27 June 2006

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of two late copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy V (Pierpont Morgan Library) and copy Y (Metropolitan Museum), and a manuscript listing the order of the Songs (Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress). Both copies are here reproduced for the first time, and, like all the illuminated books in the Archive, their texts and images are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications.

Blake printed copy V in 1821 in light orange ink on large sheets of J. Whatman paper watermarked 1818. He and/or possibly his wife, Catherine, drew four lines in pen and ink over or beside pencil lines to form a frame of three bands around each image; washed the frame's wide central band in light pinks, blues, yellows, or greens; and numbered the pages in ink 1-54 just outside the outer framing line. Copy Y, printed in 1825 in bright orange ink on J. Whatman paper watermarked 1825, is framed more decoratively with vines, curtains, and other motifs and is also numbered in pen and ink 1-54.

Both copies are connected either visually or bibliographically to copy R, previously published in the Archive (see the update for 14 December 1999). Nearly all of the impressions of copy R were printed in 1795 along with those making up copy A (forthcoming in the Archive), and then, by August 1819, were refinished and given four framing lines for Blake's patron, John Linnell. Copy R established the plate order for seven of the eight subsequent copies printed between 1818 and 1827, including copy Y and copies Z and AA, both previously published in the Archive. The exception is copy V, whose plates were uniquely arranged according to a manuscript entitled "The Order in which the Songs of Innocence & Experience ought to be paged & placed," often called "The Order of the Songs." Our reproduction of this manuscript is the first to be published since William Muir's partial facsimile of 1885, and our transcription and notes provide the most thorough textual and bibliographic treatment of it in any medium.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible through the continuing support of the Library of Congress, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
William Shaw, project manager
The William Blake Archive