A collection of poems, sketches, and epigrams drawn from Blake’s personal notebook, spanning his most creative years
What the Work Is
Designs to a Series of Ballads is a collection of William Blake’s poetry and visual art, assembled from the notebook he kept from approximately 1787 to 1818. Known also as the Rossetti Manuscript, after the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti who once owned it, the notebook contains roughly 170 poems alongside numerous sketches and designs. The work was first published in 1802, during Blake’s lifetime, though the notebook itself continued to be used for another sixteen years. The volume comprises 58 leaves, with each page measuring approximately 159 by 197 millimetres, and includes two pages of preface alongside 94 pages of sketches.
What the Book Is About
The collection represents Blake’s private creative laboratory—a commonplace book where he drafted poems, recorded prose fragments, and sketched designs that would later appear in his published works. The notebook passed to Blake after the death of his younger brother Robert in February 1787, and Blake began by filling it with emblematic designs tracing the life of a man from birth to death. Reversing the volume, he then wrote a series of poems on its final pages around 1793, before returning to the earlier pages in the 1800s. The result is a document that captures Blake’s working methods and the evolution of his ideas across three decades of his career.
Key Ideas and Themes
The notebook’s contents reflect the major preoccupations of Blake’s creative life. The poems from around 1793 include drafts of sixteen pieces that would eventually appear in his collection Songs of Experience, though some of these drafts differ significantly from their final published versions. The draft of “Infant Sorrow,” for instance, is far more expanded than the version chosen for Songs of Experience, running to nine quatrains rather than the two that were ultimately selected. Similarly, Blake’s most famous poem, “The Tyger,” exists in two earlier notebook versions that allow readers to trace his revision process.
The genre of most poems from this early section can be defined as songs and ballads, with several reflecting the political and social climate of the time. Other pieces belong to the category of satiric verses and epigrams, including a motto for Songs of Innocence and of Experience that Blake never engraved and that appears in no copy of that published work.
The notebook also contains ten poems written during Blake’s three-year residence in Felpham, a village in West Sussex, where he lived from 1800 to 1803. The majority of the 92 texts from the period 1808 to 1811 are epigrams, gnomic verses, or fragments addressed to Blake’s friends and enemies, to painters and poets, to historical and mythological characters, and even to God. One short fragment speaks of Blake’s own spiritual experience in infancy, while another contains a draft of the famous motto that would later appear in his epic poem Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, where it is combined with four additional lines.
Structure and Approach
The notebook is organised as a working document rather than a finished publication. Blake filled it with autograph drafts of poems and prose, accompanied by numerous sketches and designs, mostly in pencil. The sketches appear on nearly every page and often served as sources for Blake’s later works, including illustrations for his books, engravings, and watercolours. The volume also contains several substantial prose pieces, including memoranda from 1807, a draft prospectus for his engraving of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims from 1809, a public address from 1810, and a vision of the Last Judgment also from 1810. The latest work in the notebook is a long, elaborate, but unfinished poem called The Everlasting Gospel, dated to around 1818.
One page contains a short humorous poem about marriage alongside a picture of a man and woman rising from bed in a sparsely furnished room that may have been Blake’s own. The line of text obscured by this picture, “Ideas of Good & Evil,” likely served as a title for the 64 picture emblems that follow, 17 of which were used in Blake’s book For Children: The Gates of Paradise.
Significance and Influence
The notebook’s importance was recognised early in the history of Blake scholarship. Rossetti, along with the critic A. C. Swinburne and the poet W. B. Yeats, used “Ideas of Good and Evil” as a title for the series of poems drawn from the manuscript in their publications of Blake’s work. In 1905, John Sampson issued the first annotated edition of all these poems, creating a detailed descriptive index to what was then called the Rossetti Manuscript. Subsequent scholarly editions followed from Geoffrey Keynes in 1935 and 1957/66, David V. Erdman in 1965/82/88, and others including Alicia Ostriker and Gerald E. Bentley Jr. in 1977.
Rossetti’s introduction to his publication praised Blake’s metrical gift and formal precision, noting that these qualities constituted Blake’s special glory among his contemporaries. He observed that Blake possessed, in clear completeness, the virtues of colour and metre—what Rossetti called the true patents of nobility in painting and poetry—at a time when no one else did.
The notebook’s provenance is well documented. Blake’s widow Catherine presented the volume in 1827 to William Palmer, brother of Blake’s pupil Samuel Palmer. Rossetti purchased it from Palmer on 30 April 1847, and it passed through several hands before being acquired by William Augustus White of Brooklyn in 1887. White’s daughter, Mrs Frances Hillard Emerson, presented it to the British Library, where it now resides as Add MS 49460.
The notebook consists of 58 leaves and contains autograph drafts by Blake of poems and prose with numerous sketches and designs, mostly in pencil. The original leaves were later bound with a partial copy (ff. 62–94) of ‘All that is of any value in the foregoing pages’, which is Rossetti’s transcription of Blake’s notebook, added after 1847. At first, the notebook belonged to Blake’s favourite younger brother and pupil Robert, who made a few pencil sketches and ink-and-wash drawings in it. After Robert’s death in February 1787, Blake inherited the volume, beginning it with the series of sketches for many emblematic designs on a theme of life of a man from his birth to death.
The 1793 Poems
The section of c. 1793 contains 63 poems that include draft versions of 16 poems that entered the collection of Songs of Experience. Some of these drafts are significantly different from their final versions, as with “Infant Sorrow,” which is much more expanded and composed of nine quatrains instead of two. The genre of most of the poems of this section can be defined as songs and ballads, with some reflecting the political and social climate of that time. Some other of these poems belong to the genre of satiric verses and epigrams, including a motto to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience that was never engraved by Blake and is not found in any copy of that published work.
Later Sections and Designs
There are 10 poems in the notebook written during Blake’s life in Felpham, a village in West Sussex. The most of the 92 texts of the section from 1808 to 1811 are epigrams, gnomic verses, or fragments addressed to Blake’s friends and enemies, to painters and poets, as well as some different historical or mythological characters and even to God. There is also a draft of a famous motto from Blake’s poem Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, where it is given in a combination with other four mysterious lines. The notebook is full of Blake’s sketches and designs almost on every page, and these sketches often serve as the sources for Blake’s later works, illustrations of his books, engravings, watercolors, etc.
