Shadows of Prophecy: Blake and Millenarian Ideology

Abstract

William Hamilton Reid, a former Radical, complained in a pamphlet that in the I790os Sunday field preachers at various locations throughout London attracted not only deists and atheists who came to dispute with Christians, but also 'Mystics, Muggletonians, Millenarians and a variety of eccentric characters of different denominations'.' They reportedly conversed with the dead and with Angels and when the French Revolution began, these people became interested in revolutionary politics. Millenarian sects appear to have survived with surprising tenacity well into the nineteenth century, preserving a matrix of language and imagery by which they could imagine the new revolutionary times. Christopher Hill has pointed out that 'just as a surviving Protestant tradition contributed to the English Revolution ... so the Radicals of the English Revolution perhaps gave more to posterity than is immediately obvious.'2 These London sects were a notable part of Blake's milieu and probably a greater influence on his thought than is usually recognized. Although millenarianism has become a popular subject with historians and sociologists, millenarian interpretations of the French Revolution still raise a number of questions. E. P. Thompson is said to be currently at work on a book that intends to show the extent of Blake's affiliation with a plebeian subculture based on overliteralized biblicism infinitely more congenial to him than the discourse of the Dissenting philosophers. This article will study the manner in which Blake, like other millenarians of his day, transformed biblical hermeneutics into personal poetic statements with immediate applications to history. A few preliminary remarks on the Biblical background of such an ideology might prove useful to avoid empty generalizations on the zeitgeist. Strictly speaking, millenarianism refers to the belief in Christ's reign expected to last a thousand years after His Second Advent. At the end of this period an ultimate offensive of Evil will lead to the definitive triumph of God marked by the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgement, the creation of new heavens and a new earth. For centuries controversy raged about the exact