Little Girl Lost

William Blake, 1757-1827, illustrator, author, publisher, and printer

c. 1789-94

18.3 x 13 cm.

Beckwith, Victorian Bibliomania catalogue no. 23

Source: Songs of Innocence and Experience, song 34

Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift of Mrs. Roger S. Warner and her sisters in honor of their father E. W. Hooper.

Between 1789 and 1826, Blake rearranged his Songs of Innocence and Experience nineteen times. David Erdman, in his revised edition of Blake's complete works, states that "no two copies of the Innocence are alike." The differences are in the number and arrangement of the poems and in the coloring of the individual plates (Blake 790). "The Little Girl Lost" first appeared in the Songs of Innocence, but by 1794 Blake moved it to the Experience group (Blake 791). Therefore, with this particular illuminated poem one has a work representative of both collections of Songs. [continued below]

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Commentary by Alice H. R. H. Beckwith

In the text of "The Little Girl Lost," Blake created an image of death as sleep, followed by an awakening in an Edenic garden among tamed beasts (Raine 33-34). A sense of paradise and delight is conveyed in the work through the flora and fauna of the borders and the blue, rose, and yellow watercolor washes in the background of the text and marginal illuminations. Eden is suggested by the serpent entwined in the vine beneath the second stanza, and by the embracing young couple in the lower right corner. Slender weeping branches on the right suggest funerary monuments. The remarkable, light-filled background colors unite the ornament and text. This page is printed by Blake's relief etching method (Lister passim) which allowed him to work with the text and the ornament at the same time, achieving a profound visual unity. However, Blake's text is sometimes difficult to read, and his process was expensive and time-consuming. Nonetheless, his recognition of book design as belonging to the domain of the fine arts was an important legacy to later nineteenth-century artists and amateurs of the book.

The provenance of this set of Songs of Innocence and Experience is fully documented under Copy O in G. E. Bentley's Blake Books. Copy O was inherited by Mrs. John Flaxman's sister, Maria Denman, from whom John Ruskin borrowed it. Ruskin's thank-you note to Miss Denman is enclosed in the box which holds rhe disbound plates of Copy O. Going directly to the heart of these designs, Ruskin praised their color, saying, "I had before the deepest respect for the genius of Blake—yet I was quite ignorant of his fine feeling for colour—which is one of the ruling and lovely qualities of these noble designs."

References

Beckwith, Alice H. R. H. Victorian Bibliomania: The Illuminated Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Exhibition catalogue. Providence. Rhode Island: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1987.

William Blake, illustrator, author, publisher, and printer. Songs of Innocence and Experience. London, ca. 1789-94.

Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Antiquity (1963). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.

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Last modified 24 December 2013