Vital Heat and the Organized Body: Burke, Blake, The French Revolution and The [First] Book of Urizen

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the French Revolution, it had become apparent that the conventional metaphor of the body politic, framed around a stable hierarchical relationship between the monarchical head and the subservient body, was no longer fit for such a purpose. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, medical understandings of the body were far more sophisticated than ever before. This article puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. Reading The [First] Book of Urizen against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution, this article demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourse. In doing so, this article contests assumptions in recent Blake criticism that Blake found images of freedom in the organic phenomenon of self-organization (a logic of form taken up in Burkean conservatism), emphasizing instead Blake’s indebtedness to the Hunterian doctrine of vital heat.