New Facsimile Edition of William Blake’s Notebook Published
SP Books
The facsimile edition of The Rossetti Manuscript
SP Books has releasing a facsimile edition of The Rossetti Manuscript notebook with William Blake's writings and sketches published alongside Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s editorial annexe for the first time.
The Rossetti Manuscript originally served as William Blake’s personal notebook before finding its way to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By editing and transcribing Blake’s poems and circulating the notebook’s contents among his contemporaries, Rossetti contributed to Blake’s popularisation in Victorian Britain.
This edition marks the first time that the pages added by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother are published alongside Blake’s original work.
The Blake notebook was probably begun by William Blake’s younger brother Robert whose sketches can be seen on several early pages. After Robert’s death in 1787, William inherited the notebook, keeping it beside him for more than three decades and adding sketches and writing intermittently, most intensely between 1792 and 1794.
The notebook’s contents cover the span of Blake’s creative output including poetry and drawings as well as quotations from Milton and Shakespeare and biographical references to specific moments in Blake’s career. In addition to the illustrated demons and strange creatures are portraits of Blake himself, the revolutionary Thomas Paine, and of a woman, probably his wife Catherine. Other notable pages showcase the beginnings of some of Blake’s most famous works, such as London, two drafts of The Tyger alongside preliminary sketches for the illuminated poem, and the first verse of The Chimney Sweeper.
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SP Books
Double-page spread from the new publication
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SP Books
Double-page spread from the new publication
After her husband’s death, Blake’s wife Catherine is believed to have given the notebook to the artist William Palmer who kept the notebook for more than 20 years before selling it to the 19-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 been copied out. D. G. C. R."
Following Rossetti’s death in 1882 the notebook was sold at auction to the bookseller, publisher and bibliographer Frederick Startridge Ellis. 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. The manuscript is now part of the collection of the British Library.
