Posts Tagged ‘printing’

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – 2

Chapter 2: The Form & Style of The Marriage

As it is not clearly dated on its title page, for some time there was considerable confusion as to when Blake had actually published The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with scholars selecting dates between 1790 and 1793 according to contextual hints that they sought in the text. It is now accepted that Blake completed all twenty-seven of the plates in the book in 1790, printing most of the extant copies that survive in that year, although he produced three more in the mid-1790s and another two richly illuminated versions in 1818 and 1827.

The Evolution of The Marriage
In the course of bibliographical work over the past two decades to establish the actual date of publication of The Marriage, Joseph Viscomi in particular has drawn attention to the unusual – convoluted, even – history of its printing. Eaves, Essick and Viscomi observe in their introduction to The Early Illuminated Books that “there are clear indications that the Marriage was not begun and finished overnight”, including different shaped letters (particularly lower-case g’s with serifs on the left, right or missing) and text that is in upright roman script in some places but slanted italics elsewhere. They conclude, however, that “the best evidence suggests that the twenty-seven plates of the Marriage took him months rather than years.” (Eaves, Essick, Viscomi 114)

In three essays published in the late 1990s, Viscomi traced the evolution of The Marriage’s publication, drawing on some of the observations that first appeared in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), where he had argued that it was probably printed shortly before he began etching plates for C. G. Salzman’s Elements of Morality in October 1790 (Viscomi 1993 259). In the first of his three related essays, Viscomi proposed that The Marriage had developed through four to six distinct printing sessions, suggesting that Blake did not have a completed manuscript before he began work (Viscomi 1997 58-9). The subsequent essays draw upon this technical insight to make observations about how plates 21-4 were intended as a separate pamphlet (1998) and the connections between references to printmaking in the text and Swedenborg (1999). At this point, it is the first essay on the evolution of the printing process that is most relevant.

By measuring impressions on copies of The Marriage, Viscomi established that plates 21-4 had been cut from the same piece of copper and were probably produced as a separate pamphlet before work began on the rest of the book. Indeed, one early copy of The Marriage, Copy K, consists only of these four plates which begin with the line “I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise” and conclude with “I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no.” (E42-3)

Through his meticulous reconstruction of the plates, Viscomi is able to propose that Blake used seven plates to print the entire Marriage, cutting larger sheets of copper to make the smaller pages of his book. He is also able to suggest a chronology for the sequence in which The Marriage was composed, some parts of this chronology (such as the original, anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet) being more firmly established than others. As such, Viscomi’s argument is that Blake composed his book in the following order of plates: 21-4, 12-13, 1-3, 5-6, 11, 6-10, 14, 15, 16-20, 25-7 (1997 48). That Blake then chose to rearrange his plates into the order in which we typically read them now (plates 1-27), extending what began as a pamphlet into a much more ambitious literary work, has important consequences for the fragmentary nature of this remarkable book. “Blake appears to have changed his mind about publishing an independent pamphlet – and/or a series of individual pamphlets to constitute a Bible of Hell – deciding instead to publish a group of interrelated variations on a set of themes, nearly all of which are raised in some form or another in the original pamphlet.” (Viscomi 1997 60)

The form of The Marriage
Viscomi’s careful and technically intricate set of essays offers a compelling insight into the development of Blake’s ideas, how the disjointed and apparently arbitrary nature of The Marriage emerged from a series of interrelated pamphlets. Nonetheless, while this explains how the book came to be printed in the form in which it comes down to us, as Viscomi himself observes it does not explain the very strong reactions which readers have had when reading this very strange text.

Aside from occasional notices of sale, there was little in the way of response to The Marriage in Blake’s lifetime, and if his original intention of provoking a reaction among Swedenborgians met with any success there is no record of this. Of his later acquaintances such as John Linnell and Samuel Palmer who read the book, they left few comments and the reason why may be gathered from a letter which Palmer sent to Anne Gilchrist in 1862, in which he recommends she censor the text:

I think the whole page at the top of which I have made a cross in red chalk would at once exclude the work from every drawing-room table in England. Blake has said the same kind of thing to me; in fact almost everything contained in the book; and I can understand it in relation to my memory of the whole man, in a way quite different to that roaring lion the “press,” or that red lion the British Public. (Cited in Bentley 431)

Anne did, in the end, allow substantial portions of The Marriage to be published in her husband’s Life of William Blake although with very little in the way of critical commentary, remarking instead that “the student of Blake will find in Mr Swinburne’s William Blake, A Critical Essay, all the light that can be thrown by the vivid imagination and subtle insight of a poet on this as on the later mystic or ‘Prophetic Books.’” (Gilchrist 68) Swinburne himself declared The Marriage “the greatest of all his [Blake’s] books: a work indeed which we rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation” (Swinburne 204) and, in contrast to the majority of nineteenth-century commentators, saw the variety and audacity of its paradoxes, heresies and eccentricities as examples of Blake’s writing at its most profound.

The content alone was not all that caused early critics apart from Swinburne to falter in their assessment of The Marriage. As the editors of the Blake Archive observe, Blake’s heterodox perspectives further disorient readers through a radical combination of genres – poetry, prose, cultural history and Menippean satire. This latter form, which began to be applied to The Marriage by Blake scholars in the 1990s, originated in the now lost works of Menippus, a Greek Cynic and satirist who lived in the third century BC and whose texts influenced classical writers such as Varro and Lucan (and whose influence on Blake Leslie Tannenbaum noted in the 1970s). Menippean satire combined different genres and styles of writing as well as rapidly shifting viewpoints, a miscellany or medley of positions and situations that can be observed in such writers as Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. “In philosophy, Menippean satire is a method for analyzing propositions, clearing off conceptual confusion, and discrediting intellectual mythology.” (Kaplan 21)

Dustin Griffin remarks, with some justice, that “although Blakeans have seen the Marriage as prophetic satire, they have by and large done little more than label it a ‘Menippean satire’.” (Griffin 57) Part of the reason for this is due to the revision of our understanding of The Marriage’s evolution in the light of Viscomi’s careful bibliographical work: Blake did not set out to write a miscellany; rather one emerged during the rather complex schedule of etching different plates. Nonetheless, if he did not intend to produce a Menippean satire Blake appeared happy enough with the final disjointed form of his book. The startling variations that occur from plate to plate, or section to section, serve as intellectual shocks to the reader that prevent him or her from settling too comfortably in the precincts of hell or the fields of heaven.

Proverbs and Fancies
Despite the incongruities in the production and form of The Marriage, it must also be recognised that as well as strong thematic consistencies running throughout the entire text there are also repeated formal motifs that provide some coherence to the structure of the book. For Martin Nurmi, the book “developed according to no traditional logic or plan” (Nurmi 51) and yet, as John Howard suggests, “Blake’s infernal philosophy emerges from what is superficially a disjointed collection of heterodox thoughts and fanciful experiences”, and that “the work has a unity, though it escapes the reader at first” (Howard 61).

This formal unity is most evident in the series of Memorable Fancies. These comprise the greater part of The Marriage and while the situation and perspective of each one can be radically different (whether dining with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, for example, or witnessing an angel and devil conversing over the true nature of Jesus), after only a few encounters the sudden punctuations of each of these fantasies leads the reader to expect tumult and disorder. This anticipation of anarchy itself provides an unusual form of coherence, an act of imaginative reading whereby we are expected to make intellectual leaps between each scene in a form befitting Menippean satire.
The first of the Memorable Fancies offers a short prologue to the section of The Marriage that has become the most famous:

As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as The sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.
When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five? (E35)

Many of the individual proverbs that follow, such as “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” or “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion”, have become memorable in their own right, detached from the immediate contexts of the work in which they first appeared. These maxims obviously have their roots in biblical proverbs such as those found in Ecclesiastes, but whereas the general tenor of the older sayings is conservative in character that of those in The Marriage is deliberately provocative and disturbing. Probably only the aphorisms of Nietzsche approach Blake’s for boldness, but in their economy, vividness and sustained wit Blake’s proverbs are without peer in the literature of any language.

The Memorable Fancy that precedes the Proverbs of Hell also indicates the important transformation of perception that Blake expected to accompany the act of reading: as another famous adage expresses it pithily, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.” Thus, according to traditional theories of experience espoused by Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, perception was largely a passive affair in which the external world illuminated the closed cave of human senses. Blake, however, unfolds the cave, opens up the abyss so that the bird becomes an “immense world” when understood by the imagination. Rather than the operation of transcendant reason organising passive sense impressions, active imagination proceeds from the desires of the body. Such an understanding is indicated in the following Memorable Fancy in which the narrator sits down to dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel:

I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. (E38-9)

As such, the form and structure of The Marriage is designed to compel this perception of the infinite in everything, the “firm perswasion” that it is imagination that shapes the world rather than vice versa, a conscious reformation that, as Gross remarks, is a vital, libidinous and necessary response to the grinding development of political systems of his day (Gross 176). Blake’s point is polemical and contentious – deliberately so – but the important point here is that by refusing the conventions of an orderly narrative, the support of rational, organised, and also restricted thought, the book brings reason to the the abyss of senses so that by falling into the precipice of rational thought it will be forced to take flight, for “No bird soars too high. if he soars with his own wings.” (E36)

Next – Swedenborg & The Marriage

Tags: printing, satire, the Bible, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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Mei-Ying Sung: William Blake and the Art of Engraving

William Blake and the Art of Engraving. Mei-Ying Sung
London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. pp. 220. £60. ISBN: 9 781851 969586.

This monograph, an extension of Mei-Ying Sung’s PhD thesis, begins with a simple observation that while Blake’s technique of relief etching has attracted considerable academic interest in recent decades, his engraving processes – including, remarkably, the archive of surviving copper plates - have been much neglected. Sung suggests that the main reason for this is that engraving as a technology of reproduction is obsolete and consequently downgraded, but a (slightly) more positive reason may be that Blake’s technique of relief etching was so innovative, particularly with regard to the illuminated books produced using this method, that it has been a much more obvious source of academic inquiry. Related to this is the much more ambivalent and frustrating factor that Blake as an artist is frequently treated as secondary to Blake as poet.

Sung’s opening technical argument provides a deft and scholarly summary of a controversy that dogged Blake studies for several years (and which often appears opaque and esoteric to general appreciators of Blake’s art). In the years following the large exhibition of Blake’s works at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2000-2001, disagreement arose between Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi and Michael Phillips following the latter’s publication of a book, William Blake, The Creation of the Songs, in which he suggested that Blake registered plates to pull copies twice rather than once in order to make colour prints. The argument which followed became bad tempered at times, and most readers (including not a few Blake specialists) would have been overwhelmed by the intensely technical details. Sung, however, provides a usefully concise version of the controversy, with a conclusion that is rather damning towards Phillips while also observing that all experts involved confined themselves to the prints while ignoring – more or less completely – the surviving thirty-eight copper plates that survive.

It is by considering these artefacts in detail that Sung’s work provides her most rigorous innovations in Blake studies, most notably how Blake had to work and re-work his plates using a technique known as repoussage, as well as providing fascinating detours through subsequent experiments to renovate Blake’s techniques by artists such as Ruthven Todd, Joan Miró and William Stanley Hayter. In the chapter on “The History of the Theory of Conception and Execution”, a theory which has its origin in Blake’s remarks in a letter to George Cumberland in 1795 refuting the separation of the powers of invention and execution, Sung shows how the emphasis on relief etching as well as the experiments of the Surrealists has skewed our understanding of Blake’s actual practice. Despite the mistakes this has led to, however, Sung demonstrates immense respect towards the work of Ruthven Todd, a much neglected figure in Blake studies who, as she observes, was probably as important as Geoffrey Keynes in returning attention to Blake’s art.

After this theoretical introduction, the following three chapters of William Blake and the Art of Engraving provide a highly technical examination of Blake’s practice. “The Evidence of Copper Plates” begins from the observation that while proofs of prints may provide most information about the development of an image, “there is information on the metal plates which is not shown on the prints” (p. 46), most notably evidence of repoussage which indicates how the process of production is corrected as the artist works on the plate. Because, as Sung points out, plates were often re-used or rarely collected, the body of plates belonging to Blake is very small and so this chapter also provides more general information on other engravers, such as the 170 copper plates belonging to George Cruikshank and the forty or so copper and steel plates left by Phiz.

Sung notes that differences in etching and engraving techniques could have a significant difference on the amount of correction required to complete a work, and this provides important context for the subsequent chapter, “Blake’s Engraved Copper Plates”, which synthesises current knowledge about extant plates and those for which some information has been recorded even if the plates themselves are lost. This catalogue is a useful source of information for Blake scholars, and the chapter concludes with a more detailed analysis, as well as catalogue raisonné of the remaining plates for Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Sung’s careful examination indicates that “the evidence of the plates and Blake’s alterations to them shows not only the development of ideas but also modifications of errors”, and that this leads us “to reconsider the limits of [Joseph] Viscomi’s concept about Blake’s technique being original creation rather than secondary reproduction”, the Job engravings being a “mixture of experiments and trial and error” (pp. 85, 118).

In terms of providing minute particulars on Blake’s life, the following chapter on “Copper Plate Makers in Blake’s Time” is incredibly specialist but also quite fascinating. Rather crudely, I am not sure my own appreciation of Blake is especially influenced by knowing who provided the copper for the artist’s engraving work, but the role of the British copper industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the activities of companies such as Pontifex, opens up the world of industry within which Blake worked. There is not quite the cultural engagement here that is found in work such as that of Isobel Armstrong on Victorian glass, but details such as copper theft in the early nineteenth century offer enticing glimpses into the commercial environment of the time.

Wider appeal, however, will probably be found in the final chapter on the earliest re-engravers of Blake’s Virgil woodcuts. Of course, this statement reflects my own interest in the reception of Blake’s works, but those woodcuts began to engage with an audience during Blake’s lifetime and, as Sung observes, indicate how readers actually engaged with the Thornton Virgil has rarely been addressed. Detailing her primary research into a surviving woodblock, an early imitation of Blake’s design, Sung displays excellent detective work when discussing how Blake’s illustrations appeared in later Victorian publications such as the Athenaeum.

William Blake and the Art of Engraving is an incredibly detailed, highly technical and scholarly work, one that contributes greatly to our understanding of Blake’s techniques of production in a tradition that includes figures such as Bentley, Viscomi, Essick and Phillips. Her most important addition is to refocus specifically on Blake’s work as an engraver, and throughout the book Sung demonstrates remarkable and comprehensive attention to the minute particulars of his craft that allows her to challenge easy assumptions about the theory of his creative practice.

Tags: art, books, printing
Posted in Reviews |

The new Blakes at the Tate

On Monday, during a visit to Tate Britain, I had a chance to see the William Blake prints that have recently been acquired by Tate and are currently undergoing restoration.

Tate purchased the eight prints at the beginning of this year, with funds largely raised by members and patrons (you can read the original news story here). A certain romanticism has already started to accrue to the prints – most notably their discovery inside a railway timetable (a small myth that caused at least one of the conservationists to roll his eyes in disdain). In any case, the collection is undoubtedly beautiful, consisting of eight prints from an original series of ten according to the numbers on the pages. Six of these are taken from The Book of Urizen, with the other two being drawn from The Book of Thel and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The works had apparently been loaned for a 2007 exhibition at Tate, but this was my first chance to see them in detail.

One of the most fascinating features of the prints, beyond the immediate, vivid colouring of dark blues and turquoise, bold, fiery orange-golds and reds and, of course, Blake’s powerful designs, was the patina of dirt and mild abuse that had built up in the intervening two centuries, traces of the material history of the prints subsequent to Blake’s composition and execution. The starkest example of this was the print taken from the final plate of The Book of Thel, which has thick fold lines in the paper where someone had probably wrapped its corners to fit it into an oval frame. As David Worrall remarked, the chances were that an owner of these prints identified this single image as the only one really suitable for public display, the others being shuffled away somewhere into a private portfolio. Similarly, the stab holes alongside each image indicate that at some point all were bound together, but the absence of creases indicates that they were not viewed as a book, instead simply being gathered together for safe keeping.

All the images found here were originally produced as part of Blake’s composite art, combining text and image to convey the prophetic messages of Blake’s illuminated books. As with his Small Book of Designs, however, it is quite clear that the original collector, while interested in Blake’s visual art, had little time for the artist’s idiosyncratic poetry. As such, the relief etchings were masked off so that no text was displayed and then worked up as painted copies, with hand drawn borders surrounding the printed area.

The prints are due to go on display at Tate Britain in July 2010 before being included as part of a major exhibition at the Pushkin Gallery in 2011.

Tags: art, printing, Tate Britain
Posted in Arts and Culture |

Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1

Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions

Contents

Chapter 1: Blake’s Illuminated Printing

Chapter 2: Songs of Innocence

Chapter 3: Songs of Experience

Chapter 4: Contrary States of the Soul

Selected Reading

Chapter 1: Blake’s Illuminated Printing

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is the best known of William Blake’s works in illuminated printing, the art form with which he is particularly associated. The Songs were not Blake’s first production using the technique of relief etching, the earliest known examples being There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One. These were probably produced in 1788 (according to a reference made by Blake in his late work, The Ghost of Abel), that is a year before he published Songs of Innocence.

Commercial Printmaking & Relief Etching

As Joseph Viscomi points out: “No printmaker before Blake had incorporated the tools and techniques of writing, drawing, and painting in a graphic medium, though the materials and tools were commonplace.” (Viscomi 2003 42) At the time when Blake worked, most commercial engraving on copper plates was via a process known on intaglio engraving, where lines were cut into copper directly or alternatively through a waxy varnish, with acid then eating into the copper plate before the lines were then worked over and enhanced with the engraver’s burin, a fine steel cutting tool.

This was how Blake produced most of his commercial work, but it was an extremely laborious process and the delicate lines produced with a burin were not suitable for substantial amounts of text. As such, intaglio engravings were typically combined with type set into blocks, Blake himself using this method on his designs for the publisher Francis Edwards’ version of the long poem Night Thoughts.

For Blake, then, relief etching offered possible commercial advantages over traditional methods, allowing him to combine text and image without the expense of hiring additional typesetters. Because Blake controlled the means of his own production, it also enabled him to pursue highly idiosyncratic art forms, although this should not be interpreted as a desire on his part to ignore commercial considerations. During the nineteenth century it became fashionable to see Blake deliberately opposed to profit, but the Songs in particular were printed to take advantage of a growing market for children’s books (Darton 108-13).

Relief etching (which Blake also referred to as “stereotype” in The Ghost of Abel) was intended as a means for producing such books much more quickly. Stereotype, a process invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast from a wood engraving, but Blake’s innovation was somewhat different. Drawing his lines with acid-resistant varnish, the plate was steeped in acid so that the exposed areas of copper were etched away, leaving raised lines that could receive ink. John Jones points out that relief etching “would appear crude compared to regularized typesetting and intaglio line engraving”, something that did not appeal to conventional publishers. For Blake, however, the handmade look of his prints could also appear much more artistic than the “perfection attained through mechanization.” (Jones 30)

The Creation of the Songs

In William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (2000), Michael Phillips provides a comprehensive account of how the Songs came to be composed and printed. Phillips points out that there are two surviving manuscript sources for some of the Songs of Innocence: an early version of “Laughing Song” written in his 1783 book, Poetical Sketches, and the manuscript of An Island in the Moon, written some time between 1782 and 1785 and which contains versions  of “Holy Thursday”, “Nurses Song” and “The Little Boy Lost”. For the later Songs of Experience, Blake worked on versions of poems such as “The Tyger” in his Notebook, revising them again and again until he was satisfied with them enough to prepare them for printing.

When working on the copper plates, Blake’s technique was somewhat different to the usual one employed by engravers. Typically, the artist would cover the entire plate with acid-resistant varnish (also called the “ground”) before using his tools to score or scratch lines through that varnish down to the plate. By covering the plate with nitric acid, or aqua fortis, the exposed lines would be eaten away, creating grooves in the plate that would hold ink while the level surface of the copper was cleaned for printing, a process reversed by Blake:

Instead of covering the entire plate with a varnish or ground and cutting his design into it with engraver’s tools, he used the varnish like ink and the copper plate like a sheet of paper. Dipping his quill pen or fine pencil brush into the acid resistant varnish he wrote his text and drew his design directly on the polished surface of the plate, just as a writer would write out fair copy and as an artist would draw. All of the surfaces that were not protected were then corroded or eaten away by the acid, leaving raised lines which would be inked for printing. (Phillips 15)

Joseph Viscomi, in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), emphasises just how important this technique of drawing was to Blake, allowing him to compose freely on the plate rather (than as was previously thought) creating designs first of all on paper before transferring them to the plate. “While Blake often used tools of the printmaker in addition to the tools of the poet and painter, the initial design was executed like a pen and wash drawing.” (Viscomi 1993 64)

While some of the early versions of the Songs in particular were printed in monochrome, several of them also show signs of Blake’s experiments in colour printing. The ability to print colour directly onto a page was an incredibly difficult process that was only gradually improved during the nineteenth century, yet some of Blake’s copies of the Songs show that rather than just hand-colouring the plates afterwards he also sought to use colour during the printing process. Here Phillips and Viscomi (the latter supported by Robert Essick) part ways: Phillips has argued that Blake used a “two-pull” printing process, using registration pinholes in the paper to allow him to pass it through the printing press twice, once with a monochrome print that was then overlaid with colour. Viscomi and Essick, by contrast, argue that Blake printed his pages just once, mixing different colours onto the same plate. Most Blake scholars working in this field agree with Viscomi and Essick that Blake used a “one-pull” process to print his plates.

Copies of the Songs

Songs of Innocence was first printed in 1789 and, when he composed Songs of Experience in 1794, Blake typically issued them in combined form as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, though he also made the Songs of Innocence available on their own until 1818. There are 32 surviving copies of Songs of Innocence and 29 copies of the combined Innocence and Experience.

While Blake scholars had been aware for years of the different versions of individual copies of the Songs (whether Innocence alone or combined with Experience), it was Joseph Viscomi who, in 1993, most clearly emphasised the importance of these variations from copy to copy. In Blake and the Idea of the Book, Viscomi pointed out that Blake most likely worked on print runs, or editions, of his individual illuminated books, making a series of prints over a short period of a few days that could later be coloured, bound and sold to prospective buyers.

Songs of Innocence has thirty-one plates, with twenty-two copies in existence including all the plates (and eight comprising only twenty-seven plates, when Blake moved “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found” were moved to Experience). Some of the copies still extant, such as Copy T of Songs of Innocence were printed posthumously, probably by Frederick Tatham who had befriended Blake towards the end of his life and took care of Catherine Blake after his death (Viscomi 1993 248-9). Blake had also taught his wife how to print and colour the copies of books they made together so that she could help him with his work, both of them sharing the task of illuminating the prints.

As Viscomi observes, Blake had a very relaxed attitude towards the Songs (1993 274-5). As well as transferring “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found” poems, he also alternated “The School Boy” between Innocence and Experience, and although “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” was nearly always treated as a song of innocence, Blake did present it as a song of experience in Copy O. In 1793, as Phillips points out, Blake had advertised Innocence and Experience separately (Phillips 109), and it may have been his intention for them to be available as separate books but he decided against this (at least for Songs of Experience) after printing up copies of his new work. By considering individual copies as print runs or editions, it is easy to see that there are distinct phases in the production of the Songs that very often makes them appear to be very different books – for example between the delicate washes of early copies of Songs of Innocence produced in 1789 in contrast to the more vividly colour printed versions of the mid 1790s and heavily hand-painted copies from the second decade of the nineteenth century. Viscomi warns against seeing each individual copy of the illuminated books as a revision: they were not meant as unique versions but rather copy-editions, reflecting Blake’s attitudes to his Songs at different periods in his own life (Viscomi 1993 374).

Next – Chapter 2: Songs of Innocence

Tags: printing, Songs of Experience, Songs of Innocence
Posted in Files |