Notebook of William Blake

The Notebook of William Blake (is known also as the Rossetti Manuscript from its association with its former owner Dante Gabriel Rossetti) was used by William Blake as a commonplace book from c.1787 (or 1793) to 1818.

The Notebook [Butlin #201] consists of 58 leaves and contains autograph drafts by Blake of poems and prose with numerous sketches and designs, mostly in pencil. Containing two pages of preface, alongside 94 pages of sketches, each page is approximately 159 x 197mm. The original leaves were later bound with a partial copy (ff. 62–94) of 'All that is of any value in the foregoing pages' that is Rossettis' transcription of Blake's notebook (added after 1847).

At first the Notebook belonged to Blake's favourite younger brother and pupil Robert who made a few pencil sketches and ink-and-wash drawings in it. After death of Robert in February 1787, Blake inherited the volume beginning it with the series of sketches for many emblematic designs on a theme of life of a man from his birth to death. Then, reversing the book he wrote on its last pages a series of poems of c.1793. He continued the book in 1800s returning to the first pages. All together the Notebook contains about 170 poems plus fragments of prose: (1807), Draft for Prospectus of the Engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims (1809), Public Address (1810), A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810). The latest work in the Notebook is a long and elaborated but unfinished poem dated c. 1818.

On the page 4 is placed a short humorous poem and a picture above showing of a man and woman rising from bed in a sparsely furnished room that could be Blake's own. The line of text obscured by the picture "Ideas of Good & Evil" served probably as a title to 64 following picture emblems, 17 of which were used for the book "For Children: The Gates of Paradise". D. G. Rossetti,A. C. Swinburne, and W. B. Yeats in their publications of Blake's poetry used this as a title for the series of poems from the manuscripts. In 1905 John Sampson issued the first annotated publication of all these poems and created a detailed descriptive . It follows by some other scholarly publications edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1935 & 1957/66), David V. Erdman (1965/82/88) & together with D. K. Moore (1977), Alicia Ostriker (1977), Gerald E. Bentley Jr. (1977), etc.

...
Wikipedia