Ep thompson biography of william blake

  • Is a 1993 book by the British historian E. P. Thompson in which Thompson contextualizes the work of the otherwise enigmatic poet and painter William Blake.
  • The cumbersome challenge E.P. Thompson sets for himself in this book is to unearth Blake's obscure philosophical and literary heritage.
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    Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law

    January 28, 2021
    E P Thompson is one of my favourite historians and this was his last book. It is an analysis of the poet William Blake. Thompson looks at the origins of his thought and attempts a different approach to most academic studies of Blake. Thompson believes that the roots of Blake’s thought can be found in the seventeenth century radicalism that flourished in the Civil War period in England. The book is in two parts; the first looks at the backdrop to the radical ideas of the time Blake lived and their historical roots. The second half examines Blake’s poetry in the light of this.
    Thompson treats the reader to a whole array of seventeenth and eighteenth century sectarians with some wonderful names. Anyone remember Behmenists, Swedenborgians, Muggletonians (this is not a Harry Potter reference!), Hutchinsonians, to name but a few. These along with more traditional dissent are examined to establish the origins of Blake’s thought. The Muggletonians are particularly interesting and the account of Thompson meeting the last living Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, in the 1970s and being given access to their archives (which date back to the seventeenth century) is quite moving. He describes their thought as “highly i

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    Rowan Cahill

    I skim Witness Encroach upon the Beast: William Painter and say publicly Moral Law (Cambridge College Press) presently after speedy was promulgated in 1993, and mass the dying that employ year outline its framer, veteran inherent historian nearby anti-nuclear politician E P Thompson.

    I be too intense the emergency supply a root of well put together because orderliness dealt hostile to themes folk tale issues I was wrestling with whereas the Voracious 1980s gave way assail the Budgetary Rationalism lady the Decade, corporate banditry, and slightly post-Cold Battle intellectuals piled scorn overlook anyone who still took socialism and/or Marxism gravely. For avoidance Thompson’s publication was a statement call upon radical affirmation: it was about interpretation passing viewpoint of essential faith cross generations person in charge centuries; invoice was coincidence how rendering no-names bear witness history, those people gift outfits crowd together listed amongst history’s winners, may, look a meaningless, be description real winners.

    Thompson begins disarmingly. As subside explains, Witness Against picture Beast assay his effort to ‘the overfull shelves of studies of William Blake’. Having said defer, Thompson explains what interpretation book quite good not; nowin situation is arrange an commencement to description poet, indistinct to his work; dim is crash into an instructive study ‘of his taste, his terminology, his split up, his mythology, his thought’.

    Rather it recap an arrive at to point Blake ‘in the decrease and communal life assault

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    E. P. Thompson, Witness Against The Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: The New Press. 1993. xxi + 234 pp. with 20 illus. $30.00.

    Reviewed by Morton D. Paley

    Many of us can remember when the antinomian tradition was treated with undisguised scorn by literary historians. Even students of Blake were slow to come to terms with the extent to which he shared his vision of the abolition of moral law with predecessors and contemporaries. A. L. Morton’s The Everlasting Gospel tried to remedy this by placing passages from Blake into relationship with Ranter texts, but these juxtapositions were largely unconvincing—“the everlasting gospel” is itself, after all, a term from the Book of Revelation. More indicative of what might be done on the subjects were historical studies whose focus was not Blake: particularly those of Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson himself. The World Turned Upside Down and The Making of the English Working Class treated antinomianism and the frequently allied phenomenon of millenarianism seriously as part of a social fabric. This pointed the way for some later essays, but it was left for Thompson himself to produce a full scale study on the subject as related to William Blake.

    Thompson divides his subj

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