AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding 'London'

'London' forms part of a series of poems written by the poet and visionary William Blake called Songs of Innocence and  of Experience. Although Blake is highly rated by modern critics as a 'pre-Romantic' poet, his reputation in his own time was that of an eccentric. His own literary executor, Frederick Tatham, burned many of Blake's works after his death considering them heretical or politically radical, and is said to have censored many of his more explicit drawings and engravings.

'Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience in two parts. Songs of Innocence appeared first in 1789, and consisted of nineteen poems, illustrated by Blake with detailed engravings that were innovative in style, using relief etching, or what is sometimes called 'illuminated printing'. The difference between this and ordinary etching is that instead of engraving lines on the plate to produce a reverse image, relief etching allows the engraver to write on the plate with an acid-resistant ink, and draw alongside the writing. The plate is then placed in acid so as to leave the untreated part in relief. This method allowed Blake to produce images that mimic handwritten illuminated manuscripts, hence the alternative name. As an experienced engraver, Blake had produced many conventional prints and illustrations in the style of the day, but this methodology allowed him to develop a more individual style, with coloured prints that melded text and image together.


In 1794, Blake re-released the poems from Innocence along with twenty-six further poems, which he entitled Songs of Experience. The complete volume was published as Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul and reflects in its views Blake's radical political views and unconventional theology.  London' comes from Songs of Experience and its tone is characteristic of the poems in that volume. Typically, Songs of Innocence present an apparently innocent or cheerful view of the world, which is contrasted with a matched poem in Experience showing a darker or more cynical view of a similar subject. Not all poems have a pairing, and some, such as 'The Little Girl Lost' and 'The Little Girl Found' were moved by Blake in subsequent editions from Experience to Innocence and back again, suggesting that his sense of the relations between the two sections of the volume was not a fixed one. Nonetheless, the general principle holds true: a good example would be, for instance, 'The Lamb' and 'The Tiger'.


'The Lamb' presents an appealing picture of an innocent lamb who is likened to Christ 'himself a lamb'. The child-speaker asks the lamb 'doth thou know who made thee?' and this question becomes itself an illustration of the divine, and the lamb's life 'by the stream and o'er the mead' an image of the fields of heaven. By contrast, the tiger's 'fearful symmetry' is shown to illustrate a darker side of creation, with the restless questions rhythmically pounding at the reader 'What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?  / What the anvil?' suggesting something like the demanding questions with which God answers Job's complaint: 'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding' (Job 38).

London, unusually, has no paired poem, but it fits well with other Experience poems in that it shows a bleaker and more politically alert view of the world than do the poems of Innocence. It describes walking through London and seeing, rather than the beauties of the city, the horror that lies beneath its everyday life. The Tate Gallery has an illustration of the original plates for 'London' here which includes a reading of the poem.

Like many of the poems in the volume, 'London' has a deceptively simple form, consisting of four quatrains rhymed ABAB in what first appears to be generally iambic tetrameter. The regularity of the verse gives it a slightly 'nursery-rhyme'- feel that deliberately evokes a child's eye view of the world, and occasional shorter lines of seven syllables, starting with a trochee, seem to lend emphasis to particular words and ideas. This kind of verse is actually called accentual metre, and it works by counting stresses rather than syllables. It is commonly used in hymns and nursery-rhymes. To find out more about it, and hear some examples, it is well worth looking at the excellent guide on metre produced by the University of Freiburg.

The poem is narrated in the first person, and though we have little direct sense of who the narrator might be, unlike in some of the other poems in the volume, it seems likely that the 'I' in the poem here represents Blake himself. (For a fascinating examination of narrational voice in Innocence and Experience, look at 'The Unspoken Voice in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience' by William J Martin.) The speaker explains how when walking through London he sees everywhere the marks of unhappiness, and focuses in particular on the evils of oppression, the plight of chimney-sweepers, the impotence of the Established Church and the consequences of sexual abuse.

By John Rocque 1746 London

There is an interesting article by Linda Freedman on the British Library website about the drafts of the poem that is well worth reading, and gives some insight into how carefully Blake chose his words. In his first draft, for instance, he described the streets as 'dirty', and then changed this for the more politically resonant term 'chartered'. The repetition of 'chartered' implies different senses of the word, and makes the reader reflect upon it. 'Chartered' literally means licensed or controlled (as in 'chartered accountant'), but it is also reminiscent of 'charted' (or mapped), and it suggests restriction, in that a charter dictates what you can or cannot do. In the eighteenth century, the process of chartering towns and cities meant generally taking land out of public ownership and placing it into private hands (rather like the enclosure of agricultural land), and Blake saw this as part of the process that prioritised the already rich over the poor. The streets are 'chartered' because they are both carefully mapped (part of the ownership of what might have formerly been open land) and commercially managed--they are subject to charters, or agreements, about their use. The Thames, being a river, might seem to be free of these limits, yet it too is seen as 'chartered'. Blake may also be thinking of the increasing building going on in London at this time, and the ways in which the river and its tributaries was increasingly confined because of building work. The Fleet river, for instance, was in the process of being built over when Blake was writing, and is now completely underground (for an account of this and other rivers now built over, see London's Lost Rivers).

A strong sense is created (by the speaker 'meeting' faces) that he is literally or metaphorically going against the flow of people in the street. The speaker notes how the faces of the people he sees are 'marked'. To mark something means to disfigure it or put a sign upon it. It also means to notice it, and the repetition of the word encourages us to think of these different meanings. When observing 'a mark in every face I meet' the poet may punningly mean also that he literally 'marks' or notices the faces of the people because of the signs of unhappiness that he sees. The simple language and the strong alliteration of 'm' sounds on stressed syllables emphasises this important link between 'mark' and 'meet', while the unstressed alliteration of 'weakness...woe' emphasises the connection between these two ideas. This link between 'weakness' and 'woe' could mean that the  people are not only unhappy but in some senses guilty--it is their own moral weakness, it is suggested, which leads to their woe, or it could mean that they are perhaps hampered by physical weakness, which is the result of their oppression by others. Blake deliberately and very typically does not explain which reading is primary, but allows both ideas to live together in the simple linking of the words.

Where the first stanza has concentrated on sight, the second focuses on sound. The five-fold repetition of 'every'  almost enacts its own meaning, with the repeated 'in every' showing Blake using the rhetorical figure of anaphora so as to start a series of clauses in the same way, creating a focused intensity. The inverted sentence structure means that it is not until of the end of the stanza that we find out what 'every' sound is telling him, and this builds a tension in the poem. We want to find out what it is that 'every' person is telling us, from the adult to the child. The phrase 'mind-forged manacles' is a brilliant and expressive one (changed from the original 'german-forged' manacles), which immediately links to the idea of oppression from within. Blake is talking here about more than a system of political oppression, he is talking about the ways in which people collude with their own oppression, or find it impossible or unthinkable to resist. The strongest echo here, for Blake's original readership, would have been with the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Blake was introduced to Rousseau's ideas about mankind's primal innocence through his close friend William Godwin, who believed that human evil came from the ownership of property. The first words of Rousseau's book The Social Contract, written in 1762, are (famously) 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains'. These chains can be seen echoed in the 'manacles' of line eight; chains of the mind, which can be heard, but not seen, evidenced through the misery that they produce.

Stanza three goes on to detail some of the abuses of power that cause the terrible cries of the people. The chimney-sweeper is a familiar figure in Blake, having his own poem in both Innocence and Experience; for Blake the use of small boys of five or six to climb chimneys and sweep them was one of the most terrible everyday abuses of childhood that he saw (the chimney-sweep directly addresses the reader and accuses them that 'your chimneys I sweep). The children were starved and beaten by their masters to encourage them to climb into spaces that were sometimes no larger than seven inches square, and fires were lit beneath them to encourage them to climb if they were reluctant. Here, Blake suggests that the chimney sweeper's lot is a direct indictment of the inactive Church. The personified 'blackening' church buildings are implicitly horrified by the knowledge that the smoke that blackens them comes from chimneys swept by small children, but the church nonetheless allows the practice to continue. Blake's attitude towards the established Church was a negative one--he believed strongly in God but did not feel that the church practised Christianity in its failure to take action against social injustice.

Similarly, the 'hapless soldier', though quieter (his protest is simply a 'sigh') is miserable. The results

The Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789

of his 'mind-forged manacles' are bloody and deadly. Whether the blood that then runs down the palace walls is the blood of those who lived in the palace (as in the French revolution--a very current political reference), the blood of the soldiers who defend it or the blood of those who vainly attack it, the implication is the same--the soldier's lack of autonomy leads to bloodshed.

Beyond these examples though, the worst of all (or perhaps the most frequent, or the most piercing) is the misery that comes through sexual abuse. It is easy to read Blake as a conventional moralist here, but he is attacking something very specific. Blake was not someone who believed that sex outside marriage was intrinsically wrong--in fact he is sometimes thought of as a forerunner of the 19th century 'free love' movement, which held marriage to be a form of slavery. He certainly held that some conventional ideas of chastity were contrary to the free spirit that should prevail amongst humankind, and while himself devotedly married throughout his life to his wife, is reported to have once suggested to her that he take a second wife and that they all live together so as to facilitate childbearing.

What Blake is really objecting to, in the final stanza, is child prostitution. Child prostitution was a fact of life in eighteenth-century London, with children routinely treated for venereal disease. The 'youthful harlot' is a paradox, too young to consent meaningfully to her role as prostitute. In Blake's vision, she 'blasts'  and 'slights' children and marriage.  Some critics think that the harlot is cursing her own child, born in sorrow, and this is certainly one possible reading. However, at the time that Blake was writing, the transmission and cure of venereal diseases such as syphilis was poorly understood (for an explanation of what the disease entails, see here), and men who used prostitutes and were vulnerable to disease often went straight from the streets to their marriage-bed, bringing the infection home to their wives. At this time there existed a widely-held but erroneous belief that having sex with a virgin could cure signs of sexually transmitted diseases, a belief that amazingly survives today in the 'virgin cleansing myth' that suggests that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS. The very existence of child prostitutes, then, is  a literal curse on the marriage bed of those men who use them--so that it becomes the paradoxical 'marriage-hearse' instead. The 'youthful harlot' might well curse the man who had abused her in order to 'cleanse' his prospective marriage bed, and that use would in itself enact her curse, in that the disease would not be cured, but would bring with it the associated complications of--for instance--secondary and tertiary syphilis, bringing infertility and miscarriage, or transmitted to children as congenital syphilis.  The curse of the harlot then follows through the generations of the men who have abused her, the language of 'blasts' and 'blights' presenting her as almost a malignant but powerful force of nature.

The stretch of Blake's canvas in this poem then is from the personal to the universal--from the individual wrongdoing of anyone who accepts having their chimney swept by climbing-boys, through the sexual sin and exploitation that young prostitutes represent, to the oppressive behaviour of the largest structures of power. His vision of London is bleak; it is a city that represents exploitation and misery, and which has 'marked' its people with sadness. The frightening energy of the final 'curse' suggests the impossibility of this structure of power staying as it is, and hints at Blake's desire for revolution and change.