THE FREE PLAY OF INTERESTS AND IDEAS

Sometime in the August of 1823, William Blake was listening to a group of people who, according to Blake's biographer Alexander Gilchrist, were ‘of a scientific turn … discoursing pompously … about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, etc.’. Unable to contain himself any longer, Blake burst in on the conversation by exclaiming, ‘It is false! I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger.’

This extraordinary assertion was characteristic of what Gilchrist called Blake's ‘devout old-world imagination’, a world-view that was partly created from Blake's ‘indestructible animosity’ towards the numerous mechanical and scientific methods – measuring, calculating, categorising and compartmentalising – that were rapidly transforming the society and culture of England at that time. Such methods were certainly employed to their fullest extent when a parish's open fields and commons were being enclosed. The common field system, with its Anglo-Saxon origins, can also be construed as but one component part of Blake's ‘old-world’: in a landscape that was characterised by fields so extensive and so lacking in any visible boundaries, Blake's claim that he could walk to the end of the earth would have been almost understandable.

In the 1780s, the young Blake wandered out into the rural margins of London, having visions amongst common haymeadows that were not enclosed until well into the nineteenth century: ‘On Peckham Rye … while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps … one summer morn, he sees the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking’.