AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY Volume 13 Number 1 Summer 1979 MARTIN BUTLIN is Keeper of the British Collection of the Tate Gallery, London, author of numerous works on Blake and Turner, and frequent con• tributor to Blake. SUSAN FOX, Queens College, City University of &3Ue New York, has published essays on Blake and Spenser and a book, Poetic Form in Blake's Milton (Princeton, 1976). Her poetry has IAN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY appeared in the Chicago Review, The Paris Review, Volume 13 Number 1 and The New York Quarterly. Summer 1979 THOMAS R. FROSCH is Associate Professor of English at Queens College. He has written The Awakening of Albion, a study of Blake, as well as a forthcoming book of poetry, Plum CONTENTS Gut (New Rivers Press). Blake's Response to Wollstonecraft's Original ROBERT F. GLECKNER is Professor of English at Stories Duke University. His most recent article is by Dennis M. Welch, 4 "From Selfish Spleen to Equanimity: Byron's Thoughts on the 1978 Tate Gallery Exhibition Satires," in the summer 1979 issue of Studies in Romanticism. by Martin Butlin, 16 Blake in China THOMAS v. LANGE, a specialist in illustrated by N.G.D. Malmqvist, 24 books, is Assistant Curator of Printed Books and Bindings at the Pierpont Morgan Library, The "Double" of the Double Portrait of Blake: A New York. He co-authored the article in the Description of Tatham's Replica Portrait Times Literary Supplement (14 Jan., 1977) by Raymond E. Thompson, 29 reporting the discovery of an unrecorded album of Blakeana, and is bibliographer of The The Authorship of the Spectator Review of Gilchrist Illustrator and the Book in England, 1790- by Robert H. Tener, 33 1914. At present he is compiling a catalogue of the Blake collection at the Morgan Library, to appear in Blake. MINUTE PARTICULARS N. G. D. MALMQVIST, Stockholm, was in China Blake's Engraving of Wollstonecraft After Opie during the Blake bicentennial year, 1957, and By Thomas V. Lange, 36 is returning to China this spring. His Swedish translation of An Island in the Moon was pub• Priestley and the Chameleon Anael in The Marriage lished in April and a selection of Songs of of Heaven and Hell Innocence and Songs of Experience in Swedish by Robert F. Gleckner, 37 translation will appear in Radix (Autumn, 1979). POETRY MORTON D. PALEY is an NEH research fellow for 1979-1980. His most recent book is an intro• Bifocal duction to Blake's art: William Blake (Phaidon). by Warren Stevenson, 39 He continues to work on his book-length study of Jerusalem. REVIEWS WARREN H. STEVENSON, Professor of English at the W.J.T. Mitchell's Blake's Composite Art: A Study University of British Columbia, is the author of the Illuminated Poetry of a number of essays on Blake. reviewed by Thomas Frosch, 40 ROBERT H. TENER, Professor of English, Univer• Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson's Milton: sity of Calgary, has published articles on A Poem by William Blake Richard Holt Hutton and Walter Bagehot, and reviewed by Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. on the editorship of the Spectator, Economist, with a note on the reproductions and the National Review. by Morton D. Paley, 49 RAYMOND E. THOMPSON, Columbus, Ohio, a pro• David E. James' Written Within and Without: A fessional engineer, is a Blake enthusiast and Study of Blake's Milton collector. reviewed by Susan Fox, 52 NEWSLETTER © 1979 by Morris Eaves & Morton D. Paley CONTRIBUTORS EDITORS EDITORS: Morris Eaves, Univ. of New Mexico, and Morton D. Paley, Univ. of California, Berkeley. BIBLIOGRAPHER: Thomas Minnick, Ohio State Univ• ersity. ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR GREAT BRITAIN: Frances A. Carey, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. PRODUCTION OFFICE: Morris Eaves, Department of English, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM'37131, TELEPHONE 505/277-3103. Morton D. Paley, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Thomas L. Minnick, University College, Ohio State University, 1050 Carmack Road, Columbus, Ohio, 43210. Frances A. Carey, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3D6, England. EDITORIAL ASSISTANT IN CHARGE: Susan Corban, Univ. of New Mexico, EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Peter Chase, Wendy Jones, Kris Lackey, Cindy Lewiecki, Univ. of New Mexico. BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY is published Under the sponsorship of the Department of English, University of New Mexico. SUBSCRIPTIONS are $12.00 for 1 year, 1 volume, 4 issues. Special rate for individuals, $10.00, surface mail. $15.00 for subscribers overseas who prefer air mail. U.S. currency or international money order if possible. Make checks payable to Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Address all subscription orders & related communications to the Circulation Mgr., Susan Corban, Blake, Dept. of English, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM 87131 USA. Some BACK ISSUES are available. Address Susan Corban for a list of issues and prices. MANUSCRIPTS are welcome. Send two copies, typed and documented according to the forms suggested in the MLA Style Sheet, 2nd. ed., to either of the editors: Morris Eaves, Dept. of English, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131; Morton D. Paley, Dept. of English, Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. INTERNATIONAL SERIAL NUMBER is 0006-453X. Blake/ An Illustrated Quarterly, is INDEXED in the DENNIS M. WELCH, Clarkson College, has published Modern Language Association's International scholarly articles in Buoknell Review, Studies Bibliography, the Modern Humanities Research in Philology, Mosaic_, and Forum. Association's Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, English Language Notes' JOSEPH ANTHONY WITTREICH, JR., Professor Of annual Romantic bibliography, ARTbibliographies English, University of Maryland, is the author MODERN, and the American Humanities Index of Angel of Apocalypse (1975) and Visionary (Whitston Pub.). Poetics (1979). He is currently at work on a book-length study, The Poetry of The Rainbow: Romantic Poetry as Prophecy. INFORMATION BLAKE'S ti&w**iw^& *- -^- RESPONSE TO WOLLSTONECRAFT'S ORIGINAL STORIES ,^ DENNIS M. WELCH t appears certain that William Blake's As the book's illustrator and as the author of I Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) the Songs of Innocence (1789), Blake was likely to was partly inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's have read this short novel on the moral education Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).* It of children. D. G. Gillham says that the poet likewise appears true that two of his songs of "alludes to" or "uses" it in the Senas of Innocence, "The Little Boy Lost" and "Found," had Experience (1793). Referring apparently to the their source in C. G. Salzmann's Elements of novel and Wollstonecraft's other works on Morality , which WolIstonecraft was translating in "education," Stanley Gardner says that Blake knew 1789 and which Blake did several engravings for.2 her views "well" and that he turned them "into That he met WolIstonecraft through his acquaintance poetry in which we recognize our own adult with her novel, Original Stories* also seems anticipation, which caresses the infant inevitably likely.3 For the second edition of the novel, toward Experience."5 Gillham and Gardner do not published in 1791, he designed and engraved six add anything further to these comments, but they are plates.4 But whether his poetry and art were well taken, especially Gardner's. Although he influenced by Original Stories has never been understates the force of "adult anticipation" (in clarified. The purpose of this essay is to reveal both WolIstonecraft and Blake), his assertion is a number of relationships between Wol lstonecraft's particularly important to our understanding of novel and Blake's writing, art, and ideas. Blake's response to Original Stories, a novel that 5 seems to compare with Rousseau's Emile. In her teaching; without her direction they will not Original Stories the main character, Mrs. Mason, be able to get along in society. Blake may be acts as a governess for two young girls, Mary and satirizing her excessive sort of care in another of Caroline. Like Emile the girls need a tutor since his guardian figures — the nurse in his design for they are for all practical purposes orphans. Their "The Fly" (illus. 3). This nurse hovers over a mother has died and they have been left to the care child "in a solicitous manner which seems 9 of servants (p. vii). To teach these girls to be stifling," as John Grant says. Like the nurse, good, Mrs. Mason continually exposes them to their Mrs. Mason tries not to let her wards "out of her faults and to the need to behave morally in the sight" (p. viii). She fosters their dependence on "real world." The thesis of this article is that, her, for despite her efforts to teach them goodness while Blake recognized the necessity of living in and virtue she does not trust them to remain experience, he responded unfavorably to the novel's steadfast. Thus, at the end of the novel when the emphasis on experienced vision, which divides life girls are about to return to their father, the into false categories like good and evil and is governess says that she fears for them (p. 175). negative, oppressive, and dehumanizing. Such vision had already been of some concern to him in Children, alas, are weak, all too prone to a few poems in the Songs of Innocence. I suggest forming "illusions" (p. 122) and being deceitful. that his reaction to it was intensified by his For Blake such an opinion is an adult imposition familiarity with Wollstonecraft's novel and its on the young, an imposition that begins with the main character, Mrs. Mason, who, unlike Emile1s earliest stages of child rearing and invariably tutor, neither regards children as independent nor affects many a child's view of himself.