The Note-Book of William Blake, called the Rossetti Manuscript, edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1935.
Call number: PR 4142 .A5 1935 (Special Collections)
Case 2: “Illustrations of the Divine Comedy and its Legacy Throughout the Centuries”
This edition reproduces William Blake’s (1757-1827) “manuscript volume containing a varied collection of his writings interspersed with drawings and sketches” (p. v), which is known as The MS Book, The Rosetti MS, and Ideas of Good and Evil. Blake worked on this notebook throughout much of his life and collected poems, epigrams, and verses written between 1793 and 1818 along with various drawings and sketches. Dante Gabriel Rossetti discovered it in 1847, twenty years after Blake’s death.
As you can see below, at the center of page 17 of the illustrative section (exhibited page) Blake drew a sketch of a traveler greeted by a skeleton with the caption, “Are glad when they can find the grave.” Perhaps this drawing is a rejected design prepared for Blake’s work The Gates of Paradise, plate 15, entitled Death’s Door. On the upper portion of the page can be found two studies of a demon with a body in his mouth, most probably a preparatory drawing for Blake’s own Lucifer. The two drawings resemble the traditional iconography of Satan gnawing the bodies of the sinful souls at the bottom of hell (see also the description for Blake’s Illustrations (A.S. Roe) in this exhibit).
p. 17, two studies of a demon