The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public, who has invented a method of printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one-fourth the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward. (E 692; see NOTE at end.)
William Blake recognised the affective and the transcendent power of music. In his composite art, any meaning we derive from design or text in the absence of the musical element is necessarily partial and incomplete. Thus, when Blake’s Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, refers to Blake’s musical tastes and enthusiasms, as sharing the interest of the time in Border ballads and Scottish folksong, he perhaps shows us where we might begin in reconstructing Blake’s lost music. But Blake was also part of the sociable world of the engraver and the inventor. I find that my simple search for a “Border Melody” cited by Gilchrist has, without intending, led me to reconsider the significance of W. H. Lizars’s process of relief etching. Lizars was acquainted with Flaxman, and a friend of Linnell. What has been viewed as merely a parallel invention might then prove to be more deeply indebted to Blake’s example than previously realised.
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In Blake’s juvenile Poetical Sketches, music is simply a conventional adjunct to the poetry, and several of the poems are called “Song”—words for another’s melody. But, for the mature Blake, music and musicality are basic to his vision of art; the Songs of Innocence and of Experience all had melodies now lost. In a letter to his friend George Cumberland, Blake described himself as “Poet Painter & Musician”. He wrote on the Laocoön plate that “A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian” (E 274), and in A Vision of the Last Judgement of “Poetry Painting & Music the three Powers <in man> of conversing with Paradise which the flood did not Sweep away” (E 559).
“Nature has no Tune,” Blake wrote in The Ghost of Abel, “but Imagination has!” (E 270). And in the Descriptive Catalogue: “Music as it exists in old tunes or melodies ... is Inspiration, and cannot be surpassed” (E 544).
“Nature has no Tune,” Blake wrote in The Ghost of Abel, “but Imagination has!” (E 270). And in the Descriptive Catalogue: “Music as it exists in old tunes or melodies ... is Inspiration, and cannot be surpassed” (E 544).
The biographer John Thomas Smith, who had known Blake personally for over forty years, tells us that when he was young, Blake composed melodies for his own poems:
These he would occasionally sing to his friends; and though, according to his confession, he was entirely unacquainted with the science of music, his ear was so good, that his tunes were sometimes most singularly beautiful, and were noted down by musical professors.
And, in a particularly vivid scene recorded by Gilchrist, Blake on his deathbed “lay chaunting Songs to Melodies—both the inspiration of the moment”.
Blake’s concept of articulated vision is of the “distinct, sharp, and wirey ... bounding line” (E 550) that the true artist draws “with a firm <and decided> hand at once” (E 576) to produce “an Original Invention” (E 576) that is “Organized & minutely Delineated & Articulated” (E 576). In Jerusalem, Blake suggests a musical analogue: he juxtaposes melody and harmony as though strictly opposed rather than complementary metaphors.
Blake’s concept of articulated vision is of the “distinct, sharp, and wirey ... bounding line” (E 550) that the true artist draws “with a firm <and decided> hand at once” (E 576) to produce “an Original Invention” (E 576) that is “Organized & minutely Delineated & Articulated” (E 576). In Jerusalem, Blake suggests a musical analogue: he juxtaposes melody and harmony as though strictly opposed rather than complementary metaphors.
… By Harmonies of Concords & DiscordsOpposed to Melody, and by Lights & Shades, opposed to OutlineAnd by Abstraction opposed to the Visions of Imagination (E 229)
The comparison between painting and music, with design representing the melody and colour the harmony, was, of course, a common eighteenth-century trope. We can find a similar formulation in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose musicianship is much more easily studied than Blake’s:
la melodie fait précisement dans la musique ce que fait le dessein dans la peinture ; c’est elle qui marque les traits et les figures dont les accords et les sons ne sont que les couleurs [the melody does precisely in music what drawing does in painting; it is that which marks the strokes and figures of which the chords and instrumental sounds are only the colours].
Blake’s ideas on music also seem very close to those of John Wesley, who wrote:
The ancient composers studied melody alone, the due arrangement of single notes, and it was by melody alone that they wrought their wonderful effects. But the modern composers study harmony, which, in the present sense of the word, is quite another thing—namely, a contrast of various notes, opposite to, and yet blended with, each other ... Ever since counterpoint has been invented it has altered the grand design of music, so it has well-nigh destroyed its effects ... Our composers do not aim at moving the passions, but at quite another thing: at varying and contrasting the notes a thousand different ways. What has counterpoint to do with the passions?
Or Wesley again:
I spent an agreeable hour at a concert of my nephews. But I was a little out of my element among lords and ladies. I love plain music and plain company best.
(“My nephew” is Charles Wesley’s son Samuel, 1766-1837, composer and organist.)
Music is important to Blake, yet the only record we have of his taste in music is this anecdote in Gilchrist’s biography. Drawing on conversations with Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell, Gilchrist records the poet’s visits to the Linnell’s at Hampstead.
Music is important to Blake, yet the only record we have of his taste in music is this anecdote in Gilchrist’s biography. Drawing on conversations with Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell, Gilchrist records the poet’s visits to the Linnell’s at Hampstead.
Mr Linnell’s part of the house ... commanded a pleasant southern aspect. Blake, it is still remembered, would often stand at the door, gazing in tranquil reverie across the garden toward the gorse-clad hill. He liked sitting in the arbour at the bottom of the long garden, or walking up and down the same at dusk, while the cows, munching their evening meal, were audible from the farmyard on the other side of the hedge. He was very fond of hearing Mrs. Linnell sing Scottish songs, and would sit by the pianoforte, tears falling from his eyes, while he listened to the Border Melody to which the song is set, commencing—
“O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd,And her een as the lift are blue.”
To simple national melodies Blake was very impressionable, though not so to music of more complicated structure. He himself still sang, in a voice tremulous with age, sometimes old ballads, sometimes his own songs, to melodies of his own.
Gilchrist has thus given us a precise suggestion as to Blake’s taste in music. This is of considerable significance and deserves closer attention than it has previously received. As far as I am aware, only four subsequent writers (G. E. Bentley, Jr., James King, B H. Fairchild, and John Adlard) have taken any note of this passage in the Life. Alexander Gilchrist collected information from many people who had been intimate friends of Blake, and consequently almost everything he writes may be based on oral evidence that cannot now be recovered. (It’s this first or second-hand information from people who knew Blake in his later years that gives Gilchrist’s Life its continuing authority.)
Why was Blake susceptible to this “Border Melody”? Music communicates emotions and thoughts that would otherwise remain hidden and mysterious; it touches the heart directly. Is his weeping a simple response to the beauty of the tune, some aspect of Mrs Linnell’s performance, or to the sentiment of its words? In performance of course, the impact of performer and melody can make seem genuine the sentimentality of the words—intensifying their force and making real their emotion. Bentley himself reprints the Gilcrist anecdote verbatim but offers no further commentary beyond citing, in Blake Records, an unsatisfactory late source for the song.
James King (in William Blake: his Life), seeing nothing of significance in the Gilchrist anecdote, summarises it briefly:
Often, later in the evening, he would burst into tears when Mrs Linnell, accompanying herself on the pianoforte, sang the Border Melody
and hurries on.
In later life, Blake was much moved, as he told Samuel Palmer, with the parable of the Prodigal son. He repeated part of the story, ‘but at the words, “When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him,” could go no further; his voice faltered, and he was in tears’. James King links this to Blake’s “long-suppressed love for his own father”. Perhaps if King had been aware of the full words of the Border Melody and its reference to “the gushin’ tear’s saut bree … drapt / On an aged father’s grave” he might have given it more attention. Can one read into Blake’s response to the song a continuing sorrow at his father’s death in 1784? (Or perhaps Catherine Blake’s for her own father; probably the “Wm Boucher Aged 80 Years Poor” who was buried at St Mary’s, Battersea, on 16 September 1794.)
B. H. Fairchild (in Such Holy Song) attempts to link the anecdote to the wider culture of eighteenth-century interest in folksong but ignores the very specific information that Gilchrist provides. Fairchild suggests that “Mrs Linnell was probably performing one of Haydn’s arrangements commissioned and published by George Thomson”. No such arrangement is listed in Hoboken’s thematic index of Haydn’s works. Even if one were to exist, we should still reject the idea that Mrs Linnell performed a Haydn arrangement; it is implicit in Gilchrist’s story that Mrs Linnell is accompanying herself at the piano. A striking feature of Haydn’s folk-song settings is the richness of their piano writing. This was probably inspired by the new potential of English grands, which had developed rapidly in the last decades of the eighteenth century to become the most powerfully sonorous pianos in Europe. Haydn’s piano parts are by no means easy, and well beyond the capabilities of the average amateur singer accompanying herself at the keyboard.
Only John Adlard (in The Sports of Cruelty) makes any attempt to identify the song beyond the Blake Records indications, and to explore some of its implications. He notes that:
In later life, Blake was much moved, as he told Samuel Palmer, with the parable of the Prodigal son. He repeated part of the story, ‘but at the words, “When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him,” could go no further; his voice faltered, and he was in tears’. James King links this to Blake’s “long-suppressed love for his own father”. Perhaps if King had been aware of the full words of the Border Melody and its reference to “the gushin’ tear’s saut bree … drapt / On an aged father’s grave” he might have given it more attention. Can one read into Blake’s response to the song a continuing sorrow at his father’s death in 1784? (Or perhaps Catherine Blake’s for her own father; probably the “Wm Boucher Aged 80 Years Poor” who was buried at St Mary’s, Battersea, on 16 September 1794.)
B. H. Fairchild (in Such Holy Song) attempts to link the anecdote to the wider culture of eighteenth-century interest in folksong but ignores the very specific information that Gilchrist provides. Fairchild suggests that “Mrs Linnell was probably performing one of Haydn’s arrangements commissioned and published by George Thomson”. No such arrangement is listed in Hoboken’s thematic index of Haydn’s works. Even if one were to exist, we should still reject the idea that Mrs Linnell performed a Haydn arrangement; it is implicit in Gilchrist’s story that Mrs Linnell is accompanying herself at the piano. A striking feature of Haydn’s folk-song settings is the richness of their piano writing. This was probably inspired by the new potential of English grands, which had developed rapidly in the last decades of the eighteenth century to become the most powerfully sonorous pianos in Europe. Haydn’s piano parts are by no means easy, and well beyond the capabilities of the average amateur singer accompanying herself at the keyboard.
Only John Adlard (in The Sports of Cruelty) makes any attempt to identify the song beyond the Blake Records indications, and to explore some of its implications. He notes that:
The song which moved Blake to tears (was he thinking of Nancy Flaxman, whose husband died about this time?) has been identified for me by Hamish Henderson and is to be found, with the note ‘To an old Border melody’, [in] Alex. Whitelaw’s Book of Scottish Song … Mr Henderson tells me that the melody is printed in The Scottish Orpheus, ‘but it looks more like an 18th Century composed air “in the Scottish manner” than a Border folk-tune’. During the summer of 1968, unexpectedly, he heard it beautifully sung by a Campbeltown folksinger, Willie Mitchell.
It seems then that the “Border Melody” Mrs Linnell sang was not a product of the “debatable land” of the Anglo-Scottish border—but rather of that debatable land between the authentic and the imitation. In Hamish Henderson’s account, “O Nancy’s Hair” is a pastiche that has become absorbed into the tradition. Indeed, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, demand for traditional Scottish song could on occasion outrun the supply. Robert Hartley Cromek, whom Blake in his Notebook renamed “Bob Screwmuch” (E 504) and called “A Petty sneaking Knave” (E 509), was himself, in an irony that Blake must have relished, the victim of double-dealing in this respect. In 1809, Cromek, while touring Scotland looking for indigenous songs and ballads, was duped into accepting as authentic songs written by a young Scottish poet, Allan Cunningham. The hoax was not made public until 1819, seven years after Cromek’s death.
Bentley located “O Nancy’s hair” in a collection of 1880; Adlard in collections of 1843 (without the music), and 1924. The earliest printing of both words and music that I can trace is in fact contemporary with Blake and the Linnells (dating from 1821) and is included in
THE | SCOTISH MINSTREL | A SELECTION | from the | VOCAL MELODIES OF SCOTLAND | ANCIENT & MODERN | ARRANGED FOR THE | PIANO FORTE | – BY – | R. A. SMITH. | VOL. 1 | [engraved vignette] | Entd at Stat: Hall Price 8/s | EDINBURGH | Published & Sold by ROBT PURDIE at his Music & Musical Instrument | Warehouse No 70 Princes Street | —
The Scotish Minstrel. Title-page of Vol. 1 [1821].
On page 22 of this volume, we find:
O NANCY’S HAIR IS YELLOW LIKE GOWD. Old Border Melody.
Oh Nancy’s hair is yellow like gowd,An’ her e’en, like the lift, are blue;Her face is the image o’ heav’nly luve,An’ her heart is leal an’ true.
∙
The innocent smile that plays on her cheek,Is like the dawning morn;An’ the red, red blush, that across it flees,Is sic as the rose ne’er has worn.
∙
If it’s sweet to see the flickerin’ smileLicht up her sparklin’ e’e,It’s holier far to see it dim’dWi’ the gushin’ tear’s saut bree.
∙
’Twas na for a faithless luve’s fause vows,Nor a brither upo’ the wave,That I saw them fa’—no, they were draptOn an aged father’s grave.
∙
Tho’ joy may dimple her bonnie mou’An’ daffin may banish care,In nae blythsome mood, nor hour o’ bliss,Will these een e’er glint sae fair.
The Scotish Minstrel [1821]. Vol. 1, page 22 (“O Nancy’s hair is yellow like gowd”).
I am confident that The Scotish Minstrel is the source used by Mrs Linnell. The arrangement is performable by a single person of average musical talent—the piano part is simple and duplicates the vocal line. The words correspond closely to Gilchrist’s quotation (the later arrangements have variant texts). And the date is right; it would have been new when Mrs Linnell sang it to Blake—one cannot underestimate the appeal of something new.
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Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh), Saturday 24 November 1821, issue 15636.
The compiler of the volume, Robert Archibald Smith (1780-1829), collected more than 600 songs in the Scotish Minstrel, which was published in six volumes between 1821 and 1824. It included, anonymously, many of his own songs. Hamish Henderson’s perception was almost certainly correct; it is indeed likely that “O Nancy’s Hair” was not an authentic Border folk-tune but rather was composed by R. A. Smith.
The Scotish Minstrel [1821]. Title page vignette (“Edina Scotia’s darling Seat”).
The title-pages of the six volumes are each decorated with a vignette: “Edina Scotia’s darling Seat”, designed by P. Gibson and engraved by W. H. Lizars. It is Lizars who links us back to Blake because we already know the name W. H. Lizars from Bentley’s Blake Records:
Lizars, William Hone [sic] (1788-1859), Edinburgh painter 344fn, 345fn, 545, 551, 801; Job subscription 793, 804.
These index entries refer to Lizars as the inventor of a method of relief etching around 1820, and as the recipient of copies of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job in 1831 and 1832.
I can trace no earlier printed version of this song. It is not included, for instance, in Joseph Ritson, Scotish Songs in Two Volumes (London : Printed for J. Johnson & J. Egerton, 1794). Neither is any manuscript version listed in RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) A/II: The UK and Ireland RISM Database: Music Manuscripts, 1600-1800, in British and Irish Libraries.
I can trace no earlier printed version of this song. It is not included, for instance, in Joseph Ritson, Scotish Songs in Two Volumes (London : Printed for J. Johnson & J. Egerton, 1794). Neither is any manuscript version listed in RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) A/II: The UK and Ireland RISM Database: Music Manuscripts, 1600-1800, in British and Irish Libraries.
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Thanks to the meticulous preservation of accounts by John Linnell and his descendants, Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job can claim to be among the best documented engraving project in the 19th century. John Linnell’s Journal for 20 June 1831 notes
Sent Parcel to Mr Lizars at Edinburgh –containing Book of Job plain
and in the Subscribers List for Job he records
Augt 1832 H. W. Lizars Edinburgh for a friend 2.12.6
The Linnell Account Book now at Yale notes that the first copy was sent to Lizars as a gift
1 copy plain to Mr. Lizars Edinbg June 1831present
This is evidence, I think, for friendship between Linnell and Lizars; perhaps the Scottish Minstrel (an expensive engraved work at forty-eight shillings for the six volumes) was a gift to which Linnell responded with a set of the Job illustrations (worth fifty-two shillings and sixpence).
As to the friend for whom Lizars acquired a copy in 1832, I thought at one time it might have been his brother-in-law, Sir William Jardine, the naturalist and ornithologist. The sale of Jardine’s books and prints in 1875 included as lot 465, “Blake's Designs to a Series of Ballads written by Hayley, hf. cf. 1802”, but no copy of Job. A stronger candidate has emerged whom I shall discuss later in this paper. In the way things go, closer examination of the “Border Melody” of the Gilchrist anecdote has led me, not to the broader consideration of Blake and music that I once intended, but into a new realm, an Anglo-Scottish dimension to Blake’s circle of friendships that seems to have some link to the processes of relief etching. And one which is, furthermore, significantly connected to the Edinburgh engraving trade.
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William Home Lizars, painter, engraver, and publisher, was born in Edinburgh in 1788, the son of Daniel Lizars, a publisher and engraver. Lizars was apprenticed first to his father, from whom he learnt engraving, and then entered the Trustees’ Academy at Edinburgh, where he was a fellow student of painting with Sir David Wilkie. In 1812, he sent two pictures, “Reading the Will” and “A Scotch Wedding”, with great success to the Royal Academy in London. They are now in the National Gallery of Scotland. In the same year, however, the death of Lizars’s father forced him to abandon painting. In order to support his mother and family, he was compelled to take over the family printing and engraving business.
As to the friend for whom Lizars acquired a copy in 1832, I thought at one time it might have been his brother-in-law, Sir William Jardine, the naturalist and ornithologist. The sale of Jardine’s books and prints in 1875 included as lot 465, “Blake's Designs to a Series of Ballads written by Hayley, hf. cf. 1802”, but no copy of Job. A stronger candidate has emerged whom I shall discuss later in this paper. In the way things go, closer examination of the “Border Melody” of the Gilchrist anecdote has led me, not to the broader consideration of Blake and music that I once intended, but into a new realm, an Anglo-Scottish dimension to Blake’s circle of friendships that seems to have some link to the processes of relief etching. And one which is, furthermore, significantly connected to the Edinburgh engraving trade.
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W. H. Lizars, self-portrait. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery).
William Home Lizars, painter, engraver, and publisher, was born in Edinburgh in 1788, the son of Daniel Lizars, a publisher and engraver. Lizars was apprenticed first to his father, from whom he learnt engraving, and then entered the Trustees’ Academy at Edinburgh, where he was a fellow student of painting with Sir David Wilkie. In 1812, he sent two pictures, “Reading the Will” and “A Scotch Wedding”, with great success to the Royal Academy in London. They are now in the National Gallery of Scotland. In the same year, however, the death of Lizars’s father forced him to abandon painting. In order to support his mother and family, he was compelled to take over the family printing and engraving business.
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W. H. Lizars, portrait drawing of John Flaxman (1815). (Scottish National Portrait Gallery).
We know that Lizars was in London in 1815, when he drew John Flaxman’s portrait, now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. This drawing is of particular interest as evidence for acquaintanceship between Lizars and Flaxman. (The drawing has associated with it an admission ticket to Flaxman’s Royal Academy lecture on sculpture of 17 January 1814. The ticket, signed by Flaxman, is in the name of a Mr Fuller; the association between Royal Academy ticket and portrait may not be significant.) This London visit may also have been the start of Linnell’s friendship with Lizars, of relevance just a couple of years later, on the occasion of Linnell’s marriage.
Ticket to Royal Academy lecture, (17 January 1814), attached to Lizars’s portrait of Flaxman. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery).
In 1817, John Linnell and Mary Ann Palmer travelled to Edinburgh with the specific intention of a civil wedding (valid under Scots law but unavailable in England at that time). According to Alfred Story, his biographer, Linnell, with his wife-to-be, “had come all the way from London to testify against the usurpation of a civil act by clergy of any sort, and he would in no way bend from his purpose”. Accordingly, on September 24, the marriage took place, in the presence of Mr. James Gibson, a magistrate of Edinburgh, and Mr. Lizars. The fiancés simply made a declaration that henceforth they would hold themselves bound together as man and wife; the magistrate signed the marriage certificate, and there was an end.
The “Mr. Lizars” who witnessed Linnell’s marriage can only be W. H. Lizars, now head of the family and thus its most “respectable” member. (Respectability is an important consideration for Linnell at this time.)
The Linnells left for Glasgow the next morning, arriving at 8 p.m., and stayed the night with a Mr Rowley. The next day of their honeymoon they found themselves lodgings, and that evening, Linnell wrote to his father-in-law, Thomas Palmer.
I have now the pleasure to inform you that the marriage between your Daughter Mary and myself has (through the kind assistance of Friends in Edinburgh) been settled satisfactorily.
I have had advice from the most respectable Authorities, and the Law-Books lent me to peruse from the Public Law-Library—and finally, we both went to a most respectable Magistrate (with our Friends as witnesses), who behaved in the politest manner, and gave us a Certificate signed and sealed. So that our marriage is not only as valid as any celebrated by a Clergyman, but from the Respectability of the Friends by whom it was conducted, it appears to be considered as honorable.
In the Edinburgh newspaper, which I expect you will receive with this letter, you will see the marriage published.
Linnell-Palmer marriage. Notice in The Scotsman (Saturday 27 September 1817, page 6 col b). The marriage is recorded on the 7th line from the bottom. Copied from a very scratched microfilm.
On Tuesday 7th October, Linnell and Mary started their journey home. They first went back to Edinburgh by coach and had supper with the Lizars. Then, after staying the night at the Crown Hotel, they took the ten o’clock coach to Newcastle. Neither Linnell nor his wife ever visited Scotland again, though Story records that “both, however, cherished the recollection of the kind friendship they experienced from Mr. Lizars and his family.”
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[J.G. Lockhart], Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819). Title-page.
Lizars, a prolific engraver and an energetic presence on the Edinburgh publishing scene, had an early success with John Gibson Lockhart’s pseudonymous Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819), a satirical guide to the Edinburgh literary world for which Lizars engraved the portraits. For the so-called “Third Edition” (actually the second), Lizars provided a frontispiece in relief etching. This is, I believe, not just the only published relief-etched plate by Lizars, but the only example of relief etching now surviving made by a printmaker other than William Blake and executed in Blake’s lifetime. Robert Essick, in William Blake Printmaker, refers to this etching, but it is unclear if he has seen the original or the reproduction in Elizabeth Harris’s historical articles on early graphic processes.
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The portrait of “Peter Morris M.D.”, “painted by John Watson” and “engraved in alto relievo by W. Lizars” was “printed at the letter press by Oliver and Boyd.” In the “Epistle Liminary”, Lockhart, using his pseudonym Peter Morris, writes to the publisher William Davies:
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W. H. Lizars, “Peter Morris M.D.”, frontispiece to Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1818).
Bye the bye, I had a note from Sir Joseph Banks a day or two ago, in which he says a great deal about a new invention of Mr Lizars, which he thinks is the greatest thing which has occurred in engraving since the time of Albert Durer. I have not seen any specimen of it, but do ask him to try some of the portraits in the new way—say my own—for that is of least consequence.
(It may be that this reference to Sir Joseph Banks is intended satirically.)
A footnote adds
A footnote adds
The portrait of Dr Morris is done in this new style; and had the time permitted, the others would all have been done so likewise. It is thrown off by the common printing-press, as the reader will observe—but this is only one of the distinguishing excellencies of this new and splendid invention of Mr Lizars. I am happy that my friend’s book has the honour of being the first graced with a specimen of it; and not less so that the specimen presents a capital likeness of my friend himself. W.W.
(The initials W.W. stand for Will Wastle.)
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Lizars was trained as a line engraver and would have had little or no experience of wood engraving. Elizabeth Harris comments that Lizars “had no conception of the free brush drawing which Blake used with almost the same method, nor of the rough breadth and vigour the Continental engravers were to give the process in the 1830s.” The face and hands are drawn in black line and the rest of the picture in white line. The two styles do not fuse as they do in a wood engraving by Bewick or in relief etched work by Blake, nor are they used with equal skill. Harris points out that the portrait of “Peter Morris M.D.” combines weak and scratchy white-line work, characteristic of a first effort at wood engraving, with patches, for example in the face and hands, which show surprising assurance and sophistication. It is this combination of work obviously that of an inexperienced relief engraver with work like that in the face which, if it was engraved on wood, could only have been done by a thoroughly skilled engraver, which confirms that it was produced by Lizars’s alto relievo process. Taking the different parts in isolation there is nothing to show that they are not engraved on wood. A writer who saw the print in 1839, knowing nothing of its history, thought that the story of Lizars’s alto relievo must be “all humbug” and that the portrait of “Peter Morris M.D.” might even have been made by some jokesmith borrowing Lizars’s name to improve the joke.
Was Blake aware of this rival process and if so, how did he react? In 1820, Blake’s friend George Cumberland, then living in Bristol, wrote to his son George, Jr., in London.
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W. H. Lizars, “Peter Morris M.D.”, (detail).
Lizars was trained as a line engraver and would have had little or no experience of wood engraving. Elizabeth Harris comments that Lizars “had no conception of the free brush drawing which Blake used with almost the same method, nor of the rough breadth and vigour the Continental engravers were to give the process in the 1830s.” The face and hands are drawn in black line and the rest of the picture in white line. The two styles do not fuse as they do in a wood engraving by Bewick or in relief etched work by Blake, nor are they used with equal skill. Harris points out that the portrait of “Peter Morris M.D.” combines weak and scratchy white-line work, characteristic of a first effort at wood engraving, with patches, for example in the face and hands, which show surprising assurance and sophistication. It is this combination of work obviously that of an inexperienced relief engraver with work like that in the face which, if it was engraved on wood, could only have been done by a thoroughly skilled engraver, which confirms that it was produced by Lizars’s alto relievo process. Taking the different parts in isolation there is nothing to show that they are not engraved on wood. A writer who saw the print in 1839, knowing nothing of its history, thought that the story of Lizars’s alto relievo must be “all humbug” and that the portrait of “Peter Morris M.D.” might even have been made by some jokesmith borrowing Lizars’s name to improve the joke.
Was Blake aware of this rival process and if so, how did he react? In 1820, Blake’s friend George Cumberland, then living in Bristol, wrote to his son George, Jr., in London.
— Tell Blake a Mr Sivewright of Edinburg has just claimed in Some Philosophical Journal of Last Month As his own invention Blakes Method — & calls it Copper Blocks I think —
The letter has caused some confusion over its dating. It bears a handwritten date that was misread as 1809 when it was bound up in vol. xi of the Cumberland correspondence, and was so published by Arthur Symons. What George Cumberland actually wrote was 22 Jan 1819. The letter begins
Dear GeorgeI have sought out all the English books I possess on Painting and packed them up for you, but I do not expect you will derive half so much benefit from them on Landscape as from a summers study from nature —
George Jr.’s reply acknowledging receipt of several boxes appears in vol. xviii of the Cumberland correspondence:
Wednesday 2d Feby 1820Dear Father,The Box for Lavinia is arrived and in good time for this evening she is to take her departure from Chelsea – it came with the Card off and the Key had been taken out it is filled at the top with an empty Basket – the next time you write give us a list of the articles sent – that we may ascertain if – they came safe. Your letters with the £10 & my Box of books is also arrived for the Books I paid 7/- so much for acknowledgements – God send that we may have no more letters upon Lavinia’s affairs …
(Cumberland was unwisely intervening in his daughter Lavinia’s love life.)
It is therefore clear that George Cumberland, Sr.’s letter was dated 22 Jan 1819 by mistake for 1820, and thus now fits the publishing history of accounts of Lizars’s process. We are left with the mystery as to where or from whom Cumberland obtained his information. Whoever was George Cumberland’s informant in Bristol, he or she gave a somewhat garbled account of “Copper Blocks”. The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819 had briefly noted that W. H. Lizars exhibited “several specimens of his new style of engraving on copper in alto relievo” before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on May 17. In early 1820, the same Journal gave Lizars’s new method of relief etching a full and enthusiastic report:
It is therefore clear that George Cumberland, Sr.’s letter was dated 22 Jan 1819 by mistake for 1820, and thus now fits the publishing history of accounts of Lizars’s process. We are left with the mystery as to where or from whom Cumberland obtained his information. Whoever was George Cumberland’s informant in Bristol, he or she gave a somewhat garbled account of “Copper Blocks”. The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819 had briefly noted that W. H. Lizars exhibited “several specimens of his new style of engraving on copper in alto relievo” before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on May 17. In early 1820, the same Journal gave Lizars’s new method of relief etching a full and enthusiastic report:
Art. V.—Account of a new Style of Engraving on Copper in Alto Relievo, invented by W. Lizars. Drawn up from information communicated by the Inventor.
Lizars, or his editors David Brewster and Robert Jameson, makes large claims for the process
The new art of engraving on copper, which Mr. Lizars has invented, is a substitute for wood-engraving, in the same manner as lithography is a substitute for copper-plate engraving; but while Mr. Lizars has given us a cheaper art for a more expensive one, he has also given us a more perfect art for one which is full of imperfections. The invention of lithography, on the contrary, was the substitution of an imperfect for a perfect art, and whatever progress it may yet make, we can never expect it to exhibit that union of bold and delicate touches by which stroke engraving is characterised.
Lizars describes a method of making copper-plates for relief printing by deep etching with dilute acid.
It possesses every advantage which common engraving does, and at the same time all the advantages of engraving on wood; and, above all, it enables us to procure as many impressions as can be taken from types.
The account is detailed and informative; though Lizars admits of one problem yet to be solved.
The greatest difficulty to be surmounted, is to obtain a substitute for the varnish, which will flow from a pen or pencil like Indian ink; for as the varnish has a tendency to dry, and get tough in the pencil, the operation is by this circumstance very considerably impeded.
Of course, this was not a problem for Blake; the fifty plates of Milton, the hundred of Jerusalem, were written without the brush apparently clogging. Lizars notes
I have also tried various kinds of varnishes, viz. mastic varnish, japan, liquid etching-ground, copal varnish, and spirit varnish, but have found the best to be common turpentine varnish, or resin dissolved in turpentine.
Robert Essick recognised the value of Lizars’s account of his method as a close approximation to Blake’s. “While Lizars does not mention its application to printing a text as well as designs, his method is essentially the same as Blake’s, and even includes the use of white-line etching for cross-hatching.” Essick further points out that Lizars’s medium “recalls the pitch and turpentine solution that Linnell thought Blake had used”. (Though it may be that Linnell knew the technical details of Lizars’s process better than he knew Blake’s.) But what Essick failed to appreciate is the proximity of Lizars’s relationship to Blake’s circle of friends, and thus the strong possibility of direct influence from Blake’s process.
Lizars had experimented with relief etching of other substances besides copper:
I have tried wood covered with white lead and strong glue, with considerable success, but not with so much as copper; and it may be as well, for the sake of those who may think it worth their while to make other trials, to mention, that I have used lead, pewter, type-metal, zinc, and brass, all with various success, but have still found copper superior to them all. Mr Sivright of Meggetland, a gentleman well known in this city for his scientific acquirement, and to whom, during these experiments, I was much indebted, used with very great success the same kind of limestone which is employed in lithography.
Lizars here acknowledges the assistance of Thomas Sivright, a resident of the Edinburgh suburb of Meggetland, a well-known collector of works of art of all kinds, and presumably from where George Cumberland got his “Mr Sivewright of Edinburg”.
Lizars’s account of his new process was largely reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and in W. Newman’s London Journal of Arts and Sciences. The same volume of the London Journal included a response from another copper engraver, Charles Pye, describing a metal relief process which he claimed to have worked out “five years” earlier than the “account of the Process of Engraving on Copper Blocks into alto relievo by Mr. Lizars”. Pye’s process was not used commercially and the specimens he sent to the Royal Society of Arts were lost. The publications by Pye and Lizars establish their claims to be innovators in graphic processes. Blake had failed to publish his method despite early encouragement from George Cumberland who on 18 December 1808 had written to him: “You talked also of publishing your new method of engraving—send it to me and I will do my best to prepare it for the Press”. The links of friendship between Lizars and Flaxman, and Lizars and Linnell, now make it entirely possible that technical insights were transferred from Blake to these younger engravers, Pye and Lizars.
The “friend” for whom Lizars acquired a copy of Job in 1832 must have been someone with an interest in prints. A likely candidate then is this same Thomas Sivright whose collection was sold at auction in Edinburgh at Tait’s rooms, 1-19 February 1836:
Lizars’s account of his new process was largely reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and in W. Newman’s London Journal of Arts and Sciences. The same volume of the London Journal included a response from another copper engraver, Charles Pye, describing a metal relief process which he claimed to have worked out “five years” earlier than the “account of the Process of Engraving on Copper Blocks into alto relievo by Mr. Lizars”. Pye’s process was not used commercially and the specimens he sent to the Royal Society of Arts were lost. The publications by Pye and Lizars establish their claims to be innovators in graphic processes. Blake had failed to publish his method despite early encouragement from George Cumberland who on 18 December 1808 had written to him: “You talked also of publishing your new method of engraving—send it to me and I will do my best to prepare it for the Press”. The links of friendship between Lizars and Flaxman, and Lizars and Linnell, now make it entirely possible that technical insights were transferred from Blake to these younger engravers, Pye and Lizars.
The “friend” for whom Lizars acquired a copy of Job in 1832 must have been someone with an interest in prints. A likely candidate then is this same Thomas Sivright whose collection was sold at auction in Edinburgh at Tait’s rooms, 1-19 February 1836:
Catalogue of the extensive and valuable collection of books, pictures, drawings, prints, and painters’ etchings, ancient bronzes and terracottas, Etruscan vases, marble busts, antique carvings and chasings in wood and metal, coins, minerals, gems, and precious stones, philosophical instruments, wines, spirits, &c. &c. of the late Thomas Sivright Esq. of Meggetland and Southouse, which will be sold by auction by Mr. C. B. Tait, in his Great Room, 1, Hanover Street, on Monday, February 1, and sixteen following days, at one o’clock. (Edinburgh: printed by Thomas Constable, m.dccc.xxxvi.)
The catalogue includes an extensive preliminary account of Sivright’s books, prints, and other works of art
It is seldom that a Collection, so extensive and valuable in all its departments, as that contained in the following Catalogue, has been offered for sale in Scotland. It consists of Books, Pictures, Original Drawings and Etchings by Eminent Masters, Prints, Antiques in great variety, Coins, and Miscellaneous Articles of Virtu, comprehending the acquisitions of the late Mr. Sivright of Meggetland, during a period of nearly thirty years. The whole has been selected with the taste and judgment, by which that gentleman was so eminently distinguished as a Collector and an Amateur.
...
Mr. Sivright’s Collection of Pictures has been long well known to the Amateurs of Scotland, and, consequently, any account of its general character is here uncalled for. It exhibits, in its details, fine and undoubted specimens of the pencils of Paul Veronese, Rembrandt, Cuyp, and Wynants, with delicious Bits by Ruysdael, Vander Neer, Both, and various other masters of lesser note. The Drawings and Etchings, forming a most suitable Pendant to the Pictures, are chiefly by the great masters of the Italian, Early German, Dutch, and Flemish schools. In Prints, too, the collection is eminently rich, and exhibits the progress of the art from the earliest period, when the graver was rudely but powerfully handled by Mantegna and Albert Durer, to the most refined specimens of modern engravings … In short, there is not a department of taste or fancy, for the gratification of which the Collection … does not afford the richest and most ample materials.
Disappointingly, the sale contained no copy of Job, but it did include Blake’s nineteen watercolour drawings commissioned by R. H. Cromek to illustrate a new edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave in 1804:
[lot] 1835 Volume of Drawings by Blake, Illustrative of Blair’s Grave, entitled “Black Spirits and White, Blue Spirits and Grey”.
To digress for a moment, the puzzling title of Lot 1835 derives from a song traditionally interpolated in Macbeth, act IV, sc. i,
Black spirits and white,Blue spirits and gray;Mingle, mingle, mingle,You that mingle may.
The song can also be found added to Thomas Middleton’s The Witch and is quoted in a letter of Thomas Butts to Blake in September 1800.
The drawings sold for £1. 5. 0. and reappeared suddenly in 2003. Until the watercolours were found in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow, there had been no trace of them since Sivright’s heirs sold the originals in 1836. The only known record of them had been engravings of twelve of the drawings, produced by Luigi Schiavonetti.
Lizars himself died in Edinburgh on 30 March 1859, leaving a widow and family. The subsequent sales at the Edinburgh auctioneers Dowells & Lyon, on 14 February and 10 July 1860 contain no Blakes.
POSTSCRIPT
For Lord Macaulay, history was a debatable land bordered by those of philosophy and poetry:
Lizars himself died in Edinburgh on 30 March 1859, leaving a widow and family. The subsequent sales at the Edinburgh auctioneers Dowells & Lyon, on 14 February and 10 July 1860 contain no Blakes.
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For Lord Macaulay, history was a debatable land bordered by those of philosophy and poetry:
This province of literature is a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.
Macaulay’s strictures (which may indeed apply to this speculative paper), find a parallel in Blake’s attitude to the debatable authenticity of Chatterton and Ossian, where the debatable land between true and false, between invention and plagiarism, between authentic and pastiche, was of considerable fascination:
I Believe both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient, Is so (E 665).Any imperative to pursue historical authenticity is countered by Blake’s transhistorical aestheticism:I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other Poet whatever Rowley & Chatterton also (E 666).
Edward Larrissy suggests that Blake recognised that Macpherson and Chatterton were copiers in the sense suggested in the Descriptive Catalogue: that they, like Blake himself, are making copies of “stupendous originals” (E 530). But this, as Larrissy notes, is bound to raise questions about Blake’s view of originality, especially in relation to his own work. In his letter to Thomas Butts of 6 July 1803, Blake refers to himself as completing “a Grand Poem. I may praise it since I dare not pretend to be other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity” (E 730).
William Blake, The Ghost of Abel (1822), plate 2.
Despite his apparent insouciance over matters of over originality and copying, Blake was nevertheless concerned about absolute issues of priority. Blake’s invention of relief etching should be seen in the context of a flurry of inventions, few of them successful, of new reprographic processes in the late eighteenth century. The works in illuminated printing of the 1790s had been addressed “To the Public”. In the 1820s, he issued two brief relief-etched texts, On Homers Poetry On Virgil (c. 1822) and The Ghost of Abel. Robert Essick suggests that these “were probably meant for distribution to friends rather than for general sale”. In The Ghost of Abel, he boasts, “1822 W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788” (E 272). John Linnell was one of the early owners of The Ghost of Abel, so perhaps Blake was directly addressing here the one man who knew the truth about Blake’s and Lizars’s inventions.
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The Ghost of Abel (1822), plate 2, detail.
The importance of the hitherto-unrecognized Anglo-Scottish connection with Blake revolves around the circulation of contemporary knowledge about the relief etching process he had used for the illuminated books. In short, although the process had little impact in England, it seems to have been closely imitated in Scotland, even during Blake’s lifetime.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A version of this paper was read at “Romanticism’s Debatable Lands”: the British Association for Romantic Studies Biennial Conference, 28-31 July 2005, Newcastle upon Tyne. My thanks to Neil Hedgeland for locating “O Nancy’s Hair” in Edinburgh City Library; to Mei-Ying Sung for the timely loan of photocopies; to Minne Tanaka for her affecting singing of the Border Melody, and to David Worrall for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
A version of this paper was read at “Romanticism’s Debatable Lands”: the British Association for Romantic Studies Biennial Conference, 28-31 July 2005, Newcastle upon Tyne. My thanks to Neil Hedgeland for locating “O Nancy’s Hair” in Edinburgh City Library; to Mei-Ying Sung for the timely loan of photocopies; to Minne Tanaka for her affecting singing of the Border Melody, and to David Worrall for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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NOTE
Citations from William Blake’s writings follow the text established by David V. Erdman:
Citations from William Blake’s writings follow the text established by David V. Erdman:
The complete poetry and prose of William Blake.—Newly revised ed.; edited by David Erdman; commentary by Harold Bloom.—Anchor books.—New York NY; London : Doubleday, 1988.
The Erdman text is now available online at https://erdman.blakearchive.org/. References to the Erdman edition are indicated with the letter E followed by page number.
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
John Adlard.—Sports of Cruelty: fairies, folk songs, charms and other country matters in the work of William Blake.—London : C. & A. Woolf, 1972.
John Adlard.—Sports of Cruelty: fairies, folk songs, charms and other country matters in the work of William Blake.—London : C. & A. Woolf, 1972.
G. E. Bentley, Jr.—Blake Records. Second Edition: Documents (1714-1841) concerning the Life of William Blake (1757-1827) and his Family incorporating Blake Records (1969) Blake Records Supplement (1988) and Extensive Discoveries since 1988.—New Haven; London : published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004.
Bentley’s references to Lizars include a minor typographical error that turns William Home Lizars into William Hone Lizars; an error that persists in citation by subsequent scholars.
G. E. Bentley, Jr.— “Thomas Sivright and the Lost Designs for Blair’s Grave”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, xix (1985-86), 103-6.
Colin Blacklock.—“William Blake illustrations are found after 165 years”.—The Guardian (Thursday, 31 January 2002), s.1, p.8.
And much other press and broadcast news coverage.
British Library, Manuscript Collections.—Add MSS 36491-522 (George Cumberland, fl 1785-1836, antiquary, corresp, diaries and family papers)
Barbara Bryant, comp.—“The Job designs: a documentary and bibliographical record”, in David Bindman, ed.—William Blake’s Illustrations of the book of Job: the engravings and related material with essays, catalogue of states and printings, commentary on the plates and documentary record by David Bindman, Barbara Bryant, Robert Essick, Geoffrey Keynes and Bo Lindberg.—6 vols.—London : William Blake Trust, 1987.
Martin Butlin.— “New risen from the grave: nineteen unknown watercolours by William Blake” .—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3 (Winter 2002), 68-73.
Bentley’s references to Lizars include a minor typographical error that turns William Home Lizars into William Hone Lizars; an error that persists in citation by subsequent scholars.
G. E. Bentley, Jr.— “Thomas Sivright and the Lost Designs for Blair’s Grave”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, xix (1985-86), 103-6.
Colin Blacklock.—“William Blake illustrations are found after 165 years”.—The Guardian (Thursday, 31 January 2002), s.1, p.8.
And much other press and broadcast news coverage.
British Library, Manuscript Collections.—Add MSS 36491-522 (George Cumberland, fl 1785-1836, antiquary, corresp, diaries and family papers)
Barbara Bryant, comp.—“The Job designs: a documentary and bibliographical record”, in David Bindman, ed.—William Blake’s Illustrations of the book of Job: the engravings and related material with essays, catalogue of states and printings, commentary on the plates and documentary record by David Bindman, Barbara Bryant, Robert Essick, Geoffrey Keynes and Bo Lindberg.—6 vols.—London : William Blake Trust, 1987.
Martin Butlin.— “New risen from the grave: nineteen unknown watercolours by William Blake” .—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3 (Winter 2002), 68-73.
Catalogue of a portion of the valuable library of works on natural history, science, antiquities … which belonged to the late Sir William Jardine, Bart. of Applegirth, removed from Jardine Hall; to be sold by auction by Mr Dowell, within his Book Rooms, 18 George Street, Edinburgh, on Tuesday, 7th December, and two following days … [1875].
Catalogue of the extensive and valuable collection of books, pictures, drawings, prints, and painters’ etchings, ancient bronzes and terracottas, Etruscan vases, marble busts, antique carvings and chasings in wood and metal, coins, minerals, gems, and precious stones, philosophical instruments, wines, spirits, &c. &c. of the late Thomas Sivright Esq. of Meggetland and Southouse, which will be sold by auction by Mr. C. B. Tait, in his Great Room, 1, Hanover Street, on Monday, February 1, and sixteen following days, at one o’clock.—Edinburgh: printed by Thomas Constable, M.DCCC.XXXVI.
Mark Crosby.—“Blake and the Banknote Crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818”.—University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 4, Fall 2011 (815-836).
Morris Eaves.—The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake.—Ithaca & London : Cornell University Press, 1992.
For discussion of contemporary ideas about how the roles of melody and harmony in music provide metaphors for line and colour in painting, see his pages 240-42.
Robert Essick.— “Jerusalem and Blake’s final works”, in Morris Eaves, ed.—The Cambridge Companion to William Blake.—Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Catalogue of the extensive and valuable collection of books, pictures, drawings, prints, and painters’ etchings, ancient bronzes and terracottas, Etruscan vases, marble busts, antique carvings and chasings in wood and metal, coins, minerals, gems, and precious stones, philosophical instruments, wines, spirits, &c. &c. of the late Thomas Sivright Esq. of Meggetland and Southouse, which will be sold by auction by Mr. C. B. Tait, in his Great Room, 1, Hanover Street, on Monday, February 1, and sixteen following days, at one o’clock.—Edinburgh: printed by Thomas Constable, M.DCCC.XXXVI.
Mark Crosby.—“Blake and the Banknote Crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818”.—University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 4, Fall 2011 (815-836).
Morris Eaves.—The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake.—Ithaca & London : Cornell University Press, 1992.
For discussion of contemporary ideas about how the roles of melody and harmony in music provide metaphors for line and colour in painting, see his pages 240-42.
Robert Essick.— “Jerusalem and Blake’s final works”, in Morris Eaves, ed.—The Cambridge Companion to William Blake.—Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Robert N. Essick.—William Blake, printmaker.—Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1980.
B. H. Fairchild.—Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form and Image in the Poetry of William Blake.—Kent OH : Kent State University Press, 1980.
Alexander Gilchrist.—Life of William Blake: “pictor ignotus”.—2 vols.—London : Macmillan, 1863.
Algernon Graves.—The Royal Academy of Arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904.—3 vols.—London : Henry Graves, 1905.
David Groves.—“’Great and Singular Genius’: further references to Blake (and Cromek) in the Scots Magazine” .—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1 (Summer 2005), 47-48.
Elizabeth M. Harris.— “Experimental graphic processes in England 1800-1859. Part iii” .—Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no. 5 (1969), 49.
B. H. Fairchild.—Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form and Image in the Poetry of William Blake.—Kent OH : Kent State University Press, 1980.
Alexander Gilchrist.—Life of William Blake: “pictor ignotus”.—2 vols.—London : Macmillan, 1863.
Algernon Graves.—The Royal Academy of Arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904.—3 vols.—London : Henry Graves, 1905.
David Groves.—“’Great and Singular Genius’: further references to Blake (and Cromek) in the Scots Magazine” .—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1 (Summer 2005), 47-48.
Elizabeth M. Harris.— “Experimental graphic processes in England 1800-1859. Part iii” .—Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no. 5 (1969), 49.
Geoffrey Keynes.—Blake Studies: essays on his life and work.—2nd ed.—Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
James King.—William Blake: his Life.—London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991.
Edward Larrissy.—William Blake.—Rereading literature.—Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
David Linnell.—Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: the Life of John Linnell.—Lewes: Book Guild, 1994.
W. H. Lizars, “Art. XXXVI.—Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,—continued from last Number, p. 195”, Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, vol. 1 (June-October 1819), 407.
W. H. Lizars.— “Art. V.—Account of a new style of engraving on copper in alto relievo, invented by W. Lizars” .—Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, ii (January-April 1820), 19-23.
Lizars had a close involvement with the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal. In early volumes most of the illustrations are engraved either by W. & D. Lizars or W. H. Lizars. A later “New series” has editors including Lizars’s brother-in-law, Sir William Jardine.
[J. G. Lockhart].—Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk Art. V.—The third edition.—3 vols.—Printed for William Blackwood, Edinburgh, and T. Cadell and W. Davies, London, 1819.
Lockhart, Walter Scott’s future son-in-law, is following the model of Scott’s own Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) in adopting the persona of a prosy provincial bachelor. Lockhart married Sophia, Scott's elder daughter, on 29 April 1820
Thomas Babington Macaulay.—The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay.—Popular ed.—London: Longmans, Green, 1889.
Michael Phillips.— “Blake and the Terror 1792-93” .—The Library, 6th series, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1994) 263-297.
Charles Pye.—“Mr. Pye on Engraving on Metal and Stone. On a new Process of Engraving on Metal and Stone” .—London Journal of Arts and Sciences, I (1820), 55-58.
Charles Pye, 1777-1864, engraver, was a pupil of James Heath. Pye’s brother John, also an engraver, had been one of the subscribers to Blair’s Grave in 1806.
Dennis M. Read.— “Cromek, Cunningham, and Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway song: a case of literary duplicity”.—Studies in Bibliography, vol. 49 (1987), 175-187.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.—Essai sur l'origine des langues : où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l'imitation musicale.
First published posthumously in 1781 from a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque publique de Neuchâtel. There are numerous later editions and translations.
John Thomas Smith.—Nollekens and his times: comprehending a life of that celebrated sculptor; and memoirs of several contemporary artists, from the time of Roubiliac, Hogarth, and Reynolds, to that of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake.—London : H. Colburn, 1828.
R. A. Smith.—The Scotish minstrel: a selection from the vocal melodies of Scotland, ancient and modern.—6 vols.—Edinburgh: published and sold by Robert Purdie, [1820].
Alfred T. Story.—The Life of John Linnell.—2 vols.—London : Richard Bentley & Son, 1892.
Story suggests that Linnell met Lizars for the first time in Edinburgh, following a letter of introduction from a mutual London acquaintance. Since Story calls William Lizars, “David” and there are other aspects of his account that don’t ring true, I feel justified in proposing an earlier London meeting.
Mei-Ying Sung.—William Blake and the Art of Engraving.—London : Routledge, 2009.
John Wesley.—The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley; edited by Nehemiah Curnock.—8 vols.—London : Epworth Press, 1909-16.
Alexander Whitelaw.—The Book of Scottish Song, collected and illustrated with historical and critical notices by Alex Whitelaw.—Glasgow, Edinburgh, & London : Blackie & Son, 1843.
Edwin Wolf, 2nd.—“The Blake-Linnell accounts in the library of Yale University”.—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 37, 1st quarter (1943), 1-22.
Edward Larrissy.—William Blake.—Rereading literature.—Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
David Linnell.—Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: the Life of John Linnell.—Lewes: Book Guild, 1994.
W. H. Lizars, “Art. XXXVI.—Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,—continued from last Number, p. 195”, Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, vol. 1 (June-October 1819), 407.
W. H. Lizars.— “Art. V.—Account of a new style of engraving on copper in alto relievo, invented by W. Lizars” .—Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, ii (January-April 1820), 19-23.
Lizars had a close involvement with the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal. In early volumes most of the illustrations are engraved either by W. & D. Lizars or W. H. Lizars. A later “New series” has editors including Lizars’s brother-in-law, Sir William Jardine.
[J. G. Lockhart].—Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk Art. V.—The third edition.—3 vols.—Printed for William Blackwood, Edinburgh, and T. Cadell and W. Davies, London, 1819.
Lockhart, Walter Scott’s future son-in-law, is following the model of Scott’s own Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) in adopting the persona of a prosy provincial bachelor. Lockhart married Sophia, Scott's elder daughter, on 29 April 1820
Thomas Babington Macaulay.—The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay.—Popular ed.—London: Longmans, Green, 1889.
Michael Phillips.— “Blake and the Terror 1792-93” .—The Library, 6th series, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1994) 263-297.
Charles Pye.—“Mr. Pye on Engraving on Metal and Stone. On a new Process of Engraving on Metal and Stone” .—London Journal of Arts and Sciences, I (1820), 55-58.
Charles Pye, 1777-1864, engraver, was a pupil of James Heath. Pye’s brother John, also an engraver, had been one of the subscribers to Blair’s Grave in 1806.
Dennis M. Read.— “Cromek, Cunningham, and Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway song: a case of literary duplicity”.—Studies in Bibliography, vol. 49 (1987), 175-187.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.—Essai sur l'origine des langues : où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l'imitation musicale.
First published posthumously in 1781 from a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque publique de Neuchâtel. There are numerous later editions and translations.
John Thomas Smith.—Nollekens and his times: comprehending a life of that celebrated sculptor; and memoirs of several contemporary artists, from the time of Roubiliac, Hogarth, and Reynolds, to that of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake.—London : H. Colburn, 1828.
R. A. Smith.—The Scotish minstrel: a selection from the vocal melodies of Scotland, ancient and modern.—6 vols.—Edinburgh: published and sold by Robert Purdie, [1820].
Alfred T. Story.—The Life of John Linnell.—2 vols.—London : Richard Bentley & Son, 1892.
Story suggests that Linnell met Lizars for the first time in Edinburgh, following a letter of introduction from a mutual London acquaintance. Since Story calls William Lizars, “David” and there are other aspects of his account that don’t ring true, I feel justified in proposing an earlier London meeting.
Mei-Ying Sung.—William Blake and the Art of Engraving.—London : Routledge, 2009.
John Wesley.—The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley; edited by Nehemiah Curnock.—8 vols.—London : Epworth Press, 1909-16.
Alexander Whitelaw.—The Book of Scottish Song, collected and illustrated with historical and critical notices by Alex Whitelaw.—Glasgow, Edinburgh, & London : Blackie & Son, 1843.
Edwin Wolf, 2nd.—“The Blake-Linnell accounts in the library of Yale University”.—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 37, 1st quarter (1943), 1-22.
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