William Blake

The Michael Scot trail continues to lead in all sorts of amusing directions. I believe Scot's prominence in history, beyond academic treatises on medieval science, stems largely from his visibility in Dante's Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy in turn gained quite beautiful illustrations at the hands of William Blake though sadly this project was left unfinished when Blake died. So when my wife and I found ourselves planning a trip south of the border a stop in Cambridge for William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum seemed obligatory. It would have been even without Scot.

The exhibition was a revelation, illuminating the radical humanitarianism underlying his visionary art. It sent me back to this long-neglected book where I lingered over the tale of little Tom Dacre who is sold to be a chimney sweep by his father when his mother dies. His life is miserable but he has a wonderful visionary dream of liberation in which an angel tells him that if he's a good boy, 'He'd have God for his father and never want joy.' The next morning:

And so Tom awake; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

Blake would improve Tom's material lot but he's already in a better place spiritually.

Our world is very different from Blake's and most of us nowadays do not share his religious belief. In the world we've created for ourselves, doing your duty is no defence against great harm, maybe cast aside in some global restructuring exercise or suddenly finding ourselves guilty of some unimagined bureaucratic sin. Why should people buy into structures where you can do your duty and come to harm nonetheless?