Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Cláudia Franco Souza, João Carlos Callixto
In a post published 1 April 2020 on his personal blog, John McGowan declared that “[a] student learns how to ‘do’ close reading by immersion in various examples of the practice, not by learning a set of rules or ‘a’ method.” In the present case, we are indeed bringing to the fore two radically different, although both inspired and inspiring, examples of readings of William Blake’s poetry and poetic principles, one by Fernando Pessoa and the other by Três Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers). Pessoa (1888–1935) is the modernist writer now acclaimed, in both elite and popular cultural circles, as Portugal’s twentieth-century national poet; aware of Blake since at least 1903–04, he openly acknowledged his influence c. 1915: “In my intellectual ancestry I find Blake and Walt Whitman.” Três Tristes Tigres is a Portuguese pop-rock band from the 1990s, currently comprising the singer Ana Deus, the guitar player Alexandre Soares, and the poet Regina Guimarães; almost twenty years after their first albums (1993–98), the group released Mínima Luz (Minimum Light, 2020), which includes the track “Tigre,” the first musical adaptation of a poem by Blake to be sung in a Portuguese translation.
{"title":"Portuguese Readings of William Blake: Fernando Pessoa, a National Poet, and Três Tristes Tigres, a Pop-Rock Band","authors":"Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Cláudia Franco Souza, João Carlos Callixto","doi":"10.47761/biq.304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.304","url":null,"abstract":"In a post published 1 April 2020 on his personal blog, John McGowan declared that “[a] student learns how to ‘do’ close reading by immersion in various examples of the practice, not by learning a set of rules or ‘a’ method.” In the present case, we are indeed bringing to the fore two radically different, although both inspired and inspiring, examples of readings of William Blake’s poetry and poetic principles, one by Fernando Pessoa and the other by Três Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers). Pessoa (1888–1935) is the modernist writer now acclaimed, in both elite and popular cultural circles, as Portugal’s twentieth-century national poet; aware of Blake since at least 1903–04, he openly acknowledged his influence c. 1915: “In my intellectual ancestry I find Blake and Walt Whitman.” Três Tristes Tigres is a Portuguese pop-rock band from the 1990s, currently comprising the singer Ana Deus, the guitar player Alexandre Soares, and the poet Regina Guimarães; almost twenty years after their first albums (1993–98), the group released Mínima Luz (Minimum Light, 2020), which includes the track “Tigre,” the first musical adaptation of a poem by Blake to be sung in a Portuguese translation.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86185955","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}
Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture of 7 December 2019, observed that the public nowadays prefers facts to fiction. This is an auspicious remark for my purposes, as my theme will be the autobiographical book of Czesław Miłosz, another Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who received his award in 1980, a year after Tokarczuk’s literary debut. The Blake of Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is part of a fictional world, a curious addition to the story: Agnieszka Holland’s film Spoor, adapted from the book and cowritten by the novelist, eliminates the Blake references without much (or perhaps any) loss to the plot. Conversely, the Blake of Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro, initially published in 1977 (a round anniversary of Blake’s birth and death), is a vital part of life. I will first recall a few relevant details from Miłosz’s bi(bli)ography, then reflect on the character and quality of his tribute to William Blake. Unlike my chapter for The Reception of William Blake in Europe, whose profile dictated the method (that is, an overview) and the narrow focus on the role Miłosz’s book played in the history of the reception of Blake in Poland, I will engage here more intensively with Ziemia Ulro and, by doing so, postulate a much more extensive appeal of Miłosz’s work. In particular, I will be pointing to the importance and value of this book—translated into English by Louis Iribarne as The Land of Ulro—for international Blake circles.
{"title":"“I inhabited the Land of Ulro long before Blake taught me its proper name”: Czesław Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro/The Land of Ulro","authors":"E. Borkowska","doi":"10.47761/biq.303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.303","url":null,"abstract":"Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture of 7 December 2019, observed that the public nowadays prefers facts to fiction. This is an auspicious remark for my purposes, as my theme will be the autobiographical book of Czesław Miłosz, another Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who received his award in 1980, a year after Tokarczuk’s literary debut. The Blake of Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is part of a fictional world, a curious addition to the story: Agnieszka Holland’s film Spoor, adapted from the book and cowritten by the novelist, eliminates the Blake references without much (or perhaps any) loss to the plot. Conversely, the Blake of Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro, initially published in 1977 (a round anniversary of Blake’s birth and death), is a vital part of life. I will first recall a few relevant details from Miłosz’s bi(bli)ography, then reflect on the character and quality of his tribute to William Blake. Unlike my chapter for The Reception of William Blake in Europe, whose profile dictated the method (that is, an overview) and the narrow focus on the role Miłosz’s book played in the history of the reception of Blake in Poland, I will engage here more intensively with Ziemia Ulro and, by doing so, postulate a much more extensive appeal of Miłosz’s work. In particular, I will be pointing to the importance and value of this book—translated into English by Louis Iribarne as The Land of Ulro—for international Blake circles.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80845029","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’s Songs of Experience found a powerful response in the Spanish author Leopoldo María Panero (1948–2014). In his work, which is crowded with echoes of the Blakean images of the sick rose and the tiger, he offers a reinterpretation of some of Blake’s most popular motifs.
{"title":"“Sick as a Rose”: William Blake in Leopoldo María Panero’s Poetry of Experience","authors":"Cristina Flores","doi":"10.47761/biq.302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.302","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake’s Songs of Experience found a powerful response in the Spanish author Leopoldo María Panero (1948–2014). In his work, which is crowded with echoes of the Blakean images of the sick rose and the tiger, he offers a reinterpretation of some of Blake’s most popular motifs.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"304 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77634291","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}
Under what conditions might Blake’s Beulah offer a script for a revolutionary present? This essay explores an episode in the visual reception of Blake as a letterpress poet from a time of civil unrest in Italy. Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah: Saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (William Blake in Beulah: A Visionary Essay on a Poet in Comic Strips, 1977) is an avant-garde experiment in visual adaptation inspired by lettrism, Dada, and neo-avant-garde critiques of typography. Their analysis of the loss of the visual elements of writing certainly applies to the textual transmission of Blake’s works, which separated the poet from the artist in order to publish his poetry in typographical layouts. Abstracted from the visual form of the illuminated book, Blake’s poetry offered an ideal testing ground for Costa’s “visionary essay” in the sense of a creative-critical attempt to turn poetry into comic-strip captions. In fragmenting, resegmenting, repeating, and distributing Blake’s words across comic-strip panels, Costa releases them from the constraints of language and genre, testing how Blake might fare as a comic-strip poet. In what follows, I will explore how Costa’s comic-strip Blake subverts the orders of language, genre, and the medium of the book. I will focus on the most experimental section of Blake in Beulah, in which Costa reinvents The French Revolution as a prophetic cue for the 1977 movement.
在什么条件下，布莱克的比乌拉可能会提供一个革命性的礼物脚本?本文探讨了意大利内乱时期布莱克作为凸版印刷诗人在视觉上接受的一个插曲。Corrado Costa的William Blake在Beulah: Saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (William Blake在Beulah:一篇关于连载漫画诗人的幻想文章，1977年)是视觉改编的前卫实验，灵感来自字母主义，达达主义和新前卫的印刷批评。他们对写作中视觉元素缺失的分析当然适用于布莱克作品的文本传播，这将诗人与艺术家分开，以便以印刷布局出版他的诗歌。布莱克的诗歌从插图书的视觉形式中抽象出来，为科斯塔的“幻想散文”提供了一个理想的试验场，在这种意义上，他试图把诗歌变成漫画的说明文字。在将布莱克的文字分割、再分割、重复和分布在漫画面板上的过程中，科斯塔将它们从语言和体裁的限制中解放出来，测试布莱克作为漫画诗人的表现。接下来，我将探讨科斯塔的连环画《布莱克》是如何颠覆语言、体裁和书的媒介秩序的。我将重点关注《比乌拉的布莱克》中最具实验性的部分，科斯塔将法国大革命重新定义为1977年运动的预言线索。
{"title":"Reading Revolutions: Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah, a Visionary Cartoon Essay in 1977 Italy","authors":"Luisa Calé","doi":"10.47761/biq.300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.300","url":null,"abstract":"Under what conditions might Blake’s Beulah offer a script for a revolutionary present? This essay explores an episode in the visual reception of Blake as a letterpress poet from a time of civil unrest in Italy. Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah: Saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (William Blake in Beulah: A Visionary Essay on a Poet in Comic Strips, 1977) is an avant-garde experiment in visual adaptation inspired by lettrism, Dada, and neo-avant-garde critiques of typography. Their analysis of the loss of the visual elements of writing certainly applies to the textual transmission of Blake’s works, which separated the poet from the artist in order to publish his poetry in typographical layouts. Abstracted from the visual form of the illuminated book, Blake’s poetry offered an ideal testing ground for Costa’s “visionary essay” in the sense of a creative-critical attempt to turn poetry into comic-strip captions. In fragmenting, resegmenting, repeating, and distributing Blake’s words across comic-strip panels, Costa releases them from the constraints of language and genre, testing how Blake might fare as a comic-strip poet. In what follows, I will explore how Costa’s comic-strip Blake subverts the orders of language, genre, and the medium of the book. I will focus on the most experimental section of Blake in Beulah, in which Costa reinvents The French Revolution as a prophetic cue for the 1977 movement.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89911474","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 intend in this paper to focus on a lesser-known, yet highly significant, aspect of Blake’s aesthetic reception in southeast Europe. The radio play William Blake’s Black Bible (Biblia neagră a lui William Blake) represents—as one learns at the end—a tribute to the victims of the Colectiv Club fire, which occurred in Bucharest on 30 October 2015. The site itself was a blast from the past: established as a private venture by a prominent bourgeois family, Prodanof, between the two world wars, it became a successful footwear factory during the communist era and was left derelict after the demise of the Ceaușescu regime in late 1989. It was subsequently rented by private businessmen and turned into a fashionable events club after 1990.
在本文中，我打算把重点放在一个鲜为人知但非常重要的方面，即布莱克在东南欧的审美接受。广播剧《威廉·布莱克的黑色圣经》(Biblia neagru a lui William Blake)是向2015年10月30日发生在布加勒斯特的集体俱乐部大火的受害者致敬。这个地方本身就是过去的一个爆炸:在两次世界大战之间，它是一个著名的资产阶级家族普罗丹诺夫(Prodanof)的私人企业，在共产主义时代成为一家成功的鞋厂，在1989年底Ceaușescu政权倒台后，它被遗弃了。它后来被私人商人租用，并在1990年后变成了一个时尚的活动俱乐部。
{"title":"William Blake’s Black Bible as a Spectacle of Doom: A Recent Note to Blakean Reception in Romania","authors":"Cătălin Ghiță","doi":"10.47761/biq.301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.301","url":null,"abstract":"I intend in this paper to focus on a lesser-known, yet highly significant, aspect of Blake’s aesthetic reception in southeast Europe. The radio play William Blake’s Black Bible (Biblia neagră a lui William Blake) represents—as one learns at the end—a tribute to the victims of the Colectiv Club fire, which occurred in Bucharest on 30 October 2015. The site itself was a blast from the past: established as a private venture by a prominent bourgeois family, Prodanof, between the two world wars, it became a successful footwear factory during the communist era and was left derelict after the demise of the Ceaușescu regime in late 1989. It was subsequently rented by private businessmen and turned into a fashionable events club after 1990.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"171 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74377976","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’s influence on modern culture is undeniable. Blake—in contrast, for example, to P. B. Shelley, Wordsworth, or Byron—has a huge presence in literature, art, and music. Striking parallels and historical evidence for connections between Blake and his modern audiences have been identified and discussed, determining why he matters. From the discussions of synergies in the intellectual and emotional climates of his time and our own arise two questions, which this special issue on Blake’s reception in Europe endeavors to address: One, what of Blake (person, poetry, and art) bridges the gulf of time, appears universal, or seems directly relevant? Two, what happens to Blake if works (texts and images) are separated and taken up by audiences that ostensibly have little in common, apart from a shared residual Christian position or other—esoteric or secular—values originating in Western culture? The latter, which is about ownership, leads to a further question: If there are too many idiosyncratic interpretations of Blake, does the real Blake get lost?
{"title":"To See the Worlds of a Grain of Sand: Blake and Reception","authors":"S. Erle","doi":"10.47761/biq.298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.298","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake’s influence on modern culture is undeniable. Blake—in contrast, for example, to P. B. Shelley, Wordsworth, or Byron—has a huge presence in literature, art, and music. Striking parallels and historical evidence for connections between Blake and his modern audiences have been identified and discussed, determining why he matters. From the discussions of synergies in the intellectual and emotional climates of his time and our own arise two questions, which this special issue on Blake’s reception in Europe endeavors to address: One, what of Blake (person, poetry, and art) bridges the gulf of time, appears universal, or seems directly relevant? Two, what happens to Blake if works (texts and images) are separated and taken up by audiences that ostensibly have little in common, apart from a shared residual Christian position or other—esoteric or secular—values originating in Western culture? The latter, which is about ownership, leads to a further question: If there are too many idiosyncratic interpretations of Blake, does the real Blake get lost?","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81492457","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 drew the attention of the influential Russian poet and literary critic Nikolai Gumilyov (1886–1921). Gumilyov was the first to translate “The Mental Traveller” into another language, in the period from 1918 to 1921, and his late poetry contains many traces of Blakean influence.
{"title":"The Mental Travellers: On Blake’s Reception by Nikolai Gumilyov","authors":"Vera V. Serdechnaia","doi":"10.47761/biq.296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.296","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake drew the attention of the influential Russian poet and literary critic Nikolai Gumilyov (1886–1921). Gumilyov was the first to translate “The Mental Traveller” into another language, in the period from 1918 to 1921, and his late poetry contains many traces of Blakean influence.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87605506","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}
{"title":"Blake in Europe, edited by Sibylle Erle: cover and table of contents","authors":"S. Jones","doi":"10.47761/biq.299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79962919","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}
Spector has spent much of her career championing a “canon of rejected knowledge” that she describes in her book as having been “extirpated from the bibliographies of acceptable resources” (330). The Evolution of Blake’s Myth is her most ambitious and persuasive statement yet on the importance of esoteric or “hidden” traditions, largely Kabbalistic, to Blake’s work. Spector discusses almost all of Blake’s illuminated books and a good number of his paintings; she also develops a vocabulary for Blake’s composite art that allows for a consistently integrated discussion of text and design.
{"title":"Sheila A. Spector, The Evolution of Blake’s Myth","authors":"R. Yoder","doi":"10.47761/biq.292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.292","url":null,"abstract":"Spector has spent much of her career championing a “canon of rejected knowledge” that she describes in her book as having been “extirpated from the bibliographies of acceptable resources” (330). The Evolution of Blake’s Myth is her most ambitious and persuasive statement yet on the importance of esoteric or “hidden” traditions, largely Kabbalistic, to Blake’s work. Spector discusses almost all of Blake’s illuminated books and a good number of his paintings; she also develops a vocabulary for Blake’s composite art that allows for a consistently integrated discussion of text and design.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77270315","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}
Even though William and Catherine Blake are mentioned on only a handful of pages, Blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued by Susan Mitchell Sommers’s The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian London for its portrayal of groups and eclectic discourses close to, and sometimes touching, the Blakes. The Siblys were a family of booksellers who specialized in the occult, publishing on such topics as astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and prophecy. The book focuses largely on the two oldest brothers, Manoah (1757–1840), a Swedenborgian minister and Bank of England employee, whom the Blakes almost certainly met, and Ebenezer (1750–99), a bookseller, freemason, quack, astrologer, political operative, bigamist, and self-described male midwife and alchemist. As Sommers points out, when the Siblys have been considered at all, they have been examined from various disciplinary frames that often misconstrued their larger lives and work. Accordingly, one of the real strengths of the book is Sommers’s careful engagement with, and correction of, the existing scholarship, based on detailed, documented research.
尽管威廉·布莱克和凯瑟琳·布莱克只在寥寥几页中被提及，但苏珊·米切尔·萨默斯(Susan Mitchell Sommers)的《伦敦的兄弟姐妹:乔治时代伦敦神秘边缘的一个家庭》(The Siblys of London: a Family on The Esoteric边缘)会让布莱克的粉丝们彻底着迷，因为书中描绘了与布莱克一家关系密切、有时令人动心的群体和不偏不谬的话语。西布利家族是一个专门从事神秘学书籍的书商家族，出版的书籍主题包括占星术、炼金术、巫术和预言。这本书主要集中在两个哥哥身上，一个是玛诺亚(1757 - 1840)，他是瑞典的部长和英格兰银行的雇员，布雷克一家几乎肯定见过他;另一个是埃比尼泽(1750 - 99)，他是书商、共济会会员、庸医、占星家、政治操刀者、重婚者，自称是男性助产士和炼金术士。正如索默斯所指出的那样，当人们对西布里夫妇进行研究时，他们受到的是各种学科框架的审视，这些框架往往误解了他们更广泛的生活和工作。因此，这本书的真正优势之一是，索默斯基于详细的文献研究，对现有学术成果进行了认真的研究和修正。
{"title":"Susan Mitchell Sommers, The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England","authors":"Wayne C. Ripley","doi":"10.47761/biq.293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.293","url":null,"abstract":"Even though William and Catherine Blake are mentioned on only a handful of pages, Blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued by Susan Mitchell Sommers’s The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian London for its portrayal of groups and eclectic discourses close to, and sometimes touching, the Blakes. The Siblys were a family of booksellers who specialized in the occult, publishing on such topics as astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and prophecy. The book focuses largely on the two oldest brothers, Manoah (1757–1840), a Swedenborgian minister and Bank of England employee, whom the Blakes almost certainly met, and Ebenezer (1750–99), a bookseller, freemason, quack, astrologer, political operative, bigamist, and self-described male midwife and alchemist. As Sommers points out, when the Siblys have been considered at all, they have been examined from various disciplinary frames that often misconstrued their larger lives and work. Accordingly, one of the real strengths of the book is Sommers’s careful engagement with, and correction of, the existing scholarship, based on detailed, documented research.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72805477","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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