William Blake – Biographical and Historical Background
Biographical Background
Throughout his life, William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a
radical and visionary, and these two aspects of his genius must be seen as interdependent.
His radicalism – political, religious and artistic – was in part shaped by his
background and upbringing. What gave it a distinctive quality, however, was
Blake’s astonishingly vivid imagination – so vivid in fact,
that the world around him was in some ways less real than his visions.
This visionary capacity, of course, helped to fuel the charges made by his
detractors that he was insane. In fact, it endowed Blake with a creative
freedom in his poetry, engravings and paintings to express the truth as he saw
it and to promote social and political change through an imaginative
transformation of the world.
He was born in
Blake was initially educated at home, largely by his mother,
and this experience instilled from the start an independence of mind. When he
was ten he went to a drawing school, and at the age of fourteen he was
apprenticed as an engraver. In 1779, in his early twenties, he studied at the
From his earliest years, Blake was a visionary, subject to
vivid ‘waking dreams’ and terrifying nightmares. When he was four years old he
said that God had appeared to him at the window and on another occasion he
claimed to have seen a tree full of angels. Once he rushed home to tell his
surprised mother that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree. How
should we understand these claims? In part they may suggest a (not uncommon)
refuge from the unhappiness of childhood. More significantly, we can perhaps
already detect a kind of moral protest by a sensitive child against the harsh
reality of late eighteenth-century society, and indeed of the human condition,
which was to inform his later writing. It was early evidence of that
imaginative capacity to transform the real world that was to be seen in Songs of Innocence. And just as there,
where the ideal dream world is threatened by the evil and corruption described
in Songs of Experience, so the young
Blake’s optimistic ‘waking visions’ were overwhelmed by darker fears and
anxieties when he slept and he was tortured by nightmares. The positive and
negative images which haunted his imagination in these years were to resurface
later – and to inform the patterns and symbolism in the poetry.
Blake’s social and political radicalism, however,
distinctive its manner of expression, was to an extent influenced by his
parents. They were religious dissenters and this puts his background firmly in
a tradition of hostility towards the Church of England and, inevitably at this
time, the State. Coming from humble origins himself, his sympathies were always
with the common people and he hated the inequities perpetrated by the still
powerful eighteenth-century alliance of monarchy, aristocracy and Church. Blake
rejoiced that the old order was being challenged and later gave his
enthusiastic support to the French and American Revolutions. However, while he
belonged to the dissenting tradition, he was often at odds with the dissenting
sects and the radical political groups who might have been seen as his natural
allies. As a consequence, he was never part of a mainstream anti-establishment
movement, but was rather a single voice, striving to be heard above the clamour
of late eighteenth-century political and religious life.
To some extent this can be explained by the fact that Blake
was a radical in more than simply political terms. Indeed, he was opposed to
the very ways of thinking in his age. The philosophers and scientists of the
eighteenth-century had promoted a rationalist and materialist world view which
was to prove very influential and has survived into
the twentieth century. Blake traced this
process back to Isaac Newton (1642-1727) whose classical physics had
generated a view of the universe as a great clockwork machine, all the laws of which we would eventually come
to know. Blake hated this kind of understanding, feeling that it was anti-human and took all the
mystery out of God’s creations. Blake
might sympathize with the
dissenters’ and radicals’ opposition to the
old order of Church and King, but he rejected their faith in rationalism
as the only basis for a new social and political order. His own mental experience suggested that
there were other, more imaginative, ways of seeing, and more importantly, other
forms of truth.
Consequently, Blake
sought to write in quite new and
challenging ways in order to
offer an antidote to those habits of mind which were shaping
the emergent social, political and
religious conditions of the period. His
poetry demonstrated a new and distinctive
voice and this is evident in Songs
of Innocence and of Experience and in the later Prophetic Books e.g.
Thus Blake’s visionary
capacities, and the symbolism derived from the dreams and nightmares of his childhood, shaped a philosophy and a language which were opposed to
the scientific and materialist
tendencies of his age. In celebrating the creative power of the imagination he wished to demonstrate ways of seeing which went beyond the understanding of the scientists and had the potential to improve the human
lot. An inspired - and prophetic - art should, in Blake’s view,
be enlisted in the service of humanity. In this way his radicalism and his poetic vision can be seen to be complementary. His was in every sense a revolutionary art.
Social and Political
Background
One way of establishing the Importance of William Blake is
to understand that he was writing at a time when our modem world was born. The
literary artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism - in which Blake
is perhaps one of the first major figures - emerged at the time as far-reaching
changes were taking place in all areas of British life.
The key word is ‘revolution’ - both at home and abroad. The Industrial Revolution initiated remarkable
changes in manufacture and production based on technological and scientific developments. It created new
wealth for the commercial and professional
middle classes who increasingly challenged the power base of the landed gentry and their allies in the Established
Church (the rise of dissent and especially Methodism,
is an important factor here). And it called into being an exploited Industrial underclass who did not share in the new wealth
The Agrarian Revolution was prompted by an urgent need
to feed an exploding population.
The Enclosure Acts meant that common land passed into private ownership and, with developments in agricultural science, became productive arable land - but In the
short-term this brought hardship
with the decline of subsistence farming and the lass of grazing rights.
Starving country people were increasingly forced Into the squalid slums of the growing manufacturing towns. Thus in a context
of the rise of capitalism, shifting
power structures and increasing social unrest, modern Britain was bom: urban, industrial,
democratic, secular and religiously
plural.
These transformations in British social, political and economic
life were accelerated by developments abroad. It is sometimes said that the American Revolution had as great an impact on this side of the Atlantic as it did In the Thirteen Colonies: it changed the political and social complexion of
We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Monarchical and aristocratic government - and the politics
of deference - were totally undermined
in
There were even more
startling developments across the Channel. Some thinkers saw the French Revolution as bringing about the ‘end
of history’, in other words a new beginning for human society where the ancien regime (based on the privileges
of nobility and king) would be
overthrown, and liberty, equality and
fraternity would prevail.
In
This optimism was short-lived. The French Revolution
collapsed into internecine violence with the Reign of Terror In 1793-4. For
those who had placed so many hopes in the Revolution - and this included Blake and the other Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge -
worse was to follow when France ostensibly to spread the Revolution abroad, began under the leadership of
Napoleon to invade other European countries in a bid for European
dominance which was to last for twenty years.
This seemed to be the final betrayal
of the high ideals of the
Revolution. Blake’s disillusionment
with the course of the Revolution is reflected in the darker mood of
Songs of Experience.
In
A revolutionary era ended with the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration at the Bourbons.
Other European monarchies, whose futures
had looked bleak, were re-established and the Congress of Vienna went a long way towards restoring the
status quo on the continent. Nevertheless, the revolutionary spirit lived on and social and political
thinking was changed irrevocably.