Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  Any change, large or small, in the details of a story can translate into significant changes to its overall meaning. This applies to more than just history. It also applies to books. And it especially applies to the works of William Blake.

  SONGS OF INNOCENCE

  1789

  The Author & Printer W Blake

  This is the text of the title page in Blake’s most famous printing endeavor. Songs of Innocence is a collection of poems (or songs) apparently intended for children. It includes such titles as “A Cradle Song,” “Infant Joy,” “The Lamb,” and (because this was the eighteenth century and kids got bills to pay) “The Chimney Sweeper.”

  Everything a reader needs to understand about Blake’s book is all there on the title page: Songs of Innocence, printed in 1789 by a W. Blake, who is also the author. That should just about do it, right?

  Wrong. Without the title page in its original trappings, the text communicates only part of the message. For example, many of the themes inside Songs of Innocence deal with safeguarding children, birds, old people, and other indelibly cute creatures from the evils of the world. Take a look at the original title page illustration on the next page (a Blake relief etching, by the way), and you’ll see that the narrative shifts a bit.

  INDIVIDUAL TITLE PAGE OF SONGS OF INNOCENCE FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE, BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. Image courtesy Yale Center for British Art.

  First, we feel a moral imperative to apologize for reproducing that title page in black and white. It is simply breathtaking in its original state, with a delicate wash of blues, reds, greens, and yellows. You’re missing something extraordinary if you don’t see it in color, an experience so beautiful that it’s almost painful to tease you with this echo. But that is the point. When the illustration is translated into this medium, part of the experience is lost. Still, as bad as that is, you’re missing way more when you have only the text in front of you, which is how Blake’s poetry is most commonly reproduced, and how most of us first read him.

  When the text is combined with the image as Blake intended, we notice something else going on, something a bit at odds with the title. Blake specialist Robert Essick explains, “An adult reading to or lecturing children is a common motif in frontispieces and title-page vignettes of eighteenth century children’s books. Blake exploits this convention by making one significant revision: the heavily dressed mother or nurse shows the book . . . to the boy and girl” [emphasis added].

  It’s as if Blake were somehow condoning the idea of children reading (and one of them a girl, no less!). By now it shouldn’t surprise you that reading in the eighteenth century was a seriously dangerous pastime. Historian Robert Altick summarized the stakes: “Popular education struck horror into the souls of those committed to eighteenth-century social theory. It promised sloth, debauchery, and the assumption of superior airs on the part of the people—followed, as the day the night, by irreligion and revolution.”

  And how about the tree that’s looming above those little revolutionaries? The vine winding around its trunk is serpentine in nature, and there are strange apples straining against their boughs, leaning forward like delicious orbs of good and evil hovering tantalizingly above youthful innocence. What seems at first like a totally mundane title page for a kid’s book becomes a perilous scene of biblical proportions that makes you want to scream out, Don’t read it! Run away! The call is coming from inside the book! After seeing the words in their original context, we suddenly have to revise the interpretation that these poems are meant only for children—or that they’re even innocent at all.

  Another example from Blake’s Songs of Innocence can be found in the poem “The Little Black Boy,” in which Blake takes a swing at the racism and white entitlement of eighteenth-century England. Read on its own, without the accompanying illustrations, the poem is about a little boy who notices he’s different from other boys: “White as an angel is the English child: / But I am black as if bereav’d of light.”

  “And we are put on earth a little space,” the boy’s mother tells him, “That we may learn to bear the beams of love. / And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face / Is but a cloud . . .”

  Totally fine with this, says every Englishman, because it’s 1789.

  The boy then continues, addressing the white child, “And thus I say to little English boy. / When I from black and he from white cloud free / . . . I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear, / To lean in joy upon our father’s knee. / And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, / And be like him and he will then love me.”

  Sounds about right. This is what little black boys should aspire to be: shade for white people. To be loved by white people, you must serve white people. And stroke their silver hair. Still, add Blake’s illustrations, and the story changes a bit. The last plate shows Jesus not with two children “free” from color, but with both a white and a black child at his knee.

  As you can see on the following page, the little black boy is still a little black boy. Despite being in the presence of God, he hasn’t shed his “cloud” of dark skin as promised. In fact, he even appears to have angelic wings by virtue of the . . . we’re going to say lambs (?) feeding in the background. Or large, furry newts? Shaved ocelots, maybe? Whatever. In this copy, the black boy has wings and seems to be interceding on behalf of the white child, who has not yet learned to “bear the beams of love.” As one scholar noted: “Thus the design puts [the white boy] in the position of the lost soul who has been rescued by his black ‘guardian angel.’”

  “THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (CONTINUED),” FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE, BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. Image courtesy Yale Center for British Art.

  Books are not created in a vacuum. The larger context of a work, including material elements beyond the printed words, makes up an inextricable part of the interpretation. Blake’s work is endlessly challenging, which is one reason it’s so beautiful. As readers, we lose the fundamental Blakeness of a work—that weird, provocative, glorious spirit—the further we push it out of context.

  It is easy to take these small details for granted, even though they can completely alter our experience of a book. For example, most of us don’t normally notice how illustrations, merely by their placement, can change the meaning of texts. Consider the 1796 edition of Leonora, translated into English from the original German by J. T. Stanley. The publisher, William Miller, commissioned William Blake to create three original designs for the poem. One of those designs would be used as the frontispiece, opposite the title page. The frontispiece essentially sets the tone and expectations of the entire book, and is far and away the most important illustration. In many books published in the eighteenth century, it is the only illustration.

  In the spirit of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, which were being collected in Germany about the same time, Leonora is the story of a young woman whose life goes awry in grotesque ways. As the poem opens, she is awaiting the return of her fiancé, William, from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63, and yes, we’re aware that’s nine years; historians aren’t good at naming things. Or math, apparently). When Leonora’s waiting proves fruitless, she blames God, much to the disapproval of her mother, who tries to console her by saying:

  Who knows but that he yet survives

  Perchance far off from hence he lives

  And thinks no more of you.

  Forget, forget the faithless youth

  Away with grief, your sorrow soothe

  Since William proves untrue.

  Sometimes mothers know just what to say to mend a broken heart. This was definitely not one of those times. Telling a teenage girl not to worry because her true love isn’t dead, he’s probably just an asshole who has a family of his own by now, is the exact opposite of helpful. Not surprisingly, Leonora acts like a teenager, dramatically beating her breast and praying for death.

  Her fiancé then suddenly shows up on horseback in front of her house and invites her
on a midnight ride. But here’s the catch: she has to go right now, and can’t tell anyone. So many red flags to unpack here, but Leonora is young and doesn’t realize how very awful German fairy tales are. After riding around talking about dead people for a while, William then reveals himself to be Death, who’s come to take her to hell for blaspheming God. The earth then cracks open to receive her.

  Despite the genuinely disturbing latter half of the poem, the various English translations of Leonora end on an optimistic note. Leonora exclaims, “Thy will be done / Lord, let thy anger cease,” and “[t]he spectres vanish’d into air . . . all was hushed in peace.” In one version, William even returns from the war revealing that the whole poem was just a dream from the mind of a feverishly lovesick girl.

  Various illustrators created designs for the immensely popular Leonora, which spurred several translations, play adaptations, and musical compositions. On the following page is an original pen-and-ink drawing for a famous scene in Leonora, by the German painter Johann David Schubert, made a few years after Blake’s commission.

  You can almost see the Disney film in the making: the dashing hero with great hair, the doting maid whose body not only defies the physics of riding a horse, but does so in order to showcase her tiny waist, supple breasts, and cartoonish doe eyes. And is that a nude ankle we see?

  “LEONORE,” ORIGINAL PEN-AND-INK DRAWING BY JOHANN DAVID SCHUBERT, CIRCA 1800. Image courtesy Schmidt Auctions.

  FRONTISPIECE OF THE 1796 STANLEY TRANSLATION OF LEONORA, DESIGNED BY WILLIAM BLAKE. Image courtesy Christie’s Auction

  Now look at what Blake did.

  Good God, man! Leave something for our nightmares. And this was the frontispiece, the most important image in the book. Blake’s illustration changes the focus of the entire text from a theme of eventual redemption and God’s ceaseless love to a cacophony of muscular butts, limbs that aren’t physically possible, and a teenage maiden who’s got no goddamn time for flashing ankles.

  In case you’re wondering—no, this design didn’t play well with readers. From the British Critic: “[Concerning] the distorted, absurd, and impossible monsters, exhibited in the frontispiece to Mr. Stanley’s last edition . . . [Blake] substitutes deformity and extravagance for force and expression, and draws men and women without skins, with their joints all dislocated, or imaginary beings, which neither can nor ought to exist.”

  That illustration changed readers’ perceptions of Leonora. Single images really can have that much power. Take Sherlock Holmes as a further example. When we picture the world’s most famous detective, we see him sporting that iconic deerstalker hat. That fashion choice comes not from the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, but from an image by Sidney Paget, the man who illustrated the Sherlock Holmes stories when they first appeared in the literary magazine The Strand.

  It’s worth noting that critics of Blake’s Leonora weren’t being entirely fair in their judgment. After all, the poem was an eighteenth-century German tale in the vein of birds pecking out the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters. When Death reveals himself to Leonora at the end of the poem, it goes like this:

  Scarce had he spoke, when, dire to tell

  His flesh like touchwood from him fell

  His eyes forsook his head.

  A skull, and naked bones alone

  Supply the place of William gone

  ’Twas Death that clasp’d the maid.

  Now off to bed, kiddies. Blow out the candles. Sweet dreams. Blake’s frontispiece is pretty faithful, if you ask us. (We’ll also take this opportunity to emphasize how much we love this image. There’s something truly breathtaking about Blake’s species of nightmare.) His contemporaries, however, did not agree. The biographer G. E. Bentley notes that after this publication, “most books with Blake’s engravings after his own designs were commissioned chiefly by his close friends . . . or were published by himself.” Blake’s frontispiece to Leonora altered the focus of the work, and it was not a change appreciated by readers of his day.

  Blake could have taken special umbrage at one line from the British Critic: namely, that the figures in his design portrayed “imaginary beings, which neither can nor ought to exist.” He probably read that in a room somewhere and shook his head. Because, for William Blake, the figures from his illustrations weren’t merely wisps of some roiling fever. They were actual beings that wove together the fabric of his reality.

  WILLIAM BLAKE was born in 1757 to the owners of a hosiery shop in London. Even as a young boy, he seemed more interested in doodling on handbills than winding tape, wrapping parcels, and measuring yards of fabric. Also at an early age, God scared the shit out of him by peeping into his window. “You know, dear, the first time you saw God,” his wife reminded him during one interview, “was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window, and set you a-screaming.”

  God later tried to make up for this poor first impression by granting glorious visions to the young lad: such as the biblical prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree watching him; or another tree filled with angels, who were, also, silently watching him; then there were the haymakers working in the fields surrounded by angelic beings, and they were all watching him. From an early age, Blake understood that God was watching you. All the time.

  Blake was one of those people for whom the term enthusiasm, from a Greek word meaning “inspired by a god,” truly applied. “When [Blake] said ‘my visions,’” wrote journalist and confidant Henry Robinson, “it was in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of everyday matters.”

  Many people who spent time with Blake became convinced that he was suffering from delusions, or was outright insane. One of the harshest critics of his work railed, “When the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken for the sallies of genius . . . the malady has indeed attained a pernicious height.” He went on to call Blake “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.”

  Another close friend of Blake’s put it in the most politically correct way possible: “I very much fear his abstract habits are . . . much at variance with the usual modes of human life.” And Blake’s wife famously remarked, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”

  Blake genuinely believed he interacted with ghosts, angels, and demons on a daily basis. He often awoke to “harps which I hear before the Sun’s rising.” And, okay, one of his poems was dictated to him by a faerie in his parlor. But does that mean Blake was suffering from psychosis? Is that how we judge a person’s sanity? By the medical definition of “psychosis,” yes, it is. But as Blake observed, “there are probably men shut up as mad in Bedlam, who are not so . . . possibly the madmen outside have shut up the sane people.” And that is totally not something a madman would say. . . .

  Blake’s “religious convictions . . . [have] brought on him the credit of being an absolute lunatic,” wrote Robinson, “this belief of our artist’s in the intercourse which . . . he enjoys with the spiritual world has more than anything else injured his reputation.” Robinson’s assessment was probably accurate. Blake was not fully appreciated in his time, and he died nearly penniless. There’s no doubt that his visions made for awkward social situations. Take this comment made to a small group of friends one evening: “I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it.” This creates a striking image of Blake as a wide-eyed old man who is constantly afraid of everyday objects within his cone of vision.

  What Robinson overlooks in his assessment, however, is that much of Blake’s brilliance was positively defined by his “intercourse” with the supernatural. As Doris Lessing has written, “Posterity, it seems, has to soften and make respectable, smooth and polish, unable to see that the rough, the raw, the discordant, may be the source and nurse of creativity.” It was as if Blake’s senses perceived more than the natural world around him—experiences and information lost to the rest of us.

  This “talent” manifested itself from his very first ventur
e into the printing houses of London. Admitting that his son would never be great at sewing and dressmaking like a proper haberdasher, Blake’s father enrolled him in the drawing school of Henry Pars from ages ten to fourteen. Upon graduation, young William was taken to interview as a potential apprentice to William Wynne Ryland, an artist and print seller who once served as engraver to the king. The fee that Ryland would have charged was probably hefty (somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds sterling), but Blake’s father was willing to pay if his son’s future could be comfortably secured.

  The interview did not go well. “Father,” Blake reportedly said, “I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” On the list of things not to say during a job interview, this has to be near the top. You are suggesting that your potential employer (a) Looks like he might be a criminal; or (b) Is ugly enough that someone should hang him. In Mr. Ryland’s case, however, it turns out that a was the correct answer. Falling on hard times, William Ryland was found guilty of forging bills from the East India Company to the tune of £7,114. In August 1783 (eleven years after Blake’s interview), he was indeed hanged from a tree.

  Blake’s father took him next to see James Basire, the principal engraver to both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Since Basire possessed a face that didn’t suggest future crimes, Blake was apprenticed to him for seven years, at the cost of fifty-two pounds. From Basire, Blake learned the art of engraving, which included, among other things, cutting clean, straight lines into copper plates; cutting angled lines to represent shade (crosshatching); using a “dot-and-lozenge” technique, which added small dots between the cut lines to create a 3D-esque depth of field; and the specialty of Basire’s shop, intricate, curving “worm-lines.”