The poem ‘London’, which William Blake printed by hand in 1794 as one of his Songs of Experience, gives a voice, as never before and rarely since, to the sufferings of the urban poor. Here, the causes of poverty and the nature of the modern Babylon are identified: the theft of common land from the people, and the consequent debasement of social value by means of squalid commercialism.
The poem begins:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
The first draft of this poem has survived in Blake’s notebook, and from this we know that originally Blake used the phrase ‘dirty street’. The substitution ‘charter’d’ changes everything.E.P Thompson remarks that ‘the word is standing at an intellectual and political cross-roads’, producing not a single meaning but a series of associations.
The word ‘charter’d’ invokes the mighty chartered companies such as the East India Company, whose ships set out from the Thames, and whose operations were at the time under attack in the radical press. The word also alludes to the Whig concept of freedom (chartered liberty, the Magna Carta), but this is not true freedom, rather a debased freedom handed out by the powerful, not claimed as of right. Blake’s contemporary Tom Paine wrote in Rights of Man:
It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect—that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. . .
The dominant association of the word, however, is with the legalised theft of land from the people, by charter and Act of Parliament. In Blake’s lifetime the enclosure of common land which had begun in the fifteenth century was continuing at an unprecedented pace. It is estimated that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more than seven million acres of land were enclosed by a series of 4,200 private Acts and various general enclosure Acts. [1] The land (the ‘charter’d streets’) and even the rivers (the ‘charter’d Thames’) was once the birthright of the people, but had been expropriated by the rich and powerful.
Thomas Spence and Thomas Paine had explicitly linked the theft of land by charter to the distress of modern civilization, and so too does Blake. The poem continues:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
Thompson points out that ‘Blake's "London" is not seen from without as spectacle. It is seen, or suffered, from within, by a Londoner.’ This is a poem whose ‘moral realism is so searching that it is raised to the intensity of apocalyptic vision.’
As the poem progresses the narrator takes the reader with him ever deeper into the sights and sounds of the desolate city. Commercial transactions and the institutions of the powerful destroy the human spirit, ultimately corrupting all that is created (‘the new-born infant’s tear’) and blighting all human attempts at unification (‘the Marriage hearse’).
Later, Blake was to express the antithesis of this desolate vision as the reawakening and re-unification of ‘Albion’, the embodiment of England and of all mankind, and in his epic poem Jerusalem appears one of the finest articulations of the early co-operative or ‘socialist’ spirit:
In my Exchanges every Land
Shall walk, & mine in every Land,
Mutual shall build Jerusalem:
Both heart in heart & hand in hand.
Sources
E. P. Thompson, 'London' in Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993).
William Blake, London, in Songs of Experience, 1794.
William Blake, Jerusalem, c. 1815, plate 27.
www.blakearchive.org/
[1] Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, 1987.
