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Erdman remarks in his introduction to The Illuminated Blake:
 

In Plate 11 Blake etched, and soemtimes clearly painted, a mer-woman with one human leg and one dolphin leg, treated blithely as the skirt of a pink dress when he chose to keep the secret. And in the Argument page (Plate 2) the puxxling object, or non-object, being exchanged from hand to hand is manifestly meant to be beyound our ken...what we can almost see as green grapes in one copy, is plainly just green leaves on a branch in another, and so on...In effect Blake was issuing different editions for different audiences. The trustworthy Thomas Butts was sold a copy of the Marriage, copy F, that exhibits the mermaid in full amphibian visibility. The purchase of copy G (unknown) was the only owner permitted to see, what had been etched on the plate but not brought out in other copies, the bloody trophy dropped by Ugolino in Plate 16.

The introductory matter in The Early Illuminated Works observes that Blake himself did not seem to aggressively advertise or identify himself this particular book:

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the only undated and unsigned illuminated book besdies the early tractate All Religions Are One and the late broadsheet On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. The paper trail is faint. Blake mentions the Marriage only once, sixth in the list of works advertised for sale in 1793: "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Illuminated Printing. QUarto, with 14 designs, price 7s. 6d." In later years he does not list the Marriage among the books available for sale in his letters to either Dawson Turnder (9 June 1818) or George Cumberland (12 April 1827), where he mentions several other illuminated books. (Eaves, et al.113)

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Bentley notes that Blake's possessions fell into the hands of Tatham, who associated with Mrs. Blake near Blake's death, resulting in the severe losses of Blakeana: 
 

Besides drawings Tatham clearly had proofs of Blake's engravings, copies of the Illuminated Works, and Blake's copperplates, from which he printed copies of America (1), Europe (1), Jerusalem (3) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (16) about 1831 and 1832. "Previously in this letter Mrs. Gilchrist wrote: 'He is the actual Tatham who knew Blake and enacted the holocaust of Blake manuscripts--not designs, I think, as I have heard from his own lips.' Edward Calvert's son wrote (A Memoir of Edward Calvert Artist, London,1893, p. 59) that Calvert, fearing such a holocaust, had gone 'to Tatham and implored him to reconsider the matter, and spare "the good man's precious work;" notwithstadning which, blocks, plates, drawings, and MSS., I understand, were destroyed.' The evidence is further confused by Richard Garnett's contradictory reports that when Garnett saw Tatham about 1860 Tatham 'sought to convey that they [relics of Blake] had been sold, not destroyed' and that at the same time 'Tatham had said, without giving any explanation, that he had destroyed some of Blake's manuscripts and kept others by him, which he had sold from time to time.' It seems quite clear that Tatham destoryed enormous amounts of material, for Cunningham (pp. 506-7) said Blake 'left volumes of verse, amounting, it is said, to nearly an hundred, prepared for the press', and Blake told Crabb Robinson (Feb. 18th, 1826) that he had 'written more than Voltaire or Rousseau--Six or Seven Epic poems tas long as Homer and 20 Tragedies as long as Macbeth'. Nothing remotely like this quantity has survived, and there is no reason to exculpate Tatham. The destruction probably consisted largely of Prophecies--it is remarkable that even in 1831-2 Tatham did not print the Prophecies which attack conventional morality and religion most explicitly (Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Urizen). Tatham's authenticating signature on many surviving drawings indicates that he thought these were less Satanic--or perhaps more saleable. (417 n.3)

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