19th Century London Analysis

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The situation is somewhat the same also in Blake, who successfully reflects the political and economic troubles of 19th century London by giving his readers the ability to visualize what it would be like to be a victim of the monarchy’s governing tactics. In the poem he talks about poverty, death, marriage and prostitution, child labor: all aspects of the failure of the social organization, of the deficiencies of the State. The "blackening Church" is connected to the brutal exploitation of young childhood as chimney-sweepers. Their cry appals the church in the sense of putting to shame, challenging or indicting, as does the sigh of the soldiers. Blake goes also a step further by referring to the Palace, a symbol of power which is running with blood. He critiques the Monarchy and the aristocratic hierarchy which is responsible for the devastating conditions in England. Palace is used as a metaphor for the politicians ' lack of empathy towards the lower classes. In the final stanza, the harlot "blasts the new-born infant 's tear and blights with plagues of the marriage hearse". We hear curse and a sick child is born into a world of poverty, a world where his mother is forced to make a living as a harlot. The people of London have to …show more content…

London in the 19th century was an industrialized city where not only goods but also human values, childhood and life itself were sold. Blake and Dickens understood it as a modern city, in the perspective that it was "a city built in the shadows of money and power" (Wolfreys 1998, p. 36), a city of mystery and ineffability due to its labyrinthine and mazelike locations. In both cases, London is not just a name of a location, a base for the plot; it is rather "a place of squalid mystery and terror, of grimly grotesque, of labyrinthine obscurity and lurid fascination" (Gissing, Scott 1965, p.

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