"Mrs. Bliss", or at least the sale of her Blake books, was brought to the attention of Blake scholars by Geoffrey Keynes some forty years ago (47), & fuller detail added by G.E. Bentley, Jr. (1977, 654). These writers note little more than the discovery of an auction catalogue
BIBLIOTHECA SPLENDIDISSIMA. | — | A CATALOGUE | OF | A SELECT PORTION | OF | THE LIBRARY OF MRS. BLISS, Deceased, | Removed from her Residence at Kensington; | COMPRISING | An extensive, rare and valuable Collection of Original | Persian, Chinese, Turkish, Hindostan, and other Drawings, | exquisitely finished, representing the Manners, Amuse | ments, Customs, Dresses, Trades, Architecture, Manufactures | and Costumes of the Eastern Nations, richly Illuminated | Missals, expensive Works on Botany and Natural History, | the various Galleries, Books of Processions, National Works | of Art, and an Assemblage of fine Drawings and Prints. | … the whole in the finest condition, many on large paper, with proof, and early | impressions of the plates, the Works on Natural History and Botany most beautifully | coloured, sumptuously and tastefully bound in morocco and russia, by Kalthoeber, | Staggemeier, C. Lewis, Bohn, Welcher, C. Smith, Murton, and other eminent binders, | regardless of experience, and finished in their best style. | ">Which will be Sold by Auction, | BY SAUNDERS & HODGSON, | At their GREAT ROOM, "The POETS GALLERY," 39, FLEET STREET. | On Wednesday, April 26th, 1826, and three following Days, at | Halfpast Twelve o'Clock precisely. | = | To be Viewed, Three Days preceding, and Mornings of Sale, and | Catalogues had, (price 1s. each.).
whereby the Bliss library was auctioned in April 1826 in 814 lots sold over four days. The library contained a large collection of natural history books & more than seventy illuminated manuscripts: missals, psalters, & Books of Hours, as well as a number of works by William Blake. Keynes & Bentley both quote the title of the Bliss sale (wrongly) as "Bibliotheca Splendissima" which may trip off the tongue more easily & looks like better Latin, but isn't. The word used about the sale (& the correct Latin superlative) is "splendidissima".
The five Blake lots in the 1826 sale were
10 Blake's (W.) Gates of Paradise, 16 plates, red morocco, gilt leaves
11— — Songs of Innocence and Experience, 2 vols, coloured engravings, red morocco, gilt leaves
...
41 Blair's (Robt.) Grave, a Poem, illustrated by 12 etchings, by Schiavonetti, from designs by W. Blake, calf extra, gilt leaves 1808
...
370 Young's (Edw.) Night Thoughts, with engravings from Blake's designs, half bound, red morocco 1797
371 Young's (Edw.) Night Thoughts, with engravings from Blake's designs, coloured calf extra, marble leaves 1797.
Does the presence of so many Blake books in Bibliotheca splendidissima suggest any close acquaintanceship? Not in itself, but when we look at individual titles, the inference is hard to avoid.
The "Bliss Blakes", as we might call them, appear to have been collected at dates between 1794 (the proof copy of For Children: the Gates of Paradise), through 1802 (the supposed date of the Bliss Songs), to 1808, or later, for her copy of Blair's Grave (though she is not listed among the subscribers to Blair's Grave). One might conjecture, from her Blake books identified by Bentley, that Mrs. Bliss acquired her Blakes directly from the poet-painter himself.
The Bliss copy of For Children: The Gates of Paradise (lot 10 of the 1826 sale) is identified by Keynes & Bentley with copy A, now with the Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress. It appears to be a proof printing before either Blake's or Johnson's imprints were added to the plates. A proof copy, by its nature, is unlikely to have been on commercial sale, & it would have been strange for her to acquire this particular copy from Johnson when the rest of the edition specifically bears his name as publisher. This lends credence to the view that she must have acquired it directly from Blake.
Her copy of the Songs (lot 11, which Bentley identifies as copy P, the Wormsley Library copy) is again distinctive with, unusually, Innocence & Experience separately paginated in Blake's hand, to correspond to its binding in two volumes as though Blake knew beforehand how Mrs. Bliss intended it to be bound. Books from the Bliss library are often characterised by their fine bindings. Even more significantly, copy P is the only copy of the Songs carrying a textual correction in Blake's hand. Line 12 of "The Tyger"
What dread hand & what dread feet
is altered to read
What dread hand formd thy dread feet.
An interesting comparison is with the text as given by B. H. Malkin in A Father's Memoirs of his Child
What dread hand forged thy dread feet.
In both cases, these corrections are attributable to Blake himself. Moreover, if the correction supplied to Malkin is evidence of his & Blake's close personal relationship, should not the correction for Mrs. Bliss's Songs be regarded likewise. I would suggest that Blake makes these careful amendments for close acquaintances that he knew would actually read the Songs—not just want the work for the sake of the illustrations.
There is also the instance of her two copies (lots 370 & 371, plain & coloured) of Young's Night Thoughts with the Blake designs. There are just twenty or so copies of Night Thoughts hand-coloured by William & Catherine Blake. Bentley suggests that the hand-coloured copies of Night Thoughts were sold directly by Blake himself; & that they derive from the copies supplied to Blake by Richard Edwards as part of a customary arrangement between publisher & engraver.
Bentley notes the differences between Blake's engravings for Young's Night Thoughts & those for other illustrated literary works such as Boydell's Shakespeare, Macklin's Bible, & Bowyer's Hume: "Boydell's, Macklin's, and Bowyer's plates were highly finished engravings—or at least they were advertised as such—whereas Blake's were outline engravings only (though they were not advertised as such). … A special advantage of outline rather than highly finished engravings was that they could be more easily and effectively hand coloured, and such colouring may have been part of the original intention". Bentley goes on to suggest
Perhaps the plan was always for Blake to be given copies of the Night Thoughts to colour, as part of his share of the profits of the work. The colouring of these engravings, creating a luminous beauty like that of the watercolours, adds an aesthetic dimension to the Night Thoughts never contemplated by Boydell, Macklin, and Bowyer and makes Blake's coloured Night Thoughts plates rarer, more extraordinary, more valuable, and more beautiful than the works of his more expensive and famous rivals. (1988, 302)
Mrs. Bliss's copy of a coloured copy of Night Thoughts is identified by Bentley as Copy D. "Coloured about 1797; bound in contemporary Brown calf over blue and reddish yellow marbled boards, rebacked with reddish brown leather" It sold for £4. 4s. Thus, even in the example of Bliss's ownership of a relatively extensively produced work like Night Thoughts, circumstances suggest a purchase made directly from Blake. Again this brings Mrs. Bliss close to Blake & clearly of considerable significance to his biography.
But who was this Mrs. Bliss? For the last thirty years, that sale catalogue has been all that is known of her. To begin with, I found myself pursuing some false trails. G.E. Bentley, Jr. once thought it possible that Mrs. Bliss was connected with Philip Bliss, the Oxford antiquary, but only because it was relatively easy to find information about Philip Bliss—& this does not lead us back to Mrs. Bliss or to that 1826 sale.
He commented in a personal communication (12 April 1994)
I can't now recall how I discovered the Bliss catalogue but suspect that it was in the British Library's catalogue of its own sale catalogues, which used to be for internal use only but which I believe is now published. Nor can I recall what made me think the Bliss catalogue might have Blake in it.
However, Joseph Viscomi had stated confidently
Philip Bliss, an antiquary, bibliographer, and a close friend of Utterson and Dawson Turner was the son of Anne Bliss, whose Songs copy P and For Children copy A were sold in 1826 to Hanrott. (425)
Is it at all possible that the "Mrs. Bliss" whose library was sold in 1826 could be some relative of Philip's, perhaps his wife or his mother?
Bliss, Philip (1787–1857), antiquary & book collector, was the elder son of Philip Bliss (d. 1803), rector of Dodington & Frampton Cotterell, near Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire. His mother was Anne Michell (born about 1761) of Conham, formerly in Wiltshire, now a locality within the Bristol urban area. The younger Philip Bliss died at St. Mary Hall, Oxford, on 18 November 1857. His wife Sophia, whom he had married in 1825, survived him; their son & daughter both died in childhood. The sixteen volumes of Philip Bliss's correspondence now in the British Library include letters from his mother, 1825-1848, & some verses written by her on her 64th birthday in 1825. The very wording of the title page of that 1826 catalogue with its reference to "The Library of Mrs. Bliss, Deceased, Removed from her Residence at Kensington" tells us that "Mrs. Bliss" was dead by 1826 & had resided at Kensington. This must rule out both Philip Bliss's wife—newly wed in 1826—& his mother—resident in Taunton after her husband's death in 1803. Anne Bliss won't do. Viscomi & Bentley had been following false trails.
Reconstructing the Bliss library, suggesting works in it that Blake could have seen, will compel a reconsideration of Blake's original context of reception, & bring forward evidence for Mrs. Bliss's friendship with William Blake. Mrs. Bliss's library resembles that of William Beckford in not conforming to the standard book-collecting model of the time—the Dibdinian type of the Bibliotheca Spenceriana. Her library does not include long sets of Aldines or tall Elzevirs; there's no enthusiasm for incunabula, for Wynkyn de Worde or Pynson; there are no classics in editio princeps. Instead there's an insistence on the beauty of individual books—of fine illustrations & handsome bindings. Note, for instance, the works by Thomas Bewick in the 1826 sale
9 Bewick's (T.) History of British Birds, 2 vols, wood cuts Newcastle 1816
...
507 Bewick's 25 original Drawings of Dogs, neatly mounted, with Portrait of Bewick, red morocco, gold borders, by C. Smith
But the finest printed volumes in her library were her natural history books. The title page to Bibliotheca Splendidissima lists some spectacular folios
Buffon Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux, 14 vols. large paper; … Storia Naturelle degli Uccelli, 5 vols; … Sepp's Birds, 2 vols; Scheuchzer's Natural History, 15 vols; … Plenck Icones Plantarum, 6 vols; Thornton's Sexual System of Linnaeus; … Roxburgh's Plants of the Coast of Coromandel; … Abbot and Smith's Insects, 2 vols; … Bulliard Historie des Champignons de la France, 7 vols; Vieillot Histoire Naturelle, 3 vols, large paper; … Brookshaw's Pomona; … Buchoz Historie Naturelle, 5 vols, … &c. &c.
In some respects, De Ricci's comments on the Beckford collection could apply to Mrs. Bliss's Bibliotheca Splendidissima: "less a library, in the proper sense of the word, than a cabinet of bibliographical rarities and freaks, each one a gem of its kind" (85).
Sources
G.E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
G.E. Bentley, Jr., "Richard Edwards, publisher of Church-and-King pamphlets and of William Blake", Studies in Bibliography, vol. 41 (1988).
British Library. Add MS 34567-34582, Correspondence of Philip Bliss: 1806-1857.
Seymour De Ricci, English collectors of books and manuscripts (1530-1930) and their marks of ownership. Sandars lectures; 1929-1930 (Cambridge: University Press, 1930).
Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliotheca Spenceriana: or, A descriptive catalogue of the books printed in the fifteenth century and of many valuable first editions in the library of George John Earl Spencer. 4 vols. (London: Printed for the author by W. Bulmer, Shakespeare Press, and published by Longman, Hurst, Rees [etc.], 1814-15).
Strickland Gibson and C. J. Hindle, "Philip Bliss (1787-1857), Editor and Bibliographer", Oxford Bibliographical Society. Proceedings & Papers, vol. 3(1931-1933), 173-260, 387-8.
Geoffrey Keynes, "Introductory Volume" to William Blake, The Gates of Paradise (Clairvaux, 1968).
Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton University Press, 1993).
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