Special Collections
Book of the Month, May 2010
Poems in English: with Illustrations by William Blake
John Milton
London: Nonesuch Press, 1926
[S.L.] III [Nonesuch Press - 1926]
This edition of John Milton’s English poems has been regarded as the finest twentieth-century edition of Milton. It is divided into two volumes. Paradise Lost takes up all of one volume; Paradise Regain'd, Samson Agonistes and miscellaneous poems occupy the other. The editor was Canon Henry Charles Beeching (1859-1919), who wrote his own poetry as well as editing that of others.
The book’s publisher is the Nonesuch Press, founded by Francis Meynell in 1923: a private press whose books were printed by commercial printers in order to combine the quality of private press books with affordability (in this case, the letterpress was printed at Cambridge University Press). Milton was one of eleven Nonesuch titles to appear in 1926, a year which specialised in seventeenth-century writers: in addition to Milton, Abraham Cowley, John Evelyn, Thomas Otway, and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
One of the distinguishing features of this edition is 53 illustrations by William Blake (1757-1827), whose Writings had already appeared with the Nonesuch Press the previous year and whose Poetry & Prose and Pencil Drawings were to be published by the Press the following year. All three of these were edited by the surgeon and bibliographer Geoffrey Keynes (1887-1982), who was the most prolific author of the Nonesuch Press and whose considerable output on Blake was instrumental in establishing Blake as a central figure in the history of English art and literature. Keynes is responsible for providing brief notes on the illustrations at the back of each volume of the Nonesuch Milton which Francis Meynell was to see as ‘my favourite, I think, of Nonesuch publications. The Blake illustrations are surprisingly right. Everything about the making of this book went easily from the beginning: a pretty sure sign of success’.
This copy, a recent acquisition for the Sterling Library, has the bookplates of Thomas Wodehouse Legh Newton (1857-1942), a diplomat and Conservative politician who served as Paymaster-General during the First World War. Newton was evidently more interested in possessing than in reading it, as the volume arrived at Senate House Library with its pages unopened.
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