Of all the modern and contemporary poets who have been influenced by Blake, Mary Oliver might seem an unlikely heir. We think automatically of the visionary system of Yeats, the pugnacious lyricism of Roethke, the prophetic excess of Ginsberg, or the erudite obscurity of Geoffrey Hill. We certainly don’t expect to find Blake’s challenging and transcendent poetics echoed in simple verses that celebrate the “god of dirt,” the messy world of vultures, skunks, and pond scum. On the other hand, Oliver’s deliberate invocations of Blake prod us to look again at his attitude toward nature and the physical body. Even her most “naturalistic” poems, like the one above, are steeped in the language of art: the butterflies’ wings are “pages” like those of Blake’s illuminated books, their energy the “agitated / motions of the mind.” For both poets, the human mind marks the border between the material and spiritual worlds, and the poet’s task is to awaken the reader’s imagination toward some purpose. That purpose generally is not made explicit but rather grows organically out of the visionary experience: an experience in which “ordinary” perception is suspended.
{"title":"Eternity in the Moment: William Blake and Mary Oliver","authors":"J. Michael","doi":"10.47761/biq.80","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.80","url":null,"abstract":"Of all the modern and contemporary poets who have been influenced by Blake, Mary Oliver might seem an unlikely heir. We think automatically of the visionary system of Yeats, the pugnacious lyricism of Roethke, the prophetic excess of Ginsberg, or the erudite obscurity of Geoffrey Hill. We certainly don’t expect to find Blake’s challenging and transcendent poetics echoed in simple verses that celebrate the “god of dirt,” the messy world of vultures, skunks, and pond scum. On the other hand, Oliver’s deliberate invocations of Blake prod us to look again at his attitude toward nature and the physical body. Even her most “naturalistic” poems, like the one above, are steeped in the language of art: the butterflies’ wings are “pages” like those of Blake’s illuminated books, their energy the “agitated / motions of the mind.” For both poets, the human mind marks the border between the material and spiritual worlds, and the poet’s task is to awaken the reader’s imagination toward some purpose. That purpose generally is not made explicit but rather grows organically out of the visionary experience: an experience in which “ordinary” perception is suspended.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85815993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his manuscript “Life of Blake” (c. 1832), Frederick Tatham writes that during the 1790s William and Catherine Blake resided in Hercules Buildings in a pretty clean House of 8 or 10 Rooms & at first kept a servant, but finding (as M.rs Blake declared & as every one else knows) the more service the more Inconvenience, she like all sensible women, who are possessed of industry & health & only moderate means, relinquished this incessant Tax upon domestic comfort, did all the Work herself, kept the House clean, & herself tidy, besides printing all Blakes numerous Engravings, which was a Task alone sufficient for any industrious Woman, but however as there is no state, or scheme, or plan, without its accompanying Evil Blake had reason to regret his having left no one in possession of his House during his & M.rs Blakes absense for one day paying some friendly visit, some Thieves entered it & carried away Plate to the Value of 60 Pounds & clothes to the amount of 40 more. However, as this note will demonstrate, by the end of January 1791 William and Catherine may have been all too aware that leaving a servant in charge of 13 Hercules Buildings was no sure security against burglary.
{"title":"“Mr CLAY of Hercules Buildings”","authors":"A. Whitehead","doi":"10.47761/biq.94","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.94","url":null,"abstract":"In his manuscript “Life of Blake” (c. 1832), Frederick Tatham writes that during the 1790s William and Catherine Blake resided in Hercules Buildings in a pretty clean House of 8 or 10 Rooms & at first kept a servant, but finding (as M.rs Blake declared & as every one else knows) the more service the more Inconvenience, she like all sensible women, who are possessed of industry & health & only moderate means, relinquished this incessant Tax upon domestic comfort, did all the Work herself, kept the House clean, & herself tidy, besides printing all Blakes numerous Engravings, which was a Task alone sufficient for any industrious Woman, but however as there is no state, or scheme, or plan, without its accompanying Evil Blake had reason to regret his having left no one in possession of his House during his & M.rs Blakes absense for one day paying some friendly visit, some Thieves entered it & carried away Plate to the Value of 60 Pounds & clothes to the amount of 40 more. However, as this note will demonstrate, by the end of January 1791 William and Catherine may have been all too aware that leaving a servant in charge of 13 Hercules Buildings was no sure security against burglary.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87440835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hazard Adams modestly introduces Blake’s Margins by describing it as “less for scholars … than for people who want to know more about Blake’s thought … and for students in the early stages of study of his work” (3). Beginners will find most of this eminently sensible and learned book edifying, but in fact there are very few Blake scholars anywhere who would not benefit from reading it straight through. In some ways, Blake’s annotations are among the least ironic of his writings, but every Blakean marginalium is a tail that wags a very substantial dog: we can’t really understand a given one without attending to the interplay with the full annotated text and with the broader contexts that contributed to Blake’s response. Since even the best Blake editions inevitably misrepresent the marginalia by supplementing them with (at most) snippets of the annotated texts, many of which are unfamiliar and/or out of print, it would be a good thing if Blakists were in the habit of reviewing the relevant chapter in Adams before quoting anything written in a margin. Of course it would be even better if we all reread, say, the last third of Berkeley’s Siris with care before repeating “God is not a Mathematical Diagram,” but if that is not to happen, Adams’s judicious summaries will help us much more with the nuances of that declaration than, for instance, the two barely relevant sentences from Berkeley quoted by David Erdman in his edition (E 664).
{"title":"Hazard Adams, Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations","authors":"Alexander S. Gourlay","doi":"10.47761/biq.81","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.81","url":null,"abstract":"Hazard Adams modestly introduces Blake’s Margins by describing it as “less for scholars … than for people who want to know more about Blake’s thought … and for students in the early stages of study of his work” (3). Beginners will find most of this eminently sensible and learned book edifying, but in fact there are very few Blake scholars anywhere who would not benefit from reading it straight through. In some ways, Blake’s annotations are among the least ironic of his writings, but every Blakean marginalium is a tail that wags a very substantial dog: we can’t really understand a given one without attending to the interplay with the full annotated text and with the broader contexts that contributed to Blake’s response. Since even the best Blake editions inevitably misrepresent the marginalia by supplementing them with (at most) snippets of the annotated texts, many of which are unfamiliar and/or out of print, it would be a good thing if Blakists were in the habit of reviewing the relevant chapter in Adams before quoting anything written in a margin. Of course it would be even better if we all reread, say, the last third of Berkeley’s Siris with care before repeating “God is not a Mathematical Diagram,” but if that is not to happen, Adams’s judicious summaries will help us much more with the nuances of that declaration than, for instance, the two barely relevant sentences from Berkeley quoted by David Erdman in his edition (E 664).","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"134 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77365974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
William and Catherine Blake returned to London in September 1803, after spending three years in the seaside village of Felpham in Sussex. During the two years that followed, one of William’s most important and time-consuming occupations was assisting William Hayley with the illustrations to be engraved for Hayley’s Life of George Romney. Blake had commissions for two of these and hoped for more. These activities were no mere task for Blake, who praised the gifts of “our admired Sublime Romney” and thought, unfairly, that Romney’s talent had been diverted from history to portrait painting by Hayley, asserting in a frank letter to his brother James that Hayley “thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney” (30 January 1803, E 725). In the extraordinary letter that Blake wrote to Hayley about his renewal of vision “on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures,” he stated: “I can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am now engraving after Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of Art.”
{"title":"William Blake, George Romney, and The Life of George Romney, Esq.","authors":"Morton D. Paley","doi":"10.47761/biq.82","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.82","url":null,"abstract":"William and Catherine Blake returned to London in September 1803, after spending three years in the seaside village of Felpham in Sussex. During the two years that followed, one of William’s most important and time-consuming occupations was assisting William Hayley with the illustrations to be engraved for Hayley’s Life of George Romney. Blake had commissions for two of these and hoped for more. These activities were no mere task for Blake, who praised the gifts of “our admired Sublime Romney” and thought, unfairly, that Romney’s talent had been diverted from history to portrait painting by Hayley, asserting in a frank letter to his brother James that Hayley “thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney” (30 January 1803, E 725). In the extraordinary letter that Blake wrote to Hayley about his renewal of vision “on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures,” he stated: “I can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am now engraving after Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of Art.”","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80226531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Most of the primary material in William Blake’s Conversations will be familiar to those who have studied Gerald E. Bentley’s two editions of Blake Records, Blake Records Supplement, and his 2001 biography, The Stranger from Paradise, but the scholarly alchemy effected by distilling reports of Blake’s spoken words into a compact volume and adding an array of related tools has created something rich, strange, and likely to prove enduringly useful. Because many of the reports come to us from within a generation or two after Blake’s death, they are strongly colored by the late Georgian/early Victorian conception of him: these Blakeish words often seem to reflect the minds of the reporters as much as they reveal the mind of Blake, and as the intervening years and layers of reportage multiply, the share of credible Blake content diminishes. A snippet of Blake’s conversation that was worth retelling or recording is likely to have been one that conformed to, or at least resonated with, the other stories about Blake in circulation at the time. Gathered together in largely unmediated form, these reports constitute a portrait of a fellow we might call Anecdotal Blake, a somewhat different being from the persona we moderns know through his works in ink and paint, Autographic Blake. Ironically, Autographic Blake was not very well known to some of the original constructors of Anecdotal Blake—even to ones who knew Flesh and Blood Blake himself. Those modern readers who are thoroughly acquainted with Autographic Blake may find the shimmery Anecdotal Blake who rises in these pages to be an uncanny and alien creature, but it is intriguing to hear his voice, and like any chatty ghost he may have things to tell us beyond the grave.
{"title":"Gerald E. Bentley, Jr., William Blake’s Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis","authors":"Alexander S. Gourlay","doi":"10.47761/biq.87","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.87","url":null,"abstract":"Most of the primary material in William Blake’s Conversations will be familiar to those who have studied Gerald E. Bentley’s two editions of Blake Records, Blake Records Supplement, and his 2001 biography, The Stranger from Paradise, but the scholarly alchemy effected by distilling reports of Blake’s spoken words into a compact volume and adding an array of related tools has created something rich, strange, and likely to prove enduringly useful. Because many of the reports come to us from within a generation or two after Blake’s death, they are strongly colored by the late Georgian/early Victorian conception of him: these Blakeish words often seem to reflect the minds of the reporters as much as they reveal the mind of Blake, and as the intervening years and layers of reportage multiply, the share of credible Blake content diminishes. A snippet of Blake’s conversation that was worth retelling or recording is likely to have been one that conformed to, or at least resonated with, the other stories about Blake in circulation at the time. Gathered together in largely unmediated form, these reports constitute a portrait of a fellow we might call Anecdotal Blake, a somewhat different being from the persona we moderns know through his works in ink and paint, Autographic Blake. Ironically, Autographic Blake was not very well known to some of the original constructors of Anecdotal Blake—even to ones who knew Flesh and Blood Blake himself. Those modern readers who are thoroughly acquainted with Autographic Blake may find the shimmery Anecdotal Blake who rises in these pages to be an uncanny and alien creature, but it is intriguing to hear his voice, and like any chatty ghost he may have things to tell us beyond the grave.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84677330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
William Blake on Self and Soul discusses fundamentally interesting topics: Blake’s relation to empiricism and Gnosticism, and his struggle with existential alienation. But the book applies a preconceived framework to his poetry, and this has an unfortunate steamroller effect: it flattens out the texts in its path and moves straight ahead, passing by much that would be helpful, and even necessary, to its purpose. To summarize the framework: “the essential uneasiness of consciousness” (85) is exacerbated by empiricism, a “Science [of] Despair” (Milton 41.15, E 142) that renders the self “intangible” and the world “real” (12). The soul’s intuition of its “transcendental provenance” (xiii), discounted by empiricism, is experientially true, for Blake and all human beings. For remedy, Blake pursues Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, but with a twist, rejecting the individual immortal soul in favor of “the Human Imagination” and the afterlife in favor of “the Eternal Now” (21). He describes the problem in the early illuminated books, then develops his solution, which leads from personal agency in The Four Zoas to individual reformation in Milton and ultimately to self-sacrifice in Jerusalem.
{"title":"Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul","authors":"Tristanne J. Connolly","doi":"10.47761/biq.85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.85","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake on Self and Soul discusses fundamentally interesting topics: Blake’s relation to empiricism and Gnosticism, and his struggle with existential alienation. But the book applies a preconceived framework to his poetry, and this has an unfortunate steamroller effect: it flattens out the texts in its path and moves straight ahead, passing by much that would be helpful, and even necessary, to its purpose. To summarize the framework: “the essential uneasiness of consciousness” (85) is exacerbated by empiricism, a “Science [of] Despair” (Milton 41.15, E 142) that renders the self “intangible” and the world “real” (12). The soul’s intuition of its “transcendental provenance” (xiii), discounted by empiricism, is experientially true, for Blake and all human beings. For remedy, Blake pursues Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, but with a twist, rejecting the individual immortal soul in favor of “the Human Imagination” and the afterlife in favor of “the Eternal Now” (21). He describes the problem in the early illuminated books, then develops his solution, which leads from personal agency in The Four Zoas to individual reformation in Milton and ultimately to self-sacrifice in Jerusalem.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78880631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A splendid publication by the William Blake Trust features reproductions of Blake’s nineteen watercolors illustrating Robert Blair’s The Grave, rediscovered in 2001, and texts by Martin Butlin and Morton D. Paley. These drawings, plus Prone on the Lonely Grave—She Drops, which was once part of the group, were executed by Blake in the fall of 1805 on commission from Robert Hartley Cromek, whose edition of the poem with Blake’s illustrations, engraved by Louis Schiavonetti, appeared in 1808. Butlin’s contributions to the volume extend to a consideration of related drawings, including Death Pursuing the Soul through the Avenues of Life. He states that this work “stands out from the finished watercolours in that it is a monochrome drawing, finished in sepia washes over pencil on card in a rather heavy manner uncharacteristic of Blake’s own hand; although the invention seems to be by the artist [Blake], the work is perhaps a pencil drawing gone over by someone else to make it more saleable in the later 19th century.” A long footnote includes the following comments:When this drawing was first brought to my attention in 1965 I accepted it on the basis of a reproduction but suggested, in a letter to Sir Geoffrey Keynes of 13 December 1965, that it had perhaps been gone over in parts by someone else. By the time it was acquired by Essick in 1971 I had been able to see it and was satisfied that it was a perfectly good work by Blake and it was included without qualification in my catalogue in 1981. However, constant brooding over reproductions of this work has led me to my present doubts. Not surprisingly, these statements immediately caught my attention. In 1965 Butlin apparently believed that Death Pursuing had been “gone over” only “in parts by someone else,” but his statement in 2009 that it is “a pencil drawing” from Blake’s hand suggests that he now believes that all the washes were added by “someone else.” While I am tempted to do some teary-eyed “brooding” myself over Butlin’s partial deattribution of what I had long considered one of the more delicious examples of neo-gothic horror in my collection, his comments raise more general issues about how drawings are attributed, how the scholar/connoisseur converts subjective responses into convincing propositions, and how reproductions can play a role in those endeavors.
{"title":"Attribution and Reproduction: Death Pursuing the Soul through the Avenues of Life","authors":"R. Essick","doi":"10.47761/biq.83","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.83","url":null,"abstract":"A splendid publication by the William Blake Trust features reproductions of Blake’s nineteen watercolors illustrating Robert Blair’s The Grave, rediscovered in 2001, and texts by Martin Butlin and Morton D. Paley. These drawings, plus Prone on the Lonely Grave—She Drops, which was once part of the group, were executed by Blake in the fall of 1805 on commission from Robert Hartley Cromek, whose edition of the poem with Blake’s illustrations, engraved by Louis Schiavonetti, appeared in 1808. Butlin’s contributions to the volume extend to a consideration of related drawings, including Death Pursuing the Soul through the Avenues of Life. He states that this work “stands out from the finished watercolours in that it is a monochrome drawing, finished in sepia washes over pencil on card in a rather heavy manner uncharacteristic of Blake’s own hand; although the invention seems to be by the artist [Blake], the work is perhaps a pencil drawing gone over by someone else to make it more saleable in the later 19th century.” A long footnote includes the following comments:When this drawing was first brought to my attention in 1965 I accepted it on the basis of a reproduction but suggested, in a letter to Sir Geoffrey Keynes of 13 December 1965, that it had perhaps been gone over in parts by someone else. By the time it was acquired by Essick in 1971 I had been able to see it and was satisfied that it was a perfectly good work by Blake and it was included without qualification in my catalogue in 1981. However, constant brooding over reproductions of this work has led me to my present doubts. Not surprisingly, these statements immediately caught my attention. In 1965 Butlin apparently believed that Death Pursuing had been “gone over” only “in parts by someone else,” but his statement in 2009 that it is “a pencil drawing” from Blake’s hand suggests that he now believes that all the washes were added by “someone else.” While I am tempted to do some teary-eyed “brooding” myself over Butlin’s partial deattribution of what I had long considered one of the more delicious examples of neo-gothic horror in my collection, his comments raise more general issues about how drawings are attributed, how the scholar/connoisseur converts subjective responses into convincing propositions, and how reproductions can play a role in those endeavors.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83369392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I remember being introduced to a senior scholar at a summer Huntington Library lawn party a generation ago and his inquiring politely, “Well, what’s your angle?” Stephen Dedalus’s inner panic to “say something” flashed to Steelyard the Lawgiver’s Island in the Moon reassurance that “every person has a something” as I fumbled to come up with a dissertation abstract. Those more than thirty years past rise again in contemplating the analogous age differences between the two sets of contributors to this Romantic Circles electronic collection, which presents the efforts of four “younger Blake editors and scholars” and three “established” ones. The latter, Mary Lynn Johnson, W. H. Stevenson, and David Fuller, are doubtless familiar to subscribers of this journal for their three different “successful print editions” of “texts designed to appeal to first-time readers of Blake,” while the former, Rachel Lee, J. Alexandra McGhee, and co-editors Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, “have all worked as project assistants to the Blake Archive and received their graduate training from its editors” (introduction, par. 4; Johnson, par. 2). With the concise print elders accounting for less than a third of the volume (in my printout, anyway, and not counting the errata sheet for Johnson and Grant’s second edition, for which there is no editorially supplied print option), and the organizers’ point taken that “Stevenson, Johnson, and Fuller all see their editions being used in connection with the Blake Archive” (introduction, par. 7), the juxtaposition carries the sense of staged generational baton-passing to celebrate the expanding empire of the Blake Archive.
{"title":"Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, eds., Editing and Reading Blake","authors":"N. Hilton","doi":"10.47761/biq.86","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.86","url":null,"abstract":"I remember being introduced to a senior scholar at a summer Huntington Library lawn party a generation ago and his inquiring politely, “Well, what’s your angle?” Stephen Dedalus’s inner panic to “say something” flashed to Steelyard the Lawgiver’s Island in the Moon reassurance that “every person has a something” as I fumbled to come up with a dissertation abstract. Those more than thirty years past rise again in contemplating the analogous age differences between the two sets of contributors to this Romantic Circles electronic collection, which presents the efforts of four “younger Blake editors and scholars” and three “established” ones. The latter, Mary Lynn Johnson, W. H. Stevenson, and David Fuller, are doubtless familiar to subscribers of this journal for their three different “successful print editions” of “texts designed to appeal to first-time readers of Blake,” while the former, Rachel Lee, J. Alexandra McGhee, and co-editors Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, “have all worked as project assistants to the Blake Archive and received their graduate training from its editors” (introduction, par. 4; Johnson, par. 2). With the concise print elders accounting for less than a third of the volume (in my printout, anyway, and not counting the errata sheet for Johnson and Grant’s second edition, for which there is no editorially supplied print option), and the organizers’ point taken that “Stevenson, Johnson, and Fuller all see their editions being used in connection with the Blake Archive” (introduction, par. 7), the juxtaposition carries the sense of staged generational baton-passing to celebrate the expanding empire of the Blake Archive.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88358012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay presents and explores new information concerning the life, residences, and circle of Catherine Blake in the period immediately following her departure from Linnell’s town house, c. March 1828, until her death in mid-October 1831. It revises a number of Bentley’s assertions regarding the chronology and location of her residences. The essay will also explore her relationship with Frederick Tatham, the member of the Ancients with whom she had most contact after Blake’s death, and who—rightly or wrongly—inherited the Blakes’ earthly possessions after Catherine’s demise.
{"title":"“an excellent saleswoman”: The Last Years of Catherine Blake","authors":"A. Whitehead","doi":"10.47761/biq.92","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.92","url":null,"abstract":"This essay presents and explores new information concerning the life, residences, and circle of Catherine Blake in the period immediately following her departure from Linnell’s town house, c. March 1828, until her death in mid-October 1831. It revises a number of Bentley’s assertions regarding the chronology and location of her residences. The essay will also explore her relationship with Frederick Tatham, the member of the Ancients with whom she had most contact after Blake’s death, and who—rightly or wrongly—inherited the Blakes’ earthly possessions after Catherine’s demise.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"232 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89252245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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