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Northrop Frye, in the 1947 study Fearful Symmetry, claimed that William Blake was a "victim of anthologies". While that may be true to an extent, Blake’s modes of production and distribution of his works did almost nothing to promote his reputation or ensure his place in the canon. During his lifetime, only a fraction of his work was published in the usual sense; most of his work circulated among a very tight circle of friends and admirers. We could not say that Blake’s work appealed to the “common reader” during his lifetime – whatever real or ideal construct we posit as the “common reader”. It is only in the decades after his death that a recuperation project brought Blake’s work to the attention of a wider public, but even then that public was not, I maintain, a “common readership”. Implicated in this process are early biographers, scholars, and critics. Along the way, though, each generation has had to struggle with the question of how to present the multimedia works of Blake’s hand: by describing, by representing, or by ignoring.
What I want to suggest today is that, first of all, Blake’s conception of audience was exclusive in the extreme; that, even though some of his poems and designs have wide audience appeal, there has never been a “common reader” of the whole of Blake’s works; and, finally, while Blake is perhaps a “victim” of critics, paradoxically, it is recent scholarship, in conjunction with new technology, that will make the visionary poet and engraver more than an anthology entry to future generations of readers.
It seems important to begin by reviewing some of the interrelated features which contributed, indeed, perhaps ensured, Blake’s near obscurity during his lifetime: first, his training as an engraver allowed him to make a living, however meagre, throughout his life; this was crucial because, second, Blake’s attitude towards the public would not allow him to pander to public taste; third, his self-publishing method, with its individual decoration, was labour-intensive and, in many respects, ran counter to the very bases of “printing”; and fourth, we need to realize that Blake’s original art, at least, may not have been much to the public’s liking in any event. Allan Cunningham, who wrote the entry on Blake for the 1830 Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, said that
Let me just remind you of Blake’s self-publishing method: the one revealed to him by his dead brother Robert in a dream. The vision showed him how to combine engraved graphics with engraved writing, creating a multimedia printing process which precluded the need for moveable type, a compositor, or anything connected to a typical print shop of the day. The plates were inked, the paper laid on, taken off, and decorated by hand in watercolour (what Blake called “fresco”) by both Blake and his wife, whom he had taught to “[tint] them from his drawings with right artistic feeling” (Gilchrist, in Essick, p. 10).
he wanted the skill of hand, and fine tact of fancy and taste, to impress upon the offspring of his thoughts that popular shape, which gives such productions immediate circulation. His works were looked coldly on by the world, and were only esteemed by men of poetic minds, or those who were fond of things out of the common way. He earned a little fame, but no money by these speculations, and had to depend for bread on the labours of his graver (43).
Taken together, these facts practically guaranteed that Blake’s reputation as an original poet would be recognized in a relatively small circle.
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The process itself complicated Blake’s publicity: control of publication was clearly in the author’s hands for, as Gilchrist put it, “[n]ever before surely was a man so literally the author of his own work” (70-71). The process also has complicated the very way we describe it: commentators struggle to find the right words to describe Blake’s “collection”, his “manuscript”, his “compositions” – all terms attempting to come to grips with the new media Blake was producing.
For there is no other way to describe Blake’s productions than as multimedia productions. And at least we have records of the poetry and pictorial art, for Blake’s vision gave him a method for combining the two media in a permanent form. But apparently his imagination ranged even further. Cunningham notes, writing 3 years after Blake’s death,
In sketching designs, engraving plates, writing songs, and composing music, he employed his time, with his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all his undertakings….Of his music there are no specimens – he wanted the art of noting it down – if it equalled many of his drawings, and some of his songs, we have lost melodies of real value (42, emphasis added).How intriguing to think that Blake composed music, too, but we have lost it because he was not literate in musical notation.
But that is part of Blake’s project, too: to re-create a pre-literate condition where there is, as much as possible, an unmediated experience between artist/performer and viewer/reader/listener. England’s reading public was changing dramatically in the 1790’s, and the idealized 18th-century audience, the “public sphere” described by Jurgen Habermas, was splitting into multiple and competing audiences, ultimately to emerge a mere representation of a reading public rather than real, breathing readers. Jon Klancher notes the particular poignancy of this shift when he writes that
perhaps for the last time, it was still possible to conceive the writer's relation to an audience in terms of a personal compact. The small, deliberative, strategic world of early nineteenth-century reading and writing still allowed for Wordsworth to imagine the reading of a poem as a personal exchange of 'power' between writer and reader, for Shelley to imagine rather intensely the 'five or six readers' of Prometheus Unbound, or for Coleridge to scan the audience of his plays to recognize those who had also attended his lectures (p. 14).William Blake, in both his publishing technique and his attitude towards publicity, still saw the “personal compact” of artist and individual reader/viewer, and thus resisted the drive towards a merely “representative” public.
The only two of Blake’s works to be “printed” in the usual sense of the word still did not publicize his multimedia genius: the early Poetical Sketches (1783) was printed, but had no graphics and was not distributed; the engravings which accompanied Blair’s poem The Grave (1808) were made from Blake’s designs – he did not even engrave them himself – and, of course, the poem they accompanied was not his. Even so, on the subject of “publicity”, Gilchrist says
[d]uring 1804 to 1805 had been produced that series of Drawings illustrative of Blair’s Grave, by which, from the accident of their having been afterwards really published and pushed in the regular way, Blake is most widely known – known at all, I may say – to the public at large (Gilchrist, 246).
Blake’s audience, then, was “fit though few”, as we can see from a few contemporary accounts. Benjamin Malkin, in 1806, discussed several of the Songs of Innocence, which he says is part of “a collection, circulated only among the author’s friends” (Bottrall, 34). Among these “friends” was Henry Crabb Robinson, who was responsible for introducing either Blake or Blake’s works to the foremost literary figures of his day, including Southey, Hazlitt, and Wordsworth. Crabb Robinson even introduced Blake to the German public in 1811, in an article for the Hamburg periodical Vaterlandisches Museum which dealt with “The Tyger” and four other of the Songs, and included a discussion of the pictures as well as the poems (Bottrall, 14). Several years later, in 1824, Charles Lamb wrote in a letter to Bernard Barton
His poems have been sold hitherto only in Manuscript. I never read them: but a friend at my desire secured the ‘Sweep Song’. There is one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning:And finally, three years after Blake’s death in 1827, Poet Laureate Robert Southey wrote in a letter to Caroline BowlesTiger, Tiger, burning bright,Which is glorious, but alas! I have not the book; for the man is flown, whither I know not…(Bottrall, 40).
Thro’ the desarts of the night,
I have nothing of Blake’s but his designs for Blair’s Grave, which were published with the poem. His still stranger designs for his own compositions in verse were not ready for sale when I saw him, nor did I ever hear that they were so (Bottrall, 44).As these examples show, in the absence of publication in the usual sense, Blake’s works were known largely through channels of circulation, like oral recitation, lending copies to one another, and simple word-of-mouth.
This rarity of the illuminated works placed them more in the realm of individual art objects than reproducible printed matter. Blake’s first biographer Gilchrist explains that Blake’s original asking price for a copy of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience was two guineas, but that later in life he would do a nice “special edition” for you for five guineas, spending quite a lot of time decorating such a copy. At the time of Gilchrist’s writing, though, 1859, he says a copy of Songs is worth 10-12 guineas, and he comments very specifically on the collector’s item dimension of a Blake volume, using the language of art collecting to further emphasize its difference from a typical printed book:
Of the books and designs of Blake, the world may well be ignorant. For in an age rigorous in its requirement of publicity, these were in the most literal sense of the words, never published at all….They are thus collected, chiefly because they are (naturally enough) already ‘RARE’ and ‘VERY RARE’ (Gilchrist, 2).
But Blake’s work did not remain an art collector’s oddity, even though it shares many features of an individual art work. After his death, Blake’s reputation was slowly restored, no, established by the work of several editors, biographers, and commentators. First of these was the anonymous publication of the Songs in 1839, which consisted of the poems only. The editor, who we now know was J.J. Garth Wilkinson, felt compelled to publish these poems because, as he says, they
are quite free from the dark becloudment which rolled and billowed over Blake in his later days….many of these delicious lays belong to the Era as well as to the Author” (51).Gilchrist’s biography followed in 1863. It argued for Blake’s genius, included discussions and transcriptions of several poems, and even reproduced some of the graphic plates, although uncoloured. Five years later, Swinburne published his book-length essay on Blake which influenced future scholarship by arguing that the entire work be considered together, “dark becloudment” or no “dark becloudment”. A few years after that, the Rossettis were fascinated by Blake’s multimedia compositions, as we might expect. The next important contribution to popularizing Blake comes in 1893 with W.B. Yeats’s edition of the Works, in 3 volumes. By this time, there appears to be much interest in the mythology of Blake’s “system”, and the first scholarly edition followed in 1905. It still took until 1928 for an edition which attempted to reproduce the graphical dimension of Blake’s works. In this edition, editor Joseph Wicksteed wrote
[o]nly a handful of people, mostly young painters, recognised during Blake’s lifetime that he was a man in a million. He was rescued from oblivion a hundred years ago, and the work of interpretation began; arbitrarily at first, but with increasing scrupulousness and regard for factual evidence. Nobody would pretend that even now the bulk of Blake’s poetry is easily accessible, or that it is ever likely to become so (Bottrall, 23).
It is the developing technology which contributes to Blake’s publicity, understanding, and popularity. The initial technology of his printing technique sufficed for some of the early collections brought out in the 19th century, but in our own century photographic reproductions of the images have contributed to Blake’s canonization. No longer are the plates the exclusive domain of a few scholars who have had the privilege of viewing them; today, anyone can view Blake’s works in an approximation of the way they were intended. The student of today can choose from one of the beautiful codex-book versions, with photographic plates, transcriptions, and so on, or even from electronic versions, such as at the Blake Archive. The most recent developments in technology seem perfectly suited to Blake's multimedia works; indeed, some of Blake’s works seem perfectly suited to a multimedia environment. Look at the "positive/negative" dimension of this plate from Jerusalem, which is, in effect, unreadable in a conventional book. By making it an animated graphic file, I can display both sides of the image to the reader, who now may be able to read both the forward and backward text.
TranscriptionUnderfoot: |
 from Jerusalem |
TranscriptionIn the Clouds: In Heaven the only Art of Living/ Is Forgetting & Forgiving/ Especially to the Female But if you on Earth Forgive/ You shall not find where to live |
Multimedia, of course, would also provide an appropriate site for his musical compositions, too, if we had some record of them. Still, we cannot say that the electronic forms of these works provide the reader with what the author “intended”, or even that they re-create the reading experience with a small, bound, handcrafted book in any significant way.
That is why we must always keep firmly in mind the use to which the text or edition we have at hand is being put. Blake’s canon is aimed neither at the “common reader” – Gilchrist asserts that Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all” – nor at the scholar, who is, nevertheless, inclined to see him or herself as the special audience Blake was addressing. It is part of the Romantic ideology that the bardic poet may be making utterances that fall on deaf ears, but part of the poet’s genius is that he creates the public taste by which he is to be understood and appreciated. Klancher suggests that the English Romantics were especially anxious about the shape and taste of the reading public; whether or not that anxiety is exclusive to the English Romantics, I maintain that, unlike Wordsworth, for instance, who took on the task of forming the public’s taste, Blake resisted this work, or perhaps simply had such faith and fulfillment in his small audience that he did not feel the need to carve out a new readership. The tone of this latter conviction emerges from the note Blake attached to his 1820 production Jerusalem addressed “To the Public”:
After my three years’ slumber on the banks of the ocean, I again display my giant forms to the public. My former giants and fairies having received the highest reward possible, the love and friendship of those with whom to be connected is to be blessed, I cannot doubt that this more consolidated and extended work will be as kindly received.
But as we’ve seen, several others were glad to do the work to create an audience for Blake, especially in this century. Editors and scholars, and just plain fans, have made available the entire corpus of poems and prose, or random images (think The Ancient of Days, for example), or various reproductions of the multimedia works in their entirety. In their multiple dimensions of printing, picturing, or performing Blake’s works, current editions of Blake have a wide range of reading, academic, and scholarly uses. Indeed, it is possible that Twenty-First Century William Blake will no longer be a “victim of anthologies” but will become a “victim of the world wide web”.
copyright 1999 S. M. Lane