Table Of ContentA BLAKE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Annotated Lists of Works, Studies, and Blakeana
G. E. BENTLEY, JR., AND MARTIN K. NURMI
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, Minneapolis
© Copyright 1964 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America at the
Lund Press, Inc., Minneapolis
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-19946
PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS,
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI, AND IN CANADA BY THE COPP CLARK
PUBLISHING CO. LIMITED, TORONTO
The plates from America, on page 1, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, on pages
75 and 193, and Jerusalem, on page 171, are reproduced with the permission of Faber
and Faber, London, and the British Museum Print Room; and the plates from
Jerusalem on pages 39 and 213, with the permission of the Blake Trust. The plate
on page 83, engraved by Schiavonetti after Blake, is from Blair's Grave.
To Sir Geoffrey Keynes
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Preface
This bibliography lists the published works of William Blake and other
published materials concerned with him: his writings in original, facsimile, and
typographic editions; books for which he designed or engraved illustrations;
collected reproductions of his paintings and engravings; catalogues of exhibi-
tions or important sales of his work; bibliographies; books which he owned or
annotated; and books and articles which discuss him. In addition, it gives the
location of extant manuscripts.
We have listed everything we could find concerning Blake that was pub-
lished before 1863, when modern interest in him began, with the publication
of Alexander Gilchrist's Pictor Ignotus. After 1863 we have been somewhat
more selective, excluding reprints and translations of individual poems which
appeared in collections not focused on Blake; reviews that have no independ-
ent value or that have not been thought important enough to reprint; repro-
ductions of single pictures in non-Blake books; and most very brief biographi-
cal and critical accounts appearing in books. Of these shorter pieces appearing
in books, we have in general excluded those that were less than five pages long;
casual references unless there were a great many of them; and chapters in lit-
erary histories in which Blake's name does not appear in the title. Of course
when brief accounts were of some intrinsic value they were included. Except
for excluding reviews appearing after 1863, we have not been selective in our
listing of periodical articles which mention Blake in the title.
This bibliography, however, is more than an organization of known facts,
for it includes a significant amount of new material. Besides the hundreds of
modern articles which have never previously appeared in Blake bibliographies,
there are a large number of new early references to Blake. These include a
printed comment on Blake's work some sixteen years before any previously
known (by George Cumberland in 1780); one of the longest and most violent
contemporary attacks on Blake, in the Antijacobin Review for 1808; and a
significant amount of new material about Blake's reputation for the years
1827-1863.
Our bibliography is an enumerative one (sometimes called a checklist)
rather than a descriptive bibliography. We have not, that is, attempted to
give technical descriptions of the books we list or of Blake's manuscripts. The
only exception is with works published during Blake's lifetime (chiefly in
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Part III, listing engravings), where we have given more complete infor-
mation from the title pages. This bibliography does not, therefore, super-
sede that by Sir Geoffrey Keynes in 1921; rather, it supplements it. In his
descriptive bibliography Sir Geoffrey generally gives more information
about a work than we do, but we have been able to utilize forty years of
Blake scholarship in many areas to bring his researches up to date. Many
manuscripts, for instance, have naturally settled down to permanent homes
since 1921, and we have incorporated information about them —though
here too we are often indebted to Sir Geoffrey for information published
since 1921. Our bibliography should therefore be used in conjunction with
Keynes's Bibliography (1921); Keynes and Wolf's William Blake's Illu-
minated Books (1953); the notes in the Keynes edition of The Complete
Writings (1957); the bibliographical introductions in Sloss and Wallis's
edition of William Blake's Prophetic Writings (1926); and with other
works in Part IV which we do not attempt to duplicate.
The growth of Blake scholarship in the last forty years has been enor-
mous, and this bibliography lists many hundreds of items published since
Keynes's Bibliography in 1921. This has posed special problems, for the
languages of Blake scholarship have grown from English, French, Japa-
nese, and German in 1921 to include Italian, Bulgarian, Spanish, Russian,
Portuguese, Swedish, Georgian, and probably others. In the face of such
prodigious growth among proliferating languages and scripts, it may be
some comfort to Blake scholars to learn that we have found no Blake
materials whatever in bibliographies of Arabic; Assamese; Bengali; Bur-
mese; Chinese; Gujarati; Hebrew; Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, Pushta; Kan-
nada, Badaga, Kurg; Maithili; Marathi; Oriya; Persian; Sanskrit, Pali, and
Prakrit; Sinhalese; Syriac; Tamil; Telegu; Turkish; and Urdu.
We have also been faced with the problem of whether or how to deal
with various modes of "publication" which are not normally considered
in bibliographies but which might reasonably be of interest to Blake schol-
ars. We have from time to time run across references to motion pictures,1
ballets,2 microfilms,3 music (both settings and records),4 stamps,5 post-
1 We know of only two, one prepared by the Blake Bicentenary Committee.
2Geoffrey Keynes and Gwendolen Raverat. Job A Masque for Dancing
Founded on Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. Music by R. Vaughan Williams.
Pianoforte arrangements by Vally Lasker. London, N.Y., Leipzig, Amsterdam,
[1931?]. The Masque was first performed at the Norwich Festival in 1930, and is
now a regular part of the repertoire of the Royal Ballet. A history of the Masque
will be found in no. 301.
3 Most libraries will, of course, supply individual microfilms of works in their
collections. The only organization we know which does this commercially, however,
is Micro Methods Ltd., East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorks, England, which supplies
colored microfilms of the Fitzwilliam copies of Thel (copy G); Visions of the Daugh-
ters of Albion (copy P); Marriage of Heaven and Hell (copy I); America (copy O);
Europe (copy K); and Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
* See below, pp. 363-365, "A Bibliographical Note on Musical Settings of Blake."
5 The Blake stamp is Roumania no. 1219, issued in 1958 as part of an annual
writers' set, and valued at fifteen cents — see no. 663.
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A BLAKE BIBLIOGRAPHY
cards,6 and poems7 about Blake, but our information was so incomplete
and the difficulties of collection were so unfamiliar and formidable that we
have made no effort to do more than record our chance findings.
Most of the great Blake collections have been formed in the past forty
years and given to public institutions, until today twice as many of the
illuminated works (116) are in public collections as in private (63). The
best collection of Blake's art is in the Tate Gallery, London, but the ma-
jority of the works in illuminated printing have come to the United States.
The most important repositories of Blake's illuminated books are the Brit-
ish Museum (20), the Library of Congress (20 — exclusively through the
munificence of Lessing J. Rosenwald), Harvard (15), the Fitzwilliam Mu-
seum (12), the Pierpont Morgan Library (11), the Huntington Library
(10), Yale (7), and the New York Public Library (6).
Methods
The bibliography is divided into six Parts: I Editions of Blake's Writ-
ings; II Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings; III Engravings; IV
Catalogues and Bibliographies; V Books Owned by Blake; VI Biography
and Criticism. All editors, annotators, introducers, authors, etc., of works
in Parts I through V will be found cross-referenced in Part VI. Part VI,
which is considerably longer than all the other Parts put together, is there-
fore the operative heart of the bibliography, and will probably be used
most frequently. Should the reader want to find, for instance, whether
Fuseli ever wrote anything about Blake, or when Russell's catalogue of
engravings was published, Part VI will direct him most expeditiously to
the answers (Yes, and 1912).
Successive editions or printings of books and articles are given imme-
diately after the original entry (except in Part IV, Catalogues and Bibli-
ographies). In these multiple printings, the first edition is indicated by an
A after the number, and successive editions are differentiated from it by
B, C, D, and so on. Cross references to a specific edition of a work there-
fore give the relevant letter: no. 1234F, for example, refers to Todd's 1942
edition of Gilchrist, and not to Gilchrist in general.
With the exception of Part IV, the bibliography is organized alpha-
betically. Part IV is arranged chronologically, by the year of publication.
For an essay on the dates of Blake's works, see "Blake's Chronology,"
pp. 31-38.
In listing works published after 1831, we have given in italics the short
6 Most libraries and museums with Blake collections sell postcard-sized repro-
ductions of Blake's works, but the most ambitious collection of such reproductions
is probably that published by the British Museum.
7 For the period before 1863 we have recorded all the poems about Blake that
we have discovered, but thereafter we have simply ignored them, whether written by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Thomson, Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, William
Rose Benet, or Ezra Pound (Canto XVI).
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A BLAKE BIBLIOGRAPHY
title — that part of the title which would be given in an accurate footnote,
for instance — followed in roman type by the subtitle, the place of publica-
tion, and the date. For works published before 1831 we divide the title
from the subtitle in the same way, but we attempt to give a precise and
complete transcription of the title page with the following exceptions: The
author's name is moved to the top of the entry and shorn of honorific or
descriptive material, F.S.A., Rector of Rotherhithe, etc. Mottoes are omit-
ted, as are "Vol. I," "Part IV," etc. If the title page does not announce the
number of volumes in the work, this information is inserted in square
brackets. No attempt is made to indicate except sequentially the position
on the page of the various parts of the title, nor are the variations in fonts
of type and long s indicated. Superscript letters (e.g., "Mr") are repeated
faithfully from the originals, but the punctuation which is often under the
raised letter in the original has often had to follow the letter here (e.g.,
"Mr:"). The unsatisfactory American system of punctuation, in which
terminal punctuation is supplied within quotations whether it appeared in
that form in the original or not, has in this respect vitiated the accuracy of
the quotations throughout. In the discussions which follow the title pages
of early works, the points mentioned are never an exhaustive bibliographi-
cal description of the book, but are merely the data we have found neces-
sary to distinguish this particular title from others like it.
Normally we have not examined more than one copy of each title or
edition. The location given for early works therefore merely indicates the
first library in which we found it. It may be useful to those attempting to
follow our footsteps to know that almost all the books were searched for
first in the British Museum and then in the Bodleian Library. As a conse-
quence, if a given work is reported from some other collection such as
Princeton or Harvard this normally means that the work was not found in
the British Museum or Bodley. In most cases where we give more than one
location of an early title, the reader may assume that the identification of
the title is a matter of moderate complexity. It has been GEB's distressing
discovery that the more copies of a given edition were examined, the more
unsuspected variants were likely to turn up; and, in particular, the more
pretentious and extensive a work published between the years 1770 and
1830 was, the higher are the chances that it was originally issued in parts.
Only rarely have we been able to trace the original part-issue of these early
titles.
A few numbers have been silently omitted from the regular sequence
(e.g., 500 and 2089). Similarly a few numbers have been inserted into
the normal sequence, distinguished from other numbers by a lower case
letter at the start of the number. Thus a 1430 comes after 1430 and be-
fore 1431. These added entries should be clearly distinguished from first
and succeeding editions of a work, which are indicated by an upper case
letter following the number.
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Symbols
Six symbols or devices are used to give additional information about
the entries. (1) Italic numbers identify works which we think to be of par-
ticular importance to Blake studies; about sixty works (all books) are thus
distinguished. (2) An asterisk (*) indicates that the work contains one or
more illustrations by or of Blake. If there are more than twenty illustra-
tions, the number is specified in a note. If they form a complete series, such
as the designs for Comus, the series is identified. (3) A dagger () indicates
a work in which a contemporary reference to Blake is printed for the first
time. (4) For works printed before 1831, the year Catherine Blake died,
we have shown (within parentheses) where we found copies of individual
works. (5) When Keynes also describes these works, as is normally the
case, we have given a reference to Keynes within square brackets. Thus an
entry ending "(BM) [Keynes, 1921, item 37]" means that the copy of the
work we saw was in the British Museum, and that it is also described as
item 37 in Keynes's 1921 Blake bibliography. All but a very few items
have been verified by ourselves or by our generous collaborators. (6) The
few exceptions are indicated by a section mark (§). Naturally we have
considerably less confidence in such descriptions than in those for works
we have actually seen. Despite diligent efforts to exclude errors, however,
no doubt some have crept in. We should be grateful to anyone who will
take the trouble to call our attention to them gently.
Organization of the Parts
I. Editions of Blake's Writings. Blake's works are listed in alphabetical
order of title. Various editions of a given work are listed in chronological
order, except that all translations are grouped together after the English
editions. Part I is divided into two sections. The first section consists of
reprintings of works as Blake issued them (but ignoring illustrations). Thus
Songs of Innocence, Poetical Sketches, Jerusalem, and other individual
works will be found in Part I, Section I. All works which include either
more or less than a complete book as Blake issued it (say, Songs of Inno-
cence and Other Poems, or Eight Songs of William Blake) are listed sepa-
rately in alphabetical order by title under Part I, Section II, Collections
and Selections. Editors, introducers, etc., will be found cross-referenced
in Part VI. We have made no attempt to cite anthologies including Blake
published after 1863. We have given the present location of Blake's manu-
scripts; recorded each separate publication of Blake's poems before 1863;
and given the total number of surviving copies of each of Blake's works in
illuminated printing. We have made no effort to describe these illuminated
works individually; for this information the reader should see the 1953
Keynes & Wolf Census.
II. Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings. Books which consist
chiefly of reproductions of Blake's art are organized in two sections analo-
gous to those in Part I. (1) Blake's illustrations for a given author (say
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