SOURCE: Chayes, Irene H. “The Marginal Design on Jerusalem 12.” Blake Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 51-76.

In the following essay, Chayes analyzes the designs in the margins of Jerusalem as a way of understanding themes and structure in the work.

Among the many lively, varied, and unjustly neglected minor designs in Jerusalem, those that occupy the vertical margins on a number of plates make up a distinct and consistent group. Typically, they form unified sequences of images, usually human figures, which may be related to similar designs elsewhere in Jerusalem, or by allusive borrowings may recall Blake's illuminated books from much earlier in his career; at the same time, their relation to the texts on the same plates is likely to be oblique or incidental. There are two external limitations governing the marginal designs as a group which are particularly relevant to long-standing Blakean themes. Because the composition is necessarily vertical...