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The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of Blake’s Small Book of Designs copy A and Large Book of Designs copy A; the republication of Blake’s large color printed drawings of 1795, with five additional impressions and all of them now searchable; and the addition to the Blake Collection Lists of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—31 contributing institutions altogether. The Archive now also features newly revised textual transcriptions for Blake’s descriptions of his illustrations to Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” as well as updated Help documentation that reflects the launch of the Virtual Lightbox and recent improvements to the Archive’s search engines.

The Small Book and Large Book were commissioned in 1796 by Ozias Humphry, a renowned miniaturist painter, and are now in the British Museum. The Small Book consists of 23 plates from The First Book of Urizen, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Blake masked the texts on these relief-etched plates and beautifully color printed the designs on 26 x 19 cm. leaves of Whatman paper. The Large Book consists of eight color printed impressions pulled from etchings (Albion rose and The Accusers of Theft, Adultery, Murder) and relief etchings, including plates from Visions and Urizen and the separate relief plates of America a Prophecy plate d and Joseph of Arimathea Preaching, on the same type of paper, cut to 34.5 x 24.5 cm. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can examine the prints in the Small and Large Books of Designs with impressions from the illuminated books in the Archive. The Small Book and Large Book can be found in the Archive by moving through the following categories: Table of Contents >Works in the Archive >Separate Prints and Prints in Series >Designed and Engraved by Blake.

The Small Book was literally a book, its leaves bound through three stab holes, but the Large Book is a “book” only by analogy, for its leaves were neither stabbed nor, apparently, bound. Aesthetically, the Books grew out of Blake’s twelve large color printed drawings of 1795. Although at least one of the designs, God Judging Adam, shows evidence of having been color printed from a copperplate etched in relief, the other eleven appear to have been painted within pen and ink outlines on gessoed millboards (a thick cardboard) and printed onto large sheets of damp wove paper using a rolling press. From such a prepared matrix Blake was often able to print two impressions (a first and second pull) without repainting the matrix, and he finished all impressions in watercolors and pen and ink. He appears to have produced thirty impressions from the twelve designs in at least two printings, c. 1795 and c. 1804-05. No design has more than three extant impressions. As with the illuminated books, each impression is different due to variations in color printing and finishing. For a full technical description of Blake’s large color prints and their relation to the illuminated books and Small and Large Books of Designs, see Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’: the Productions of 1795,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (Fall, 2007): 52-83.

The Archive has already published in its Preview Mode a selection of 23 impressions of the large color printed drawings (at least one impression of each) and the small version of Pity printed from a different matrix. With this republication, the Archive adds five impressions of five designs: Newton (Lutheran Church in America), never before reproduced in color, God Judging Adam (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Nebuchadnezzar (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), Satan Exulting over Eve (Tate Collection), and Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab (Fitzwilliam Museum). The Archive now contains all extant impressions of the twelve designs except the last impression of Hecate, or the Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, which declined the Archive’s request for a high-resolution image. With this republication, all the impressions of the color printed drawings are searchable and their illustration descriptions accessible, enabling users to engage in detailed, specific, and reliable searches of motifs, objects, subjects, and gestures.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager

William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of The Pickering Manuscript (c. 1807).

In 1803, after three increasingly unhappy years in Felpham, Sussex, as artist-in-residence for William Hayley, Blake wrote in a letter to his friend and patron Thomas Butts, “O why was I born with a different face / Why was I not born like the rest of my race” (Erdman pages 733-34). He varied that couplet only slightly in the separate poem “Mary,” which at some point he copied neatly into a 22-page manuscript with nine other poems—seven known from no other source—on paper that he reutilized from Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads, 1802 (to which Blake had contributed engraved illustrations). On the spacious inside margins he wrote out the ten poems that constitute what is conventionally known as The Pickering Manuscript—after one of its several nineteenth century owners.

In the final manuscript version, the clarity and formality of the hand, the neatness and uniformity of the arrangement, the scarcity of changes, and even the number of poems tantalizingly suggest a specific occasion for the collection. But there are no designs, no title page, and no concrete evidence to indicate Blake’s intentions. The manuscript remained with Blake’s wife Catherine after his death in 1827. The poems were not published until 1866—the year Pickering bought them.

In attempts to capture the character of the collection in a title, it has also been called the Ballads Manuscript (Bentley) and the Auguries Manuscript (Johnson and Grant). All the poems have strong precedents in earlier work—characteristic subject matter, ideology, and attitude; ballad- and hymn-like structures built upon characteristic rhythms, rhymes, and repetitions; a striking talent for aphorism and invented proverb; and strong ironies in strange mixtures of story and saying, among other familiar traits. No one who has read the Songs and the Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell will fail to recognize the poetic neighborhood of The Pickering Manuscript as Blake’s.

But he must have sensed that he had produced ten particularly masterful poems underwritten by an increasingly codified mythology. The elegant, memorable, dark “Mental Traveller” comes across as a module that Blake could easily have slipped into his more extended mythopoeic ventures—extraordinarily concise but enigmatic, as if it can simultaneously know precisely what it is about but remain baffling to readers who want to crack its code. But other poems beckon to readers (and poets, artists, and musicians, because these are among Blake’s most influential lines) who prefer unsparing social insights balanced against hope and healing. This attractive, popular Blake is best represented in the long aphoristic sequence “Auguries of Innocence,” where it is possible “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (object 16). Miraculous acts of imagination can be achieved even in a world where “The Harlots cry from Street to Street / Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet” (object 18).

The Pickering Manuscript follows An Island in the Moon as the second major project overseen by the Archive team from the University of Rochester’s department of English. The manuscripts, like other works in the Archive, have fully searchable texts and images supported by our ImageSizer application; by the Archive’s revamped search engines, which allow more productive searching; and by the Virtual Lightbox, our new digital tool that allows users to examine images (including images of texts) side by side, as well as to manipulate them for close study. The manuscripts feature zoomed images of textual cruxes to strengthen the explanatory power of Editors’ Notes. A sophisticated XML tagset integrated with a straightforward and legible color coding system (using XSLT and CSS) reduces the clutter of conventional textual signs and symbols. A simple key to the color coding is available from every page of the transcriptions.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience Copy E. This copy, prepared in 1806 especially for Thomas Butts, Blake’s patron, is in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Complete copies of Songs consist of 54 impressions; due to the way Blake assembled Songs Copy E, it has 54 impressions, but it is missing “The Clod & the Pebble” and has duplicates of “Laughing Song.”  Almost all the impressions were printed from various print runs, with most of the Innocence impressions coming from the raw sienna and yellow-ochre printing of 1789 (see Innocence Copy B in the Archive), and its Experience impressions coming from the yellow-ochre impressions that form Experience of Songs Copies B, C, and D, printed in 1794 (Copies B and C are in the Archive).

Songs Copy E also includes eight impressions printed in the same green ink on the same paper and with many of the same accidentals as those in Innocence Copies I, J, X, and Innocence of Songs Copy F, printed in 1789 (copies I and X are forthcoming and F is in the Archive). As a result of these various printings, Copy E has two copies of “Laughing Song,” one in Innocence, on the recto of “Little Black Boy,” and one in Experience, on the recto of “The Little Girl Lost,” which Blake originally printed as an Innocence poem but had moved by 1794 to Experience. To complete Copy E, Blake printed “A Dream” and “To Tirzah” in dark brown ink on one side of the leaf and numbered them “28” and “54,” ending Innocence and the entire series respectively. Much later in the nineteenth century, an owner of the copy added a posthumously printed copy of “The Clod & the Pebble,” which is included here as the final plate.

Despite its impressions having been printed in various styles and inks, Songs Copy E appears visually coherent—unless one looks closely. Blake colored the impressions with watercolor washes when he first printed them, and then, around 1806, just before he sold the copy to Butts, he recolored them in his late style, in which texts are lightly washed, words traced over in pen and ink, and unprinted plate borders penned in. The impressions, however, were not refinished (or freshened up) merely to make them cohere visually, or to justify the copy’s £6 6s. selling price. They were worked over because they had to be, for most were printed poorly. The legibility of many of these impressions depends entirely on texts being overwritten in pen and ink. In Innocence, twelve of twenty-eight prints were overwritten, and most of these were overwritten completely. In Experience, five of the nineteen yellow-ochre impressions were completely overwritten and most of the others have letters and words touched up. “Nurses Song” in Experience printed so lightly that Blake printed the plate twice in an attempt to darken the text. The register was off in the second printing, slightly below and to the left of the first printing. The result is a double image, particularly noticeable in the vines and leaves right of the first stanza and between the two stanzas. For a full description of this double printing, see Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, “An Inquiry into William Blake’s Method of Color Printing,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 35 (2002): 74-103.

Had the impressions been left as printed most would have been illegible and indistinct. The designs that printed well were not outlined. In fact, very few of the designs in other copies of Songs or Innocence produced in these printing sessions were rewritten or outlined, even though many would have benefited from such treatment. Apparently, the impressions that most needed to be salvaged were the last chosen to form copies, which may explain why those used for Songs Copy E were still in the studio in 1806, thirteen and sixteen years after they were printed and after most of the other copies from their editions had been sold. Nevertheless, Blake’s care and attention upon revisiting these old prints yielded one of his most beautiful copies of Songs.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Songs Copy E are fully searchable and are supported by our Virtual Lightbox and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated books, and with the Lightbox, users can examine images from any of the works side by side, as well as crop, zoom, and juxtapose them for close study. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to Copy E and to all the Songs texts previously published.

With the publication of Songs Copy E the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 80 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, sketches, color print drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the republication of nine electronic editions of Blake’s water colors illustrating the works of John Milton:

“Comus,” Thomas Set, 1801
“Comus,” Butts Set, c. 1815
“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Thomas Set, 1809
“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Butts Set, c. 1815
“Paradise Lost,” Thomas Set, 1807
“Paradise Lost,” Butts Set, 1808
“Paradise Lost,” Linnell Set, 1822
“Paradise Regained” c. 1816-20
“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” c. 1816-20

These nine water color series were previously published in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except illustration descriptions and Image Search; with this republication, those features become available.

The republication of the Milton water colors is timed to take advantage of the Archive’s revamped search engines, launched in July, which allow for more detailed, specific and reliable searching of illustration descriptions, and the Virtual Lightbox, our new digital tool that allows users to examine images side by side, as well as to crop, zoom, and juxtapose them for close study. It is the ideal means for studying and comparing Blake’s Milton watercolors. The republication of these nine series represents a major advance toward the Archive’s goal of eventually republishing all works currently available in Preview mode and publishing all new Archive images so that they are searchable.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive