Milton: titlepage or frontispiece

The Blake Society Zoom meeting of October 15, 2021, was devoted to MILTON AND THE COTTAGE. The following notes are a response to the first part of the discussion and are concerned with the titlepage (some think of it as a frontispiece; it has elements of both) to Blake’s Milton a Poem in 2 Books (1804).

Milton plate 1; copy A, British Museum.

Plate 1 of Milton presents a nude man, the spiritual form of the poet John Milton, against a background of smoke and flames. In copy A, the vortex of billowing smoke is clearly shown emerging from Milton’s left palm and, to a lesser extent, from his right wrist. (It is not so obvious in some later impressions; and is ignored by many commentators.) At the bottom is Milton’s motto from Paradise Lost: To Justify the Ways of God to Men.

Bunhill Fields—the long continuities of London life and death

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.—BLAKE. 

The Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and the adjacent Artillery Ground are the last large open spaces remaining of the three great fields (Bunhill Fields, Smithfield, and Moorfields) that constituted the Manor of Finsbury. The name Bunhill is a corruption of “Bone Hill”, perhaps implying the presence somewhere on the land of a Saxon burial mound. Another suggestion is that the marshy field was used as a refuse tip—a dumping ground for rags and bones, including animal bones from the Smithfield shambles, but I think the name predates the establishment of the livestock market. The manor was originally the prebend of Halliwell and Finsbury, established in 1104 to provide support for a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral.

In 1315, in the reign of Edward II, the prebendary manor was granted by Robert Baldock, the king’s secretary, to the Mayor and commonalty of London. This act enabled more general public access to a large area of fen or moor stretching from the City of London’s boundary (London Wall), to the village of Hoxton. Though ownership of Bunhill Fields reverted to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1514 to 1867, it continued to be leased and managed by the Corporation of London. The Corporation in turn sublet the field. This pattern of lease and sub-lease (and often sub-sub lease) was customary with Corporation land and persists to this day.

Blair's Grave—a conundrum

The place that books have in the social values of their time is expressed in the frame built to hold them, that is to say, the splendour and beauty of their external protection, their binding.

Last week, at the London International Book Fair (22-24 May 2014), Sims Reed Rare Books offered for sale an elaborately bound copy of Robert Blair's The Grave, with the William Blake illustrations engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti. This is the description in the Sims Reed fair checklist.

7. BLAKE, WILLIAM. Robert Blair. The Grave, A Poem. London. Printed by T. Bensley ... for the Proprietor, R. H. Crombie [sic] &c. 1808. Folio. (420 x 330 mm). [42 leaves; pp. xiv, 36]. Frontispiece portrait of Blake by Schiavonetti after T. Phillips, printed title with verse by Montgomery verso, leaf with Blake's poem 'To the Queen', additional etched frontispiece marked 'Proof', 3 leaves with 'List of Subscribers', leaf with Cromek's 'Advertisement', leaf with Fuseli's appreciation and text and 11 plates, all by Schiavonetti after Blake; plates printed on white laid paper with the watermark 'AUVERGNE', the text on cream wove paper with the watermark 'J WHATMAN 1801' where applicable; sheet size: 410 x 320 mm. Contemporary full red straight-grained morocco by Charles Hering with his ticket to front free endpaper verso, boards with elaborate decorative tooling in  gilt and large central Cathedral stamp, skull tools to corners, blue watered silk doublures with gilt decorative tooling, a.e.g. A magnificent copy of the large paper issue of Blake's illustrations for The Grave bound in red morocco in Cathedral style by Hering.                                                                            £18,500

Rylands Blake project 11. Archive materials relating to Rebekah Bliss

In the Bliss Bibliotheca Splendidissima, the books that were the most far-flung in their origin, the most difficult to procure in Rebekah Bliss’s lifetime, the most unexpected in an Englishwoman’s library of circa 1800, were the two Japanese books that appeared in the 1842 sale of books that had passed to her cousin's son, Samuel Roffey Maitland:

[lot] 696 Book of Fishes, printed in Colours, with descriptions and a prefatory treatise in the Japanese Language

697 Book of Plants, Reptiles and Insects, printed in Colours, with descriptions in Japanese

Sir Frederic Madden noted in his copy of the sale catalogue that these two books were purchased by Bohn on behalf of “Mr. Bland”. In fact, apart from a volume of Chinese drawings acquired for the British Museum, all the Oriental books in the 1842 sale were acquired by the noted Persian scholar Nathaniel Bland. Following Bland’s suicide in 1866 (apparently because of his gambling debts), the Bland collection was acquired en bloc by the Earl of Crawford, and the Crawford collection itself purchased in 1901 by Mrs. John Rylands.