William Blake's Notebook by William Blake

William Blake's notebook : a treasure he kept all his life

This literary and artistic document gives a uniquely intimate insight into the Romantic poet and artist William Blake’s creative process. Born on the 28th November 1757, Blake worked primarily as an engraver, printmaker and illustrator in his lifetime, accepting artistic commissions as well as pursuing his own painting and poetry. Well-known for his illuminated manuscripts, which showcased his own watercolor illustrations alongside his poems, his best-known works include Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem. While he did sell artwork to patrons and organise exhibitions to showcase his work, Blake was nonetheless largely unrecognised in his lifetime, perhaps owing to his anti-establishment and unconventional views. His contribution to poetry and visual art is now universally acknowledged and Blake is heralded as one of the most influential and significant writers in English Literature.

The notebook, which consists of 116 pages and measures 19.7 x 15.9 cm (7 3/4 x 6 1/4 in) was probably begun by William Blake’s younger brother Robert, whose sketches can be seen on several early pages of the notebook.

William Blake's imagination brought to life

After Robert’s premature death in 1787, William inherited the notebook, keeping it beside him for more than three decades and adding sketches and writing intermittently, with his most intense period of usage between 1792 and 1794. Having covered every inch of available space on the right-hand pages, Blake promptly turned the notebook over and began working on the blank versos. His reluctance to part ways with this little book perhaps serves as evidence for its deep significance to him, both creatively and emotionally. Indeed, the loss of Robert marked him profoundly, a sentiment movingly expressed in a letter to his friend William Hayley written in 1800, ‘Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the regions of my imagination.’

The notebook’s contents cover the span of Blake’s creative output; poetry and drawings abound, as well as quotations from Milton and Shakespeare and biographical references to specific moments in Blake’s career, such as his apprenticeship to the engraver James Basire, or his encounter with the prophetess Joanna Southcote, with whom he seems to have felt an affinity. On almost every page there are demons and curious beasts, and many faces, some imaginary, some clearly portraits: of Blake himself on p.67, of the revolutionary, Tom Paine, on p.74, and of a striking woman, probably his beloved wife Catherine, on p.82.

Contemplating the densely populated pages, it is possible to recognise the beginnings of some of Blake’s most emblematic works. Indeed, the notebook contains drafts for 16 of the poems that would later be included in Songs of Experience, including fragments from ‘London,’ ‘The Human Abstract’ and the first verse of ‘The Chimney Sweeper.’ Also present here are two draft versions of what is arguably Blake’s most famous poem ‘The Tyger,’ which merit comparison with the final version that would appear in his 1794 illuminated manuscript.

William Blake's intense creativity revealed

The notebook traverses many of the themes that would persist throughout Blake’s oeuvre, such as the tension between the human and divine, the hypocrisy of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent destruction of nature and suffering of the working classes. The manuscript also offers the opportunity to engage with some of Blake’s more enigmatic work, such as ‘The Sick Rose,’ which has puzzled critics since its publication. Can deciphering Blake’s furious revisions and preliminary sketches for the poem offer a new interpretation?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's fundamental role

Blake’s were not the only artistic hands through which this notebook passed. Indeed, its very existence today was assured by those into whose care it was placed after the poet died in 1827. Shortly after her husband’s death, Blake’s wife Catherine appears to have given the notebook to artist William Palmer in a gesture that ultimately assured the notebook’s existence today; Frederick Tatham, the inheritor of Blake’s estate after Catherine’s death, purportedly burnt a considerable portion of the poet’s work in a fit of religious fervour against its supposedly heretical content. Palmer, however, kept the notebook for over twenty years before selling it for ten shillings (about £40 in 2022) to a young artist destined for an extraordinary future - the nineteen-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who recorded his purchase in a penciled note on a blank page at the beginning of the notebook.

In 1850, and with the assistance of his brother, William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti transcribed and edited 42 of Blake’s poems from the notebook, which he eventually bound to the notebook itself as a 33-page appendix with the advisory note ‘All that is of any value in the foregoing pages has here been copied out. D.G. C. R.’

The Rossettis played an important role in popularizing Blake for a Victorian audience and allowed other artists and intellectuals the opportunity to see and draw inspiration from Blake’s work. Rossetti made the notebook available to the poet Algernon Swinburne and worked with Alexander Gilchrist in the 1850s to produce an early biography of Blake, entitled Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus.

It appears that Blake’s rebellious spirit was a source of inspiration for Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who, like Blake, rejected the more mechanistic style of the artists who directly followed Raphael’s example. Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites also found a common foe in the more contemporary English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who founded the Royal Academy of Arts and who favoured a more conventional approach to the process of making art.

However, the Rossetti brothers were also partially responsible for perpetuating misconceptions of Blake and his work that were more palatable to their own sensibilities. Dante Gabriel faced criticism from other Blake researchers, such as Richard Herne and John Sampson who felt that the Rossetti’s’ deviations from the original text misrepresented the reality of Blake’s complex life, work and ideology.

William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a unique facsimile

Our reproduction of the manuscript is the first to include the pages added by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother, allowing the reader to make their own judgement.

Following Rossetti’s death in 1882 the notebook was sold at auction, where the bookseller, publisher and bibliographer Frederick Startridge Ellis became its new owner. After passing through various hands, it was acquired in 1887 by the bibliophile William Augustus White. In 1928 his daughter and heir Frances White Emerson donated it to the British Museum.