University of Virginia Library

Plate 96

The peculiar arrangement of this page, the only one in Jerusalem in which Blake's fourteeners are doubled back on themselves to make room for a picture, can be accounted for by an earlier use of the plate. Elsewhere the pictures accommodate themselves to the shape of the text, but here the shape of the picture, belling out oddly at its base to no apparent purpose, has been determined by the shape of earlier engraving on the plate, I find. There is a good deal of submerged cross-hatching in the area below the center of the picture and along its left side near the text, the only distinguishable form being a perspective drawing of what looks like a small Grecian temple. From the top to the center of the picture some 7 irregularly spaced lines of cursive italic writing are fragmentarily visible as white loops across the thick outlines of Blake's drawing. In the Rosenbloom copy the first words are decipherable as "The greatest".

These prove to be the first words, in the same cursive engraver's lettering, of a commercial manifesto in the center of a large poster etched by Blake for "Moore & Co's Manufactory & Warehouse of Carpeting and Hosiery, Chiswell Street, Moor-fields" (reproduced as Plate 10 in Keynes's book of William Blake's Engravings: The Separate Plates, 1956).[34] The Grecian temple turns out to be the roof and walls of a "Common Carpet Loom"; the belling out of the Jerusalem picture is necessitated by the shape of the base of one of the large pillars that flank the "Carpeting and

Hosiery" advertisement. Jerusalem 96 is etched on a piece of copper cut from the lower left quarter (roughly speaking) of the plate.[35]

The visible seven lines are the beginnings of seven of the lines in the announcement of carpets and stockings for sale to private families and to merchants:

The original design, with sun-lit royal crests above, carpet-hung pillars, and "innocent" sketches of sons and daughters of Albion spinning, rolling carpets, and laboring at three sorts of looms — Common, Persia & Turkey Carpet, and Stocking Frame — may be thought of as the commercial contrary to Blake's painting of Hervey's Meditations, or the innocent contrary to "Nelson guiding Leviathan." How appropriate to etch upon it the picture of Albion regenerated and "England who is Brittannia" rejoicing, the climactic page of Jerusalem in which "all the Cities of Albion" rise from their slumbers. Too bad it was necessary to obliterate at the bottom the adaptation from Martial which Blake had inscribed for Moore & Co., if he had not suggested it to them:

— which is to say, the world of London makes you this gift: now the loomfork of Britain has conquered Babylon's needle.