A Response to My Colleagues

As noted briefly in my introduction, the new edition of Blake began as a scholarly obligation: to produce an edition that might be adequate to what I judged then, and still do, one of the most important fictional works of nineteenth-century American—and global—literature. I take great satisfaction in knowing that six notable American scholars are reasonably happy with the result. Preparing the edition led me along an educational adventure into the unknown. As John Ernest has so well said, this kind of work brings into clear view what is perhaps the foundational understanding of humanist scholarship: “that there is much that we don’t know” and can’t know about the works we study and transmit, that scholarship is executed “in a realm of historical uncertainties.” Marlene Daut’s note about the uncertainty in the reading of the Weekly Anglo-African’s “Nigration” is telling: Is it a typo? Should it be “migration”? Should it be “Nigrition”? Should we just leave it alone? We don’t know. In its case—there are many others in Blake—I suspect we will never know. Then, too, if those final missing chapters of Blake should one day come to light, we will know something we didn’t know before—another consequence of the scholar’s vocation.

Ernest’s commentary should remind us all why my edition of Blake is not a “definitive edition.” For almost forty years, I have been arguing that there is no such beast as a definitive edition, a fact made especially clear in the case of Blake, which stops at its highly uncertain, unresolved ending. And as the small example of “Nigration” shows, there is much more we don’t know and that we want to know about this great book. Yet the idea of a definitive edition is useful for an editor because it lays down a severe demand: to be as thorough and as honest in one’s work as humanly possible.

I have done my best. As Benjamin Fagan points out, however, my work has not been error-free, and I’m grateful that he clarified the publication history of the WAA and the Anglo-African Magazine. He is also surely right to argue that we must seek a more thorough grasp of “Blake’s periodical context.” His comments on the political vantage taken by Palm and Pine and WAA might well lead one to judge—I ought to have pointed it out in my commentary—that Blake may have been stopped where it now ends by the deliberate decision of Delany or Hamilton or both together. Delany may have come to accept Hamilton’s anti-emigration views as early as mid-1862 because of the dire war conditions at home and the white British resistance to his Niger settlement plan. And if he and Hamilton did in fact decide to stop Blake before its original emigrationist conclusion—if we could show that to be true—imagine how we would have to rethink our view of Blake!

One makes mistakes, and one makes judgments that may later seem unfortunate. One also develops ideas and arguments that others find problematic in various ways. Katy Chiles worries that some of my arguments are presented so that students “will unquestionably accept” what I have proposed. But surely no scholar wants anyone ever to unquestionably accept any of our studies. In this context, I think of Whitman’s statement “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher,” an aphorism I have long admired, though I would prefer to recast it slightly since I think scholars are not teachers but students—in this case, “American Scholars”—whose vocation is to foster inquiry. So instead I would adapt Whitman: “He most honors my style who learns under it to empower the student.”

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela judges that I make too much of the religious elements in Blake, to the detriment of what she correctly sees as the work’s clear commitments to ideas of “liberal personhood” and “personal autonomy.” I tried to show that Delany’s Masonic views underpinned his...