Blake 2.pdf

Computers and the Humanities 36: 27–48, 2002.

Digital Facsimiles: Reading the

William Blake Archive ∗

JOSEPH VISCOMI

University of Noth Carolina, Department of English, Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520, NC 27599-3520,

Chapel Hill, USA

E-mail: jsviscom@email.unc.edu

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

In the forest of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(1–4) 1

1. The Case for Facsimile Reproduction

The lines of the epigraph are from the most anthologized poem in English

literature. 2 They are, of course, the ﬁrst four lines from William Blake’s “The

Tyger,” one of twenty-six poems in his Songs of Experience , ﬁrst printed in 1794

with twenty-one poems and combined at that time with his Songs of Innocence

of 1789 to create his best known illuminated book, Songs of Innocence and of

Experience . These bibliographical details, though, only hint at the complexities

of studying and editing Blake’s poetry, complexities revealed more quickly and

clearly by a simple comparison between the lines as they appear above and the

form in which they were originally read (Figure 1).

Immediately, we see that Blake’s text is calligraphic, illustrated, and ﬁnished

in watercolors, features which textual scholars have argued theoretically – and, I

believe, we sense intuitively – as contributing to the meaning of the whole. 3 Indeed,

we recognize the typographic translation as grossly distorting the original artifact,

a hand-colored impression printed from a copper plate executed in “illuminated

printing” (i.e., “relief etching”), a technique Blake invented in 1788. Instead of the

needles, burins, and other metal tools of the graphic artist, Blake worked on copper

plates with pens, small brushes, and an ink impervious to acid (probably asphaltum

in turpentine mixed with a little lampblack); he wrote text backward, illustrated it,

and etched the untouched metal below the surface to leave the integrated design

in printable relief. Working on metal with the tools of poet and painter enabled

Blake to create a multi-media space, a “site” where poetry, painting, and print-

JOSEPH VISCOMI

Figure 1. “The Tyger,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy C.

making came together in ways both original and characteristic of Romanticism’s

fascination with autographic gesture, with spontaneity, intimacy, and organicism.

Blake used illuminated printing as a mode of production rather than repro-

duction, combining text and illustration on the plate for the ﬁrst time rather than

reproducing a pre-existent page design. The etched design, however, is continually

recreated when printed, for it is printed in different inks and colored differently

at different periods. The result is a “printed manuscript,” an oxymoron coined by

Robert Essick to describe Blake’s ability to produce repeatable yet unique works.

For example, “The Tyger” above (Figure 1) is from an early copy of Songs desig-

nated as copy “C”; its Experience impressions were printed in 1794 in yellow ochre

ink on both sides of ﬁne wove paper (which when bound with other leaves created

facing pages) and ﬁnished in light watercolor washes. This version looks and feels

quite different from the impression in late copy Z (Figure 2), which was printed in

1826 in orange-red ink on one side of the leaf, elaborately colored, strengthened in

pen and ink, and given frame lines like a miniature painting.

DIGITAL FACSIMILES: READING THE WILLIAM BLAKE ARCHIVE

Figure 2. “The Tyger,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy Z.

Now, add to this basic comparison numerous other impressions produced from

the same plate at different times and in different production styles, each looking

slightly to dramatically different from the other, each with the possibility of textual

variants, and nearly all occupying a different place in each copy of the book, and

you will begin to glimpse the bibliographical and textual difﬁculties confronting

the editor – and student – of Blake.

How editors resolve these difﬁculties affects directly how Blake is known and,

of course, what Blake we come to know. Typographic transcriptions, which abstract

texts from the artifacts in which they are versioned and embodied, made good

economic but poor editorial sense. They made possible inexpensive editions of

Blake’s poetry and his inclusion in anthologies – and thus classrooms – but, as we

see, at the expense of Blake’s intentions. Such transcriptions are “reader’s texts”

when Blake’s idiosyncratic punctuation is corrected, with stops determined by

modern rules of syntax or grammar. For example, Keynes edits the lines as:

JOSEPH VISCOMI

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(1–4) 4

Erdman, on the other hand, attempts to reﬂect Blake’s markings as closely as type

allows (many of Blake’s marks have no typographic equivalent), choosing marks

by consensus, by comparing numerous printings of the text to see which mark –

e.g. comma or period – is most often present:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forest of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(1–4) 5

The resulting composite text may claim to have excavated the text as executed on

the copper plates, but it no more corresponds to an actual printed work than the

user friendly reader’s text.

Relative to type, unscaled monochromatic reproductions of colored illuminated

pages move readers closer to Blake’s vision, though they fail to capture size, color,

and texture of the original. At the other end of the reproductive continuum are

facsimiles, and the ﬁnest of these, like the hand-colored collotypes produced by

the William Blake Trust between 1952 and 1978, represent the originals more

successfully, but as expensive limited editions they are themselves not readily

available to students. And even they fail to provide the kinds of detail necessary

for good art historical and editorial analyses. To discern, for example, whether

a mark was etched on the copper or added or changed afterwards in printing or

coloring the impression would still require close ﬁrst-hand scrutiny of the original

works, which are housed in international collections at widely separated locations.

Moreover, facsimiles and reproductions both present an edited Blake, edited in the

sense of works selected for reproduction and in the way images are reproduced.

Indeed, the public’s exposure to Blake – and this includes many advanced students

and not a few scholars – has been narrowly restricted to a small number of items

that have been too frequently reproduced. 6 For example, Songs copy Z (Figure 2)

is one of only two copies (both late) commercially reproduced in color, whereas

the less ﬂashy early copy C (Figure 1) has never been reproduced. Reproductions

and facsimiles also edit Blake by reproducing only the image and not the full

sheet, which means bibliographical information, such as paper’s size and the plate’s

registration to the paper, goes unrecorded and Blake – or Mrs. Blake – appears to

be a neater printer than he/she was and the pages visually more uniform than they

are.

Typographic editions and reproductions of only about 20% of Blake’s illumin-

ated canon (40 or so of the 175 copies of the 19 illuminated books Blake produced

DIGITAL FACSIMILES: READING THE WILLIAM BLAKE ARCHIVE

between 1788 and 1827, when he died), reproduced sometimes well, sometimes

execrably, but in no coherent historical order and insufﬁcient detail to sustain

scholarly and editorial research – this was the state of Blake studies when in 1993

the editors of the Blake Archive began to conceive of reproducing Blake digitally.

Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and I had just ﬁnished editing nine illuminated works

for the Blake Trust and, while pleased with the scholarly apparatus we developed,

we were frustrated by the relatively small number of reproductions allowed. With

the economic restraints of the codex form fresh in mind, we visited the Insti-

tute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia,

where we began to envision a critical hypertext of approximately 3000 images,

2/3rds drawn from the illuminated works and the remainder from Blake’s paint-

ings, drawings, prints, and manuscripts, with all texts and images deeply encoded

in SGML. We would represent the illuminated canon by exemplary copies from

each printing of each illuminated book, as well as copies from the same printing

session with important variants in coloring, motifs, arrangements, etc., along with

related material, such as drawings, proofs, and sketches, so that the production

history of each book would be recorded. 7 About half of the books selected for

inclusion had never been reproduced before – including six of our eight copies of

Songs . Our typographic transcriptions of texts would be, in the terms of textual

criticism, as “diplomatic” as the medium allows. That is, in line with the archival

dimension of our project, our texts are conservative transpositions of the original

into conventional type fonts, retaining not only Blake’s capitalization, punctuation

(within the limitations of typography), and spelling, but also (for the ﬁrst time

in a complete edition) his page layout. Unlike printed editions of Blake, which,

as noted, have typically chosen among the textual features of various copies to

produce a single printed text, the texts in the Archive are speciﬁc to individual

plates ; each transcription is of a particular plate in a particular copy and no

other. 8

Once archived digitally, structured and tagged (indexed for retrieval in SGML,

adapted to the purpose), annotated with detailed descriptions, and orchestrated

with a powerful search engine (in this case DynaWeb software), the images in

the Archive could be examined like ordinary color reproductions. But they could

also be searched alongside the texts, enlarged, computer enhanced, juxtaposed in

numerous combinations, and otherwise manipulated to investigate features (such

as the etched basis of the designs and texts) that have heretofore been imper-

ceptible without close examination of the original works. Even scholars who are

able to globetrot from collection to collection end up relying heavily upon their

inadequate memories, notes, photocopies, and photographs to compensate for the

distances in time and space between collections. Seeing the original prints, paint-

ings, manuscripts, and typographical works is good in itself; but seeing them in

ﬁne, trustworthy reproductions, in context and in relation to one another is the

scholarly ideal. Difﬁculty of access to originals and reliance on inadequate repro-

ductions has handicapped and distorted even the best efforts. Again, the result has

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