To begin with it is necessary to understand what the Enlightenment thought was. Though it is not easy to put it in a few lines, but, the Enlightenment thought discouraged individual cognition and encouraged individuals to conform to the percepts of dominant institutions. Blake’s London opens with a contrasting image, “I wander thro’ each charter’d street”(1). Wander on one hand is suggestive of freedom, charter’d on the other, alludes to restrictions and authority. If Charter’d directly links to the commerce. According to Thomas Paine, commerce will, be the liberation of people from institutions of absolute authority like the church and monarchy. He elaborates this in last chapter of Rights of man where he says, “If commerce were permitted …show more content…
These manacles are the anti Jacobin rhetoric that was was on the London street. The anti Jacobin rhetoric was that inequality was inevitable within a system and convincing the people to accept the illegitimacy of French Revolution. These mind forged manacles have to do with associations that were trying to restrain the revolutionary drive of the French