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Issues) and Begin with the Summer Is• English and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Sue AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY Read All about It: Blake in the Marketplace, 2005 VOLUME 39 NUMBER 4 SPRING 2006 £BUe AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY www.blakequarterly.org VOLUME 39 NUMBER 4 SPRING 2006 CONTENTS Articles Discussion Blake in the Marketplace, 2005 Blake's Four "Zoas"! By Robert N. Essick 148 By Magnus Ankarsjo 189 Building Jerusalem'. Composition and Chronology "mark ye the points" By Aiken Ward 183 By Justin Van Khrck 190 Minute Particular Corrigendum William Blake in "The Vanguard of the Age" To "A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake, By Morton D. Paley 185 Blake 39.3 (winter 2005-06) By Robert N. Essick 182 Review Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World Reviewed by Michael Fischer 187 ADVISORY BOARD G. E. Bentley, Jr., University of Toronto, retired Nelson Milton, University of Georgia Martin Butlin, London Anne K. Mellor, University of California, Los Angeles Detlef W. Dorrbecker, University of Trier Joseph Viscomi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Robert N. f.ssick. University of California, Riverside David WorralLThe Nottingham Trent University Angela Ksterhammer, University of Western Ontario CONTRIBUTORS Morton D. Paley, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-1030 Email: [email protected] ROBERT N. ESSICK is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and a frequent contributor to this jour• G. E. Bentley, Jr., 246 MacPherson Avenue, Toronto, nal. Ontario M4V 1A2 Canada AILEEN WARD (Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, Nelson Hilton, Department of English, University of Emeritus, New York University) is author of John Keats: The Georgia, Athens GA 30602 Making of a Poet and of articles and reviews on British ro• Email: [email protected] mantic writers, and editor of selected works by Blake, Keats, and De Quincey. She is currently at work on a biography of David Worrall, Faculty of Humanities, The Nottingham Blake. Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS U.K. Email: [email protected] MORTON D. PALEY'S ([email protected]) most recent book is The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. He is currently working on a study of Samuel Taylor INFORMATION Coleridge and the fine arts. BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY is published under the sponsorship MICHAEL FISCHER ([email protected]) is the author of Stan• of the Department of English, University of Rochester. Subscrip• ley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (1989) and numerous ar• tions are $60 for institutions, $30 for individuals. All subscriptions ticles on romanticism and literary theory. He is professor of are by the volume (1 year, 4 issues) and begin with the summer is• English and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of sue. Subscription payments received after the summer issue will be the Faculty at Trinity University. applied to the current volume. Addresses outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico require a $15 per volume postal surcharge for sur• MAGNUS ANKARSJO ([email protected]) is a lecturer face delivery, or $20 for airmail. Credit card payment is available. at the University of Northampton and a visiting fellow at Not• Make checks payable to Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Address all tingham Trent University. He is the author of William Blake subscription orders and related communications to Sarah Jones, and Gender (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). Blake, Department of English, University of Rochester, Rochester NY 14627-0451. Back issues are available; address Sarah Jones for information on issues and prices, or consult the web site. JUSTIN VAN KLEECK ([email protected]) recently completed and defended his dissertation, on the editorial historv of the MANUSCRIPTS are welcome in either hard copy or electronic form. Four Zoas manuscript, at the University of Virginia. The ob• Send two copies, typed and documented according to forms sug• session lives on, however: he is currently working on an elec• gested in the MLA Style Manual, and with pages numbered, to tronic edition of the manuscript for the Blake Archive. either of the editors: Morris Eaves, Dept. of English, University of Rochester, Rochester NY 14627-0451; Morton D. Paley, Dept. of English, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-1030. No articles will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped self- addressed envelope. For electronic submissions, you may send a EDITORS diskette, or send your article as an attachment to an email mes• sage; please number the pages of electronic submissions. The pre• ferred file format is RTF; other formats are usually acceptable. EDITORS: Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley INTERNATIONAL STANDARD SERIAL NUMBER: 0160-628x. Blake/An Illus• BIBLIOGRAPHER: G. E. Bentley, Jr. trated Quarterly is indexed in the Modern Language Association's REVIEW EDITOR: Nelson Hilton International Bibliography, the Modern Humanities Research ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR GREAT BRITAIN: David Worrall Association's Annual Bibliography of English Language and Lit• erature, American Humanities Index, Arts and Humanities Cita• PRODUCTION OFFICE: Department of English, Morey 410, tion Index, Current Contents and the Bibliography of the History University of Rochester, Rochester NY 14627-0451 of Art. MANAGING EDITOR: Sarah Jones [email protected] TELEPHONE: 585/275-3820 FAX: 585/442-5769 © 2006 Copyright Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley Morris Eaves, Department of English, University of Rochester, Rochester NY 14627-0451 Coven George Cumberland, Portrait of Catherine Blaketf), 'in,nl: [email protected] c. 1783-85(?). Essick collection. See pp. 164-65. ARTICLES ily from deposit at the Tate Collection in late summer 2004. The third tempera from the Goyder collection, The Flight into Egypt (Butlin #404), remains on deposit with the Tate after an unsuccessful attempt by that institution to raise funds to Blake in the Marketplace, 2005 purchase the work. Christ the Mediator, by far the best paint• ing of the three, was offered at a Christie's London auction on 14 June 2005 with an estimate of £500,000-800,000 (illus. BY ROBERT N. ESSICK 1). There was only one bidder, an unidentified party on the telephone, who simply bid against the reserve price until win• ning the lot at £450,000 (£512,000 with the buyer's premium). begin by updating the introductory comments in my Given the estimate range, the price must have disappointed I 2003 and 2004 sales reviews (Blake 37A [spring 2004]: both the vendor and the auction house, but Christ the Me• 116-17, and 38.4 [spring 2005]: 124-25). In the former, I diator still managed to set a record for a tempera painting by told the story of Blake's rediscovered watercolors for Robert Blake. Blair's The Grave; their most recent adventures are reported A visually less impressive work, but a more famous repre• below under Drawings and Paintings. In the 2004 review, I sentation of Blake's imaginative range than most of his bibli• commented on the rediscovery of Visions of the Daughters of cal paintings, is his full-length portrait of The Ghost of a Flea Albion copy N and the legal controversy over its ownership. from the Smaller Blake-Varley Sketchbook of c. 1819 (illus. 2). In early February 2005 I learned from Christine von der Linn The sketchbook was dismembered and auctioned leaf by leaf of Swann (formerly Swann Galleries), the New York auction at Christie's London in 1971. The flea returned to the same house, that a member (or members) of the Whitney family, rooms on 9 June 2005 with a cautious estimate of £4000-6000. in whose possession the volume resided for many years, had The auction catalogue included an exceedingly poor illustra• won the case, apparently out of court, against the man who tion that turned the paper tone to a medium gray and the brought the book to Swann. As far as I can determine, the drawing into a ghost of the ghost of a flea. There were also book is now owned by, and in the physical possession of, a rumors that the drawing had been fiddled with in recent years member or members of the Whitney family. John Windle, the (see the caption to illus. 2). But collectors and dealers were San Francisco book dealer who specializes in Blake, has been not put off. There were at least 3 bidders still in the game at told that there are no current plans to sell the book. £30,000—Windle, the British Blake collector Alan Parker, and I was not able to inspect Visions copy N while it was at someone on the telephone. Windle dropped out at that point, Swann, but Windle saw the volume only a few days before its with Parker the victor on a bid of £72,000 (£86,400 inclusive return to the Whitney family. He found on a front flyleaf the of the buyer's premium). Alan Parker is the son of the railroad following, previously unrecorded, pencil inscription: executive and Blake collector Sir Peter Parker (1924-2002). The Ghost of a Flea establishes a new record price for any 1848 uncolored drawing by Blake. Its sale also buttresses my sus• 12 8th paid 70s picion that, with many of Blake's works, the usual standards for this to of aesthetic appreciation and connoisseurship are not helpful A Evans 8c Son [ampersand and final word unclear] in establishing market values. This slight pencil sketch of a London humanized flea (or an insectivorous human) is less a "work of RT [ possibly "RL"] art," as a consensus of dealers and collectors would normally 4 guineas was asked for it define that term, than a documentary record of an extraordi• I interpret this to mean that RT (or RL) purchased the book nary mind. from the London dealer A. Evans & Son, probably on 8 De• Bloomsbury Auctions (formerly Bloomsbury Book Auc• cember (or possibly 12 August) 1848, paying 70 shillings.
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