When considering the texts we read for this course and how each portrays London, the two that stand out the most to me are “London” by William Blake and “Night Walks” by Charles Dickens. Each work highlights a lot of the negative aspects of Victorian Life in London that invoke a lot of pathos in the reader, but each author completes this task in their own unique ways.

The poem “London” by William Blake is organized in 4, 4 line stanzas which constrains the topics and style, leaving Blake a relatively short space to work with. This being said, he gets right into life in London as uses his depictions of life to set the scene, a first-person point-of-view, and his diction to create a dismal tone. In stanza one, he uses diction such “weakness”, “woe”, and “charter’d”: “And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe” (3-4). His word choice is quite interesting as he depicts the people as incapable of helping themselves. Dissimilarly with his use of “charter’d”, the city itself is presented as confined, mapped, and under government control (according to Google’s definition). This theme blaming the royalty/ government carries on within each stanza. In the second stanza, he uses words such as cry, fear, ban, and mind-forg’d manacles. Cry is repeated 3 times in the poem, and two of them are in this section; once time is found in “every man” and once referring to every infant. This stanza focuses a lot on the pain and suffering of the people in the streets. “In every voice: in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” (7-8). The use of “ban” again shows government or royal restriction, manacles refers to shackles or constraints (according to the google definition), and mind-forged implies that these men and children are constrained by the minds and beliefs of how others see them, as well as how they see themselves.

In stanzas 3 and 4 he moves away from broad generalizations of “every man” and “every face” to very specific encounters. In stanza 3, Blake refers to crying chimney-sweepers and blackened churches. Puling a little knowledge from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” the chimney sweepers are often kids sent to work quite young, so again a child is crying. The blackened churches I read as possibly being covered in soot from the chimney, or blackening in sin and impurity as white is regularly associated with purity as well as in church ceremonies. Stanza 3 also refers to “And the hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls” (11-12). These lines lead me to believe that Blake is blaming royalty and the government for the bloodshed and the deaths of its people as it stood back and watched. In stanza 4, “How the youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the new-born infants tear” brings a lot of emotion to some ordinarily overlooked individuals. Words such as tear, plagues, and hearse are all centered around a “new-born infant”. A harlot, being a prostitute, appears to be cursing at a newborn in the streets because the baby has plagued rapid and wide spread death on the importance and meaning of marriage. Marriage is often associated with government, conformity, and a way of life. It is symbolic that the birth of the infant is bringing an end to the prospects of marriage for the woman, as well as causing a widespread plague on marriage throughout the city. According to Blake, life is awful, dreadful, full of misery, and at the center of all of the sadness: royalty is to blame.

In Charles Dickens’ “Night Walks”. he has a lot more room to expand on his dismal outlook on London. He does so in a one-person point-of-view like Blake, but in the story-like fashion of a man walking through the city streets. He gives specific details of the roads he turns down, his surroundings, and of the locals he encounters with. He eases his way into the darker elements of London at night, starting off with a restless city at “half-past twelve”. It was filled with “houseless people” and he describes the drunkards, the taxis and “that specimen was dressed in soiled mourning”. He says different kinds of people and happenings late at night appear to band together with others of a similar state of mind. Throughout his story, Dickens writes from the persona of a homeless person, while contradictorily referring to the others like him as “specimen”, “it”, “savage”, “creature”, and “wild bears”. While Blake focused on who was to blame for the situations in London, Dickens seems to focus on the widespread homelessness and disease. He talks a lot of the high rate of suicides, dry-rot developing in men, and how there are more dead than there are living. He describes dry-rot in such a way that is seems as if the working class that have it all, are working themselves to both physical and mental exhaustion. The results of this overworked nature of life causes depression and loss of will to live so that they quite literally rot away and die.

“Night Walks” also has sections where children and the government palaces are referred to, though the government is referred to more sarcastically and less direct in nature than Blake. Dickens walks past the Courts of Law and he writes that they were “hinting in low whispers what numbers of people they were keeping awake, and how intensely wretched and horrible they were rendering the small hours to unfortunate suitors”. Yet, just before he calls Parliament a stupendous institution in the eyes of other nations. This quote is symbolic in that in the eyes of its own people, the government appears to be failing. Yet, while this is such an important and central cause of dismal life, this section takes up only a small paragraph in Dickens’ work. In a contrasting manor, Blake’s whole poem alludes to the situation of everyday life being the fault of parliament and royalty. The children are also not used in Dickens’ story to draw more sympathy, but describes them as hunted and uncared for savages who fight and allude police in Covent Garden: “But one of the worst sights I know in London, is to be found in the children who prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the carts and barrows, dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the pavement in the Piazza with the rain of their naked feet”.

Dickens describes how hard these men work and how tough life is, but in a different way than Blake. Blake’s poem is representing these men as consumed with sorrow and feeling sorry for themselves rather than the tough and nasty conditions of working. Blake’s poem is more effective in drawing immediate pathos through large generalizations, but Dickens’ story captures the reality of life that can only be seen at night by presenting real places, real people, and very specific scenarios. Each author carries a different tone in their approach to the topic; Blake’s is dismal and sorrow, where Dickens is shameful and disgust. Both authors are attempting to draw awareness and pathos to their depiction of life through the connection and trust offered through a first person point-of-view, but in vastly different ways of telling their story and drawing the attention of the public to their cause.

Literature from 19^thcentury England portrays London in many different ways. The fact that this time was very controversial era between the success and beauty of the city and the treatment of the working and lower-class citizens is reflected through the works of writers such as William Blake and Charles Dickens. In Blake’s poem “London,” he details the tragedy that is the lives of common Londoners. Every face Blake sees has “marks of weakness, marks of woe.” His repetition of the work “every” emphasizes how widespread these injustices are and show that every man, every infant, every person he sees is suffering. Men and children are crying, soldiers are dying, women are forced into lives as harlots and have even more children that cannot be taken care of. The image Blake paints of London in this poem is a dreadful and almost hyperbolic one, and one that represents disgust for a city plagued with such horrors.

In his essay “Night Walks” Charles Dickens paints a more realistic but equally depressing image of London. Blake focuses on the weariness of the people in his poem, but Dickens acknowledges it as a whole in London; not just found in the people, but in the rivers and architecture as well. Dickens is more realistic in his portrayal in that there seems to be no use of hyperbole in his text, but rather a tone of frankness. For example, he states that “to walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it…” He is rather straightforward in not only his admitting that the present times are “evil” but that the activity he described is the easy thing to do, so he did it. This tone carries throughout the piece. He still admits the wonders of London, such as the “perfection of [the] stupendous institution” that is the walls of British Parliament and that “Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was wonderful company.” It is these admissions intertwined with the descriptions of the horrors Dickens has seen during his night walks that supports the reality of his portrayal of London. Overall, both writers have some rather unpleasant things to say about London in the 19^thcentury, but whereas Blake is more hyperbolic in his approach, Dickens is more realistic and still shows that there is something to be admired in the great city. London used to be great, and could be great again, but in the present time of these works she and her people are suffering.

This illustration by Gustave Doré depicts a group of people, mainly children, huddled together on the side of a street in the night time. The mood of this illustration is overwhelmingly dreary. Overall it is a very dark image—the brightest point being the street lamp in the upper left-hand corner. The faces of the people are not only dark but are rather miserable as well. They are huddled together, sharing blankets, as if the only source of warmth they have is each other. The objects laying in front of the two main adults in the image look as though they could be all the belongings of this family, from vases to a violin. Such a dark, depressing image is clearly meant to evoke similar emotions in its viewer, as one cannot help but feel sorry for the people in the illustration. The image definitely appears to be a commentary on the living conditions that affected particularly women and children in London in the mid to late 19^thcentury. It is heartbreaking to see people living in conditions such as this—in the cold on the side of the street—but it is especially so to see children, or what could possibly be a family, suffering in this manner.

This illustration is reminiscent of William Blake’s poem “London” which details the tragedy that is the society of common men, women, and children in London. Within the first stanza, Blake says he marks “in every face I meet/ marks of weakness, marks of woe.” In this image, every individual has a face marked by woe. Both this illustration and Blake’s poem mark a dreadful time in London’s history and depict the miserable conditions of the every-day people.

I found the tones reflected in the poems “London” by William Blake and “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” by William Wordsworth to both express an awareness of similar conditions in London. What I mean by awareness is that in Blake’s poem, he mentions the the despair and harsh conditions that were present in London during this time period throughout the poem. Wordsworth, in contrast, chose to reflect on a time when everything seemed to be at peace, but I think he maintained the awareness that the day was yet to happen and that it would be filled with the hardship that Blake describes in his poem. 

Blake’s poem dives deep into the struggles of the people in London. In the first stanza he describes the faces of the people he encounters in London with “Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” Furthermore, he mentions the cries and sorrows of several groups of people in London, including the soldiers who he portrayed as suffering at the hands of the Nobility in the lines “…the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down the palace walls(.)” The final image Blake provides the reader with is of the Harlot, a “prostitute or promiscuous woman” according to dictionary.com, cursing the (assuringly her own) infant in the middle of the night. These images explicitly describe the life that Blake is observing in his experiences throughout London and I think he chose to focus on these negative examples in order to strengthen his critique on London. 

What drew a strong connection to the industrial and urban setting Wordsworth hints towards in his poem was the second quatrain:

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, 

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 

Open unto the fields, and to the sky; 

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.  

This seems to be the only section where I felt Wordsworth remotely suggested the crowdedness and population of London, especially in the second line which is a list of industrial marvels. What is different from Blake’s poem would be the context Wordsworth places these items in; the beautiful nature that surrounds and infiltrates London. I found Wordsworth setting this poem in the morning just as the sun is rising to be significant in pointing out that the air was only smokeless because work in the factories had not begun yet. This extends to all of the quietness that Wordsworth describes, as nothing in the day had begun in the London scene he was describing.