Tuesday, January 09, 2018

BROKEN LINKS (94)

June 2016

 You may have noticed a number of links on our pages have recently led nowhere. This is because the University of Georgia is no longer supporting the material by Nelson Hilton which was provided through their domain. Professor Hilton gave us access to many resources including his work on the Blake Digital Text Project. Our links on our sidebar to Blake's Contents, Blake's Index and the Concordance to Complete Works have disappeared because of the loss of links to his works.

I personally am most disappointed because the links Hilton provided to images in the Four Zoas are not longer available. The page images on a number of pages of the Four Zoas which I posted, no longer have images because the files they were linked to are unavailable. I can replace the images with those which the crawler picked up
when the posts were published, but the images there are of lower resolution. Hilton's images allowed us to read Blake's text as he wrote and edited it, as well as view the sketches which illuminated his pages.

 

The manuscript for the Four Zoas resides in the British Library. The library provides digital imagery for a portion of the book starting at page 44. Using Professor Hilton's files for the early pages of the manuscript and the British Library's images for later pages, I published posts on 80 of the 138 pages of the Four Zoas. There is always more work to be done but there are many hands and minds who are contributing to the effort.
 

Professor Hilton graciously replied to my plea for help with a copy of his file for the 4ZS.
 

Keep watching for further developments.
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January 2018

I am happy to report that the British Library arranged for all of the images for pages of the Four Zoas to be posted at the William Blake Archive. I was concerned because the Archive does not allow copying of their images. However when I requested use of the images from the British Library they readily granted permission to download the images from the Archive and to post them to my blog. Posts which for a time had only broken links, now have pictures of the text and sketches which Blake abandoned over 200 years ago.

The Blake Archive provides a readily-used format and well produced images. Study of the Four Zoas should be enhanced by this addition to Blake's work which is available on the internet.


British Library
Four Zoas Manuscript
Page 94

Four Zoas, Night VII, Page 94, (E 367)
"Tho all those fair perfections which men know only by name
In beautiful substantial forms appeard & served her
As food or drink or ornament or in delightful works
To build her bowers for the Elements brought forth abundantly    
The living soul in glorious forms & every One came forth
Walking before her Shadowy face & bowing at her feet"

3 comments:

Vincent said...

This has happened to me a lot over the last ten years during which I trustingly linked to various sites and mostly acknowledged the sources, only to discover later that their site was no longer active, resulting in dead links.

I've been able to recover the images in most cases by going to http://archive.org/web/web.php and pasting in the link, so as to get access to the image in question, which could then be downloaded and copied to my own web-space, paid for through annual subscription, with appropriate adjustments to the original post in its html form.

If this is giving you any difficulty, let me know and I may be able to help.

ellie Clayton said...

Thank you Ian. This is very helpful, although it won't supply all of the missing images. It is a good resource to learn about.

If we were able to ask the right questions, there is no doubt that we would get the right answers. You gave the answer before I formulated a question.

I miss the Wayfarer.

Vincent said...

I've been missing him too, Ellie - have broken a long silence yesterday.