The Portrayal of Industrialization in London by William Blake

In “London” by William Blake the grunge, and domineering nature of a city engaged in a transformation of industry, is articulated through the setting. London of the poem, and the 1700s and 1800s, was griped by a sense of overwhelming entrapment in the mechanical comings and goings of industry. This massive shift is expressed through the stark nature of the setting, and the speaker’s awareness of a sense of confinement, and malaise in the face of great progress. Blake’s choices in the portrayal of industrialized London, is one aimed to express the overwhelming battle between machinery, and flesh in a city gripped by the throws of revolution.
It is through the city itself, and the people who inhabit it that Blake elects to convey the harsh reality of the progression of time on the fallible nature of humans, and the enduring nature of machines. It is in “marks of weakness, marks of woe,” of passerby’s that the speaker identifies the sense of depression that has descended like the smog of an industrial city, upon its inhabitants. This entity that takes with it the hop...