Notes Introduction: Blake and his traditions 1. William Blake, 'Annotations to Aphorisms', p. 226; E596. John Casper Lavater, Aphorisms on Man, trans. ].H. Fuseli (London: ]. Johnson, 1788). I have consulted this edition, though not the copy owned by Blake. All citations of Lavater's text will be referred to by aphorism number rather than page number. The same holds true for citations of Blake's annotations of particu­ lar aphorisms when his remarks refer to a particular aphorism except in instances where Blake's comments appear on a blank page and following Erdman, I will refer to these by page number. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Blake's work are taken from David V. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose o(Wil/iam Blake, rev. edn (London: Doubleday, 1988), hereafter 'E'. 2. Edward Larrissy, William Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 36. 3. Northrop Frye, Fear(ul Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 8; John Beer, Blake's Humanism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 16; Michael Ferber, The Social Vision o( William Blake (Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 136-8; Tristanne Connolly, William Blake and the Body (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 30-1, 42,62. 4. S.H. Clark, 'Blake's Milton as Empiricist Epic: "Weaving the Woof of Locke"', SiR, 36 (1997), pp. 457-82; Steve Clark, '''Labouring at the Resolute Anvil": Blake's Response to Locke', in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 133-52; and Wayne Glausser, Locke and Blake: A Conversation Across the Eighteenth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 5. Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Desiree Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964). 6. Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture o( Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 7. Keri Davies, 'William Blake's Mother: A New Identification', Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 33 (1999), pp. 36-50; Marsha Keith Schuchard and Keri Davies, 'Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake's Family', Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 38 (2004), pp. 36-43. 8. Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds, Blake in the Nineties (London: Macmillan, 1999); and Historicizing Blake (London: Macmillan, 1994). 9. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea o(the Book (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 289. Although in the appendix to this text, Viscomi lists 1794 and 1795 as the first printing of No Natural Religion and All Religions respect­ ively, he dates their composition to 1788 (pp. 187-97). 191 192 Notes 10. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, rev. edn (London: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 243. 11. David Worrall, 'William Blake and Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden', Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1975), pp. 397-417. 1 Experiences of empiricism 1. 'Blake and the Mills of Induction', Blake Newsletter: An Illustrated Quarterly, 10 (1977), pp. 109-12 (p. 111). 2. James Hindmarsh, A New Dictionary of Correspondences, Representation, &c. or the Spiritual Signi(zcations of Words, Sentences, &c. As Used in the Sacred Scriptures ([London]: Robert Hindmarsh, 1794), p. 239. 3. Jean H. Hagstrum, 'William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment', in Critical Essays on William Blake, ed. Hazard Adams (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991), pp. 67-78 (p. 69). 4. For Locke's significance within a larger history of ideas, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 164-77; Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 125-7; Ian Hacking, 'Memory Sciences, Memory Politics', Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 67-87 (pp. 80-1). 5. For the connection between Blake and Hume, I am indebted to White, who notes that both Blake and Hume were concerned 'that the new logic [of empiricism], like the old, triumphed by means of circular reasoning' (p. 110). 6. The authorship of the English 'translation' of Aphorisms is itself a matter of debate as the translator, Blake's friend Fuseli, took certain creative liberties with the text. Blake may well have been aware of Fuseli's inventiveness, though, as one who 'cannot concieve the Divinity of the [... ] Bible to consist either in who they were written by or at what time' (Annotations to Watson, p. 22; E618), Blake is likely to have regarded this as of little consequence. In any case, Blake addresses Lavater by name throughout his annotations, and following his lead I too will refer to Lavater as the work's author. For a detailed discussion of this matter, see Carol Louise Hall, Blake and Fuseli: A Study in the Transmission of Ideas (London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1985) and R.J. Shroyer's introduction to the Scholar's facsimile of Blake's copy of Aphorisms (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1980). 7. Erdman links these comments with Johnson's imprisonment as part of his larger argument concerning Blake's fears about persecution for publication (Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; repr. London: Dover, 1991), pp. 301-2). While Erdman's suggestion that the withdrawal of The French Revolution entailed the 'withdrawal from any audience beyond a few uncritical or even uncomprehending friends' has been challenged by subsequent scholars, the suggestion that he was deeply affected by the persecutions of the 1790s seems undeniable (Prophet, p. 153). For recent re-evaluations of Blake's potential audience, see David Worrall, 'Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture', in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 194-211. 8. The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 72. Notes 193 9. The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 41. 10. Peter Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 4-19. 11. These topics have been discussed at length by Morris Eaves, William Blake's Theory of Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 152-3; Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 189-94; Edward Larrissy, 'Spectral Imposition and Visionary Imposition: Printing and Repetition in Blake', in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 61-77 (pp. 63-4, 68-9); Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea, pp. 42-4. 12. Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 5. 13. For a detailed discussion of these issues, together with evidence of late eighteenth-century criticisms of Locke see Ferber, pp. 14-24. 14. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 136. 15. Much has already been written on Blake's concept of the spectre, and the following studies provide detailed discussions of the topic: Steve Vine, Blake's Poetry: Spectral Visions (London: Macmillan, 1993); Lorraine Clark, Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1991); Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words (Berkeley: California University Press, 1983), pp. 147-72. To my knowledge, little has been written to date comparing Blake's spectre with that encountered in Specters of Marx, but see Colebrook below. 16. Claire Colebrook provides an informative and useful discussion of Blake, Derrida and the (Derridean) spectre, which discusses the conjuration and counter-conjuration characteristic of enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought ('The New Jerusalem and the New International', Parallax, 7 (2001), pp. 17-28). Colebrook's discussion differs in focus from the one presented here, though her readings converge with mine in a number of significant ways, as noted below. 17. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, repr. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253-64 (p. 256). 18. G.E. Bentley Jr., Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 692. 19. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), §2.1.3-4. 20. Thomas R. Frosch, The Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (London: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 26-7, 31. 21. Joseph Viscomi, 'In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Print­ making in Blake's Marriage', in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 27-60 (p. 44). 22. As instructed by aphorism 643, Blake has underlined the aphorisms that have 'affected [him] agreeably, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness' (E583). Following Erdman, Blake's underlining here, and throughout the marginalia, is indicated by the use of italics. 194 Notes 23. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), 3.P53.Dem. References to this text are to book number, proposition or definition number and either demonstration, corollary, scholium, or explanation. 24. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), p. 18. 25. Mary Lynn Johnson, 'Blake, Democritus, and the "Fluxions of the Atom": Some Contexts for Materialist Critiques', in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 105-24. 26. Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake's Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp.