Introduction
THIS VOLUME presents five of
William Blake's early illuminated books, beginning with his first known efforts
(c.1788) at printing texts and designs together from relief-etched copperplates and concluding with Visions
of
the Daughters of Albion (1793).
Along with the Songs of
Innocence of 1789, [1] these
works contain many of the fundamental
principles and images, both visual
and verbal, that have made Blake famous in our time. These works also
reveal the early development and first flowering of relief etching, the medium
so intimately bound up with Blake's achievement as both poet and artist. An
understanding of how these books were made
will provide the material foundation for a brief consideration of the formal and thematic
developments they reveal. More detailed discussions are offered in the individual introductions to each
title.
Much
of the appeal that relief etching must have had for its inventor lay in its
simplicity and directness. [2] Blake needed only to draw, with brush and pen, his pictures and letters on a copperplate with an acid-resistant varnish of
the sort commonly used by etchers in his day. He made corrections easily by
scraping off some of the varnish or adding more. He then surrounded the plate with a wall of wax, poured acid into the
shallow vessel thereby created, and
allowed the acid to eat away the exposed metal. His images were then left in relief, like moveable type or a modern
rubber stamp. Even in his first illuminated
book, Blake added a further graphic technique. By scraping through varnished areas to expose the copper, he created lines that
printed white against a dark background—see, for example, the fine lines in the clouds on plate 4 of All
Religions are One. Such white-line work could be cut with needles into the
varnish before etching or into the metal with burins afterwards. Similarly,
entire relief areas could be easily scraped away before or after being etched, or masked during printing. But the addition of new relief surfaces, except for very small dots
or lines, was extremely difficult and is not known to have been attempted by
Blake.
Blake's
technique required him to write his texts in reverse, only a minor challenge
to
one trained as a professional engraver and etcher who must constantly
work with mirror images. The slight difficulty of reverse writing was more
than compensated for by the autographic nature of the medium. The technique
consumed far less labour and time than either conventional
etching/engraving or typographic printing. It permitted—indeed, promoted—a seamless relationship between conception and
execution rather than the
usual divisions between invention and production embedded in eighteenth-century print technology and its economic and social
distinctions among authors and printers, artists and engravers. Like drawings and manuscripts, Blake's relief
etchings were created by
the direct and positive action of the author/artist's hand without
intervening
processes, such as tracing, transferring, or mechanical
copying, generally employed in the intaglio printmaking that Blake practiced all his life. Yet, like conventional
graphics and letterpress
texts, relief-etched images could be printed many times over. It is
fair to
say, in spite of the apparent contradictions of such terms,
that Blake's relief etchings are composites
of 'printed drawings' and 'printed manuscripts'.
Relief
etching allowed for direct composition in the graphic medium without detailed drawings
sized to the plates or carefully blocked-out manuscripts showing precisely where
the words would be placed on each plate. The absence of such preliminaries for Blake's
illuminated books strongly suggests that he took advantage of this feature of
his medium. All Blake needed was a rough manuscript of the sort we find in
his Notebook; he did not require a fair copy or even a completed
manuscript to begin production. Formatting an illuminated book required at most a
sketch to indicate the general location of
design and text areas; both could be modified in the course of drawing and
writing in varnish (see the
Introduction toThe Book of Thel, discussion of supplementary illustration 4 (71)). The size, shape, and length of the text on each plate, and the placement
and size of designs, were fixed only when the plate was executed. This
method of production allowed Blake to
compose plates seriatim within distinct textual units, such as those in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Each
unit, however, could be produced out of sequence and assembled later in a variety of arrangements. Each illuminated
plate and book could grow and take
shapes not previously determined.
Although
pictorial images could be invented directly on the copper, Blake sometimes turned
to his storehouse of designs that he had first developed as drawings. A good
case in point is offered by the development of the figure with legs crossed
and thrusting his arms downward and to his left on the title page to Visions of the Daughters of Albion (for a
detail, see Visions,
supplementary illustration 3). Blake first invented this design in the early
1790s as a pencil sketch inscribed in another hand `The Evil Demon'
(supplementary illustration 1). [3] At
about the same time, he borrowed the motif for a series of emblematic designs
he was sketching in his Notebook (supplementary illustration 2). Here
he
modified the figure, crossing his left leg over his right, lengthening his
hair, and slanting his extended arms downward. For the etched version
in
Visions, Blake
retained these variants and made further but much slighter modifications.
Both drawings were executed before Blake began work on the Visions title page and neither was
drawn with the illuminated book in mind. No direct preliminary drawing was
required, for Blake needed only to return to his emblem design and draw it free-hand
on
the copperplate. As with all known drawings
of motifs subsequently used in relief etchings, Blake did not reverse the image
when he drew it on the plate, and thus
it is reversed in impressions from the plate. [4]
After cleaning the varnish from his plates, Blake
inked their relief surfaces with a dabber
(similar to a letterpress printer's inking ball) and printed them with low
pressure in the engraver's rolling press that he owned. He generally proofed
a
complete copy of a book in black ink,
but in his early years Blake favoured coloured inks for almost all copies intended for sale. While some plates were
probably printed singly, the early copies of Songs of Innocence, The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, and Visions of the
Daughters of Albion were printed two plates at a time, in one turn through the press, on two
aligned leaves, and then two more
plates were printed on the other side of the same leaves. Most copies of The
Book of Thel may have
been printed two plates at a time, but in all known copies on only one side of the leaves. For all the
illuminated books, multiple impressions were taken from each plate, or each set of plates intended to be printed
together, before it was removed from the bed of the press and the next plate
or
set printed. Printing two plates simultaneously
enabled Blake to register facing pages and to attend to the page spread. Printing multiple impressions, by far the
most efficient method, corresponded to the
long-established practices of both plate and type printers and allowed Blake
and his wife Catherine to build up a stock of books quickly.
In the
early years of production, most printing sessions for the illuminated books included
several different colours of ink, although Blake generally used only one colour
on each impression. Slight residual droplets, particularly along the edges
of relief plateaus, of a prior colour in some impressions suggest that Blake
would pull all impressions he desired in one colour for a plate (or set of
plates) in the press, clean the plate(s), and then ink
with the new colour. Once again, this would have been the most efficient method
and did not
require the repetition of the same sequence of colours from one plate to the
next. In a few hours at their press, Blake
and Catherine could print sets of impressions and separate them into piles according to colour of
ink, for eventual assembly into copies of an illuminated book. These
procedures led to a purposely diversified stock of books. The products of each printing session correspond to
an
'edition' of a book, while each ink colour
can be considered a different 'issue' of the edition.
Hand
colouring was also executed by editions for all but a few late printings of the
illuminated books. Blake and his wife would colour all the impressions
of one plate in an edition, then go on to the next pile of prints
from another plate. This production sequence is indicated by the
presence of the same colours applied in the same manner (although not
necessarily applied to the identical areas) on the same plates in multiple
copies from the same printing sessions of Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel,
The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell and Visions
of the Daughters of Albion. The fundamental unit of
production for the illuminated books was the printing and
colouring session, not the individual copy. In the last stage of
production, copies were assembled from impressions on hand. Although
Blake may have chosen particular impressions to create a copy, such care was
not necessary as long as impressions from the same printing issue and the same
colouring session were bound together. Care was required,
however, when assembling copies from poorly printed impressions;
such prints were often illegible and required outlining and
rewriting in pen and ink. By 10 October 1793, when Blake announced in his advertisement 'To the Public' that 'No
Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted' (E 693, K 208), the Blakes had assembled a diverse stock of illuminated books ready for sale.
Blake is not known to have produced commissioned
copies of his books until the nineteenth century.
Early
in 1794 Blake added colour printing to his repertoire of illuminated-printing techniques.
Colour printing may have evolved out of Blake's habit of using various ink colours
during his early printing sessions. It would have been a simple step to apply a
second colour
of ink to selected areas of a single copperplate, but this soon developed into the use of gum- or glue-based pigments to
create rich colouring effects. These pigments were very probably applied to the plate with brushes, a variation
on the standard à la poupée method
of colour printing intaglio plates with small dabbers. Blake used a very
simple form of colour printing, confined to a few touches of black and brown on
relief surfaces, in the first extant printing of There is No Natural Religion c. 1794
(see our reproduction of copy G) and in a few copies of the illuminated books
produced as part of a large-paper set c. 1795. Such rudimentary
colour printing, however, may not be Blake's first use of the technique. As
with relief etching in general, Blake's progress was sure and quick. From
the start, he appears to have understood and exploited the opportunity
provided by his shallow etching to print colours from recessed as well as relief
areas of his plates, as can be seen in copy F of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, reproduced here. The deep hues
and dense and textured surfaces in such works tend to give them a brooding
intensity that matches the sublimity of the texts they accompany. But even
the finest colour-printed impressions required some hand colouring and often
pen and ink outlining to clarify forms.
The rapid technical
development of relief etching and colour printing is matched by Blake's exploration of the potentials of the
illustrated book, and in particular the connections between format, literary genre, and pictorial mode. He began,
in All Religions are One, with aphorisms accompanied by simple designs with
a
very limited range of motifs, a
conjunction similar to the emblem books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The physical distinction between one copperplate
and another is maintained in the
confinement of each aphorism or other textual unit to a single plate, while
their sequence is set by the number
given each 'Principle' and the long-established conventions for placing frontispieces and title pages. There is
No Natural Religion expands on this format by including two contrasting series
of
numbered propositions concluded by a
full-plate design acting as a tailpiece for the whole work.
Songs of Innocence introduces a new form—the illuminated poem—for
the
presentation of brief lyrics. Most
are completed on a single plate, but several are allowed to continue onto a
second. Only the companion poems 'The Little Girl Lost' and 'The Little Girl Found' share a plate; all others begin
at the head of a plate and conclude at the
foot of a plate. The absence of plate or poem numbering and the manner in which
the impressions were printed and
coloured allowed Blake to arrange the book in a variety of sequences. The conventional use of headpiece and
tailpiece designs, long familiar to Blake
from his work in engraving commercial book illustrations, [6] is
enriched in the Songs of Innocence by the placement of major design elements in one
or both side margins when the short
lines of his lyrics left sufficient space. On some plates, such as 'Infant
Joy', the brief text is surrounded on all sides by parts of a single, unified
design.
In The Book of Thel, Blake brought to the
illuminated book the genre of verse narrative in
lines of fourteen syllables. The text is divided into four numbered sections,
each beginning at the top of a plate
or just below a headpiece and ending at the foot of a plate or just above a tailpiece. At least one such
design punctuates each division between sections of the text. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell expands and complicates this basic format. After a verse 'Argument' with a design in
the bottom and right margins, as in some
of the Innocence plates, the
prose text is divided into sections of narrative, aphorisms, and numbered declarations like those in the
early tractates All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion. Most of these sections in the Marriage, however,
consist of more than one plate and a few
share the same plate; many are titled, but others are set off from what preceded
them by a headpiece alone. Except for the design in the right margin of 'The Argument', major designs appear only
at the beginnings or endings of textually
self-contained sections. This restraint is balanced by great freedom in the use
of numerous small, interlinear designs
that combine the functions of illustration, decoration, and even punctuation. The presence, absence,
and size of designs may have been dictated
in some cases by the space left after writing the text on the copper.
In both
Thel and the Marriage, Blake dispensed with frontispieces, perhaps because his medium permitted what amounts to a full-plate
design on title pages. The frontispiece
returns in Visions of the Daughters of Albion to complement a highly pictorialized title page. After 'The Argument' (plate 3) of Visions,the remainder of the text is one
continuous narrative with dialogue, divided only
by
illustrations and, as in Thel, extra
space between lines to indicate verse paragraphs. Interlinear decorations on
plates 5 and 8 have been expanded
into significant illustrations; but the simple manner in which the plates are divided between text and illustration,
with most designs at the head or foot of a plate, remains the same as in Thel and the Marriage. After theMarriage was printed, c. 1790,
Blake's
commercial commitments increased substantially. With Visions, Blake
returned to illuminated printing after a
two-year hiatus, picking up stylistically—and, as we shall see, thematically—where
he
left off. The typographic convention of catchwords, however, present in all
but the early tractates, is abandoned in favour of etched numbers (first
used in Thel)
to indicate the sequence of
plates.
The
relationships among texts and designs in the illuminated books are so various and
complex that they defy easy generalization. The philosophical propositions in All Religions are One and There
is No Natural Religion offer little visual imagery or even named
objects. These qualities alone may have determined the relative independence of
many designs from accompanying texts. The links are thematic and
metaphoric, not direct and literal. Here and throughout the illuminated
books, similarities and differences among the designs can be as important as
text/design connections. In The Book
of Thel, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, most of the larger
designs tend to picture events and characters described in the text, although
not necessarily on the same plate. The title page and final tailpiece in Thel are among the more
notable exceptions to this rule of thumb; both include major motifs not named
in the text. Smaller designs and the
fairy-like figures that decorate the first text plate of Thel and the title page of Visions are generally less
directly related to specific passages in the poems. In both these books and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the title page designs function as epitome illustrations that encapsulate several
essential themes in a single complex
image. The other designs in the Marriage extend through a wide range of text/design conjunctions and
contentions.
It would
be wrong to conceive of these changes in the structuring of the illuminated books
as a story of progressive improvement. Rather, they show Blake's creativity in exploring
the possibilities of his visual and verbal media. We can sense a similar range
in pictorial and poetic styles, extending from the feminine pastoral and
picturesque of Thel to the
comic, satiric, and horrific sublime in the Marriage and Visions.
Similarly, Blake's rhetoric employs an impressive number of
traditional modes, with particular attention to aphoristic
declaration and the subtle uses of the interrogative as a way to confound common
assumptions, suggest alternatives, and engage the reader's imagination. The early
illuminated books also indicate the variety of Blake's often antithetical
intellectual engagements: John Locke and rational
empiricism in the early tractates, contemporary natural philosophy in Thel, Emanuel Swedenborg and John
Milton in the Marriage,
feminist and anti-slavery tracts in Visions, and everywhere the Bible. These explicit allegiances
and arguments were in turn shaped by the revolutionary times in which Blake
lived and his own personal and professional roles as an urban artisan, a Christian
radical, and an ambitious artist and poet.
Within
the variety of the early illuminated books we can perceive some thematic continuities.
Desires, both those of the body and those that attempt to transcend the
physical, are a central issue. The conflict between desire and the
forces of restraint or repression shapes much of the dramatic
tension so characteristic of Blake's writings. That drama in turn
energizes the concern with changes in perception or states of consciousness
from error to enlightenment, innocence to experience, and hypocrisy to
honesty. The concept of a 'Poetic Genius' in all humans, introduced in All Religions are One, receives
further investigation in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The educative limits of sense
experience and the debate between natural and revealed religion
at the heart of There
is
No Natural Religion continue
as key issues in The
Book of Thel. The concern with female sexuality and the search
for self-definition in Thel take
centre stage in Visions
of the Daughters of Albion. The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, through its wit and wonderful oddities,
engages desire and restraint in their most basic theological, historical, and psychological
contexts.
The
early illuminated books provide Blake's readers with a wealth of delight, but
an equal portion of difficulties. His logic is contracted and mixed with
irony and parody in the tractates and the Marriage. The location of Blake's own point of view or voice
in Thel, the Marriage, and Visions is a matter of endless critical debate. Throughout the illuminated poems, the relationship between the
literal and the metaphoric is often puzzling—although that may well be an essential part of Blake's attempt to
disconcert conventional suppositions
about the relationship between the real and the imaginary and between
representation and that which is represented. Our attempt to assist readers
with these and related issues is
continued in the introductions and notes to each illuminated book. The
sections on 'Plates and Printings' necessarily delve into some technical
details, but the investigation of how and
when Blake made his books has some of the qualities of good detective stories and should engage
readers who usually avoid bibliographic essays.
[1] All plates originally etched for Songs of Innocence are reproduced and discussed in volume 2 of this series, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Andrew Lincoln (1991).
[2] Only a brief summary of the relief-etching process is given here. For a more detailed description, see Viscomi, Art of Blake's Illuminated Prints. For a general survey of the full range of Blake's graphic works, see Essick, Blake Printmaker. The information summarized here (and in the separate introductions to each book) about printing formats and the dates and contents of printing and colouring sessions is fully set forth in Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book.
[3] Butlin
no. tog dates this drawing to 'c.1793' and places its composition after Visions. We
believe that the logic of the motif's
development indicates the sequence presented here. If copied after the Visions title page, the drawing would have had right and left in the
same direction as in the plate.
[4] The full-plate designs in white-line
in Milton and Jerusalem are
exceptions to this practice. They required
preliminary sketches for counter-proofing onto the copper, and thus the printed
image has right
[5] Dated to c. 1788 in Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, chapter 20, correcting
Essick, Separate
Plates 12-13. According to Smith 2:461, Blake's recently deceased brother revealed the process
of
relief etching to him in a dream. If Blake
believed this, then the choice of a composition invented by Robert for one of the first attempts at relief etching would be appropriate
[6] See particularly Ritson, a work for which Blake engraved nine designs after Thomas Stothard. For further comments on the illustrative formats of the illuminated books, see Easson.