Conditions of the Working-Class in England Index. William Blake's London - 21st Century Socialism. You are in > People & Culture People & Culture by Simon Korner / January 8th 2008 No-one was immune.
Blake's poem on England's capital city, written in 1792, is a devastating portrait of a society in which all souls and bodies were trapped, exploited and infected. London by William Blake I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. These sixteen lines do far more than describe the city in which William Blake lived for most of his life.
The poem’s opening shows the narrator wandering the “charter’d” streets of London down to the “charter’d Thames”. Thomas Paine had stated in his best-selling Rights of Man the year before: “It is a perversion of terms to say, that a charter gives rights. BOME. Victorian Times. Victorian England. For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events (roughly) in the reign of Queen Victoria, conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned.
" Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment.
In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. William Blake's Notebook. Table showing accidents in factories, 1898. Engels' description of factory conditions, 1844. German writer and political theorist Friedrich Engels (1820-95) is perhaps best remembered as the co-author, with Karl Marx, of The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
North and South: An industrial synthesis - The Atlasphere. The Industrial Revolution was one of the most important periods in human history, when intrepid entrepreneurs, using the latest science and technology, dramatically increased the productivity of human labor and ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity that lifted all classes of society.
It was also a time of dangerous, dirty working conditions and occasional famines. Writings of the time usually focused on the negatives more than the positives. A genre of literature emerged, called the industrial novel, that dealt with the problems of the time. The most famous of these books is Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, with its rationalistic schoolmaster and heartless hypocrite of a mill owner.
Such novels were usually sympathetic to the poor and indifferent or hostile to the industrialists. Our author Mrs. Matters are different in an industrial novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. History: Victorians. History - British History in depth: The Chartist Movement 1838 - 1848. Met de Loep op Lancashire. Katoen en samenleving 1750-1850. Door Ernst Corbeek De Industriële Revolutie, was een snelle, radicale omwenteling naar een industriële samenleving waarin de techniek een belangrijke rol speelde (Engels, Toynbee).
Of misschien toch een geleidelijke ontwikkeling vanaf de 16e eeuw, niet puur economisch/technisch, maar breed maatschappelijk, meer continuïteit en minder discontinuïteit? Hij begon in Engeland, Europese landen volgden en hij duurde tot ver in de 20ste eeuw. Historisch kader In Engeland was de textielnijverheid gebaseerd op wol (uit dezelfde streek), maar ook op linnen en zijde (geïmporteerd). Doordat de Compagnie sitsen (met de hand gedecoreerde katoenen stoffen) naar Engeland bracht, verspreidde het zich ook meer onder de bevolking. Waarom snelle groei van katoenindustrie in Engeland en concentratie in Lancashire? {mospagebreak} 1. Einde middeleeuwen was er vooral zelfvoorzienende landbouw. De manufactuur: Is een werkplaats waar onder leiding van een opzichter grote groepen mensen werken. 2. {mospagebreak}3. William Blake and the Urban Landscape of Apocalypse. This paper was presented at the 2009 International Conference on Romanticism in New York, NY.
Imagery, symbolism and themes in Blake's London from Crossref. Imagery and symbolism Blake paints a nightmare vision of social and urban decay, where anguished sounds reverberate, darkness prevails (‘black'ning Church', ‘midnight streets') and death stalks the streets (the ‘blood' of the ‘hapless Soldier', the ‘hearse' that contains those stricken with ‘plagues').
Charter'd - Blake uses the image of the charter to represent the absence of freedom for the common people of London. Royal charters were issued to towns and cities, ostensibly giving them freedom. However, Tom Paine (see Social / political background > The spirit of rebellion – politics > Tom Paine's The Rights of Man) argued that charters simply allowed those cities possessing one to create their own mini-state, governed by its own hierarchy. ‘Every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself' (Paine) Mark - Blake uses biblical imagery when he refers to ‘Marks of weakness'. Investigating imagery and symbolism. London Audio Poem - by William Blake. GCSE Bitesize - William Blake: London. Social Themes and Contexts of Gaskell's Fiction.