There is an exhibition of William Blake’s works currently on at the Tate and that reminds us that Blake was a man of radical views.
It is worth reflecting that some of the most well-known figures in British history held minority and indeed what many would regard as extreme religious views. William Blake was certainly one.
The late historian EP Thompson wrote extensively about Blake and the religious traditions he stood in. There is a review of his Witness Against the Beast from a Blake related website which gives a flavour in overview of what he was looking at:
http://bq.blakearchive.org/28.2.paley
In another age these minority traditions were perhaps better understood. The paperback edition of Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was published as the 1000th Pelican book in September 1968. To mark the occasion the Guardian published a special supplement to which Thompson himself contributed a piece headlined ‘Beast and Whore’. In Blakeian terms the reference was to Church and State.
Thompson notably uses the ‘beast and whore’ line as the introduction to his chapter in the Making of the English Working Class, The Liberty Tree, about the London Corresponding Society that fought for democratic rights in a period when Britain was rather more autocratic than it has been in more recent times. Until now anyway.
William Blake almost certainly speaks to the Johnsonian times
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