Abstract
Blake’s ‘London’ (Songs of Experience) ends nocturnally in ‘midnight streets’. Night thoughts in midnight streets make the night the true Enlightenment, by questioning daytime identity. So does the American Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936, originally Bow Down: An Anatomy of Night), which also has Night Thoughts behind it.1 Nightwood starts with Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese, giving birth to Felix, a posthumous child. During the 1880s, Vienna was close to the racism where it was dangerous to be Jewish, like Felix’s father; so Hedvig had no wish for the son. Felix grows up obsessed with ‘Old Europe’ (p. 22) — self-hating, guarding a racial purity that excludes him. He also involves himself with the circus, which brings him into contact with the Irish/American homosexual Dr Matthew O’Connor, and the American Norah Flood. Felix would like to be a Gentile, and O’Connor would like to be heterosexual or a woman. O’Connor is seen later in his home in Paris and Felix meets the American Robin Vote, ‘a tall girl with the body of a boy’ (71). Felix marries Robin to have a son (desiring to perpetuate the official past), and Chapter 2 describes her giving birth to a boy, and rejecting maternality. She leaves Felix and becomes Nora’s lover.
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Notes
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber 1936). Page-numbers in text.
Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Outside, the Night’, The Space of Literature trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1982), p. 169.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 46.
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground trans. Jessie Coulson (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972), pp. 17–18.
George Rudé, Hanoverian London 1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1971), p. 4.
Ralph Hyde (ed.), The A to Z of Georgian London (Guildhall Library: London Topographical Society 1982), reproduces Roque. Phillips, p. 58, reprints a 1793 map of Lambeth;
see also Stanley Gardner, Blake’s Innocence and Experience Retraced (London: Athlone 1986), pp. 137–41. For Blake’s houses, see BR 550–69. For maps of London c. 1810, S. 624–6.
Celina Fox (ed.), London — World City 1800–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992);
Dana Arnold, Representing the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800–1840 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2000).
See Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (London: Macmillan 1998),
Dana Arnold (ed.), The Metropolis and its Image: Constructing Identities for London, 1750–1950 (Oxford: Blackwell 1999).
Illustrations to Egan were by George Cruikshank (see Sketches By Boz and Oliver Twist). See Guilland Sutherland, ‘Cruikshank and London’, in Ira Bruce Nagel and F.S. Schwarzbach (eds) Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Pergamon Press 1980), pp. 106–25.
Linda Clarke, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built Environment (London: Routledge 1992), pp. 114–18.
Revised (Phillips, pp. 10–12) from when Obtuse Angle sings it in An Island in the Moon (E. 462, K. 59). On An Island in the Moon see Nick Rawlinson, William Blake’s Comic Vision (London: Palgrave 2003), pp. 98–162.
See David Fairer, ‘Experience Reading Innocence: Contextualizing Blake’s Holy Thursday’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002), 535–62.
See Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), p. 128, on ‘cherish’ as ‘entertain kindly’.
D.G. Gillham, Blake’s Contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and Experience as Dramatic Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966), p. 196, sees the speaker as abstractly moralizing.
Sir John Summerson, ‘The Mind of Wren’ in Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (New York: W.W. Norton 1998), pp. 51–86, compares Wren and Locke.
Thomson, Works (Oxford, 1951), pp. 422–3.
Tom Paine, Rights of Man ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1969), p. 242.
See E.P. Thompson, ‘London’, in Michael Phillips (ed.) Interpreting Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1978), pp. 5–31. Cp. ‘Why should I care for the men of Thames / Or the cheating waves of charterd streams’ (E. 473, K. 166).
See Vivian de Sola Pinto, ‘William Blake, Isaac Watts and Mrs Barbauld’, in Vivian de Sola Pinto (ed.) The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake (London: Victor Gollancz 1957), pp. 65–88.
See J.H. Pafford (ed.), Isaac Watts: Divine Songs: Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, facsimile reproductions of the first edition of 1715 with an illustrated edition of c.1840 (London: Oxford University Press 1971), pp. 154–5.
For details, see PE 216–17. For Thurlow by James Gillray (1756–1815), see James Gillray: The Art of Caricature ed. Richard Godfrey (London: Tate Publishing 2001), fig. 2 and no. 105.
See Sean Shesgreen, Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1983).
Quoted from the criminologist Gotthold Lehnerdt in Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 trans. Pierre Gottfired Imhof and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion Books 1998), p. 23.
On history painting, see Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1992).
For the acrostic, see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983), p. 64.
In Wilkie Collins, Basil, the dying Margaret in her delirium refers to her unconsummated marriage as ‘the funeral of our wedding’, ed. Dorothy Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), p. 291.
See also John Harvey, Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1970), pp. 139–41, on the funeral in Phiz’s illustration to the wedding-scene, ‘Coming Home from Church’ in Dombey and Son.
Blake produced five copies of Jerusalem, A, C, F, and D, E; the latter the one copy he coloured. The groups vary in the order of Chapter 2. Erdman follows the first, Keynes D and E (putting plates 43–6 after plate 28). See Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983), pp. 1–12.
See the picture by David Wilkie (1785–1841), ‘The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch’, painted for Wellington, 1816–1822: this, contrasting with Blake’s portrayal of the ‘hapless soldier’s sigh’, shows four or five pensioners but emphasizes the young serving soldiers: see Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie: Painter of Everyday Life (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery 2002), pp. 88–91.
See Francis Place, on tea gardens as ‘places of amusement and dissipation’, The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854) ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1972), pp. 28–9; see also M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966), pp. 18, 162, 279, 296.
Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1994), p. 122. Porter says that Highgate in 1793 had only 200 houses; see pp. 116–23 for sites discussed.
See PE 472–5, and Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983), pp. 73–8.
The Jew’s Harp House was where the radical London Corresponding Society held its last general meeting, 7 December 1795: John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), p. 597. The political presence robs the passage of nostalgia, creating, instead, organized innocence. Barrell’s book suggests the extent of political paranoia infecting London from Pitt’s government.
See Dana Arnold, pp. 1, 6–7. Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983), pp. 141–2, sees a pun on Babylon and London.
David Punter, ‘Blake and the Shapes of London’, Criticism 21 (1981), 1–23, p. 17.
See Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘Blake’s Cities: Romantic Forms of Urban Renewal’, in David Erdman and John E. Grant (eds) Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1970), pp. 413–42.
See Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images of the City in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978), pp. 157–72, for this.
For the pre-history of the National Gallery (architect: William Wilkins, opened 1838), on a square cleared in 1830, see Nick Prior, Museums and Modernity: Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture (Oxford: Berg 2002), pp. 63–96. The nucleus of the collection had belonged to John Julius Angerstein, a founder of the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, and had opened in Pall Mall after 1806. After Angerstein’s death (1823), Parliament purchased the collection.
On Bunhill Fields, see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), pp. 43–4.
Jean Hagstrum, ‘Blake and British Art: The Gifts of Grace and Terror’, in Karl Kroeber and William Walling, Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978), pp. 61–80 (p. 74).
Edward Howard, Rattlin the Reefer ed. Arthur Howse (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978), pp. 12, 13. PE 288–91, discusses the area in Blake’s time, including the run-down Apollo Gardens.
Francis Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854) ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1972), p. 80.
See Tate Gallery Catalogue, William Blake (London: Tate Publishing 2000), pp. 72–3.
Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake (1863) ed. W. Graham Robertson (New York: Dover 1998), pp. 7–8. See also BR, p. 7.
Quoted, Raymond Lister, Samuel Palmer and ‘The Ancients’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), p. 7.
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© 2005 Jeremy Tambling
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Tambling, J. (2005). ‘I see London, blind …’. In: Blake’s Night Thoughts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505612_5
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