Slavery as Fact and Metaphor: William Blake and Jean Paul Marat

Abstract

In many ways, William Blake is the guiding spirit behind this book, and his most characteristic, bardic tone of ‘the voice of honest indignation’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is exemplary of those reformists who identify social wrongs and espouse natural rights. Through his poetry he comments on each of the dominant political and social causes which attracted natural law theorists: the American revolution, the French revolution, slavery, child labour and female emancipation. However, his mythological and psychological model of the states of innocence and experience is so broad-based and comprehensive that it is capable of exposing many other specific issues. In fact, his approach is intrinsically one which is uniquely based on an essential and prior theory of natural rights. His poetry graphically (and in some cases, literally) encapsulates the movement away from laws or law, which are inherently restrictive, to rights or freedoms. The tendency of natural rights thinking is away from systems and abstractions and towards the needs of individual human beings in their ‘natural’ state. Blake is always working from these premises, and actively opposing systems and laws, however well-meaning they may have been in origin (such as Christianity). In particular, Blake realises that one issue which provides him with a central reference point for rights thinking is slavery and its abolition, a cause which had a special topical reference for writers and politicians in the 1790s.