Sylvia Clayton
Blake’s Progress
Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law
By E P Thompson
Cambridge University Press 280pp £17.95 order from our bookshop
Lecturing in New York in 1968 the historian E P Thompson defined himself as a Muggletonian Marxist. In later years he was to admit that his allegiance to both Muggleton and Marx was less than wholehearted, but it is primarily as a Muggletonian that he has written this his final book – Thompson died in August 1993 after a long illness – a brilliantly illuminating exploration of some of the forces that shaped the imagination of William Blake.
It is a pity that 'Muggletonian' sounds such a ridiculous word. Early in Pickwick Papers Dickens chooses the name of Muggleton for the town where Mr Pickwick watches a cricket match, a town that is pompous, provincial and wholly bent on commercial gain. The original Muggletonians were not like that
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