Blake Reloaded

Although many of the Romantic poets displayed a high degree of anxiety concerning the way in which their works were produced and transmitted to an audience, few, if any, fretted quite as much as William Blake did. Being also a highly accomplished engraver and printer, he was certainly the only one of the Romantics to be able to completely move beyond mere fretting. Others may have used their status or wealth to exert their influence upon the production process, but ultimately, they were at the mercy of editors, publishers, and printers and relied on others to turn their visions into published works. Blake, on the other hand, was his own editor, engraver, printer, and publisher. He was able to control to the minutest detail every single aspect of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from conception all the way to the selling of the finished volume. Short of being his own purchaser, Blake achieved the highest possible degree of control over the work’s transmission, and considering that there are only nine known complete copies of the work (twelve total including variants and uncolored prints), even the audience itself was almost handpicked (Ackroyd, 265).

“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans/ I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”, he wrote, and create he did (Ackroyd, 113). Spurning the common intaglio method of etching in which indented lines formed designs on plates, Blake invented a novel process of printing in relief in which the designs were actually raised above the surface of the plate. Blake was very proud of this method and staked a great deal of faith and hope in it. “I have invented a method of Printing both Letterpress and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces work at less than one fourth of the expense,” he enthusiastically raved (Bindman, 106).

About his actual method Blake was very secretive and never published it. In fact, not even his closest friends were given the privilege of watching him work on his relief etchings. He does, however, repeatedly allude to this “infernal method”, which he claimed was given to him by his deceased brother Robert in a vision. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a devil wrote with “corroding fire” upon the side of the abyss of the five senses, and Blake says that he would “print in the infernal method, by corrosives . . . melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (plates 7 & 14).

Although scholars differ in their opinion of what Blake’s method was and acknowledge that since Blake guarded it very tightly, there is little chance of ever ascertaining the precise details of his technique, much progress has been made to discover the general principle of his relief etchings. In 1947, William Hayter, Joan Miro, and Ruthven Todd made an attempt to discover Blake’s method by experimenting with making relief etchings that would reproduce the distinctive appearance and feel of his illuminated works. Using as reference his printed works, a fragment of a rejected copper plate for America, and electrotypes for some of the Songs of Innocence, they were able derive a method of using acids to make satisfactory relief etchings on copperplates (Bindman, 106).

Much of what we know or can conjecture about Blake’s method is a result of the solutions that the 1947 researchers arrived at. All the experts agree that the designs were made on the copperplates with a special acid-resisting varnish, but they continue to disagree upon how the varnish was applied. There are three most probable ways in which Blake could have made the designs. The most prevalent belief was that he drew and wrote in reverse directly on the copperplate with the acid-resistant varnish and a quill (Ackroyd 112). Another commonly accepted theory is that he drew the design as it would appear in the final print in acid-resistant varnish on paper coated with gum-arabic and then, after soaking the paper, transferred the entire design in reverse to a heated copper plate by placing it face-down on the plate and applying pressure with a roller over the back of the paper (Hagstrum, 4). It is also possible that Blake could have drawn his design with ink on paper, transferred the ink onto the copperplate, and then traced over the ink with acid-resistant varnish.

After applying the design in a varnish of salad oil and candle-grease onto the copper, Blake covered the plate with an “aqua fortis” consisting of vinegar, salt armoniack, baysalt, and vert de griz, which bit into the unvarnished surface of the plate for three to four hours to leave the design raised approximately a tenth of a millimeter above the rest of the surface (Ackroyd 112-113). To make prints off of finished plates, Blake applied an ink of burnt oil and pigments, usually in an orange-brown but sometimes also in black, onto the etched relief by dabbing the design with a linen ball soaked with ink. He then also painted the unlined parts of the surface with a mixture of water, color pigments, and carpenter’s glue to fill in the coloring of the plate (Ackroyd 113). When the ink and pigment was transferred to the paper using a normal etching press, pigment on the eaten surface around the relief lines may not always be picked up by the paper, creating the distinctive white gap that sometimes appears between an inked outline and the fill-in coloring in Blake’s illuminated works.

After the printing was done, William Blake and his wife, Catherine, would finish coloring in the pages using watercolors. Catherine then stitched the pages together and bound them within their covers (Ackroyd 119). Because each copy must be individually printed and colored, no two copies are the same. Indeed, Blake took full advantage of this ability to individualize different copies of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and articulated or obscured, or sometimes even completely obliterated, details within the design from version to version so that what appeared to be merely a girl in a dress in one copy became a half-mermaid-half-human hybrid in another, what appeared to be a leaf in one became a cluster of fruits in another, and pyramids, chalices, mountains, and clouds appeared and disappeared to give each version not only a different appearance but also varying levels of clearness to its meaning. Blake was able to control exactly how obscure he wanted his meaning to be from copy to copy.

Blake’s method of printing and finishing gave his illuminated works a hand-hewn, roughly finished quality very different from the usual polished look of commercial etchings which Blake had also shown himself highly capable of producing. By engraving both the design and the text on the same plate, Blake thought that he had devised a way of making sure that his work was taken as a whole entity that would forever remain intact and inseparable. To him, the reward was worth the sacrifices of energy he invested in each copy, “I curse & bless Engraving alternately, because it takes so much time & is so untractable, tho’ capable of such beauty & perfection (Hagstrum 5).

Such “beauty and perfection”, however was to last only for as long as Blake remained in his obscurity. With the rediscovery and revival of Blake in the latter part of the 19th century at the hands of enthusiastic promoters such as Charles Algernon Swinburne, came a suddenly increasing demand for accessible and affordable copies of his work. In 1868, 75 years after Blake first completed his first copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the first mass-produced edition of the work was finally printed (http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bossert/blaketl.html). Finding themselves with no means of mechanically reproducing Blake the way it was originally printed, publishers ripped the text out of the entwined embrace of the pictures with which they were framed and deposited them in neatly packed and arranged lines. Hailing the first textual printing of Blake’s Jerusalem, one critic rejoiced, “it is only when the complete works of Blake are readily accessible and legible that we may hope that the greatest of English mystics will be adequately studied and appreciated; and if this is to be, the divorce of the poem from its illustrations is an imperative though none the less regrettable necessity” (Maclagan & Russell, vii). Blake, however, had never designed his work to be read in fragmented components but as a whole, and often the words lost much of their meaning when taken from their pictorial context. As Jean H. Hagstrum points out in William Blake: Poet and Painter, “with but few exceptions contemporary commentators have deserted one of the earliest insights into Blake’s art—that he ‘interwined’ paintings and poetry so closely ‘that they cannot well be separated’ and that in ordinary publication Blake’s verses, lacking the support of design, sometimes sound like nonsense” (Hagstrum 3). Thus, as Stephen M. Lane noted in “Blake, the Common Reader, and Multimedia”, Blake was truly victimized by the printers of anthologies and collections (http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Elanes/blakerdr.htm). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was no exception, and was crudely sutured onto the starkness of blank unadorned pages along with other works from the Blake canon, although most publishers did at least make some sort of attempts at preserving Blake’s plate numbering.

As the twentieth century progressed Blake continued to grow in popularity. W. P. Witcutt in Blake: a Psychological Study noted, “of the poets of the Romantic Revival, the reputations of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge have remained much the same as in their own time; that of Byron has declined; that of Southey sunk altogether out of sight; while that of Blake has continually advanced” (Witcutt, 7). More and more people continued to discover the world of Blake and to be enthralled and fascinated by it, and with an increase in awareness the demand continued to rise, “the market for books by and about Blake has continued its steady upward course, in some cases beating the general inflation rate by a fair margin . . .. Early facsimiles have increased more than other genres of Blakeana, and the publications of the Blake trust have held their value in spite of wide availability” (Essick, 86). Beginning in 1951 with a reproduction of Jerusalem, the William Blake Trust had begun issuing colored facsimiles, or as a critic once called it, “reasonable forgeries”, through Trianon Press (http://library.ucsc.edu/oac/exhibits/trianon/pub.htm). These Trianon Press productions, although available in greater numbers than Blake’s original works, remained expensive and rare collectors’ items because of the great amount of work required to produce them. It was not until the technologies of photographic color reproductions became more commonplace in publishing around the 1990’s that affordable editions of facsimile reproductions became available in large numbers.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, Blake attained the status of a pop-culture icon. Bands like The Doors named themselves after references in Blake’s works (“if the doors of perception were to be cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”), and teenagers and garage bands across the globe began to sing of the “doors of perception” (http://fusionanomaly.net/williamblake.html). With the advent of the internet, the works of Blake finally found a home where they could be broadcast in all their glory to an almost infinitely wide audience. Perhaps because no other Romantic poet demanded quite the full combination of graphical and textual capability unique to the internet, Blake’s works have shown an affinity to the technologies of world wide web in a way not paralleled by any other Romantic poet, and the internet community has, in turn, embraced Blake. One of the first Blake discussion list on the internet arrived in 1993 alongside Albion.com, “one of the oldest commercial sites on the internet” (http://www.albion.com/blake/), and since those early forays of the public into the realm of the electronic world, many more Blake-centered mailing lists and websites have cropped up, ranging from personal webpages on the likes of geocities and yahoo to scholarly dissertations on university sites. With the successful ambitious achievements and still continuing efforts of the Blake Digital Text Project (http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/home1.html) and the absolutely massive William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org), a monolithic concordance of Blake’s works, of which The Marriage of Heaven and Hell occupies the important status of being his first prophetic work, is being created. Already, six of the nine known copies of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are available online at the William Blake Archive in a format intended to facilitate the direct study of how the various versions differed from each other.

The technological advances of the end of the twentieth century has finally given Blake’s prophecies a voice and an audience that he never had in his lifetime. Perhaps it is one that Blake never envisioned nor wanted, since he did not advertise for sale The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as he did his other works and did not even put his own name on it, but it is an audience nonetheless, and, at that, as admiring a one as any poet or artist could ever hope for.

References

Online sources Blake Digital Text Project. (http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/home1.html)

The Blake List at Albion.com. (http://www.albion.com/blake/)

Fusion anomaly (a psychedelic music website). (http://fusionanomaly.net/williamblake.html)

Lane, Stephen M. "Blake, the Common Reader, and Multimedia." (http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Elanes/blakerdr.htm)

Publication list of the Trianon Press. (http://library.ucsc.edu/oac/exhibits/trianon/pub.htm)

The William Blake Archive. (http://www.blakearchive.org)

Timeline of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bossert/blaketl.html)

Printed sources Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Bindman, David. “A review of Robert N. Essick’s William Blake’s Relief Inventions.” Blake: an illustrated quarterly #54. 14 (2), fall 1980. pg. 106-107.

Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace 1980-1981.” Blake: an illustrated quarterly #61. 16 (1), summer 1982. pg 86-87.

Hagstrum, Jean H. William Blake: Poet and Painter. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Maclagan, ERD & Russel, AGB, eds. The Prophetic Books of William Blake. Jerusalem. London: A. H. Bullen, 1904.

Witcutt, W. P. Blake: A Psychological Study. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966.