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1 Blake and Conflict

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3 Blake and Conflict Edited by Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee

4 Introduction, selection and editorial matter Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee 2009 Individual chapters contributors 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blake and conflict / edited by Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee. p. cm. The present volume grew out of a two-day Blake and Conflict conference held at University College, Oxford, in September 2006 Pref. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Blake, William, Political and social views. 2. Literature and society England History 18th century. 3. Literature and society England History 19th century. 4. Art and literature England History 18th century. 5. Art and literature England History 19th century. 6. Blake, William, Religion. 7. Social problems in literature. 8. Politics in literature. 9. Theology in literature. I. Haggarty, Sarah. II. Mee, Jon. PR4148.P6B dc

5 Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors vii ix x xi Introduction 1 Jon Mee and Sarah Haggarty 1 Blake and the Ontology of Empire 12 Saree Makdisi 2 A wise tale of the Mahometans : Blake and Islam, Angus Whitehead 3 Blake, the Female Prophet and the American Agent: The Evidence of the 1789 Swedenborg Conference Attendance List 48 David Worrall 4 Impurity of Diction: The Harlots Curse and Dirty Words 65 Susan Matthews 5 She Cuts his Heart Out at his Side : Blake, Christianity and Political Virtue 84 David Fallon 6 From Donation to Demand? Almsgiving and the Annotations to Thornton 105 Sarah Haggarty 7 A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action : Mutuality, Converse and Mental Fight 126 Jon Mee 8 Shadows in the Cave: Refocusing Vision in Blake s Creation Myth 144 Sibylle Erle v

6 vi Contents 9 A Minute Skirmish: Blake, Hayley and the Art of Miniature Painting 164 Mark Crosby 10 Blake and the Literary Galleries 185 Luisa Calè 11 Blake s Poems on Art and Artists 210 Morton D. Paley Index 229

7 Illustrations 2.1 [James De Ville], Manual of Phrenology, as an Accompaniment to the Phrenological Bust, frontispiece (1828). Courtesy of Angus Whitehead William Blake, Illustration to Dante s Divine Comedy (1824 7) Hell, Canto 28; The Schismatics and Sowers of Discord: Mahomet, pen and watercolour over pencil, 37.3 x 52.7 cm. Reproduced with kind permission from the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia John Flaxman, Illustration to Dante s Inferno Canto 28, in Compositions [... ] from the Divine Poem of Dante Alighieri, Containing Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (London, 1807), George Smith Collection, University of York Libraries and Archives, Special Collection. Reproduced with kind permission from the Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, pl. 5/obj. 7, Satan Going Forth from the Presence of the Lord and Job s Charity (1826). Reproduced with kind permission from The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, 24 September 2007 ( William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, pl. 19/obj. 21, Every Man also Gave Him a Piece of Money (1826). Reproduced with kind permission from The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, 24 September 2007 ( William Blake, William Cowper (1801). Reproduced with kind permission from the Trustees of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford William Blake, Thomas Butts Senior (c ). Reproduced with kind permission from the Trustees of the British Museum Thomas Alphonso Hayley (1800), designed by Henry Howard after a medallion vii

8 viii Illustrations by John Flaxman, engraved by William Blake. Reproduced with kind permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, N. 280 d Henry Fuseli, Satan Bursts from Chaos (1799). Reproduced with kind permission from Private Collection, Switzerland, copyright Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, copy C, pl. 9: Chap: IV / 1 Ages on ages roll d over him... (1794). Reproduced with kind permission from the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B William Blake, Extra-illustration of Night II lines , in Edward Young, The Complaint, and, The Consolation; or, Night Thoughts (London, 1797), p. 25. Reproduced with kind permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Arch A b. 11, p William Blake, The Christian Triumph, frontispiece to Night IV, in Edward Young, The Complaint, and, The Consolation; or, Night Thoughts (London, 1797), p. 65. Reproduced with kind permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Arch A b. 11, p Richard Westall, Illustration for Book III of Paradise Lost, in The Poetical Works of John Milton, 3 vols (London, ), I, opposite p. 77. Reproduced with kind permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, b. 1 3 vols, opposite p

9 Abbreviations Anns BIQ BR E Experience Innocence Marriage Pl. Urizen Annotations Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly G. E. Bentley, Jr, Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) Reference to page numbers in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman, com. by Harold Bloom, rev. edn (New York: Doubleday, 1988) Songs of Experience Songs of Innocence The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate The [First] Book of Urizen All quotations of Blake s writings, unless otherwise indicated, refer to Erdman s edition. Both plate and line numbers, separated by a colon, are usually given, as well as page numbers. ix

10 Acknowledgements The present volume grew out of a two-day Blake and Conflict conference held at University College, Oxford, in September The editors are grateful to the staff, fellows and old members of University College for their support. Their thanks are also due to the English Faculty of the University of Oxford for further help with funds. Sarah Haggarty has been supported throughout the preparation of this volume by the Janice Scott Junior Research Fellowship, based at University College. Jon Mee would like to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust via the award of a Philip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. The editors are especially grateful to their co-convenors, Mark Crosby and David Fallon. SARAH HAGGARTY University College, Oxford JON MEE University of Warwick x

11 Contributors Luisa Calè is Lecturer in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Luisa s work explores the intersections between the literary and the visual, especially the practices of reading and viewing in the cultures of print, exhibitions and visual entertainments of the Romantic Period. She is the author of Fuseli s Milton Gallery: Turning Readers into Spectators (OUP, 2006) and the co-editor of Dante on View: Dante s Reception in the Visual and Performing Arts (Ashgate, 2007). Mark Crosby completed his D.Phil. at Oxford on the three-year period Blake spent in Felpham under the patronage of William Hayley. He now teaches at Oxford and Durham, and is working on a project examining intellectual patronage in the eighteenth century. Sibylle Erle is Visiting Junior Research Fellow, University of London, and Senior Lecturer in English, Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln. Her academic interests include science, visual culture and Anglo-German cultural relations. She has written a chapter in The Reception of Blake in the Orient (Continuum, 2006), a piece in Blackwell Literature Compass, a chapter in Women Reading William Blake (Palgrave, 2006) and has an article forthcoming in Comparative Critical Studies. She is currently completing a book on Blake, Lavater and physiognomy. David Fallon is a Research Fellow at University of Warwick, working on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature. He recently completed his doctorate at University College, Oxford, where his thesis was entitled William Blake and the Politics of Apotheosis. His articles have appeared in Blackwell Literature Compass and Eighteenth-Century Life. Sarah Haggarty is Janice Scott Junior Research Fellow in English at University College, Oxford. She has written a monograph, Blake and the Gift, and is currently researching an intellectual history of gift-giving in the long eighteenth century. With Jon Mee, she is writing a guide to the criticism of Blake s Songs for Palgrave. Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism (CUP, 1998) and William xi

12 xii Contributors Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Susan Matthews is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. In the 1990s, Susan published work on Blake, the women s novel, and on gender and Romanticism. She has recently returned with a series of published essays (in The Reception of Blake in the Orient and Blake, Nation and Empire, for example) to work on Blake and the discourses of sexuality. Her new project, The Female Will: Blake, Sexuality and the Polite is due to be published by CUP in Formerly Margaret Candfield Fellow in English at University College, Oxford, Jon Mee is Professor of Romanticism Studies at University of Warwick. He is the author of Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism (OUP, 1992) and Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (OUP, 2003), as well as a number of other articles and essays on Blake. He is currently a Philip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellow working on conversation and controversy in the Romantic period. Morton D. Paley is Emeritus Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of a number of studies of British Romantic poetry and art, including The Apocalyptic Sublime, Portraits of Coleridge, Coleridge s Later Poetry and The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. He is co-editor of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. At present he is completing a study of Coleridge and the fine arts with the aid of an Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Fellowship. Angus Whitehead is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He worked for his thesis, on the immediate living and working environments of William and Catherine Blake, at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York. Angus has published material on the Blakes in The British Art Journal and Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, in which he has another article forthcoming. He is currently writing a book on the last years of William and Catherine Blake. Angus is editor of the Blake Journal, the annual journal of the Blake Society of St James. He recently convened the Blake at 250 conference in York. David Worrall is Professor of English and Research Leader in English at Nottingham Trent University. He has published extensively on Blake and on other aspects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His books include Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and

13 Contributors xiii Surveillance, (1992) and Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures, (2006). With Steve Clark, he has edited Historicizing Blake (1994), Blake in the Nineties (1999) and, most recently, Blake, Nation and Empire (2006). From , he led an AHRC-funded research project at NTU, on East Midlands Moravian Belief Communities, with special reference to William Blake ( ) saw the publication of two of David s monographs: The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, and Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment.