London: Notes

---

This provides a bitter and harsh view of the city, which is characterised in terms of repression, regimentation, disease, hypocrisy and death. London is dominated by the spirit of "Reason", the "mind-forged manacles" which bind and restrain the natural spirit (symbolised in the regimented streets and the "charter'd Thames"), and the hypocritical Establishment ("church" and "palace") does nothing to prevent or speak out against injustice (symbolised in the cries of the young chimney sweepers, with reference here to the political agitation from the 1780s onwards to improve their working conditions of child ). The new-born child, traditionally a symbol of hope and the promise of a new start, is here the child of an adolescent prostitute, blighted by venereal disease, and every marriage, in this city, is associated with Death (the hearse) rather than Life.

This portrait of a city of repression and death owes something, perhaps, to Old Testament portraits of Jerusalem prior to its destruction, but it is clear also that Blake was offering a perspective on contemporary London, and more particularly to the city under the counter-revolutionary regime of Pitt in the 1790s. Blake, like contemporary Romantic poets such as Shelley and the young Wordsworth, were highly critical of the political reaction to the French Revolution in England, and in this poem we have some insight into the colour of Blake's radical politics, and his attempt to provide a total snapshot of a reactionary culture in all its aspects.

Return to London