Blake Context Flashcards
Industrial Revolution
- Blake was an early critic of Industrialisation.
- Blake saw the effects of labour on many indivuduals, including: chimney sweepers, soliders and prostitutes.
- Blake swaw religion tied up with government power and oppression.
Christianity
- Blake was from a dissenting family
- Blake saw the Bible as poetic inspiration “sublime of the bible.”
- Songs of Innocence = Pastoral/Biblical imagery.
- Blake had faith in human redemption.
- Blake developed a intensely personal version of religion.
- Particularly interested in the Fall, saw it as being caused by the human desire to consrtuct institutions and restrain and constrain people’s desires and freedoms.
Spiritual Visions
- Blake experienced spiritual visions throughout his entire lifetime.
- Blake didn’t need to take drugs as he already had a heightened perception that others sought through drugs.
- Saw visions, trees of angels, figures at the window of his bedroom.
- Buried in a non-conformist burial ground in London.
Childhood
- Blake believed that children began life in heaven and so they were the closest to God on Earth.
- Blake opposed what society did to children, e.g. young boys dying as Chimney Sweeps.
Protesting against government power
- The songs written by Blake in 1794 directly attacked the deeply conservative British government.
- The Tory Government was terrified that a revolution, similar to one that had recently occured in France, would arise in Britain, leading to some draconian policy making.
- The country was very much in the hands of a few powerful men who ensured control remained where it was.
- Blake was a supporter of the vunerable and powerless and those being controlled.
- Blake suggests that the politcal world is motivated by selfishness and self-love; those who have power want to bind others to their own delights.
Protesting against the abuse of children
- In some poems Blake criticises the way adults abuse children.
- Chimney Sweeps were apprenticed at the age of seven and their treatment by their male employers was often brutal.
- Children lived in constant fear of suffocation and burning and not suprisingly their lives were cut shot by their cruel employment.
Blake’s anticlercism
- Blake frequently attacks established religion for its destructive dogmas and ideologies.
- He draws attention to the miseries caused through the Church’s demand for obeidence and obeisance.
- The Christian Church is an institution that today one would hope is converned with the acts of charity, mercy and empathy, particularly concerning those who are most vunerable, such as children.
- However, in Blake’s poetry, the Churxh is seen as a powerful organisation which does nothing to help the powerless and disenfranchised; in fact, the institution is portrayed as being complicit ain the opppresion of the people.
- Blake espouses a liberal outlook on sexuality and sexual desire, attacking the repressive and damaging influences of traditional religious teachings and morality on thses most natural of human instinicts.
Marriage
- Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782.
- She was five years younger than him and was illiterate. Blake trained her to be an engraver, and she helped him throughout her life.
- They seem to have remained close throughout their marriage, though they were unable to have children.
- At one point Blake suggested bringing in a concubine (this was in accordance with the beliefs of the Swedenborgian Society), but Catherine was distressed by the idea.
Views
• Anti-authoritarian.
- Equality for women: feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was a close friend, and Blake illustrated her Original Stories from Real Life (1788)-
• They shared views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage. In 1793’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.
•Racial equality.
Rejected the restrictions of the Old Testament God, and saw the New Testament God as a positive influence.
• Portrayed the upper class institutions and the Church of England as corrupt and exploitative.
Home
- Born on 28 November 1757, the son of a hosier. He grew up in London, Liberal household of the dissenting tradition, meaning that they rejected the Church of England.
- It is thought that they belonged to the Moravian religious
- The bible was of supreme importance in Blake’s childhood, and influenced much of his own work in concepts, themes and style.
Education
• From the age of ten Blake did not go to school, His father let him pursue his own studies at home, and sent him to ‘drawing school’ at the age of ten. Blake later wrote,
‘Thank God I was never sent to school / To be Flog’d into following
the Style of a Fool. His approach was always anti-authoritarian.
- His early influences and explorations included the work of Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer, and the poetry of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.
• In 1772 he was apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire, at the age of 14.
• In 1779 he became a student at the Royal Academy.
Work
- During his apprenticeship to Basire, Blake worked in Westminster Abbey, engraving the tombs and effigies.
- He was influenced by its gothic style, faded brightness and colour.
- At the Royal Academy, Blake rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens.
- He disliked the school’s first president, Joshua Reynolds, especially his pursuit of ‘general truth’ and ‘general beauty’.
- Blake continued to prefer the bold, unfashionable lines of artists such as Raphael, rather than the “blurred’ and muddy’ oil-paintings that were fashionable at the time.
Blake had some paintings exhibited at the Academy, but did not enjoy critical success in his lifetime. In his later life he was known as an engraver, not a poet or artist. He was a worker, part of the new commercialism, and died almost penniless. In this sense, he should not be bracketed with the upper class ‘Romantic poets’ such as Byron and Keats.
Political context
- Much of Blake’s politicakl radicalism surfaced during the year sleading up to the French revolution. he began disagreeing with institutionalised religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form.
Social Context
- The period between Blake’s birth in 1757 and his death seventy years later, was a time of great social, political, philosphical and economic upheval.
- One of the major alterations to traditional life was the emergence of large, industrial, overpopulated cioties that accomodated for the large influx of people to metropolitian areas folloing the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
- The resulting society was one of oppression and poverty; to which Blake was utterly disgusted with.
Blake against the education system
- Blake argues implicitly throught The Songs of Innocence and Experience that the best eductaion comes when children are given freedom to grow.
- He believed that nature was the best eductator because it is instinctive and sympathetic.
- Blake suggests that when children are taken away from the natural rhythms of life, they will be cast into a world of winter barrenness.
