Night Thoughts (Folio Society Limited Edition)

Edward Young (1683–1765) wrote The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality in nine “Nights”, published between 1742 and 1745. It was a long meditation on mortality, grief and the consolations of faith, composed in the wake of the deaths of his stepdaughter, her husband and his wife, and it was one of the most widely read poems of the eighteenth century. Its influence on the Romantic movement was substantial.

In 1795 the publisher Richard Edwards commissioned William Blake to illustrate a lavish new edition. Blake produced 537 watercolours, designed to encircle the cut-out text of the poem on each page, and he planned to engrave about two hundred of them. Edwards published only the first volume in 1797, with 43 engravings for the first four Nights. It was a commercial failure and the venture was abandoned. The watercolours remained unpublished, and are now in the British Museum.

The Folio Society’s facsimile of 2005 reproduces the complete series in colour for the first time, from the unique copy in the British Museum. Oxford’s scholarly edition of 1980 reproduced all the watercolours, but only 78 of its illustrations in colour. A reviewer in Blake Quarterly called the Folio facsimile the most beautiful and aesthetically satisfying new book on Blake in many years, and noted that it weighed 25 pounds. The commentary volume by Robin Hamlyn, a curator at Tate Britain, gives a brief analysis of each of the 537 designs.

YOUNG, Edward (illus. William Blake). Night Thoughts: The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality. 

First Folio Society edition. First and only complete publication of Blake's watercolour illustrations for Night Thoughts. Limited to 750 numbered copies, this being number 484. Thick elephant folio. Vol. I & II: 548 pp. across two volumes; companion volume: [vi], xx, 362 pp. Two main volumes bound in quarter goatskin and illustrated cloth. Spines lettered in gilt. Cover illustration by Neil Gower. Contents printed on Natural Evolution paper by Castelli Bolis. Accompanied by envelope containing three loose prints. Companion commentary volume by Robyn Hamlyn. Housed in purple buckram solander case lettered in gilt. Some very mild foxing to the cloth of Vol. II. Otherwise fine throughout. A near fine set.

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Catalogue Number: HH000154.