Abstract
This chapter examines a single copy of Essay on Sepulchres (1809) which has been illustrated with beguiling pencil drawings post-publication, including a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). While the inside front cover has been signed by the landscape artist, John Linnell (1792–1882), when the essay was sold at auction in 1992, the drawings were attributed to the collector William Young Ottley (1771–1836). This chapter examines the dialogue between the drawings and the text, using the drawings to suggest new understandings of Sepulchres. It contextualises this copy of the essay, plotting its history, and explores Godwin’s relationships with artists, demonstrating that these drawings speak to a much longer legacy for Godwin’s essay than is usually acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
William Godwin, ‘Entry for 27 November’, The Diary of William Godwin, ed. by Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodelian.ox.ac.uk [accessed 10 July 2020]. The entry reads: ‘On Monuments, p. 3. Udolpho, p. 358’.
- 2.
The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, 1801–1809, ed. by Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), II, pp. 286–7. Mark Salber Phillips reads Lamb’s first comment as ‘satirical’ but goes on to note that she gives a ‘fairly detailed and, in part, sympathetic summary of Godwin’s ideas’. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 323 (n).
- 3.
The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, II, p. 287. Mary Lamb began the letter on Friday and finished it on Saturday (it is dated [Friday, 9 December–Saturday, 10 December 1808] by Marr).
- 4.
Mark Philp, ‘Introductory Note’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), VI: Essays, ed. Mark Philp, p. 3.
- 5.
Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft , William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 163.
- 6.
Salber Phillips; Paul Westover, ‘Godwin, Literary Tourism, and the Work of Necromanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 48:2 (2009), 299–319 (p. 300).
- 7.
Tom Mole, ‘Romantic Memorials in the Victorian City: The Inauguration of the ‘Blue Plaque’ Scheme, 1868’, in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. by Dino Franco Felluga https://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=tom-mole-romantic-memorials-in-the-victorian-city-the-inauguration-of-the-blue-plaque-scheme-1868 [accessed 2 July 2020] and What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See Salber Phillips and Laqueur on Sepulchres as mourning for Mary Wollstonecraft. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
- 8.
Carlson, pp. 163–211.
- 9.
Pencil drawings attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital images courtesy of the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077). I am very grateful to the staff of the archives and library at the Paul Mellon Centre who have been extremely helpful over the course of the research underpinning this chapter and who have given permission to reproduce two photos from the Photographic Archive here. Hereafter all references to the drawings will be to the images in PA-F06077.
- 10.
https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/archives-and-library/photo-collections/artists-a-z [accessed 2 July 2020].
- 11.
London, Paul Mellon Centre Institutional Archive, PMC62/25, pp. 94–98. The ledger is dated 1992 on its binding. The photos are numbered 0066/1–0066/36. There is no 0066/11. Beginning with the inside front cover, the photographer photographed the verso pages of Sepulchres and then the recto. The numbering of each photo proceeds chronologically. The recto pages begin with the fly leaf (0066/17). The photographer must have forgotten to photograph page 17 for a photograph of this page is the final item (0066/36) which is surprising given that pages 16–17 feature the most highly worked-up drawings on the essay and include a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Indeed the record for 0063/36 has been added in pencil with a question mark, after the other pen entries.
- 12.
Christie’s, British Drawings and Watercolours (London: Christie’s, 1992), Lot 37. Auction catalogue. Christie’s include an ‘Explanation of cataloguing practice’ in the catalogue whereby ‘A work catalogued with the name(s) or recognised designation of an artist, without any qualification, is, in our opinion, a work by the artist’. ‘Attributed to’, used in the case of these drawings, is defined as ‘In our opinion probably a work by the artist in whole or in part’.
- 13.
Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), [no page number], 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0037 and PA-F06077-0039). Hereafter, page numbers from the 1809 edition of Essay on Sepulchres will be given in the text. William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres (London: W. Miller, 1809).
- 14.
PA-F06077-0051; PA-F06077-0053; PA-F06077-0043.
- 15.
PA-F06077-0047 (p. 35); PA-F06077-0015 (p. 66); PA-F06077-0041 (p. 7).
- 16.
As Mole puts it ‘Godwin’s pantheon aimed not transform the national landscape so much as to reform the national consciousness. […] The resulting pantheon would exist as much in the consciousness of the informed individual as in the physical environment’. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, p. 136. See also Westover, p. 312.
- 17.
In his diary, Godwin refers to the essay as ‘On Monuments’ until the entry on 3 February 1809 where it becomes ‘Sepulchres’. This change speaks to the difference between a monument and a sepulchre whereby the former can refer to a tomb or sepulchre (implying the presence of a corpse) but also (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) to a ‘statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a famous or notable person or event’. A sepulchre specifically denotes a space ‘for the interment of a human body’. The inclusion of ‘sepulchres’ in the title speaks much more clearly to the importance Godwin places on marking the location of the corpse than ‘monument’ does. ‘monument, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/121852 [accessed 2 July 2020]; ‘sepulchre, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/176261 [accessed 2 July 2020]. ‘Entries on Sepulchres’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 10 July 2020].
- 18.
PA-F06077-0009, PA-F06077-0045 (pp. 28–29); PA-F06077-0015, PA-F06077-0061 (pp. 66–67); PA-F06077-0019, PA-F06077-0063 (pp. 80–81).
- 19.
Pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), p. 16, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0007) (Fig. 1); pencil drawing attributed to Henri Fuseli illustrating William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), p. 17, 17.2 × 10.5 cm. Private collection. Digital image courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06077-0067) (Fig. 2).
- 20.
Nicholas Turner, ‘Ottley, William Young (1771–1836), writer on art and collector’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-20941 [accessed 2 July 2020].
- 21.
Anonymous, Cincinnatus, 1700s, plaster cast from the antique, 162 × 80 × 42, Royal Academy of Arts, London; William Blake, Drawing of Legs of Cincinnatus, c. 1779–80, ink and wash over graphite on paper, 24.2 × 33, Bolton Museum and Archive.
- 22.
Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, William Blake (London: Tate, 2019), p. 33.
- 23.
Martin Myrone, ‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’, British Art Studies, 5 https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-05/mmyrone [accessed 2 July 2020].
- 24.
Henry Ottley, A Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Recent and Living Painters and Engravers, Forming a Supplement to Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers as Edited by George Stanley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1886), pp. 126–127.
- 25.
William Young Ottley, [no title], 1771–1805, drawing, 25 × 13 cm, British Museum, London. Museum number 2010,5006.96. The British Museum acquired the statue in 1805 and record that it was previously owned by Charles Townley. See https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1805-0703-18 [accessed 16 July 2020]. The dates the British Museum ascribe to Ottley’s drawing imply that the drawing was made when the statue was part of Townley’s collection, before its acquisition by the museum in 1805.
- 26.
Martin Myrone.
- 27.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, in The Examiner, A Sunday Paper, On politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals for the Year 1818 (London: John Hunt, 1818), p. 24. I have used this earliest published version of ‘Ozymandias’ since if Ottley is the artist he is likely to have encountered this version or the version titled ‘Sonnet’ which appeared in Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen published in 1819. The punctuation is rather different even between these two editions. See Kelvin Everest for a discussion of this: ‘“Ozymandias”: The Text in Time’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 24–42.
- 28.
Shelley’s sonnet famously arose from a competition with Horace Smith which took place around Christmas 1817. The phrase ‘King of Kings’ also appears in Smith’s sonnet where it is likewise capitalised.
- 29.
PA-F06077-0007 (p. 16) and PA-F06077-0067 (p. 17).
- 30.
William H. Davenport has highlighted the similarities between Sepulchres and Shelley’s ‘An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte’, published November 1817. Davenport also notes that Shelley’s review of Mandeville the following month (in The Examiner 28 December) referenced Sepulchres . William H. Davenport, ‘Shelley and Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres”’, Notes and Queries, 197:6 (1952), 124–125.
- 31.
Everest, pp. 31–32. Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, pp. 227–228.
- 32.
Interestingly, it is this scenario of a perished city which is imagined in Smith’s sonnet, also titled ‘Ozymandias’. Smith’s sonnet imagines a hunter encountering ‘some fragment huge’ in ‘the wilderness | Where London stood’. Horace Smith, ‘Ozymandias’ in The Examiner, A Sunday Paper, On politics, Domestic Economy, and Theatricals for the Year 1818 (London: John Hunt, 1818), p. 73.
- 33.
Everest, pp. 32–33.
- 34.
According to Mary Shelley’s reading list both she and Percy Bysshe Shelley read Godwin’s essay in 1814. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I, p. 86.
- 35.
‘Entry on William Mulready’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 4 March 2020].
- 36.
‘Entry on William Hilton’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 27 July 2020].
- 37.
Marcia Pointon, ‘Mulready, William (1786–1863), painter’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-19520 [accessed 10 July 2020].
- 38.
‘One possibility is that Godwin sought out young artists with a view to securing their services for the publishing house’. ‘Entry on William Hilton’, The Diary of William Godwin [accessed 10 July 2020].
- 39.
A. T. Story, The Life of John Linnell http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/linnell/story/5.html [accessed 7 August 2020].
- 40.
David Linnell, Blake, Linnell, Palmer & Co. (Sussex: The Book Guild Ltd., 1994), pp. 9, 12.
- 41.
G. E. Bentley Jr, Blake in the Desolate Marketplace (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), p. 55.
- 42.
Linnell, p. 108.
- 43.
Alan Philip Keri Davies notes that ‘W. T. Spencer is the source for a number of dubious Blakes: for the spurious Blake memorabilia illustrated in Thomas Wright’s biography, and the book by Godwin with an irrelevant marginal illustration attributed to Fuseli, but probably fake’. ‘William Blake in Contexts: Family Friendships, and Some Intellectual Microcultures of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Surrey, 2003), p. 274. The claim of an accompanying memorandum might well have been fictionalised but the sale of the essay by Christie’s in 1992 and their attribution to Ottley suggests the illustrations are not fake. Another copy of Sepulchres was sold by Sotheby’s in 1991–2 for £220 (significantly less than the illustrated copy which sold for £1500), suggesting that the illustrations to Godwin’s essay significantly raised its value. Book Auction Records: A Priced and Annotated Annual Record of International Book Auctions Volume 89 For the Auction Season 1991–1992, 95 vols (Folkestone: Dawson Publishing, 1992) LXXXIX, p. 236. The digital image of page 59 of Sepulchres is PA-F06077-0057.
- 44.
Thomas Wright, The Life of William Blake in Two Volumes, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1929), II, pp. 93–4. The assertion of an accompanying memorandum is startling but Wright has come across the essay and presumably the memorandum via the infamous forger and bookseller W. T. Spencer. Wright reproduces one of the drawings (p. 59 of Sepulchres) in The Life of Blake.
- 45.
Mark Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision (H. Holt and Company; New York, 1946), p. 153 (n): ‘A copy now in existence bears on its inside cover the name of John Linnell, the young artist who was later to be Blake’s friend and ardent disciple, and throughout the copy are marginal pencil drawings of spiritual beings that may very well be Blake’s; at the least they are Fuseli’s or some other imitator’s. Whether the book was originally Blake’s and later given to Linnell, we do not know, or whether it was after 1818, when Linnell first came to know Blake, that the drawings were made. At any rate, in his twenties Linnell was himself acquainted with Godwin and Shelley, and this is the one point in Blake’s life at which a meeting with Shelley seems likely’. Robert N. Essick, ‘Blake in the Marketplace’, Blake : An Illustrated Quarterly, 26 (1993), 140–159 (p. 148).
- 46.
Myrone and Concannon, p. 134. In the end, though, Louis Schiavonetti engraved Blake’s illustrations. For more on this see Robert N. Essick and Morten D. Paley, Robert Blair’s The Grave Illustrated by William Blake: A Study with Facsimile (London: Scholar Press, 1982).
- 47.
Leigh Sotheby, Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Books of Prints, and Works Connected with Literature and the Fine Arts, the Property of the Late William Young Ottley ([London], 1837). The reference for The Grave is on page 6 (item 84) and for Jerusalem on page 16 (item 306).
- 48.
Bentley’s record of the history of Copy A of Jerusalem is as follows: ‘On 11 Aug. 1827 (the day before Blake died), “Mr [William Young] Ottley [gave Linnell £5. 5s.] for Mrs Blake for a copy of Jerusalem” (Blake Records [1969], 594, 341, 347), perhaps this copy’. G. E. Bentley, Jr., ‘Forgotten Years: References to William Blake, 1831–62’ in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr., (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 232. He is surer in Blake Records where he identifies the Ottley payment as for Copy A: ‘This is Jerusalem (A)’. G.E Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 790. Schiavonetti, who engraved Blake’s illustrations for The Grave also engraved works in Ottley’s The Italian School of Design: Being a Series of Facsimiles of Original Drawings, by the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors of Italy; with Biographical Notices of the Artists, and Observations on their Works (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823).
- 49.
Davies, p. 17.
- 50.
The influence of Blake on Ottley is known: ‘Ottley’s own Roman sketches, of draped and nude male and female figures (London, V&A), and his Twelve Designs Illustrating the Life of Christ (Rome, 1796), engraved by Tommaso Piroli (c. 1752–1824), reveal a linear Neo-classical style derived both from William Blake and from his friend John Flaxman’ . David Rodgers, ‘Ottley, William Young’, Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press, 2003) https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000064209 [accessed 10 July 2020].
- 51.
Ottley’s Italian School of Design reproduced in facsimile 84 engravings of Italian drawings, including works by Michelangelo.
- 52.
Jenijoy La Belle, ‘Blake’s Visions and Revisions of Michelangelo’, in Blake in His Time, ed. by Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 13–22 (pp. 19–20).
- 53.
La Belle, p. 20.
- 54.
Janet A. Warner, ‘Blake’s Use of Gesture’ in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. by David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 174–195 (p. 193).
- 55.
William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion Copy A: electronic edition. 1804–c.1820. Printed c. 1820. Book, 100 plates on 100 leaves. Ranging between 22.7 × 17.1 and 20.1 × 14.0. http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/jerusalem.a?descId=jerusalem.a.illbk.01 [accessed 13 October 2020].
- 56.
William Blake, drawing, ‘Various Personifications’, reproduced in Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 44. Warner, p. 189. The digital image of page 28 is PA-F06077-0009 and page 35 is PA-F06077-0047.
- 57.
PA-F06077-0057.
- 58.
In their catalogue, Christie’s described this ‘a figure seen from above at the top of the text area, his arms extending down each side, looking down at a tiny figure spread out on the segment of a globe at the bottom’.
- 59.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Scott Elledge, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1993), ll. 19–22.
- 60.
William Blake, Europe, a Prophecy Plate 1: Frontispiece ‘The Ancient of Days’ Copy B: electronic edition, 1794, 23.4 × 16.9, Relief and white-line etching with colour printing and hand colouring, http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/europe.b?descId=europe.b.illbk.01 [accessed 13 October 2020] and ‘Newton’, 1795–c.1805 Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper. 40 × 60 (sheet). Tate. Reproduced in Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, William Blake (London: Tate, 2019).
- 61.
Warner, p. 187.
- 62.
Using a corpus of 210 anthologies published between 1822 and 1900, which he calls ‘a substantial sample’, Tom Mole shows that ‘Ozymandias’ was only anthologized three times in this period. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, pp. 190, 200.
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I am grateful to the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Humanities at The University of Edinburgh which awarded me a Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014–2015 to begin this work on Essay on Sepulchres and to the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive for permission to reproduce two images here.
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Stark, H. (2021). An Illustrated Afterlife: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres . In: O'Brien, E., Stark, H., Turner, B. (eds) New Approaches to William Godwin. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_11
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