‘The Night of Holy Shadows’: Europe and Loyalist Reaction

Abstract

The situation for political reformers changed drastically during 1792. By December, Joseph Johnson’s friend William Roscoe believed that ‘a general panic has seized the kingdom’.¹ It is difficult to be certain when Blake composed and engraved Europe. The title page date of 1794 perhaps records when the work was illuminated or completed; the prophecy more meaningfully relates to the conservative reaction of 1792–93.² Europe is a complex meditation on contemporary political repression and draws on Enlightenment narratives of the history of religion and especially the imagery of apotheosis to view it in a larger historical and mythical context.