Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working piecemeal on encoding Blake’s marginalia for Robert Thornton’s The Lord’s Prayer, Newly Translated (1827), a 10-page pamphlet which gives a new translation of the Lord’s Prayer from the original version in Matthew 6:9-13 and accompanying critical and explanatory notes. Unlike with most of the Blake marginalia pages, which have relatively legible writing —

— deciphering this one was a challenge, and not quite achieved (though I’m hardly alone in failing to do this). The difficulty was largely owing to two features which are not typical of the Blake marginalia in other pages of the Thornton, or in the Watson and Lavater books we’re also working on: it seems to be written in something like smudgy grey pencil, and, at first sight, it seems to consist of one large nebulous mass extending up the right side from the bottom margin. Blake did certainly write his marginal notes all over the margins of his books and sometimes at odd angles to the text on the page:

While working for the Blake Archive over the summer, I found myself drawn into two different worlds, both based in language and presentation, beset with problems of transcription and clarity, and cohering around the sublime mind of William Blake.