Edward Young. Night Thoughts, with Illustrations by William Blake. Commentary by Robyn Hamlyn. London: The Folio Society, 2005. ISBN: by subscription only. Price: US$1700.

In late 1794 William Blake was commissioned by the publisher Richard Edwards to produce watercolor designs for a planned illustrated edition of the then-popular poem by Edward Young entitled The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, known today (when it is mentioned at all) as Night Thoughts. The poem itself, divided into nine sections, or “nights,” was written and published between 1741 (when Young started writing it) and 1745, the final Night being some three times longer than the first. Though Richard Edwards would only ever publish the first four nights of the poem, which included forty-three of Blake’s designs, engraved by Blake himself, William Blake produced an astonishing 537 designs. This represents by far Blake’s most voluminous single pictorial work. The set of designs is certainly interesting for what they offer visually, providing as they do innumerable motifs and figures that reappear throughout Blake’s work. However, the occasion of Blake’s executing the designs, some of which he would also later engrave, for the work of another poet, provides an interesting instance of the intersection of art and commerce that remained of particular concern to Blake himself, and continues to be equally interesting to Blake scholars. Additionally, the material arrangements within which Blake’s performed the work (materiality being yet another consistent theme that Blake returned to) are sufficiently complicated to be of continued interest to scholars. And by material arrangements I refer quite literally to the fact that Blake was provided by Edwards with pages of Whatman paper (roughly 420mm by 325mm) from which had been cut a window (slightly off-center). Into this “letterpress” window were glued pages containing the printed text of Young’s poem. The pages as Blake received them in fact contained multiple editions of the poem, ranging in publication date from 1742 to 1745 (dates are provided on the printed title pages for each Night). This scheme was decidedly different from the usual approach to illustrated editions—for which, at least in 1795, there was a considerable market—which involved providing full page illustrations of text on facing pages. In other words, text and image occupied their own, very separate spaces. Edwards’ illustrated edition of Young’s Night Thoughts, however, would provide the printed text in a more or less central window, set off with a thin red-lined border, surrounded on the same page by illustration. Thus text and design, though obviously not physically intruding on one another, nonetheless contest for the reader’s eye much more so than is the case when illustration and text are presented on facing pages. Blake’s designs often dominate the page, in fact, as his figures are monumental in scale, occupying an entire margin from top to bottom. Just as often, Blake implies a colossal figure who is in fact only visible “around” the letterpress window. In other words, the body of such a figure is provided by the printed text itself. A particularly striking example is provided on page 12 of Night IV in which Christ is figured such that his outstretched arms are visible in the left and right margins of the page. His robes and feet are visible at bottom, and his head is figured to the top (facing left in the watercolor and right in the engraving). His entire body is the text of Young’s poem. As often, an implied body in action is partially occluded by the letterpress window (for example, the title page to Night II shows Death preparing to unleash one of his “darts,” though we can see only part of his body, separated from the hand that holds the weapon). As such, …