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by Rebecca Romney

  165“Even Milton and Shakespeare”: William Blake, Prospectus, October 10, 1793. Because it’s an individually engraved piece of ephemera, and therefore subject to typical devastation, no copies survive. We have the text thanks to Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1863), 2:263.

  165turpentine, asphaltum [black petroleum], and linseed oil: Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 56.

  165dead at the time: This story is told in Gilchrist, Life, 1:69.

  166translate into significant changes: See Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 199. Elaborating on Thomas G. Tanselle’s work, McGann argues that “every documentary or bibliographical aspect of a literary work is meaningful, and potentially significant,” including its material aspect, and that therefore “all editing is an act of interpretation” (78, 27).

  166breathtaking in its original state: Because we can’t all march into the Huntington and browse through original illuminated printing by Blake, we offer you the gift of the Blake Archive, one of the best websites dedicated to making rare books on a specific topic digitally accessible: blakearchive.org. Also note that the hand-coloring on Blake’s plates did not remain uniform across copies, so while we describe blues, reds, greens, and yellows here, there are copies that are mostly yellow and blue, or yellow and green. At the Blake Archive you can compare these various copies.

  168“exploits this convention”: Robert N. Essick, William Blake at the Huntington (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1994), 52.

  168“promised sloth, debauchery”: Altick, Common Reader, 33.

  169“bereav’d of light”: Poem transcribed from the Yale Center for British Art’s copy of William Blake, Songs of Innocence, objects 29 and 30. Available online at the Blake Archive.

  169“black ‘guardian angel’”: W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 12–13.

  175“neither can nor ought to exist”: The British Critic, September 1796, quoted in G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 117.

  175deerstalker . . . an image by Sidney Paget: Footnote 3 by Klinger in Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1, ed. with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005), 388.

  176“chiefly by his close friends”: Bentley, Stranger, 117.

  176“set you a-screaming”: Thomas Sadler, ed., Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson: Second Edition, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1869), 2:383.

  176granting glorious visions: For more jaw-dropping anecdotes on visions, see G. E. Bentley Jr., ed., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 2002), 36–39.

  177“inspired by a god”: A breakdown of the Greek goes en (“in”) + theos (“god”) + ousia (“essence”).

  177“ordinary unemphatic tone”: Sadler, Reminiscences, 2:302.

  177“an unfortunate lunatic”: Anonymous review of Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue in the September 17, 1809, issue of The Examiner, written by Robert Hunt. Quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 332–33.

  177“his abstract habits”: John Flaxman Jr., letter of December 1, 1805. Quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 380.

  177“always in Paradise”: Seymour Kirkup, letter of March 25, 1870. Quoted in G. E. Bentley Jr., Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 221.

  177“harps which I hear”: Letter of January 27, 1804. Quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 243–44.

  177dictated to him by a faerie: Bentley, Stranger, 151.

  177“the madmen outside”: Quoted in Gilchrist, Life, 1:326.

  178“injured his reputation”: Henry Crabb Robinson, “William Blake, Künstler, Dichter, und Religiöser Schwärmer,” Vaterländisches Museum (1811), quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 339.

  178“till I am frightened at it”: Quoted in A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer: Painter and Etcher (London: Seely and Co., 1892), 24.

  178“source and nurse of creativity”: Doris Lessing, “Sketches from Bohemia,” The Guardian, June 14, 2003.

  178“live to be hanged”: The original anecdote is told in Gilchrist, Life, 13, but certain details, such as how much Ryland charged to take on apprentices, are added in the retelling in Bentley, Stranger, 30–31.

  179was indeed hanged: Bentley, Stranger, 31.

  179“worm-lines”: Ibid., 35. This section in Bentley also has a striking sensory description of the sights, sounds, and smells of an engraver’s shop.

  179“draw a feather over it”: Quoted in ibid., 35.

  180“tools of his trade”: Ibid., 47.

  180“perverse invention”: Ibid., 54.

  180“Joseph, the sacred carpenter”: Gilchrist, Life, 1:69–70. Emphasis original.

  180cut down on the costs: Bentley, Stranger, 93.

  181clapping for joy: Gilchrist, Life, 1:59. Gilchrist calls this “a truly Blake-like detail.”

  181“with his spirit I converse”: Quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 21.

  181rebirth in the art of illuminated manuscripts: Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 47.

  181went for almost a million dollars: The famous Sotheby’s sale, The Library of Abel E. Berland Part I: lmportant English Literature, Science and Philosophy, October 8, 2001.

  182“combines the painter and the poet”: Quoted in Gilchrist, Life, 2:263.

  182366 leaves: D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59. McKenzie cites his reliance on Dr. John Kidd’s work for this section.

  182“blood down Palace walls”: William Blake, “London,” in the Yale Center for British Art’s copy L of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795), object 51.

  184illustrative act of charity: Essick, Huntington, 60.

  184we miss major components: This was actually done as a sort of pedagogical experiment by Jennifer Phegley, as recounted in “They Are Not Just Big, Dusty Novels’: Teaching Hard Times within the Context of Household Words,” in Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History, ed. Ann R. Hawkins (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), 122–31. Phegley discovered her students were much more sympathetic to the plight of Dickens’s characters, and more likely to be convinced by the arguments of his narrative when reading Hard Times as part of Household Words.

  184“merest glimpse of that complex world”: McGann, Textual, 33.

  184“composite art”: This term was first used by Jean Hagstrum in William Blake: Poet and Painter (1964), but was explored in detail by W. J. T. Mitchell in Blake’s Composite Art (1978). The concept itself took wing thanks to Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (1947).

  184“hovered over his head”: Bentley, Records, 470–71.

  186“almost hopeless torment”: Bentley, Stranger, 150.

  187the Serpent: Ibid., 150–51.

  187“sew me together yourself”: Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl: Or, a Modern Monster (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996).

  187“conceive of gender and identity”: George Landow, “Stitching Together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl,” review of Patchwork Girl, by Shelley Jackson, electronic book review (blog), September 1, 1996, http://www .electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/piecemeal.

  187“God of this world”: Annotation by Blake in his copy of Thornton, Lord’s Prayer, quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 9–10.

  188“gentleman . . . Lord Chancellor”: Annotation by Blake in his copy of Bacon’s Essays, quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 10.

  188“I longed to see Satan”: Allan Cunningham, “William Blake,” The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Second Edition (London: John Murray, 1830), 174.

  189“deadly
terrors”: William Blake, “The Tyger,” in the Yale Center for British Art’s copy L of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795), object 36.

  191“‘scaly skin of gold and green’”: Cunningham, “Blake,” 173.

  192precise relief etching technique: See Viscomi, Idea of the Book, for the full treatment.

  192“mere drudgery”: Letter of Blake, January 1802, quoted in G. E. Bentley Jr., William Blake in the Desolate Market (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 10.

  192“tangible link to all the succeeding moments”: G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2.

  192“infinite which was hid”: William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in the Library of Congress’s copy D (1785), object 14.

  192“so evidently insane”: This was actually written by the famous romantic poet Robert Southey, who was poet laureate for thirty years. Quoted in Bentley, Stranger, 341.

  193“most thoroughly sane man”: Palmer, Life, 23.

  194“I was Socrates”: Robinson, Reminiscences, 2:301–2.

  184“most drastic act of reinterpretation”: Aileen Ward, “William Blake and His Circle,” in Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 33.

  194“triumphs of the engraver’s art”: Bentley, Stranger, 424.

  194“chronic copper intoxication”: Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s Death,” Blake, vol. 30 (1996): 37.

  194“use our imaginations”: Bentley, Stranger, 438.

  194“Listen to the dead with your eyes”: This quote as applied to the study of books was borrowed from Roger Chartier, The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014).

  Chapter 8: The Memoir That Killed Her Memory

  195“deviation from rectitude”: Mary Wollstonecraft, Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 3:12.

  195that pen of yours: Cf. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), which famously begins, “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” and then systematically demonstrates, with damning quotes from the likes of Ruskin, that, yes, it is indeed a metaphorical penis.

  196made-up career: The career “professional author” is defined in the sense of earning pay for writing. See Andrew Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005), 53; and Betsy A. Schellenberg, “The Professional Female Writer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain: 1680–1789, ed. Catherine Ingrassia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 48–49.

  196number of titles: Michelle Levy, “Women and Print Culture, 1750–1830,” in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830, vol. 5, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 31.

  196unique genius: Bennett, Author, 52.

  196landmark court cases: See Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 197–217.

  196“Mother of Feminism” . . .“Prostitute”: Susan J. Wolfson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the poets,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181.

  197“thwarting self-murders”: Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (rev. ed; London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2014), 356.

  197“weak as the weakest girl”: Sylvanus Urban, Gentlemen’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 68, no. 1 (1798): 368. Also quoted in Todd, Wollstonecraft, 356–57.

  197more a slave than a spouse: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 5.

  198“pedagogue with her own theory of education”: Ibid., 58.

  198rock star exceptions such as . . . Christine de Pizan: Shailor, Medieval, 92.

  199useless liars: See Republic III. In the classical period, the two most common roles of an author were imitation and divine inspiration. Plato makes a distinction between “imitation” and personal narration, and seems okay with poetry in defense of “justice,” but he also calls for extensive censorship: “we must put a stop to such stories, lest they produce in the youth a strong inclination to do bad things.” Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 1029. See also Seán Burke, “Changing Conceptions of Authorship,” in Authorship: From Plato to Postmodernism, a Reader, ed. Seán Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 5.

  199dipped in excrement: Technically, this is the punishment for flatterers, a subspecies of fraud. We are open to a discussion of whether the punishment for thieves (spontaneous combustion via snakebite) or falsifiers (leprosy and other diseases) might be more suitable. Inferno, cantos 17–30.

  199Equal-magnitude gifts: Scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest (“Knowledge is a gift of God, so that it cannot be sold”). Quoted in Burke, Knowledge, 149.

  199paid him for his work: S. H. Steinberg and John Trevitt, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London: British Library, 1996), 108.

  199“just one of the numerous craftsmen”: Martha Woodmansee, “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 15.

  199Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson: Rose, “Court,” 212; and Loewenstein, Author’s Due, 239.

  200“authorship” overlaps “authority”: Bennett, Author, 6.

  200accused of plagiarism: Catherine Ingrassia, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5.

  200“They’ll say it’s stoln”: Quoted in Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, ed. John Harvard Ellis (Charlestown, MA: Abram E. Cutter, 1867), 101. Originally published in the prologue of her 1650 collection The Tenth Muse.

  200the actual writer of To Kill a Mockingbird: Glynnis MacNicol, “Harper Lee: The ‘Great Lie’ She Didn’t Write Mockingbird Rears Its Head Again,” The Guardian, July 20, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015 /jul/20/harper-lee-to-kill-a-mockingbird-authorship-women-writers.

  200“denied so as to be attained”: Seán Burke, “Introduction to Feminism and the Authorial Subject,” in Authorship: From Plato to Postmodernism, a Reader, ed. Seán Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 146.

  200Mary Brunton: Brunton’s first novel, Self-Control (1811), was popular enough to merit three editions in a single year. It wasn’t universally liked, however; a contemporary female reader noted, “I read Self-Control and like it extremely, all except some vulgarity meant to be jocular which tired me to death, but I think the principal character charming & well supported & the book really gives good lessons.” Is this one of our Amazon reviews? Quoted in Lorna J. Clark, ed., The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 133.

  200the Great Forgetting: Coined by Clifford Siskin in The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

  201“struggle for authorship”: Burke, “Feminism,” 145.

  201nineteenth-century literary life: Joanne Shattock, “The Construction of the Woman Writer,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1800–1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9.

  201“great genius”: Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1857), 1:66

  202“same human rights”: Anne K. Mellor, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and the Women Writers of Her Day,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141.

  202“same method as boys”: Ibid., 142.

  202“always relative to the men”: Rousseau, Émile (1762), quoted in Mary Wollst
onecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1792), 175.

  203“best and most important”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1953), 529–30.

  203“diametrically opposite”: Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 83.

  203complications from childbirth: Godwin’s memoir contains a graphic play-by-play of Wollstonecraft’s agonizing death from septicaemia (in which the placenta rots inside the mother rather than being expelled), on pages 181–98. A particularly heartbreaking passage: “He immediately proceeded to the extraction of the placenta, which he brought away in pieces, till he was satisfied that the whole was removed. In that point however it afterwards appeared that he was mistaken.” Godwin, Memoirs, 181.

  204read her works and not also fall in love: Of Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Godwin once remarked, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” Quoted in Todd, Wollstonecraft, 369.

  204“marks of contempt”: Godwin, Memoirs, 9.

  204“active and hardy sports”: Ibid., 12–13.

  205discredited . . . as a result: Take the previously mentioned Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau, who not only couldn’t keep himself from making five aftermaths out of wedlock, but then, in order to “preserve the honor of the mother” (mocking air quotes, there, not actual quotes) convinced her to give them all up for adoption. And this was the author who became an international celebrity for his treatises on education and child rearing.

  205“Unsex’d female”: Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798).

  205“challenging men to duels”: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 185.

  205“apt to wreck”: Anna Katherine Elwood, Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), 2:152.

  205earliest sympathetic discussions: Shattock, “Construction,” 15.

  207“alum and soap”: Todd, Wollstonecraft, 267.

  207nearly devoid of sex: This can be awkward for the likes of second-wave feminists, who sometimes “brand her a sexual puritan.” See Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 117.