contexty stuff Flashcards
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
