William Blake and Slavery: Mind-forg'd Manacles

by David Bindman, William Blake (Illustrator), Darryl Pinckney

The English poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) was uncommonly aware of the evils of slavery in his time, having illustrated Narrative of a Five Year's Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1791), John Stedman's firsthand account of the brutal suppression of a slave revolt in South America. But for Blake, the interest was not only in physical but mental enslavement. The ubiquity of "mind-forg'd manacles" (as he put it in his great poem "London") in a rapidly industrializing Europe compelled some of his most dramatic and complex text and images. With over 60 color reproductions from Blake's illuminated books, watercolors and engravings, all from the collection of The British Museum, William Blake and Mind-forg'd Manacles presents a strong statement on this great artist's pungent and independent political vision. It includes an essay on the theme of slavery in Blake's visual imagery by the exhibition curator and leading Blake scholar David Bindman, as well as a text on Olaudah Equiano, an African ex-slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery, by the novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney. This book commemorates both the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Blake's birth.

148 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2007

About the author

British art historian

Reviews

[Laemeur · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strength of this book is in its great selection of lesser-seen etchings and watercolours. All serve to support the theme of slavery in Blake's work, which is well-stated in Bindman's titular essay. The second of the two essays in the volume seems ...shoe-horned in. It recounts the story of Olaudah Equiano, the African slave who bought his own freedom at sea and is the first to have written (and have published) his autobiography in English; one of Blake's poems is mentioned in a single sentence near the end of the essay. The supplementary visual material is interesting, and helps, with the Equiano essay, to set the historical scene and tie Blake's work to the Earthly slave trade -- but once you delve into the words and images of Blake himself, you're drawn out of this world and into his, a grand and mythic place where chains and manacles are only metaphors for the slavery of the mind and spirit.