Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/310

 PREFACE

TO

THE PICKERING MS.

Pickering MS. is the name used throughout this edition for the smaller of the two Blake holographs from which D. G. Rossetti selected the 'poems hitherto unpublished.' printed in the second volume of Gilchrist's Life (pp. 76-116). In his introduction to this 'precious section' he explains that its contents 'have been derived partly from the MS. Note Book ["the Rossetti MS."] to which frequent reference has been made in the Life, and partly from another small autograph collection of different matter somewhat more fairly copied.' 'The poems,' adds Rossetti, 'have been reclaimed, as regards the first-mentioned source, from as chaotic a mass as could well be imagined; amid which it has sometimes been necessary either to omit, transpose, or combine, so as to render available what was very seldom found in a final state. And even in the pieces drawn from the second source specified above, means of the same kind have occasionally been resorted to, where they seemed to lessen obscurity or avoid redundance.'

In 1866, three years after the publication of Gilchrist's work, the MS., as we learn from Shepherd's introduction to his edition of 1874, was bought by Basil Montagu Pickering, son of the William Pickering who in 1830 had published the first letterpress edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. 'These considerations,' says Shepherd, referring to the inaccuracy of Rossetti's text, 'his father's former connexion with the Songs of Innocence, and the purchase eventually of a number of inedited Poems of Blake, led the Publisher to re-issue his father's volume together with the newly-acquired pieces in 1866. . . . The little volume was welcomed as satisfying a public want, and it passed into a second edition (now also exhausted) two years later (1868).'