A Travelling Man: Eighteenth Century Essays Book

This was fascinating. I bought it because I really like Thompson's books and think he's a really good historian and I really like Blake. However, it ended up being much less about Blake and much more about obscure 18th century Christian sects. I found that interesting though as I was raised in a very evangelical church where we were told their belief system was "as the original church founded by the apostles". So it was intriguing to read where their ideas had actually come from only a few centuries earlier and how those ideas had developed and what other ideas people were having at the same time. So I ended up liking the first half of this book much better than the second half where he actually got around to talking about Blake.

There was also discussion of the rights of women that I thought was very interesting. Some were claiming that if they gave "any woman" rights then "why not also birds and dogs" (49). Which is kinda terrifying that it shows that the female was considered equal to animals not man. It also reminded me of all the arguments we've been hearing about marriage equality lately and how it will lead to bestiality and incest.

Swedenborg came across as quite a misogynist though. Saying how men were able to have mistresses if their wife was not of their faith but that women shouldn't because, "with men is the love of sex in general but with women the love of one of the sex... The male sex has stimulations that kindle and inflame but which is not the case with the female sex" (138).

Thompson spent a lot of time discussing Muggletonians (which I'd never heard of before). They had some very interesting ideas about Eve and the Serpent. The idea that Cain was the serpent's child instead of Adam's and that humans had been two races one with a heavenly inspiration and one with a satanic one was quite interesting.

When he did focus on Blake he focused on a few poems and looked at early versions compared with published versions. I must admit I found it less enlightening that I was hoping. But then I find poetry and literary criticism quite hard to get into. Though there was one particular passage towards the end which I did like, "For once animated by the imagination , once released into culture and myth those old gods went on eternally, unless they were slain by the imagination or hammered by it into new forms and myths" (215).