William Blake: the Creation of the Songs: from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. - book review

by Michael Phillips. London: The British Library and Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 180.72 color plates, 37 black-and-white illustrations. $55.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

To prepare himself to write this study of the genesis of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Michael Phillips gave two years of evenings to learning how to print, travelled all over the world to examine all but two of the fifty known copies, and studied in minute detail the notebook in which Blake entered drafts of all the poems of Experience, trying to establish, by tracing changes in ink colors and nib sizes, the sequence of occasions in which Blake entered or revised them. He also studied the political atmosphere of England and local events in Lambeth at the time Blake worked on the Songs, reading at length through parish records and newspaper advertisements. The results of all this research are gathered here in a handsome volume published to coincide with the major Blake exhibition at the Tate Gallery (November 2000), of which Phillips was a guest curator.

The seventy-two color plates are beautifully done and worth the price of the book alone (happily published in paperback from the outset). Anyone interested in comparing the often widely different colorings of certain plates should place this book beside the recent Blake Trust/Princeton edition of the Songs, edited by Andrew Lincoln (1991), and the older Trianon/Orion/Oxford version, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1967); there is just one duplication of a plate. For not very much money we now can own good reproductions of at least one plate from twenty-one copies of Innocence or of the joint Songs. They are all different from one another, too, sometimes in striking ways, sometimes in subtle. Phillips gives us six versions of the title-page of Innocence, for instance, and five each of the Innocence "Holy Thursday" and the Experience "Nurse's Song," as well as a "London" and a "Tyger." (The "Tyger" is the same as the one from Copy T in the Blake Trust/Princeton edition; it is, alas, no more ferocious than in other copies, but is surrealistically colored like a calico barber pole.) With the expanding on-line Blake Archive and improving desktop printers we may soon have even better means to ponder the effects of varying colorings, effects perhaps even on the meanings of the accompanying texts, but for now we must be grateful for these additions to what is in print.

Among the plates are reproductions of eighteen pages of the notebook (N 98-115 in the Erdman numbering)--those pages that carry texts or designs relevant to the Songs. These too are splendid: we can see what Phillips means by the different shades of ink and widths of nib. There are no transcripts in ordinary type as there are in David Erdman's edition of the notebook (Oxford, 1973); instead, in a very long central chapter, Phillips takes us step by step through the entire eighteen pages, transcribing each version of each poem and noting each revision or crossing-out. Among the plates, finally, are photographs of Phillips's own copper plate copy of the Innocence title-page, and a few plates by other printers of Blake's day.

Though it stays focused on the evolution of the Songs, the book still seems something of a hybrid. Relatively short chapters on the printing techniques frame the long chapter on the notebook; the explanations of the former presume little knowledge and are generally very clear, but some technical details are controversial and can be assessed only by other specialists (of which this reviewer is not one). Sometimes ballooning out from amidst the usually chaste and exacting accounts of the notebook variora are detailed reports of Phillips's discoveries of possible sources or inspirations of the poems, complete with illustrations, but however interesting these may be (I will take up a few of them), they throw the book off balance because they do not take their place beside the comparable research of many scholars before him. One who chooses this book as an introduction to the Songs will get a peculiar impression of Blake's historical milieu. Space was doubtless limited, but some of Phillips's research belongs in articles addressed to other scholars and not, or not at such length, in a commentary that looks to be thorough.

He offers a long argument, for example, against taking November 1792 as the terminus ad quem of notebook entries that led to the Songs, a date widely accepted on the basis of Blake's allusions to Lafayette's arrest by the Austrians, news of which arrived in London that month. Phillips has found documents from a few months later that he believes shed light on the drafts, and to use them he must postdate the completion of the notebook. His first claim relies on Nancy Bogan's offering of a source for the intriguing stanzas that seem intended for what became "London":

   Why should I care for the men of Thames
   Or the cheating waves of charterd streams
   Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
   That the hireling blows into my ear

   Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
   Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
   The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
   I was born a slave but I long to be free

Bogen suggested that Blake thought of the Ohio River because he had been reading Gilbert Imlay's A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, published in 1792. What Phillips has discovered is that the book did not appear until the end of the year; he has located its first advertisement in The Public Advertiser for 12 December, in a column next to one that was likely to capture Blake's attention: a warning "to certain Print-shops wherein libellous Pictures and Engravings are daily exhibited" that their owners may be prosecuted. This is a nice piece of research, and it is certainly possible that Blake was pushed and pulled toward the thought of the Ohio by these two articles. Yet the Ohio was so well known and so frequently cited in poetry that Blake hardly needed to see it again in print. Major battles with the French had taken place along its banks, battles celebrated in many a verse. If he wanted a contrast to the Thames, the Ohio was almost inevitable. Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787), which we know Blake read, mentions it five times. Dyer mentions it in The Fleece (1757). A trawl through the English Poetry Data-Base will produce many more instances.

Phillips extends the date later still by citing a poem by John Thelwall of April 1793 where "charter'd" is used rather as Blake used it (though not of a river); here the same point can be made: the term had been widely deployed for several years, as Phillips acknowledges. He wants to extend the date well into 1793 because by then the anti-French reaction had taken hold and Blake's fear of it may have registered in his work, but it is difficult to see what is really gained by a later date, for none of the evidence he has found, it seems to me; counts as an unequivocal source for any of the drafts, let alone an allusion that might alter the way we read them. He cites, and reproduces, a ledger of the accounts of the Parish of Lambeth, where Blake was then living, where it is indicated that an unknown child was found dead in February 1793; the news would have been "the catalyst for the bitter irony of Blake's railing satire" of "Holy Thursday" in Experience. This may well be so--though it is the design, not the text, that presents a dead child--but was it not common in London for children to die of malnutrition?

In general Phillips sees Blake as highly suggestible along a narrow register of subjects, largely social and political. Building on the argument of Nurmi, Erdman, and Paulson that Blake's tyger owes its birth less to a cosmic blacksmith than to the September Massacres, which several British observers likened to tigerish behavior, Phillips concludes, "`The Tyger' may be a metaphor for the forces of revolution in France." Yet the fact that tigers were sometimes enlisted as metaphors for events in France does not make every tiger French. The tiger has been an emblem of cruelty since the Aeneid. The poem is highly resistant to any single line of interpretation and seems to shrug off political allusions with ease; they would only diminish it in any case. When Phillips then goes on to say that Blake might have taken the local reaction against the revolution as itself tigerlike, he is building on air.

Despite the way they intrude into the commentary, and despite my disagreements with some of them, I am glad to have these digressions into Blake's situation. A haunting photograph of Fore Street, Lambeth Riverside, may or may not be from the neighborhood Blake had in mind as the setting for "London"--after all, its speaker wanders through "each charter'd street," not just those nearby--but it conveys something of the London we too easily forget and Blake knew all too well. Phillips is at work on a biography of Blake in Lambeth during the anti-Jacobin reaction, on which he has published interesting articles. I hope he will enrich it with as many pictures as he can find, not so much to nail down a source or allusion as to present the world (or one of the worlds) Blake dwelled in, a world almost entirely lost.

I also found many of the details about Blake's notebook sessions interesting, though it is not clear what implications, if any, they have for how we interpret the final works. Phillips points out that the "Introduction" to Experience is not found in the notebook. "Earth's Answer" is, but it is tied at the outset to "Thou hast a lap full of seed," with which it shares some imagery. That poem was abandoned. In its new context, following an "Introduction" almost certainly composed after it, "Earth's Answer" is "profoundly altered." Indeed one is tempted to say that its history explains why "Earth's Answer" seems not quite an answer to the voice of the bard, or seems an answer to someone else. Still, even if he did not have the bard in mind when he wrote the "Answer," Blake must have had the "Answer" in mind when he wrote the "Introduction," and in any case he engraved them both and placed them in succession in all copies. So we must take them together as a single work, or a pair of works in dialogue, however they came to be. It then becomes part of its meaning, its literary effect, that Earth seems half deaf.

One more detail worth relishing: Blake seems to have worked on "London" and "The Tyger" on the same occasion. Two of the greatest poems in English on the same day!

I shall be brief about the chapters on Blake's printing methods. Much of it is uncontroversial and clearly explained, along with good reproductions of contemporary printing equipment. Phillips disagrees with Essick and Viscomi, on whose work he builds, on such details as the speed with which Blake could print his pages, whether he printed the Songs plates in pairs or separately, and whether he normally printed his plates once or twice--that is, passed them through the press only once or, as Phillips believes, passed them through a second time with different colored inks. I will leave it to those better qualified than I am to assess his claims. These disputes notwithstanding, I find it remarkable how much we do know about this obscure London engraver: where he got his copper plate and the sizes he cut it down to, when and where he got his paper and how he treated it before printing on it, what pigments he used for hand watercoloring, what acids for the bath, and so on. His characteristic method, relief etching, is pretty well understood now; Phillips contrasts it clearly with intaglio, and offers the suggestive analogy--intaglio is to relief etching as Locke's blank slate is to innate ideas--which ties his method to his core beliefs about the soul and nature.

On one seemingly technical point--whether, apart from the Songs, Blake composed directly on the copper plate (in a wax "resist"), as many scholars believe, or he wrote and revised on paper before transcribing onto copper, as Phillips believes--I have to say I think Phillips has the better argument, though he might have been more explicit about what "composing" means. It is true that we lack first drafts of almost all later works and some earlier ones, but the argument from silence is dangerous; surely it is more remarkable that the Songs notebook has survived than that other textbooks have not. Moreover there is the manuscript of The Four Zoas, a draft of a work never engraved but quarried for Milton and Jerusalem. It is also true that Blake claimed that Jerusalem was dictated to him, but if Blake was taking it down onto copper plate the dictator must have been the most patient of spirits. In any case, Blake gives it away in Jerusalem itself, where he writes, "When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare...." We get the absurd idea of "Verse" whose "Cadence" is not determined! Blake appears to have "consider'd" a great deal, and it is hard to agree that he did it all while hovering over the plate. He had to lay out the design, with space for the text, and then write the text, backward, in careful "copperplate hand," in a sticky resist. He could erase mistakes, but it cost some time and trouble even before the resist hardened. It is pleasing to imagine his spiritual advisers coming every day with different inks and nibs, making him cross out what they dictated the day before, and sitting around chatting while he labored over his plates. But that was their job; they were his own spirits.

Michael Ferber
University of New Hampshire

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