31 October 2001

The William Blake Archive www.blakearchive.org is pleased to announce the publication of new electronic editions of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy G and Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy P, both printed c. 1818. This is the first reproduction of Marriage copy G and the first full color reproduction of Visions copy P since the badly-degraded filmstrips produced by Micro Methods Ltd. in the 1970s.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy G is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy P is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. They join copies of Marriage and Visions from other printings: Marriage copies C (1790), H (1790/1821), F (1794), D (1795), and I (1827), and Visions copies C and J (1793), F (1794), and G (1795). Other copies of Marriage and Visions are forthcoming: Marriage copy K (plates 21-24) and copies L and M (plates 25-27), from the first printing of the plates in 1790, with plates 24 and 25 in first states; and Visions copy O, printed with copy P.

The electronic editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and new images scanned and color-corrected from first-generation 4x5" transparencies; text and images are each fully searchable and supported by the Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates. With the Archive's recently added comparison feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of an illuminated book.

With the publication of these two titles, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 45 copies of 18 of Blake's 19 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. They also join our searchable SGML-encoded electronic edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. With the forthcoming publication of Jerusalem copy E, the Archive will contain at least one copy of each of Blake's works in illuminated printing and multiple copies of most.

Marriage copy G, one of nine extant copies, is the only copy with a variant plate order (1-11, 15, 14, 12, 13, 16-27) that can be traced directly to Blake, and it is the first of his last two copies in which the cave and rock forms on plates 10, 11, 15, and 20 were printed. These forms were part of the original designs as executed on the plates but were wiped of ink in all earlier copies and thus did not print; they show up only in this copy and copy I.

The early histories of Marriage copy G and Visions copy P are not known, but they were bound together (with The Book of Thel copy N) until 1890. They also share the same printing session and printing and coloring styles. Both are printed in red-orange ink on one side of RUSE & TURNERS/1815 paper and finished in watercolors and pen and ink. Each impression is numbered in the top right corner and bordered by one thin line drawn in red-orange ink a little over a centimeter around the image, setting off each page like a miniature painting. These extraordinarily beautiful copies were produced in the same session with other books in the Archive: The Book of Thel copy O and The Book of Urizen copy G. This late style, which Blake also used c. 1821-22 and 1825-27, can be seen in other books in the Archive: America a Prophecy copy O and Europe a Prophecy copy K, published earlier this year, Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies Z and AA, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy I.

The editors of the Archive recently photographed over 1250 works by Blake in the British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, including all 537 water colors illustrating Edward Young's Night Thoughts and hundreds of pencil sketches (nine newly discovered), drawings, and watercolors. Over the next few years, we will be adding this extensive collection of books, prints, and drawings to the Archive. Many of these works will be reproduced in color for the first time.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

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