William Blake Research Paper

Art as always is a very powerful force for explaining the world around us. Artists of all kinds working on canvas, with music, with verse or in prose are the foremost interpreters of the human condition. Artists have the ability to take things which are happening around them and translate them into a specific theme or into a work which resonates with people. Artists have an extremely vital social and cultural function in this sense, they are the ones that have the ability to give meaning to events which most people are still very much unable to deal with. This was William Blake’s place in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. Blake’s works are a very good place to understand a particular strain of thought in England which

The efforts of Colquhoun, Hannah Moore, the Methodists, Bishop Barrington, William Wilberforce among others was all the same and it was beautifully summed up by Edmund Burke in 1795, who said that “Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality, and religion, should be recommended to them; all the rest is downright fraud." (Making of the English Working Class 57) This fear of the lower classes married with a fear of change and innovation which was brought by the French Revolution relegated England’s lower classes to the state in which they were in at that time. The 1790s was a time of counterrevolution and it was an attempt by members of England’s propertied classes to hold the tide of progress that was coming. In fact, Thompson argues that the “poor lost their rights in the land and were tempted to crime by their poverty and by the inadequate measures of prevention.” (Making of the English Working Class 62) The nature of class, inequality, politics and crime in the 1790s was majorly important and something which can’t be ignored. The people which Blake was writing about in his poetry were the ones affected by these changes and the ones who had no voice outside of “mob

These historical processes had real life consequences and one of the most powerful ways in which it did was through prostitution. Prostitution in eighteenth-century London affected the lives of “every class of man in every decade of the century.” (White) Prostitution was done “by poor women for poor men in unfashionable neighborhoods.” (White) Prostitution was according to White just an unescapable part of life in London during the century and it seeped into conversation, art, and prose which it was just an accepted part of the City’s social life. This is a fact and one which Blake clearly understood and made a very important part of his poem in describing life in