17 April 2000

The William Blake Archive www.blakearchive.org is pleased to announce that it has received a two-year Preservation and Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The editors and staff are most grateful for the support it provides as we begin to expand the Archive over the next few years to include Blake's drawings, paintings, and engravings.

We are also very pleased to announce the publication of new electronic editions of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies H and I, both in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. Printed in 1790 and 1827 respectively, they join copies of Marriage in the Archive from other printings: copies C (1790), D (1795), and F (c. 1794). Copy G, from a c. 1818 printing, and copy K (plates 21-24) and copies L and M (separate printings of "A Song of Liberty") from a 1790 printing are forthcoming.

The electronic editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and new images scanned and color-corrected from first-generation 4 x 5 inch transparencies; texts and images are fully searchable and supported by the Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.

With the publication of these two titles, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 41 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 H, perhaps the most illuminated of Blake's illuminated books, appears initially to have relied on colored inks rather than watercolor washes for its coloring. It was produced with copy B in 1790, with plates printed in various shades of red, olive, and green inks on both sides of the leaves. The impressions forming copy B (Bodleian Library, Oxford University) are uncolored, and those forming copy H may also have been left in this state originally. But copy H was sold to the painter John Linnell, Blake's young patron, in 1821 for two pounds and two shillings (less than half of what he was asking for books of similar size and number of pages), and apparently at that time Blake extensively reworked the pages by coloring the illustrations, adding gold leaf (e.g., title page), streaking the background of the texts in yellows and blues, and, what is most unusual, going over the texts in various colored inks, letter by letter, line by line. The results are pages among the most colorful that Blake ever produced and texts among the most challenging editorially, with many key words and phrases visually highlighted (e.g., "Contraries" and "Human existence" of plate 3 set off by dark ink in lines rewritten in red ink). Such detailed refinishing also resulted in a book with stylistic features characteristic of productions both early (facing pages and plates printed without borders) and late (elaborate coloring and page numbers).

One stylistic element characteristic of illuminated books produced c. 1818 and later is the frameline, usually one thin line in red or black ink drawn a few centimeters around the image. Copy H has no framelines, probably because they would prove visually jarring for pages that face one another. But they are used to superb effect in Marriage copy I, where they set off each page as a miniature painting. Copy I, printed and colored in 1827 for Thomas Wainewright, was one of the last illuminated books produced by Blake. It was printed in orangish-red ink on one side of J. Whatman paper dated 1825, numbered 1-27, and finished in gold, watercolors, and pen and ink to match Wainewright's copy of Songs (copy X). It was produced in the same style Blake used in c. 1818, 1821-22, and 1825-26. Works from these sessions include The Book of Thel copy O and Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies Z and AA, which are in the Archive, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy G, Jerusalem copy E, America, a Prophecy copy O, Europe, a Prophecy copy K, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy P, all of which will enter the Archive within the year. Printing plates in full (i.e., with their plate borders), a feature of this late production style, can make pages appear slightly larger and introduce compositional elements missing in copies printed earlier. For Marriage copy I, as well as copy G, the inclusion of the plate borders introduced the outer lines forming rocks and cavern shapes on plates 10, 11, 15, and 20, images named in the text but pictured only in these last two copies.

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

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