Comparación de técnicas.

Following the production of the black, green, and yellow issues of the Songs of Innocence

in 1789, Blake entered an intense period of productivity which would not be broken until 1795. It was during this period that Blake produced several editions of the Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790), the Visions of the Daughters of Albion

(1793), For the Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), America: A Prophecy (1793), the Songs of Experience (1794), Europe: A Prophecy (1794), The First Book of Urizen (1794), the Song of Los

(1795), the Book of Los (1795), the Book of Ahania (1795), and the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795). These works were printed on a variety of papers and were cut to a variety of sizes.1 _{Moreover, the techniques used to print and colour these books were}

various, ranging from intaglio printing to relief etching and from water colouring to colour printing. Blake took a seven year hiatus from illuminated printing in 1795. During this period, Blake focussed mostly on commercial enterprises, moving to Felpham in 1800 and—following a brief resumption of illuminated printing in 1802— returning to London in 1803.2 _{When Blake’s hiatus from illuminated printing was finally}

broken, he produced approximately fifty illuminated books between c. 1802 and 1827. The majority of these books were new editions of old works. However, Blake did print some new works, including Milton: a Poem in Two Books (1804-10), On Homer’s Poetry (1822), On Virgil (1822), and The Ghost of Abel (1822). The grandest and most ambitious of these new works was Jerusalem.3

The composition history of Jerusalem is shrouded in mystery. Its title-page is dated 1804. However, the watermarks of the papers used in Jerusalem indicate that the work was not printed until the earliest of 1818.4 _{Joseph Viscomi, in Blake and the Idea of the Book}

(1993), argued that “for a book of only one hundred pages to take fourteen (actually

1 _{For more details on the papers used in these works, see chapter one.}

2 _{Blake’s commercial projects during this period focussed mostly on a series of 537 engravings for an edition of}

Edward Young’s The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality (1797) and to a number of William Hayley’s projects, including Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802), Life of William Cowper (1802-04), and Triumphs of Temper (1803).

3

The ambitous nature of Jerusalem has been acknowledged frequently. Jean H. Hagstrum argued that the “relation between text and design” in the iconotexts of Jerusalem were “as close as any Blake ever achieved—as when a verbal metaphor is translated into boldly original lines and rich colours” (113).

4 _{The watermarks in copy B of Jerusalem read: “J WHATMAN | 1818.” Subsequent copies of Jerusalem (copies A,}

C-F) were printed on a variety of papers, the watermarks of which included “J WHATMAN | 1818,” “J WHATMAN | 1819,” “J WHATMAN | 1820,” “J WHATMAN | 1824,” and “J WHATMAN | 1826.” It is important to note that the watermarks of the papers used in a work do not necessarily coincide with the year of the work’s production: according to Viscomi, “Milton copies A-C and the ca. 1818 Ruse & Turners copies of illuminated books were printed around three years after the date of their dated paper. . . . The assumption, in other words, that books were printed the year of their paper’s watermark—the assumption underlying the dating of

Jerusalem—is unfounded” (Book 346). Viscomi concludes that “copies A, C, and D were the first copies of

Jerusalem printed” (Book 354), probably in 1820, and these early copies were followed by copies B and E in 1821 and copy F in 1827:

Jerusalem was . . . first printed in three copies in black ink, with two copies (A and C) numbered alike and the third (D) reordered (without erasures) and given frame lines. The fourth copy (E) was printed one or two years later in orange ink and was ordered like copy D because it, too, followed the plate numbers. It too was given frame lines but was also richly coloured. . . .

Jerusalem had a fifth copy (F) printed in 1827, which initially followed Blake’s second order, the order of the plate numbers and of copy E, the copy on hand. (Book 360)

sixteen) years to complete would mean that Blake was not consistently or continually occupied with it at all. . . . Not only was Jerusalem not laboured on year in and year out, but it may also have sat for years without being worked on” (339). In the very least, Blake had completed over half of Jerusalem by 1807 because, in the summer of 1807, George Cumberland visited Blake and noted that “Blake has eng.d _{60 Plates of a new}

Prophecy!” This prophecy must have been Jerusalem because, as G. E. Bentley notes, the “only poem by Blake with more than ‘60 Plates’ is Jerusalem” (Records 246n). Moreover, Crabb Robinson, in his diary entry dated 24 July 1811, stated that Blake “showed S. [Robert Southey] a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem” (qtd. in Bentley Records: 310). Thus, in the view of Viscomi, “if Cumberland’s comment can be trusted, then as much as 60 percent of the work had been completed within three years, and 40 percent occurred over eleven or more years, written and rewritten no doubt as inspiration struck” (Book

339).

Blake began the composition of Jerusalem in 1804 and worked on the poem in a number of sessions until the first printing of the book in 1820. During this period, Blake’s ideas about the contents, functions, and readership of Jerusalem changed considerably. After all, the long duration of the ambitious project—sixteen years—meant that the composition of the text took place alongside a number of events which might have changed Blake’s attitudes towards both Jerusalem and his audience. Exploring the peritexts of Jerusalem will reveal the original and delayed functions of the work, highlighting Blake’s originally inclusive and subsequently exclusive attitudes towards his readership.