Blake and Nationalism

Abstract

The century of Blake’s birth was that during which nationalism came to be regarded generally as the greatest determining factor of modern history, when Christian and Renaissance universal republics were replaced by amor patriae. National feeling was not something new in Europe, particularly during times of conflict, but such activities as the nationalisation of education, the organisation of political loyalties and cultivation of ‘mother’ tongues led to a demand for participation in the nation state that was to have revolutionary consequences by the end of the 1780s, what Hobsbawm called the ‘dual revolution’ of politics and economics.1 Modern Britain, formed by the union of England and Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was tested by the events in France, war both threatening and bracing a nation that prided itself on commerce and industrialisation. This, the spectre of British nationalism that emerged from the ashes of the French Revolution, was the shadow of Blake’s Albion.