14 December 1999

The William Blake Archive http://www.blakearchive.org is pleased to announce the publication of new electronic editions of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies R and AA. Copy AA has been reproduced only once previously, as a microfilm many years ago; copy R has never been reproduced before.

Songs copies R and AA are both in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. They join copies of Songs in the Archive from other printings: copies C (1789/1794), F (1789/1794), L (1795), and Z (1826). Copies O and V, from 1795 and c. 1818 printings, are forthcoming.

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 publication of these two titles, the Archive now contains 39 copies of 18 separate books, including at least one copy of every one of Blake's works in illuminated printing except the 100 plates of Jerusalem (forthcoming).

We are also pleased to announce that the Archive was recently named to the NEH's prestigious EDSITEment list of "Top Humanities Web Sites" http://edsitement.neh.gov/.

Copy R, printed and colored c. 1795, is of special interest because it was Blake's own copy and, with slight variations, provided the plate order for the last seven copies, printed between 1818 and 1827. This was the first time that Blake printed the Innocence and Experience plates in the same session. All copies of Songs produced before copy R--for example, copies C and F in the Archive--were compiled from Innocence impressions printed in 1789 (either from the raw sienna issue, as in copy C, or green issue, as in copy F) and Experience impressions printed in 1794 (either lightly color printed, as in copy C, or heavily color printed while Experience was still in progress, as in copy F). And copy R marks the first time that Blake printed plates 34-36 ("The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found") as Experience plates; in the earlier copies of Songs he printed them as Innocence poems and transferred them to Experience at the time of compilation.

Though Blake printed the Innocence and Experience plates in the same session, he apparently meant for them to be separate works. He printed the plates in various shades of greenish and grayish black ink, but did not print the combined title plate, and stabbed and numbered the two parts as separate volumes. He produced copy R, in other words, almost exactly as he advertised its two separate sections in his prospectus of October 1793, where Songs of Innocence and of Experience was not advertised as such, but rather as "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience," with each part listed as a separate work and described as "Octavo, with 25 designs, price 5s." Almost exactly, but not quite, because copy R was printed on one side of folio-size leaves and its Experience had only twenty-four designs, since it did not include "To Tirzah," which had not yet been executed, or plate a, which had been used as a tailpiece in copies B-D.

Songs copy R now has the combined title plate and "To Tirzah," but both were inserted late. "To Tirzah" may have been printed and inserted with the copy's impression of "The Tyger," which is watermarked "J Whatman / 1808" (the only impression so marked). Both plates were printed in a solid black ink, not the greenish and grayish black of the other plates, and are numbered sequentially as part of Experience (1-25) and thus must have been inserted before this numbering and the numbering, in the same style and medium, of Innocence (1-28). The combined title plate was also printed in this solid black ink, but it is unnumbered and may have been printed and/or added later, though almost certainly before copy R was sold to Linnell in 1819, by which time the pages had been given four framelines, the Experience pages had been renumbered 29-53 to continue the sequence of numbers in Innocence, and many Experience impressions had been recolored.

Copy R was produced with Songs copy A as part of a set of illuminated books printed on large paper, approximately 38 x 27 cm., the size of the "I Taylor" paper it shares with copy A. It was trimmed to 30 x 22 cm. when bound to match Linnell's other illuminated books. Copy R joins other works from the large-paper set now in the Archive (The Book of Thel copy F, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy D, There is No Natural Religion copy L, All Religions are One copy A, and America, a Prophecy copy A, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy G) and forthcoming (The First Book of Urizen copy B and Europe, a Prophecy copy H).

Innocence and Experience were printed together as a single, combined work in 1826 to form Songs copy Z, which is in the Archive, and copy AA. Both copies sold for L5.5s., half what Blake listed Songs for in an 1827 letter. Both copies Z and AA were printed in the same orange ink Blake used ca. 1818 and 1821-22 (works from these sessions include The Book of Thel copy O, which is in the Archive, and Jerusalem copy E, America, a Prophecy copy O, Europe, a Prophecy copy K, Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy P, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy G, each of which will enter the Archive within the next year). Like the books produced in these sessions, both copies were given single red framelines, though the pen and ink page numbers (1-54) were placed outside rather than inside the frameline.

In the future, with the release of our revised site interface, users will be able to instantly compare impressions from various copies of an illuminated book within the same browser window. At the moment, users need to open other browser windows to make such comparisons. Doing so with impressions from copies AA and Z, however, is instructive and well worth the effort. Impressions from the same plate, though printed and colored in the same style, often appear quite different if the text was rewritten or an image was strengthened in pen and ink (either black or red). But this characteristically Blakean bounding line was usually necessitated by an otherwise illegible text or undifferentiated images. Overall, the impressions in copy AA were better printed and required less pen and ink salvaging than those used to form copy Z.

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

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