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1700Congreve, The Way of the World
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1700John Dryden, Fables
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1702Queen's Royal Cookery
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1704East India Company sales catalogue
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1711The Spectator
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1712Jonathan Swift, A Proposal...
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1715Sugar in Britain
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1719Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
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1721Bartholomew Fair
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1724Trade and the English language
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1729Swift, A Modest Proposal
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1730East India Company: Bengal textiles
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1731English arrives in the West Indies
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1733Hogarth, Harlot's Progress
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1738Cities in chaos
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1738Polite conversation
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1738James Miller, Of Politeness
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1740Samuel Richardson, Pamela
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1742Advert for a giant
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1743Muffin seller
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1747The Art of Cookery
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1749Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
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1755Johnson's Dictionary
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1759Sterne, Tristram Shandy
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1762Lowth’s grammar
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1762Rousseau, The Social Contract
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1764Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
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1773Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
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1775Captain Cook's journal
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1775Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
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1780Burns, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
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1780Anglo-Indian newspaper
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1781Notices about runaway slaves
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1782First British advert for curry powder
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1789Storming of the Bastille
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1789Olaudah Equiano
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1790William Blake's Notebook
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1791Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
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1791Walker’s correct pronunciation
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1792Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
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1794Songs of Innocence and Experience
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Intro
William Blake (1757-1827) was an artist, poet, mystic, visionary and radical thinker. Working at a time of great social and political change, his work explores the tensions between the human passions and the repressive nature of social and political conventions. In this, perhaps his most famous collection of poems he investigates, as he put it in the subtitle, 'the two contrary states of the human soul'.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is as much a work of art as a collection of poems. Produced laboriously from etched copper-plates, it combines text and hand-coloured illustrations, and draws on the nursery rhymes, chapbooks and popular ballads that Blake would have encountered during his London childhood. His intention was to dramatise the concepts of innocence and experience, giving them an unorthodox twist that sprang from his reading of philosophers such as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jacob Boehmen.
At first glance, his poems seem childlike and insubstantial, with simple rhythms and rhyming patterns and images of children, animals and flowers. However, they are often argumentative or satirical, and reflect his deeply held political beliefs. Blake deals with radical subjects such as poverty, child labour, political and social revolution, industrialisation and the abuses of the Church. Many of the poems in Songs of Experience respond to counterparts in Songs of Innocence, exploring their themes from darker, more complex angles.
The oddness of Blake’s vision led many of his contemporaries to denounce him as mad: his biographer Peter Ackroyd has commented that, 'He might have been some star-child, or changeling, who withdrew into himself and into his own myth because he could not deal directly or painlessly even with the human beings closest to him'.
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