Printer's Error by Rebecca Romney

Author:Rebecca Romney
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

“LONDON,” FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE, BY WILLIAM BLAKE, PRINTED IN 1795. IMAGE COURTESY YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART.

Yet, this is the original illustrated page of “London.”

Above the manically depressive text stands the image of a young boy helping a crippled old man, an illustrative act of charity overshadowing the textual human woes. Unless that kid is leading the old man to a gang of street punks who beat him up and steal those sweet crutches, the illustration and the poem are sending two different messages to the reader that must be considered together when experiencing “London.” Taken as a composite work of art, the poem can be read as a question and answer: the text as the problem and the illustration as the solution.

The additional context of Blake’s illustrations changes how we read the text, but important meanings can be imposed by other factors we may not immediately notice. When Charles Dickens was publishing his serial novel Hard Times in 1854, he did so within the pages of his own weekly magazine, Household Words. The weekly also contained nonfiction articles, but their arrangement in relation to the fictional Hard Times installments was designed to provide setting and context to the events of the novel. Actual news articles about the rights of workers, failed safety regulations, accidents, and industrial reform coincided with the lives and deaths of Dickens’s fictional characters. When reading Hard Times as a standalone novel separate from Household Words, we miss major components of the argument Dickens is making.

As the scholar Jerome McGann argues, the words on a page offer only “the merest glimpse of that complex world we call literary work and the meanings it produces.” William Blake is an exquisite example of this concept because his “composite art” of word and image allows for unusual complexity, with layers upon layers of meaning.

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