Blake's Antislavery Designs for "Songs of Innocence and of Experience"

Abstract

Literary studies seldom suggest the importance of the prolonged Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791, or the Saint-Domingue revolt as it was called, for 19th century Britain, France, and the Americas. The French Revolution of 1789 that supposedly was the defining event of the Romantic age was not as far-reaching in its consequences for both Europe and the Americas as the extraordinarily complicated Haitian Revolution. (1) Blake was creating his engravings for John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam when the Saint-Domingue revolt broke out, and the rebellion influenced his work as surely as the French Revolution did. The well-planned uprising began in August, 1791, at night as slaves set sugar cane fields afire. Thousands of other slaves soon joined a force that moved from plantation to plantation, burning them while killing all whites and resisting slaves. West Indian slave revolts characteristically followed this pattern: the slaves would begin by burning the hated sugar cane fields, sugar mills, and plantation house; and the firing of the cane fields was a sign to slaves on distant plantations that the revolt had begun. (2) The fires of Ore and fierce flames ... round the abodes of men (America. 16.21-23) that usher in revolutions in Blake's prophecies may allude to slave revolts with the burning cane fields as well as to the French Revolution William Blake may not have been a part of the 18th century Black Atlantic but he was often close to its perspective, as several have noted including Paul Gilroy (11-12). (3) The antislavery movement and its concomitant slave revolts, especially of Saint-Domingue, inspired his poetry and designs. As one of the few British poets to see the inevitability of the Haitian Revolution, he welcomed the associated savagery that continued for year after unbelievable year. The grim events became the basis for tropes in his works, from Songs of Experience (1793) to the Lambeth Prophecies (1793-1795), The Four Zoas (1797-1805), and parts of Jerusalem (1804). Marcus Wood connects this Revolution with Blake's work of the 1790s (Slavery 192; Poetry 143-144). By the late 18th century approximately 20,000 blacks lived in London, and many of them were slaves or runaway slaves who survived by begging or working in the pauper occupations (Walvin England 35-45). Several years before 1789, when Blake composed the Songs of Innocence, British abolitionism had become a widespread movement. Ordinary middle-class citizens, dissenters, working-class laborers across England as well as Scotland and Ireland, women who had never before been politically active, even children who gave up sweets made of sugar produced by West Indian slaves, all passionately supported the abolition of the British slave trade. However, the only abolitionists who could vote were the English, male, propertied Anglicans, and these tended to be Evangelicals. Because of their political prominence, William Wilberforce in particular, they shaped the abolitionist movement as they waged their perennial battle to persuade both houses of Parliament to pass the Abolition Bill, a struggle that did not succeed until 1807. Nearly all the members of the Abolitionist Society founded in 1787 were Evangelicals, and thus members of the Church of England. These wealthy and politically well-placed conservatives were interested in converting the slaves to their own brand of Christianity. The goal of the other abolitionists appeared to them to be primarily political, while these evangelicals believed that the state of the slave's soul was most important. Blake was involved in London abolitionist circles. He attended the meetings of the Swedenborgians during 1791-2 as they planned their own colony of ex-slaves in Sierra Leone, in addition to the one planned by members of the Abolitionist Society in league with the government. He attended Joseph Johnson's weekly dinners, which usually included abolitionist sympathizers. …