publications

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

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of Copies D and G of The Book of Thel. Copy D is in the British Museum and Copy G is in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

The Book of Thel is dated 1789 by Blake on the title page, but the first plate (Thel’s Motto) and the last (her descent into the netherworld) appear to have been completed and first printed in 1790, while Blake was working on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Copies D and G are from the first of three printings of Thel, during which Blake produced at least thirteen copies, printed in five different inks to diversify his stock. Copy D, for example, was printed in yellow ochre ink, Copy G in green and greenish-blue inks; both are lightly finished in water colors. Copies from this press run were certainly on hand when Blake included the book in his advertisement “To the Public” of October 1793: “The Book of Thel, a Poem in Illuminated Printing. Quarto, with 6 designs, price 3s.” Copies D and G join copies in the Archive from the other two printings: Copy F, printed and colored c. 1795, and Copy O, printed and colored c. 1818. They also join Copies H, J, L, and R from the first printing.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Thel Copies D and G are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote 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. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to copies D and G and to all the Thel texts previously published.

With the publication of Thel Copies D and G, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 79 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 publication of an electronic edition of thirty-three of Blake’s water color illustrations to the Bible. All take their subjects from the New Testament and have been added to the twenty Old Testament subjects published in March 2010 as “Illustrations to the Bible, c. 1780-1824,” under Drawings and Paintings, Water Color Drawings. This new group is presented in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (which provides detailed descriptions of Blake’s images).

Blake executed most of these New Testament water colors c. 1800-05 for his patron Thomas Butts. The exceptions are The Whore of Babylon of 1809 and The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the Yale Center for British Art, datable to c. 1825. The subjects range from the childhood of Jesus to his ascension, the later history of his parents and one of his major followers, St. Paul, and a group of eight designs based on the Book of Revelation. While the illustrations of the life of Christ are fairly conventional in their subjects, in part because of the long tradition of picturing almost every event in the Gospels, individual motifs recall designs in Blake’s illuminated books and thus offer a window on Blake’s visual interpretation of the Bible. The illustrations of Revelation complement Blake’s intense engagement with apocalyptic events and images in his own poetry.

The selection of fifty-three biblical water colors now available in the Archive will be supplemented in the future with early works, such as Abraham and Isaac, datable to c. 1780, and will continue through Blake’s final biblical water colors, such as Moses Placed in the Ark of the Bulrushes.

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 electronic editions of Blake’s illustrations to Robert John Thornton’s edition of The Pastorals of Virgil (1821) and a selection of his preliminary drawings for his Virgil wood engravings. The texts and images in both groups are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications.

When planning a third edition of his successful school text of Virgil’s Pastorals, Robert John Thornton employed Blake to contribute some of the new designs for the two-volume work. His assignment was to illustrate Ambrose Philips’ English “imitation” of Virgil’s first eclogue. Blake produced four small designs as relief etchings on a single copperplate, but these were rejected by Thornton. There may have been several reasons, including the unconventional style of etching, the semi-nudity of some of the figures, and the difficulties letterpress printers would have encountered with such an unusual matrix. Apparently Blake was asked to prepare wood engravings, a medium in which he had never before worked, instead of relief etchings. He executed a series of at least twenty-one pen, pencil, and wash preliminary drawings; these were probably approved by Thornton. The wood engravings that Blake produced from them, however, were far less conventional. Thornton was again taken aback by Blake’s bold transgression of contemporary styles and sensibilities. Several influential artists, including John Linnell and Sir Thomas Lawrence, commended Blake’s work; their opinions convinced Thornton to print them in his 1821 edition. Three designs were engraved by a journeyman for the sake of comparison with Blake’s own productions in wood, and Thornton added a statement below Blake’s first design implying his hesitations about Blake’s artistry. Pre-publication proofs of Blake’s wood engravings show that each group of four were cut on a single block; these were cut apart, slightly reduced in size on all four sides, and printed with brief letterpress captions. This format, as published in Thornton’s Virgil, is preserved in our reproductions.

In addition to his original wood engravings, Blake contributed six copperplate intaglio engravings picturing famous classical figures. He also executed a reduced drawing, perhaps directly on the woodblock, based on a painting by Nicolas Poussin. This was cut in the block by John Byfield. All these materials are included in our reproductions of Thornton’s Virgil. In addition, the relief etching of four designs, the woodblock of Blake’s first wood engraving, and the pre-publication proofs of two groups of designs (I and II) before they were separated are available under Related Works in the Archive on the Show Me menu for objects 5-7.

Twenty of Blake’s preliminary drawings for his wood engravings, all executed in monochrome wash, were sold at auction from the Linnell collection in 1918. These are now widely dispersed; seven are untraced and one drawing in the group was not engraved. We are now publishing a selection of seven of these drawings and plan to add more as they become available.

Although small in size and almost rejected by the man who commissioned them, Blake’s Virgil wood engravings have been among his most influential works. The young artists who gathered around Blake in his final years, including Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, and Edward Calvert, were deeply inspired by the Virgil engravings. Palmer called them “visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise”—an encomium that ignores the darker implications of some designs. Several twentieth-century British artists, including Graham Sutherland, were also influenced by Blake’s wood engravings.

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 nineteen of Blake’s tempera paintings illustrating the Bible.  They are presented in a new category, “Illustrations to the Bible (c. 1799-1803)”—see Paintings, under Drawings and Paintings, in the table of contents for Works in the Archive.  The designs are arranged according to the passages illustrated and are presented in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (which provides detailed descriptions of Blake’s images).

The Bible had an enormous influence on Blake’s work as both artist and poet.  Among his many and complex responses to that text is a group of paintings he created for his patron Thomas Butts, beginning in 1799.  Most were executed in that year and the next, but at least three were probably completed while Blake was in Felpham, 1802 and 1803.  Fifty-three of these “cabinet paintings” (as small works of this type were called in Blake’s time) have been recorded.  Only thirty are now traceable, seven based on the Old Testament and the remainder on the New.

This group of nineteen paintings is the second installment in our publication of a large selection of Blake’s drawings and paintings illustrating the Bible.  The first installment, a group of twenty water colors with subjects based on the Old Testament, was published in March of this year.

The medium of these paintings, now generally called “tempera,” is water-based with a glue and/or gum binder.  Blake was probably trying to create jewel-like paintings; in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, he compared them to “enamels” and “precious stones.”  He never used the word “tempera” but called his medium “fresco”—a term that recalls Renaissance wall paintings—and claimed that he had invented the new genre of “portable Fresco,” an alternative to paintings in oil.  Most were executed on canvas, but three are on copper and one (The Agony in the Garden) is on tinned iron.

Unfortunately, Blake’s medium was inherently unstable.  The pigment layers expanded and contracted at different rates. Almost all his temperas of 1799-1803 show considerable surface cracking and other defects; many have been repaired at least once.  Some, such as The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, have been over-painted in ways that misrepresent Blake’s original work.

The biblical temperas of 1799-1803 can be divided into two groups according to size.  Most are approximately 27 x 38 cm., but five of the extant paintings measure about 32.5 x 49.5 cm.  The works in the larger size illustrate the life of Christ and may form their own series.

The Fitzwilliam Museum has requested some assistance with The Christ Child Asleep on a Cross, recently presented to the museum by the heirs of George Goyder.  The provenance of this tempera painting includes its recovery from a “bombed house in 1940” by the dealer James Rimell of London in 1940 (Butlin 410).  The Fitzwilliam Museum would appreciate any information about the owner or owners of the painting prior to its acquisition by Rimell.

Please contact the Department of Paintings, Drawings and Prints:  fitzmuseum-pdp@lists.cam.ac.uk

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