When Autodidacts Teach: A Study of William Blake’s Pedagogic Opinions and their Manifestations in Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Abstract

William Blake had an abiding interest in creating systems, and he saw this task as a matter of freedom. This thesis examines the characteristics of his educational system as manifested in his Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It posits that Blake often assumed the role of a teacher who is actively engaged in the cultivation of values, behaviors, and systems of thought in his readers. The thesis probes the influence of Blake’s autodidactic upbringing on shaping his unconventional ideas and his hostility towards the institutionalization of education. Blake’s pedagogic system, it demonstrates, characteristically empowers children, promotes engagement with nature, and encourages questioning what we often take for granted. Furthermore, this thesis suggests the framework’s capacity to inform us about an educational motivation behind his choices of themes, styles, and literary techniques. It examines the books’ texts and pictures, looking for tensions and patterns in how Blake depicts educational symbols of his time such as books, schools, and teachers. While it is not the thesis’s intention to exhaustively examine the pedagogic theories in Blake’s time, it does discuss the major ideas and forces that shaped the debate about education in the eighteenth century in order to compare and contrast them with Blake’s epistemological tendencies. These will include primarily the theorists whom Blake read and engaged with, namely John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft. This thesis wishes to fill a gap in up-to-date studies that look into Blake’s writings on education and contribute to long-standing debates about his work’s audience, genre, and objectives. It hopes to provide not only a framework for reexamining his work but also a new way of looking at Blake, the man––thus advancing his ever-evolving image.