Mind Forg'd Manacles: William Blake and Slavery | Southbank Centre

Mind Forg'd Manacles: William Blake and Slavery

William Blake, Urizen in chains, Plate 20 from The First Book of Urizen, 1794. Department of Prints & Drawings, The British Museum. Photo: © Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum.

David Bindman, Darryl Pinckney
210 x 160 mm 148 pp softback
45 colour and 22 b/w illustrations
978185332 259 4
£14.99

William Blake (1757-1827) was unusually aware of the horrors of slavery, which he knew about in detail from a book he illustrated.  But slavery was to him not only a physical system but a mental state of restricted perception that he called ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Mental enslavement and its opposite, freedom, gave rise to his most dramatic and complex writings and images. With over 60 vivid reproductions from Blake’s illuminated books, watercolours and engravings in the British Museum, this volume includes an essay by the curator, leading Blake scholar David Bindman on the theme of slavery in Blake’s visual imagery, and another by novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney on Olaudah Equiano, an African former slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery in Blake’s time.

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