In Folio: Rare Volumes in the Stanford University Libraries

Edward Young, 1683-1765.

The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts.

London: Printed by R. Noble for R. Edwards, 1797.

This was the first large scale commercial commission for William Blake (1757-1827), who created a series of 537 illustrations for this work. The illustrations (watercolor drawings) are largely allegorical, strange, and inventive; many of the illustrations were, according to Blake, revealed to him in visions and dreams. Blake intended to reproduce them in a deluxe edition of engravings, but he engraved only forty-three folio plates, which cover the first part of the poem to the end of the Night the Fourth; no more of the poem was published in this edition. The result was somewhat predictable: many have been offended by the “nudity;” Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) thought the designs “balanced between the conception of of genius and the ravings of positive insanity.”

Edward Young came from a clerical family, and later took orders himself. He fell into melancholy after the death of his wife, and from 1742-1743 wrote Night Thoughts, a series of meditations on death and redemption. The poem became widely read and went through several editions, perhaps because of its offer of what Blake's biographer Peter Ackroyd calls "exultant sepulchralism." Night Thoughts is some10,000 lines long, arranged in nine books (or “Nights”). Young’s popularity was not confined to England. Night Thoughts was translated into French by Le Tourneur in 1769 (Méditations de la Nuit), and eleven French editions were issued from 1765 and 1800. Rousseau praised Young, and the French revolutionary Robespierre was said to carry a copy with him.

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