University of Virginia Library

The Date of Blake's Pickering Manuscript
or
The Way of a Poet with Paper
by
G. E. Bentley, Jr.

On February 18th 1826 William Blake told Crabb Robinson, "I have written more than Voltaire or Rousseau — Six or Seven Epic poems as long as Homer and 20 Tragedies as long as Macbeth",[1] and Allan Cunningham reported that at his death in 1827 Blake "left volumes of verse, amounting, it is said, to nearly an hundred, prepared for the press".[2]

Most of these manuscripts are lost, probably burned by Frederick Tatham, who came into possession of most of Blake's property on the death of his widow, but one of them, perhaps less theologically startling than the others, survived in eleven sheets stitched into paper wrappers. This manuscript was first publicly referred to in Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake in 1863,[3] when a number of poems from it were published. Gilchrist did not mention that the owner was Frederick Tatham, but within a year or so the manuscript, with a covering letter by Tatham, was offered for £15.15.0 by the London dealer Francis Harvey. In his catalogue Harvey said, apparently of Tatham,

By 1866 it had come into the possession of the publisher Basil Montagu Pickering in whose edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience, with Other Poems it was published in that year,[5] and since that time it has been known as the Pickering Manuscript. It has been in private hands in the United States since the end of the nineteenth century, and apparently no scholarly text has been printed from the manuscript itself. I am deeply indebted to Mrs Landon K. Thorne, the present owner, who generously allowed me to study the manuscript at leisure.

The Pickering Manuscript contains fair copies of ten of Blake's loveliest and most enigmatic poems: "The Smile", "The Golden Net", "The Mental Traveller", "The Land of Dreams", "Mary", "The Crystal Cabinet", "The Grey Monk", "Auguries of Innocence", "Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell", and "William Bond". Most are narrative poems, and some of Blake's best known lines are to be found here, including:

and Recently these poems have been receiving increased attention,[6] and it would be well if we could lighten the obscurity that surrounds their early history.

In particular it would help if we could date the poems, for modern scholarship tends to analyse Blake's writings in a strict chronological context. Unfortunately the paper on which the poems are written bears no visible watermark, and there appear at first to be no external indications of date, such as the signatures of early owners or contemporary references to the poems. Most scholars have agreed with Sampson that internal evidence suggests a date of 1801 to 1803,[7] but this internal evidence is by no means conclusive.

It consists principally of repetitions of phrases from "The Grey Monk", "Mary" and "The Golden Net" in Blake's Notebook among other passages written about 1801 to 1803, in his Jerusalem, parts of which were first engraved about 1804, and in Blake's letter of August 16th 1803. Sampson says that "'Mary' was certainly written before" the 1803 letter, because in a ten-line poem about himself in the letter Blake used two lines ("O why was I born with a different face? Why was I not born like that rest of my race?") adapted from the forty-eight-line narrative poem "Mary" ("O why

was I born with a different Face[?] Why was I not born like this Envious Race[?]"). It does not seem to me, however, that any priority can "certainly" be deduced from the relationship of these four lines, particularly in view of Blake's known habit of quoting himself in a different context after a lapse of years. (For instance, in The Four Zoas of 1797 to about 1808 he repeats some seventy-five lines from Tiriel [1789?], Visions of the Daughters of Albion [1793], America [1793], The Book of Urizen [1794], and The Book of Ahania [1795].) Blake might well have written "Mary" years before or after 1803 as far as any relationship with the August letter will "certainly" show.

The priority is at least a little clearer with "The Golden Net" and "The Grey Monk". The untitled Notebook version of "The Golden Net" is clearly a fairly rough draft, with numerous deletions and second thoughts. A number of differences between the two versions are ambiguous, such as the alteration of the Notebook "flaming" to "Burning" in line 23 of the Pickering Manuscript copy. Most of the clear indications, however, point to the Pickering version as being a fair copy of the Notebook draft, rather than any other relationship (such as the Notebook version being a revision of the Pickering Manuscript, or both being based on a third, lost, version). In lines 6, 7, 24, 26, the Pickering copy follows the corrected rather than the deleted phrases in the Notebook draft, and in line 3 it eliminates the infelicitous second repetition of the phrase

The priority of the Notebook draft of "The Golden Net" over the Pickering Manuscript fair copy seems moderately clear.

The conclusion is similar in a somewhat more complicated situation for "The Grey Monk". The Notebook draft is a sixty-one-line untitled first person narrative poem with numerous alterations and twenty-one lines of afterthought not clearly marked for insertion. The Pickering Manuscript fair copy is a thirty-six line third person narrative using lines 19-22, 15-18, 23-43, 57-61, and 44-48 of the Notebook draft. In Jerusalem plate 52, lines 1-16 of the Notebook draft are used with lines 1-10 of the additional stanzas (including the new draft of lines 57-61 used also in the Pickering Manuscript). The Jerusalem version clearly derives from the Notebook and not from the Pickering Manuscript; two of its stanzas appear in the former but not in the latter. The Pickering fair copy also seems to derive from the Notebook. When lines 25, 34, 47, 58, and 60 of the Notebook draft were copied in the Pickering Manuscript, the corrected rather than the deleted phrases were repeated. Similarly, in lines 20, 22, 44, and 57 of the Notebook are found phrases which were improved in the Pickering draft. (For instance, line 44 of the Notebook reads "The hand of vengeance sought the bed", but the intention is made clearer in the Pickering Manuscript with the alteration of the verb to "found".)

It seems probable, then, from the internal evidence, that the first drafts of some of these poems were written with others in Blake's Notbook about 1801 to 1803, and one of them was perhaps composed on August 16th 1803. This, of course, only gives us an initial terminus. The Pickering fair copies could have been written at any time between 1803 and Blake's death in 1827, so far as this internal evidence is concerned.

There is, however, a piece of external evidence which has not heretofore been recorded. On page 16 of the Pickering Manuscript in the bottom left hand corner there appears to be an erasure, from which only four small fragments survive. They are so faint and vague as to be almost indecipherable except for one peculiarity. The lines are firmer, more regular, and (if such a word may be permitted for a straight line less than a sixteenth of an inch long) more angular than might be expected in ordinary writing.

In fact, the erased word appears to have been printed from type, not inscribed by hand. A study of the roughened surface of the paper, and in particular of the verso, where the pressure of the type seems to have left an impressed image, suggests that the word was "With".

But why should there be an isolated printed word on an otherwise blank page? It is difficult to imagine why just one word should have been printed on a page — but perhaps this one word was originally accompanied by many others: The other words may have been to the left of this one, and have been cut off. But in what circumstances would one expect to find a word (particularly one beginning with a capital letter) well to the right of others on a page? It might happen in an extra long line of poetry, or it might happen with a catchword, particularly at the foot of a page of poetry. Except for ill-set display pages (such as broadsides or titlepages), I cannot think of other ordinary circumstances in which one might find such an isolated printed word as the "With" in the Pickering Manuscript.

The question then arises, under what circumstances might Blake have been using sheets of printed poetry on which to write his poem? Fortunately, the list of known possibilities is very short. Though Blake was a printer, he is only known to have printed from copperplates, not from type, and though he was a poet, only one volume of his poetry (Poetical Sketches) was printed in conventional type and circulated. However, he did have in his hands considerable quantities of the sheets to a little volume entitled Designs to A Series of Ballads [by William Hayley] which were published by and for Blake in four numbers on June 1st, July 1st, August 5th, and September 9th 1802, and when he found he could not sell these Ballads Blake regularly used the sheets as scratch paper.

On May 28th 1802 Hayley wrote to his friend Lady Hesketh:

The text of Hayley's poem was set by the nearby Chichester printer Joseph Seagrave, a friend of both Blake and Hayley, and Blake printed his engraved designs on the spaces left for them, stitched the separate Ballads in blue wrappers, and sold them, largely through Hayley's friends like Lady Hesketh. (We may be confident that Seagrave printed the sheets first and then gave them to Blake rather than vice versa, for a few pages of the printed text survive which have not yet had the engraved designs added to them.)

The sales through such genteel ballad-mongers as Lady Hesketh proved so slow that Blake probably did not even recover his expenses, and on April 3rd 1803 Hayley wrote to the London publisher R.H. Evans (who also sold the Ballads) to ask him

Six months later no decision had yet been reached about the Ballads, and on October 26th 1803 Blake wrote to Hayley: It was not until some fourteen months later that the fate of the quarto Ballads issued in parts was decided. On January 22nd 1805 Blake wrote to Hayley to express his Even with this apparently plain understanding, however, it was not until April 25th 1803 that Blake could write to Hayley: It would have been only at this time, or perhaps on June 18th 1805 when the octavo volume of Ballads was published, that Blake could have been confident that he could no longer sell the old quarto edition in numbers.

Before the spring of 1805, there must have appeared a good chance that some of the quarto Ballads might still be sold separately, and it is unlikely that Blake would yet have begun tearing up the printed sheets to use for scratch paper. After the spring of 1805, however, he would have been morally obliged to cease publication of the quarto separate Ballads in competition with the collected octavo edition, particularly in view of Phillips's explicit statement "That we must consider all that has been printed as lost". After June or January 1805 he must have had no choice but to make the best of the wreck of the original project, by using the blank paper from the 1802 edition in any way he could.

Mostly, of course, he must have used these printed sheets for notes or sketches that have been long since lost. However, at least twelve such sheets may be traced more or less confidently, and it is very likely that others have yet to be identified. Those traced are:

• 1) The blank verso of the Titlepage on which Blake transcribed a poem by Sheridan.
• 2) The blank back of Page 9 (Ballad I) with a sketch of "The Chaining of Orc".
• 3) Page 9 verso with a sketch of Catherine Blake.
• 4) Page 9 verso with a sketch of a leg.
• 5) Pages 20 and 26 (Ballad II) with a sketch perhaps for Dante.
• 6) Pages 21 and 24 with sketches of a terrified runner.
• 7) Page 37 (Ballad III) used in the binding of America copy O.
• 8) Pages 41-48 (Ballad III) bound into Blake's Notebook.
• 9) Page unknown used for Blake's letter of October 14th 1807.
• 10) Page 9 verso with a sketch of A Figure in Flight.
• 11) Pages 20 and 26 with a sketch of A Figure seated under a Tree.

For most of these pages, the evidence connecting them with the 1802 Ballads is clear, but the date at which they were re-used is not so clear. It seems possible to me that the earliest of these is the letter of 1807 (which is associated with the 1802 Ballads by the most dubious evidence) and the latest about 1825. For sketches or manuscripts of unknown date on 1802 Ballads paper we should therefore expect a date of between 1807 and 1825.

Let us first establish the connection of the pages above with the 1802 Ballads and then try to date them as closely as possible.

1) Sheridan's poem is copied on the verso of the Ballads titlepage,[10]

so there can be no doubt of the source of the paper. The poem is a song from a popular farce which was repeatedly printed from 1780 on, but Blake of course cannot have transcribed it on the Ballads paper before 1802.

2) The entire text of page 9 is plainly visible on the recto of the sheet on which Blake sketched "The Chaining of Orc",[11] so that here too the paper source cannot be doubted. The sketch itself much resembles one in America (1793) plate 3, and is related to one in The Four Zoas (1797) page 62, but of course it can have been made no earlier than June 1802. There is, however, an isolated engraving of "The Chaining of Orc" of 1812[12] which differs in treatment from the present sketch but which may yet have been the occasion for Blake to record and work out his ideas on the subject. 1812 is at least a possible guess for the Orc sketch on the Ballads page.

3) The sketch of Catherine on the back of another page 9[13] has always been dated about 1803 because of its association with the 1802 Ballads. This seems to me, however, to be insufficient grounds for such an

early date. It would be safer to call it merely "after 1802", or better "probably after 1805".

4) The sketch of a human leg also on a page 9[14] is so tentative and fragmentary as to offer nothing to which to attach a date.

5) The "Dante" sketch is on a sheet of paper with the printed catchword "With" at the bottom left corner, and on the verso the last letters of a printed word may be seen: "ast".[15] The type and position of the former exactly match that of the catchwords on Ballads page 20, which is the only "With" catchword in the volume. The "ast" are the last letters of the word "breast" which reach considerably further into the right margin of page 26 (the conjugate page in Ballad II) than any other line. This is clearly a sheet of Ballads paper. The date of the drawing, unfortunately is not so clear. It is certainly similar to other Dante drawings, with flying demons overhead and tormented souls floating in the mire at the foot, but it is not obviously related to any given Dante drawing. If it was made for the Dante series, its date can scarcely be earlier than 1824, when the other Dante drawings were begun.

6) The sketches of a terrified running figure are on a sheet of paper with a printed catchword ("It") on one side and a scratched out printed word which may be "Run" on the other, corresponding to pages 21 and 24 (E2r, E[3]v) of the Ballads. The subject has not been confidently identified, and the date is unknown.[15a]

7) In the binding of America copy O (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum) may be plainly seen a fragment of "Ballad the Third [page] 37", so that the connection of the binding scrap with the 1802 Ballads cannot be doubted. The earliest possible date of the binding may be established very confidently. Though America is dated 1793, the watermarks in this copy are of 1818 and 1820; the watermarks of Europe (1794) copy K with which it is bound are also 1818 and 1820. This set originally belonged to John Linnell, and its gilt white vellum binding is very similar to that on the unwatermarked Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793?) copy H (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum) which Linnel bought from Blake on April 30th 1821 for £2.2.0; to that on copy R of Songs of Innocence and

of Experience (now in the Fitzwilliam) watermarked 1808 (end papers 1824) which Linnell bought for £1.19.6 on August 27th 1819; and to Jerusalem (1804-1820?) copy C (now in the possession of Mrs. G. Ramsay Harvey) watermarked 1818, 1819, and 1820, the second chapter of which Linnell evidently paid 14s for on December 30th 1819.[16] It seems likely that Linnell had these four bindings made about 1824 and that the Ballads page was first used in the binding at this time.

8) Pages 117-120 of Blake's Notebook have been bound into the manuscript as an afterthought. At the top margin of page 117 is an italic letter B which is identical in shape and distance from the top margin with the initial letter of the word "Ballad" on page 45 of the fourth Ballad. On page 118 the very beginning of the first letters of "Ballad the Third" (the running title) and of the first and third lines of the first stanzas ("The Dog" and "It was") are visible. On page 120 of the Notebook is a catchword "And" which comes from Ballads page 46. For all, the positioning, shape of letters, size, and so on, are identical in the Notebook Fragments and in the 1802 Ballads. The connection of the two cannot be doubted. The date itself is relatively clear. Pages 117-119 contain a draft advertisement for "Blake's Chaucer An Original Engraving" first announced in 1809 in his Descriptive Catalogue and published October 8th 1810. This draft must then be from 1809 or 1810. On page 120 is part of "The Everlasting Gospel" which is usually dated about 1818. These Ballads pages were therefore evidently not used before about 1809.

9) Blake's letter of October 14th 1807 is written on paper watermarked "180[2?]".[17] If the last numeral has been correctly deciphered, this may be the same paper as that used in the 1802 Ballads which is also watermarked "1802".

10) The verso of a sketch of A Figure in Flight, in the British Museum Print Room (pressmark: LB 43 7b) has the last three lines of "End of the First Ballad." The date of the drawing is conjectural.

11) The recto of the sketch of A Figure seated under a Tree, in the British Museum Print Room (LB 43 3a) has an erased catchword which seems to be "With", and on the verso the letters, "st" from "breast" are visible, indicating that these were originally pages 20 and 26 (see no. 5 above). The context and date of the drawing are not known.

To summarize the information about the dates at which the Ballads paper was re-used for other purposes: the sketches of Catherine, the terrified runner, the figure seated under a tree, the figure in flight and the anonymous leg, and the transcript of the Sheridan poem, cannot be confidently dated; the letter is dated October 14th 1807, the Notebook fragment

is after 1809; the "Chaining of Orc" sketch may be about 1812; the binding of America copy O must be about 1824; and the Dante drawing, if it has been correctly identified, must be given a date after 1824. This evidence seems to support the hypotheses above from the publishing history that Blake would have begun to use his Ballads for scratch paper only after 1805.

Let us return now to see in what ways this evidence applies to the Pickering Manuscript. The visible remains of the erased printed word at the bottom of page 16 (on which part of "Auguries of Innocence" is written) consists of one line at an angle to and higher than the three others, as if of a capital M or W. To its right are two dots on either side of a very short vertical line. The position of these three marks suggests that they are the bottom of the printed word. Though one may imagine, after long study with a magnifying glass and much vain tilting of the page to catch the light in impressed hollows from which the ink has been erased, that the word was "With", we must first ascertain that it could not fit some other word in the 1802 Ballads.

For this purpose a xerox copy of page 16 of the Pickering Manuscript was made on translucent paper. The Princeton copy of the four very rare Ballads was then carefully examined for all possible examples of line-ends which reached into the right margin well beyond the others and for catchwords which stood significantly to the right of the text above them and which began with a capital letter with a slanting line like the erased initial one on page 16 of the Pickering Manuscript (A, M, N, V, W, X, Y). No possible line-ends appeared, but among the catchwords the possibilities were "What" (pp. 1, 25), "Not" (4, 45), "A" (11), "No" (14), "And" (16, 23, 42, 46), "Ah!" (19), "With" (20), "More" (33), and "When" (50). On these catchwords the xerox copy of page 16 of the Pickering Manuscript was superimposed so that the angle line in the erased fragment just covered part of the angled line (or, in the case of W, first one and then the other of the angled lines) in the capital letter of the catchword. In several cases, in "When", "What", and "With", the fit was quite close, but in only one case was it exact.

On the "With" on page 20 the fit of the fragments from page 16 of the Pickering Manuscript is quite perfect. The coincidence of the lines surviving from the erasure with the catchword is so complete that there can be little doubt of their original identity. The paper on which pages 15-16 of the Pickering Manuscript are written originally formed the outer margin of pages 19-20 of Hayley's Designs to Series of Ballads.

This conclusion being accepted, what consequences follow from it? The most important ones, I believe, relate to the date at which the poems in the Pickering Manuscript were transcribed.

• 1) Since the unwatermarked page 16 of the Pickering Manuscript is on paper which, when the margins have not been cut off,

  ---

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  shows a watermark of "1802", it is probable that all the paper in the Pickering Manuscript came from the 1802 Ballads and would, if the sheets were complete, exhibit this same watermark of "1802".
• 2) Pages 15 and 16 of the Pickering Manuscript, and almost certainly the rest of the pages as well, can scarcely have been re-used before July 1st 1802 when the second Ballad containing page 20 and its revealing catchword "With" were published. In particular, pages 15 and 16 at least cannot have been transcribed as early as 1801, as Sampson and others following him have surmised.
• 3) The Pickering Manuscript poems are unlikely to have been transcribed on the abandoned Ballads sheets before the spring of 1805, when it first became clear to Blake "That we must consider all that has been printed as lost."
• 4) It would be reasonable to associate the uncertain date of the transcription of the Pickering Manuscript poems with the more certain dates of some of the other uses to which the Ballads sheets were put. We should, that is, be prepared to accept a date of 1807 or 1809 to 1824 as likely for this transcription.

These arguments from the paper used in the Pickering Manuscript apply, of course, only to the date at which the poems in it were transcribed. They do not bear at all upon their date of composition unless we are to argue that the poems were first written down in the Pickering Manuscript. This argument would be difficult to maintain confidently. The first drafts of Blake's poems, as seen for instance in his Notebook and in The Four Zoas, are tormented with deletions, afterthoughts, erasures, and uncertainties. In the Notebook draft of "The Grey Monk", for example, there are nine substantial changes of words or lines in the first sixty-one lines, including an extra line in the fourteenth stanza. Then six new stanzas were added, one with only three lines and one with only one ("A tear is an &c"), three substantial changes were made in the additional lines, and the stanzas were renumbered.

By contrast the Pickering Manuscript poems are clearly fair copies, with very few significant changes. On pages 1-3, 7-9, 14, and 18, a few lower cases letters were altered to capitals; on pages 6, 10, and 16, a few words were erased and replaced; and on pages 18 and 19 six deletions and alterations are made neatly in a different (brown) ink. In only five poems are there any changes of substance, and in "The Grey Monk" there are no changes of any kind. The Pickering Manuscript is perhaps the best example of a manuscript fair copy by Blake that has survived. The dates of its transcription will therefore tell us little about the date of composition of the poems in it beyond giving us a final terminus. Unfortunately the external evidence adduced here merely suggests that the Pickering Manuscript poems cannot have been transcribed before July 1802 and may have been written between about 1809 and 1824.

It might be well if the Pickering Manuscript were known by a title more relevant to Blake and to its contents, instead of merely by the name of its third known owner who had it for about twelve years. In a similar situation, Blake's Notebook was for years known as "The Rossetti Manuscript" because it belonged for a time to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who indeed like Pickering preserved and first published the poems in the manuscript at length. The more relevant and convenient title, "Blake's Notebook", has only come into general use in the last thirty years. I suggest that a name usefully describing the period, the paper, and the subjects of some of the poems in the "Pickering Manuscript" might be The Ballads Manuscript. The name would at least have the advantage of referring to a permanent rather than a temporary feature of the manuscript.

The way of a poet with paper seems, in the case of Blake, to be almost as predictable as the way of a man with a maid. His poverty and his frugality directed that when he had in hand redundant stocks of paper no longer useful for their original purpose, he should carefully use them for other purposes as well. Thus when he was given some nine hundred sheets of 1794 J WHATMAN paper for his Night Thoughts engravings, he not only used it for his Night Thoughts drawings and proofs but as well for much of the manuscript of his Four Zoas, for printing several copies of his works in Illuminated Printing, and for backing sheets when printing his 1802 Ballads.[18] Similarly, when it became plain that he could not sell the 1802 Ballads Blake used the blank margins of the printed sheets for letters. sketches, and poems. It seems likely that when those habits are more widely recognized, more examples of the ways in which Blake used these paper stocks will be observed[19] and more precision may be achieved in dating his manuscripts, drawings, and illuminated books.

Notes