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William Blake, "London"

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Excerpts from Scholarly Criticism of "London"
[From The Norton Poetry Workshop CD-ROM, edited by James F. Knapp]

From "London" in E. P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and The Moral Law

"London" is among the most lucid and instantly available of the Songs of Experience. "The poem," John Beer writes, "is perhaps the least controversial of all Blake"s works," and "no knowledge of his personal vision is necessary to assist the understanding." [1] I agree with this: the poem does not require an interpreter since the images are self-sufficient within the terms of the poem's own development. Every reader can, without the help of a critic, see London simultaneously as Blake's own city, as an image of the human condition. So far from requiring a knowledge of Blake's personal vision it is one of those foundation poems upon which our knowledge of that vision can be built. A close reading may confirm, but is likely to add very little to, what a responsive reader had already experienced.

But since the poem is found in draft in Blake's notebook we are unusually well placed to examine it not only as product but in its process of creation.

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

(E26–7)

In Blake's draft the first verse was originally thus:

I wander thro each dirty street
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
And see in every face I meet
Marks of weakness marks of woe [2]

The first important change is from "dirty" to "charter'd." Another fragment in the notebook helps to define this alteration:

Why should I care for the men of thames
Or the cheating waves of charter'd streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
I was born a slave but I go to be free [3]

Thus "charter'd" arose in Blake's mind in association with "cheating" and with the "little blasts of fear" of the "hireling." The second association is an obvious political allusion. To reformers the corrupt political system was a refuge for hirelings: indeed, Dr. Johnson had defined in his dictionary a "pension" as "In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country." David Erdman is undoubtedly right that the "little blasts of fear" suggest the proclamations, the Paine-burnings and the political repressions of the State and of Reeves' Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers which dominated the year in which these poems were written. [4] In the revised version of "Thames" Blake introduces the paradox which was continually to be in the mouths of radicals and factory reformers in the next fifty years: the slavery of the English poor. And he points also ("I was born a slave but I go to be free") to the first wave of emigration of reformers from the attention of Church-and-King mobs or hirelings.

But "charter'd" is more particularly associated with "cheating." It is clearly a word to be associated with commerce: one might think of the Chartered Companies which, increasingly drained of function, were bastions of privilege within the government of the city. Or, again, one might think of the monopolistic privileges of the East India Company, whose ships were so prominent in the commerce of the Thames, which applied in 1793 for twenty-years' renewal of its charter, and which was under bitter attack in the reformers' press. [5]

But "charter'd" is, for Blake, a stronger and more complex word than that, which he endows with more generalised symbolic power. It has the feel of a word which Blake has recently discovered, as, years later, he was to "discover" the word "golden" (which, nevertheless, he had been using for years). He is savouring it, weighing its poetic possibilities in his hand. It is in no sense a "new" word, but he has found a way to use it with a new ironic inversion. For the word is standing at an intellectual and political cross-roads. On the one hand, it was a stale counter of the customary libertarian rhetoric of the polite culture. Blake himself had used it in much this way in his early "King Edward the Third":

Let Liberty, the charter'd right of Englishmen,
Won by our fathers in many a glorious field,
Enerve my soldiers; let Liberty
Blaze in each countenance, and fire the battle.
The enemy fight in chains, invisible chains, but heavy;
Their minds are fetter'd; then how can they be free? [6]

It would be only boring to accumulate endless examples from eighteenth-century constitutional rhetoric or poetry of the use of chartered rights, chartered liberties, magna carta: the word is at the center of Whig ideology.

There is, however, an obvious point to be made about this tedious usage of "charter." A charter of liberty is, simultaneously, a denial of these liberties to others. A charter is something given or ceded; it is bestowed upon some group by some authority; it is not claimed as of right. And the liberties (or privileges) granted to this guild, company, corporation or even nation exclude others from the enjoyment of these liberties. A charter is, in its nature, exclusive. . . .  

For Burke, then, "charter" and "charter'd," while not over-laboured, remain among the best of good words. But not for Paine: "I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead." A charter implied not a freedom but monopoly: "Every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself, and the qualifications of electors proceeds out of those chartered monopolies. Is this freedom? Is this what Mr. Burke means by a constitution?" It was in the incorporated towns, with their charters, that the Test and Corporation Acts against Dissenters operated with most effect. Hence (Paine argued—and economic historians have often agreed with him) the vitality of the commerce of un-incorporated towns like Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield. The Dissenters (he wrote), "withdrew from the persecution of the chartered towns, where test laws more particularly operate, and established a sort of asylum for themselves in those places. . . . But the case is now changing. France and America bid all comers welcome, and initiate them into all the rights of citizenship." 

This is (for Paine) the first offence of "chartered": it implies exclusion and limitation. Its second offence was in its imputation that anyone had the right to grant freedoms or privileges to other men: "If we begin with William of Normandy, we find that the government of England was originally a tyranny, founded on invasion and conquest of the country . . . Magna Carta . . . was no more than compelling the government to renounce a part of its assumptions." Both these offences were criticised in a central passage which I argue lay somewhere in Blake's mind when he selected the word:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect—that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. . . . The only persons on whom they operate are the persons whom they exclude. . . . Therefore, all charters have no other than an indirect negative operation.

Charters, he continued, "are sources of endless contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the common rights of national society." The charters of corporate towns might, he suggested, have arisen because of garrison service: "Their refusing or granting admission to strangers, which has produced the custom of giving, selling and buying freedom, has more of the nature of garrison authority than civil government" (my emphasis).

Blake by now had come to share much of Paine's political outlook, although he did not share his faith in the beneficence of commerce. He thus chose "charter'd" out of the biggest political argument that was agitating Britain in 1791–93, and he chose it with that irony which inverted the rhetoric of Burke and asserted the definitions of "exclusion," the annulling of rights, "negative operation" and "giving, selling and buying freedom." The adjectival form—charter'd—enforces the direct commercial allusion: "the organisation of a city in terms of trade." [7]

The other emendation to the first verse is trivial: in the third line "And see in every face I meet" is altered to "And mark . . ." And yet, is it as trivial as it seems? For we already have, in the fourth line, "Marks of weakness marks of woe." Thus Blake has chosen, with deliberation, the triple beat of "mark." And we respond to this, whether we are conscious of the nature of the response or whether the words beat upon us in subliminal ways: even in these biblically illiterate days we have all heard of "the mark of the Beast." Some of Blake's central images—his trees, and clouds, and caves, and serpents, and roots—have such a universal presence in mythology and literature that one may spend half a lifetime in the game of hunt-the-source. And sometimes the hunting is fruitful, provided that we remember always that the source (or its echo in Blake's mind) is not the same thing as what he makes of it in his own art. Miss Kathleen Raine, a Diana among hunters, has found this:

The opening lines of London suggest very strongly Vergil's account of the damned in Hades:

Nor Death itself can wholly wash their Stains;

But long-contracted Filth ev'n in the Soul remains.
The Reliques of inveterate Vice they wear;
And spots of Sin obscene in ev'ry Face appear. [8]

The suggestion need not be excluded; this echo, with others, could have been in Blake's mind. But if so, what does Blake do with it? For Blake's poem evokes pity and forgiveness—the cries, the "hapless Soldier's sigh," "weakness" and "woe"—and not the self-righteous eviction to Hades of "long-contracted Filth," "inveterate Vice" and "spots of Sin obscene." Moreover, in the amendment from "And see" to "And mark," Blake (or the speaker of his poem) closes the gap between the censorious observer and the faces which are observed, assimilating both within a common predicament: the marker himself appears to be marked or even to be marking. [9]

But "mark" undoubtedly came through to the reader with a much stronger, biblical resonance. The immediate allusion called to mind will most probably have been "the mark of the Beast," as in Revelation xiii.16–17:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the Beast, or the number of his name. 

The mark of the Beast would seem, like "charter'd," to have something to do with the buying and selling of human values. . . .

These considerations, which are ones of cultural context rather than of superficial verbal similarities, lead me to reject the suggested allusion to Ezekiel. What Blake's contemporaries were arguing about in the 1790s was the rule of Antichrist and the hope of the millennium: the mark seen in "every face" is the mark of the Beast, a mark explicitly associated with commercialism. And if we require conclusive evidence that Blake was thinking, in "London," of Revelation, he has given us this evidence himself, with unusual explicitness. For the illumination to the poem [13] appears to be an independent, but complementary, conception; and for this reason I feel entitled to discuss the poem also as an independent conception and within its own terms. The illumination (if I am pressed to confess my own view) adds nothing essential to the poem, but comments upon the same theme in different terms. Nor are we even certain how the poem and the illumination are united, nor why they complement each other, until we turn to Jerusalem, Book 4 (E241):

I see London blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets
Of Babylon, led by child, his tears run down his beard

In both the poem and the illumination, London's streets appear as those of Babylon of Revelation; but in the illumination it is London himself who is wandering through them. [14]

In the second verse the important change is from "german forg'd links" to "mind-forg'd manacles." The reference was, of course, to the Hanoverian monarchy, and perhaps to the expectation that Hanoverian troops would be used against British reformers. [15] The change to "mind-forg'd" both generalises and also places us again in that universe of Blakean symbolism in which we must turn from one poem to another for cumulative elucidation. In this case we have already noted that the image of the mind as "fettered" by the invisible chains of its own unfreedom had appealed to Blake in his youthful "King Edward the Third." The development of the image is shown in another fragment in the notebook, "How to know Love from Deceit":

Love to faults is always blind
Always is to joy inclind
Lawless wingd & unconfind
And breaks all chains from every mind

Deceit to secresy confind
Lawful cautious & refind
To every thin but interest blind
And forges fetters for the mind

The "mind-forg'd manacles," then, are those of deceit, self-interest, absence of love, of law, repression and hypocrisy. [16] They are stronger and harder to break than the manacles of the German king and his mercenaries, since they bind the minds not only of the oppressors but also of the oppressed; moreover, they are self-forged. How then are we to read "ban"? F. W. Bateson, a confident critic, tells us "in every execration or curse (not in every prohibition)." [17] I can't share his confidence: one must be prepared for seventeen types of ambiguity in Blake, and, in any case, the distinction between a curse and a prohibition is not a large one. The "bans" may be execrations, but the mind may be encouraged to move through further associations, from the banns before marriage, the prohibitive and possessive ethic constraining "lawless" love (" 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door"), to the bans of Church and State against publication and activities of the followers of Tom Paine. [18] All these associations are gathered into the central one of a code of morality which constricts, denies, prohibits and punishes.

The third verse commenced in the notebook as:

But most the chimney sweepers cry
Blackens oer the churches walls

 This second line was then changed to:

Every blackning church appalls

The effect is one of concentration. Pertinacious critics have been able to invert most of Blake's meanings, and readers have even found to suppose that these two lines (in their final form) are a comment upon the awakening social conscience of the churches under the influence of the evangelical revival: the churches are appalled by the plight of the chimney-sweeping boys. [19] The meaning, of course, is the opposite; and on this point the notebook entitles us to have confidence. In the first version the churches are clearly shown as passive, while the cry of the chimney-sweepers attaches itself, with the smoke of commerce, to their walls. By revising the line Blake has simply tightened up the strings of his indignation by another notch. He has packed the meaning of "The Chimney Sweeper" of the Songs of Experience (whose father and mother "are both gone up to the church" to "praise God & his Priest & King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery") into a single line, the adjective "blackning" visually attaching to the Church complicity in the brutal exploitation of young childhood along with the wider consequences of the smoke of expanding commerce. "Appalls" is used in a transitive sense familiar in Blake's time—not as "is appalled by" but as puts to shame, puts in fear, challenges, indicts, in the same way as the dying sigh of the soldier indicts (and also threatens, with an apocalyptic image) [20] the Palace. [21] "An ancient Proverb" in the notebook gives the three elements of a curse upon England:

Remove away that blackning church
Remove away that marriage hearse
Remove away that [place: del.] man of blood
You'll quite remove the ancient curse. [22]

Church, marriage and monarchy: but if he had left it at "place," then it could have been Tyburn (or Newgate), the place of public execution—the altar of the "Moral & Self-Righteous Law" of Babylon and Cruel Og, in the center of London, whose public rituals Blake may have witnessed.

The poem, in its first version, was to end at this point, at "Runs in blood down Palace walls." But Blake was not yet satisfied: he returned, and worked through three versions of a fourth, concluding verse, squeezing it in between other drafts already on the page. One attempt reads:

But most thro wintry streets I hear
How the midnight harlots curse
Blasts the new born infants tear
And smites with plagues the marriage hearse.

Bateson tells us that "the images are sometimes interpreted as a reference to venereal disease. But this is to read Blake too literally. The diseases that descend upon the infant and the newly married couple are apocalyptic horrors similar to the blood that runs down the palace walls." [23]

It may be nice to think so. But the blood of the soldier is for real, as well as apocalyptic, and so is the venereal disease that blinds the new-born infant and which plagues the marriage hearse. We need not go outside the poem to document the increased discussion of such disease in the early 1790s, [24] nor, to turn the coin over, the indictment by Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle of marriage without love as prostitution. The poem makes the point very literally. Blake was often a very literal-minded man.

Another fragment in the notebook is closely related to this conclusion: a verse intended as the conclusion to "The Human Abstract" (or so it would seem) but not used in its final version. It does not, in fact, relate directly to the imagery of "The Human Abstract" and we may suppose that Blake, when he realised this, saw also how he could transpose the concept to make a conclusion to "London":

There souls of men are bought & sold
And milk fed infancy for gold
And youth to slaughter houses led
And [maidens: del. ] beauty for a bit of bread. [25]

This enables us to see, once more, that "London" is a literal poem and it is also an apocalyptic one; or we may say that it is a poem whose moral realism is so searching that it is raised to the intensity of apocalyptic vision. For the poem is not, of course, a terrible cumulative catalogue of unrelated abuses and suffering. It is organised in two ways. First, and most simply, it is organised about the street-cries of London. In the first verse, we are placed with Blake (if we are entitled—as I think we are—to take him as the wandering observer) and we "see" with his eyes. But in the second, third and fourth verses we are hearing, and the passage from sight to sound has an effect of reducing the sense of distance or of the alienation of the observer from his object of the first verse, and of immersing us within the human condition through which he walks. We see one thing at a time, as distinct moments of perception, although, by the end of the first verse, these perceptions become cumulative and repetitive ("in every face . . . marks . . . marks"). We hear many things simultaneously. Literally, we hear the eerie, almost animal cadence of the street-cries (and although we may now be forgetting them, if we were to be transported somehow to eighteenth-century London, these cries would be our first and most astonishing impression), the cries of the children, the "weep," "weep" of the chimney-sweeps, and, led on by these, we hear the more symbolic sounds of "bans," "manacles" and the soldier's "sigh." This second verse is all sounds and it moves through an acceleration of generalisation towards the third. If "charter'd" is repeated, and if "marks" falls with a triple beat, "every" falls upon us no less than seven times: a single incidence in the first verse prepares for five uses in the second and a single incidence in the third ties it into the developing structure. "Cry" also falls three times, carrying us from the second verse to the first line of the third. But in the third verse there is a thickening of sensual perception. Until this point we have seen and heard, but now we "sense," through the sound (the "cry" and the "sigh"), the activities that these indicate: the efforts of the chimney-sweep, the blackening walls of the churches, the blood of the soldier. We are not detached from this predicament; if anything, this impression of "hearing" giving way to "sensing" immerses us even more deeply within it.

We have been wandering, with Blake, into an ever more dense immersion. But the opening of the fourth verse ("But most thro' midnight streets I hear") appears to set us a little apart from this once more. "I hear" takes us back from ourselves to Blake, who is a little apart from the scene and listening. Nothing in the earlier verses had prepared us for the darkness of "midnight streets," unless perhaps the "blackning Church": what had been suggested before was the activity of the day-time streets, the street-cries, the occasions of commerce. The verse is not knitted in tidily to the rest at the level of literal organisation: the "Marriage hearse" is a conceit more abstract than any other in the poem, apart from "mind-forg'd manacles." Since we know that he had intended at first to end the poem with three verses, [26] should we say that the final verse was an afterthought tacked on after the original images had ceased to beat in his mind—imperfectly soldered to the main body and still betraying signs of a separate origin?

It is a fair question. Blake, like other poets, had afterthoughts and made revisions which were unwise. And if we were to stop short at this literal or technical organisation of the poem we could make a case against its final verse. But we must attend also to a second, symbolic, level of organisation. The immersion in sights and sounds is of a kind which forces one to generalise from London to "the human condition." The point is self-evident ("In every cry of every Man"). But this kind of statement, of which a certain school of commentators on Blake is over-fond, takes us only a little way, and a great deal less far than is sometimes knowingly implied. For "the human condition," unless further qualified or disclosed, is nothing but a kind of metaphysical full stop. Or, worse than that, it is a bundle of solecisms about mortality and defeated aspiration. 

But "the human condition" is what poets make poetry out of, not what they end up with. This poem is about a particular human condition, which acquires, through the selection of the simplest and most archetypal examples (man, infant soldier, palace, harlot), a generalised resonance; it expresses an attitude towards that condition; and it offers a unitary analysis as to its character.

Two comments may be made on the attitude disclosed by Blake towards his own material. First, it is often noted that "London" is one of the Songs of Experience which carries "the voice of honest indignation." This is true. The voice can be heard from the first "charter'd"; it rises to full strength in the third and final verses (appalls, runs in blood, blasts, blights). But it is equally true that this voice is held in equilibrium with the voice of compassion. This is clear from the first introduction of "mark." If we have here (and the triple insistence enforces conviction) the "mark of the Beast," Blake would have been entitled to pour down upon these worshippers at the shrine of false gods the full vials of his wrath:

And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication. And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the Beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name. [27]

But Blake indicates "weakness" and "woe," and the slow rhythm of the line, checked at mid-point, suggests contemplation and pity rather than wrath. Nor is this note of grave compassion ever lost: it continues in the cries, the fear, the tear: even the soldier is "hapless." If "London" is that part of that human condition which may be equally described as "Hell," it is not a hell to which only the damned are confined, while the saved may contemplate their torments; nor is this Virgil's "Hades." This is a city of Everyman; nor do we feel, in our increasing immersion, that we—or Blake himself—are observers from without. These are not so much our fellow-damned as our fellow-sufferers.

The second comment upon Blake's attitude is this: his treatment of the city departs from a strong literary convention. To establish this point fully would take us further outside the poem than I mean to go. But one way of handling the city, both in itself and as an exemplar of the human condition, derived from classical (especially Juvenalian) satire; and in this it is the city's turbulence, its theatre of changing human passions, its fractured, accidental and episodic life, its swift succession of discrete images of human vice, guile or helplessness, which provided the staple of convention. Samuel Johnson's "London" was the place where at one corner a "fell attorney prowls for prey" and at the next a "female atheist talks you dead." And the convention was, in some part, a countryman's convention, in some part a class convention—generally both: a country gentleman's convention. From whichever aspect, plebeian London was seen from outside as a spectacle. Wordsworth was still able to draw upon this convention—although with significant shifts of emphasis—in The Prelude. [28]

Blake's "London" is not seen from without as spectacle. It is seen, or suffered, from within, by a Londoner. And what is unusual about this image of the-human-condition-as-hell is that it offers the city as a unitary experience and not as a theatre of discrete episodes. For this to be so, there must be an ulterior symbolic organisation behind the literal organisation of this street-cry following upon that. And this symbolic organisation should now, after this lengthy discussion, have become fully disclosed. The tone of compassion falls upon those who are in hell, the sufferers; but the tone of indignation falls upon the institutions of repression—mind-forg'd manacles, blackning Church, Palace, Marriage hearse. And the symbolic organisation is within the clearly conceived and developing logic of market relations. Blake does not only list symptoms: within the developing imagery which unites the poem he also discloses their cause. From the first introduction of "charter'd" he never loses hold of the image of buying and selling although these words themselves are never used. "Charter'd" both grants from on high and licenses and it limits and excludes; if we recall Paine it is a "selling and buying" of freedom. What are bought and sold in "London" are not only goods and services but human values, affections and vitalities. From freedom we move (with "mark") to a race marked by buying and selling, the worshippers of the Beast and his image. Then we move through these values in ascendant scale: goods are bought and sold (street-cries), childhood (the chimney-sweep), human life (the soldier) and, in the final verse, youth, beauty and love, the source of life, is bought and sold in the figure of the diseased harlot who, herself, is only the other side of the "Marriage hearse." [29] In a series of literal, unified images of great power Blake compresses an indictment of the acquisitive ethic, endorsed by the institutions of State, which divides man from man, brings him into mental and moral bondage, destroys the sources of joy and brings, as its consequence, blindness and death.

It is now evident why the final verse is no afterthought but appeared to Blake as the necessary conclusion to the poem. The fragment left over from "The Human Abstract"

There souls of men are bought & sold
And milk fed infancy for gold
And youth to slaughter houses led
And beauty for a bit of bread

is a synopsis of the argument in "London." As it stands it remains as an argument, a series of assertions which would only persuade those already persuaded. But it provided, in its last line, the image of the harlot, whose love is bought and sold, which was necessary to complete "London" and make the poem "shut like a box."

And the harlot not only provides a culminating symbol of the reification of values, she is also a point of junction with the parallel imagery of religious mystification and oppression: for if this is Babylon, then the harlot is Babylon's whore who brought about the city's fall "because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." For English radical Dissent in the eighteenth century, the whore of Babylon was not only the "scarlet woman" of Rome, but also all Erastianism, all compromise between things spiritual and the temporal powers of the State, and hence, very specifically, that extraordinary Erastian formation, the Church of England. One recalls Blake's annotations to Bishop Watson (throughout), and his polemic against "The Abomination that maketh desolate. i.e. State Religion which is the Source of all Cruelty" (E607). Hence the harlot is able to unite in a single nexus the imagery of market relations and the imagery of ideological domination by the agency of a State Church, prostituted to the occasions of temporal power.

To tie the poem up in this way is, perhaps, to add to its pessimism. To end with the blood on the Palace walls might suggest an apocalyptic consummation, a revolutionary overthrow. To end with the diseased infant is to implant life within a cycle of defeat. And yet the poem doesn't sound defeated, in part because the tone of compassion or of indignation offers a challenge to the logic of its "argument," [30] in part because the logic of the symbolic analysis of market relations proposes, at the same time, if not an alternative, at least the challenge that (in compassion and in indignation) this alternative could be found. . . .

Notes

1. John Beer, Blake's Humanism (Manchester, 1968), p.75. 
   
   
2. The Notebook of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Oxford, 1973), p. 109; hereafter cited as N.
   
   
3. N113. The obliterated title of this fragment has been recovered by David Erdman as "Thames." 
   
   
4. See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, which fully argues these points on pp. 272–79. These poems were "forged in the heat of the Year One of Equality (September 1792 to 1793) and tempered in the 'grey-brow'd snows' of Antijacobin alarms and proclamations." See also A. Mitchell, "The Association Movement of 1792–93," Historical Journal, 4: I (1961), 56–77; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 115–26; D. E. Ginter, "The Loyalist Association Movement, 1792–93," Historical Journal, 4: 2 (1966), 179–90.
   
   
5. "The cheating waves of charter'd streams" and "the cheating banks of Thames" should prompt one to think carefully of this as the source which first gave to Blake this use of "charter'd." The fullest attack from a Painite source on the East India Company did not appear until 1794: see the editorial articles in four successive numbers of Daniel Isaac Eaton's Politics for the People, 2: 8–11: "The East India Charter Considered." These constituted a full-blooded attack on the Company's commercial and military imperialism ("if it be deemed expedient to murder half the inhabitants of India, and rob the remainder, surely it is not requisite to call it governing them?") which carried to their furthest point criticisms of the Company to be found in the reforming and Foxite press of 1792–93. No social historian can be surprised to find the banks of the Thames described as "cheating" in the eighteenth century: every kind of fraud and racket, big, small and indifferent, flourished around the docks. The association of the banks of Thames with commerce was already traditional when Samuel Johnson renewed it in his "London" (1738), especially lines 20–30. Johnson's attitude is already ambiguous: "Britannia's glories" ("The guard of commerce, and the dread of Spain") are invoked retrospectively, in conventional terms: but on Thames-side already "all are slaves to gold, / Where looks are merchandise, and smiles are gold." Erdman argues that the "golden London" and "silver Thames" of Blake's "King Edward the Third" have already assimilated this conventional contrast in the form of irony: see Erdman pp. 80–81.
   
   
6. E415. If we take the intention of this fragment to be ironic, then Blake was already regarding the word as suspect rhetoric. 
   
   
7. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), p. 148.
   
   
8. Kathleen Raine, Vol. 1, pp. 24–25 (citing Dryden's Aeneid VI. 998–1001).
   
   
9. Heather Glen has noted that "the sense of an inevitable and imprisoning relationship between the 'facts' he sees and the way in which he sees is reinforced by the use of 'mark' as both verb and object." See "The Poet in Society: Blake and Wordsworth on London," Literature and History 3 (March 1976).
   
   

13. See Illus. 11. 
    
    
14. One further suggestion may be offered about the mark of the Beast. The Muggletonians afford yet one more possible resonance of "mark." In Swedenborgian exegesis the "mark of the Beast" was sometimes taken to signify the solifidian doctrine of justification by faith without works. But Blake can scarcely have been using "mark" in this way, since this was precisely his own, antinomian, "heresy." The Muggletonians, however, offer a very different interpretation. In their meetings prayer was rejected, as a "mark of weakness," and Muggleton wrote:
    

    The mark of the beast is this, when a head magistrate or chief council in a nation or kingdom, shall set up . . . a set form of worship, he or they having no commission from God so to do, and shall cause the people by their power and authority . . . to worship after this manner of worship that is set up by authority, as this beast did. . .

    Hence to receive the mark of the Beast signifies "to worship the image set up" by established authority. L. Muggleton, A True Interpretation of . . . the Whole Book of the Revelation of St. John (1808), pp. 174–75. This appears to take us very much closer to the universe of Blakean symbolism than do the Swedenborgian glosses.
    
    
15. See Erdman, pp. 277–78.
    
    
16. Blake was also thinking of priestcraft, as we know from "The Human Abstract." Nancy Bogen suggests (Notes and Queries, new series, 15: 1 [January 1968]) that he may have been reading Gilbert Imlay's Topographical Description (London, 1792): on the Ohio (where the Thames-born slave will go to be free) Imlay found freedom from priestcraft which elsewhere "seems to have forged fetters for the human mind." But the poem itself carries this suggestion only in so far as the manacles immediately precede the "blackning Church." Fetters and manacles were anyway part of a very general currency of imagery: see, e.g., Erdman, p. 129, n. 35.
    
    
17. F. W. Bateson, Selected Poems of William Blake (1957), p. 126.
    
    
18. See E. D. Hirsch, Innocence and Experience (New Haven, 1964), p. 264.
    
    
19. For an example of this confusion, see D. G. Gillham, Blake's Contrary States (Cambridge, 1966), p. 12: "The Church is horrified at the evil of the sweeper's condition, but it is helpless to do much about it . . ."
    
    
20. On this point, see Erdman, pp. 278–79. The British reformers of the 1790s were, of course, at pains to stress the identity of interests of the soldiers and the people: and also to expose military injustices, flogging, forcible recruitment ("crimping"), etc.
    
    
21. Many examples could be given of this transitive use of "appal": see also the OED and the last line of "Holy Thursday" in Experience. Thus William Frend, who shared something of Blake's ultra-radical Christian values, wrote: "Oh! that I had the warning voice of an ancient prophet, that I might penetrate into the innermost recesses of palaces, and appal the haranguers of senates!" Frend's "appal" means "throw into consternation," "warn," "shock." The phrase was used in the appendix to William Frend, Peace and Union Recommended (St. Ives, 1792): this pamphlet occasioned the celebrated case of Frend's trial before the Vice-Chancellor and his expulsion from Cambridge: see Frida Knight, University Rebel (1971), esp. chapter 8. The pamphlet was on sale by mid-February 1793 (William Frend, Account of the Proceedings . . . [Cambridge, 1793], p. 72), and the appendix caused especial outrage among loyalists, and by the first week in May the University had opened its proceedings against Frend. From the juxtaposition of ancient prophet, palaces and appal, and from the fact that Blake and Frend shared friends and sympathies (see Erdman, pp. 158–59), one could argue that Blake's line could carry an echo of this celebrated case. But this is highly unlikely: Erdman gives a terminal date for inscribing the Experience drafts in the notebook as October 1792 (N7)—although "appalls" was introduced as a revision, perhaps subsequently. But it is unnecessary to argue for such direct influence. What we are really finding is a vocabulary and stock of images common to a particular intellectual tradition, in this case that of radical Dissent. It is helpful to identify these groups and traditions, since they both place Blake and help us to unlock his meanings: but as to the actual "source" we must maintain a steady scepticism.
    
    
22. N107.
    
    
23. Bateson, Selected Poems, p. 126. See also the more elaborate (and unhelpful) argument of Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Ithaca, 1963), pp. 141–42, which also discounts the clear meaning of the third line.
    
    
24. As, for example, the long review of Jesse Foot, A Complete Treatise on the Origin, Theory, and Cure of the Lues Venerea etc. (1792—but based on lectures read in Dean Street, Soho, in 1790 and 1791) in Analytical Review, 12 (April 1792), 399, and 13 (July 1792), 261. See also the discussion in Grant C. Roti and Donald L. Kent, "The Last Stanza of Blake's London," Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 11:1 (Summer 1977).
    
    
25. N107.
    
    
26. This is emphasised by the fact that it was the first line of verse 3 which (in the notebook draft) was to begin with "But most . . ."; "But most the chimney sweepers cry."
    
    
27. Revelation xiv. 8–11. These verses immediately precede those in which the Son of Man appears with "in his hand a sharp sickle," and which lead on to "the great winepress of the wrath of God" (xiv. 14–20)—that version of the last vintage which worked in Blake's imagination.
    
    
28. See Williams, Country and City, chapter 14, and Glen, "The Poet in Society."
    
    
29. With "Marriage hearse" we are at the point of junction with another universe of imagery which critics of the "neo-Platonist" persuasion emphasise to the exclusion of all other aspects of Blake's thought. In this universe, for the spirit to assume mortal dress is a form of death or sleep: hence sexual generation generates death: hence (these would argue) "Marriage hearse." There are times when Blake uses images in this way, although often with more equivocation, inversion or idiosyncrasy than this kind of criticism suggests. This is not, however, one of these times. The poem is not concerned with lamenting the constrictions of the spirit within its material "coffin" but with the "plagues" which "blight" sexual love and generation.
    
    
30. See F. R. Leavis, "Justifying One's Valuation of Blake," in Paley and Phillips, Essays, p. 80: "the effect of the poetry [of the Songs] is very far from inducing an acceptance of human defeat. One can testify that the poet himself is not frightened, and, further, that there is no malevolence, no anti-human animus, no reductive bent, in his realism. . . ."

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