Abstract
There has been an abiding interest in the relationship between Blake and popular traditions of religious heterodoxy. A historical context for Blake’s millenarianism has been provided in the prophetic radicalism of his contemporaries Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, but critics seeking a context for his antinomianism have gone back to seventeenth-century sources. A.L. Morton, for example, traced Blake’s antinomianism to the Ranters and Seekers on the radical fringe of Puritan dissent. He concluded that Blake was ‘the greatest English Antinomian, but also the last’ (Morton,1958 p. 36)1. I shall be offering evidence of manifestations of antinomianism in the London of Blake’s time which show that he was far from being the last antinomian. At the same time I shall suggest that critics who have discussed the similarities between Blake’s ideas and seventeenth-century antinomianism were correct to the extent that there seems to have been a conscious revival of ranting ideas from the previous century in the 1790s.
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Notes
See John Evans’s A Sketch of the Denominations of the Christian World, eighth edition (1803) pp. 80–1.
See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972); Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)
A.L. Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970).
See Maria de Fleury, Antinomianism Unmasked and Refuted and the Moral Law Proved from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be Still in Full Force as the Rule of Christian Conduct (1791) p. 37
Maria de Fleury, The Analytical Review 20 (1794) pp. 39–41.
See James Relly, Christian Liberty: or, The Liberty wherewith Christ hath made us Free (1775) pp. 6–7
Walter Wilson, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses in London. Westminster, and Southwark, 4 vols (1808–14) vol.1, pp. 358–60.
For details of the relationships between the London Corresponding Society and Brothers and his following, see J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 223–4.
Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) consistently demonstrates the connections between currents of political radicalism and religious enthusiasm in the period.
See Huntington, The Utility of the Books and the Excellency of the Parchments 2nd edn (1796) p. 30
Huntington, Living Testimonies: or, Spiritual Letters on Divine Subjects (1795) p. xxvii.
See Huntington, The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel (1792) p. 81.
See Huntington, The Child of Liberty in Legal Bondage: or, the Son and Heir in the Servant’s Yoke (1794) p. 76.
Thomas Hacker’s reply was made in the pamphlet entitled The Believer’s Entanglement by the Moral Law Proved Inconsistent with the Abolition of the Law (1794).
Ebenezer Hooper, The Celebrated Coalheaver: or, Reminiscences of the Reverend William Huntington, S.S. (1871) p. 89.
Huntington, The Utility of the Books (1796) pp. 33–4.
Richard Brothers, Wonderful Prophecies, being a Dissertation on the Existence, Nature, and Extent of the Prophetic Powers in the Human Mind, 4th edn (1795) p. 5.
Garnet Terry, Prophetical Extracts, (1794–5), pamphlet 5 p. 4.
Vigors M’Culla, The Bank Note: or, The Engraver Carved in Answer to Onesimus, the Ecclesiastical State Thinker (1806) pp. 44, 49.
William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (1800) p. 69.
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Mee, J. (1994). Is there an Antinomian in the House? William Blake and the After-Life of a Heresy. In: Clark, S., Worrall, D. (eds) Historicizing Blake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23477-6_3
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