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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
G. E. Bentley, Jr. Blake Records. Second Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xxxviii+943. Illus. $95.00.
I well remember the effect that G. E. Bentley, Jr.'s Blake Records (henceforth BR) had when it first appeared in 1969. In the world of Blake scholarship the most recent full biography then was Mona Wilson's of 1929, revised in 1948; there had been much fruitful research on Blake's life in the interim but there was no reliable single source to which one could turn for information about what was known. Its scope going from the earliest known references to Blake's family to Catherine Blake's death in 1831, Blake Records spared me and many others from many hours' search in libraries to find a single reference. Furthermore, it contained in addition to its chronologically arranged body of texts a number of other important features: six early essays on Blake, a detailed account of Blake's residences, 39 pages of "Blake Accounts," a list of "Engravings by and after Blake," and 60 illustrations. Nineteen years later, enough new material had been discovered to demand an additional, slim volume, and Blake Records Supplement (henceforth BRS), xlvii+ 152 pages long, appeared in 1988. The ensuing 16 years of scholarship have no doubt produced enough additional data for another Supplement, but we must be grateful both to Professor Bentley and to Yale University Press for combining this and the material of BR and BRS into a single easy-to-use volume (henceforth BR2). This review will concentrate on what BR2 contains that its predecessors do not, and the significance of these additions for our knowledge of William Blake.
The front matter of the second edition of BR2 includes some "Red Herrings" (xxv-xxix) corrected from BR. The most important of these are: Blake's father was not (as far as can be proven) a Baptist any more than he was, as some scholars wished to believe earlier, a Swedenborgian; Blake did not take off his hat to the Apostle Paul while walking down Cheapside; and according to Bentley, the Blakes did not sit naked in their garden and invite Thomas Butts to join them, saying "It's only Adam and Eve, you know." The last of these items, however, seems to me still open to discussion. The basis for the story comes from Alexander Gilchrist's great Life of William Blake, 'Pictor Ignotus' (1863). Butts died in 1845 and so could not have been interviewed by Gilchrist, who says only that Butts had been fond of telling the story, "which has since been greatly retailed about town." Blake's friends Samuel Palmer and John Linnell denied the story's validity, and Butts's grandson declared hearing his grandfather say "there was no truth in it" (xxvi). Linnell met Blake in 1818 and Palmer even later; the former was a Baptist with a puritanical streak and the latter a conservative Anglican. Captain Butts's recollection of what his grandfather had said long before may have been fuzzy by the mid-nineteenth century. None of them may have been able to envision the Blake of the turbulent 1790s. It may also be worth noting that some early Quakers would disrupt Anglican services by walking in naked to affirm the sacredness of the body.
Some important scholarship in recent years has been devoted to identifying William and Catherine Blake's parents and grandparents. We now know that Catherine's father, born in Lambeth on 25 December 1714 (1) was named William Butcher, his surname later to become Boucher (possibly, as Bentley suggests, in recognition of Huguenot origins). Catherine's mother, Mary Davis, married William Butcher in her home parish of Wandsworth...
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