G.E. Bentley Jr. William Blake in the Desolate Market.

Pierce, John B.

G.E. Bentley Jr. William Blake in the Desolate Market. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's up, 2014. 244 pp. $49.95.

William Blake in the Desolate Market is an important supplement to essential works on Blake produced by G.E. Bentley Jr. over the course of his career. In some ways, the book is narrower in focus than Blake Records or Blake Books, but perhaps that is one of its essential virtues. "The facts in the book," as Bentley himself points out, "derive largely from ... Blake Records, second edition" but they are "assembled and organized here in a new context, and some information is newly recorded" (xix). The new context under examination in William Blake in the Desolate Market is the financial one in which Blake found himself consistently challenged, if we can apply the idea of challenge to a context which Blake himself saw as entirely problematic. Indeed, the value of Bentley's latest enterprise is that it asks us to carefully re-examine the degree to which Blake engaged with a "Market."

The title of the book is drawn from Night 2 of Vala or The Four Zoas:

   What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song
   Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with
   the price

   Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
   Wisdom is old in the desolate market where none come to buy.

The passage fits the popular conception of Blake as an outsider, as a prophet unheard in his own country, and as an artist expressing himself in verbal and visual modes at odds with the popular and profitable. Yet the early chapters of Bentley's book offer compelling evidence of Blake's experiences of engagement with a marketplace set against a failure to sustain these engagements. There is the introduction of Blake into the salon of Harriet Mathews where Blake was welcomed with enthusiasm and supported in the printing of his first book of verses, Poetical Sketches. The Mathew salon and the appearance of a first book of poems offered Blake "a splendid opportunity for fame and fortune, or, better for reputation and patronage" (31), but Blake took little interest in the small book of poems himself, failing to proofread or promote it. Bentley speculates that "Blake was clearly uncomfortable at being exhibited as a prodigy at Mrs Mathew's salons" and cites the satire of "such earnest musical gatherings in ... An Island in the Moon" (33).

Anecdotes such as these give us a sense of the "desolate" nature of the "market" Blake faced. Invitations and opportunities were clearly available to Blake, but the terms of engagement were consistently frustrating to an artist who found himself unwilling or perhaps unable to work within the constructions of material exchange. Bentley offers an epigram to the discussion of the Mathew Salon and the fate of Poetical Sketches which highlights the pattern of invitation, engagement, and disengagement shown in Blake's financial life. In a letter of 7 October 1803 to William Hayley, Blake writes "at certain periods a blaze of reputation arises round me in which I am considerd as one disguisd by some mental perfection but the flame soon dies again & I am let stupefied and astonisd. O that I could live as others do in a regular succession of Employment" (30). In citing this quotation and others like it, Bentley to some extent presents us with Blake, the poet-prophet-artist who resists commodification and is, certainly in modern constructions of the poet, held up as a figure as rebellious as Orc or Los and resistant to the cheapening influences of the commercialization of art.

However, the data, charts, and factual information are also salutary in reminding us that Blake was making a living, albeit a limited one, outside the worlds of eternity represented through his illuminated printing. Bentley reminds us of an essential financial truth throughout Blake's career: "From 1780 to 1799, more than 90 per cent of his income derived from his commercial engravings" (103). According to Bentley's estimates, the illuminated works themselves rarely made a financial profit given that "Up to 1793, only Thel and Innocence can have been sold at a profit, considering only the cost of the copper" (85). The result is the careful reminder of how contemporary financial contexts defined the visionary writer in very different terms, since "In the eyes of his contemporaries, Blake was an engraver who also painted pictures" (104).

Thus, while chapter 8, "Blake's Works in Illuminated Printing, 1789-1827," may be one that many of us will turn to first, other chapters on Blake as commercial engraver (chapter 1), teacher (chapter 4), printer (chapter 5), and painter (chapter 6) are equally important in rounding out the picture of Blake's financial life and his engagement in the world of commerce and trade. A summary chart of Blake's lifetime earnings by decade illustrates the large role his work in more conventional conservative enterprises supported the visionary labour on the illuminated works (105). Bentley notes that "Blake's works in illuminated printing provided only a small fraction of his income, never more than about 10 per cent. They were" he goes on to note, "a luxury both to him and to the buyer" (104).

Perhaps the most important contribution of William Blake in the Desolate Market is the background context it provides for discussion of the financial William Blake. The phrase itself will, no doubt, give pause, if not a moment of revulsion, to many who study Blake both seriously and casually. Still, the carefully documented listings of Blake's productions--their costs of production and purchase--remind us that as much as he may have fought against materiality he was always immersed in it. Catherine Blake's statement that her husband was "always in Paradise," as Bentley reminds us, was certainly an argument about where Blake wanted to live, but it is not a fully complete statement about where he had to live. The pressure of the financial appears to have evident impact on even the production of the illuminated writings, for instance. Bentley notes that "We can ... estimate plausibly his expenses, enough, ... to deduce that his illuminated books did not earn money beyond their expenses until, around 1793, he learned to etch on both sides of the expensive copper plates" (5). Important arguments have been made in the last two decades about the methods of printing and about the ways in which material production has shaped representation and signification. Bentley's latest publication, as his earlier ones have, develops contexts for expanded discussion of Blake's engagements while not in Paradise.

John B. Pierce

Queen's University