AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY VOLUME 24 NUMBERS WINTER 1990/91 BLAKE/ANILLUSTRA TED QUARTERL Y Winter 1990/91 £%Ue AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY VOLUME 24 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1990/91 CONTENTS ARTICLES 102 Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French 80 The Printings of Blake's Dante Revolution as Linguistic Event, Engravings reviewed by Lisa Plummer Crafton by Robert N. Essick 103 Jerome J. McGann, Towards a MINUTE PARTICULARS Literature of Knowledge, reviewed by Michael Fischer 90 A New Voice on Blake Bruce E. Graver 106 Historicizing Blake: A Conference at St. Mary's College, Strawberry 94 John Clerk, Esq. Hill, 5-7 September 1990, David Groves reviewed by Jon Mee REVIEWS NEWSLETTER 96 David Fu Her, Blake's Heroic 108 Blake's Fax, Blake And The ISSN, Argument, reviewed by Reproductions Of Blake's Faerie Brian Wilkie Queene, Trianon Press Archive Exhibition 99 Martin Bidney, Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination, reviewed by Stuart Atkins 101 David Lindsay, ed., Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Robert F. Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg, eds., Approaches to Cover: William Blake, Dante engravings Teaching Blake's Songs of plate 6, "The Pit of Disease: The Falsifiers." Innocence and of Experience, Courtesy of the British Museum, Depart• reviewed by Edward Larrissy ment of Prints and Drawings. ©1991 Copyright Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley Winter 1990/91 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY issues of the current volume. Foreign CONTRIBUTORS EDITORS addresses (except Canada and Mex• ico) require a $6 per volume postal surcharge for surface mail, a $15 per Editors: Morris Eaves, University of volume surcharge for air mail delivery. STUART ATKINS is Professor of Ger• Rochester, and Morton D. Paley, U.S. currency or international money man Emeritus at the University of University of California, Berkeley. order necessary. Make checks payable California at Santa Barbara. to Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Ad• Bibliographer: Detlef W. Dorrbecker, dress all subscription orders and re• USA PLUMMER CRAFTON, an In• Universitat Trier, West Germany. structor of English at West Georgia lated communications to Patricia Neill, College, is finishing a dissertation on Review Editor: Nelson Hilton, Blake, Department of English, Univer• Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyri• University of Georgia, Athens. sity of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. cal Ballads for the University of Ten• Associate Editor for Great Britain: Many back issues are available at a nessee. David Worrall, St. Mary's College. reduced price. Address Patricia Neill for a list of issues and prices. ROBERT N. ESSICK is Professor of Production Office: Morris Eaves, English at the University of California, Department of English, University of Manuscripts are welcome. Send two Riverside. Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. copies, typed and documented accor• ding to the forms suggested in The BRUCE E. GRAVER, Associate Profes• Telephone: 716/275-3820. MLA Style Manual, to either of the sor of English at Providence College, Fax: 716/442-5769. editors: Morris Eaves, Dept. of English, is editing Wordsworth's Aeneid trans• University of Rochester, Rochester, lation and Chaucer modernizations for Morton D. Paley, Department of NY 14627; Morton D. Paley, Dept. of the Cornell Wordsworth. English, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. English, University of California, DAVID GROVES, a Canadian univer• Berkeley, CA 94720. Only one copy Detlef W. Dorrbecker, Universitat sity lecturer, is the author of six books will be returned to authors. Please send Trier, FB III Kunstgeschichte, Postfach on the poet and novelist James Hogg disks if your manuscript was typed on 3825, 5500 Trier, West Germany. (1770-1835). a computer; note the name of the com• Nelson Hilton, Department of English, puter, the word processing system used, MICHAEL FISCHER is Professor of University of Georgia, Athens, GA and the file name of your article. If English at the University of New Mexico 30602. possible, have your disk converted to and the author of Stanley Cavell and WordPerfect 5.0. Literary Skepticism (U of Chicago Press, David Worrall, St. Mary's College, Straw• International Standard Serial 1989). berry Hill, Waldegrave Road, Twick• enham TW1 4SX, England. Number: 0l60-628x. Blake/An Illus• EDWARD LARRISSY is author of Wil• trated Quarterly is indexed in the liam Blake(.1985), and Reading Twenti• Modern Language Association's Inter• eth-Century Poetry: The Language of national Bibliography, the Modern Gender and Object (Blackwell, 1990). Humanities Research Association's INFORMATION Annual Bibliography of English Lan• JOHN MEE, Lecturer in English at the guage and Literature, The Romantic Australian National University, is the Movement: A Selective and Critical author of Dangerous Enthusiasm: Wil• Managing Editor: Patricia Neill Bibliography(ed. David V. Erdman et liam Blake and the Culture of Radical• Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly is al.), American Humanities Index, the ism in the 1790s (forthcoming, Oxford published under the sponsorship of Arts and Humanities Citation Index, University Press, 1992). the Department of English, University and Current Contents. of Rochester. BRIAN WILKIE, Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, Fayette- Subscriptions are $40 for institutions, ville, is the author of Blake's Thel and $20 for individuals. All subscriptions Oothoon (English Literary Studies, are by the volume (1 year, 4 issues) 1990) and (with Mary Lynn Johnson) and begin with the summer issue. Sub• Blake's "FourZoas": The Design of a scription payments received after the Dream (Harvard UP, 1978). summer issue will be applied to the 4 80 BLAKE/ANILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY Winter 1990/91 The Printings of Blake's Dante Engravings By Robert N. Essick s readers of the annual sales reports after J. Ls death 0- L- jnr)—had 50 Ltd. The references to both the Job and Ain this journal may have noticed, copies (india on drawing paper) Dante engravings make this previ• complete sets of Blake's engraved illus• printed by Holdgate."1 This statement ously unrecorded letter worth printing trations to Dante's Inferno have consis• provides crucial information: there in full: tently fetched over $30,000 at auctions were only two printings, laid India th during the last few years. As a conse• paper (or chine applique) was used May 18 . 92 The Avenue 76 Fulham Road quence of this high value, dealers have for both, and Holdgate Bros, printed SW the second issue of 50 impressions become increasingly interested in ways r of ascribing a particular set of the seven "soon" after Linnell's death in 1882. Dear M Quaritch plates to a specific press run since the We are not informed, however, about I waited a few days before sending you earliest impressions would command the date, printer, and press run of the the five sets of Job you ordered—thinking the highest prices. In response to re• first printing.2 Fortunately, other I might send the Dante same time—but my quests for information on this matter, records in the Ivimy collection fill in brother James whom I saw yesterday tells as well as a desire to demonstrate how these gaps. Two receipts from the plate me that there is a hitch in getting the Dante printed because the man whom my father economic imperatives influence the printers Dixon & Ross, No. 4 St. James's employed & whom we wish to do it now Place, indicate that £2.15s. was paid by study of printed images as much as is ill, though he is expected soon to their making, I began to study various Linnell on 26 September 1838 for "25 recover— I told my brother that I would sets of the Dante plates to correlate of each of 7 Plates Dante India," and a undertake to get it done safely & as well by their physical characteristics with the further £1.10s. on 2 October 1838 for some others—but in the country they are I known dates of printing. Since there "95 Imp", of 7 Pits. Dante India."3 think too conservative & slow coach— are records of only three print runs in These receipts make it clear that there however I will have my man bring up the the nineteenth century, the problem were actually two early press runs. That 10 sets of Job either tomorrow or Friday— seemed easily solvable. But the situa• they were paid for only a week apart, I was about writing fathers to bring me 5 tion is far more complicated than I had and may have been performed even sets tomorrow but if they cannot look out the 10 in time he will bring them up Friday. anticipated, as the following report closer in time, accounts for the younger With regard to the printing of the Dante it Linnell's reference to nineteenth-cen• will demonstrate. occurs to me that perhaps you might know The documentary record of print• tury printings at only "two dates," a who is the best copperplate printer in Lon• ings is less complete, and its inter• habit continued by modern scholars don and if you know that he is also pretation by scholars less accurate, but one that I will abandon here. As for thoroughly trustworthy (supposing we left than one would wish. The first to offer the third printing, a draft of a letter the plates in his hand for a time) I think we any information on the subject were from John Linnell, Jr., to the London might save time. —of course I should give Bentley and Nurmi, who in their 1964 book dealer Bernard Quaritch, dated 6 the printer precise instructions as to the Blake Bibliography quote from per• May 1892 states that the Dante "proofs" style of printing, etc. With regard to the Papers which you tinent documents in the Joan Linnell (i.e., impressions from the 1838 print• ings) had been "disposed of and that alluded to in a previous letter—have you Ivimy collection.