9 March 1999

The editors of the William Blake Archive are pleased to announce the publication of three new electronic editions of Blake's most popular work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. They are of copies C, F, and L--none has been reproduced before now.

Songs copy C is one of the first copies of the combined Songs. Along with copies B, D, and E, it was formed in 1794 of Innocence plates printed in raw sienna on both sides of the leaf in 1789 and Experience plates lightly color printed in yellow ochre in the same format in 1794. By this time, Blake had decided to move plates 34-36 ("The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found") to Experience, but since plate 34 was printed on the verso of the leaf with plate 26 ("A Dream"), plate 26 is read in this copy, as well as in copies B and D, as an Experience poem. And, like copies B and D, copy C is missing plate 52 ("To Tirzah") but has the small vignette known as plate a (five cherubs carrying a naked figure), one of Blake's earliest relief etchings used here as a tailpiece. Copy C is in the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

Bibliographically, copy F is even more interesting. It, too, consists of two sections printed differently and at different times. Its Innocence plates were printed in green ink on both sides of the leaf in 1789, probably before the raw sienna printing. Its Experience plates were heavily color printed on one side of the leaf in 1794, before those in copy C, possibly while Experience was still in progress. The impressions of Experience were printed with those now in Songs copies G, H, and T, which are all missing plates 39, 44, 45, and 48. Together, these four plates form one sheet of copper. The fact that all four plates are missing from all four copies suggests that the plates were not yet part of Experience at the time of this printing. These four color-printed copies of Experience appear to have been intended as autonomous publications. At any rate, there are no extant sets of Innocence impressions printed in this style, copies G and H remain without Innocence, and copies F and T were assembled by someone other than Blake.

Songs copy L, like copy F, is in the Yale Center for British Art. Unlike copies C and F, though, its two parts were printed together in a uniform style, dark brown ink on one side of the leaf, ca. 1795. It has all 54 plates, including plate 52, that make up the combined Songs and is numbered by Blake 1-54.

All of these editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and all are fully searchable for both text and images and supported by the unique Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates. We now have twenty-nine copies of sixteen illuminated books in the Archive. We will soon be adding two more copies of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and an in-depth illustrated Tour highlighting the Archive's features and some ways to use its resources. We will continue to add new electronic editions of illuminated books throughout the spring and summer.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi, Editors
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Project Manager
The William Blake Archive

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