key context at home
- industrial revolution gave rise to dissent
- Birth of modern Britain: rise of capitalism, shifting power structures
- radical thought, violence and rioting
key context abroad
- American war of independence undermined hierarchical and monarchical structures
- -> Blake hated George III
- the terror: those that placed hope in revolution were disillusioned
What was Holy Thursday?
annual service from 1872 onwards at St. Pauls Cathedral on maundy Thursday
–> day for the london charity school children (mainly orphans) focusing on values of pity and charity
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- feelings more important than reason
- humans are naturally good, but corrupted by society
- importance of nature
- importance of domesticated mother
- Blake attacked him as an irreligious freethinker
Emanuel Swedenborg
- unorthodox religious thinker
- rejected Holy Trinity and argued that Jesus alone was god
- fall from eden was not a punishment by a just god, but the revenge of a ‘selfish father of men’
Blakes life
- set up print shop but the business died
- devised his own mythology, a mixture of myth and the bible
Romanticism
priory to the imagination, freedom, self-expression and the individual
Blake’s anti-clericalism
- attacks the destructive dogmas and ideologies
- miseries caused by the churches demand for obedience
- church fails to protect childhood innocence
- is complicit in oppression
- tyrannical spiritually, sexually and emotionally
pastoral poetry
celebrates natural world
nature as a manifestation of god
primacy to imagination
Victorian child labour and the conditions they lived in
child labour was the norm in the 1880s
laws passed over a series of decades to gradually improve working conditions and treatment of children
what jobs did Victorian children perform?
- coal mines
- chimney sweep
- factory worker
- domestic servant
why were children employed in mines
- Children were much smaller, allowing them to manouever tight spaces
- children demanded less pay
what were working conditions like in mines
- lack of proper ventilation, coal dust was very thick in the air
- 12 to 18 hours a day
- constant noise
- rat infestation
- explosions and cave ins
what were working conditions like for chimney sweepers
- some as young as 3
- arms, elbows, legs and knees scraped raw
- getting stuck in stacks –> dying alone
- lung damage
- purposefully underfed so they would fit for longer
who would become a chimney sweep
- orphans, who were put back on the street when too big for the chimneys (9 or 10)
- kidnapped children
chimney sweeper act 1788
- law against the use of young children under 8
- master sweep had to offer proper clothe sand decent living conditions and allow children to go to church on sundays
1840 act
illegal to make someone under the age of 21 climb a chimney to clean it
Deism
god does not interfere past creation
people are responsible for people
Anapaestic rythum
da da dum
skipping rythum
e.g. second holy thursday
Trochaic rythum
cradle song
Tiger
second holy Thursday
Iambic rythum
first holy Thursday
Thou shalt not
Spondee
Key methods in blake
form: two collections
nursery ryhme form
natural imagery
transition between innocence and experience
anthropomorphism (tiger and lamb symbol) –> animals as symbolic for humans
