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Reviewed by:
  • Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G.E. Bentley, Jr
  • Gillian Fenwick (bio)
Karen Mulhallen, editor. Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G.E. Bentley, Jr. University of Toronto Press. xvi, 300. $65.00

G.E. Bentley, Jr starts the introduction to his William Blake: Selected Poems (2006) by saying that Blake was scarcely known to his contemporaries, [End Page 743] while ending with a note that Blake’s reputation is now growing, indeed in some quarters flourishing, and that his spirit is alive and well. Just how well may be judged from the fact that the England cricket team takes to the field for an international home match, except at Lord’s, to a rousing rendition of the hymn ‘Jerusalem’: William Blake’s words and C. Hubert Parry’s music, professional soloists and spirited fans belting it out. Yes, Blake lives on in academic studies like these Essays in honour of Bentley’s lifetime of Blake scholarship and even in popular culture.

In her introduction to this collection of essays, Karen Mulhallen quotes Blake: ‘He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars.’ She rightly says that it is Bentley who has done just that for William Blake, down to not only Blake’s life and works but the very materials of his creations, what Bentley has elsewhere told us included the unconventional use of copper and wooden spoons and sugar paper. Bentley’s scholarship lies at the very roots of Blake’s reputation today: Bentley as editor, bibliographer, biographer, and critic. As determined detective, passionate collector, inspiring teacher, and generous friend, he has dedicated his working life to Blake. His balance of vision and creation are something Blake himself would surely have admired.

The thirteen pieces in this volume are a fine tribute to Bentley’s scholarship. Joseph Viscomti’s on forgeries is especially good: bibliographical investigation at its best and with its roots in Bentley’s work. Mary Lynn Johnson begins with the first major journal publication of ‘an impossibly young G.E. Bentley Jr’ in 1956. It was on Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts. Back in Jerusalem, as it were, Keri Davies makes the case for locating its dark satanic mills in London rather than the industrial north, at least in Blake’s own experience, and says that Blake might well have had in mind the likes of the Albion flour mill near Lambeth or, more to the point, Koops’s paper mill at Millbank. Robert N. Essick’s essay on collecting Blake ranges from Blake’s patron to twentieth-century collectors J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry E. Huntington, Lessing J. Rosenwald, and Paul Mellon. He cites Geoffrey Keynes and G.E. Bentley, Jr as the best examples of the symbiotic relationship between collecting and scholarship.

There are black-and-white illustrations throughout these essays, twenty colour plates of varying interest – Blake’s The Bard, from Gray nicely illustrating the use of gold on tempera, three well-reproduced pages from copy M of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and four less than successful pictures of exhibition walls at the Tate Gallery – and a lovely dust jacket of Blake’s Hiding of Moses.

Essick describes ‘book-hunting expeditions’ with the Bentleys:

Jerry would roam the shelves taking mental notes about likely prey. He rarely ventured to ask the dealer, ‘Do you have any Blake?’ No need to clue [End Page 744] him in. Beth and Jerry would then consult, sometimes even leaving the shop to insure privacy. Beth would then return to open negotiations. Few dealers could resist her mixture of charm and hard bargaining. It was a perfect team effort.

It is a picture anyone who has known the Bentleys can readily transfer to their whole life together, the one complementing the other, that balance so rare in life and yet so perfectly exemplified in Beth and Jerry. Robert Brandeis, chief librarian at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, notes in the appendix to this collection of essays that the fruits of their ‘fifty years of collecting adventures’ are now generously deposited at Victoria as the Bentley Collection: 2,400 items that will support research...

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