This workshop will explore some of the ways in which the artistic vision of William Blake has been reimagined and reinvented in British art and culture, with a special focus on material held at the John Rylands Library.

Hosted by the John Rylands Research Institute, the event builds on previous Blake projects at the John Rylands Library, including the exhibition Burning Bright: William Blake and the Art and Craft of the Book, which explored Blake’s own work as a commercial engraver, and his legacy in the world of the book in the century after his death.

This workshop spotlights other themes relating to Blake and his legacy in material held at the John Rylands Library as part of continuing efforts to unlock Blakean materials in the collections. Topics include Blake himself as a re-inventor in his designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1795-97); reinventing Blake’s Songs in editions of the poems held in Rylands collections; and Blake and counter-culture, represented in modern literary archives held at the Library.

The event is free to attend, and open to all. Booking is essential as places are limited.

This event is funded by the John Rylands Research Institute.

Programme

1-1.15: Introduction (Christie Room)

1.15-2.15: 3 x 15 minute papers + discussion (Christie Room)

• Lusia Calé (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Disbound, Encircled, Unrolled: Physical and Metaphorical Materialities of the Book in Blake’s Night Thoughts’
• Colin Trodd (University of Manchester), ‘Codifying Vision: James Smetham’s Monuments to William Blake’
• Sarah Haggarty (University of Cambridge), Blake’s namby-pamby? Responses in the Rylands Library to the childlikeness of Songs

2.15-3.30: Collections Session (Bible Room) / Tea and Coffee Break (Christie Room)

The group will be split in half for refreshments and the collections session; the two groups will swap between the activities at 2.50. A virtual tour of William Blake’s Cottage and other materials will be available to view during the break.

3.30-4.45: 3 x 15 minute papers + discussion (Christie Room)

• David Hopkins (University of Glasgow), ‘The Impact of Machines’: Blake, British Surrealism and the Machine’
• Douglas Field (Blake & Counter-Culture), ‘Transatlantic Visions: William Blake, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Horovitz’
• Jason Whittaker (University of Lincoln), ‘Here be Tygers: from composite art to sequential art’

4.45-5: Closing discussion (Christie Room)

Abstracts and Speaker Biographies

Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Disbound, Encircled, Unrolled: Physical and Metaphorical Materialities of the Book in Blake’s Night Thoughts’

Time gives the Preface, endless Age unrolls

the Volume, (ne’er unroll’d) of human Fate

Edward Young, Night Thoughts, VII, p. 2

This paper explores Blake’s illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) as a process of reflection on the practice of book making. While in his 1793 prospectus Blake had celebrated the invention of a unified ‘method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet’ (E 692), Night Thoughts stages the separation of media. To illustrate Night Thoughts involved a practice of dissecting, breaking up the bindings, and testing the possibilities and limits of the book as a cultural form. When Richard Edwards enlisted Blake for his illustrated edition of Night Thoughts he had copies of first and second editions of the poem disbound from their gatherings and each page mounted in windows cut out of folio sheets so that Blake could encircle the letterpress with illustrations in the expanded margins. Traces of this composite book within the book remain in the edition that Edwards published in 1797 with a selection of 43 engraved illustrations. After discussing the preliminary book-making practice, and Blake’s working copy of Night Thoughts as a book of watercolours, I will focus on the physical, metaphorical, and visual representation of the book in Blake’s practice of illustration, tracing his visual translations of Young’s metaphors of the book of life, time, and the apocalyptic unrolling of the scrolls (Rev 5).

Biography: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) works on Romantic period literature, visual culture, collecting, and the history of the book. She is writing a monograph entitled The Book Unbound. Her most recent publication is the current issue of Word and Image on 'Literature and Sculpture at the Fin de Siecle', which she has co-edited with Stefano Evangelista.

Colin Trodd (University of Manchester): ‘Codifying Vision: James Smetham’s Monuments to William Blake’

James Smetham, the Victorian painter, critic and poet, was bound to William Blake in several important ways. First, he produced a long, semi- fantastical review of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (1863), a reduced version of which was incorporated into the revised and expanded 1880 edition of this classic biography. Second, Smetham developed a strange system of containing, documenting and intensifying vision, what he called ‘monumentalism’, a medium utilised with relish when he set about commenting on the domain of spiritual forces he discovered at work in Blake’s imagination. Third, he produced an Index Rerum (‘index of things’), a vast, leather-bound volume of images, diagrams, charts and other materials, which is held in the Rylands Library, Manchester. As imagined by Smetham, the manuscript is designed to clarify the terms and objectives of human existence. It attempts to provide a visual history of moral life by generating a picture of his interior life and by compiling a pictorial record of attitudes, gestures, and fabrics of vision of the figures, both real and mythic, to whom he felt he belonged. This remarkable work, at once inventory of experience and visionary drama, is spotlighted in a paper that sets out to explain the nature of Smetham’s investment in Blake’s art and the idea of Blakean imagination.

Biography: Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) is the author and co-editor of several books on British painting and culture, including Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999), Governing Cultures (2000), Art and the Academy (2000), Representations of G.F. Watts (2004), and Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World, 1830-1930 (2012). He has co-edited two Special Editions of Visual Culture in Britain: Victorian History Painting? (2005), and William Blake: the Man from the Future (2018/19) He is currently working on a book on Ford Madox Brown’s murals in Manchester Town Hall.

Sarah Haggarty (University of Cambridge): ‘Blake’s namby-pamby? Responses in the Rylands Library to the childlikeness of Songs’

From their earliest circulation within Blake’s lifetime, the lyrics and composite artwork of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) have been understood to be peculiarly childlike, their forms like their author simple and unschooled, yet (in the experiences of some) possessed of an extraordinary power that enabled readers to access their own childhood pasts. My talk will develop this theme of childlikeness—sometimes cast by Blake’s detractors as childishness or ‘namby-pamby’—in relation to the dialogue between ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’, to the poems’ versification and their editors’ responses, and to the Songs’ composite art, and its interpretation by subsequent illustrators. I will do this with reference to a range of examples taken from the Rylands Collection and beyond (including texts by the Rossettis, Gilchrist, Ellis and Yeats, and John Sampson, and illustrations by Celia Levetus, Olive Allen, Honor Appleton, and Jacynth Parsons).

Biography: Sarah Haggarty is a lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Blake’s Gifts (2010) and the edited collection Blake in Context (expected 2018).

David Hopkins (University of Glasgow): ‘‘The Impact of Machines’: Blake, British Surrealism and the Machine’

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that William Blake’s visionary art and writings had a strong impact on British Surrealism. This is generally thought to have been most evident in the lyricism of Paul Nash and other artists linked to neo-romanticism. However, this paper argues for a more robust reception of Blake in terms of the ‘Impact of Machines’ exhibition that took place at the London Gallery in 1938 and, effectively, aligned Blake’s denigration of industrialism with dada and surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. The film maker Humphrey Jennings was instrumental in devising this exhibition and it is possible to argue that Jennings was fundamental to the development of a Blake-inspired dialogue with the machine in British art, with the late surrealist Eduardo Paolozzi being the outstanding exponent of this Blakean legacy.

Biography: David Hopkins is Professor of Art History at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include Dada and Surrealism, post-1945 art and theory, and aspects of twentieth century photography, particularly in relation to Surrealism and post-war American photography. His book Childish Things: The Tradition of Surrealism and the Discourse of Childhood is forthcoming with Yale University Press (2019).

Douglas Field (University of Manchester): ‘Transatlantic Visions: William Blake, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Horovitz’

In June 1965, 7000 people gathered at the Albert Hall in London to hear eighteen poets read from their work, among them Michael Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell and Allen Ginsberg. For many cultural commentators, the Albert Hall reading marked the beginnings of the British Counter-cultural scene which was heavily influenced by the American Beats present, but also by William Blake. Ginsberg and some of the other poets, including the British Beat poet Michael Horovitz, jointly composed an ‘Invocation,’ which they read at the press conference held in advance of the event. Beginning with six lines lifted directly from Blake’s Jerusalem, the ‘Invocation’ explicitly announced that the Albert Hall gathering would be an awakening of Albion: England! awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy Sister calls! * * * * And now the time returns again: Our souls exult, & London’s towers receive the Lamb of God to dwell In England’s green & pleasant bowers.’

Four years later, Horovitz, published Children of Albion, a collection of poems that were inspired by the Albert Hall reading. Blake’s influence is again visible in the title—an appropriation of Blake’s use of the word Albion, the oldest known word for Britain, and the focus of his major poem, ‘Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion.’ As Horovitz has noted, ‘Great-grandfather William has long been among the most seminal & crucial inspirations of all to me. I hardly ever do or say anything to do with poetry and the arts without some reference to or echo of his almost incomparably wide-ranging works…’

Ginsberg’s invocation of Blake has been well-documented; he claimed he had visions of the poet-artist in 1948, and a number of his poems are indebted to Blake. Ginsberg recorded Blake’s poems and repeatedly honoured the British poet, alongside his compatriot Walt Whitman.

This paper explores the phenomenon of Blake in the work of Ginsberg and Horovitz during the mid-1960s in order to consider how and why the nineteenth century poet-painter became such a vital force in two counter-cultural poets from England and the US respectively. What was it about Blake’s life and work that held such as transatlantic appeal? The paper will consider, amongst other topics, the parallels between Blake’s work—a composite art made of words and images—and avant-garde and counter-cultural art of the 1960s, which frequently pushed the boundaries between image and text, as well a as a consideration of how Blake’s importance cut across both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1960s.

Biography: Douglas Field is senior lecturer in twentieth century American Literature at The University of Manchester. He is most recent book is All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin. He is currently working on a new edition of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.

Jason Whittaker (University of Lincoln): ‘Here be Tygers: from composite art to sequential art’

This paper will offer a brief overview of some of the ways in which the composite art of William Blake has been adapted into variant forms of sequential art in graphic novels, concentrating on the use of his poem “The Tyger” in a number of comic book writers including Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Mike Mignola and Korshi Dosoo. This offers an opportunity to sketch out some of the history of interactions with Blake over the past four decades (in a very brief format) as well as demonstrating a number of opportunities by means of which Blake is used as a means for different comic book writers and artists to engage in critical interactions with each other via a series of appropriations and interpretations of the Romantic artist.

Biography: Jason Whittaker is Head of the School of English and Journalism, University of Lincoln. He has written extensively on the reception of William Blake’s work, and is co-editor with Colin Trodd of the forthcoming edition of Visual Culture in Britain dedicated to Blake’s work.