Blake Books Supplement: A Bibliography of Publications and Discoveries about William Blake 1971–1992, being a Continuation of Blake Books (1977) by G.E. Bentley, Jr

Abstract

... philoprogenitiveness ... phrenology ... plants ... Plato ... plumage ... polygamy ... Poor Law Commissioner’s Report ... Poovey, Mary ... poverty . . . ” (276). Particular subjects recur in varying contexts to form a many-layered project. Apart from encyclopedic resources and the wide-ranging nature of the intellectual world that Matus considers, Unstable Bodies will become im­ portant for the readings it provides of Victorian fiction. I wish Matus had written a bigger book or allowed herself more room here, but what she does is valuable. To my mind, she is particularly interesting on the passionate narrator in Agnes Grey, a novel in which Matus finds “a submerged doc­ umentary of self-assertion, conflict and competition” (92). Close reading of Lucy Snowe’s commentary on the Cleopatra painting, carefully informed with contemporary discourses of sexuality, race, and orientalism, illuminates passion and unstable sexualities in Lucy herself, in Polly, Ginevra, Doctor John, and de Hamal. In the Eliot discussion, Matus is interesting on the Madonna figure, but finds a new high in her discussion of gender and sex­ ual difference as focussed in the debate that she develops between language and painting. To identify critical readings that have particularly engaged me does inadequate justice to the value of all these readings, which are so thoroughly informed by the interdiscursive debates on which Matus draws. This book will be of continuing value to students of sexuality, gender, and feminist and cultural studies, and to the reader of Victorian novels. su sa n n a e g an / University o f British Columbia G.E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement: A Bibliography of Publications and Discoveries about William Blake 1971-1992, being a Continuation of Blake Books (1977) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). xvii, 789. Illustrated. $229.50 cloth. Surpassed only by Alexander Gilchrist and Sir Geoffrey Keynes, G.E. Bent­ ley, Jr. has been an indomitable scholar of the life and works of William Blake. For over forty years, he has, with admirable precision and devotion, dedicated himself to a careful, methodical study of the life and bibliography of the poet-artist. In a series of ground-breaking articles, he has unearthed most of the facts about Blake’s life that have been discovered in this century; he has also been an assiduous student of the various copies of Blake’s printed work, especially the illuminated verse. Blake Books Supplement is the third major comprehensive bibliography of Blake published by Bentley, who co­ authored, with Martin K. Nurmi, the relatively short A Blake Bibliography (1964) and wrote Blake Books (1977), a magisterial work of almost eleven hundred pages. 240 Although it follows a similar format, Blake Books Supplement does not, however, attain quite the same high standards as its predecessor. The bibliography is divided into six parts: I. Editions of Blake’s Writings; n. Re­ productions of Drawings and Paintings; III. Commercial Book Engravings; IV. Catalogues and Bibliographies; V. Books Owned by Blake; VI. Biography and Criticism. Parts I-V admirably accomplish what they attempt: they update, correct, and add to the information furnished in 1977. My reserva­ tions centre on the introductory essay, “Blake Discoveries, Scholarship, and Criticism 1971-1992” and on Part VI. Before 1977, there were several annual bibliographies — of varying degrees of accuracy — which supplied listings of critical and other writings on Blake; since 1977, however, this kind of information has been readily and reliably available, as in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. I really wonder if Bentley and the Clarendon Press needed to devote pages 329-696 (almost half the book) to such a compilation, especially when Bentley’s commentary on this plethora of books and articles is uniformly banal and uninformative (in most instances, he provides summaries which do not even begin to suggest the complexity of the arguments being presented). In Blake Books, Bentley, in a substantial introductory essay, “Blake’s Reputation and Interpreters” (1551 ), contributes an informative, crisply written history of Blake scholarship. As I have suggested, the corresponding essay in Blake Books Supplement is a major disappointment. Here, Bentley shows himself as an antiquarian with little or no interest in the entire purpose of rescuing facts from the past; in my opinion, such information is of little or no value unless it can ultimately...