WILLIAM ALLINGHAM’S NOTEBOOK OF POEMS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 March 1968, Page 9

WILLIAM ALLINGHAM’S NOTEBOOK OF POEMS

BY BLAKE

D. F. McKenzie

One of the library’s most recent acquisitions is a small manuscript volume of poems by William Blake, compiled in the 1850’s by the poet William Allingham. The volume as at present bound is made up of seventy leaves of writing paper, measuring in folio 7.1 in. x 4.5 in. The first six leaves, which are watermarked 1856, are blank; the next seventeen leaves bear extracts from the Songs of Innocence and Experience; then follow twelve leaves of ‘Extracts from a Manuscript Book of William Blake’s’; two further leaves bear extracts from the Songs of Innocence; next come sixteen leaves of poems from the Poetical Sketches; and finally a further seventeen blank leaves, also watermarked 1856. Those poems written out by Allingham from earlier printed texts are of little interest, although it may be noted that in copying from the Poetical Sketches he must have had access to a copy corrected in part by Blake himself, for of the 11 emendations inked into the Turnbull copy, Allingham follows five 1 . The central section of excerpts from Blake’s own manuscript volume is, however, of more interest. In his study of Blake’s manuscript notebook, Sir Geoffrey Keynes quotes D. G. Rossetti’s account of how it came into his possession: ‘I purchased this original M.S. of [William] Palmer, an attendant in the Antique Gallery at the British Museum, on the 30th April, 1874. Palmer knew Blake personally, and it was from the artist’s wife that he had the present M.S. which he sold me for 10s. Among the sketches there are one or two profiles of Blake himself. D.G.C.R.’ 2 .

As Sir Geoffrey also records, Rossetti had ideas of publishing part of the notebook, but he had still done nothing about it when he was approached by Alexander Gilchrist in iB6O. A letter from Rossetti to Allingham on 1 November*; of that year, however, suggests a prior interest on Allingham’s part: ‘A man one Gilchrist, who lives next door to Carlyle, and is as near him in other respects as he can manage wrote to me the other day, saying he was writing a life of Blake, and wanted to see my manuscript by that genius. Was there not some talk o f your doing something in the way of publishing its contents 3 Y }j c Allingham’s interest in Blake may be traced back to at least 1849. In his diary for 16 August of that year he records meeting Coventry Patmore at the British Museum and talking with him about Blake. The next day, a Friday, his entry reads: ‘To Slater, publisher, and talked to him about a new edition of Blake’s poems : civil, and seems inclined to publish.’ r And on the Saturday Allingham went again to the British Museum: ‘Mr Patmore. He helps me to look up Blake, but without success ; .they seem to have nothing of his.’ 4 During this year he pub-

lished in Hogg's Weekly Instructor part of Blake’s ‘King Edward the Third’ and a ‘sympathetic and understanding but not very original’ essay entitled ‘Some Chat about William Blake’. 5 For the next few years Allingham continued to show interest in Blake’s writings and compiled the autograph notebook here described. It was clearly made up cumulatively, in sections, the blank leaves being added some time in or after 1856 and presumably when all the sheets were bound. On the first leaf of the section drawn from the Poetical Sketches Allingham wrote ‘Copied May ’54 W A’. I have the impression that the one containing extracts from the Songs of Innocence and Experience is earlier than this, and that containing excerpts from Blake’s notebook is definitely so. On the first leaf of this section Allingham has written: ‘(Purchased by Mr D. G. Rossetti from Palmer an attendant in the British Museum, who knew Blake personally, and was given the M.S. by Mrs Blake. It is a rough note-book, containing draughts of many of his published poems and numerous sketches with pen and pencil along with a crowd of strange jottings and memoranda. Blake seems to have possessed almost all the high qualities of the human mind unstrung, as it were.) W.A.’

Allingham must have borrowed the notebook from Rossetti and made his transcript well before 1851, for on 17 January that year Rossetti wrote to him as follows: ‘I think I heard you say lately (or somebody else say of you) that you thought of writing a paper on Blake. I was looking the other day over my Blake M.S., and it struck me more forcibly than ever as affording good materials for an article, which I resolved I would do as soon as leisure permitted. May I therefore beg, that, should you in fact fulfil your intention, you will not make use of any of those extracts which you took from my book at the time I lent it to you?’ 6 In the event Allingham did not proceed with his plans to publish material from the notebook. Rossetti eventually lent the volume to Gilchrist in 1861 and when Gilchrist died later that year he himself edited a selection from the manuscript which was printed in the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (1863).

There has been some suspicion that Blake’s manuscript may originally have included many loose sheets that ‘contained verses which were so bad that Rossetti threw them into his waste-paper basket, from which Swinburne rescued a few fragments not quite so worthless as the rest.’ 7 To judge by his many conjectural readings Allingham evidently had more trouble than Sir Geoffrey Keynes (or, at least, less success) in deciphering Blake’s handwriting. But it is reassuring to be able to say that Allingham’s early transcript, made so long before Rossetti’s own editorial labours, includes nothing which is not in Sir Geoffrey’s fascimile edition. And Allingham’s own volume is not with-

out interest both as an Allingham autograph and as one more witness to the live appreciation of Blake throughout the 1850’s, culminating in

Gilchrist’s Life of 1863.

Yjryji nrf o3ni xrv/inbjbiv/ ,1 REFERENCES ?i snsf xhixlv/ iood odl b~~ff t i : 1 They are: ‘cheek’ for ‘cheeks’; ‘behold* for ‘I am’; ‘infold’ for ‘unfold’; ‘birds’ for ‘beds’; ‘Eares’ for ‘cares’. Allingham does not observe any of the remaining corrections, although he moits the word ‘in’ from the phrase ‘and in his hand’. See ‘Blake’s Poetical Sketches (1783)’, The Turnbull Library Record vol. I (n.s.), no. 3 (March, 1968), pp. 22 iuSuih'j iiru’ur/i orb 2£ihuboi}ni .Cl .O 2 Blake Studies (London 1949,), p. 16. Sir Geoffrey’s fascimile edition of the notebook, with introduction and full transcriptions, was published by the Nonesuch Press in 1935. . 3 Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , ed. O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965- ), i. 380. m t »*[***> if nf <o§ffGJ. blV£t : I .UVS 4 William Allingham: A Diary, ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (London, 1907), Vp/53.b7i0D svbsojdo* hsiles od ycm jeiiw lisxu io 5 G. E. Bentley Jr and Martin K. Nurmi, A Blake Bibliography (Minneapolis, 1964), p. 216. [ d>iv7 snxjz gfiixrjqo sxh xii 3din xjnsxnoiisflq hasiom’j b t>Z3lb 6 Letters i. 96-97. qioii jmsiiimoo gfiigzcq sis sis.rib ,323x1} cl S: 1 7 E. J. Ellis, William Blake (London, 1907), p. 299; quoted by Bentley and Nurmi in A Blake Bibliography, p. 41. n ] nr.moniZ .W snsT vd shine iiQife £