Romantic Circles Blog

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of America a Prophecy copies B and I. Ten of the fourteen extant copies of America were printed in 1793, the date on its title plate. Copy I, now in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, is from this printing. The eighteen plates of copy I, like those of the other 1793 copies but unlike those of the later copies, were printed on two sides of the leaves, except for the frontispiece and title page (plates 1 and 2), and left uncolored. The plates were printed in greenish-black ink; five lines at the end of the text on plate 4 were masked and did not print, and plate 13 is in its first state. Copy B was printed in 1795 with copy A in the same brownish black ink on one side of the paper, with plate 13 in its second state. Unlike copy A, however, it is uncolored except for gray wash on the title plate. Now in the Morgan Library and Museum, copy B has a very curious history. Its plates 4 and 9, which were long assumed to be original, are in fact lithographic facsimiles from the mid 1870s produced to complete the copy. For a full technical description and history of this copy, see Joseph Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes Revisited; One Dew-Smith Revealed.” Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G. E. Bentley, Jr. Ed. Karen Mulhallen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 35-78. Copies B and I join six other copies in the Archive, copies E and F (1793), A (1795), M (c. 1807), and O (1821), which altogether represent the full printing history of this illuminated book.

America a Prophecy was the first of Blake’s “Continental Prophecies,” followed by Europe a Prophecy in 1794, executed in the same style and size but usually colored, and, in 1795, “Africa” and “Asia,” two sections making up The Song of Los. Fine and important examples of all three books are in the Archive. Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of America copies B and I are fully searchable and are supported by the Archive’s Compare feature. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to copies B and I and to all the America texts previously published.

With the publication of these two copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 85 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

Due to recent security concerns related to Java browser plugins, the Archive has disabled its Java-based ImageSizer and Virtual Lightbox applications. Users can still view 100 and 300 dpi JPEG images as well as complete transcriptions for all works in the Archive including America copies B and I. Text searching is also still available for all works in the Archive, and image searching remains available for all works except those in preview mode. In the coming months the Archive will implement redesigned pages that restore the features of ImageSizer and the Virtual Lightbox without the use of Java.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.


Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

Announcing the latest addition to ROMANTIC-ERA SONGS

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/douglass/music/index.html

The Miller and His Men (1813), Isaac Pocock, music by Sir Henry Bishop, contributed by Christina Fuhrmann.

The site is free and all music is playable and downloadable.

Also available on the site:

• Blackbeard; or, The Captive Princess (1798) [ed. Peter Broadwell]
Scenario and song texts by John Cartwright Cross (d.1810?)
Original score by James Sanderson (1769-1841).

• Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity! (1798)
Libretto by George Colman, the Younger, Musical Score by Michael Kelly

• Remorse (1813), Samuel Taylor Coleridge; music by Michael Kelly.
[contributed with commentary by Olivia Reilly]

• A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern (1815)
Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron

• Death’s Jest-Book (published posthumously 1850) Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
Music by Brian Holmes

• Animal Magnetism (1788), Elizabeth Inchbald.
Composers Isaac Nathan and J. Augustine Wade

• A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783), Hannah Cowley
Various Contemporary Composers and Lyricists, with Original Music and Arrangements by Brian Holmes and Vocal Arrangements by Holley Replogle

• The Haunted Tower (1789) [from La Tour Enchantée, un Opéra-comique, by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade]. Adapted by James Cobb, with musical score by Stephen Storace.

• The Gipsy Prince (1801), Thomas Moore
with live link to complete edition on Romantic Circles

• Songs of Lady Caroline Lamb

• John Percy’s Compositions Based on Lyrics by Ann Radcliffe
Contributed by Mandy Swann

• Contemporary Settings of Byron Lyrics.

The New York Society Library has recently completed the online cataloging of its Hammond Collection: 1,152 novels, plays, poetry, and other works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally part of a New England lending library, these volumes date from 1720 to 1847 (bulk dates 1770-1820) and reflect the popular reading interests of those years, including Gothic novels, romances, epistolary fiction, musical comedies, and other genres. A number of these books are quite scarce; in a few cases, the NYSL holds the only known extant copy.

To browse these books as a group in the Library’s catalog: http://library.nysoclib.org/, search by author for “James Hammond’s Circulating Library.”

The New York Society Library is a membership library in New York City, founded in 1754. For more information, please visit their Website: http://www.nysoclib.org/

Our special collections are accessible to members and non-members alike. We invite interested researchers to contact us at rare[underscore]books[at]nysoclib[dot]org.

As seen at Frankensteinia and elsewhere, the New York Public Library is hosting what looks to be a fantastic exhibition of Shelley circle materials, many on loan from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The exhibit runs through Sunday, June 24, 2012.

According to the exhibition page, items on display include:

Selections from the manuscript of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
Godwin’s Diary, digitally published with annotations in July 2010
Correspondence between William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
The Esdaile Notebook containing P.B. Shelley’s youthful work (Pforzheimer)
Shelley’s gold and coral baby rattle
The only known letter from Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont’s daughter Allegra, who died at 5.
A necklace owned by the Shelley family with locks (lockets) of P.B. and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s hair
Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook’s engagement ring and her last letter before committing suicide
Percy Shelley’s copy of his first major poem “Queen Mab,” complete with his notes and annotations. The poem was politically-charged, discussing the evils of eating meat and religion, amongst other things. Shelley actually pulled the poem from distribution after it was published, and it was only widely disseminated after his death.

There’s more at the NYPL’s site for the exhibition.

Romantic Circles is pleased to announce a new volume in the Praxis series (series editor, Orrin Wang), Romanticism, Forgery, and the Credit Crunch, edited by Ian Haywood:

http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/forgery/index.html

This Praxis volume looks at the impact on Romantic print culture of the suspension of cash payments in 1797 and the subsequent rise in prosecutions (and executions) for forgery. The four essays cover mainstream novelists (Austen, Scott) as well as radical journalists (Cobbett, Hone) and caricaturists (Gillray, Cruikshank). Ian Haywood edits and contributes to the volume, along with Robert Miles, Alex Benchimol, Alex J. Dick, and Nick Groom. The aim of the collection is to explore the Romantic credit crisis of 1797-1821. The decision to end cash payments and flood the economy with low denominational banknotes led to a spectacular increase in executions for banknote forgery. Many Romantic writers saw this bloody debacle as a sensational illustration of the dangers of an economic system based on mere “paper” value. While some critical attention has been given to the cultural history of credit (Brantlinger, Poovey), the issue of forgery has been overlooked. Yet, as the essays in this volume show, the impact of the credit crisis and its thousands of victims affected literature, journalism and art in often profound ways.

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce a new volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis series, Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters, edited by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan.

Robert Bloomfield’s letters document one artist’s struggles (and sometimes his victories) to share his unique voice and vision; the online publication of his extant letters (a companion to this collection of essays) reveals new and exciting insights into Bloomfield the artist and the man.The essays included in this Praxis volume highlight and draw attention to aspects of Bloomfield’s literary production that would likely not be possible without the full access to his letters that the edition provides, and make a strong case for why Bloomfield continues to be worthy of study.They suggest how much more remains to be said about this prolific poet.

This volume makes use of the previously published edition at Romantic Circles, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt. This edition of Bloomfield”s Collected Letters constitutes every known letter by Bloomfield himself, plus a selection of the letters sent to him by literary correspondents and those exchanged between members of his circle.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Romantic Frictions, a new volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series.

The essays in Romantic Frictions find in Romanticism what philosophical modernity has often found there: a disposition to recognize oppositions that cannot be squared or resolved precisely because they constitute the ongoing work of culture and writing. Such frictions are embedded in a shifting temporal moment whose inner complexity is similarly textured such that neither history nor philosophy assumes a master (and fictional) disguise. Both are instead crosscut and assembled in ways that sustain an inner friction that invites being read. Rather than reify the critical tendency, stubbornly at issue since the 1980s, to suppose that Romanticism belongs either to deconstructive philosophy or to new historicism, the essays in this volume understand romanticism as a cultural and literary terrain where these and other disciplinary affiliations exist together, not as easy companions but as productive antagonists. This volume is edited and introduced by Theresa M. Kelley, with essays by Ian Duncan, Mary A. Favret, Daniel O’Quinn, Matthew Rowlinson, Colin Jager, and Jacques Khalip.

We are pleased to announce the second part of an eight-part electronic edition of the Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Two is edited by Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer.

Robert Southey, as many of our readers know,  was one of the best-known, controversial and innovative writers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Based upon extensive new archival research, this Collected edition makes available for the first time all his surviving letters, freshly edited, annotated and introduced.

Part One covers 1791-1797, turbulent years which saw the forging of Southey’s career and reputation, his involvement in radical politics, and the beginning of his friendships with Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Part Two, which covers 1798-1803, includes his public and private responses to Lyrical Ballads (1798); his reaction to the rise of Napoleon and the continuing conflict between Britain and revolutionary France; his second and final visit to Portugal and the resultant hardening of his anti-Catholicism; his unhappy stint as a secretary to the Irish Chancellor Isaac Corry, and his emotional bludgeoning by the deaths in relentless succession between 1801-1803 of three Margarets, his cousin, mother and first child. Part Two comprises 596 letters, of which 199 are published for the first time, and 107 are published in full for the first time. In addition, 5 letters that appeared pseudonymously in the Monthly Magazine are here newly attributed to Southey.

Romantic Circles recently received a correspondence alerting us to the state of disrepair into which the headstone of Margaret King Countess Mount Cashell, a pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft and friend to Mary Shelley, has fallen (see photo). Buried next to her husband, George Tighe, in the Old English Cemetery at Leghorn in Livorno, Italy, King’s grave site, along with most others in the cemetery were, until recently, covered with vegetation, earth, and roots. A group of volunteers began cleanup of the entire cemetery last year. The graves span the years 1600 to 1838 when the cemetery was closed. The chief volunteer, Matteo Giunti maintains a blog chronicling their restoration efforts.

More information about King can be found on her Wikipedia entry.