UnReading William Blake's Marginalia

Abstract Though William Blake is a central figure in the academy, there is one particular area of his work that receives little attention: the marginalia. And when annotations are incorporated into Blake studies, scholars tend to turn for quotation to typeset Blake editions, which do not communicate the visual complexity of the annotations. In addition to being visually dynamic, the marginalia provide evidence of Blake engaging the printed book of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and are thus part of his work as a book-maker. Blake's books are radically different technologies for representation than are the books he was annotating. Further, Blake's experience as a reader and annotator are reflected in his poetic universe, in which readers, writers and books figure so prominently. Despite the degree to which William Blake has become a central figure in the academy, there is one particular area of his work that could benefit from further attention-or at least a different kind of attention than it currently receives: his marginalia. Study of the original annotated volumes sheds light on many of the issues that are central to Blake scholarship, including textuality, authority, systematicity and materiality. The annotations are themselves significant beyond their "content" (what we might call their referential or semantic value), for they are the traces that remain of Blake engaging with the printed page of his day; that is, the page produced from moveable type. The marginalia function as part of Blake's working through the possibilities for a radically different kind of representational technique and technology. Further, Blake's ideas about art and about what his art was supposed to do (its epistemological and ontological status in the world) stem in part from his experience with the conventionally printed books that he owned and borrowed from others. I look at the way in which Blake's "anti-Newtonianism"-his opposition to finality, univocality and fixity-emerges from the marginalia, as it does from his other works, suggesting the degree to which Blake was working through problems of representation, and the role played by textuality and materiality in the production of meaning, as much in the marginalia as in his other artistic productions. Blake's relation to Newton has been of central concern to Blake scholars for some time, thanks in large part to Donald Ault's Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton, published in 1974. But Blake's marginalia have not been adequately integrated into this discussion. My approach to the marginalia and to Blake's anti-Newtonianism as two aspects of the larger issue of Blake engaging the problems and possibilities associated with representation (with the disjuncture between "imagination," as Blake called it, and materiality, for example) allows us to see how the marginalia are, indeed, central to the development of Blake's art. Additionally, I want to uncover the way in which Blake scholars (and scholars in other fields as well) have engaged the marginalia with little attention to their textual variability. The tendency to use the marginalia for their content alone is a product of there being no reasonably accessible edition (digital or print) that provides high-quality, photographic reproductions of the annotated volumes. Organizations like the William Blake Trust and projects like the William Blake Archive are working to provide scholars access to versions of Blake's work that are closer, in both visual and verbal dimensions, to Blake's originals. The marginalia could certainly benefit from this kind of attention and treatment as well. Currently, however, Blake specialists, general readers and students alike, are left to read and to experience Blake's annotations as they are printed in typeset editions like those of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, G.E. Bentley, Jr. and David Erdman. As I suggest below, having recourse only to typeset editions has had (and continues to have) serious consequences for Blake scholarship. …