William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts. A Complete Edition.

Abstract

Sometime in year 1795 a young bookseller by name of Richard Edwards had a bright idea. Why not bring out a new edition of a recent, but firmly established English classic, Edward Young's Night Thoughts, embellished with illustrations by a promising young English artist who could be counted on to be grateful for commission and not to charge much for his work? It was a time when London art world was stirring with grand ambition of founding a native school of history painting based in classics of English literature (Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery most famous symptom of this craze), a time when booksellers like Edwardses were filling their elegant showrooms with magnificent illuminated manuscripts and handsome new coffee-table books; a time, most important, when a talented, impoverished young painter-poet who had known Edwards family for many years was available and in need of a commission. For prosperous and well-connected Richard Edwards it was easy to indulge his inclination, as he said in Advertisement to project, and not to be too curious about the estimate of profit and loss. For Blake, whose recent attempts to speak as a prophet in his own illuminated verse had left him with nothing but his own Song of Los (among other works) as a consolation, commission must have looked like main chance that had so far eluded him, chance to secure some worldly success while pursuing his own visionary inclinations.