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Books from the Aisle: William Blake’s fantastic illustrations for Thomas Gray’s Poems, 1797
Having worked in rare books for 25 years I completely understand why William Blake’s illuminated books are highly sought-after by collectors and quite expensive. These are small handmade pamphlets that he wrote, etched, printed, colored, bound and sold by himself, in very small quantities, with help from his wife.
He trained as an engraver, and aspired to be a painter more than a poet: his friends were illustrators, engravers, printers, rather than the literati. But he was also a creative genius and a prophet, possibly a touch mad, and couldn’t be confined to being “just” an engraver, “just” an artist, or “just” a poet. He’d tried to set himself up in business as a printer, so he had the necessary equipment and training to put him in the fairly unique position to develop a process by which he would craft and produce these small books of his prophetic poems, from conception to final product. The Songs of Innocence and Experience is the greatest and most well-known of these “illuminated” Blake books.
Great as these books are, and much as I admire them, I’ve never been a fan. To my taste, there is something claustrophobic about these little books. The format is cramped, the handwriting is not the easiest to read, especially when he’s trying to cram a lot of text on the page. The colors are often pretty drab. And when you get into the later, prophetic books, the poetry is downright hermetic. Blake developed his own alternative cosmology, with his own pantheon of gods and demigods—Urizen, Los, Thel—mixing them with historical and biblical figures, past and present and future all coming together. Trying to make sense of it all is like parsing the lore of the Silmarillion, or of Elden Ring. Some have the patience for it. His illustrations in general just always left me a little cold.
Then I came across a book of his that was never intended for publication. This was a unique one-off, commissioned by his friend and sometime patron, fellow engraver and illustrator John Flaxman, as a gift for his wife. Basically a bone that he threw to Blake, to give him some employment—and some money—and possibly some consolation for a massive project Blake had thrown himself into that had gone under. In 1795 Blake began working on a series of illustrations for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a famous poem of the time. In the coming year or two he painted 537 large watercolors as marginal illustrations of the text. 537! Forty-three of these were used and engraved—in black-and-white, of course, as there really was no true full-color printing done at the time—though some copies were hand-colored after printing—for the 1797 first volume of a projected four-volume work—only for the publisher to go out of business, scrapping the rest of the project.
So in 1797 Flaxman asked him to do something similar with the poems of Thomas Gray—another poet then famous and beloved, now fairly obscure, known largely for his “Elegy, Wrote in a Country Church-yard.” Similar to the Night Thoughts, Blake took printed pages of Gray’s collected poems, and pasted them onto larger folio sheets, and decorated the margins with watercolor paintings. And on this book Blake allowed his fancy to fly free, unconstrained by any need for these images to be reproduced or published in any way, unconcerned that they might ever be seen by the general public. They are for this book only, for his friend’s wife only. And they are magnificent.
After the Flaxmans died, the volume was sold at auction, and made its way to William Beckford’s enormous collection at Fonthill Abbey, and from there into the Duke of Hamilton's collection (Beckford’s second daughter married the tenth Duke of Hamilton). Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist noted this volume’s existence in his 1863 Life of Blake, but hadn't actually seen it. Many of Beckford's books were sold with the Hamilton collections in 1882, but Blake's book wasn't included in that sale, or any after that—probably just fell through the cracks, overlooked. "The whole series, indeed, remained virtually unknown until the book was rediscovered at the final dismantling of Hamilton Palace in 1919, when it was seen by Herbert Grierson" (Bentley).
Even then, it wasn’t until 1972 that the Trianon Press, sponsored by the William Blake Trust, produced its extremely faithful facsimile edition that this book came to light, and became somewhat readily available. It was printed using stencils—as many as 42 for a single page, with an average of 25 colors per image. Gray’s text was printed letterpress, as in the original book; colors were softened with watercolor brushes—even the pencil marks in the original were reproduced faithfully. Apparently this took the press’s director and 18 employees four years to produce 518 copies. It cost 530 pounds on publication in 1972, which, according to internet inflation calculators, is the equivalent of $7900 today—and you can actually find copies for quite a bit less online.
These illustrations made me a Blake fan. Maybe they will do the same for you. Or, if you’re already a Blake fan, perhaps this is a book that you haven’t seen before. Would love to hear what you think of it, regardless! Thanks for stopping by.
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