Of Blake's Jerusalem, the last of his prophetic books, Allan Cunningham said, "The whole seems a riddle which no ingenuity can solve." Jerusalem is an extraordinarily complex work. As Robin Hamlyn and Michael Phillips have claimed in William Blake, the catalogue of the Tate Gallery's recent major Blake exhibit, "It draws together the characters and themes of his visionary universe in a drama of Redemption embracing the whole of mankind, and especially the British nation--on whose soil . . . Jerusalem must be built anew."

The dream-narrative of Jerusalem is the most complicated of Blake's illuminated printings, for the story does not follow a chronological sequence of action . After seeing a portion of the text, the poet Robert Southey termed Jerusalem "a perfectly mad poem."

With one hundred plates, Jerusalem is the most extensive of Blake's illuminated texts.

Although the work was begun by 1804, there is no record of a complete copy before 1820.

Of the six known copies of Jerusalem, five were printed by Blake himself, only one of them being a color copy.

In plate 26, Hand, wrapped in flames and representing religious error, confronts Jerusalem, representing liberty. ("Jerusalem is named Liberty. . .Among the sons of Albion"). In plate 37, Christ supports the unconscious Albion, weakened by religious error, while at the bottom the threatening vulture Spectre hovers over a prostrate Jerusalem.