The works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and E. M. Forster share a similarity when it comes to their portrayals of the people of London. Both Wordsworth and Forster view the urban environment as a corruption of humanitarianism and nature. Blake, while more filled with religiosity, does view individual religion as a personal experience between the individual and God. In other words, he bypasses the church connection. If we study Blake’s Songs of Experience, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Forster’s Howard’s End we can see these ideologies readily expressed, most of them an indictment to various degrees of the London society in which the artists found themselves.
In Blake’s Songs of Experience, we see he believes in the fall of man and the innocence of the child as opposed to the cynicism and awareness of the adult. However, we see that Blake views reason as limited in its capacity to free the soul. In a way, he believes that man must transcend reason to be free. We see this in his portrayal of the people of London’s streets in London from Songs of Experience “In every cry of every man,/In every infant’s cry of fear,/In every voice, in every ban,/The mind-forged manacles I hear—“ (Blake, 214).
In A Little Boy Lost, we see another condemnation of the clergy, because they try to reason about what no human can reason in Blake’s view, God or the highest mystery. Instead, Blake makes a case in this poem that the innocent child is often misdirected in his search for higher knowledge by those who set themselves up as absolute authorities of the unknown by claiming to have some insight into the meaning of life. The little boy in the poem explains that “’Nought loves another as itself/Nor venerates another so,/Nor is it possible to thought/A greater than itself to know” (Blake 217). However, the priest calls the boy a fiend for setting reason up as the judge
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