Major Themes in Blake’s ‘London’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Along with ‘The Tyger’, perhaps ‘London’ is the best-known of all of the poems by William Blake (1757-1827) which he published under the title Songs of Experience. This volume, which is the companion-piece to his earlier Songs of Innocence (indeed, the two volumes should be viewed as one larger work), sees Blake addressing some of the darker aspects of late eighteenth-century society, such as slavery, poverty, and the deadening effects of industrialisation.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the major themes of ‘London’.

Misery.

If we wished to define and describe the mood of London as Blake describes it in this poem, we could do worse than reach for the single word, ‘miserable’. In the poem’s first stanza, he uses the word ‘woe’ to describe the ‘marks’ which every Londoner carries around on their bodies.

These are figurative marks rather than literal ones, but they hint at the various ways in which the individual city-dweller is brought down and made miserable by a life in the capital. In the succeeding stanzas, Blake then breaks down the various causes of this misery, which also provide us with several other major themes of the poem.

Poverty.

The people whom Blake focuses on in ‘London’ do not belong to the upper classes or the ‘well-off’. They are soldiers, chimney-sweeps, and young women who have been driven to a life of prostitution in order to survive, and their various plights have made them miserable.

None of them would have been earning much to keep them above the poverty line (although a soldier who rose among the ranks could become fairly comfortable). But Blake does not focus on the public officials, the lawyers, or the merchants who were living in London at the time: instead, he draws our attention to the poverty-stricken, or those with, at best, modest means.

Disease and Decay.

Blake ends ‘London’ with a powerful image: a young girl or ‘harlot’, sold into prostitution, has given birth to a child out of wedlock. Without a husband to support her, she will be reliant on whatever poor relief there is in her parish – if, indeed, there is any. Thus poverty, that important theme for the poem, returns.

But here, Blake also summons another blight on the city: disease. The word ‘plagues’ refers most probably to venereal disease. The married men who pay prostitutes for sex, Blake suggests, destroy and degrade the institution of marriage because they take home sexually-transmitted diseases to their wives.

This turns marriage from a positive institution celebrating life and love into something akin to a funeral, mourning the death of something (here, love, and the commitment and fidelity enshrined within the marriage service), hence the ‘hearse’.

Exploitation.

Exploitation is another theme explored in ‘London’, chiefly through the figure of the chimney-sweep. The chimney-sweeper – who most likely would have been a young boy who was small enough to climb up inside the chimneys of houses – blackens the walls of the city’s churches with his cries.

Chimney-sweeping was not only hard work but dangerous work, too, and numerous medical complaints, as well as deaths through accidents, befell the children who were forced to work at the job. The nineteenth century would see a series of acts passed by the UK government to address this.

Corruption.

This is a theme glimpsed once again in the stanza about the chimney-sweep. The church – which is supposed to stand for charity, kindness, compassion, and moral rectitude – is being degraded and obscured by the suffering of the chimney-sweep, because the church is allowing such suffering to happen

Blake’s image of the chimney-sweep’s suffering turning the church walls black neatly conveys the corruption which lay at the heart of London life.

Degradation.

Everything in Blake’s London seems to be degraded or debased. The suffering of the prostitute in the poem’s final stanza debases the institution of marriage, because it is married men who ‘use’ the prostitute’s services before going home to their wives. Once again, people are often degraded by what’s going on around them, even if they live at one remove from the site of corruption.

Even that soldier’s sigh – presumably the sigh of his death throes as he perishes from his wounds received in battle, and bleeds to death – infects the walls of the rich and powerful (‘palace walls’), suggesting that they, the ones who sent him off to war, are responsible for his death and are thus corrupted or lessened by their involvement in his plight.

Industrialisation.

Although ‘London’ does not deal directly and explicitly with the Industrial Revolution and its impact on everyday city life, industrialisation is present in the poem as a theme, albeit obliquely.

For example, the reference to every aspect of London being ‘charter’d’ – that is, demarcated by legal documentation which organises and structures it – hints at the increased bureaucracy that had come into force in the wake of industrialisation, while the soot from the chimney-sweep blackening the church walls also hints at the chimney soot from factories and the smog that was beginning to engulf the city air.