G. E. Bentley, Jr. Blake Records. Second Edition (Book Review‪)‬

G. E. Bentley, Jr. Blake Records. Second Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xxxviii+943. Illus. $95.00. I well remember the effect that G. E. Bentley, Jr.'s Blake Records (henceforth BR) had when it first appeared in 1969. In the world of Blake scholarship the most recent full biography then was Mona Wilson's of 1929, revised in 1948; there had been much fruitful research on Blake's life in the interim but there was no reliable single source to which one could turn for information about what was known. Its scope going from the earliest known references to Blake's family to Catherine Blake's death in 1831, Blake Records spared me and many others from many hours' search in libraries to find a single reference. Furthermore, it contained in addition to its chronologically arranged body of texts a number of other important features: six early essays on Blake, a detailed account of Blake's residences, 39 pages of "Blake Accounts," a list of "Engravings by and after Blake," and 60 illustrations. Nineteen years later, enough new material had been discovered to demand an additional, slim volume, and Blake Records Supplement (henceforth BRS), xlvii+ 152 pages long, appeared in 1988. The ensuing 16 years of scholarship have no doubt produced enough additional data for another Supplement, but we must be grateful both to Professor Bentley and to Yale University Press for combining this and the material of BR and BRS into a single easy-to-use volume (henceforth BR2). This review will concentrate on what BR2 contains that its predecessors do not, and the significance of these additions for our knowledge of William Blake.