Life of William Blake. With Selections from his Poems and Other Writings. A New and Enlarged Edition illustrated from Blake’s own Works. With additional Letters and a Memoir of the Author.
London: Macmillan, 1880.
2 vols., 8vo, xvii, 431; ix, 383 pp., with a portrait frontispiece on India paper in each volume and numerous illustrations. Original blue cloth with elaborate gilt-stamped designs. A fine copy of this attractive binding professionally restored and with the binder’s ticket “Bound by Burn & Co” at the back. Manuscript fragment loosely inserted (see below).
§ Second and best edition and a highpoint of Victorian publishers' bindings. Gilchrist was Blake’s first full-scale biographer. The work was unfinished when he died; his wife Anne helped to complete the Life, with help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti who wrote the final chapter from Gilchrist’s notes, and his brother William Michael Rossetti -- also A.C. Swinburne whose own book on Blake was the result of his researches when reviewing Gilchrist’s book. Also of interest are the prints (found in all copies) - three from electrotypes of Blake's Virgil woodcuts, and 17 from electrotypes of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Bentley, Blake Books, 1680B. Loosely inserted is a manuscript leaf titled "William Blake", dedicated to Frederick Shields, signed "D.G. Rossetti". Essick commented: "This is a transcription of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous sonnet on Blake’s workroom and death room... There is one substantive difference between this letter version and your version: “dusky shoal” in line 4 of your version rather than “distant shoal” in the letter I have. Thus, your version follows the published version of the sonnet in D. G. Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets (1881)." Item #127251
Price: $1,575.00