The Matter of Britain: Blake, Milton and the Ancient Britons

Abstract

Throughout the eighteenth century, Milton’s posthumous reputation had developed to such an extent that, for a writer such as Blake, he had become the obvious candidate for the role of Albion’s prophet. Lucy Newlyn has demonstrated how the poet fulfilled a variety of roles during the eighteenth century — biblical primer, role model for the sublime and proponent of blank verse — and Joseph Wittreich has examined the importance of Milton’s biblical views for Blake in particular.1 Recent work has tended to concentrate on the similarity between Romantic and ‘pre-romantic’ poets with regard to Milton’s influence, the fact that (as Southey commented on Thomas Warton in 1824) writers from the late eighteenth century provided models for recuperating the past and found in Milton a ‘loving and nurturing’ literary parent.² It is such similarity rather than difference that is most important here, particularly with regard to one source for Blake’s strange history of Britain, in particular as it appears in Jerusalem: Milton’s History of Britain was written during the late 1640s and published in 1670 and, as the chronicle of Albion became more important to Blake’s soteriological history of mankind, was a significant text in shaping Blake’s ideas of the ancient Britons.