[English Literature - Poetry]
WILLIAM BLAKE
Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
London: W. Pickering and W. Newbery, 1839.
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The rare FIRST TYPOGRAPHIC EDITION OF ONE OF BLAKE'S MOST FAMOUS WORKS AND ONE OF THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS OF ENGLISH POETRY, including some of Blake's most well-known and well-loved poems, such as "The Tyger", "London", "A Poison Tree", "The Chimney Sweeper", "The Sick Rose", "The Lamb", "Holy Thursday", "The Little Black Boy", etc.
"Who but Blake, with his pure heart, his simple exalted character, could have transfigured a commonplace meeting of Charity Children at St. Paul's, as he has done in the Holy Thursday? A picture at once tender and grand. [...] Few are the readers, I should think, who can fail to appreciate the symbolic grandeur of The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, or the enigmatic tenderness of the Blossom and the Divine Image [...] For a nobler depth in beauty, with accordant grandeur of sentiment and language, I know no parallel nor hint elsewhere as such a poem as The Little Black Boy [...] We may read these poems again and again, and they continue fresh as at first. There is something unsating in them, a perfume as of a growing violet, which renews itself as fast as it is inhaled" (Gilchrist, p.74-5).
This is the first time these celebrated poems appeared following the 1789-95 1st "edition", engraved, hand-printed and hand-colored by Blake himself, of which "Blake, working together with Catherine, produced some 32 copies of 'Innocence', 13 of 'Experience', and 16 of the joint Songs over the course of his lifetime" (Haggarty & Mee), and which are now (and have always been) virtually unobtainable.
Included at the end of the book is Blake's Dedication of his Designs to Blair's 'Grave' to Queen Charlotte ("The door of death is made of gold..."), which dates from 1808, and, thus, was not included in the original edition.
This edition was edited (anonymously) by James John Garth Wilkinson, an English physician, social reformer, translator and editor of Swedenborg's works.
"Some twelve years after the death of Blake, an edition of the Songs of Innocence and Experience (the first, in fact, printed in the ordinary way) was [...] edited by Dr. Garth Wilkinson, who prefixed a graceful preface, which presented for the first time anything like an adequate appreciation of the high and subtle qualities of the artist-poet's verse." (R. H. Shepherd)
"In 1838 Mr. Charles Augustus Tulk lent Mr. Wilkinson a copy of Wm. Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience,' a copy of Blake's own making [...]. The delicacy and spiritual simplicity of the Songs made a deep impression on Garth Wilkinson [...]. His brother William, holding no lower opinion came forward with the necessary funds; subscribers were sought for high and low; a preface was written and the edition, a thin cloth-bound octavo was published jointly by Pickering & Newbery on July 9, 1839. It is of much bibliographic interest, but the edition was probably a small one, and the book is now somewhat rare." (Keynes).
"...it was only with the editorial intervention of John James Garth Wilkinson in 1839 that Songs of Innocence and of Experience was made available to reach a (slightly) larger audience. Wilkinson (1812 - 99) was a Swedenborgian writer and medic. His friend Tulk, generous as he had been with Coleridge, lent Wilkinson his own copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1838. The offspring of Wilkinson's perusal was what he called his 'Republication' of Songs in 1839 under the auspices of the London based publishers William Pickering and W. Newbery. Although Wilkinson called it a republication, 'he of course knew that the only previous publication, if it could be called so, was in the home-engraved and coloured copies prepared entirely by Blake's and his wife's hands, and sold privately to patrons; the issue under notice was therefore practically THE FIRST PUBLIC EDITION.' (F. H. Evans, 1912)
"Wilkinson's edition contained all the poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the order in which they appeared in Tulk's copy (excepting, in the edition's first printing, 'The Little Vagabond', the poem that had so vexed Coleridge's attempt to read the collection in the light of Swedenborgian ideas). In a nod to what was then Blake's most wellknown work, Wilkinson also appended a poem by Blake dedicating his designs for Blair's Grave 'To the Queen'. Preceding the poems was a lengthy introduction, in which Wilkinson 'laboured to present Blake's poems within a Swedenborgian framework' (Rix). 'If the Volume gives one impulse to the New Spiritualism which is now dawning on the world', he writes, 'if it leads one reader to think, that all Reality for him, in the long run, lies out of the limits of space and time; and that spirits, and not bodies, and still less garments, are men [...] it will have done its work in its little day; and we shall be abundantly satisfied'." (S. Haggarty, J. Mee, William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience : A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism., chap.3)
"Wilkinson's edition of Songs was FAR-REACHING IN ITS INFLUENCE. IT CARRIED BLAKE'S POETRY OVER THE ATLANTIC TO AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS [...]. However, there remained but few copies to go around. In 1863, Gilchrist recalls that only '[a] very limited impression was taken off, and the reprint soon became almost as scarce as the costly and beautiful original'" (Haggarty & Mee). Edward J. Rose in his article "The 1839-Wilkinson Edition of Blake's Songs in Transcendental America" (Blake Newsletter, 4 (1971), pp. 79-81) explores "the possible direct influence of Blake's work on writers of the American Renaissance". Rose notes that "the Houghton Library of Harvard University has in its collection two copies of the second issue of the 1839 edition [...]: one owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson and another owned by Thomas Wentworth Higginson."
Two issues of this edition exist: with and without the poem "The Little Vagabond" on leaf F4r. Most copies appear without the poem (as does the present copy). Priority of the two issues is still in dispute. This issue (without The "Little Vagabond") has long been held to be the first issue (see Keynes): the poem was believed to have been inadvertently omitted from the volume and then added later by the publisher (in place of the section title at the end); others bibliographers, however, have claimed that "The Little Vagabond" was present first but cancelled due to controversial content and replaced with the section title, in which case, this is the 2nd issue. Either case is plausible; copies of each issue turn up with about the same frequency which is to say very rarely.
Physical description:
Slim 8vo, text block measures 192 mm x 115 mm. Original publisher's dark blind-stamped plum cloth, with words "BLAKE'S POEMS" stamped in gilt on the front cover; rebacked using 19th-century cloth (matching in texture but darker in color). Original pale-yellow endpapers (rear free end-paper removed).
Pagination: xxi, [3], 74, [2 blank] pp.
Issue omitting "The Little vagabond" on p.[71], with a divisional title to "Dedication of the Poem of the Grave" instead.
Includes editorial Preface by Garth Wilkinson (pp.[iii]-xxi) dated July 9, 1839.
In addition to the title-page there are special divisional titles to Songs of Innocence (p.[2] 2nd count), Songs of Experience (p.[35]), and Dedication of the Poem of the Grave (p.[71]), all with versos blank. The text of "Dedication of the Poem of the Grave" occupies pp.73-74.
Colophon at bottom of p.74 reads: "London: printed by Walton and Mitchell, 24 Wardour Street."
Includes integral blank G2 at the end.
Condition:
Very Good -. Boards slightly rubbed, with some edge-wear and light bumping to corners; recent reback in darker (but similarly textured) 19th-century cloth. Rear feee endpaper removed (but original rear blank present); inner hinges unobtrusively reinforced. Several leaves in 'Songs of Experience' with a small ink-stain to fore-edge, on one page (p.60) smudged a bit further into outer margin, but all quite harmless and well away from the text. A few leaves with top outer corner slightly creased. Some light scattered marginal soiling. Generally clean and solid.
Bibliographic references:
Keynes, Blake, 135. Bentley, Blake Books, 171B. Keynes, Pickering, p. 27.
