Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law

see Index for multiple references to the influence of Volney's Ruins on Blake. ( )

E.P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast is a wonderful piece of history and criticism. Its subtitle "William Blake and the Moral Law" might have more accurately been "William Blake Against the Moral Law," since that is the position expressed in Blake's works. Thompson points the fact out again and again, while noting the earlier critics who have managed to ignore it.

"Inheritance," the first of the book's two sections, paints a cultural backdrop for Blake in the world of English antinomian religion. The second "Human Images" treats Blake's biography and works in relation to that tradition and to the Republican and Deist impulses of the late eighteenth century. Thompson focuses on the Songs of Innocence and Experience, with some attention to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and comissioned paintings. He is very sympathetic to Blake, and avers himself to be a "Muggletonian Marxist" (the first term referencing an antinomian sect which may have influenced Blake through his family). At the same time, he seems careful not to project his own ideas onto Blake -- much more careful than most Blake critics of my reading -- and not to rashly infer lines of influence or authorial intentions.

The fifteen black and white plates in the book are very well chosen. In the course of illustrating Thompson's points, they also make up one of the best possible collections of Blake's images on such a small scale.

http://nicodemist.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/witness-against-the-beast/ ( )

E. P. Thompson's long-awaited book on William Blake was published shortly after the historian's death in August 1993. Acclaimed as one of his best and most deeply felt works, it appears now for the first time in paperback. Written with a vivid passion, and bearing the marks of Thompson's lifelong struggle against authoritarian and anti-humanitarian politics both at the level of the individual and of the state, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law is a profound enquiry into the structure of Blake's thought and the character of his sensibility. Its qualities are among those which place Thompson himself in the same tradition of dissenting values and non-conforming radicalism represented by Blake some two hundred years earlier.

'Everything characteristic of the late E. P. Thompson - his clarity, humanity, and breadth of learning - is present in this book.' Financial Times

'The book stands as a tribute by an outstanding historian to an idiosyncratic genius.' Literary Review

'Thompson speaks to us once more in his highly individual voice through the pages of this vital and challenging work.' Tribune

'This book should go onto every undergraduate's reading list.' Evening Standard

'A stunning, undoubtedly major work.' Anarchist Studies