Blake Contexts

Religious

  • Blake’s dissenting background - rejection of deism and embrace of idea of god as within humanity, denial of an external God, god exists only within humans suffused with the nature of God, full of the Holy Spirit

  • Deism - natural religion which denies revelation and bases faith upon reasonable deduction from natural phenomena

  • The True Vine '- ‘Every thing is an attempt to be human’ - Blake

  • Nobodaddy - cruel Old Testament God of organised religion

  • Isaac Watts and contemporary children’s literature as encouraging obedience through a religious framework - ‘Divine Songs Attempted in Basic Language for the Use of Children’ 1715

  • Influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg 18th c Swedish visionary, proclaimed ‘The Divine Human’ ‘God is in the form of a man’ one of four leading doctrines in his ‘New Church’, re-opened inner worlds and proclaimed ‘the Kingdom of God is within’

  • Blake and wife early members of Swedeborgian Society in London

  • Blake ‘God only Acts and Is in existing beings or Men’

Industrial

  • Boys as young as four sold into chimney sweeping - parents often desperate

  • Figure of chimney sweep a key emblem in Blake’s social protest poems, innocent victims of exploitation and the smoke of industrialisation, uniting two central romantic preoccupations of childhood and the impact of industrial revolution on natural world

  • Mass migration from countryside to cities

  • Romantic belief in connection betweeen human and natural cycles - reaction to Enlightenment values that elevated humans to rational ordered beings, cultural conformism

  • Industrial labour as breaking seasonal cycles associated with agriculture

  • Tom Paine ‘Every charter’d town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself’

  • 1790s London - 90 workhouses operated housing around 15,000 inmates, beggars regularly whipped and imprisoned in Houses of Correction

Romantic/relational

  • 1753 marriage act passed by Lord Hardwicke established church presence as a condition of valid marriages

  • Blake’s belief in the free love movement - restriction of desire as suffocating

  • Vulnerable young girls often forced into prostitution through inability to secure work

  • Extramarital sexual relations condemned by church - more about maintaining societal order than allowing for love

Societal/political

  • No widespread conception of children’s rights or childhood as a seperate and honoured state - children expected to serve parents

  • Empire - by 1790s Britain world’s wealthiest superpower, Blake’s radical view of it as a ‘land of poverty’

  • Rudimentary system of caring for the poor, eg charity schools attacked

  • Mary Wollestoncraft known by Blake who illustrated some of her work - could link to feminist reading of Earth’s Answer

  • King suffered from widely reported mental illness

  • American Revolutionary War and French Revolutionary Wars

Illuminations

  • Ecchoing Green - children naked around tree, reaching for and picking grapes connoting the passage into adult life

  • The Divine Image - True Vine with tendrils conveys the human character of the world, with all the virtues embedded within

  • Holy Thursday SOI - Adults carrying clubs conveying implicit depiction of church’s violent enforcement of obedience

  • Introduction to Innocence - Flock appears as one large mass, speaker as shepard to vast organic body - harmony and unity within experience, benevolent role of piper, experience channeling the voices of innocence

  • Nurse’s Song SOI - Nurse reading, children holding hands in circle, some naked some clothed

  • The Chimney Sweeper SOI - Light and unearthly quality of children removed from real life, adult figure the platitudinous image of salvation

  • The Lamb SOI - Nakedness of the child implies prelapsarian state of innocence, nature and the habitat of the Lamb as pure, perfect untainted state close to God

  • Holy Thursday SOE - Natural beauty of setting juxtaposes figures of dead children

  • The Chimney Sweeper SOE - Freedman ‘a child bent over, hardly able to withstand the onslaught of winter weather and hard work…his face is turned accusingly towards the viewer…this puts us in an uncomfortably similar position to the parents

  • The Tyger - Counterweight to the terrifying imagery in the poem - the tiger appears gentle, mirroring the Lamb

  • Nurse’s Song SOE - Nurse grooming and primping child