Blake's Vision of Slavery Revisited

Author(s): David Bindman

Source: Huntington Library Quarterly , 1995, Vol. 58, No. 3/4, William Blake: Images
and Texts (1995), pp. 373-382
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3817574

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 Blake's Vision of Slavery Revisited

DAVID BINDMAN

,SC pecific references to contemporary physical-as opposed to spiritual-

slavery are infrequent in Blake's writings. Such references as there are
mostly occur, as one might expect, around 1790, during the national cam-
paigns to abolish slavery. In a seminal article of 1952, "Blake's Vision of Slavery,"
David Erdman argued that the illuminated book Visions of the Daughters of
Albion was, among other things, an abolitionist parable locked into the current
debates over the morality of slavery and British involvement in the slave trade.1
The three main actors in the Visions accordingly represent the main interests in-
volved in those debates. The villainous Bromion, who rapes the liberty-seeking
Oothoon, is a West Indian slave-owner exploiting "the swarthy children of the
sun," who bear the mark of his signet. Oothoon represents the enslaved British
nation and presumably also African slaves seeking liberty, while Theotormon is
an ineffectual liberal with the right beliefs but absorbed in his own misery, un-
willing to act and thus unable to liberate Oothoon and combat slavery, whether
it be of women or of Africans (frontispiece; color plate I).
According to Erdman, the hapless Theotormon was drawn from Captain
John Stedman, whose book on slavery in Surinam contained illustrations by the
author that Blake engraved.2 Stedman, whom Blake apparently knew well, was a
man who reputedly deplored slavery and pitied slaves; however, as Anne K.
Mellor has noted, Stedman was in fact an apologist for slavery.3 Theotormon is
also by implication William Wilberforce, who opposed slavery, but only until he
was accused of Jacobinism in the wake of the French Revolution. Blake himself,
in Erdman's account, appears to be passionately opposed to slavery but at the
same time capable of enough detachment to see through the hypocrisy of both

1. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15 (1952): 242-52.

2. J. G. Stedman, A Narrative of a five years expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London,
1796), some of these reproduced in Anne K. Mellor's article in this issue.
3. See her article in this volume.

HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY- 58:3 & 4 - 373

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374 ,
374 DAVID BINDMAN DAVID BINDMAN

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BLAKE'S
BLAKE'SVISION OF SLAVERY
VISION REVISITED
OF SLAVERY REVISITED - 375
375

1' tho p.ir AtA1 S m

lt. At 4iAime lt »8 Ith

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Figure 24. First page of anonymous pamphlet The African Widow, c. 1790-1800 (author's collection).

Dark was my day of ignorance,

And dark of sin my night,
But now the shade of death is turn'd
To morning's welcome light.

Behind the poem is the evangelical abolitionist view that it is a Christian duty to
convert the African; and it is carried out in the poem by a wealthy lady as an act
of charity and obligation. The point of the pamphlet was presumably to encour-
age wealthy individuals to take seriously the idea of converting heathens rather
than leaving them in a state of "darkness."

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376 -
376 DAVID BINDMAN DAVID BINDMAN

Ephem
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6. This is
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7. See Win
Hill, N.C
8. Ibid., 17f.

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BLAKE'S VISION OF SLAVERY REVISITED - 377

Adam stood in the garden of Eden:

And Noah on the mountains of Ararat;
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations
By the hands of the children of Los.
Adam shuddered! Noah faded! black grew the sunny African
When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East

This is one of the most compressed passages in the Prophecies; but the blackness
of the African might be interpreted as deriving from Noah's seed as the fallen
world is established by Urizen. The curse of Ham in effect allowed fundamen-
talist Christians a way of reconciling a belief in the biblical account of Creation
-which made all human beings children of the first parents-with a belief that
Africans were a benighted race.
If the Little Black Boy had achieved liberation and was freed from the black
cloud and the curse of Ham through the mercy of Christ, then we would expect
him to be wholly equal to the English boy, now freed from his white cloud. But
both the end of the poem and the terminal image suggest equivocation. The now
redeemed Black Boy, whether colored black or white by Blake, still appears to act
like a servant. He shades the English boy from the heat, stroking him in the ex-
pectation that he will gain his love by being like him. The Black Boy's subordi-
nate position is made explicit in the configuration of the image; he stands apart
like John the Baptist in an Italian Madonna and Child painting, while the white
boy adores Christ, who gazes at him tenderly.
Yet the white boy adopts a position of supplication that would have evoked
unmistakably, for many of Blake's contemporaries, the famous emblem entitled
"Am I not a Man and a Brother?" (figure 25), produced originally in 1786 by
Wedgwood for the abolitionists. Much of the power of this image-which
rapidly became universally familiar, as Hugh Honour has pointed out-came
from the precision with which it expressed the idea of the gratitude expected of
the liberated slave, who would embrace Christianity but would ever afterward be
a loyal servant to the white masters and mistresses who had liberated him.9 One
might explain the Little Black Boy's servility to the white boy and the white boy's
servility to Christ as a sign that the poem is an ironical exposure of the limita-
tions of the abolitionist position-that is, that blacks were to be freed from
chains only to become servants, for as converted heathens they could only aspire

9. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World
War I, pt. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 62-64.

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378378
'- DAVID BINDMAN DAVID BINDMAN

Figure 2
(courtes

to join t
of the i
Cowper
likely to

The atti
dent sym
vent ant
Liberty
Viscomi

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BLAKE'S VISION OF SLAVERY REVISITED ," 379

racial typology. The poem contains an invocation to Jews to leave off counting
gold, and to the African: "O African! black African (go winged thought widen his
forehead)." The parenthetical aside implies the African's mental backwardness.
Like the Jew he is in a pre-Christian state and must throw off his inherited char-
acter before he can receive the message of universal revolution; the aside also asso-
ciates mental and spiritual characteristics with physical form. But why the
African's narrow forehead? The answer, I believe, is to be found first of all in John
Caspar Lavater's Physiognomy, published in a number of editions from 1788 on-
ward,10 for which Blake made a number of engravings. He would have had a spe-
cial involvement through his friendship with Henry Fuseli, who was in turn a
friend of Lavater's. Blake could have read in Lavater that man combines animal,
intellectual, and moral aspects in his being, and that all of these are expressed in
differing proportions in the face, which is always dominated by one of the three
aspects. The forehead-and this idea was not new to Lavater-was the seat of in-
telligence: "it is likewise evident that the faculty of thinking has its seat, not in the
foot, in the hand, or in the breast; but in the head,-in the interior of the fore-
head.... The forehead, down to the eye-brows, [is] the mirror of intelligence."11
Lavater does not apply this notion of the dimensions of the forehead to the
African, but this connection had already been made by the Dutch painter Pieter
Camper, who first applied physiognomical theory to racial classification.
Camper's theory was in effect an attempt to apply the ancient theory of the Great
Chain of Being to the races of humanity, along with all the later apparatus of
anatomical classification developed by Linnaeus and Buffon. Camper's method
was to measure the angle caused by the meeting of two lines, one line drawn along
the forehead and nose and the other through the chin and mouth (figure 26).12 In
the Greek ideal form, the two lines meet without an angle, while the European
form deviates from this slightly. The African, however, with a sharp angle at the
intersection of the two lines, is closer to the orangutan than to the European. The
effect, as can be seen from the diagram, is for the African's forehead to narrow and
to recede.

There is, however, one problem in proposing the influence of Camper: his
book, published in Holland in 1784, only became available in English in 1794.
But the preface tells us that Camper was a familiar figure in London before the

10. John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter (London, 1789-98); see also Robert N.
Essick, William Blakes Commercial Book Illustrations (Oxford, 1991), pl. xix.
11. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy.
12. The Works of the late Professor Camper, on the Connexion between the Science ofAnatomy and The Arts of
Drawing, Painting, Statuary, etc. (London, 1794), 32-44.

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380 -x
380 DAVID BINDMAN DAVID BINDMAN

Figure 26.
Figure 12 from [Pieter Camper], The Works of the late Professor Camper (London, 1794).

publication of the English translation, especially at the Royal Academy, where he

knew William Hunter, the professor of anatomy from 1768 to 1783. He also dis-
cussed racial physiognomy with Benjamin West, who was exercised about the
correct way to depict the Jews in his biblical paintings.13 The beliefs prevalent in
the circle of the Hunters are suggested in a print of William's brother, Dr. John
Hunter, after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, engraved by William Sharp in
1788 (figure 27). The Hunter brothers were both interested in comparative
anatomy and kept distinguished public museums containing specimens of all
kinds, from vegetables to human skulls.14 John is shown in his museum, sur-
rounded by specimens, and he has open a page from a volume containing draw-
ings (or perhaps engravings) of skulls. They are evidently intended to illustrate

13. Ibid., 8-9.

14. See Jessie Dobson, John Hunter (Edinburgh, 1969).

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382 v
382 DAVID BINDMAN DAVID BINDMAN

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