Of “Combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud”: William Blake’s Urizen as Steam Engine, Albion Mill, & Notes Towards a Materialist Method for the Anthropocene

Abstract

William Blake’s THE [FIRST] BOOK of URIZEN (1794) provides an important point of departure to consider technological changes related to the proliferation of steam engines. Blake’s engagement with visual metaphors of pollution, across the images of the illuminated book, and the language of combustion, with regard to the work’s poetics, invites readers to make connections with Albion Mill as a resonant site of industrial production where steam engines were first deployed in a process of mass manufacture in Romantic-period London. Thinking with Blake’s art, and connecting myth and the material history of Albion Mill, provides a critical means of understanding how the affective atmosphere of industry conditioned and acted as a factor of Romantic artistic production. In the end, reading Blake’s URIZEN dialectically in relation to the mobilization of steam engines at Albion Mill enables readers to see that, in the character’s being “Combustion, blast, vapour and cloud,” Urizen is a steam engine.