Manuscript Manifestations: Reassessing William Blake's Marginalia in The Works Of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798)

Inside William Blake’s copy of The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798) are extensive annotations; some agreeing, others objecting, some poetic, others simply dismissive. Despite the fading manuscript notes, the impact of the marginalia has been widely used in studies of both Blake and Reynolds, often as evidence of Blake’s aesthetics and philosophy and sometimes to historicize or criticize the Royal Academy. The marginalia have been misunderstood and misapplied in previous scholarship because the manner in which the annotations work alongside Reynolds’ text has not been seriously taken into account. The manuscript notes have been abstracted from their original source and the later development of the marginalia has been neglected. This thesis examines Blake’s marginalia on their material and conceptual levels alongside the centre text (The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Volume I) to better understand Blake’s writing in the margins. It suggests that Blake used the margins of books as a kind of laboratory in which he voiced his ideas in relation to Reynolds. The thesis begins by looking at the nature of marginalia at the time and Blake’s marginalia in this book in particular. The second part considers the difficult artistic relationship between Reynolds, the cultural authority of British art and Blake, part of a newer generation of artists, although a very distinctive one. The third part examines the threads of ideas in the margins of Works that were later developed in Blake’s own writing: the Notebook, his ideas on Art in the Descriptive Catalogue and 1809 Exhibition, the illuminated books, and one of his final works, the Laocoön.