1. Blake, Posthumously Printed

My wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels …. (Blake, letter to William Hayley, 16 September 1800; Erdman [hereafter E] 709) His widow, an estimable woman, saw Blake frequently after his decease: he used to come and sit with her two or three hours every day. These hallowed visitations were her only comforts. … He advised with her as to the best mode of selling his engravings. (Anon., “Bits of Biography,” Monthly Magazine [March 1833]: 245)

The following essay,I am pleased to dedicate this essay to my friend G. E. Bentley, Jr., the better bibliographer whose many works on Blake made this one—​and so many others—​possible. I am grateful to Bob Essick for reading numerous versions of each section over the past six years, for his patience, suggestions, and insights. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Shand for copyediting, Grant Glass for securing images for reproduction, and, especially, to Sarah Jones for her many queries and corrections. What errors remain are mine alone. though long, detailed, and comprising thirteen parts, focuses on just seven basic questions: Which of Blake’s illuminated works were produced after his death? Who produced them? Where and when were they produced? How were they sold? Why do so many posthumous copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience seem incomplete? Why did posthumous production stop? Answering these questions requires examining closely and thoroughly the bibliographical evidence provided by posthumous prints as well as new biographical facts about Catherine Blake, Charles Heathcote Tatham, and his son Frederick Tatham. It also requires tracing the probable location and movement between 1827 and 1832 of the rolling press used to print Blake’s plates.

Frederick Tatham cared for the widowed Catherine and came to possess all of Blake’s effects after she died in October 1831. He did not inherit Blake’s works in a legal sense; no will written by Catherine giving the works to him is extant. He claimed in his “Life of Blake” manuscript that she had “bequeathed” to him the copperplates “as well as all of [Blake’s] Works that remained unsold at [her] Death being writings, paintings” (Bentley, Blake Records, 2nd ed. [hereafter BR(2)] 688).John Linnell, Blake’s last patron (1818–27), contested Tatham’s claims and believed Blake’s effects should have gone to Blake’s sister, Catherine. For an overview of Mrs. Blake’s death and what transpired immediately afterwards, see BR(2) 545-47, 551-56. The exact size of Tatham’s bounty is unknown, but it must have been substantial, given Blake’s claim to have “written more than Voltaire or Rousseau—​Six or Seven Epic poems as long as Homer and 20 Tragedies as long as Macbeth” (BR[2] 496). In addition to Blake’s manuscripts, Catherine appears to have inherited over 350 drawings and sketches and at least eighteen copies of Poetical Sketches and Descriptive Catalogue (Bentley, Desolate Market 65-66, 81). Because, as will be demonstrated, she sold relatively few items, “Tatham came into possession of so large a stock of Designs and engraved Books, that he has, by his own confession, been selling them ‘for thirty years’ and at ‘good prices’” (Anne Gilchrist; see H. H. Gilchrist 130). Mrs. Gilchrist was grossly mistaken, however, if she thought that Tatham had been selling Blake’s illuminated books, as though Blake’s stock of them was so large that it took thirty years to deplete.Anne Gilchrist’s idea that Tatham had inherited numerous illuminated books may have come from Allan Cunningham, who stated in 1830 that Blake still had “many copies” at the end of his life (BR[2] 654).

From the known provenances of Blake’s illuminated books and the patterns of production of his late copies from c. 1818 to 1827 and of the copies printed posthumously from c. 1827 through 1832, we can safely infer that Blake left very few complete copies. Catherine inherited Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy N, Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy W, the Small Book of Designs copy B, the highly finished Jerusalem copy E, over fifty loose impressions of There is No Natural Religion, a copy of All Religions are One, loose impressions of The Ghost of Abel and On Homers Poetry, three copies of For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise and many loose impressions, and at least one copy of For Children: The Gates of Paradise.Plate numbers and copy designations for Blake’s illuminated books follow Bentley’s Blake Books. She would have necessarily inherited the nearly 100 miscellaneous proofs and discarded impressions of illuminated plates from 1789 to 1827 that Tatham sold in volumes of Blakeana (see section 10). Blake appears to have left no copies of The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America a Prophecy, Europe a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, The Song of Los, or Milton a Poem. Surely Linnell was not exaggerating when he told George Cumberland on 18 March 1833 that not even Blake had copies of all the titles (BR[2] 554).

Catherine sold Blake’s last copies of Visions and Songs in 1829 and 1830 respectively, leaving Tatham with many loose prints but very few illuminated books. Indeed, Tatham’s stock of “engraved Books” consisted almost exclusively of posthumously printed impressions, which, in terms of the number of individual images or leaves, came to compose the bulk of his “inheritance.” As we will see, America, Europe, and Jerusalem were each printed posthumously three times; For the Sexes was printed to produce enough impressions for four copies; and Songs was printed at least ten times—​possibly eleven—​in three printing sessions. These works account for around 1150 extant posthumous relief etchings, etchings, and engravings. The presence of intaglio impressions and of blemishes in the shallows of relief-etched impressions demonstrates the use of a rolling press—​presumably Blake’s. The sheer number of impressions represents much time and labor and raises critical questions: Who printed them and why? When and where?

Because most posthumously printed copies of illuminated books contain leaves watermarked 1831 or 1832, or both, Tatham, who took possession of the copperplates in the fall of 1831, appears responsible for printing most of them. But because Catherine was still alive during much of 1831, G. E. Bentley, Jr., suspects that she and Tatham collaborated on printing the “copperplates of America, Europe, Jerusalem, and the Songs” (Stranger 442). Angus Whitehead agrees, suspecting that she “may have printed plates of America …, of Jerusalem copies H, I, J …, and of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies a, b, c, d, f, g¹, g², i, j, k, l, [and] o” (“Last Years” 79n35). His research into Catherine’s last residences has led him to suggest that, in the two-room apartment in which she resided for the last two years of her life, she “continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death” (89). In another essay, Whitehead and Mark Crosby portray her as an independent artisan who continued the “firm” of “Wm Blake” (Crosby and Whitehead 106).

Identifying which works are posthumous and who printed them affects our understanding of Blake, Catherine Blake, and Frederick Tatham. Did the widow Blake print and color illuminated plates up until her death? If so, was she, as this would imply, the primary posthumous printer? Or did she collaborate with Tatham in producing posthumous works? Or did Tatham produce the majority of posthumous prints after Catherine died?

2. 1827–28: Catherine Blake Resides in John Linnell’s Studio and Prints Blake’s Etchings and Engravings

Blake died on 12 August 1827 and was buried five days later. On 18 August, Linnell contacted James Lahee, the printer of the Job engravings, about Blake’s rolling press. According to Bentley, Linnell asked Lahee “if he wanted to buy Blake’s press” (BR[2] 467). He presumably intended to raise money for Catherine Blake. According to Whitehead, however, Linnell sought to trade the press for a smaller one (“Last Years” 77). Lahee’s letter to Linnell supports the idea of a trade: Sir In answer to your note as to M^rs Blakes press I beg to say that I am not in want of a very large press at this moment, but if it happens not to be larger than Grand Eagle, and it is a good one in other respects I have one idle which would answer M^rs B’s purpose, and which I would exchange with her for but the fact is that wooden presses are quite gone by now & it would not answer me to give much if any Cash; notwithstanding the circumstances you mention would prevent my attempting to drive a hard bargain …. (BR[2] 467) The phrases “would answer M^rs B’s purpose” and “I would exchange with her” do suggest that Catherine “appeared intent on continuing to print from a rolling press, presumably in an effort to market her husband’s works and support herself” (Whitehead 77). George Cumberland, Jr., thinking that was her intention, wrote his father c. 16 January 1828 that Mrs. Blake “intends to prin[t] with her own hands [her late husband’s works] and trust to their sal[e] for a livelihood” (BR[2] 482). Before we can ascertain how much of her intent she realized in practice and how realistic it was, we need to locate where she set up her printing press.

Lahee informed Linnell that “wooden presses are quite gone by now.” After sending an assistant to evaluate Blake’s press, he declined Linnell’s offer. On 30 August 1827, Linnell moved the old press, not a trade-in, from the Blakes’ residence at 3 Fountain Court, the Strand, to his studio at 6 Cirencester Place, Fitzroy Square (BR[2] 468). Catherine followed two weeks later, on 11 September (BR[2] 471), presumably with her belongings and all of Blake’s books, manuscripts, copperplates, large color prints and their matrices, portfolios of sketches and drawings, temperas and watercolors, frames, canvases, and stretchers, the large painting Blake was working on at the end of his life, and printing and painting supplies, materials, and tools. The move no doubt involved “a great deal of Luggage,” as Blake termed their worldly possessions when, in 1800, they moved from Lambeth to a cottage in Felpham to be near his then-patron William Hayley. But this time, given that Blake had sold his print collection to Colnaghi in 1821, Catherine’s move—​in addition to the rolling press—​probably involved fewer than the “Sixteen heavy boxes & portfolios full of prints” that she and Blake took to Felpham (E 710, BR[2] 99). At Linnell’s studio, she was to be granted a nominal income as housekeeper (BR[2] 538-39). These arrangements were, according to Alexander Gilchrist, “in part fulfilment of the old friendly scheme” (1: 365).The historical record regarding Catherine’s finances at the time of Blake’s death is confusing. She appears to have needed to borrow £5 from Linnell to help with the burial costs, though having just received from William Young Ottley through Linnell £5.5s. for Jerusalem copy F (Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book [hereafter BIB] 357). She is reputed to have received a gift of £100 from the king’s sister Princess Sophia, which she returned, claiming others were more in need than she. Yet in mid-August 1827, encouraged by John Constable, Linnell had taken up her cause with the Royal Academy, which proved unsuccessful (BR[2] 460-63). Returning Princess Sophia’s gift seems unlikely if it had actually been given—​or an extraordinary and inexplicable rejection. The source of the story about the princess was Seymour Kirkup, who was in Italy at the time; that Linnell does not mention the gift makes its existence doubtful. Catherine did withdraw an application for assistance from the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution in early 1830, but appears to have done so because by then she felt financially secure (see section 5).

Linnell had been actively trying to help William and Catherine Blake financially since June 1818, when he hired Blake to assist him in engraving the portrait of James Upton, pastor of the Baptist Church, Church Street. In addition to being a portrait and landscape painter (preferring the latter but needing the former to support his growing family), Linnell was an accomplished, albeit self-taught, graphic artist. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions and was recorded in its catalogues as “painter and engraver” (Graves, Royal Academy 5: 64). By the time he met Blake in 1818, he had already etched or engraved twenty-one portraits and landscapes after his own designs.Linnell’s first engraving, in 1813, was after his portrait of John Martin, pastor of the Baptist Church, Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, which he had joined in 1812. This is where he met Charles Heathcote Tatham, father of Frederick (Story 1: 73). The engraving of Martin, according to Alfred Story, sold “upwards of seven hundred copies” (1: 71). Linnell collected old master prints and had examples of Dürer, Holbein, Raimondi, and Bonasone. Blake’s examining “ancient” engravings with Linnell eventually led to his adopting some of Linnell’s burnishing techniques (see Essick, Printmaker 223) and to the pure engravings of the Job illustrations (see Viscomi, Blake and His Followers 10-11). Linnell was thirty-five years younger than Blake and not in a position to provide charity, but apparently he quickly realized Blake’s precarious financial situation and soon took on the role of agent and, eventually, patron. Over the next several years, he found Blake customers for his illuminated books and designs, bought copies of the illuminated books (including Songs, Marriage, America, and Europe) and designs (including those for Milton’s Paradise Regained), and commissioned works (including designs from Paradise Lost, a second copy of the Job watercolors and the engravings after them, and 102 Dante watercolor illustrations and seven engravings after them). By 1826, he was concerned for Blake’s physical wellbeing.

That summer, Linnell had begun urging the Blakes to move closer to him, first near his cottage in Hampstead and then, when that failed, to Cirencester Place (A. Gilchrist 1: 350-55). On 7 February 1827, he wrote in his journal, “to M^r Blake. to speak to him @ living at C. P” (BR[2] 455), which was at Fitzroy Square, the neighborhood of Blake’s brother James and former patron Thomas Butts.Butts lived at 17 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, between 1808 and 1845 (Viscomi, “Green House” 10-11). As Bentley notes, “The reference does not make clear whether the Blakes were to move into Linnell’s studio, into independent lodgings, or into the building where Blake’s brother James lived” (BR[2] 455n). Exactly where probably did not matter to Blake, because moving required changes and that alone elicited terror and terrible anxiety. He wrote to Linnell a few days later, “I have Thought & Thought of the Removal. & cannot get my Mind out of a State of terrible fear at such a step. the more I think the more I feel terror at what I wishd at first & thought it a thing of benefit & Good hope” (E 782). Instead, the Blakes spent Blake’s last year in their two-room apartment at Fountain Court, where they had lived since 1821.

The Cirencester Place residence appears to have been used as Linnell’s studio. Catherine’s housekeeping would have been less demanding here than at the family’s Hampstead residence, where Linnell and his wife were raising five children between the ages of one and nine—​a brood that would eventually become nine by 1835.William, James, John, Elizabeth, and Hannah, ages one, four, six, seven, and nine (Crouan xxii-xxiii). Whitehead also notes that there is no evidence that Catherine took care of Linnell’s children (“Last Years” 77n15). A working rolling press in the studio would certainly have been to Linnell’s advantage—​as would a tenant who was a skilled printer. Catherine knew how to print both intaglio plates, like Blake’s etchings and engravings, and relief-etched plates, like those making up illuminated books. According to Blake, in 1803 she had “undertaken to Print the whole number of the Plates” for Hayley’s The Life, and Posthumous Writings, of William Cowper, which she did “to admiration & being under my own eye the prints are as fine as the French prints & please every one” (E 726-27). The print-run for the first edition was 500 copies, indicating that Catherine pulled 2000 impressions of four engravings, which earned her “Twenty Guineas” (E 727)—2.5 pence per impression.Hayley recognized the labor involved, noting that Blake “and his good industrious Wife together take all the Impressions from the various Engravings in their own domestic Press” (BR[2] 151). That, however, is not quite accurate. Blake executed six plates in Hayley’s three-volume Cowper and designed one of them, the second plate in volume 2. Catherine printed the four plates in volumes 1 and 2 of the first edition. According to Crosby and Whitehead, she may have printed the second edition as well. The “plates in the first edition are poorly inked and wiped compared with the second edition,” which they read as “suggesting that Catherine improved her techniques with practice” (99) rather than as the work of another printer, which, as Robert N. Essick notes, “may indeed be the case” (Commercial Book Illustrations 86). Crosby and Whitehead also suggest that Catherine may have printed other commercial engravings after 1800 (99). Printing intaglio plates well took skill and experience in both inking the plate and wiping the ink from the plate, first with muslin rags and then with the palm of the hand covered with whiting. Printing intaglio plates without an assistant, as Catherine appears to have done, is especially daunting, because in addition to inking plates, the printer has to cut sheets into leaves and dampen them for printing, to deliver leaves to plates using paper or metal tongs to keep from touching the leaves with inky fingers, to register leaves to plates correctly, to pull plates through the press with the right pressure, and to arrange impressions to dry without offsetting one onto another. Blake told Hayley that Catherine printed the relief-etched broadside Little Tom the Sailor, “a few in colours and some in black which I hope will be no less favour’d tho’ they are rough like rough sailors. We mean to begin printing again to-morrow” (26 November 1800, E 714). Even with an assistant, this was no easy task, because the work comprised four plates: head- and tailpieces etched in white line, long text plate etched in relief, and a narrow, wide colophon (3.5 x 12 cm.) etched in relief. These needed to be inked, aligned on the press bed, and printed on a sheet of paper to reconstruct the composition.Because illuminated plates were not uniform in size, a uniform bottom sheet for the series marking the alignment of plate to paper could not be used. Consequently, paper had to be registered to the plate by eye to create proper and pleasing margins. The quality of plate registration in the early copies of illuminated books is uneven, with plates tilted left and right, off center, or falling or rising on the page with too much top or bottom margin (the Blakes apparently gave themselves a very wide margin of error). These visual effects are obscured when the leaves are presented in mats or cropped to the image. They are also obscured in reproductions, even in the Blake Archive, because designs are cropped for economic and aesthetic reasons: showing entire leaves requires more paper or creates larger files and reduces the size of the printed image (see Viscomi, “Digital Facsimiles”).

While Catherine was staying in Linnell’s studio, Linnell was probably still etching—​or proofing—​eight heads for John Varley’s Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy and/or six facsimile copies of old line engravings after figures in the Sistine Chapel, both published in 1828. She may have helped Linnell proof or print some of his plates, and/or he may have helped her print some of Blake’s intaglio plates, including impressions of the Dante engravings and “Canterbury Pilgrims” that he recorded in his general accounting book for 5 September 1827 (BR[2] 790).The 5 September entry is after the press arrived but before Catherine was in residence. The impressions may have been printed to test the set-up of the press. Seven entries in Linnell’s general accounting book between September 1827 and March 1828 are “To Mrs Blake.” These range from £1 to £5, which could account for her assisting him at the press (BR[2] 791). The latter impressions may have included the three she sold on 8 January 1828 to Henry Crabb Robinson and Barron Field (BR[2] 480, 705-06).

With her press (and Linnell’s studio) set up for intaglio printing, Catherine seems likely to have also printed copies of For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, Blake’s emblem book comprising twenty-one small etchings. Blake had first executed the work in 1793 as For Children: The Gates of Paradise, which he advertised in his prospectus of 1793 as “a small book of Engravings” (E 693). For Children has eighteen plates in two states; five copies are extant (A-E; Bentley, Blake Books [hereafter BB] 186). Around 1818, Blake brought all but plate 11 to a third state and added three text plates (19, 20, and 21), transforming the work into For the Sexes. He appears to have printed For the Sexes copies A and B together, on paper approximately 16 x 11 cm., watermarked J Whatman / 1818, possibly a ninth of a foolscap sheet (42.5 x 34.5 cm.).Copy A is untraced, but its recorded leaf size matches the leaf size of copy B (BB 194), three of whose leaves are watermarked J Whatman / 1818. Linnell acquired both copies, probably directly from Blake, though when and how are not known.Linnell’s general accounting book for the period has an entry “For prints” on 10 December 1820, for £1 (BR[2] 780), which has no accompanying receipt and may account for the sale. Blake apparently put For the Sexes away until at least 1825, the date of the J Whatman paper in copies C and D—​whose plates 1-10 and 13-18 are in their fourth states, with plates 11, 19, and 21 in their second states, plate 12 in its third state, and plate 20 in its first state. The 22.8 x 14.3 cm. leaves are most likely quarter sheets of printing demy (56 x 45.6 cm.). He returned to the plates one more time, bringing all of them to a new state. Copy E appears to have been the first copy printed with the plates in their final states, presumably c. 1826–27.Plate 12 is in four states; plates 11, 19, and 21 are in three states; plate 20 is in two states; the rest are in five states. For a detailed description of all five states of plate 7 (“Fire”), see Essick, “Marketplace, 2016,” illus. 2. The unmarked leaves are 26.2 x 18.8 cm., possibly quarters of crown sheets (approximately 51 x 38 cm.).

Bentley suspects that copies F, G, H, I, J/N, K, and L were all printed posthumously by either Catherine or Tatham because they are incomplete, larger than copies A-E, and many of them “can be traced to Tatham” (BB 196-97).Recently rediscovered copy N (Blake Books Supplement [hereafter BBS] 79) clearly completes copy J, hereafter referred to as copy J/N. Materially, though, these seven copies form two different groups. The seventy-one impressions forming copies F, G, H, and I were printed on leaves approximately 34 x 24 cm.—​apparently quarters of super royal paper (68 x 48 cm.)—​watermarked J Whatman / 1826. Copies G and I are missing plate 19 (“The Keys of the Gates”) and copy F is missing plates 19 and 20. Copy H is missing plate 19 and eight other plates, which, on one hand, suggests that the twelve impressions in what we call copy H may be duplicate impressions from the printing session responsible for the three near-complete copies. On the other hand, the leaves of copy H were stabbed, as were those forming copies F, I, J/N, and D, which suggests that copy H was once complete. If so, then its printing session produced around eighty impressions, four per plate minus plate 19, enough to form copies F, G, H, and I, with copy H now missing eight other plates. The impressions making up copies J/N, K, and L appear also to have been printed per plate, not per copy. The plates were printed cleanly on unmarked leaves approximately 37 x 26 cm., quarters of imperial sheets (74 x 54 cm.). The two groups’ different sizes and types of paper strongly suggest different printing sessions; the absence of plate 19 in copies F, G, H, and I and its presence in copies J/N, K, and L suggest two different printers.Copy L’s plates 2, 19, and 20 were added to For Children copy D by Tatham.

At first glance, Catherine appears responsible for copies F, G, H, and I and Tatham for copies J/N, K, and L. But this division is highly unlikely because of what the two groups share. As noted, copies F, H, and I from the first group and copy J/N from the second group were stabbed. This mode of binding was used for illuminated books and possibly undertaken by Catherine; it was certainly known to her as Blake’s assistant in the printing and compiling of illuminated books (BIB 102-05). Stabbing signals her hand in the production of copies F, G, H, and I and excludes Tatham’s from them and from copies J/N, K, and L because none of the illuminated books that he is certain to have printed was stabbed (see section 6).In Blake and the Idea of the Book I missed the significance of these bibliographical facts and recorded the posthumous impressions of For the Sexes as the work of Catherine and/or Tatham (367). I believe now that Blake produced the assortment of proofs and impressions making up copies J/N, K, and L, that Catherine produced copies F, G, H, and I, possibly with the assistance of Linnell, and that Tatham did not print any of Blake’s intaglio plates. The grey and black washes in copy F impressions also support the idea that Catherine was responsible for printing and compiling copy F and, presumably, its sister copies, G, H, and I. Similar washes are in “Joseph of Arimathea” 2F, an impression printed on paper watermarked 1828 (Essick, Separate Plates 5).This impression was “very probably acquired by George Richmond (from Mrs. Blake or Frederick Tatham?)” (Essick, Separate Plates 5). America copy N and Europe copy I, which she appears certainly to have printed (see section 5), were also touched up in black and grey washes throughout. Washes, like stabholes, are absent in the illuminated books that Tatham printed. Washes are also absent in For the Sexes copies A-E, the known lifetime copies that Blake printed, as well as in copies J/N, K, and L, which aligns the production of this second group of copies with Blake. The unmarked leaves of copies J/N, K, and L are similar in texture to the unmarked leaves of copy E, raising the possibility that Blake printed copies E, J/N, K, and L in the same printing session, proofing and printing enough impressions of his plates in their final states to form three or four copies.All fourteen leaves in copy K are approximately 37 x 26 cm.; six of the ten leaves in copy J are also this size. The impressions in For the Sexes copies E, L, and N were trimmed (BB 194-95, BBS 78). The idea that copies J/N, K, and L were printed by Blake is also supported by the order in which the two groups were produced, which can be determined by two scratches on plate 2. Neither is present in copies A through D, one of them is present in E, J/N, K, L, G, H, and I, and both of them are present in copy F, indicating that the group to which copy F belongs—​F, G, H, and I—​was printed after copies E, J/N, K, and L.The shared scratch is across the “s” in “Paradise”; the unique scratch is across the “P” in “Paradise,” which apparently occurred when the plate was printed for copy F. Plate 2 has other scratches, most noticeably three at the top left corner under the “F” in “For” of the title; these scratches first appear in copy E and remain in all subsequent copies. Blake apparently did not find the accidental scratches at the top of plate 2—​or the scratches in other plates—​troublesome.

Bentley is right to trace many copies of For the Sexes to Tatham. Indeed, the number of copies that Tatham inherited also supports the idea that Blake, not Tatham, printed copies J/N, K, and L. He inherited For Children copy D and For the Sexes copies C, D, E, and F, and probably copies G and H (BB 201-03).According to a 1929 Sotheby’s sales catalogue, copy I was “believed” to have been given to Joseph Dinham (BB 203), who was one of six people at Catherine’s funeral (BR[2] 547). He was a sculptor and protégé of the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, who knew Blake and had acquired a copy of the Job engravings in 1826. Dinham may have learned of Blake through Chantrey and acquired copy I directly from Catherine, whom family tradition had assumed to be Blake. As we will see, America copy N and Europe copy I were also printed by Catherine but thought by late owners to have come directly from Blake. He gave copy F as a gift “to M^r. Bird on his attendance at the Funeral Oct 23^r.^d. 1831—​being the day on which the widow of the author was Buried in Bunhill Fields Church Yard” (BB 202). He sold copies C and D c. 1833 to Samuel and Thomas Boddington, respectively. He sold For Children copy D with plates 2, 19, and 20 from For the Sexes copy L to Frederick Locker (BB 192); he also sold Locker For the Sexes copy E (BB 202). Tatham’s possession of four or more copies in late 1831 probably would have removed his incentive to print more copies during this time—​between 1831 and 1833. Moreover, the illuminated books he did print are all on J Whatman paper dated 1831 and 1832, and the press needed to print them was no longer accessible after 1832 (see section 9). The dates of exchanges—​copy F followed by copies C, D, and E—​also rule out Tatham as having extracted plate 19 from Catherine’s copies (F, G, H, and I) because he did not extract plate 19 from the other copies he obtained from her. Plate 19 is probably missing from copies F-I for the reason proposed by Bentley: “Pl. 19 was engraved on the verso of pl. 20 and was thus easy to overlook” (BB 196).Bentley deduces that plates 19 and 20 share one piece of copper from their shared plate sizes. Blake’s relief-etched plates provide many precedents: the plates for Experience, Europe, and Urizen, for example, are on the versos of the plates for Innocence, America, and Marriage, respectively. Etching on both sides of an intaglio plate, however, was extremely unorthodox. Printers would assume the verso of an etching, engraving, or stipple was blank, because a design on the verso could be easily scratched while the plate was on the work bench or brazier, where the recto was inked. Scratches would show up in the verso’s printed design as thin black lines across white paper. Blake could relief-etch both sides of plates because such scratches across the relief line system were filled in by ink and/or hidden in finishing. Plate 19, in other words, was not printed. This mistake in production makes it probable that copies F–I were printed apart from copies J/N, K, and L, that the two groups were produced by different printers, and that one of the printers knew the work better than the other.

In addition to the copies mentioned above, Tatham also sold loose impressions from copies J/N and L as part of volumes of prints and proofs that he put together for sale (BB 131, 203, BBS 79). For Tatham to have sold lifetime copies and impressions means that Blake printed most—​if not all—​of his late copies of For the Sexes on speculation, not commission. Catherine appears to have done the same, adding four copies to the copies and pile of impressions that she had inherited, presumably hoping to build up her stock of this title in preparation for selling. She appears not to have realized that objective: the monies from the sales of the copies that she and Blake printed went to Tatham. That cold economic reality casts doubt on the assumption that Catherine had succeeded in supporting herself by printing Blake’s works. As we will see in section 12, the market she needed for Blake’s work to provide a viable income did not yet exist; the prices that his illuminated books were fetching were not sufficient to make her or anyone financially independent—​including Tatham, who sold Blake’s works for thirty or more years to supplement his main income, which came from portraits in pastels and watercolors.

One copy of For the Sexes that did not pass through Tatham’s hands was copy K. Linnell owned it and almost assuredly acquired it either from Blake or Catherine Blake, because by early 1831 Linnell was on litigious rather than speaking terms with Tatham, who accused Linnell of owing Catherine money for the Dante designs and later claimed them as his own (BR[2] 537ff., H. H. Gilchrist 130). Linnell’s owning copy K is interesting because he already owned copies A and B. As noted, plates 1-18 in copies A and B were in their second and third states, c. 1818, with plates 19-21 in their first states. The copy K impressions were in their final states, c. 1826–27, which included visual effects created by burnishing that Blake learned from Linnell (Essick, Printmaker 223). Perhaps Blake made a gift of the loose impressions to show his patron the latest versions of these designs, or Catherine gave them in thanks for his hospitality. However Linnell obtained them, they are from a larger assortment of prints and proofs that have been mistakenly identified as posthumous. Removing this late assortment of prints—​copies K, J/N, and L—​increases the number of lifetime proofs and impressions of For the Sexes and leaves only copies F, G, H, and I as posthumously printed. This latter group was printed by Catherine, presumably at the Cirencester Place studio, when she and Linnell were printing and proofing various intaglio plates.

3. 1828: Catherine Blake Leaves Linnell’s Studio under the Auspices of Frederick Tatham

When Catherine Blake left Linnell’s, she appears to have printed intaglio works but not yet any of the relief-etched illuminated books. At the very least, Cumberland Jr.’s comment about her intending to print her husband’s works—​by which he appears to have meant the relief etchings, but perhaps also Blake’s book of emblems—​suggests that she hadn’t done so as of mid-January 1828. She apparently moved to Tatham’s with all of her and Blake’s belongings, including the press. Although the press’s presence at Tatham’s is not documented textually, it is evinced materially, as we will see, in the form of copies of America and Europe that can be traced back to Catherine during the period she was under his care. The exact lengths of her residencies with Linnell and Tatham are not clear, however, nor is the location of the latter residency, because Alexander Gilchrist is mistaken about when she left Linnell’s and silent on the location of Tatham’s “chambers.”

According to Gilchrist, Catherine remained at Linnell’s for some nine months; quitting in the summer of 1828, to take charge of Mr. Tatham’s chambers. Finally, she removed into humble lodgings at No. 17, Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, in which she continued till her death; still under the wing, as it were, of this last-named friend. The occasional sale to such as had a regard for Blake’s memory, or were recommended by staunch friends like Mr. Richmond, Nollekens Smith and others, of single drawings, of the Jerusalem, of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, secured for her moderate wants a decent, if stinted and precarious competence. (1: 365) Catherine sold Songs copy W in March 1830 for £10.10s. to John Jebb, Bishop of Limerick (BB 423). Jerusalem copy E, elaborately colored and valued by Blake at “Twenty Guineas” (E 784), certainly one of Catherine’s most valuable single artifacts, was sold by Tatham (BB 259-60). But this oversight is less troublesome than the many confusions and ambiguities in this oft-quoted passage.

Whitehead dates Catherine’s departure from Linnell’s studio as “c. March 1828” (“Last Years” 80), noting that Linnell’s poor health because of overwork may have figured into her decision to move to Tatham’s (80n42). An entry in Linnell’s accounting book for April 1828 reads, “To Mrs Blake (furniture sold) [£]1 10” (BR[2] 791). With either a March or an early April departure, she appears to have stayed with Linnell less than seven months, not nine. And rather than staying with Tatham for two years, as is generally thought, she appears to have resided with him for only one year, arriving by April 1828 and leaving by early April 1829. Tatham implies a one-year residency with these parameters in a letter of 11 April 1829,Bentley dates the letter as 11 April (BR[2] 755) and as 1 April (BR[2] 495). In Blake Records Supplement [hereafter BRS], he dates it 11 April 1829 (90n178). In private conversations, he confirmed the date as 11 April 1829. in which he states that Catherine had already moved to her own apartment. Writing to an unknown patron who had inquired about Blake’s books (see section 5), he apologized for his delayed response, explaining that as a “consequence of M^rs. Blake’s removal from Fountain Court to N^o. 17. Upper Charlotte St Fitzroy Square, a wrong address was put on the letter at Fountain Court and it was only received by her the day before yesterday” (BR[2] 495).Tatham does not mention Catherine’s yearlong stay with him (or the almost seven months she stayed with Linnell), implying, intentionally or not, that she had been living independently since the death of her husband. Her first forwarding address from Fountain Court was Linnell’s studio at 6 Cirencester Place, but Linnell is unlikely to have forwarded the 1829 letter to Tatham, as Bentley suggests (BR[2] 495n), because Catherine had left Linnell’s studio in spring 1828. The letter was presumably forwarded from Fountain Court to one of the Tathams’ residences, either 1 Queen Street, Mayfair, or 34 Alpha Road.

Bentley correctly records that Catherine left Tatham’s residence in spring 1829, but he also dates her stay with Tatham as 1828–30—that is to say, as being concurrent with her lodgings at 17 Upper Charlotte Street (BR[2] 754-55). He notes that Catherine’s address is in doubt, because in Tatham’s letter of 18 October 1831 and in the documents for her burial of 20 October 1831 the address is recorded as “Upper Charlton Street” (BR[2] 754n). Whitehead’s impressive detective work has confirmed that Catherine moved directly from Tatham’s to 17 Upper Charlton Street, where she stayed from April 1829 until her death on 18 October 1831.For a summary of the confusion over Catherine’s last address, see Whitehead, “Last Years” 86-87. This was a two-room apartment (Whitehead, “Last Years” 89) in the Fitzroy Square neighborhood, where Cirencester Place was located and where Catherine presumably had friends. She did not maintain concurrent residencies but, as we will see, probably had access to Tatham’s residence during this period. Whitehead also discovered that in early 1829 Catherine had inherited £20, along with some furniture, from her brother-in-law Henry Banes, which enabled her to move and to begin living independently.Banes, who died in January 1829, was the husband of Catherine’s sister and the Blakes’ landlord at 3 Fountain Court. See Whitehead, “The Will of Henry Banes.”

According to Bentley, Catherine “moved in with the Tathams in Lisson Grove to look after them” (BR[2] 755). But recently discovered information reveals that Frederick Tatham and Louisa Keen Viney, of Essex, were married 25 April 1831—​by which time Catherine had been in her own place at 17 Upper Charlton a full two years.The marriage register can be accessed at the Tatham Family History website, under Frederick Tatham <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php?​mediaID=109&​medialinkID=155>. This resource came online in the past decade and continues to grow. She never “look[ed] after” Tatham and his wife; the idea that she had done so and took an apartment of her own only after Tatham married appears to have originated with Tatham himself. In his “Life of Blake” manuscript, written c. 1832, he states: After the death of her husband she resided for some time with the Author of this[,] whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her; until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere affection & regard. She then returned to the lodging in which she had lived previously to this act of maternal loveliness—​in which she continued until she was decayed by fretting & devoured with the silent Worm of grief …. (BR[2] 690) Bentley’s understanding of the phrase “domestic arrangements” to mean marriage appears to have been widespread. According to Henry Curtis, the historian of the Tatham family, “It would appear, from the facts recorded by Gilchrist, therefore, that Mrs. Blake removed from Fredk. Tatham’s chambers on his marriage, and to lodgings almost certainly near at hand.”Quoted in the entry for Frederick Tatham at the Tatham Family History site <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​getperson.​php?​personID=I0840&​tree=Tatham>. Curtis’s typescript, “Notes for a Pedigree of the Tathams of Co. Durham, England,” is the basis of much of the genealogy in the site, as well as the current ODNB entries for Tatham, C. H. Tatham, and Richmond (C. H. Tatham’s son-in-law). Curtis presumably read Tatham’s “Life of Blake” as first reproduced in A. G. B. Russell’s The Letters of William Blake (1906).

Tatham’s explanation for Catherine’s departure is ambiguous. She took care of his domestic arrangements, he says, “until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office,” adding that she “returned to the lodging in which she had lived previously to this act of maternal loveliness—​in which she continued until she was decayed by fretting & devoured with the silent Worm of grief” (emphasis added). As noted, Catherine did not have an apartment concurrent with her residency with Tatham—​and she did not return to Linnell’s studio. Tatham presumably meant that she returned to her previous Fitzroy Square neighborhood. The “changes” that “took place” were most likely in Catherine’s physical condition in 1830 and 1831. The phrase “in which she continued” appears to modify the “act of maternal” kindness in the form of housekeeping, implying that she remained “still under the wing” of Tatham, as Gilchrist states. But Tatham is clear that Catherine’s declining strength ended her caregiving, which means that she continued to live (and to decline physically) in her own lodgings for the last two years of her life. By mid-1830, as we will see, Tatham appears to have moved to 20 Lisson Grove North. The distance between her Fitzroy Square residence and 20 Lisson Grove North was three miles round-trip, which seems unlikely to have been routinely undertaken by the increasingly frail Catherine.Bentley implies that she may have walked from her lodgings to Grosvenor Place with Lord Egremont’s painting under her arm in August 1829 (BR[2] 498). This distance was about three and a half miles round-trip. If she did walk it over, that does not mean she was in equally spry shape in 1830 or 1831.

4. 1828–29: Catherine Blake Resides in Mayfair at the Office and Studio of C. H. Tatham

Catherine Blake moved to Linnell’s studio on 11 September 1827; her printing press preceded her by about two weeks. By March or early April 1828, she had moved out, presumably with all her belongings, including the press. At the time, Frederick Tatham, twenty-two years old, was still living with his parents, Harriet and Charles Heathcote Tatham, at 34 Alpha Road, Lisson Grove, a relatively new development in Marylebone, west of Regent’s Park. The Alpha Road residence also housed seven of Frederick’s younger brothers and sisters: Robert, Edmund, Georgiana, Maria, Augusta, Harriet, and Julia, all between the ages of three and sixteen.C. H. Tatham’s first child, Charles Howard, born 11 December 1802, died seventeen days later; Lydia, the fourth child, born 27 February 1807, died 22 March 1808. The last seven of his twelve children, starting with Julia, born 24 May 1811, and stopping with Robert Bristow, born 30 May 1824, were born at Alpha Road, suggesting that it had become his main residence by 1811 (Tatham Family History site). Frederick’s unmarried twenty-four-year-old sister Caroline (b. 1803) was possibly still in residence. Their brother Arthur (b. 1808), the future clergyman, was away at Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1827 to 1831.Arthur Tatham (1808–74) was for more than forty years rector of Broadoak and Boconnoc in Cornwall and, from 1860, prebendary of Exeter Cathedral. This large house belonged to his father, an important neoclassical designer of ornaments, furniture, and silverware, as well as a successful architect.C. H. Tatham was “very involved with the family firm of Tatham Bailey & Sanders” (Galinou 478). His brother Thomas (1762–1818) was apprenticed to John Linnell, the great eighteenth-century cabinetmaker and a distant relative of the Tathams. His brother John was a solicitor, who “dealt with the legal side of Tatham’s transactions” (Galinou 478).

In Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb, Mireille Galinou explains how Alpha Road was developed from the Eyre estate. C. H. Tatham bought the lease of a house on 2 May 1808 from Alexander Birnie, the leaseholder; the architect and builder was probably Thomas Martin (449, 478).Galinou discusses Tatham’s influence “in the early days of the St. John’s Wood estate” in chapters 3 and 8. Birnie was his neighbor, at 35 Alpha Road. Galinou reproduces an illustration of Tatham’s house (fig. 56, p. 118), which reveals that it was two floors with an attic and commanded a “vast expanse of ground” (158). It was not a small dwelling. The Tate’s description of Linnell’s watercolor Tatham’s Garden, Alpha Road, at Evening (illus. 1) gives an accurate idea of the size and grandeur of the “cottage,” though it supposes that Tatham, not Martin, was the architect: The scene is in the garden or grounds of Linnell’s friend Charles Heathcote Tatham’s house, 34 Alpha Cottages, Alpha Road, Marylebone, London. Alpha Road ran between Park Road and Lisson Grove, to the west of Regent’s Park. Houses on either side of it, designated Alpha Cottages, began to be built c. 1808 (the first year in which they were rated), in what had formerly been open fields. Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772–1842), at this period a flourishing architect with a practise in Queen Street, Mayfair, designed and built 34 Alpha Cottages for himself; but his house was no cottage in the ordinary sense. Marylebone Parish Rate Books (Marylebone Library, Archives Department) show that it had the highest rateable value in Alpha Road (£120 p.a.; most of the other houses were rated below £50); street plans show 34 Alpha Cottages as a sizable detached house, set at an oblique angle to the road in large grounds.“See R. Horwood, Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, 3rd ed., 1813; Peter Potter, Map of the Parish of St. Marylebone, 2nd ed., c.1824. It should be noted that some renumbering of Alpha Cottages took place between 1812 and 1826, in the course of the development of the road, and possibly because one or more of its semi-detached houses came under single ownership; rate books at the beginning of that period number Tatham’s house first as 36, then as 35 and finally as 34. The street was styled Alpha Cottages until 1826, when it became known as Alpha Road” (The Tate Gallery 1984–86: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions Including Supplement to Catalogue of Acquisitions 1982–84 [London, 1988] 74-75, quoted at <http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​art/​artworks/​linnell-​tathams-​garden-​alpha-​road-​at-​evening-​t04139>). The house was already renumbered 35 Alpha Road by 1824 (see Boyle’s Directory for 1824), and the location was already then known as Alpha Road.

The property can be seen in the 1819 Horwood map (illus. 2, circled in blue), the 1834 Mogg’s map (illus. 3, marked with the number 1), and the 1834 St. Marylebone map (illus. 4, shaded in pink).

C. H. Tatham also had a house at 1 Queen Street, Curzon Square, in Mayfair.Tatham Sr. was recorded in the Royal Blue Book for 1825 as “Charles Heathcote Tatham Esq., 1 Queen St., Mayfair, and 35 Alpha Road, Regents Park.” In Clayton’s Court Guide to the Environs of London, 1830, Frederick Tatham appears as “F. Tatham Esq., Alpha Road, Paddington.” Because all of Tatham’s correspondence with the Eyre estate went to this address until 1831, Galinou believes the house at “Alpha Road was a second residence (his main address being in Mayfair)” (478).Galinou notes that C. H. Tatham “may have relied on hackney coaches (the taxis of the day) or his own two feet for travelling back and forth, as he does not appear to have added stables and a coach house to the Alpha Road property” (251). However, the Alpha Road residence had a coach house and stables by 1828, and probably earlier (Marylebone Rate Books [hereafter MRB] 1828, reel 55). The house in Mayfair was rated at £66, however—​about half that of the other houses on the street and half that of his “cottage.” It appears never to have been a family residence, since none of Tatham’s children was born there. His first child, Charles Howard, was born at Park Street, Mayfair, as was Frederick, his third child, in July 1805. This was the address C. H. Tatham recorded in the 1802 Royal Academy exhibition catalogue. His fourth child, Lydia, was born at York Place, Marylebone, as was his fifth, Arthur, in September 1808. He used the York Place address for the 1807 Royal Academy exhibition. He appears to have moved from York Place to Alpha Road by 1811. By 1809, while living at York Place, he began to use the 1 Queen Street house as his office and studio; he is listed there in the Royal Academy exhibitors’ catalogues from 1809 until 1831 (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 324-25).The Park Street and York Place residences appear to have been family residences as well. No births are recorded at the Queen Street address, suggesting it was used exclusively as his work space from 1809 onward. Frederick Tatham listed the same address for the Royal Academy exhibition in 1825 (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 325), for the British Institution exhibitions in 1828 and 1829 (Graves, British Institution 528), and for the Royal Society of British Artists in 1829 (Whitehead, “Last Years” 83). He used 20 Lisson Grove for the Royal Academy shows from 1830 to 1832.

Whitehead has reasonably proposed that Catherine lodged in rooms above the Mayfair office, rather than at Alpha Road, with Frederick Tatham spending weekends with his family and most weekdays in the studio in Mayfair, presumably one of the rooms upstairs, and thus a relatively limited amount of time with her (“Last Years” 82-83). Though smaller than neighboring houses, the Mayfair office was certainly large enough for a tenant and her belongings, which included a press and many copperplates. Tatham Sr. had known Catherine since at least 1799, when he acquired Blake’s America copy B (BB 100).On the verso of the frontispiece, Tatham inscribed: “From the author / to C H Tatham Oct^r. 7 /1799.” The signature matches those in letters C. H. Tatham wrote to Sir John Soane, which are in the Soane Museum. Blake owned copies of Tatham’s Three Designs for the National Monument (1802) and Etchings, Representing the Best Examples of Ancient Ornamental Architecture (1799[–1800]), neoclassical line drawings that Tatham had etched himself and that had become an important and influential sourcebook for architects and designers (BB 697).C. H. Tatham “spent two years working on the 102 plates showing the best examples from [Henry] Holland’s collection, and published in 1799 Etchings of ancient ornamental architecture drawn from the originals in Rome and other parts of Italy during the years 1795 and 1796. Of the 210 subscribers, almost a third were architects and craftsmen.” A second edition, containing more than 100 plates, appeared in 1803, and a German translation was published at Weimar in 1805. A third edition was published in London in 1810, and often reprinted. In 1806 Tatham published the companion Etchings Representing Fragments of Antique Grecian and Roman Architectural Ornament; in 1826 the two works were issued together (ODNB). On 15 March 1827, Blake wrote Linnell to tell him that he “saw M^r Tatham Sen^r yesterday he sat with me above an hour & lookd over the Dante he expressd himself very much pleasd with the designs as well as the Engravings” (E 782-83). The visit, which appears to have taken place at Fountain Court, is further testimony of C. H. Tatham’s regard for Blake. After Blake’s death, he appears to have been one of the “staunch friends like Mr. Richmond, Nollekens Smith and others” that Alexander Gilchrist claims wanted to help Mrs. Blake (1: 365).

C. H. Tatham, only fifty-six years old in 1828, would presumably have welcomed the opportunity to provide living and studio space to the widow of an old friend. And like his friend Linnell, he knew how to use and value a rolling press. He had been trained in drawing—​and presumably etching—​by the engraver John Landseer, and had been collecting prints since late 1796, after he returned from Rome and inherited “a valuable collection of prints.”A transcription of C. H. Tatham’s unpublished autobiography, written in 1826, is online at the Tatham Family History site. He was an active designer, still exhibiting at the Royal Academy (fifty-three designs between 1797 and 1836).C. H. Tatham did not exhibit in 1832, 1833, or 1834, for good reasons (see sections 9 and 10), but he returned in 1835 and again in 1836. At his Alpha Road home, he hosted many gatherings of artists; indeed, it had become “a focus of artistic activity” (ODNB). Blake met the sixteen-year-old Richmond at the Alpha Road home (A. Gilchrist 1: 297). Other visitors included Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, Benjamin Haydon, and possibly Welby Sherman, a member of the Ancients.Haydon boarded at the house of Tatham’s friend John Charles Felix Rossi at 21 Lisson Grove North, an adjacent neighborhood that Frederick Tatham would move to c. 1830. By 1817, Rossi’s prosperity had declined, and he rented rooms in his house to Haydon, who remained a tenant until 1822. Haydon executed a pastel portrait of C. H. Tatham in 1823 (said to be “remarkably similar to a painting ascribed to Linnell”) <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php​?mediaID=279​&medialinkID=375>. Several of these, including Calvert and Sherman, were influenced by Blake to try their hands at engraving and wood engraving; in 1827, Richmond had engraved “The Shepherd” and “The Fatal Bellman.”

Catherine stayed in Mayfair for about a year, from April 1828 until late March or early April 1829. This is apparently where Frederick Tatham drew her portrait, which is dated “Sept^r. 1828” (illus. 5).

Linnell’s pencil drawing of Tatham (illus. 6) may also have been executed there, or at 34 Alpha Road, around this time, when Linnell and Tatham were still on friendly terms (see note 116). While in residence, Catherine appears to have spent little time at the press. She probably printed an impression of “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour” (c. 1822), which Evans listed as “a Stereotype design for Pilgrim’s Progress, presented by Mrs. Blake to Mrs. Tatham, 1828, rare.”This impression is listed in A. E. Evans & Son, [after 1844] catalogue (Bentley, Sale Catalogues). It is not recorded in Essick’s Separate Plates and is presumably untraced. Its date suggests that she may have printed it—​and not just given it—​while at Mayfair, because the only “Mrs. Tatham” at the time was Frederick Tatham’s mother, Harriet. Catherine may have expressed her gratitude to Tatham’s parents for their assistance in providing her a clean place to stay—​perhaps humorously or ironically alluding to her “sweeping” house and thus to her assistance in keeping it that way. This white-line etching, printed from the plate’s surface like a relief etching, may have been her first printing of a relief plate since the death of Blake. Her gift to C. H. Tatham—​Blake’s engraving of the Rev. Robert Hawker, inscribed “M^r C Tatham / The humble is formed to adore; / the loving to associate / with eternal Love / C Blake” (BR[2] 398)—​may have been printed while she was at Linnell’s, along with other intaglio works.Essick thinks the note was written during her widowhood (Separate Plates 189); the impression itself may have been new, as Whitehead notes (“Last Years” 84).

In effect, Frederick Tatham arranged for Catherine’s lodging rather than providing it. The person responsible for providing it was C. H. Tatham, who paid the rates where she appears to have resided. Frederick Tatham seems to have intentionally concealed the details of these arrangements, presumably because he wanted to appear as her only gracious benefactor; in his “Life of Blake,” he also conceals Linnell’s generosity in helping Catherine immediately after Blake’s death (BR[2] 495n). He has not been alone in omitting C. H. Tatham’s role in Blake’s biography. The 1896 DNB entry for Richmond records his meeting Blake at Linnell’s house, despite Gilchrist’s account. Richmond’s son, however, verified Gilchrist’s claim: “The home of Mr Tatham the architect, was a centre for the visits of remarkable men, and prominent among them was William Blake at the period when he was living at 3, Fountain Court. My father met him for the first time at Mr Tatham’s House in Alpha Road, St John’s Wood” (Stirling 24).Linnell introduced Richmond to C. H. Tatham as a potential drawing teacher for Tatham’s daughter Julia (whom Richmond married in January 1831). Linnell introduced Palmer to C. H. Tatham as well as to Frederick, who, like Richmond and Palmer, was then training to be a painter (in addition to being a sculptor). Nevertheless, the 2004 ODNB does not mention the place of their meeting. Tatham Sr.’s hand in helping Frederick Tatham help Catherine Blake appears to have gone unrecognized in modern Blake studies, except by Whitehead.

5. 1829: Catherine Blake Prints Copies of America and Europe in Mayfair after Moving to Her Apartment

Catherine Blake moved from Curzon Square to Fitzroy Square in early spring 1829, around the time she printed America copies N and Q and Europe copies I and L. These were probably the first posthumously printed relief-etched illuminated books, with one pair possibly commissioned and the other printed on speculation. They appear to have been printed after she moved to her apartment in Fitzroy Square. She presumably retained access to the studio and brought Blake’s other works—​the drawings, manuscripts, paintings, sketches, and books—​with her to the new apartment, where she set herself up as Blake’s agent and made “the occasional sale” (A. Gilchrist 1: 365). Crosby and Whitehead suspect that she also set up her press in her apartment and that she “had enough room here to print as well as colour and sell her husband’s works” (104; see also Whitehead, “Last Years” 89 and n137). The technical, material, and circumstantial evidence examined below suggests, however, that the press remained in Tatham’s Mayfair studio until the end of 1832 and that Catherine did not print any copies of Jerusalem or Songs. She did print two copies of America and two copies of Europe at Mayfair in spring 1829, which Tatham helped her sell, as is revealed by his letter of 11 April 1829. As noted, Tatham was responding to an inquiry that arrived shortly after Catherine left. The unknown person Tatham addresses had read in John Thomas Smith’s Nollekens that Catherine was alive, needed to sell copies of Blake’s books, and was doing so “at the original price of publication” (BR[2] 494-95, 626). Tatham replies: In behalf of the widow of the late William Blake, I have to inform you that her circumstances render her glad to embrace your Kind offer for the purchase of some of the works of her departed husband. … This elevated widow is now seeking a support during the remainder of her exemplary course, through the medium of the enlightened and the generous with no other hope than that she will ultimately be joined to that partner once more …. I can only add, that, should you, Sir, be inclined to possess, for the embellishment of your own collection, and the benefit of the widow, any of the enumerated works, they shall be carefully sent to you upon your remitting the payment, and I will take proper care that your Kindness shall be rewarded with the best impressions …. (BR[2] 495-96, emphasis added)

Tatham’s letter is known only as transcribed by Thomas Hartley Cromek in his “Recollections of Conversations with Mr. John Pye, London 1863–4” (BR[2] 871n37). Bentley suggests the engraver Pye may have been the recipient (BRS 90n178), but he also states that the recipient “may have been James Ferguson or the Earl of Egremont” (BR[2] 496). Both bought Blake works from Catherine around this time. Lord Egremont bought Blake’s painting of Spenser’s The Fairie Queene (Butlin #811), delivered that August; Ferguson bought illuminated books, presumably what Tatham meant by “impressions.” The letter was presumably the kind Tatham sent to Ferguson (and may have been the one he did send) and to other potential patrons. The phrase “enumerated works” implies an accompanying list; Tatham’s letter to Ferguson, which alluded to seven large color prints, included a “List of Works” (BR[2] 497, A. Gilchrist 2: 262).

According to Gilchrist, Ferguson (1791–1871) was “an artist … from Tynemouth” who wrote and “took copies of three or four of the Engraved Books” (1: 366). According to Bentley, Ferguson was in Tynemouth between 1824 and 1830, with a stay in London in 1827, though where in London and exactly when he does not say (“Peripatetic” 19). “In a List of Works by Blake, offered for sale by his widow, to Mr. Ferguson … occurs the following item:—​A work called Outhoun. 12 Plates, 6 inches more or less. Price, £2 2s. 0d.” (A. Gilchrist 2: 262). The “List of Works,” like Ferguson’s letter, is not extant, nor is a work called Outhoun. Blake did, however, create a character named Oothoon, the main character of his Visions of the Daughters of Albion, apparently listed by Tatham from memory.Visions has eleven plates, though in his letter to Dawson Turner Blake advertised it as “folio” with “8” designs for £3.3s. (E 771). In his 1827 letter to Cumberland, Blake priced it at £5.5s. (E 784). Ferguson’s copy of Visions was in A. G. Dew-Smith’s collection that sold at Sotheby’s in 1878 (Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes” 60). Dew-Smith of Cambridge or his agent may have acquired the work at the 1871 sale of the effects of Ferguson. Ferguson’s copy of Visions appears certainly to have been one of the three beautiful copies (N, O, and P) printed c. 1818, the last copies of Visions that Blake printed. The process of elimination indicates Ferguson acquired copy N because copies O and P had been sold by this time.Visions copy P, Thel copy N, and Marriage copy G were printed and finished in the same style and bound together; they were likely commissioned by an unknown collector and possibly initiated the c. 1818 printings of illuminated books (see BIB chapter 33). Visions copies O and N were printed on speculation, the former acquired by Crabb Robinson for £1.1s. (BB 477), presumably between 10 December 1825, when he met Blake (BR[2] 419), and August 1827, when Blake died.

Ferguson’s other “Engraved Books” almost certainly included America copy N and Europe copy I, both posthumously printed.America was initially designed as a monochrome work, with white-line hatching creating textures and tones; so, too, was its sister work, Europe, but the latter was finished in 1794, after Blake had begun printing his books in colors. Europe copy H is the only lifetime monochrome copy. Their owner, Sir George Grey (1799–1882), inscribed on the front flyleaf of America copy N: I purchased this book at the sale of the
effects of a deceased artist, (I now forget his
name), who had obtained it direct from
Blake. The paper bears the paper mark
of 1812. This copy therefore although
purporting to be printed in 1793 and
1794—​was probably printed after 1812, when
he was living in South Molton Street.Grey’s inscription is transcribed from a digital image of the flyleaf, as shown in the Auckland Libraries online digital gallery. There are three distinct passages on the flyleaf, and it is clear that Grey and subsequent owners and curators thought these copies of America and Europe were lifetime copies. Although Grey clearly thought his copies were lifetime impressions, they came from Catherine, presumably through Ferguson, who died in Middleton-in-Teesdale (in the general vicinity of Grey, of Falloden, Northumberland) in 1871 (Bentley, “Peripatetic” 13). The sale to Ferguson of three “Engraved Books”—​Visions, America, and Europe—​was likely facilitated by Tatham, acting “in behalf” of Blake’s widow and rewarding patrons “with the best impressions.”

America copy N and Europe copy I were printed as a matching pair on the same size and type of laid paper in the same printing session and were similarly stabbed through three holes. They were produced with America copy Q and Europe copy L, which were also printed as a pair, though on wove paper (see below). For Catherine to print copies of America and Europe as matching pairs implies that one or both titles were no longer in stock. Both pairs were printed in black ink with full borders on quarto-size leaves: 32.6 x 23.6 cm. for America copy N and Europe copy I and 29.5 x 22.1 cm. for America copy Q and Europe copy L. Blake advertised America as folio in the 1793 prospectus and both America and Europe as folio in his 1818 letter to Dawson Turner (E 771), and all lifetime copies were printed with leaves that size—​approximately 37 x 27 cm., which are quarters of imperial sheets. However, the last copies of America and Europe that Blake printed, copies O and K respectively, for Linnell in 1821, were 30 x 24 cm., closer in size to those printed by Catherine.

The paper and ink of America copies N and Q and Europe copies I and L are unlike the paper and ink used in the sixteen copies of four illuminated books printed on paper watermarked J Whatman / 1831 and J Whatman / 1832. Moreover, the copies with these J Whatman watermarks were all printed differently from the two pairs of America and Europe. The different materials and modes of printing point to different printers. First, consider the paper Catherine used. All eighteen leaves of America copy N and all seventeen leaves of Europe copy I are marked either R & T or ruse & turners / 1812 (BB 89, 142). The eighteen leaves of America copy Q and sixteen of the seventeen leaves of Europe copy L are marked either T Stains or T Stains / 1813 (BB 89, 142). Because printing papers did not come this size (Turner 209ff.), the leaves for both pairs of copies had to have been cut from larger sheets. For all but one of the leaves to be watermarked is unique among the illuminated books. Normally, an illuminated book has at most twenty-five percent of its leaves marked because Blake routinely produced his leaves by quartering large sheets. For example, America copy O and Europe copy K have thirty-six quarto-size leaves (trimmed to 30.3 x 24.0 cm.) of J Whatman / 1818, 1819, 1820 paper, but just ten watermarks, indicating that Blake probably quartered ten sheets of royal paper (approximately 63.5 x 50.8 cm.) to produce forty leaves. The ten copies of six illuminated books that Blake printed c. 1818 reveal the same pattern of paper preparation. The leaves in these copies, about twenty-five percent marked ruse & turners / 1815, appear to have been quarter sheets, with some quarters halved to produce the leaves for Songs copies T and U.The sheet size was possibly medium, approximately 58.4 x 45.7 cm. The leaves for Visions copies N, O, and P, Milton copy D, Marriage copy G, Urizen copy G, and Thel copies N and O were approximately 28 x 23 cm. untrimmed. That leaf size halved (or the sheet cut into eighths) produced leaves of 22 x 14 cm. for Songs copies T and U.

Catherine appears to have continued this practice when she prepared the leaves for For the Sexes copies F, G, H, and I, quartering eighteen or so super royal sheets of J Whatman / 1826. Blake had used J Whatman papers almost exclusively for books produced around and after 1818, which strongly suggests that these sheets were part of Blake’s stock, possibly acquired to print new copies of For the Sexes. The ruse & turners / 1812 and T Stains / 1813 papers were most likely not part of that stock. Blake never printed on T Stains papers, and the ruse & turners papers were laid, whereas Blake printed on wove paper (including the ruse & turners / 1815 paper used c. 1818)—​and he emphasized that he did so in the 1793 prospectus.Blake wrote in his prospectus, “The Illuminated Books are Printed in Colours, and on the most beautiful wove paper that could be procured” (E 693). Before this, however, he printed Marriage copy L (plates 25-27, “A Song of Liberty”) on laid paper (with a C BALL watermark). This, the only illuminated book printed by Blake on laid paper, was etched in relief and printed c. 1790 in dark brown ink on a single sheet folded to make a pamphlet of two leaves, each leaf 21.2 x 17.3 cm., with plate 25 in the first of two states (see Viscomi, “Evolution,” 296 and n22). Nearly all the leaves are watermarked, indicating that the leaves of both stacks were almost certainly quarters cut from larger sheets. Catherine is very unlikely to have purchased from a stationer just the sections of the sheets with the visible watermark, or, for that matter, 1812 and 1813 paper c. 1829. Someone, perhaps C. H. Tatham, Frederick Tatham, or Linnell, may have given her remnants of sheets from his studio.The R & T and ruse & turners / 1812 papers are from different moulds and were possibly quarters of royal sheets (63.5 x 50.8 cm.); the T Stains and T Stains / 1813 papers are probably from the same mould, possibly medium sheets (58.4 x 45.7 cm.), with the date cut from the former. Both papers are thinner than the J Whatman Blake used more often. The marked quarters may have been set aside for aesthetic reasons because the marks were visible in wash and watercolor drawings—​even without back lighting.

The T Stains watermark, for example, runs the width of the leaf, along the top (illus. 7) or bottom margin; its “T” and “S” are 2.5 cm. high, and the other letters are 1.7 cm. high. The oddity here is not the use of old paper. Blake used a ruse & turners / 1810 writing paper for sixteen of his last twenty extant letters between 31 January 1826 and 3 July 1827 (BB 273, 274n27).Only three of these late letters have the watermark, suggesting that Blake had three sheets of laid writing paper that he cut to produce leaves. The leaf size of the 25 April 1827 letter to Linnell is 20.9 x 16.8 cm., which is one-sixth of royal paper (63.5 x 50.8 cm.). He may have used the same 1810 paper for a pencil drawing from 1820 (Butlin #748). What was unusual, in fact unique, was printing on T Stains paper, printing on laid paper, and printing exclusively on watermarked leaves.

While the stacks of T Stains / 1813 and ruse & turners / 1812 papers were unlikely to have belonged to Blake, the leaves were prepared and printed in a manner that connects them to Blake and Mrs. Blake and differentiates them from impressions on the J Whatman / 1831 and 1832 papers. The 1812 and 1813 papers, like all of Blake’s papers, were printed damp. Consequently, lifetime impressions, which shrank upon drying, are slightly smaller than the impressions on J Whatman / 1831 and 1832 papers, which reveal no shrinkage in the image, making it clear that leaves were printed dry. The America and Europe impressions on T Stains / 1813 and ruse & turners / 1812 papers are the size of lifetime impressions and are consistently 2 to 4 or 5 mm. smaller than those printed in the copies of America and Europe on J Whatman / 1832 papers.Dampened papers, wove and laid, shrink about two to four percent. For example, the Experience title plate in Songs copies A, T, and AA is 12.5 x 7.2 cm. (left x top). In posthumous copies a and l, which were printed on heavy and thinner J Whatman paper respectively, it is 12.7 x 7.4 cm. (left x top). Larger images reveal the difference between plates printed on damp and dry paper more readily. For example, impressions of America plate 1 in copies F, H, and O range between 23.3 to 23.4 x 16.9 cm. (left x bottom); in America copy P, printed on J Whatman / 1832 paper, plate 1 is 23.9 x 17.3 cm. Europe plate 1 in proofs and in copies K and L ranges from 23.5 to 23.6 x 16.9 cm. (right x top); in Europe copy M, printed on J Whatman / 1832 paper, plate 1 is 23.9 x 17.2 cm. Jerusalem plate 45 in copy A is 22.55 x 16.25 cm. (right x top); in copy H, printed on J Whatman / 1831, it is 22.9 x 16.5 cm.

Catherine knew how Blake printed his books because she assisted him in printing them. Like Blake, she dampened the leaves for her copies of America and Europe. She also appears to have printed the plates in an intaglio ink. This is the kind of ink Blake used in illuminated printing, the sign of which is a more reticulated and less smooth or flat surface than is produced by relief ink (BIB 98-100). Reticulation, usually most noticeable in flat relief areas, can be obscured by washes. In monochrome works, such as Jerusalem copies A and F, America copies B and E, and Europe copy H, Blake brushed over the printed ink in black water-based washes, deepening the black outlines and plate borders and smoothing out splotchy areas. Catherine strengthened the plate borders in America copy N (illus. 8) and Europe copy I (illus. 9) in grey and black washes.

America copy Q and Europe copy L, which were printed with copies N and I, were posthumously colored in the early twentieth century (BB 105, 160), which covered up most of her touch-ups. The repetition of light grey lines delineating clouds in plate 5 of America copies N and Q (illus. 10, 11) reveals her hand, however, and shared accidentals among impressions in the two copies indicate that they were printed in the same session.

The numbers in black ink at the top right corner of the plates, where Blake usually placed his numbers, also appear to have been her work in all four copies. The number “14” on Europe copy I (illus. 12) is similar enough to the “14” in copy L (illus. 13), the posthumously colored copy, to strongly suggest one hand responsible for both.Bentley notes that the plate numbers in Europe copies I and L “have little authority” (BB 144n9). He also records, however, that their binding order is the same as Linnell’s Europe copy K (BB 146). As noted, Catherine may have had Linnell’s America copy O and Europe copy K—​the last copies of these books that Blake printed—​in mind when she printed her copies. The plate order in copy I, though, has a variant. The order of copy K is 1-5, 10, 9, 6-8, 11-18; it is the same in copy L (which is missing plate 3); in copy I (also missing plate 3), plate 5 follows 9. If the plate numbers in copies I and L are by Catherine, then copy I’s unique plate order was her doing. Europe copy M, printed by Tatham, follows the plate order of copies D, E, F, and G.

The variation among the shapes of numbers (for example, the bottom loop of the “3” or slant of the “6”) within these four copies is no greater than the variations within lifetime copies of illuminated books, where nip, brush, or ink could make for slight differences. In fact, the numbers on these posthumous copies, presumably made by Catherine, resemble the numbers on lifetime copies as closely as do the numbers in Blake’s letters and receipts (for instance, the Butts account of 1805). Note, for example, the “14” in America copy O (illus. 14). This is curious, but not necessarily surprising; if Catherine was responsible for numbering the plates, then her emulating the style of Blake’s numbers would be expected.

Although Catherine printed America copy N and Europe copy I on laid paper and America copy Q and Europe copy L on wove paper, she appears to have printed the four copies in the same session. Printing books in different sizes in the same printing session is to print per copy rather than per plate. From 1789 through 1795, Blake printed per plate, which yields many impressions that are then compiled into copies (BIB 153-57). He began to print per copy after 1800, when he returned to printing a few copies of Innocence and Experience (BIB 377-78), often one copy by commission and another for stock. By printing leaves from different piles, he was able to create copies of the same book in different sizes during the same session. Blake appears to have used this method to print Songs copies W and Y at the same time on quarto and octavo leaves respectively.Calvert owned Songs copy Y, presumably ordering it directly from Blake; Catherine owned Songs copy W, presumably printed on speculation. That Visions copies N and O also sold long after they had been printed with copy P indicates that they were produced on speculation. The mode in which America copies N and Q and Europe copies I and L were produced suggests Catherine’s hand because it resembles what she and her husband had done previously. That they were printed in black intaglio ink on dampened paper and touched up in grey and black washes differentiates them from Jerusalem copies H, I, and J, America copy P, Europe copy M, Songs copies a, b, c, d, e, f/j, g, h, i, and p, and loose impressions, and Innocence copy T—​that is, from all the books printed on J Whatman / 1831 and 1832 papers. These were printed in sepia, a hue never used by Blake, or black. These inks transferred more solidly because they were designed for relief rather than intaglio printing; they were not touched up with added washes; and they were printed on dry paper.

Catherine seems to have produced her copies of America and Europe to fill an order by Ferguson, probably in spring 1829, but no later than 1 August 1829, when her fortunes changed dramatically and removed the need for her to print copies of illuminated books (see below). At any rate, America copy N and Europe copy I were sold together, presumably with Visions copy N and apparently to Ferguson. The sister copies—​America copy Q and Europe copy L—​were probably printed on speculation. They appear to be the copies Palmer claimed belonged to Robert Peel (BB 105), whose brother-in-law, the Rev. Cockburn, lived in Frederick Tatham’s Lisson Grove neighborhood (though, as we will see in section 9, not as Tatham’s neighbor, pace Whitehead, “Last Years” 82n64).Rev. Cockburn married Elizabeth Peel, daughter of Sir Robert Peel and sister to Robert Peel, the future prime minister. According to The Records of the Cockburn Family, she “brought him some forty or fifty thousand pounds” (Cockburn and Cockburn 67). According to Galinou, Cockburn’s house, known as Lisson Lodge, was not listed among the Eyre developments, so it is probable that it was outside the Eyre estate (private correspondence). Tatham apparently made the sale, but whether he did so for himself or for Catherine is not known.

On 1 August 1829, Catherine delivered Blake’s large watercolor of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to Lord Egremont (BR[2] 498), whose wife had much earlier commissioned The Vision of the Last Judgment and Satan Calling Up His Legions (Butlin #642, 662). Lord Egremont’s payment of £84 was probably enough “to have kept Catherine out of want for the rest of her life” (BR[2] 499). This was a goodly sum, considering that “Blake’s yearly income does not seem to have gone much above £100, and sometimes it was probably not much more than £50” (BR[2] 812). This gift, combined with the £20 she received in early 1829 from her brother-in-law Henry Banes (along with some furniture) and, as we will see, the monies she made from sales by the end of 1829, improved Catherine’s financial situation enough that she withdrew her application for assistance from the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, 5 January 1830 (BR[2] 501-02). With “the widow of the late William Blake” now having some financial security, the incentive to print more monochrome copies of the books—​which could earn at most only a pound or two (see section 12)—​apparently disappeared. The first period of posthumous printing appears to have ended in spring 1829, but no later than midsummer 1829, by which time Catherine produced four copies of For the Sexes (F-I), two copies of America (N and Q), two copies of Europe (I and L), a few impressions of “Canterbury Pilgrims” and the Dante engravings, and at least single impressions (though possibly more) from “Joseph of Arimathea,” “The Interpreter’s Parlour,” and the Rev. Hawker portrait.

6. 1831–32: Frederick Tatham Prints Illuminated Books in the Mayfair Studio

There are no further signs of posthumous printing until 1831, at the earliest. J Whatman / 1831 paper was used in Jerusalem copies H, I, and J and in ten copies of the Songs, which also include a few leaves watermarked 1832. Jerusalem copies H and I also have eight leaves watermarked J Whatman / 1832 of the same weight and texture as their 1831 leaves. America copy P and Europe copy M are exclusively on J Whatman / 1832 paper, the same weight and texture as the 1832 leaves in copies of Jerusalem.The Vivian Gallery proofs of Europe plates 6, 7, and 12 are in reddish-brown ink on unmarked paper; their proofs of America plates 2, 5, and 15 are in the same ink on J Whatman / 1831 paper (BB 143, 89). Innocence copy T is on J Whatman / 1831 paper.Blake Books records Innocence copy T as possibly having a “4” in its watermarks (BB 366); with that information, I speculated that posthumous impressions may have been printed as late as 1840 (BIB 426n10). Further study of posthumous productions made me doubt this date. In 2013, I checked the watermarks with the assistance of Stephen Ferguson, curator of Rare Books at Princeton, and ascertained that the number in question is a “1.” A heavier weight J Whatman / 1831 paper was used in Songs copies a, g, and i. Catherine Blake died in October 1831, so an 1831 watermark in a book does not rule out her participation in that book’s production—​but an 1832 watermark does. Her participation is similarly ruled out in books with leaves of 1831 and 1832 paper, and in books whose leaves were printed dry in either black or sepia relief ink—​which includes all impressions on 1831 and 1832 papers. Books sharing these material characteristics appear to share the same printer, and that printer was not the person who printed copies of America and Europe in black intaglio ink on damp leaves of T Stains and R & T papers. The technical and material evidence points to at least two distinct printers, whom I believe to be Catherine Blake and Frederick Tatham.

Most of the posthumous Songs impressions printed in black, with few exceptions, are on 1831 paper; most of the sepia impressions are on 1832 paper and, with few exceptions (specifically the light sepia impressions in copies a and h), were better, more professionally printed than those in black inks. Image quality and watermarks suggest that the black impressions of Songs were Tatham’s first attempts at printing illuminated plates and that he improved as a printer with experience.The difference in print quality in posthumous copies of Songs between the black and most sepia impressions and the different leaf size for the latter (6 to 9 cm. shorter than the black impressions), along with the higher quality printing in posthumous copies of Jerusalem, America, and Europe, also raise the possibility of more than one posthumous printer. Someone other than Tatham, perhaps, printed either the black or sepia impressions. He appears certainly to have begun his posthumous productions after the death of Catherine. As noted, she used Blake’s printing method, and Tatham is very unlikely to have used a different printing method if he were collaborating with her. Moreover, he is also unlikely to have printed the books at the scale he did while the plates and press were her property. Indeed, producing sixteen or more copies of four illuminated books (Songs, America, Europe, and Jerusalem) reflects a commitment in time, money, and labor that dwarfs Catherine’s project and that would not have been in her physical or financial best interests. The amount of paper that Tatham used—​over 200 large sheets—​reflects different motivations and objectives from the first round of posthumous printing. He was now acting “in behalf of” himself and presumably supplementing Catherine’s “List of Works” for sale with posthumous copies of the books. Posthumous printing, in other words, appears to have begun in earnest only after Catherine died—​when he took possession of press, plates, and all of her and Blake’s effects and used different printing materials and practices with different objectives. Given the dates of his paper, Tatham may have started printing in late 1831 and continued in 1832 with new sheets of J Whatman paper; he may also, however, have started in 1832 with different stacks of the same size J Whatman paper purchased in that year. No posthumously printed impression has a watermark later than 1832, the year Tatham appears to have lost the use of the rolling press (see section 8).

Tatham used J Whatman / 1831 papers of different weights to print Songs and Jerusalem; he used both weights for Songs but only the lighter weight for Jerusalem. The J Whatman / 1832 sheets were the same size and weight that he used for Jerusalem, which enabled him to continue printing Jerusalem and to print America and Europe. A few sheets of the 1832 paper were also used in copies of Songs. The untrimmed leaves of Jerusalem copy J, all on J Whatman / 1831 paper, have seventeen watermarks among them. Jerusalem copies H and I, with 1831 and 1832 papers, have twenty-two and fifteen watermarks respectively. One expects, however, twenty-five watermarks per copy, as in Blake’s copy A of Jerusalem (BB 226), which signifies twenty-five sheets quartered to produce 100 leaves.The leaves of Jerusalem copy A were trimmed to 32.7 x 26.5 cm. The other four complete copies of Jerusalem printed by Blake have either twenty-three or twenty-four watermarks, indicating that their leaves were quarters of large sheets. Where are the missing watermarks in these copies of Jerusalem? They are in Songs. The sheets appear to have been royal in size (63.5 x 50.8 cm.), which Tatham cut in fours to produce leaves for Jerusalem, America, and Europe, and in sixes, nines, and twelves to produce the leaves for Songs.

Tatham printed America copy P, Europe copy M, and Jerusalem copies H, I, and J in a dark sepia (reddish-brown) ink (illus. 15).

The first three of these works were acquired from Tatham by Samuel Boddington by 1833.Samuel Boddington also owned For the Sexes copy C, Descriptive Catalogue copy E, and a colored copy of Young’s Night Thoughts, presumably all purchased from Tatham. From Linnell he acquired copies of Illustrations of the Book of Job and “Canterbury Pilgrims,” 30 March 1835 (BR[2] 793-94). Earlier that month, Boddington wrote Linnell about wanting to show him “my small Blakes coloured by himself” (10 March 1835, BR[2] 793n). He may be referring to There is No Natural Religion copy C or D; their earliest provenances do not rule this out. If so, he probably acquired it from Tatham; numerous impressions of this work were inherited by Tatham and sold with other works once belonging to him by an unknown collector at Sotheby’s, 29 April 1862 (see Viscomi, “Printed Paintings,” appendix 4).  Jerusalem copy I apparently was sold—​or went through an intermediary—​to Butts, from whose collection it sold at Sotheby’s in 1852 with his other illuminated books (four bought from the Cumberland sale in 1835, BB 158). Jerusalem copy J, which appears to have been printed exclusively on J Whatman / 1831 paper and perhaps finished before the others, was acquired by James Vine, who met Blake through Linnell, possibly as early as 1818. This was the year Linnell met Blake and, as Cumberland Jr. wrote, “promised to get him some work” (BR[2] 340-42). Vine bought Milton copy D and Thel copy O, both printed c. 1818, Songs copy V, printed c. 1821, and Illustrations of the Book of Job, printed in 1826. He bought the posthumous Jerusalem copy J from Tatham between 1832—​when it appears to have been printed, along with copies I and H—​and 1838, when it sold at auction with Vine’s other illuminated books (BB 261). Because of his litigious relation with Tatham, Linnell seems unlikely to have steered Vine or anyone else to Tatham after Catherine died. Somehow, though, Blake’s former patrons learned of Tatham’s project, or perhaps Tatham sought Butts, Vine, and other collectors out, surmising (correctly) that they would want to add a copy of Jerusalem, Blake’s masterpiece, to their collections of illuminated books.

Posthumous copies of the Songs vary widely in paper size, image quality, and ink color. As recorded in Blake Books, they were printed in “grey,” “black,” “brown,” “red,” “reddish-brown,” “yellowish-brown,” and “orangish-brown.” Keynes and Wolf describe the ink colors as “grey,” “dark grey,” “light brown,” “red-brown,” “sepia,” “dark brown,” and “orange-brown” (66-69). The colors of ink are less diverse than recorded, however. Color is to a great extent subjective and its saturation (that is, intensity) is affected by various factors: the quality and amount of pigment in the ink, the thinness of the ink layer, the type and condition of the paper when printed (damp or dry), the amount of pressure used to transfer the ink, and the kind and amount of oil in the ink. Moreover, hues can vary within a copy depending on when and how the ink was replenished and applied during the session. What Bentley and Keynes and Wolf refer to as “grey,” for example, splotches black where the ink builds up (for instance, along the plate’s sides), revealing that it was a black ink applied thinly. Brown runs along a continuum of dark reddish brown (sepia) to a lighter, slightly more saturated reddish to orangish brown. Some copies of Songs, such as copies e and h, have several shades of “brown.” The colors in posthumous copies of Songs appear to have been various hues of black and sepia.Blemishes from the shallows combined with light and uneven printed relief lines are common among the posthumous impressions. These visual effects suggest second pulls—​that is, impressions printed from plates that were heavily printed but not reinked between pulls. Blake used second pulls to great effect in many of his color prints, large and small. They were fainter and consequently needed more finishing and touching up—​of which he took full creative advantage. Tatham took second pulls but did not touch up. For Tatham, pulling second impressions was an occasional gamble.

Tatham printed posthumous Songs copies b, c, e, and f on J Whatman / 1831 paper in the same reddish-brown ink used in Jerusalem, America, and Europe. He sold copy b to Hannah Boddington (BB 426)—​presumably sometime in the early 1830s when he was selling works by Blake to her brothers (BB 260)—​and copy c to her brother Samuel around the same time. Copy f was bound by 1869, with an inscription on a flyleaf noting that an early owner “dated the book 1836”; it was last seen in 1919, but seems to have reappeared in 1925 as copy j, colored in Blake’s late style and sold as an original copy (BB 427-28). Tatham printed Songs copies d and p in black ink and copies a, g, and i in pale black ink.The impressions in Songs copy d are mistakenly recorded as “sepia,” “brown,” “brownish black,” and “dark sepia” (Keynes and Wolf 67, BB 370, BBS 112, and Rutter and Gallup 330, respectively). Copy h comprises impressions from various printings, but may have been initially printed in black ink (see section 7). The first owners of copies e and f/j and the black copies are not known.Copy d was cut down and bound at the back of a copy of J. J. G. Wilkinson’s edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (London: W. Pickering, 1839) and owned by the editor William Odell Elwell by 1840 (BB 426). Elwell introduced Wilkinson to Tatham in 1838 (BR[2] 557) and was presumably Songs copy d’s first owner.

Songs copies a, g, and i were printed lightly and unevenly on leaves watermarked J Whatman / 1831 that are heavier, with a rougher surface, than the J Whatman / 1831 paper in Jerusalem and other copies of Songs. These heavier leaves, approximately 24.4 x 19.3 cm. with uneven edges (as though torn from sheets along a ruler rather than cut), appear to be sixths of approximately twenty-seven royal sheets.This thicker paper was also used for a few leaves in copies m and k and plates 1 and 52 in copy h, which measure 0.34 mm. thick. All other leaves in copy h are 0.18-0.20 mm. thick, according to Essick, who measured them with a Brown & Sharpe blade micrometer calibrated to 0.01 mm. The images are more heavily embossed on the thicker leaves than thinner paper but are also slightly larger than lifetime impressions, signaling that they, too, were printed dry. Despite the different type of paper, the manner in which copies a, g, and i were printed suggests that Tatham was the printer and that he printed these copies in a separate session.

Plate 23 (second plate of “Spring”) of Songs copy i was washed very simply (illus. 16), reminiscent of the first copies of Innocence (1789), and thus superficially resembles Catherine’s work.

As Essick notes, he and I were doubtful but entertained the possibility that Catherine had been the colorist, although “com[ing] to no firm conclusions” (“Marketplace, 2014,” illus. 3).Bentley has speculated that “the somewhat simplistic coloring could … have been added before 1831 by Catherine Blake … or by an anonymous hand before or after 1831” (“Checklist, 2014,” illus. 1a). Now, after spending much time and effort analyzing the materials, practices, and styles of the posthumous printers, I am convinced the coloring is not by her—​nor could it be. I agree with Essick that it is not colored by either of the different hands responsible for washing plates 38, 40 (illus. 17), and 45 in his Songs copy h. The copies h and i impressions, representing three or four different colorists, are not up to the standards of Catherine’s coloring—​or Tatham’s.Tatham was primarily a portrait painter and miniaturist, working in watercolors and pastels, specializing in portraits of children. He had exhibited two portraits at the Royal Academy in 1825 and a study of orphans for a monument in 1831 (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 325); he also exhibited drawings at the British Institution in 1828 and 1829 (Graves, British Institution 528). He began his career as a sculptor but exhibited works only in 1830, 1831, and 1832. In 1830, he exhibited a marble bust of C. H. Tatham; in 1831, a marble bust of the Earl of Eldon as chancellor; in 1832, the same and a marble bust of John Coley (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 325).

First, the coloring of plate 23 was essentially washing within the lines (blue, pink, and yellow) and over the lines (tendrils, in green). A grey wash of diluted ink was placed over the figure’s neck and chin and on the chest to define the arm, which merely follows the printed hatching. While the dark wash hides and distorts the child’s face, the faces of the sheep lack the fine pen and ink outlining that is required of their forms—​and that is present in all copies colored by the Blakes. This lack of outlining eliminates details of chin, nose, ears, and eyes, and, in the case of the sheep on the left, the head itself. The colorist may have had a very early copy in mind, or simply allowed the printed lines and masses to define the forms, but he or she clearly did not know the design or have a feel for it. Indeed, the plate 23 impression in Songs copy C (illus. 18) reveals the kinds of subtle touches necessary to pull out the printed design’s forms and facial features—​which in turn reveal the difference between a colorist who knows the drawing and one who merely colors it in.

Second, it is extremely unlikely that Catherine would have collaborated with Tatham only to color one of the 165 or so impressions printed on these heavier leaves. It seems equally unlikely that she would have allowed or tolerated Tatham to print so heavily (and poorly) on dry paper—​or that he would have considered doing so in her presence. Third, it is nearly inconceivable that Catherine would have resorted to a style of coloring that she hadn’t used in thirty-five years in place of the more sophisticated style that Blake had evolved and practiced in the last decade of illuminated printing. Finally, the material evidence demonstrates that the posthumous impressions and copies of illuminated books divide into two coherent but sequential and mutually exclusive groups. Hence, it is safe to conclude that Tatham printed copy i, but its plate 23 was colored by an unknown hand.The coloring of illuminated books always falls into one of three categories: Blake, Catherine Blake, and posthumous. These hands are not difficult to identify or differentiate. If the coloring is not by one of the first two colorists, then it is necessarily posthumous. There are at least ten different posthumous colorists that I know of: Innocence copy T; Songs copy j; Songs copy M; two different ones in Songs copy e/K; the same one in America copy Q and Europe copy L; plate 23 in Songs copy i; different colorists in plates 38 and 40 (and possibly in the very slight washes in plate 45) in Songs copy h; and one colorist in plates 7, 10, and 33 in the Juel-Jensen cluster.

Catherine appears to have played no part in producing any of the posthumous copies of Songs. These copies were printed by Tatham and advertised in his “Life of Blake” manuscript. At first, he seems to have written his biographical sketch, at least in part, “to recommend the sale of Jerusalem (E)” (BB 259-60). As noted, Jerusalem copy E was certainly one of the most valuable works that he inherited from Catherine; the three monochrome copies of Jerusalem that he printed were also valuable assets. Tatham could have relied, however, on the biographies of Smith (1828) or Cunningham (1830) to introduce Blake to Jerusalem’s purchasers. He appears to have intended to publish his “Life of Blake” manuscript, because in it he advertises the Songs and himself as the source of new copies of them and more. He states that he has the “Type plates” of Songs from Catherine herself, “as well as all of [Blake’s] Works that remained unsold,” which included “writings, paintings, & a very great number of Copper Plates, of whom Impressions may be obtained” (BR[2] 688).

Tatham had apparently taken full ownership of all the copperplates, which in turn implicates him as the person who altered at least four of the plate designs in Songs. In plate 9, the first plate of “The Little Black Boy,” about 1 mm. of the mother’s hair and back have been trimmed away, presumably with a burin (illus. 19)—​easily detected when compared to a lifetime impression (illus. 20).

The bag of the chimney sweeper in Experience (plate 37) has also been trimmed back about 1 mm. Essick has pointed out similar tool work in the general title plate, where “some of the relief surfaces left of the upper figure’s left upper arm, above his head (thereby eliminating part of his left hand), and along the lower edge of his left leg and foot” have been cut away (“Marketplace, 2013,” illus. 3). He has also found white-line work on the adult figure’s left leg in the Experience frontispiece in copy h. These alterations place the plates in new states. Essick has speculated that these “2^nd st. alterations” may have been made by Catherine or Tatham “after Blake’s death” (“Marketplace, 2013,” illus. 3). Since altering an artist’s original design is such a drastic thing to do, and since Catherine appears to have had no hand in printing the Songs and thus no hand in preparing the plates for printing, the revisions were made either by Blake at the very end of his life, perhaps in preparation for copies of Songs he hoped to print in 1827, or, more likely, by Tatham.If Blake made these revisions, then they are in Songs copy X, printed for Thomas Griffiths Wainewright in 1827 and the last copy Blake is known to have printed. I have not examined this copy, which is in a private collection. On one hand, Blake’s revising images he let stand for over thirty years seems as odd as Tatham’s touching only four of fifty-four plates. On the other hand—​and from an aesthetic point of view—​Tatham, the portraitist specializing in children, may have thought he was improving the proportions of the figures, not unlike D. G. Rossetti’s smoothing out the rough outlines of Blake’s verse in his edition of Blake’s poetry in Gilchrist’s Life of Blake. The illuminated plates were now fully his, and he was prepared to print them on speculation and on order. Such behavior further supports the idea that posthumous printing began in earnest after Catherine died.

7. 1831–32: Posthumous Songs Reexamined

Complete copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience have fifty-four plates. Songs of Innocence, produced in 1789, originally had thirty-one plates. In October 1793, Blake printed his prospectus to describe and advertise illuminated books and some other original graphic works he had for sale. He listed Innocence as having “25 designs” and Experience, which was forthcoming, as also having “25 designs” (E 693). He counted illustrations and vignettes, not copperplates, and advertised the two sections as separate works. Over time, Blake would move four poems comprising five plates (34-36, 53, 54) from Innocence to Experience, but he was never to have the same number of poems, plates, or “designs” in the two parts. He executed plate 1, the general title plate, in 1794 to announce “Songs of Innocence and of Experience / Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” This new title plate enabled him to combine autonomous books into a unified whole.

Copies of Innocence and Songs had varied plate orders until about 1818 (see BIB 335-36). Songs copies T, U, W, X, Y, Z, and AA, seven of the last eight copies Blake produced (between 1818 and 1827), have the same order. This plate order, recorded as plates 1-54, is the standard order used by editors today and provides the numbers used to identify the copperplates and the poems/pages/designs in copies of Innocence, Experience, and Songs. Blake also produced a plate a, a design of five winged cherubs carrying a naked man, which he included only in Songs copies B, C, and D as a tailpiece, and a plate b, “A Divine Image,” included by Blake only in Songs copy BB. Tatham did not print plate a as part of his copies, but he did occasionally print and include plate b.Blake Books records only one impression of plate a printed posthumously, in the Joseph Holland collection (BB 372).

In addition to variations in ink color and leaf size and weight, posthumous copies of Songs vary in their number of plates. Songs copies d, e, g, and p have only forty to forty-two of Songs’ fifty-four plates and copy i has forty-four (but see below), while half a dozen or more “copies” are really just clusters of ten or more plates from Experience, or scatterings of loose impressions named after owners or institutions.In Blake Books Supplement, Bentley adds ten more posthumously printed impressions that have recently been rediscovered (112); in Sale Catalogues for March 1871, he records what appears to be an untraced posthumous copy of Innocence, which he refers to as copy q, speculating that it comprised twenty-five plates on twenty-five leaves. He also records an untraced copy of Songs for November 1885, listed as copy DD in Sale Catalogues and as copy CC in his “Checklist, 2013.” I suspect copy CC, which appears to be uncolored and missing four plates, one of which is “The Sick Rose”—​a posthumous impression that is loose and part of the miscellaneous copy o (BB 371)—​is an untraced set of posthumous impressions. Essick adds an impression of the “Introduction” to Experience (plate 30) to the list of known posthumous pulls and provides a detailed description of the forty-two plate Songs copy p (“Marketplace, 2006” and “Marketplace, 2013” respectively). Only copies a, b, c, and f/j have fifty-four plates. Copy h has fifty-seven impressions. Given their diversity, Tatham’s ten posthumous copies appear to have been carelessly printed and indifferently compiled from stacks of impressions. In fact, while Tatham printed impressions per plate, he intended, as I will demonstrate below, that each copy comprise fifty-three or fifty-four plates arranged in the standard order. Why, then, are five copies either incomplete or completed by someone other than Tatham? Why do some copies have more than one ink color and one copy has more than fifty-four plates? Why are two copies not in the standard order? An examination of Songs copy a provides the answers.

Songs copy a originally consisted of fifty-three plates printed in light black ink on heavy paper watermarked J Whatman / 1831; the leaves are 24.5 x 19.3 cm.; the printing quality is uneven throughout; and the heavy paper is the same as that in Songs copies g and i. Songs copy a included plate b, but not plates 15 and 45 (“Laughing Song” and “The Little Vagabond”), which Blake had etched on the recto and verso of the same copperplate (BB 382). Plates 15 and 45 are also missing from Songs copies d, g, i, and p—​that is, from all copies printed in light or dark black ink. Plate 15 is also missing from Songs copy h, whose plate 45 is in sepia and thus possibly a replacement for a missing black impression.Copy h has twenty-one of its twenty-five Innocence plates in black ink; plates 18, 19, 24, and 26 are in light sepia. Plate 15 is missing from Innocence copy T, a posthumous copy also printed in black ink and later finished to resemble Innocence copy B (BIB 247-49). The consistent absence of one or both of these poems from posthumous copies of Innocence and Songs printed in black ink suggests that their shared copperplate was not present when these copies were printed. Plates 15 and 45 are present, however, in copies b, c, f/j, and e, all printed in dark and light sepia inks. The different inks, paper weights and sizes, and the absence and presence of plates 15 and 45 among the copies indicate possibly three different printing sessions.

In 1864, B. M. Pickering, son of the publisher William Pickering, sold Songs copy a to the British Museum. It comprised fifty-four plates in two parts: forty of the original black impressions were stitched together and fourteen impressions were then stitched to them to complete the copy.Bentley records copy a (before the addition of plates) as having forty-two plates, sequenced as follows: 1-14, 16-29, 33-36, 38-43, 46, 49, 52, 53 (BB 378, 380). Plates 52 and 53 appear to have been added with plates 48 and 54, however, and these four plates come between the first forty and the last ten plates. The fourteen impressions included plates 45 and b, but not plate 15, and they may have been added in two stages. Plates 52, 53, 48, and 54 (in this order) were added first. Plate 53 (24.4 x 19.4 cm.) was printed in the same light black ink on the same shorter and thick J Whatman / 1831 paper as the first forty leaves; plates 52, 48, and 54, however, were printed in a darker black ink on the longer, thinner J Whatman / 1832 paper (approximately 28 x 19.4 cm.). Following plates 52, 53, 48, and 54 are plates 30, 31, 47, 37, 32, b, 51, 50, 44, and 45, all printed on the thinner, longer J Whatman paper in light reddish to orangish-brown ink.Bentley records the last eleven impressions as “brown” (BB 426n1), but also records the last ten impressions as “brown” (BB 370), which is correct. Plate 54 is in black ink, though on the same paper as the orangish-brown impressions. Plate b is in a darkish sepia (reddish brown), very similar to the ink in posthumous Songs copies b, c, f/j, and e and posthumous copies of Jerusalem. These specific impressions were never part of copy a; they did, however, replace thirteen prints that were once part of Songs copy a’s original fifty-three plates. The evidence that Songs copy a originally contained all of these plates except plate 45 and that all thirteen were deliberately extracted—​not missing in part or by accident—​becomes clear when the added plates are returned to the group of forty impressions:

	15,				30,	31,	32,					37,							44,	45,		47,	48,		50,	51,	52,	53,	54,	b
1-14,		16-27,	28,	29,				33,	34,	35,	36,		38,	39,	40,	41,	42,	43,			46,			49

So aligned, the two sets of impressions reveal that Songs copy a was originally arranged in Blake’s standard order. For the core group of forty impressions to retain this plate order reveals that Songs copy a initially had a complement of fifty-three plates and that the added impressions are replacements for impressions that were once present.

Tatham appears certainly responsible for Songs copy a’s plate order, given that copies b, c, and f/j are in the same order.Copy c is in the standard order despite also having plate b and no plate 52. The consistent pattern of plate sequencing in these copies strongly suggests that a single person did it—​that is, it is difficult to imagine that multiple later owners of these copies would all order their copies in the same way, independently. The only owner common to all these copies was Tatham, and thus he must have been the original collator. For the plates of these copies to have been sequenced according to Blake’s standard order—​long before editors recognized that there was such an order—​indicates that Tatham was familiar with one of the late copies T, U, W, X, Y, Z, or AA and used it as a model. As noted, copy Y belonged to Calvert (BB 424), his friend and fellow Ancient, and would probably have been available for him to examine. Tatham abridged at least five (and possibly seven) other copies of Songs and ordered the plates in the same manner as copy a. Songs copy i, for example, was probably fifty-three plates, minus plates 15/45 but possibly with plate b, all heavily printed in light black ink on the same approximately 24 x 19 cm. leaves of the thick J Whatman / 1831 paper used for copies a and g. With the extraction of a cluster of ten Experience plates, it was reduced to forty-three impressions. Bentley records the Innocence plate order for Songs copy i as 1-14, 16-25, 48, 26-27. He records the Experience plate order as 28, 33, 29, 34-36, 38-43, 46, 49, 52-54, which he notes corresponds to no known order (BB 378, 380).Plate 48 was printed on thinner, narrower paper (BB 374n47) and appears to have been added to the copy at a later date. Blake Books excludes plate 29 and includes plate 30 in the list of copy i plates (BB 371, 380), but includes plate 29 in the list of plates with the watermark (BB 371). The copy was recently sold to Victoria University Library, University of Toronto, and Essick records that plate 29 is present and plate 30 is absent. He also notes that Blake Books Supplement states that copy i is in the Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum (BBS 129), but this is an error for copy l (lowercase L) (“Marketplace, 2014”). Blake Books describes the ink color as “grey” (BB 371), but, as with copies a and g, the ink looks to me like a pale black ink thinly applied. If, however, we reinsert the extracted Experience plates and the missing plates 15 and 45 into the group of forty-three, then the number and order of the plates in copy i can be recovered:

	15,			30,			31,	32,				37,							44,	45,		47,	[48],		50,	51,				b
1-14,		16-27,	28,		33,	29,			34,	35,	36,		38,	39,	40,	41,	42,	43,			46,			49,			52,	53,	54

Plate 48 was added at a later date and plates 33 (“Holy Thursday”) and 29 (Experience title page) were transposed—​presumably by accident. Initially complete with fifty-three plates sequenced in the standard plate order, Songs copy i was abridged to forty-three plates, its size when sold at Sotheby’s on 29 April 1862, lot 195, as “Songs of Innocence and Experience 43” for £4.6.0 to James Toovey (BB 428).

Songs copy e was sold in the same 1862 auction with forty plates (lot 196): “Another set, wanting three plates 40.” It was also acquired by Toovey, for £1.6.0.Songs copies i and e were both sold uncolored; copy i, however, sold for more than three times the price of copy e, perhaps because the impressions were bound.  Copy e was printed in both dark and light reddish-brown inks—​which is to say, the same basic ink, diluted and replenished over the course of the printing session, used in copies b, c, and f/j. Like these copies, it probably had fifty-four plates, including plates 15 and 45 but excluding plate b. Of course, the idea that it was missing only “three plates” when sold was relative to the forty-three plate copy i in lot 195. It was actually missing fourteen impressions, all of which had been extracted from Experience and match the cluster of Experience plates missing from copies a and i.Copy e has a very intriguing history. It was posthumously colored in imitation of Songs copy Y after it was sold in 1862; it was later completed by the addition of thirteen plates extracted from Blake’s Songs copy K, which were also colored posthumously but not to match the forty copy e impressions. For the history of Songs copies e/K, see BIB 299-302.

As chart I demonstrates, the same cluster of plates extracted from Songs copies a, i, and e are also missing from copies d, g, and p. Chart II demonstrates that the same cluster of Experience plates missing from Songs copies a, i, e, d, g, and p are present in small clusters of impressions now widely distributed. Chart III records extant loose impressions from posthumous Songs of Innocence.

79. Songs copy g^1–2 has plate 44, but it was printed in orangish-brown ink and not with the other impressions making up the copy; its plate 31 was printed on a smaller leaf of paper, different from the other leaves (BB 374n48). Both plates appear to have been added to the copy later than the other impressions. Plates 1, 2, and 11 from Innocence appear to have been extracted by a dealer or owner, not by Tatham.

Chart I: Impressions missing from posthumous copies of Songs
[Plate numbers printed in red are absent because they were not originally printed as part of these copies; plate numbers highlighted in yellow are present now but were added to the copy later by someone other than Tatham.]

a		15,		30,	31,	32,					37,							44,	45,		47,	48,		50,	51,	52,	53,	54,	b
d		15,		30,	31,	32,					37,							44,	45,		47,	48,		50,	51,			54,	b
g1-2	1, 2,   11,	15,		30,	31,	32,					37,			40,				44,	45,		47,	48,		50,	51,				b
i		15,		30,	31,	32,					37,							44,	45,		47,	48,		50,	51,				b
p		15,		30,	31,	32,					37,							44,	45,		47,	48,		50,	51,				b
e				30,	31,	32,	33,				37,				41,			44,	45,	46,	47,			50,	51,	52,	53

Chart II: Extant loose Experience impressions from posthumous copies of Songs Impressions in black

l			29,				33,					38,	39,		41,	42,	43,			46,			49,		51,	52
m																												54
n				30,	31,						37,							44,			47,			50,					b
LC				30,	31,	32,					37,							44,			47
Victoria U.				30,																		48	These impressions from Songs copy p were from the Blake collection of G. E. Bentley, Jr. They, along with the rest of Bentley’s collection, are now housed in the library of Victoria University of the University of Toronto.
Keynes																													b
Juel-Jensen/Danson																		44
Harvard			29,	30,							37
Tate																						48 (2 impressions)
Beinecke																								50,					b
Dartmouth										36
Wesleyan																				46,			49
Browns
k (reddish brown)				30,													43,		45,			48,				52
Victoria U. 28,														40,				44,	45,	46,		48	See note 80.
Juel-Jensen/Danson							33
Victoria U.												38,															53(orangish brown)
o (Victoria U. [Bentley])													39 (orangish brown)
o (untraced)					31 (yellowish brown),							38 (reddish brown),						+14 others
Untraced																42,									51

Chart III: Extant loose impressions from posthumous Songs of Innocence Grey/light black

Victoria U.																								24
Tate			3 (2 impressions),																			22
Morgan (from copy n)		2,											13
Fitzwilliam (from copy m)			3,							10,	11,								19,			22
Victoria U. [Bentley]																						22
n		2
Untraced																		18
Browns
Juel-Jensen/Danson							7,			10
Brown U.													13,							20,	21
n													13

Because the same cluster of Experience plates was extracted from six copies of Songs, more loose impressions of Experience plates than Innocence plates are extant. The overlap between extant loose Experience impressions and the cluster of Experience plates extracted is not one to one. Nor could it be, since nine or ten of the extracted Experience plates from one of the abridged copies of Songs (probably copy e) provided the plates used to complete Songs copy a. Also, loose impressions extracted from clusters by later owners and sold separately are likely to be missing, perhaps one day to be found in extra-illustrated copies of Life of Blake or Nollekens and His Times.George A. Smith had extra-illustrated copies of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake and Swinburne’s Critical Essay in his April 1880 auction at Christie’s (see note 125). Both volumes are unrecorded in Bentley’s Blake Books and Sale Catalogues and appear to be untraced. For other extra-illustrated copies of Gilchrist’s Life, see BIB 207. Even without a one-to-one mapping, the missing Experience impressions are too well represented among the extant loose impressions to be coincidental; the extensive overlap reveals that the plates missing from copies a, d, e, g, i, and p were indeed printed and were once part of these copies. They were deliberately extracted from completed copies to form subsets of Experience plates.

For six complete copies to have been similarly abridged reveals a shared location for the copies and a single owner. That owner was necessarily Tatham. For all the copies to have been initially in standard order reveals the same. This last bibliographical feature is not apparent, however, because copy g is now in a curious variant of that order. An examination shows that it was almost certainly reordered by a later owner. Songs copy g (now divided into Innocence and Experience, or copies g¹ and g², with twenty-three and eighteen plates respectively) was printed in black ink on the thicker (shorter) leaves used for Songs copies a and i. The following Experience plates appear to have been extracted: 30, [31], 32, 37, 40, [44], 47, 48, 50, 51, b (see chart I). How long Songs copy g—​or any of the abridged copies—​remained as initially printed is not known. But at some point a cluster of eleven Experience plates was extracted, reducing copy g from presumably fifty-three plates (-15/45, +b) to forty-two plates.Copy g² has eighteen plates, but plates 31 and 44 appear to have been added at a later date, which suggests that the original impressions of plates 31 and 44 were among the initially extracted plates. Plates 15 and 45 were not printed for this copy; plate b was presumably printed and included, implying that Songs copy g initially had fifty-three plates. Reinserting the extracted Experience plates into the Experience section of copy g’s impressions reveals the copy’s initial number and order of plates.

Surprisingly, the plate order is the one Blake recorded in the “Order of the Songs” manuscript:

		30,	[31,]		40,					32,	45,								[44,]	50,	48,			51,	37,	47,	b
28,	29,		[31],	38,		42,	34,	35,	36,			33,	49,	41,	39,	52,	54,	43,	[44],			53,	46

Tatham had inherited this manuscript and bundled it as part of a volume of Blakeana comprising mostly illuminated prints and proofs and posthumous prints. The volume was acquired at an unknown date by George A. Smith, who had it bound by 1853. Only Songs copy V, produced c. 1821, follows the manuscript’s plate order. As noted, Vine, who owned copy V, bought the posthumous Jerusalem copy J from Tatham between 1832 and 1838. Technically, Tatham could have borrowed Songs copy V from Vine or used the manuscript in his possession to arrange the plates in Songs copy g.Songs copy V was sold posthumously for Vine at Christie’s on 24 April 1838 to Henry George Bohn for £7.15s.; he offered it in his 1841 catalogue without a price; John Bohn offered it in his 1843 catalogue for £5.5s. (Bentley, Sale Catalogues). If Songs copy V, instead of the manuscript, was used as the model, then the modeling, if done by Tatham, was done before 1838. Tatham seems more likely, however, to have followed the plate order of his own posthumous copies. A far more likely suspect is H. Buxton Forman (1842–1917), a bibliophile, editor of Shelley and Keats, and, with T. J. Wise, literary forger of nineteenth-century “first” editions.For a brilliant unmasking of Forman and Wise, see John Carter and Graham Pollard’s An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934).

Forman owned copy g and had the impressions mounted on linen stubs and bound in two volumes no earlier than 1880 and most likely after 1885.An inscription stamped in gilt on the inside of the front covers identifies that the two volumes were “Bound By Riviere & Son For H. Buxton Forman.” Riviere took his grandson as a partner in 1880. He could sequence the unbound impressions as he pleased. He would have known of Blake’s “Order of the Songs” either from Bernard Quaritch, who acquired the manuscript in 1880 as part of Smith’s Blakeana volume (BB 339), or from William Muir, who bought the volume and sequenced the plates in his 1885 facsimiles of Songs according to this order. Muir also reproduced the manuscript as an appendix to his hand-colored lithographic facsimile of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1885). Forman, a book collector with a fine Blake collection (BB 666), knew Quaritch and owned a facsimile copy of Marriage that may have been Muir’s.Forman’s library sold at Anderson Galleries, 15-17 March 1920 (part 1) and 26 April 1920 (part 2); the Blake items were in lots 35-72 and 46-65 respectively. The sale included early editions of Blake’s Songs edited by Richard Herne Shepherd (1868) and by W. M. Rossetti (1874), neither of which arranged the Songs in the plate order used in Songs copy g. Unfortunately, the description of the “reprint” of Marriage (lot 64 in part 1) does not identify the publication, which could also have been Camden Hotten’s chromolithographic facsimile (1868). The circumstantial evidence for suspecting Forman of reordering Songs copy g is strong because he had a second copy of Songs, copy h, bound in the same manner by the same binder and, with one variant, in the same plate order.In Songs copy h, plates 2 and 3 are transposed (that is, the order runs “1, 1, 3, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 …”).

The odds of Tatham’s sequencing only two of ten copies in this plate order and Forman’s acquiring both of them are very small. Forman seems more likely to have acquired both copies unbound and, because they are different sizes, as distinctly self-evident volumes. The copy g impressions are approximately 24.2 x 19.4 cm. and the copy h impressions are 28.0 x 19.3 cm. (width varies slightly). Songs copy h comprises plates 1-14, 16-54, and b, and duplicates of plates 1, 52, and 53, for a total of fifty-seven plates. The duplicates of plates 1 and 52 are the size of the copy g impressions, which suggests that Forman was unlikely to have compiled the two copies himself from a stack of loose impressions, because had he done so the black duplicate plates, given their size, would presumably have gone into copy g, not h. He appears to have acquired copies g and h already defined as copies, probably at separate times. Copy h is numbered 1-57 in pencil just below the lower left corner of the plates, presumably by or for the binder, who could use copy h to order the plates of copy g.The histories of copies g and h before Forman are not known. It is also a possibility that Forman acquired copy h already numbered and used it to resequence the plates of copy g. Forman seems to have acquired two unbound and different size copies most likely in the standard order, which he then resequenced to follow what he presumably thought was Blake’s “first” or intended order.

As originally printed by Tatham, copy h probably comprised fifty-four plates, like his other posthumous copies; he seems unlikely to have added duplicate plates at a time when he was extracting plates from his other copies, which suggests they were added by an owner. Moreover, like copy a, copy h contains black and sepia plates. Among its impressions in sepia are plates 30, 31, 32, 37, 44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, b—​plates extracted from copy a and the basic cluster of plates extracted from copies d, e, g, i, and p—​suggesting that Tatham may have printed copy h in black ink, as he had copies a, d, g, i, and p, and extracted the same cluster of Experience plates that he had from these copies.Copy h has thirty-one plates in light and dark black inks, twenty-five impressions in light and dark orangish-brown inks, and its last plate is in reddish-brown ink, the color used in Songs copies b, c, f/j, and e. Songs copy a has black and sepia impressions because an owner (presumably Pickering) completed it with plates originally extracted from Songs copy e; these extracted plates were sold separately and became part of “copy” o, which is not really a copy at all but a miscellany of posthumous impressions that Pickering also owned (BB 429). Pickering, in other words, cannibalized his incomplete set of impressions (copy o) to complete copy a. Songs copy e was also completed by an owner, but with thirteen lifetime impressions, all taken from Songs copy K and posthumously colored (see note 78). Copy h may have followed a similar path, from being printed as a complete copy to being abridged to being completed by dealers or owners with loose sepia and black impressions and embellished with three duplicate impressions in black ink.

Innocence copy T appears to have followed a similar path, only in reverse. It is the only posthumous copy of Innocence and as such is an anomaly. It follows the plate order of Innocence copy B, the coloring of which it copies exactly. In other words, it is a forgery—​but not by Tatham. Its transformation must have occurred between c. 1832 and 1910, when it sold anonymously at Hodgson’s already bound and colored. Whoever owned Innocence copy T had access to Innocence copy B, because coloring the copy T impressions required borrowing copy B and copying its impressions carefully.The early provenance of Innocence copy B is unknown. It was acquired by R. H. Clarke, the son of Hayley’s friend J. S. Clarke, and bound after 1825 (BB 404-05). It resurfaced in 1906 when sold anonymously at Sotheby’s. The early provenance of copy T is also unknown; it sold anonymously at Hodgson’s in 1910, colored and bound (lot 246). It was listed in Maggs Brothers’ catalogue in 1911 as “brilliantly coloured by William Blake” and “including the Little Girl Lost, and the Little Girl Found, from the Songs of Experience” (cat. no. 268, p. 14, lot 35). Hodgson’s listed it as having 27 plates and Maggs Brothers listed it as having 29 plates. The volume remains in its original binding but shows no evidence of two plates’ having been inserted or added after the binding, which suggests that the cataloguer for Hodgson’s may have miscounted. Innocence copy T has all the markings of a once abridged (incomplete) copy of Songs that was revised to be a complete copy of Innocence. It has twenty-nine impressions and is missing plates 15 and 53. As noted, these two plates are missing in Songs copy a, also printed in black ink, plate 15 because it was not printed and plate 53 because it was extracted along with other Experience plates. Had Innocence copy T been printed initially as a complete copy of Songs and abridged to forty or forty-three plates, it would have had plates 34, 35, 36, and 54 in black ink but no plates 15 and 53. In other words, copy T would have needed an additional eleven to fourteen plates to be a complete copy of Songs, or to have had all the Experience plates removed except for plates 34, 35, 36, and 54 (plates first published in Innocence) to be a convincing early copy of Innocence. The latter option was taken and the volume was deliberately transformed to look original by being colored in imitation of Innocence copy B. The person responsible for its transformation knew that it was financially more lucrative as an original colored copy of Innocence than an incomplete and uncolored copy of Songs—​let alone as a posthumous copy.

Songs copies a, d, e, g, i, and p appear either incomplete or haphazardly compiled and reassembled until examined in the context of their production. From this context, patterns emerge revealing Tatham’s intentions. These copies, and probably copy h and Innocence copy T, were all initially complete, with fifty-three or fifty-four plates, but abridged to between forty and forty-three plates by the extraction of the same cluster of Experience plates. The abridged copies were coherent, comprising one general title plate, two section title plates, two full-page frontispieces, twenty-three Innocence and twelve to fifteen Experience plates. The subsets were also coherent, in that they comprised only Experience plates and equaled the number of Experience text plates left in the abridged copies.

Cannibalizing complete copies was a drastic act. I read it as a sign that Tatham could no longer produce new impressions. His rationale for which Experience plates to extract eludes me, but the absence of technical and aesthetic reasons for their extraction suggests the same, that he had lost the use of the rolling press. By abridging copies and creating independent clusters of Experience prints, Tatham could increase his stock without having to print more copies. In effect, cannibalizing what he had on hand compensated for the loss of the press. He appears to have sold the Experience clusters as autonomous subsets, as is revealed by Songs copy e plates in miscellanies like copy o, as well as in volumes of Blakeana, and by the presence of Experience plates from Songs copies a, g, n, p, and/or i in volumes of Blakeana once owned by George A. Smith and Robert Arthington (BB 337, 131). New information about the Tatham family strongly supports the hypothesis that Tatham lost the use of the rolling press by the end of 1832.

8. 1832: Posthumous Printing Stops

Tatham appears to have started printing Blake’s works in late 1831, at the earliest, and stopped printing them just a year later. No posthumously printed impression has a watermark later than 1832. Dated paper, though, does not date the cessation of posthumous printing. However, three significant events occurred in Tatham’s life at this time and all are worth examining carefully, because each could have contributed to the cessation of the posthumous printing of Blake’s illuminated books. One was the negative influence of a millenarian sect led by Edward Irving; one was the financial problems of C. H. Tatham; and one was Frederick Tatham’s vacating his house and studio.

Anne Gilchrist described Frederick Tatham as “the son of an architect of some repute … and [he] was himself originally a sculptor. He abandoned that early, and took to portraits in crayons” (H. H. Gilchrist 129). Although most biographies refer to him only as a sculptor, his first exhibited works were portraits and sketches, after which he exhibited marble busts at the Royal Academy 1830–32, when his studio was in Lisson Grove (see note 67). He returned to the Royal Academy in 1835 and continued to exhibit works there until 1854—​in all, slightly more than sixty sketches and drawings in watercolors and pastels. Mrs. Gilchrist was right about his being “originally a sculptor” and having “abandoned that early”; she appears also to have been right about his having “enacted the holocaust of Blake manuscripts—​not designs, I think, as I have heard from his own lips.” She says that he “was at that time a zealous Irvingite and says he was instigated to it by some very influential members of the Sect on the ground that Blake was inspired; but quite from a wrong quarter—​by Satan himself—​and was to be cast out as an ‘unclean spirit.’ Carlyle says he is quite certain Irving himself never had anything at all to do with this” (H. H. Gilchrist 129, 131).

Edward Irving (1792–1834) was a Presbyterian minister from Scotland who gained fame and notoriety in London as a fiery preacher and for his conviction that he had prophetic and healing powers. He was excommunicated by the presbytery of London in 1830 and established the Irvingite or Holy Catholic Apostolic Church in 1832. He and Thomas Carlyle, an early friend who wrote an article on Irving after he died for Fraser’s Magazine, became estranged after the preacher embraced speaking in tongues. Still, Carlyle believed Irving could not have influenced Tatham to behave so destructively. Bentley collects the pertinent evidence and makes a convincing case that, unfortunately, a holocaust did occur (BR[2] 558-60). The evidence, such as it is, does not reveal exactly when the conflagration occurred, how long it lasted, or how much or what it consumed. Were the cremation of manuscripts and the cessation of posthumous printing chronologically overlapping but causally exclusive events? Or did Tatham’s reasons for burning manuscripts influence his decision to stop producing Blake’s “printed manuscripts”? Did he burn manuscripts upon reading them, or did he make a pile for one giant bonfire? In other words, was the conflagration an ongoing or a single event? Could such a conflagration explain the absence of illuminated plates—​the metal manuscripts, as it were—​only ten of which were extant by 1861 (see below)?

As noted, Blake told Crabb Robinson in February 1826 that he had “written more than Voltaire or Rousseau—​Six or Seven Epic poems as long as Homer and 20 Tragedies as long as Macbeth” (BR[2] 496). Ironically, he also told him that he had “been tempted to burn my MSS but my wife wont let me” (BR[2] 435).Blake also credited Catherine for the completion of Ugolino and His Sons in Prison, a tempera from about 1826. Its final version followed “the unfinished pencil drawing from the Dante series, which was begun in 1824 and left unfinished at Blake’s death in 1827” (Butlin #805). Blake mentions this work in a letter to Linnell, 25 April 1827: “As to Ugolino &^c I never supposed that I should sell them my Wife alone is answerable for their having Existed in any finishd State” (E 784). Tatham avoided the subject of manuscripts in his “Life of Blake,” but in his 11 April 1829 letter to the unknown patron he describes Blake as being as productive—​in diverse media—​as Blake had proclaimed to Robinson: “M^r. Blake’s industry was such that I have often heard him say that he has written more than Milton and Shakspeare put together; he has engraved large quantities of plates, and has painted an immense number of elaborate and laborious fresco-pictures, highly finished as Miniatures” (BR[2] 495). Tatham knew Blake’s comments on fresco from the Descriptive Catalogue, if not also directly from Blake, and he knew what Catherine Blake had brought with her to the Mayfair studio in spring 1828. Among Blake’s effects were many copperplates and presumably the large painting that he was working on when he died—​a version of the Last Judgment, mentioned in Nollekens as having over a thousand figures (BR[2] 617) and estimated to be 7 x 5 feet (Butlin #648). However, Tatham probably had not read Blake’s manuscripts or taken inventory of them, since they were not yet his property.

The many witnesses of Tatham’s admission that he had burned manuscripts are corroborated by the survival of relatively few Blake manuscripts. Calvert’s son raises the possibility that copperplates may also have been destroyed. He says his father went “to Tatham and implored him to reconsider the matter, and spare ‘the good man’s precious work;’ notwithstanding which, blocks, plates, drawings, and MSS, I understand, were destroyed” (BR[2] 559). The artist and collector John Deffett Francis (1815–1901) claims to have witnessed the destruction and is clear as to who instigated it. In his copy of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake, where Gilchrist describes Blake’s considerable stock of works as having “since been widely dispersed; some destroyed” (1: 367), Francis wrote, “Why not tell the truth! F T burnt hundreds of them at the desire of Edward Irving who said ‘They were done under the instigation of the Devil’[;] this I know for I saw it done[.] J D Francis” (BR[2] 559). He made a similar comment in his copy of W. M. Rossetti’s The Poetical Works of William Blake (London, 1874). Rossetti repeats Gilchrist’s claim, noting that “Swedenborgians, Irvingites, or other extreme sectaries, beset the then youthful custodian of these priceless relics [Blake manuscripts], and persuaded him to make a holocaust of them” (lvii). Francis commented, “Fredk. Tatham. Why he was a married man! Old enough to leave Sculpture for Water Colr portraiture,” underlining “Irvingites” to affirm “that it was this sect in particular which had spurred Tatham to a mass burning of Blake’s writings” (Skretkowicz 53). Whether or not Francis actually witnessed such horror, his knowledge and memories of Tatham appear more reliable than Carlyle’s disbelief that Irving could have had such a negative influence.

Francis left Swansea in 1834, at the age of nineteen, to pursue a painting career in London, where he “immediately befriended Frederick Tatham, from whom he acquired a number of Blake’s works” (Skretkowicz 53). Works that appear to have been acquired that year include eight posthumous prints: America plates 2, 5, 7, and 15, Europe plates 6, 7, and 12, and Jerusalem plate 35 (Essick, “Marketplace, 1987,” illus. 1; BB 107, 163, 263-64).Francis inscribed “1834” on the versos of America plate 7 and Europe plate 6. By 1878, he had donated around 1500 pieces to the British Museum, including sixty by Blake (Skretkowicz 53). Francis’s notes increase the probability that a holocaust did occur and that whatever its contents and duration it may have occurred in or continued until 1834, while Irving, who died on 7 December 1834, was still alive. Richmond, Tatham’s friend, fellow Ancient, and brother-in-law, implies that the destruction may have begun as early as c. 1832, the approximate date of Tatham’s “Life of Blake” manuscript. Nearly thirty years after the fact, he told J. C. Strange of a conflagration and alluded to the mind capable of it: “Some years ago 4 of us who knew Blake well resolved to write down all the particulars we knew concerning him—​which was done, & formed a considerable number of pages, when one of us who had the acct fell into some fanatical notions and destroyed the papers, flung them on the fire, unhappily” (BR[2] 723). While “some years ago” does not explicitly date the biography, “4 of us” implies the inclusion of Tatham and probably Calvert and Palmer—​and the “Lisson Grove” address on Tatham’s manuscript supports a c. 1832 date, because this is where he lived in 1831 and 1832 (see section 9). Perhaps Tatham destroyed his colleagues’ biographical sketches because they deviated heretically from his idea and image of Blake, possibly honestly addressing Blake’s religious unorthodoxy and ideas of “Gratified desire” (E 474). Whatever the reason, by this time—​shortly after Catherine died and while he was printing illuminated books—​Tatham possessed Blake’s images and texts and styled himself as Blake’s agent. He was indeed positioned to destroy the Blake manuscripts that he considered deviant. Did Irving’s “fanatical notions” also guide Tatham to repress or even burn Blake’s “printed manuscripts”?

Tatham did not print The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, or The Book of Urizen, the books that overtly attack conventional morality or religion.Bentley correctly notes that Tatham avoided printing Blake’s books that attack conventional morality and religion, but he is mistaken about “Tatham’s authenticating signature on many surviving drawings indicat[ing] that he thought these were less Satanic—​or perhaps more saleable” (BR[2] 560). The works that Tatham “vouched” for were sketches and scraps that he sold after 1863, when the Life of Blake expanded Blake’s market (see Viscomi, “Signing Large Color Prints” 402n52). But he did print America, Europe, and Jerusalem, books filled with sexually explicit imagery and themes. Indeed, images from Jerusalem prepared by W. J. Linton in the early 1860s for reproduction in Gilchrist’s Life of Blake were excluded by D. G. Rossetti and Macmillan, the publisher, for being pornographic (see Viscomi, “Blake after Blake” 233-38).Regarding Blake’s Visions, Anne Gilchrist said: “It would be perfectly useless to attempt to handle this side of Blake’s writings—​ … Mr. Macmillan is far more inexorable against any shade of heterodoxy in morals than in religion—​and … in fact, poor ‘flustered propriety’ would have to be most tenderly and indulgently dealt with …” (H. H. Gilchrist 128). Tatham may have chosen to print these titles because, being large and more pictorial, they seemed more saleable—​or because they were commissioned, as may have been the case with Jerusalem, copies of which he sold to Samuel Boddington, Butts, and Vine. The printing of these works also stopped, however.

Just as there were illuminated books that Tatham presumably chose not to print, were there also illuminated plates that he either objected to printing or extracted from what he printed? As discussed in the previous section, he systematically and deliberately extracted the same cluster of Experience plates from Songs copies a, d, e, g, i, and p, and possibly from copy h and the copy transformed into Innocence copy T. This cluster included “The Chimney Sweeper” from Experience, “The Garden of Love,” “The Little Vagabond,” and “A Little Boy Lost.” Could the extraction of these and the other plates signify Tatham’s objections to their content? “The Chimney Sweeper” is overtly subversive: And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery. (9-12) “The Garden of Love” is anti-clerical: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. (11-12) “The Little Vagabond” is devilishly clever—​or just devilish: But if at the Church they would give us some Ale.
……………………………………………………
And God like a father rejoicing to see,
His children as pleasant and happy as he:
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel
But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel. (5, 13-16)Essick informs me that these lines were the probable cause for “The Little Vagabond” being excluded from the second printing of the Pickering edition of the Songs, 1839 (private correspondence). And “A Little Boy Lost” fails to recognize the “glories” of old or new church: The Priest sat by and heard the child.
In trembling zeal he siez’d his hair:
……………………………………………
And bound him in an iron chain.
And burn’d him in a holy place. (9-10, 20-21)

If Tatham found these texts heretical, is it possible that he not only extracted the impressions from their copies but also destroyed their plates? By 1861, Alexander Gilchrist had requested original illuminated plates from Tatham, hoping to reproduce a selection as electrotypes for his biography, but by then only ten plates—​all from Songs—​were extant. According to Gilchrist, “The gentleman [Tatham] from whom they were obtained had once the entire series in his possession; but all save these ten were stolen by an ungrateful black he had befriended, who sold them to a smith as old metal” (1: 126). However, given the probable destruction of Blake manuscripts by Tatham, one must wonder if the “ungrateful black” was a fiction to cover up his destruction—​or sale—​of these copperplates, worth more at the time as metal than as art. Moreover, one must wonder if the paucity of proofs for Marriage, Visions, and Urizen, in comparison to those for America, Europe, Jerusalem, and Songs (the books printed by Tatham), is due to their having met a fiery fate.

The posthumous production of Songs, with ten or eleven copies in different inks and on different papers all presumably printed in 1831 and 1832, appears to have tapered off over time. With Jerusalem, America, and Europe, on the other hand, production appears to have suddenly stopped. The apparent concurrence of burning Blake’s manuscripts and halting posthumous printing—​or, chronologically, vice versa—​seems unlikely to have been a coincidence. But were the cessation of posthumous printing and “fanatical notions” causally linked? At first glance, that appears to be the case, but looking further into the production and reception of the posthumous copies of Songs suggests otherwise, because the Experience impressions extracted were not destroyed; they were sold as separate subsets of Songs and as loose impressions in volumes of Blakeana. Tatham extracted them as a salesman, not as a censor. By extracting the same cluster six or more times, Tatham was able to extend and diversify his stock of saleable Blake artifacts without printing more plates.

Generally speaking, stock is produced in anticipation of demand, and production is stopped when demand is wanting. Perhaps, then, with ten to eleven copies of Songs in hand from three different printings, Tatham had more supply than demand and stopped production as a business decision. That kind of stoppage, though, does not explain a permanent cessation in production—​or, more importantly, the abridgement of copies of Songs. It only raises other questions: Why didn’t Tatham resume printing after having sold books to Samuel, Hannah, and Thomas Boddington, Butts, Vine, Peel, Ferguson, and, apparently, Elwell? Why didn’t he print subsets of Experience plates instead of extracting them from completed copies? The failure to resume printing suggests either a loss of interest or an inability to do so—​that Tatham either deliberately relinquished or inadvertently lost his means of production. Extracting impressions and abridging copies of Songs appear to reflect his desire to continue selling Blake’s prints, which in turn suggests that the loss of the press—​the only means by which he could continue producing new copies of Blake’s books—​was due to events beyond his control. In addition to falling under the influence of Irving, Tatham experienced two other events in 1832 that altered his life. The first was his father’s vacating the Mayfair office where the press was presumably housed, and the second was his vacating his residence in Lisson Grove.

9. 1832: Financial Troubles at 34 Alpha Road, 1 Queen Street, and 20 Lisson Grove North

By hosting Catherine Blake at his Mayfair office from spring 1828 to early spring 1829 and, as I will argue below, probably retaining the press there until he vacated the premises, C. H. Tatham enabled Blake’s widow and, afterwards, his son to print illuminated works. His hospitality makes his life, home, and office worth examining. Unfortunately, most descriptions of the man and his residence are inaccurate. According to Lowell Libson, Tatham was uncompromising and litigious and this tended to alienate patrons and, in spite of his prodigious talent, his career was on the wane by the time that Linnell met him. Linnell wrote that Tatham was “naturally a proud man which appeared unhappily the case in the latter part of his career, for had he but been wise enough to accept commissions for works of inferior size he might have been fully employed, but he stood out for large jobs from the titled great and would not undertake jobs from builders.” The result was that Tatham had to abandon his Mayfair house for the more modest Alpha Cottage, Alpha Road, Marylebone, where Blake, Haydon, Palmer and Linnell were frequent visitors. Tatham finally ended his days as Warden of the Holy Trinity Hospital, Greenwich.Lowell Libson Ltd. British Art online catalogue for Linnell’s 1812 drawing of C. H. Tatham and his daughter Julia <http://​www.​lowell-libson.​com/​pictures/​charles-​heathcote-​tatham-​with-​subsidiary-​sketches-​of-​julia-​tatham>. These descriptions, drawn from the entries in the DNB of 1898 and ODNB of 2004 and repeated in both the Wikipedia entry on C. H. Tatham and at the Tatham Family History site, are mistaken. They conflate events from different periods and connect others that are unrelated. Linnell met Tatham Sr. in 1812 (see note 5), when Linnell joined the Rev. John Martin’s Baptist Church, which C. H. Tatham, a member of the congregation, had designed. Linnell’s letter, written after Tatham’s death in 1842, is quoted only in part. He also wrote that “Tatham was much among the great, had large works in hand for them, had been in Italy, and was a man of cultivated taste, and naturally a proud man, … and would not undertake jobs from builders and others. The consequence was he mortgaged his property, and ended by being only the overseer of twenty poor men for some charity” (Story 1: 74–75).

Libson apparently conflates Tatham’s Mayfair office (1 Queen Street) with his earlier Mayfair house (103 Park Street) and misinterprets “cottage” as denoting smallness and as such signifying Tatham’s career as failing; however, the move to Alpha Road by 1811 actually signified success. C. H. Tatham’s financial problems did not begin to surface till the end of the decade or appear to have become disruptive till the mid-1820s. The DNB describes him as simultaneously “masterful and litigious in professional matters, and engaged in lawsuits most unwisely with more than one of his employers.” The ODNB expands on this, noting that in 1819 he was accused of negligence concerning repairs at Castle Howard, and although the arbitrator found in his favour, he incurred great expense. On several other occasions he was involved in litigation, and the consequent desertion by his wealthy and noble patrons and his refusal to work for builders led ultimately to the ruin of his practice. Between 1820 and 1836, when his architectural career ended, Tatham’s work comprised interior decorations in a sumptuous neo-classical style for the fourth earl of Albemarle at Quidenham Hall, Norfolk (c.1820), and in Hampshire a porticoed house, Rookesbury (1821–5) … for the Revd W. Garnier, alterations and additions for William Sloane-Stanley at Paultons (1826–8) …. One clear sign of Tatham’s diminishing income was his inability to help Frederick in his budding artistic career. He wrote Linnell: “I wish I could get him abroad; but my hands are tied and bound—​my large family and my decreasing occupations threaten straitened circumstances. I am the milch cow to fifteen living souls—​think of that, Johnny!” (Story 1: 153). Whitehead dates the letter late 1828 (“Last Years” 83 and n74). The math here—​ten children and two parents—​​suggests that Tatham may have considered other relatives, or perhaps servants, and/​or his lodger, Catherine, then staying at the Mayfair studio, as dependents.

By mid-1830, around the time Frederick Tatham moved to 20 Lisson Grove North, signs of his father’s insolvency were present not only in the reduced number and type of commissions the paterfamilias was now receiving, but also in the withdrawal of consent for Julia to marry Richmond. Whereas Story believed C. H. Tatham worried about the financial prospects of the young artist (1: 74), Raymond Lister, in his ODNB entry for Richmond, believes that Tatham’s own financial concerns played a role: About 1826 Richmond fell in love with Julia (1811–1881), the beautiful fourteen-year-old sister of the Tatham brothers, whose father had engaged Richmond to give her drawing lessons. Although old Tatham had encouraged the romance, his diminishing fortune brought a change of mind when a rich and elderly suitor expressed interest in Julia. Learning of this, the young couple—​encouraged by Palmer, who loaned Richmond £40—​eloped to Gretna Green, where they were married on 24 January 1831. Back in London, Richmond set up home at 27 Northumberland Street, New Road, sending Julia to stay for the time being with Palmer’s father at Shoreham. Meanwhile John Linnell persuaded Tatham that Richmond had a promising future. Tatham forgave them, and within three weeks George and Julia were reunited: their marriage proved to be long and happy.Richmond became one of the most successful portrait painters of the period, leaving £77,000 when he died (Morning Post 20 January 1922). His miniature (8.7 x 6.9 cm.) portrait of C. H. Tatham, c. 1830, can be found at <http://​www.​radnorshire-​fine-​arts.​co.​uk/​product/​george-​richmond-​portrait-​c-​h-​tatham-​1772-​1842>.

On 13 January 1834, three years after Julia’s marriage, Harriet Tatham died. That same year, according to the DNB, C. H. Tatham “fell into pecuniary difficulties; his house and his collection of objects of interest were sold,” and “much of the latter went to Sir John Soane’s Museum, where it has since remained” (ODNB). The DNB and ODNB statements are incorrect: his “pecuniary difficulties,” which, as noted, had been building throughout the 1820s, culminated in 1832, not 1834; his collections and household furniture were auctioned in July 1833, not 1834; and Soane acquired only four lots (see section 10). What concerns us here is when C. H. Tatham vacated his house. According to the Marylebone Rate Books (C/73, reel 62), he vacated 34 Alpha Road between 29 September and Christmas 1832. He is not listed in the rate book for 1833; in place of his name is an “E,” signifying empty, and a note “xs/33,” signifying that the house was still empty at Christmas 1833 (MRB 1833, reel 66). The same marks appear in the 1834 rate books, and the house appears to have remained empty until sold in 1835. According to Galinou, “despite this downsizing Tatham built up rent arrears. An 1835 rent account shows that Tatham’s premises were back in the hands of [Alexander] Birnie, the original developer of this part of the [Eyre] estate” (478).

The St. George, Hanover Square Rate Book records Tatham as vacating his Mayfair office in 1832. His name, “Tatham Ch Heathcote,” is crossed out and “Day, William” written over it (C/651, reel 503). It is not clear, however, when in 1832 this alteration to the rate book occurred; the earliest would have been 25 March, and the latest Christmas.The rates were collected on 25 March (Lady Day), 24 June (Midsummer), 29 September (Michaelmas), and 25 December (Christmas). The duration of his residence in 1832 is also unknown because the rates were being paid throughout the year and no arrears had accrued. He was, however, certainly out of the office and studio by the end of the year.Whitehead states that he left the Mayfair office in 1833 (“Last Years” 83). Tatham may have carried on some architectural work after 1832, and he is listed in Pigot and Co.’s Commercial Directory, 5th ed., for 1832–33–34, as an architect at the Mayfair address, but, according to the rate books, he had vacated the premises by the end of 1832 and possibly earlier. The correspondence with the Eyre estate, which had been going to 1 Queen Street, was redirected to 34 Alpha Road in 1831 (Galinou 478). Because it appears to have housed the printing press, the Mayfair studio is particularly significant in the narrative of posthumous printing; its closing could have deprived Frederick Tatham of his means of production. Or did he move the press to his Lisson Grove studio?

As noted, Frederick Tatham is recorded at 20 Lisson Grove in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogues for 1830, 1831, and 1832.His residences in the 1830s can be traced using the addresses in the Royal Academy exhibitors’ lists, return addresses on his letters, and, if used cautiously, the Tatham Family History site. The 11 April 1829 letter that he wrote on behalf of Catherine places him at 34 Alpha Road (BR[2] 495). This was near his father’s house and in an area with a high concentration of artists, what Galinou refers to as an “Artists’ Colony” (270). For example, the portrait painter and watercolorist Thomas Heaphy (1775–1835), founder and first president of the Society of British Artists, lived just a few houses down Alpha Road and “devoted much of his fortune to utilising the land in the neighbourhood” (DNB).A double portrait of C. H. Tatham and Harriet Tatham, aged forty-three and thirty-five, painted by Heaphy in 1815, can be found at the Tatham Family History site <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php?mediaID=1231​&medialinkID=1559>. Between him and Tatham was Robert Brown, the first artist to build a “purpose-built painter’s studio on the estate” (Galinou 457). James Hakewill, architect and watercolorist of picturesque views, lived in St. John’s Wood; his wife, Maria Catherine, was a well-known portrait painter. Another artist in the neighborhood was his father’s friend Rossi, the well-known sculptor, who acquired enough land from the Eyre estate in 1809 to build a gallery to show his works and shops to make terracotta bricks. In 1821, “Charles Rossi and Shops” occupied 21 Lisson Grove North (MRB 1821, reel 41); Haydon, renting rooms from Rossi, lived at 21 Lisson Grove North “between 1817 and 1822” (Galinou 268). Tatham may have trained with Rossi, but the sculptor’s studio was not next to Tatham’s. In 1822, street numbers were apparently changed and Rossi was recorded in the rate books at 41 Lisson Grove North; from 1823 to 1833, he was recorded at 1, 2, and 3 St. John’s Place, which was the same as Grove Street and was across from his gallery. His premises, located “at the corner of Lisson Grove and the future Grove Street” (see illus. 2, with house and gallery circled in green and red respectively, and illus. 3, with house and gallery numbered 2 and 3 respectively), were sold in 1834, “presumably to avoid bankruptcy” (Galinou 267, 268).Another supposed neighbor was the dean of York. An unnumbered house between numbers 19 and 20 Lisson Grove North is recorded as inhabited by “Rev.d Wm. Cockburne / Dean of York.” Whitehead describes this property as “the ‘Lodge,’ which appears to have been a more recently built adjoining property,” and as “grander, with a rateable value of £120” (“Last Years” 82n64). The rate books, however, show that Cockburn was not Tatham’s adjoining neighbor. Number 21 was a house occupied by Joshua Nunn and rated at £20. Number 19 was a house occupied by John Rooke and rated at £12. Number 18a was a house (probably a shop or studio) occupied by Jacob Gaby and rated at £6, and number 18 was a house occupied by Benjamin Darke and rated at £40. But Lisson Lodge, as Cockburn’s house was known, was rated at £200 (not £120), higher than any in the vicinity. Nor was the property new. Cockburn was cited as “The Rev. William Cockburn, Lisson Lodge, Lisson Grove, Marylebone—​Honorary Governor” in the index of W. M. Thiselton’s Report of the State of the Northern Dispensary, &c., 1814. Cockburn’s property was recorded as “Lisson Lodge, 20 Lisson Grove North” in Boyle’s Court Guide for April, 1824, but Lisson Lodge was not given the number 20 in the rate books until 1831, when it was also recorded, this one time only, as “Lisson Lodge,” in pen over “House.” It had been included in the rate books unnumbered, among the numbered houses, on Lisson Grove North between 1822 and 1830. Before then, it was recorded independently as Grove Lodge, at the end of the house numbers of Lisson Grove North and before those of Grove Place (MRB 1821, reel 41). This was also its position in the 1821 census. Lisson Lodge appears to be the detached house on the Horwood map of 1819 (illus. 2, circled in cyan); in illus. 3 it is indicated by the number 4. It appears among the Lisson Grove North properties presumably for the convenience of recordkeeping for the Marylebone ward. Whatever the reason, the dean of York was not Frederick Tatham’s adjoining neighbor, and Tatham’s neighborhood was a good deal humbler than such a neighbor would suggest.

20 Lisson Grove North comprised two dwellings. In the 1830 Marylebone Rate Book, it is recorded in the preprinted ledger book as a “House,” with “& shops” penned in, and rated at £45. William Eales, a carpenter, is recorded in the column of “Inhabitants’ Names.” Eales apparently occupied the premises for only two years, because between 1822 and 1828 it was occupied by Edward Seward (?Sewell). Although recorded at 20 Lisson Grove in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue of 1830, Tatham first entered the Marylebone Rate Books at that address in 1831, when the property (“House,” with “& shops” penned in) was renumbered as 20a. In 1832, the property became 20a and 20b, but was recorded as “House” only, with Tatham as inhabitant. In 1833, the distinct units were acknowledged as such, with 20a referring to “shops” (penned in) and 20b referring to “House,” rated at £16 and £28 respectively. In the “Inhabitants’ Names” column for shops is “Fredk Tatham,” and in the next space for the house is an “E,” for empty. Tatham’s residence (20b), in other words, appears to have been vacated in the latter part of 1832—​or early 1833 before the rate collectors came calling.There are no signs of Tatham’s living at 20b Lisson Grove in 1833. To the right of the “E,” across the columns for rates—​which were left blank—​is “Henry Oliver Mids[umme]r.” Rates appear to have been collected only twice in 1833, on 24 June (Midsummer) and 25 December. Apparently when the collector came knocking on 24 June, he found Oliver and recorded his name as inhabiting the house—​though this appears to have been after recording the “E.” Oliver did not stay long, however, because the house was recorded as empty by Christmas 1833 and no monies were collected for the year. The house remained empty for all of 1834 as well.

The “shop” was recorded as empty by Christmas 1833 and remained so all of the following year. It seems to have been vacated no later than 24 June 1833—​and probably months earlier—​because Tatham was £3.2.8 in arrears for community rates (monies for the poor, cleaning, repairs, and lighting streets and highways). These rates were collected on 24 June, but Tatham’s total was recorded in the column “Unreceived on Account of / Empty Houses,” which indicates that he vacated his studio before the monies were collected—​that is, by 24 June (Midsummer) 1833. His last known letters from Lisson Grove were on 1 March 1833 to Linnell, both from 20 Lisson Grove North.He wrote Linnell asking to meet so they could “come to some settlement concerning the Dante &c,” and, presumably, the legal ownership of Blake’s effects; he followed up with a second letter that day asking for their lawyers to meet and for Linnell to pay for the lawyers, since Linnell had refused to meet in person (BR[2] 552-53). Given the information provided by the rate books, Tatham appears to have written from the studio (20a), which he was in the process of vacating, and not from the house (20b).

Tatham presumably knew sometime in 1832 exactly when his father was going to vacate the Mayfair and Alpha Road premises. For him to have moved the press to Lisson Grove for so short a period was impractical and seems unlikely. As with many large, old, heavy objects, selling or leaving instead of moving them is the best, or only, option. After Lisson Grove, Tatham appears next at 3 Grove Terrace, the address on his undated letter to Soane, presumably written after his father wrote Soane on 23 July 1833 (see section 10). Grove Terrace was just north on Lisson Grove North (the street), across from Alpha Road, and was part of a new row of houses, each rated at £40. The Grove Terrace address, however, may not have been a residence; it was recorded in the rate books as empty in 1833 (MRB 1833, reel 66) and remained empty until 25 March (Lady Day) 1834, when William Banks is recorded as the ratepayer (MRB 1834, reel 68).The address 3 Grove Terrace is not recorded at the Tatham Family History site.

As noted, Tatham exhibited marble busts in the Royal Academy exhibitions of 1830, 1831, and 1832, but no sculpture before or after these dates. These are the years he had his own separate art studio in Lisson Grove, a space that presumably enabled him to work in ways that the office/studio in Mayfair may not have been suitable for (plaster and marble dust, for example). He did not exhibit in 1833 or 1834, and he appears not to have had a separate work space after Lisson Grove until c. 1835, when he and his father resumed exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Both architect and portraitist gave their address that year as 18 Charles Street (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 325), which was probably not a residence.According to Curtis, quoted in the entry for Frederick Tatham at the Tatham Family History site, Tatham moved “sometime before [his] marriage” in 1831 to “12 [later renumbered 18] Charles Street” from Alpha Road. This, however, is the wrong date for the move. From Alpha Road, he moved to 20b Lisson Grove. C. H. Tatham apparently knew the Charles Street neighborhood from an earlier residency; he is listed at 6 Charles Street in the 1800 Royal Academy exhibition list. Charles Street runs along Middlesex Hospital, and to avoid confusion with other streets named Charles, Frederick Tatham anchored his address with “Middlesex Hospital,” while his father used “Berners Street,” which was perpendicular to Charles Street and is how a few other artists living in that neighborhood differentiated their addresses. C. H. Tatham was residing at the time at 19 Montpelier Square, so he apparently used Charles Street only as a studio address and only for this one exhibition; in 1836, the last year he exhibited at the Royal Academy, he is recorded at 4 Elizabeth Street, Hans Place. Frederick Tatham, on the other hand, is recorded at 18 Charles Street from 1835 until 1839. He appears to have been renting from John Wilson, the person recorded as paying the rates. In 1838, he exhibited “portraits of the children of Mr. John Wilson” at the Royal Academy (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 325).

All twenty-two works Tatham exhibited from this address seem to have been portraits, which implies that he was now working primarily in pastels, graphite, and watercolors—​as Anne Gilchrist and Francis acknowledge him doing after abandoning sculpture. These media are less demanding (and disruptive) than printmaking, oil painting, and sculpture, which raises the possibility that the apartment at 18 Charles Street was also his residence. But previous tenants at that address and on that street strongly suggest otherwise. In 1831 and 1832, 18 Charles Street was the address for Thomas Allom, an architect and topographical artist (Graves, Royal Academy 1: 27). In the 1820s and 1830s, painters (many of them miniaturists) occupied numbers 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, and 27 Charles Street, which indicates a neighborhood of artists’ studios—​and supports the hypothesis that Frederick Tatham did not have a separate work space after Lisson Grove until c. 1835.Addresses are culled from Graves’s dictionaries of the Royal Academy and the British Institution. That painter succeeded painter in many of these apartments suggests the spaces were used as studios, not residences. For example, the painter Michael Sharp was at number 19 between 1825 and 1828 and was succeeded by the painter William Fisk between 1830 and 1833; the painter William Willes was at number 20 in 1831 and was succeeded by the painter John Lucas between 1832 and 1837; the painter G. Leslie was at number 27 between 1832 and 1835 and was succeeded by the miniaturist Samuel Lover between 1835 and 1843.

The losses of the Tatham family’s financial security and Alpha Road home by 1832, coupled with the losses of Frederick Tatham’s own Lisson Grove residence and studio shortly after his marriage, his estrangement from Linnell, and Catherine’s death, may have contributed to his susceptibility to Irving’s influence. How long that influence manifested itself to the detriment of Blake’s works is not known, but it seems to have begun as early as 1832 and in effect at least through 1834. I have asked whether Irving’s influence might also have been somehow responsible for the cessation of posthumous printing, because that appears to have stopped c. 1832, and for Tatham’s extracting Experience plates from copies of Songs. The extracted Experience impressions were not destroyed, however; they were sold separately and in volumes and scrapbooks of prints, a mode of bundling works possibly influenced by his father (see section 10). Abridged copies and clusters of extracted impressions increased the number of saleable objects and signify that Tatham lost his press, not his desire to print Blake. If, as argued here, Catherine’s press entered C. H. Tatham’s Mayfair studio in spring 1828 and remained there after she moved to her small apartment in spring 1829, then C. H. Tatham’s closing his Mayfair office in 1832 seems the most likely reason posthumous printing stopped. These two events—​the closing of the Mayfair office/studio and the cessation of printing—​appear causally, not coincidentally, related.

C. H. Tatham’s vacating the Mayfair studio forced Frederick Tatham to either let the press go or relocate it. With the Charles Street studio not yet in place, he appears to have had nowhere to put the press other than his new living space, presumably 3 Grove Terrace; wherever he lived in 1833, bringing in a rolling press would have compromised domestic tranquillity. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that his spouse, like most and unlike Mrs. Blake, was not going to pass her “days and nights” with her artist husband and his large printing press, oily inks, solvents, stacks of paper, copperplates, and muslin rags, all “in the same room where they grilled, boiled, stewed, and slept” (Nollekens, BR[2] 624-25). He chose to let the press go. “Fanatical notions” may have caused Tatham to destroy manuscripts and possibly influenced what or what not to print, but they do not appear to have stopped him from printing. Nor did posthumous printing end because Tatham lost interest in Blake or his illuminated books. It ended because he could not replicate the working conditions he had at his father’s Mayfair office/studio and, most of all, because he lost the means of production.

10. 1833: C. H. Tatham’s Auction and Sale and Letters to Sir John Soane

By the end of 1832, C. H. Tatham appears to have moved the family temporarily to 5 Montague Street, the return address on a letter to Soane that the Soane Museum dates 5 July 1833. This house, rated at £80, belonged to his friend “Signor Raymondo Campanile” (MRB 1833, reel 64), an Italian painter of architectural views with a studio at 7 Charles Street, Middlesex Hospital (Graves, British Institution 85, for 1829). This was next to the studio C. H. Tatham had in 1800, 6 Charles Street (Graves, Royal Academy 7: 324), and down the street from the studio he and his son began using in 1835. By the end of July 1833, C. H. Tatham had moved to 19 Montpelier Square, Brompton. He had auctioned his collections and furniture at Christie’s on 9-10 July 1833. Soane, contrary to the ODNB’s claim, acquired only four lots from the auction. George Bailey, Soane’s assistant and first curator of his museum, attended the sale on Soane’s behalf and purchased lot 37, “A design for a ceiling in the Borghese Palace by Asprucci; the Mosaic pavement in the Vatican; and the entrance to the Borghese Palace”; lot 122*, “The original drawings for the work of the Pilasters of the Vatican”; and lot 122, a large scrapbook with leaves. Bailey also purchased from Priestley, a book dealer, lot 87, the presentation copy from the Duke of Bedford of Outline Engravings and Descriptions of the Woburn Abbey Marbles, 1822.

Soane asked Tatham to withdraw lot 6, proofs of a portrait of him after Lawrence, and Tatham complied.The letter, dated 8 July 1833, was dictated by Soane to Bailey (Soane Museum, Department of Manuscripts). Soane, almost blind by this time, relied on Bailey, who annotated his copy of the Tatham auction catalogue. I am grateful for this information from Stephen Astley, the curator of drawings at the Soane Museum at the time of my inquiry. He also withdrew lot 117, the portfolio of architectural drawings and plans of the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich that he had traced after the originals of Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. He presented it to Soane on 23 July 1833 as a gift: Dear Sir John
I beg leave to send a portfolio which contains my original Studies made at Rome I also send some original Drawings & Designs made by Nicholas Hawkesmoor for Greenwich Hospital—​who you know was pupil to Sir John Vanbrugh—​I also send Tracings from the first design of Sir Christopher Wren from the originals at All Souls Oxford—​If you will not do me the honour to accept them, I will accept anything for them—​I passed the whole of the day Yesterday with Rossi & took account of the state of his AffairsRossi, the sculptor, was C. H. Tatham’s friend and former neighbor. In 1834, the last year he exhibited at the academy, Rossi was financially distressed and soon afterward applied for a Royal Academy pension. which I will report whenever you may please to appoint better than I can do in the compass of this note Most respectfully I ever am Dear Sir John Yr faithful & obliged Charles Heathcote TathamTranscribed from the original letter in the Soane Museum. “The ‘Greenwich Hospital’ Album, containing survey drawings and designs for the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, designs for Blenheim, copies of designs for St Paul’s Cathedral, and measured drawings by C. H. Tatham of ancient buildings in Italy (69 leaves). Grey boards, leather spine insc: Original Drawings of Greenwich/Hospital (745 x 530). … Prov: Presented to Soane by C. H. Tatham, 1833” (Soane Museum concise catalogue, vol. 109 <http://​collections.​soane.​org/​THES83489>). “I will accept anything for them” reflects the seriousness of his financial distress. Nevertheless, he had intended to make a gift of them, but suspected, correctly, that Soane would prefer to pay. On 27 November 1833, he wrote again, in response to a letter dictated by Soane: Dear Sir John,
I beg leave honestly to declare that when I took the liberty to deposit my Roman Drawings and those of Sir John Vanbrugh etc in your possession, I did so with the feeling only of gratification that they might be found in a corner of your invaluable Museum—​But, as you so generously desire me to affix a price to them, subject to your approval, under my present case, I would say that seven pounds or less than that sum, would suffice in addition to the gratification I hope to be indulged in ….Transcribed from the original letter in the Soane Museum. Holy Trinity Hospital, Greenwich, is where C. H. Tatham “ended his days.” As noted, Linnell described him there as “only the overseer of twenty poor men for some charity” (Story 1: 74–75). His situation and position, however, were not as dismal as Linnell apparently assumed. Tatham’s friends “the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville, the Duchess of Sutherland, and others—​rallied round him, and in 1837 obtained for him the post of warden of Holy Trinity Hospital …” (DNB). Some of his children are recorded living there with him in the 1841 census. This is “where he ended his days happily and usefully. He died on 10 April 1842” (DNB).A full-length portrait of C. H. Tatham in his uniform as warden, painted in watercolors by Frederick Tatham, can be found at the Tatham Family History site <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​histories/​CharlesHeathcoteTatham_​Portrait_​byFrederickTatham_​Story.php>.

C. H. Tatham’s auction at Christie’s was a sad affair, filled with the kinds of objects characteristic of an estate sale, items acquired over a long and successful life and usually sold only upon the owner’s death. It is worth examining because it provides clues as to how his son organized his Blake collection for sale. The catalogue’s title—​A Catalogue of the Valuable and Interesting Collection of Architectural and Other Drawings, Books, and Books of Prints, Bronzes, Marbles, Greek Pottery, and Some Furniture, of C. H. Tatham, Esq.—​is misleading.Soane Museum, sale catalogue 1833:07:09-10; Lugt 13374. “In total Soane paid £37 for ‘Sundries at Mr Tatham’s Sale’. (Ledger E, 11 July 1833)” (Soane Museum catalogue description). “Some” furniture is a misnomer; Tatham, who designed furniture for the family firm of Tatham, Bailey & Sanders, had put up enough furniture (a great deal of it in mahogany and presumably from both the office and house) to take up the auction’s entire first day. Among the 134 lots were presses, but not the printing type. A mahogany “press with folding doors” was listed (lot 83), as was a “painted press, with folding-doors” (108), which was a large cupboard, often “placed in a recess in the wall, for holding linen, clothes, books, etc., or food, plates, dishes, and other kitchen items” (OED). Lot 129 was a “large oak table with flaps, and an oak linen-press.” The forms of “a fine-toned upright piano-forte by Hutton, in a rosewood case” (52) and “two mahogany music-stands” and stool (57) are evidence of music in the salons that Blake may have attended at the Alpha Road home.Mahogany appears to have been the favorite wood: “a pair of mahogany book-cases, with glazed folding-doors and marble slabs” (54), “a set of mahogany dining tables, with two extra leaves” (75), “eight mahogany dining-room chairs with leather seats” (76), “a mahogany circular table, on richly carved pillar and claw” (77), and “a mahogany four-post bedstead, and paillasse” (85). The house and office/​studio were systematically emptied of chandeliers, candleholders, copper pans, brass kettles, skillets, bidets, “six blankets and a rug” (88), “a feather bed, bolster, and two pillows” (87), and “two wool mattresses” (86).

No Blake work was for sale in the auction, but many of Tatham’s architectural drawings and prints were. Lots 123-33 consisted of “Architectural Designs by Charles H. Tatham, Esq. Framed and Glazed” and lots 117-22 were portfolios and “scrap books”: “a volume, containing 180 drawings from antiquities in Rome, by C. H. Tatham, Esq.” (117); a volume of ninety of his “original drawings” (118); a volume with “163 drawings and prints of antiquities” (119); “a scrap book, containing 138 sketches made in Italy, etc. by C. H. Tatham, Esq.” (120); “a scrap book, containing 39 drawings from antique fragments in the collection of Mr. Holland, by C. H. Tatham, Esq.” (121); and the “large scrap book with leaves” purchased by Soane (122).

The auction may not have been C. H. Tatham’s only sale. Sixteen days later, Linnell recorded in a journal entry for Friday, 26 July 1833, “To Lisson Grove to look at F. Tatham’s effects. on sale” (BR[2] 556). On its face, this entry is odd, given that Frederick Tatham had vacated both his Lisson Grove residence and studio by this time. Moreover, Linnell had stopped talking and writing to Frederick Tatham two years earlier, after Tatham claimed that Linnell owed Catherine Blake more money for the Dante watercolor designs (Story 1: 241, H. H. Gilchrist 130). Writing George Cumberland on 18 March 1833 about the whereabouts of Blake’s works, Linnell refused to acknowledge Tatham by name: “As to M^r Blake’s works I do not think any person ever possessed a complete set—​not even Blake himself—​what has become of his plates I know not—​as M^rs. Blake left all she had not sold to a person who has since that [time] become a Bankrupt or something like it and I suppose has disposed of what he had ” (BR[2] 554, emphasis added).Linnell had been friends with C. H. Tatham since 1812 and tried to help his son. His relationship with the younger Tatham had become estranged over the Dante drawings and only became more contentious after Catherine died. He never accepted Frederick Tatham’s claim of ownership of Blake’s effects. Linnell clearly knows more than he tells Cumberland; he deliberately avoids naming names, presumably to protect the Tatham family’s reputation.

Linnell acknowledges that Catherine left all of Blake’s effects, which would include the press and “plates”—​copperplates and prints—​to Frederick Tatham. He also, however, conflates Tatham with his father. Linnell had heard rumors of C. H. Tatham’s insolvency—​of his having to “mortgage his property,” as Linnell was to say later (Story 1: 75). No evidence exists that Frederick Tatham was insolvent.According to the Tatham Family History site, “no evidence” has yet been located that C. H. Tatham “was legally bankrupt or insolvent,” despite rumors of his financial problems. The Wikipedia article (n2) refers to the Times Digital Archive regarding possible bankruptcy, but I have not been able to locate any document there or elsewhere to prove that he filed for bankruptcy. I have not come across any such rumors for the son until later in his life, when Anne Gilchrist told W. M. Rossetti that he had “gradually lost all his practice” (H. H. Gilchrist 129). In effect, Linnell conflates the owner of Blake’s effects with the owner of the Mayfair studio, implying that the studio was the place Mrs. Blake last “left” them. Linnell may have actually seen the press in Mayfair. He consulted with C. H. Tatham in 1829, presumably at the Mayfair office, about his plans for his new house.Linnell consulted with C. H. Tatham about the plans he drew up for his Porchester Terrace home, and he probably would have done so at Tatham’s Mayfair office rather than in Hampstead. See John Linnell’s Building Book <https://​www.​fitzmuseum.​cam.​ac.​uk/​gallery/​linnell/​ExhibitionNotes.​htm> (item 52). Moreover, in supposing that the Tathams “disposed of what [they] had,” Linnell appears (disturbingly) not only to be identifying the last location of the illuminated plates, but also to be suggesting that Catherine sold some of them and the Tathams sold the rest—​that is, “all she had not sold.”

No material evidence in the form of posthumous prints proves that Catherine printed illuminated plates in her apartment, or even that she took the hundreds of copperplates to her apartment—​let alone the rolling press. The two-year hiatus in posthumous printing between the four copies of illuminated books that she appears to have printed in spring 1829 and the sixteen or so copies printed by Tatham starting in late 1831 coincides with the two and a half years she resided at 17 Upper Charlton Street. Linnell’s comment to Cumberland appears to imply that Catherine left Blake’s plates at C. H. Tatham’s office before he became “a Bankrupt or something like it” and thus in the literal (if not legal) hands of Frederick Tatham. One must wonder whether the illuminated plates (minus the ten remaining c. 1861) were sold by Catherine, “stolen by an ungrateful black” and “sold … to a smith as old metal” (A. Gilchrist 1: 126), or “disposed of” by Tatham or his father when emptying the Mayfair studio. Both father and son, after all, had a financial incentive to dispose of objects worth more as metal than as art. If they were sold or stolen, then we have our answer to why posthumous printing stopped: without plates there was nothing to print. If, on the other hand, the plates were neither stolen nor sold—​at least at this time—​then, as argued, the probable cause for the cessation of posthumous printing was the vacating of the Mayfair studio, and, with it, the loss of the machine needed to print the plates.

Linnell’s note in his journal—​“To Lisson Grove to look at F. Tatham’s effects. on sale”—​presumably records what he had done that day and not what he intended to do. If so, he appears not to have acquired anything from the sale, for nothing is listed after the note. The sale itself may have been motivated by Frederick Tatham’s vacating his house at 20b Lisson Grove North by the end of 1832 or early 1833 and his studio at 20a Lisson Grove North by 24 June 1833. Because “Lisson Grove” is not just a street but an area (like Soho or Bloomsbury), which includes Alpha Road (see illus. 2, 3, 4), the sale of “Tatham’s effects” may have been held a few blocks away, at 34 Alpha Road, the lease of which C. H. Tatham apparently retained in 1833. At the very least, a few circumstantial facts suggest that the items on sale were drawn from the households of both father and son.

Blake’s copy of Swedenborg’s The Wisdom of Angels, concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom appears likely to have been at the sale. An inscription on the flyleaf reads: The Ms. Notes by Blake the Artist—​acc s[ ]le
M^r. Tatham (an architect) a friend of
Blake, from whose possession the Volume
came.Jan. 1. 1839.In Blake Books, Bentley transcribes “acc s[ ]le” as “acc^g to [?],” meaning “according to” Mr. Tatham (BB 696); in the second edition of Blake Records, he transcribes it as “acc[?] sale[?] [i.e., acquired at the sale of?]” Mr. Tatham (BR[2] 556). Upon examining the original inscription, I read it to mean “acquired at the sale of.” Bentley is probably right about the inscription’s date referring to the note itself and not the purchase (BR[2] 556n). He may be mistaken, however, to assume that the book’s new owner meant Frederick, not C. H. Tatham, who owned other works by Blake, including A Vision of Hercules, a drawing from a sketchbook that contained “Calvert’s signature, a sketch by Palmer, and notes and drawings by Richmond.” It also “contained C. H. Tatham’s book-plate” (Butlin #802A). As noted, Tatham Sr. owned America copy B, which was acquired by Dew-Smith, who also owned the Swedenborg volume by 1878.The Swedenborg volume was sold as part of Dew-Smith’s collection at Sotheby’s on 29-30 January 1878 (lot 15); America copy B sold in lot 247 and, according to the Sotheby’s catalogue, came from an unknown source in 1874 (Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes” 50), which may also have been Dew-Smith’s source of the Swedenborg volume. The entrance of both America copy B and the Swedenborg volume into the same collection supports the idea that the two books once shared a provenance in C. H. Tatham, or at the very least a combined sale at 34 Alpha Road. Swedenborg’s companion volume, The Wisdom of Angels concerning the Divine Providence, was acquired by Palmer, the very “scholarly artist” and son of a bookseller, who signed it with his monogram. Palmer owned at least seven other books from Blake’s library, two of which he signed and dated 1833.Anne Gilchrist described Palmer as “the genial, scholarly artist … the last of the long line of English painters to possess and to cherish poetic-landscape art” (H. H. Gilchrist 57). Of the fifty books recorded in Blake Books (six on p. 681 plus nos. 711-54), twenty-seven are untraced. Three went to Linnell (two as gifts, one as purchase); eight were owned by Palmer, who inscribed no. 711 as “Samuel Palmer 1833” and no. 712 as “Samuel Palmer / 1833”; he also owned nos. 715, 718, 721, 743 (the Swedenborg), 749, and 735 (see BBS 322). Palmer’s date suggests this sale was the source for these two books, for The Wisdom of Angels, concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, and probably for his other books as well. The sale of “M^r. Tatham” came an opportune sixteen days after the Christie’s auction, giving C. H. Tatham an opportunity to sell what was bought in, did not sell, or was too small to fit the auction. Whether the sale was held at Frederick Tatham’s empty studio or C. H. Tatham’s empty house, “F. Tatham’s effects” seem likely to have included works belonging to father and son.

As we have seen, the convergence of bibliographical and biographical facts supports the idea that by this time the press was no longer accessible. An undated letter from Frederick Tatham to Soane suggests the same. The letter, presumably written after his father’s on 23 July 1833, reveals his father’s influence and reads like a response to the loss of the press and whatever revenue stream it may have represented. It appears also to confirm Tatham’s inability to replenish that specific stock: 3 Grove Terrace Lisson Grove Sir, May I take the liberty to inform you that at the demise of the Widow of the celebrated William Blake the Engraver & Fresco Painter (whose life has been written by Cunningham in the Lives of Painters and by Smith in the latter Volume of the Life of Nollekens), I became possessed of all the residue of his Works being Drawings Sketches & Copper Plates of a very extraordinary description. Hearing that your Collection is deservedly celebrated I beg to say that should you wish to add any of this very great mans productions to it I shall be happy to offer any portion of them to you at a reasonable rate. There are none now for Sale nor is it likely there will be but these in my possession Should you wish to see any of his very beautiful Drawings I should be happy of the honour of yr Commands for that purpose—​ I have the honour to be Sir Yr very obedient & humble servant Frederick Tatham —​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​ SculptorTranscribed from the original letter in the Soane Museum. For a partial transcription, see BR(2) 552.

Tatham wisely emphasized drawings, which Soane collected in very large quantities (for example, almost 9000 drawings from the office of Robert and James Adam entered Soane’s collection in 1833). He correctly noted that the Blake drawings that he had, unlike illuminated books and commercial engravings, were not for sale elsewhere. His comment “nor is it likely there will be but these in my possession” refers explicitly to his stock of drawings. However, it may also reference the prints from the “Copper Plates,” which he implies were also never to be replenished, in which case the comment appears to acknowledge his recent loss of the press. The loss of the press, coupled, perhaps, with the realization of how little money the books could bring in relative to the effort required to produce them (see below), forced Tatham to rethink how best to sell his Blakes. He does not mention illuminated books to Soane, expressing instead his desire to sell his Blake collection in “portion[s],” which may represent a change in sales strategy from single or paired illuminated books and single finished drawings—​the strategy favored by Catherine (A. Gilchrist 1: 366)—​to “volumes” or “scrap books” of prints and drawings, the terms used by his father and others for groups of miscellaneous drawings and prints not highly valuable or saleable individually.

Tatham implies that he could assemble a volume or scrapbook of miscellaneous drawings, presumably of the size Soane had acquired from C. H. Tatham. He did not do so for Soane, but he did for other collectors and at least one printseller. By 1843, he had sold Joseph Hogarth, a printseller, a “portfolio of Blake’s drawings,” which appears to have comprised over 100 drawings and sketches, including “Larger Drawings”—​that is, large color prints (Viscomi, “Signing Large Color Prints” 401). John Ruskin bought this portfolio c. 1843 for £100 (initially priced at £150), a sale that Richmond helped to negotiate (Ruskin 32-33).Wilkinson, who met Tatham through Elwell in early November 1838 (see note 64), described Tatham as possessing “all the drawings left by Blake” (BR[2] 557). This implies that Tatham sold the portfolio of Blake’s drawings to Hogarth between late 1838 and c. 1843. For Richmond to have directed Ruskin to Hogarth for works by Blake, instead of to his brother-in-law, implies that Tatham’s Blake collection was much depleted and that the finest works by Blake, such as the large color prints, were no longer in Tatham’s possession by 1843. Ruskin returned the portfolio and Hogarth appears to have reconfigured it and sold it to an unknown collector, whose collection sold at Sotheby’s on 29 April 1862 (see section 11). Tatham also compiled scrapbooks or portfolios for collectors. One extensive scrapbook of Blake items included 122 prints and proofs and the manuscript of the “Order of the Songs,” which George A. Smith acquired by 1853 (BB 337) and which Puttick and Simpson in 1863 (and then Quaritch in 1864) referred to as “Blakiana.”The volume with Blake’s “Order of the Songs” manuscript was in the Puttick and Simpson sale, 3-4 July 1863, as “Blakiana, The Life of William Blake in MS., extracted from Allan Cunningham, with curious plates, drawings, and scraps [£15.15.0]” (Bentley, Sale Catalogues). It was also listed in Quaritch’s 1864 A Catalogue of Books, lot 6521, as “Blakiana” with a lengthy description of its contents and a “list of Original Drawings and Sketches sold by auction in 1862 with the prices realised, etc. … £21.” The “list” is almost certainly Smith’s copy of the 29 April 1862 Sotheby auction of A Valuable Collection of Engravings, Drawings and Pictures, Chiefly from the Cabinet of an Amateur; Comprising … Original Drawings and Sketches by W. Blake ….” Smith, who owned the “Order of the Songs” manuscript, was at this auction and bought lots 159, 160, 162, 168, and 194. The Blakeana volume shows up again in Smith’s own auction at Christie’s, 1-5 April 1880, lot 168, sold to Quaritch for £66. The vendors in 1863 and 1864 were presumably listing it for Smith. Arthington acquired a volume with sixty-seven impressions and proofs, including proofs of Thel (BB 131). An extra-illustrated volume of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake used a core of 100 or more prints that John Pearson had acquired, most likely en masse in a scrapbook from Tatham (BB 205). The prints used in what appear to have been extra-illustrated copies of Gilchrist’s Life and Swinburne’s Critical Essay in the Smith sale at Christie’s in 1880 may also have come from a Blakeana volume.Lot 78 (not recorded in Bentley’s Blake Books or Sale Catalogues) of the 1-5 April 1880 auction: “Blake (W.) Life, by A. Gilchrist, illustrated, 2 vol. 1863—Swinburne (A. C.) W. Blake, a Critical Essay, illustrations, 1868, 3 vols. 1.17 to Pickering.” Swinburne’s Essay was published in one volume, hence its reformatting into three volumes indicates extra illustrations. Gilchrist’s Life was published in two volumes, but may also have been extra illustrated in the manner of a copy in the Beinecke Library, two volumes rebound on large paper. Dew-Smith owned a “Scrap Book … containing illustrations by Stothard, W. Blake” that sold in his 27-30 June 1906 Sotheby auction (Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes” 60).

Despite Cumberland’s friends thinking Blake’s prices were too high (BR[2] 458), prices for illuminated books were too low to have made uncolored posthumous copies profitable for Catherine. As noted below, the colored Songs copy P sold at auction in 1826 for £1; the uncolored Songs copy BB sold in 1830 for £1. Tatham, a fine watercolorist in his own right, did not color the Blake plates he printed. The increased time, labor, and materials required to produce such finished copies were apparently not worth the investment, nor could he have equaled what Blake had done. In this regard, he may not have long regretted the loss of the press or his changed relation to Blake’s works, from producer and seller to seller exclusively. The money to be made was in selling groups of prints and drawings rather than in printing and selling single copies of the books.

11. 1829–31 Revisited: Catherine Blake’s Apartment and Her Role in Posthumous Productions

Whitehead traces Catherine Blake’s residences in her last years with great precision. He is cautious, though, about locating her press, even questioning its existence: “Whether by early 1829 Catherine still possessed her husband’s press, had replaced it with a smaller one …, or had no press, has yet to be established conclusively” (“Last Years” 89n137, emphasis added). Yet throughout his essay he portrays Catherine as printing Blake’s illuminated plates during the last two years of her life in her two-room apartment: “For the majority of her widowhood (spring 1829–October 1831) Catherine lived independently. With her financial security ensured by the bequest from Banes and the gift purchase from Lord Egremont, she was able to support herself by printing, coloring, and selling her husband’s works, not merely for a few months but for approximately two and a half years” (86). An examination of the extant posthumous prints, however, reveals that she did not print or have a hand in printing any of the posthumous copies of Jerusalem or Songs.

Whitehead suggests that “she also appears to have colored and finished Blake’s prints, drawings, and other works from stock” (“Last Years” 79). According to Alexander Gilchrist, “Aided by Mr. Tatham she also filled in, within Blake’s lines, the colour of the Engraved Books; and even finished some of the drawings—​rather against Mr. Linnell’s judgment” (1: 366). Gilchrist’s statements appear to be the primary sources for thinking that Catherine colored posthumous impressions and illuminated prints from stock. Either Gilchrist is conflating her earlier assistance and practices in the production of illuminated books with her posthumous printing of a few books, or there are many untraced posthumous books and impressions. No coloring of posthumous impressions—​or of lifetime impressions after Blake’s death—​can be traced to Catherine. On a smaller scale, however, according to Richmond, she seems to have added the decorative scrolls to Songs copy W after Blake died (BB 423). She described this copy as being “especially precious from having been ‘Blake’s own’” (A. Gilchrist 1: 365-66) and sold it in March 1830. The framing devices here, though, are not as inventive or fine as those in Songs copy Y, which she may also have executed, albeit five years earlier.

The “drawings” that Gilchrist mentions her coloring were almost certainly the twenty-nine illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress, and her hand is suspected in the finishing because it is not as fine as Blake’s usual work (Butlin #829; W. M. Rossetti in A. Gilchrist 2: 235-36). Moreover, the sale of Pilgrim’s Progress benefited Frederick Tatham, not Catherine; it appears to have been part of the “portfolio of Blake’s drawings” that Tatham sold to Hogarth and that Ruskin acquired but returned c. 1843. That portfolio, or much of its original contents, seems to have been subsequently owned by an unknown collector who acquired other prints and drawings from Hogarth and possibly posthumous copies e and i of Songs from Tatham. This collection, including the Blake works, sold at Sotheby’s on 29 April 1862.This auction’s vendor of the Blakes is usually identified as—​or implied to be—​Tatham (Skretkowicz 53; BR[2] 795n; Butlin, “William Rossetti” 40). The argument as to why this is not possible is given in appendix 4 of my “Printed Paintings.” Twenty-eight of the twenty-nine illustrations of Pilgrim’s Progress sold in lot 187 for £13.10s. to R. M. Milnes.

According to Whitehead, “it is possible” that Blake had copies of Night Thoughts in stock and “that some of these copies could have been colored by Catherine after Blake’s death” (“Last Years” 79n37). This seems highly unlikely. Twenty-eight hand-colored copies are extant and all were finished in one of “two distinct styles, the first of about 1797, and the second of about 1805” (BB 642, crediting Martin Butlin for the information; see also Butlin #330, p. 180, and Grant et al. 1: 52-72, where they are defined as “Type I” and “Type II”). Blake is thought to have provided the models for both styles, but even that is in question because the supposed models (what Grant et al. identify as I.1 [BB copy Q] and II.1 [BB copy B]) do not follow Blake’s watercolor designs (Grant et al. 1: 60). If he provided the models, it could have been for “professional colorists” or “journeyman colorists” (Grant et al. 1: 53, 60, 55) in the employ of the publisher, Richard Edwards. The phrase “as pattern” on some copies suggests the coloring repeated that of a master copy. Blake appears not to have been one of the colorists; Catherine may—​or may not—​have been. If she was, it would not have been during her widowhood.According to Joseph Farington, Edwards “had the letter press of each page laid down on a large half sheet of paper. There are ab^t. 900 pages” (BR[2] 71). While not responsible for preparing the Night Thoughts texts, Catherine may have prepared the texts for the 116 illustrations to Gray’s Poems, which Blake executed in 1797 for John Flaxman’s wife in the same style as Night Thoughts. Moreover, no provenance of an extant copy indicates late coloring or sale by Catherine. Copy J, however, belonged to Samuel Boddington, who acquired America copy P, Europe copy M, and Jerusalem copy H, all posthumous copies, from Tatham by 1833. From Tatham he also acquired For the Sexes copy C, Descriptive Catalogue copy E, and possibly There is No Natural Religion copy C or D (see note 61). Boddington most likely procured his copy of Night Thoughts after Tatham inherited Blake’s effects. If Catherine had a colored copy in stock, then, as with Pilgrim’s Progress and most of the other works she inherited, Tatham was the one who benefited financially.Bentley raises the possibility that Blake’s outline style of engraving was designed for hand coloring and that colored copies of Night Thoughts were part of the original plan (Edwardses 179). He also acknowledges that the colorists may have been professionals, of the kind who colored commercial engravings for the publishers (237n66), and that the Blakes would have had a difficult time “accommodating” so many half sheets in their c. 1805 living quarters (189).

Despite questioning the press’s existence in 1829 (or afterwards), Whitehead, as noted, believes that Catherine probably moved a press (Blake’s or a smaller one) from Tatham’s Mayfair studio to her new apartment, that she wanted full-time access to it, and that she used it over the next two and a half years: “On an upper floor at 17 Upper Charlton Street, she appears to have continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death” (“Last Years” 89). The technical, material, and bibliographical evidence provided by the extant copies of posthumously printed illuminated books, etchings, and engravings does not support the claim that she printed many of Blake’s plates or that she colored any prints or other works from stock aside from Pilgrim’s Progress. The evidence indicates that a press was available between 1827 and 1832 for both her and Tatham, but that Catherine was not the primary posthumous printer. It also indicates a hiatus in posthumous production from the spring of 1829 to the fall of 1831, which corresponds with Catherine’s residency at 17 Upper Charlton Street. She printed four copies of For the Sexes, possibly with the assistance of Linnell, and produced impressions of “Canterbury Pilgrims,” “Joseph of Arimathea,” the Dante engravings, and the portrait of Rev. Hawker, probably while staying at Linnell’s studio. She also printed “The Interpreter’s Parlour,” possibly in a few copies, two copies of America, and two copies of Europe, presumably in Tatham’s Mayfair studio. She printed approximately 150 to 160 intaglio and relief impressions between fall 1827 and spring 1829. Tatham appears to have printed slightly more than 1000 posthumous impressions and proofs to form at least sixteen copies of four illuminated books. He produced his stock of Blake’s “engraved Books,” which constituted the bulk of his inheritance; he printed more plates, sold more works, and almost certainly made more money off Blake’s works than Catherine.

Nor is there evidence that Catherine moved the press to her apartment. The press appears to have remained idle after she printed copies of America and Europe and was not used again until she died, when Tatham began printing copies of the illuminated books. She more likely left it and the copperplates in Tatham’s care at the Mayfair studio, treating this space as her work space. The idea that Catherine continued to print Blake’s works from her apartment, which Whitehead refers to as her “studio,” is based on precedent and analogies, not extant works printed in this period. She was indeed Blake’s assistant in the production of early illuminated books and knew how to print and color impressions. Tatham notes that “she even laboured upon his Works[,] those parts of them where powers of Drawing & form were not necessary, which from her excellent Idea of Colouring, was of no small use in the completion of his labourious designs. This she did to a much greater extent than is usually credited” (BR[2] 690). Like Alexander Gilchrist, Tatham was referring to skills used earlier in her life and perhaps to her touching up and strengthening lines in grey and black washes in the copies of America and Europe that she printed c. 1829 and adding decorative frames to Songs copy W. Whitehead summarizes the case that Catherine knew how to color and print illuminated plates (“Last Years” 78-79). Having made that case myself on her behalf in Blake and the Idea of the Book, I am not contesting it—​though, unlike Tatham, I would not refer to her coloring as “excellent.” I am contesting, however, the idea that because she “could print, color, and finish her husband’s works” (Whitehead 80), she did so after Blake died. The intention—​perhaps even the potential—​for her doing so may have existed, but the evidence demonstrating that she did on any meaningful scale does not.Keynes and Wolf describe untraced Songs copy f as having its “first seven plates touched with water-colours, possibly by Mrs. Blake” (68). The description from the Sotheby’s auction catalogue, 19 December 1919, however, does not mention colors (Bentley, Sale Catalogues). Moreover, copy f was printed in the reddish-brown ink of the other posthumous copies and colored between 1919 and 1925, at which time it reemerged as copy j (BB 428).

Whitehead imagines Catherine wanting her last living arrangement to mirror hers and Blake’s, where studio and living quarters were, as noted, one and the same: “Their days and nights were passed in each other’s company, for he always painted, drew, engraved and studied, in the same room where they grilled, boiled, stewed, and slept” (Nollekens, BR[2] 624-25).Bentley adds: “This was only true in their last residence, 3 Fountain Court, Strand (1821–27), where the space seems to have been painfully restricted. It was clearly not true, for instance, of their house in Hercules Buildings (1790–1800), which Tatham said … had eight or ten rooms and a maid” (BR[2] 625n). Because Catherine’s new apartment was similar in size to what she had with Blake, Whitehead imagines that she “may have organized her space, almost certainly an upper-floor apartment, along the lines of her and her husband’s rooms at 17 South Molton Street and 3 Fountain Court” (“Last Years” 89). Again, the potential is there: In the front room, with Tatham’s assistance, she may have printed posthumous copies of Blake’s illuminated books. The scaled representation of the footprint of no. 17 on the 1872 survey map reveals that the front rooms on the upper floors measured approximately 5.49 meters (18 feet) in width and 3.66 meters (12 feet) in depth. This means that for over two years, Catherine, living independently, had space to color and sell her late husband’s works and could also resume her role in printing copies of his illuminated books. (Whitehead, “Last Years” 89)For floor plans of the last two apartments occupied by Blake and Catherine Blake, see also Hamlyn 16-20. But again, the physical evidence in the form of extant posthumously printed and colored works does not support this image or level of productivity. The copies of For the Sexes that she appears to have printed were uncolored and probably produced in Linnell’s studio along with other intaglio works—​with copy F, and possibly copies G, H, and I, inherited by Tatham. The two pairs of America and Europe that she seems to have printed in Tatham’s Mayfair studio in spring 1829 may have benefited her only in part; one pair appears to have been sold to Ferguson, but the other pair may have been sold to Peel, in which case the sale would most likely have been after Tatham moved to Lisson Grove and was possibly made on his behalf, not hers. She is known to have executed a drawing of a head in the fire (c. 1830), which Tatham inherited (Butlin #C2), and, possibly, the portrait of the young Blake (c. 1827–31), which appears “to have been given by Mrs. Blake to a friend” (Butlin #C3). As noted, she also finished coloring the Pilgrim’s Progress illustrations—​which Tatham inherited and sold.

Whitehead seeks to “revise our view of Catherine. She was not a dependent Blake relict, reliant upon his old friends and passed from Ancient to Ancient” (“Last Years” 89). Rather, in his view, she was an active artisan independent of Blake, resembling more closely the woman J. T. Smith describes, who, in addition to proofing and printing Blake’s plates, “became a draughtswoman” and “possessed a similar power of imbibing ideas, and has produced drawings equally original, and, in some respects, interesting” (Nollekens, BR [2] 608). Whitehead wishes to show that Catherine was more than the “excellent saleswoman” that Alexander Gilchrist called her (1: 366) and to counter Gilchrist’s view that “some of the characteristics of an originally uneducated mind had clung to her … an exaggerated suspiciousness, for instance, and even jealousy of his friends” (1: 317).Gilchrist may be alluding to her suspicion that Linnell did not pay Blake enough for the Dante watercolors and engravings, an idea that may have originated with Tatham, who made that claim on her behalf and then on his own after she died (BR[2] 537ff., Story 1: 241, H. H. Gilchrist 130). Anne Gilchrist notes the same, that she “retained one trait of an uneducated mind—​an unreasonable suspiciousness” (H. H. Gilchrist 130-31). Hogarth, who knew Tatham and bought many of his Blake works that were once Catherine’s, appears to reflect Tatham’s view that she was often unreasonably difficult in sales transactions and not always appreciative of genuine assistance. Responding to Smith’s portrayal of Catherine in Nollekens, he wrote at the back of his copy: Mrs Blake was hardly the passive cre[a]ture here described—​at all events Tatham did not find her so for she was opposed to everything he did for her benefit and when she submitted to his views it was always with the words she “Had no help for it”—​that at last Tatham tired with her opposition threw the Will behind the fire and burnt it saying [“]There now you can do as you like for the Will no longer exists[”] and left her. Early the following morning she called upon [him] saying William had been with her all night and required her to come to him and renew the Will which was done and never after did she offer any objection to Tatham’s proceedings. (BR[2] 493-94)According to Bentley, “this account of Blake’s will is very odd, for no such will was ever registered, and wills cannot be ‘renewed’ as casually as Catherine or Hogarth thought they could. This sounds like a nuncupative will” (BR[2] 494). Still, some kind of dramatic gesture was made and some kind of contract that Tatham and Catherine apparently took seriously was thrown into the fire. Linnell annotated his copy of Nollekens, “There is very little evidence left that M^rs Blake produced Drawings equally original with her husbands[.] The only one they ever shewed me which they affirmed to be her Design & execution is in my possession & is certainly so like one of Blake’s own that it is difficult to believe it to be the production of any other mind” (BR[2] 608n). This drawing is not among the three that Butlin records as being attributed to Catherine (Butlin #C1, C2, and C3).

We do not, however, need to counter the recollections of Gilchrist, Hogarth, and others—​by transforming Catherine in her widowhood into a full-time artisan or exaggerating her solo productivity—​to see that she was a remarkable woman. Whitehead’s meticulous research into the last residences of Blake and Catherine Blake has indeed reminded us of her crucial roles in the production of some of Blake’s works and, in the context of how other artists lived and worked, how truly supportive, understanding, and inspiring she must have been.In “Craft and Care: The Maker Movement, Catherine Blake, and the Digital Humanities,” Ashley Reed demonstrates original and insightful criteria for evaluating Catherine’s value to Blake that are not based on her being either “artisan” or “assistant.” She moves beyond these binaries to “refocus our attention away from the fixed point of the material object and toward a network of relations that brought it into being” (33). She recognizes that Catherine’s contributions as a care worker were “crucial to the creation of a finished artistic product” (32) and that “Catherine’s care is part of William’s craft, and vice versa” (35).

For example, Whitehead discovered that Catherine Blake’s apartment at 17 Upper Charlton Street was similar to—​and may have actually been—​the studio space in 1807 of the painter William Mulready, Linnell’s friend and former mentor. According to Crosby and Whitehead, “the fact that Mulready could use a floor of this residence as a painting studio suggests that Catherine had enough room here to print as well as colour and sell her husband’s works.” They reassert Whitehead’s claims: “From spring 1829 until her death in October 1831, Catherine, living independently, coloured and sold her late husband’s works, also printing copies of Blake’s illuminated books and other works” (104-05). Whitehead, citing the address recorded in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue (Graves, Royal Academy 5: 323), claims that Mulready used the space as “lodgings and studio” (“Last Years” 88). Graves, however, records addresses given by the artists, which in most cases were their studio spaces, presumably for the benefit of prospective buyers or clients. As noted, C. H. Tatham gave as his address Queen Street while living at Alpha Road, and in 1835 he gave Charles Street while living at Montpelier Square; Linnell gave Cirencester Place while living in Hampstead; and Frederick Tatham gave Queen Street while living at Alpha Road. C. H. Tatham had lots of children at home and needed an office, as did Linnell, Palmer, and Richmond. In 1807, Mulready was still (unhappily) married to the elder of John Varley’s two sisters—​who was herself an accomplished watercolorist—​with twin two-year-old boys and an infant son. He almost certainly used his two rooms as work space, not living quarters, which, between 1806 and 1809, appear to have been located at 9 Upper Cleveland Street.According to Frederic G. Stephens, author of Memorials of William Mulready, R.A. (1890), Mulready moved in 1806 to live at 9 Upper Cleveland Street, which is the address recorded in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue for that year (Graves, Royal Academy 5: 323). This apartment apparently doubled as studio and living space—​at least for a short while. In 1807, he is listed at 17 Upper Charlton Street while still residing at Upper Cleveland Street, from which he moved in 1809 to 25 Frederick Place, Hampstead Road. He was at 17 Upper Charlton for just 1807; he rented a room for painting with Linnell at 30 Francis Street, Bedford Square, 1808–09 (Stephens 56-57, Story 1: 58).

Artists need specialized spaces and are not easy to live with. The use of studios outside the home or separate from living and eating space was, and still is, the norm. Painting studios are marked by smells: linseed and walnut oils; mastic, damar, and other varnishes; gums and animal, vegetable, and fish glues; turpentine, alcohol, and other solvents; earth and other pigments. They are stocked with mortars and pestles; whiting and other chalks; canvases, wooden stretchers, papers, sketchbooks, panels, millboards, and rags; folders and portfolios; bladders, shells, glass and ceramic jars; knives, quills, and brushes; easels and palettes; bins, tables, stools, cabinets, benches, shelves, and plaster casts and models. Add printmaking to this mix, as Linnell and Blake did, and there were also waxes, etching grounds, asphaltum, rosins, acids, sharp metal tools, dabbers, whetstones, pumice stones, leather pads, tabors, vises, files, copperplates, braziers, coals, smoke, anvils, hammers, marble slabs, presses, etc. Any assortment of these materials, let alone all of them, could easily compromise domestic tranquillity. And, of course, artists at work do not want children under foot or spousal interruptions, and few spouses would accept such encroachment on their and their children’s private living space—​or tolerate the accidental but inevitable oily stains and colors that do not wash out of clothes.When printing and painting, one wears an apron or smock to protect clothing from ink and oil stains. The complications created by oils, varnishes, and solvents contributed to why oil painting and printmaking remained in the hands of professionals and occurred in special areas, unlike sketching and drawing, or working with pastels, watercolors, or washes. The late eighteenth-century invention of watercolors in solid cakes led to the medium’s popularity among amateurs, the ranks of which swelled due to ease of use and interest in the picturesque and drawing as a means of recording one’s views/​memories of nature.

Mrs. and Mr. Blake were devoted to—​and dependent upon—​one another, and she no doubt believed in his genius, but their living arrangements centered almost exclusively around his needs, a precarious situation made only more so by his not having a separate studio. In addition to his being a painter and a printmaker, he was, of course, a poet who heard voices and wrote from dictation. According to Alexander Gilchrist, quoting J. T. Smith, “[Mrs. Blake] would get up in the night, when ‘he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent; only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot: this for hours, and night after night’” (1: 316). She had, occasionally, the help of a servant (BR[2] 676), but mostly not; according to Hayley, “The good woman not only does all the work of the House, but she even makes the greatest part of her Husbands dress, & assists him in his art—​she draws, she engraves, & sings delightfully” (BR[2] 140).By “engraves,” Hayley presumably meant that she printed Blake’s engravings; there is no evidence that she knew how to engrave. In addition to her own talents, she must have been extraordinarily tolerant, loving, empathetic, and accepting—​must have believed in Blake’s gifts and participated in his life and works in ways too deep and profound for most of us to understand. Living with Mr. Blake and his rolling press—​especially in just two rooms between 1803 and 1827—​as assistant, friend, manager, and wife made Mrs. Blake remarkable indeed. Hayley was surely right in telling Lady Hesketh that she was “perhaps the only female on Earth, who could have suited Him exactly” (BR[2] 140).He adds: “They have been married more than 17 years & are as fond of each other, as if their Honey Moon were still shining.” For an examination of visual and verbal expressions and evidence of possible discord between husband and wife, at least in the early 1790s and after their return to London from Felpham, see Paley and Crosby’s “Catherine Blake and Her Marriage: Two Notes.” For an exploration of Catherine’s sexuality, real and very much imagined, see Whitehead and Gwynne’s “The Sexual Life of Catherine B.: Women Novelists, Blake Scholars and Contemporary Fabulations of Catherine Blake.”

Catherine sold a mere fraction of the designs she had inherited from her husband. Her inheritance included twelve large color prints, which Blake had priced in 1818 at £5.5s. each; Jerusalem copy E, which he had estimated at £21; the beautiful Songs copy W finished in gold leaf and priced by Blake in 1827 at £10.10s.; the equally beautiful late copy N of Visions; the Tiriel drawings; the twenty-three color prints of the Small Book of Designs copy B; a reduced drawing of the Canterbury Pilgrims (Butlin #654); The Death of Ezekiel’s Wife (Butlin #166); The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church (Butlin #69); designs for the Last Judgment (Butlin #643, 644, 647); the fresco version of the Last Judgment (Butlin #648) that Blake was working on when he died and valued at “twenty-five guineas” (A. Gilchrist 1: 358); and so much more. Indeed, all the works that would later fill Tatham’s “portfolio of Blake’s drawings” that Ruskin acquired from Hogarth once belonged to her. The portfolio included upward of 100 drawings and sketches and was only a portion of what Tatham inherited.Blake produced thirty-three large color prints in three printings and appears to have sold twenty-one of them to Butts and two collectors unknown to us, leaving Catherine twelve large color prints when he died. At least five, probably more, were in the portfolio (see Viscomi, “Signing Large Color Prints” 401 and “Printed Paintings,” appendix 4).

Catherine appears to have eventually recognized that she could secure a livelihood from Blake’s works without adding to them. She used her apartment at 17 Upper Charlton to live and to store and sell his works. She did not use it as a studio to print and color prints or, possibly, other than Pilgrim’s Progress, to color works from stock. That does not diminish her or render her an appendage of Blake’s. As Whitehead discovered, she lived independently for the last thirty-one months of her life. She was able to do so, however, as an “excellent saleswoman,” not artisan. The evidence, in the form of posthumous prints and works that Catherine is known to have sold, indicates that she earned at least £93.15.0 between August 1827 and April 1829—​in addition to her brother-in-law’s gift in early 1829 of £20 and some furniture. These monies came from proofing plates for Linnell and the sales of copies of “Canterbury Pilgrims,” Jerusalem copy F, “Ancient of Days” copy F, Cumberland’s greeting card, a copy of The Grave, the watercolor Lear and Cordelia in Prison (Butlin #53), the watercolor The Good and Evil Angels (Butlin #257), and “a Drawing of Heads by M^r. B. & two by Fuseli” (BR[2] 479-84, 538, 620, 790-92). This sum includes £20 from Linnell for housekeeping—​though this may not have been paid (BR[2] 538)—​and £17 from Tatham through Linnell in two payments for unspecified reasons (BR[2] 792); it does not include the unknown amount Henry Francis Cary paid in 1829 for Blake’s watercolor Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing (BR[2] 481n, Butlin #161). From her new apartment, between April 1829 and October 1831, she earned at least £106.16.6 from the sales of “Homer’s Illiad & Oddessey Trans by Chapman” in May 1829 to Tatham for £1.11.6 (BR[2] 792); The Characters in Spenser’s “Fairie Queene” in August 1829 to Lord Egremont for £84; Songs copy W, Christ Showing the Print of the Nails to the Apostles (Butlin #329), The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve (Butlin #666), and two prints in March 1830 to Bishop Jebb for £21;This sum assumes that Songs copy W sold for ten guineas, as understood by Bentley (BR[2] 509), and not twenty guineas, as understood by Butlin (#329). and Descriptive Catalogue copy K and Poetical Sketches copy T in August 1831 to Linnell for 5s. This sum does not include the sale of Visions copy N, America copy N, and Europe copy I in spring 1829, presumably to Ferguson. Nor does it include sales she may have made on her own without Linnell or Tatham collecting the money; the unknown first provenances of numerous works once hers that did not pass through Tatham’s hands cannot rule this out.

Tatham benefited financially from Blake’s works far more than did Catherine, but she benefited enough to support herself in her last years. During the fifty months of her widowhood, she appears to have had an income of at least £250—​and almost certainly more—​which averages to a little more than £60 a year, not bad considering that she lived for nineteen of those months rent free, first at Linnell’s studio and then at C. H. Tatham’s studio, and that as a couple the Blakes’ “yearly income,” as noted, did “not seem to have gone much above £100, and sometimes it was probably not much more than £50” (BR[2] 812). The evidence examined here indicates not only that she printed only a few illuminated works after Blake died, but also that she did not need to print them or color works from the stock she had inherited. By fall 1829, she had become financially independent through her own efforts as an “excellent saleswoman” and the largesse of Lord Egremont. In effect, in 1829, two years before Tatham began printing the lion’s share of the posthumous books, Catherine was able to retire from the business of printing.

12. 1788–1827 Revisited and Prices for Works in 1827–31

The idea that printing copies of Blake’s illuminated books would have secured Catherine Blake’s financial independence is itself suspect and recalls theories about Blake inventing illuminated printing to become financially independent.For a review of the critical theories attempting to explain the genesis and objectives of illuminated printing, see BIB chapters 1-4 and 18. Financial independence was impossible, however, at the prices Blake was asking in 1793. This reality was still true late in his life when he began asking far more per copy (and producing far fewer copies), pricing illuminated books not as poetry but as books of colored prints and miniature paintings. He admits as much to Dawson Turner in 1818, acknowledging that his books were “unprofitable enough to me tho Expensive to the Buyer” and that “the few I have Printed & Sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended” (E 771). At the inception of illuminated books, Blake presumably hoped that he might reach a larger audience with unique hand-colored and color-printed works that were also multiples than he could with one-off watercolor designs. Putting his works in more hands did not, however, mean a substantial increase in income. The ideas that “Blake clearly had high hopes that Illuminated printing would make his fortune” (Mitchell 42) and believed “he could achieve personal independence as both poet and painter at a single blow” (Frye 120) merely echo Alexander Gilchrist’s mistaken belief that the prospectus of 1793 was a financial turning point and that the illuminated books provided Blake with “a principal means of support through his future life” (1: 69). By the time of the prospectus, Blake had produced twenty-two copies of Innocence, which he priced at five shillings. Had he sold them all, he would have realized £5.10s., minus the approximately £1.11s. in copperplates, paper, oils, gum arabic, and pigments. “The income from the forty or so copies of the other five books advertised in the prospectus would have realized another seventeen pounds” (BIB 174).“In 1793 Blake knew the strengths and weaknesses of his method, he knew the size of his stock, and he knew how to add. While he no doubt hoped to earn some money as well as reputation, he must also have realized that illuminated printing, no matter how large and varied the stock, even after the costs of copper plates were recouped, could never have provided a dependable source of income at the prices he was charging, that its profits would always be supplemental to income derived from painting, designing, and engraving” (BIB 174; see also 250). In other words, Blake could have sold all the copies of his illuminated books printed over a four-year period and would have earned less than engraving one medium-size plate for Bowyer, Boydell, Macklin, or any of the other London book and print publishers.Blake told Rev. Trusler in 1799 that the size of the engraving Trusler requested would cost “Thirty Guineas & I cannot afford to do it for less. I had Twelve for the Head I sent you as a Specimen” (E 703). He was receiving similar amounts from publishers and Hayley for engraved designs. According to Bentley, “From 1780 to 1799, more than 90 per cent of his income derived from his commercial engravings” (Desolate Market 103).

Had Blake gained financial independence through illuminated printing, what would he have wanted to do? Write lyrical and narrative poems? Design, illustrate, or print his own books that incorporated calligraphy, drawing, printing, and painting? Paint visionary pictures? Illustrate the Bible, Milton, Dante, or other literary texts? Experiment with new print and color-printing technologies? Create new kinds of paint and painting surfaces? Besides forgoing copy engraving and executing more of his own inventions in various media, what exactly would he have done differently had he been financially independent?

He tells us he would have painted large frescos, the size of walls (E 527), though Robin Hamlyn comments astutely that his doing so would not have been in his best interests aesthetically (23). Blake had the eye of the miniaturist, honed no doubt by the attention to details required of engraving, but aided, as Hamlyn notes, by his being “moderately” myopic: with “his near vision … much sharper than his distance vision … close work would have come more naturally to him” (24). His frescos, which he likened to miniatures and enamels, were indeed miniatures writ large, some with many hundreds of figures and objects, as versions of the Last Judgment, Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs,” and Spiritual Condition of Man attest. Had he not given engraving so much of his time and effort, he would have denied the world the Job masterpieces. Blake did what he wanted, thanks to his tenacity, skills, talents, inspiration—​and, of course, to Catherine. But his innate abilities, coupled with loving support, assistance, and inspiration, would have gone for naught had he not also been a good engraver. He had a trade he was good at and that earned him money, enough during the first part of his career to support himself and his wife. His attitude toward his trade, at least in the 1790s, was healthy; he told Trusler that he had “no objection to Engraving after another Artist. Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, & should never have attempted to live by any thing else If orders had not come in for my Designs & Paintings …. Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or Engraving” (E 703).Blake recorded in his Notebook (117) that “Mr B … during a Period of Forty Years never suspended his Labours on Copper for a single Day” (E 568). He started his apprenticeship in 1772; by 1809, commissions for engravings had dried up (BR[2] 821), but he was still working on his own designs, including “Canterbury Pilgrims” (1810). His fight with the publisher Robert Cromek, who commissioned Schiavonetti to engrave Blake’s designs for The Grave (1806–08) and whom Blake accused of stealing his idea for the Canterbury Pilgrims design, appears to have soured him on the print trade. On 19 December 1808, Blake told Cumberland that it was “impossible” for him to return to his “former pursuits of printing” without “destroying” his “present course,” and that his “future must <alone> be devoted to Designing & Painting” (E 769-70). Engraving never disappeared from his life, though: between 1815 and 1827, he executed 103 commercial engravings and thirty original engravings (BR[2] 822-23) and earned approximately £1000 from engraving during that period (Bentley, Desolate Market 105).

Blake was certainly not alone among his peers in having to earn a living doing one thing when he much preferred doing another. Like Blake, George Romney preferred “history” paintings but painted portraits to survive, as did Thomas Gainsborough and Linnell, who both preferred landscapes. Though it took time away from his own work, engraving for the book and print publishers appears not to have stifled or impaired Blake’s imagination, vision, or inspiration. Resorting to engraving to pay the rent may have been less stressful and burdensome to him than portraiture was to so many other creative artists. Indeed, he certainly resisted Hayley, who wanted “to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do” (E 725). For all her skills, the widowed Catherine could not rely on a trade, not even printing. London publishers who were not also patrons like Hayley were likely to require print runs larger than he did for Cowper and were likely to balk altogether at hiring a small sixty-six-year-old female printer. She did not continue printing Blake’s illuminated books in any significant quantity, despite her initial intentions, and her not doing so is no more a mark against her than any of Blake’s unrealized intentions are marks against him.In January 1803, Blake told his brother James that “the Profits arising from Publications are immense & I now have it in my power to commence publication with many very formidable works, which I have finishd & ready.” He felt confident that he had learned Hayley’s “connexions & his method of managing” and that it would “be folly not to venture publishing” if he could substitute one of Hayley’s illustrated works with “one of my own & I mean to try many” (E 726). In December 1808, he told Cumberland that he was too busy with “New Vanities” and the prospect of “New profits” to return to illuminated printing and that he had “begun to print an account of my various Inventions in Art <for> which I have procured a Publisher” (E 770). After Blake died, she was more agent than artisan, but while she was with him, she was unquestionably the best printing “devil” he could have had—​or, as he said on his deathbed, she was forever his “angel” (BR[2] 655). Living with him and a large rolling press in two-room apartments for twenty-four years of her life—​from 1803 to 1827—​was evidence of that and so much more.

Cumberland wrote to Catherine on 25 November 1827 to offer advice on selling Blake’s works. He noted that his Bristol friends thought the Job engravings were priced too high at £3.3s. and were not ordering illuminated books “on account … of the prices.” The book prices that Blake quoted him in 1827 were between £3.3s. and £10.10s. (E 784). He recommended that she “fix a place in London where all [Blake’s] works may be disposed of offering a complete set for Sale to the BMPR [British Museum Print Room], as that will make them best known” (BR[2] 476, emphasis added). Cumberland was already pointing to the flaw in Catherine’s aspirations: there was very little money to be made from Blake’s printed works without his being better known. The necessity of a good reputation is something Cumberland made explicit to his son, telling him that he wanted to use the calling card Blake had engraved for him “to spread my old friends fame and promote his wifes Interest—​by making him thus the subject of conversation” (BR[2] 483).

J. T. Smith also knew the importance of reputation and believed he addressed it in Nollekens and His Times. In November 1828, shortly after Nollekens was published, he wrote to Linnell: “What I have said of your worthy friend Blake I am fully aware has been servisable [sic] to his widow” (BR[2] 490). Or so he intended and hoped. Making Blake’s books better known, however, required a “complete set,” which she did not have and would have been at a loss to produce.As noted, Blake did not have a complete set of his books when he died (BR[2] 554). He appears, however, to have had one in 1795, when he printed multiple copies of ten titles on folio-size leaves to form a deluxe set of his canon to that date (see BIB 289-94). The economic value of the kind of respected reputation that Cumberland and Smith had in mind was on full display on 1 July 1828 at the Flaxman auction at Christie’s, where Blake’s 116 large watercolor illustrations to Gray’s Poems—​which Blake had executed for Flaxman’s wife—​sold for a mere £8.8s. (or 1.4 shillings a drawing). Flaxman’s much smaller portfolio of thirty-seven drawings from Hesiod, “handsomely bound in morocco, lettered, &c.,” sold for £210—​seventy-five times more per drawing than Blake’s drawings.

Outline engravings after Flaxman were, of course, famous throughout Europe. Blake’s works were only fairly well known in London. His reputation was growing, slowly, and his works were selling and reselling, but not at high prices. When he was producing his last copies of Songs, painting them elaborately and using gold leaf, copies twenty and more years old were entering the market through auctions and printseller’s sales catalogues. In 1818, Blake priced Songs at £6.6s. (E 771); in 1827, he priced it at £10.10s. (E 784). Songs copy U, printed c. 1818, was offered in 1824 at Rivington and Cochran for £8.8s. In 1828, it sold with the property of Thomas Edwards at Stewart, Wheatley, & Adlard for just £2.13s. (BB 422). Songs copy P, printed c. 1802, sold in April 1826 in two volumes in red morocco and gilt leaves as part of the Bibliotheca Splendidissima: A Catalogue of a Select Portion of the Library of Mrs. Bliss for just £1. In July 1833, it sold with the property of P. A. Hanrott for £2.1s. Copy A of For Children: The Gates of Paradise sold for a mere eight shillings in the Bliss sale. Songs copy BB, an uncolored copy printed in black ink similar in appearance to posthumous copies, sold with fifty-five plates for just £1 (a mere 4.3 pence per plate) in January 1830 (BBS 127).

Catherine’s posthumously printed copies of illuminated books were uncolored and could not have realized the prices of Blake’s last books, which Blake knew were “Expensive to the Buyer” because of his elaborate coloring and use of shell gold that recast the pages of poetry as miniature paintings. He appears to have sold to collectors of prints and paintings as much as to collectors of rare books. Nevertheless, they were, Blake says, “unprofitable enough” to him (E 771). Had Catherine printed copies of Songs, she could have expected only a few pounds at most for monochrome copies, as is corroborated by the auction and sale catalogues at the time. Granted, she would have had the advantage of supply had there been demand, but Cumberland’s note about the books’ high prices, as well as the low resale price of Songs copy BB—​and the fact that she did not color any of the books she did print—​must give pause. Given how much of Blake’s “stock of Designs” Tatham inherited, one must also wonder how many works Catherine actually sold—​or how many she needed to sell—​to survive.

13. Summary of Argument

Catherine Blake moved her and Blake’s rolling press to Linnell’s studio at 6 Cirencester Place on 30 August 1827 (BR[2] 468) and, presumably, by early April 1828 to C. H. Tatham’s Mayfair studio at 1 Queen Street, where she lodged at least until the end of March 1829. She had already moved to her apartment at 17 Upper Charlton Street when Frederick Tatham wrote to an unknown customer on 11 April 1829. She appears to have printed only eight copies of three titles of intaglio and relief-etched books between September 1827 and spring 1829, along with some individual engravings and a white-line etching, for a total of at most 150 to 160 impressions. Whitehead believes that she moved the press with all of her and Blake’s effects to her Fitzroy Square apartment, yet no evidence of her using the press there is extant. At first, the hiatus in printing between Ferguson’s copies of America and Europe c. spring 1829 and the resumption of printing in late 1831 by Frederick Tatham may seem to suggest that Catherine moved the press to her apartment—​and thus out of Tatham’s hands. But even if the press remained at the studio in Mayfair, as I believe to be the case, Tatham is unlikely to have printed the books in the manner and at the scale he did while the plates were still Catherine’s property. In other words, it is possible, and it seems likely to me, that she left the press at the Mayfair studio and used it when she needed to.

Linnell’s application in 1827 to the Royal Academy for Catherine noted that Blake lived “in perfect harmony with his wife. never had but small prices for his works, & so though he lived with the utmost economy, he could not save anything—​& has left nothing for his widow but a few Plates & drawings which if sold would produce nothing adequate to defray even present expenses” (BR[2] 463). Cumberland explained the highs and lows of demand, despite supplies: “For Blake I have spared no pains but have no success. They seem to think his prices above their reach, yet they seemed very anxious to have his works. … His Job I have placed with a third bookseller Mr Lewis of Clifton” (BR[2] 458). Although Blake left Catherine more saleable goods than Linnell let on, Linnell and Cumberland were right about Blake’s works selling for “small prices” and about the need to increase Blake’s reputation. Catherine’s own reputation “as needy, deserving, and grateful widow,” which is how she was portrayed “in Blake’s obituary in the Literary Gazette (1827), and later by Smith … and Cunningham,” “probably incrementally enhanced” her “potential customer base” (Crosby and Whitehead 105).

Whitehead’s excellent detective work has corrected the historical record in numerous places. He located and confirmed the last two residences of Catherine Blake, discovered the date of Frederick Tatham’s marriage, helped clarify the relation between Catherine and Tatham, and recognized C. H. Tatham’s role in helping her. She did not spend her last years keeping house or caring for the Tathams, nor did she spend them in abject poverty. She was actually stable financially, but not because she continued what Crosby and Whitehead term the “firm” of “Wm Blake.” The firm, they believe, “would continue to trade for another two and a half years,” between 1829 and 1831, “through the efforts and improved material circumstances of Blake’s widow” (106).

This implication of her equal partnership in the firm of Blake is suspect. It appears predicated on a false equivalence of the acts of printing with the things printed—​the texts, designs, objects, and ideas expressed—​and on the failure to recognize differences in painting abilities. Crosby and Whitehead state, for example, that “it is extremely difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to identify accurately any specific illuminated books or indeed individual plates coloured by Catherine during Blake’s lifetime, largely due to the fact that their palettes are extremely similar, if not identical” (100). But this is not true—​it is not difficult to tell the hands apart when the artifacts are side by side, nor is it difficult when using high-resolution digital images of impressions set up for comparison.

If we examine two versions of Visions using the Blake Archive’s compare feature, “Objects from the Same Matrix,” located under the image, we can view the evidence of different hands in their creation. Looking at copies I and J, plates 7, 9, and 10, we see that I is following J generally, not note for note, and that J is the better colored of the two. Identifying the hand does not rely on the palettes, which are similar though not identical, but on how the colors are laid in. Catherine’s washes (in copy I and elsewhere) are flat and one-dimensional—​that is, laid in without underlying tones that make modeling possible, and rarely with translucent washes or stippling brushwork over the basic washes (BIB 133-42). Blake’s touch, as this sensitivity to one’s tools and medium is called, and his skills as a colorist were finer than Catherine’s, as one would expect of a professionally trained and very experienced artist. She appears to have had little to no hand in finishing the color-printed impressions of 1794 and 1795, with their surfaces and textures of indistinct “Blots & Blurs” of colors necessitating the “powers of Drawing & form”—​in other words, the creator’s eye and hand to find, pull out, and delineate forms. Her hand also seems absent in late copies of illuminated books, though their frame lines, decorative borders, plate numbers, and collation may have been her work.

The extant posthumous prints do not support the idea that Catherine was Blake’s equal partner or was continuing the “firm.” They do not support the claim that Catherine, “on an upper floor at 17 Upper Charlton Street … continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death” (Whitehead, “Last Years” 89). She printed fine copies of For the Sexes, America, and Europe, but she was not the primary printer of Blake’s posthumous illuminated books. The list of works she is known to have sold supports the idea that she was Blake’s sales agent in London. Her last years seem closer to the portrait provided by J. T. Smith and Alexander Gilchrist of a woman having no debts and surviving on a small inheritance, the care of friends, money from Lord Egremont, and an “occasional sale” of a few of Blake’s designs. She appears not only to have retired from printing in 1829, but for the first time in twenty-six years to have had a bit of space to herself—​to have had living quarters uncluttered by a large, old-fashioned wooden rolling press.

Crosby and Whitehead begin their essay with the astute observation that James Joyce’s comments about Catherine reveal more about Joyce than they do about her. No doubt our comments about her reveal much about ourselves and our times. The critical pendulum has swung from Joyce’s day, when considering information about her was thought to be unnecessary, to using her as a screen for our own projections, desires, and politics (Crosby and Whitehead 83-86). Their attempt to recalibrate the pendulum, to “reclaim the historical Catherine,” required them to focus “closely on the few hard facts and contemporaneous accounts” and to jettison “the unreliable mythology and sentimental accretions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Their “digging harder and further into the archives” has indeed yielded “new material information concerning Catherine’s final years” and enabled them to present her “as a talented and loyal, as well as willful and complex woman” (86).

To understand Catherine more fully in her own right, as well as in her many roles in Blake’s life, we must continue to excavate the archives. We need more information about Blake’s market, about his earliest patrons and collectors and the collectors who acquired his works from Catherine Blake and Frederick Tatham, to understand Blake’s reception in his lifetime and immediately afterward. We need to examine his entire canon of commercial and original works of art thoroughly, honestly, and in detail to identify the works on which Catherine assisted and the nature and extent of that assistance. In this context, the recent discovery by David Alexander that Blake took on Thomas Owen as an apprentice in 1788 requires the utmost attention and rigorous investigation (see Alexander; also Bentley, Desolate Market 37-40). Did Owen live with the Blakes at 28 Poland Street (1788–90) and/​or 13 Hercules Buildings (1790–95)? If he served the full seven years of the apprenticeship, his assistance would have corresponded with a particularly busy time for Blake as an engraver. Could he have engraved the less accomplished plates in C. G. Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (1791), as Essick suggests (“Marketplace 2010,” 141)? More important, could he have been on hand, a “devil” in the studio, during the first period of illuminated printing? If so, did his assistance affect how Blake divided labor in the production of illuminated prints and books—​and thus our understanding of Catherine’s assistance during this period?  Such information will enable us to estimate accurately Catherine’s activities during and after Blake’s life and income during her widowhood. Moreover, it will provide a portrait of Catherine that reflects the facts and not our need to burnish her image—​or our discomfort with the ideas of “wife” and “assistant.”

Whatever awaits discovery, we know one thing for sure: we do not need to make Catherine Blake more interesting or creative to make her significant and important. She already is significant and important and interesting. We need a critical vocabulary that recognizes her as such and recognizes why, a vocabulary we can use without distortion or discomfort. Perhaps then, like Hayley, we too could value and embrace Catherine “as an invaluable Helpmate, perhaps the only woman on Earth, who could have perfectly suited [Blake] as a wife … to watch over this singularly Endangered mortal, unfit in truth to take care of Himself in a world like this!” (BR[2] 205-06). Mona Wilson, Blake’s only female biographer, appears to have intuitively grasped the meaning of Hayley’s observation, noting that “no one can understand Blake’s life without being aware of the significance of [Catherine’s] helpful and faithful figure, nor is it possible to think of him with a different type of wife without loss, even without the utter destruction of the fabric of his life” (303). Blake understood Catherine’s significance and expressed it concisely: “Peace & Plenty & Domestic Happiness is the Source of Sublime Art” (E 700).