‘The Little Black Boy’ – taking stock: Blake, Race and Racism
After the recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Chair of the Blake Society, Dr Sibylle Erle, explores the poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ and its implications for our understanding of race and racism in the work and world of William Blake.
In his Guardian review of ‘William Blake’s Universe’ (23 February 2024), the Blake exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Jonathan Jones calls Blake a ‘one off’ artist and ‘one of the greatest poets in the English language’. The recognition of Blake’s talents and artistic ambitions are beautifully captured in the title of an exhibition which projects Blake’s mythmaking and refers to European ideas, philosophical traditions and contexts of revolution in equal parts. But Jones, who admires Blake, cannot but be frustrated with an exhibition in which, he claims, Blake is ‘outdone’ by other artists. If the curators’ intention was to bring Blake’s works into dialogue with his European contemporaries, to allow him to appear less singular, then, according to this reviewer, the Cambridge exhibition is a distraction, if not a failure. For Jones, Blake ‘stands apart in this gathering: a mystery, a prodigy, whom his fans accepted might be able to see the monstrous “ghost of a flea” or the spirit of John Milton’.
The presence of ‘The Little Black Boy’, chosen to illustrate Blake’s response to one of the many crises of his age (slavery), confronts Jones with an even bigger problem: the caption to this iconic work cannot gloss over the fact that Blake was no abolitionist; Blake, according to Jones, was ‘clearly a racist by modern standards’. Jones’s review and assessment of Blake’s pictorial language have left me feeling uneasy. For me, reading or viewing Blake is not so much about what we believe him to have seen but about what we see in his works. Blake lived more than two hundred years ago and the languages of our moral debates have changed significantly, while some admittedly stayed the same. We all know that Blake got into trouble with the law because he attacked a soldier who took offence and pursued the issue, which started as a misunderstanding, to the bitter end; what I admire most in Blake and his story, as opposed to the other Romantics’, is that he was accused and eventually acquitted of treason. The emotional fallout must have been enormous. What I find puzzling is that Jones decided to treat Blake as if he was one of us. In my opinion, we need to judge him within his own time.
Blake was friends with John Gabriel Stedman, a military man and, though sympathetic to the cause, no abolitionist. In 1791, when he began work on Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), Blake engraved at least thirteen of the full-page plates. Many have argued that Blake ‘dampens’, to use Li Qui Peh’s term (2023: 368), the brutal and explicit nature of Stedman’s (lost) drawings by superimposing the visual language of Neoclassicism and sometimes pornographic eroticism. There is no companion poem to ‘The Little Black Boy’ in Songs of Experience (1794) that openly tackles the horrors of slavery. Why is that? Was Blake a racist without knowing it? Did he make exceptions for his friends? There are no easy answers, for me at least.
In the catalogue to the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam David Bindman deliberates that ‘the Black boy’s vision of redemption […] is significantly limited, for […] the Black boy is still cast as subservient to the little white boy, shading him from the heat’ (2024: 99); the white boy converses with Jesus, but the little black boy stands back and listens. Bindman uses the word ‘communes’, when suggesting that one boy talks to Jesus while the other does not. Is that really all that there is to see? The Fitzwilliam owns not one but several copies of Songs of Innocence (the different versions displayed with this Emanation are all at the Fitzwilliam). The act of exclusion, at least in the plate of the chosen copy, is dulled because both boys, in Bindman words, are ‘represented as white’ (99); the fully clothed figures appear in a pinkish colour. Are we to conclude that while skin colour may vary, all our souls are white (pure)? Racialised religious colour symbolism, no doubt, determines how we read the text and its images. This poem all depends on the right colours being in the right places:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:
Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.
(‘The Little Black Boy’, ll. 23-28, E9)
What the little black boy seems to be thinking is that only in death can he be equal to the little white boy. That equality can only be achieved in death is poignant. And, even in death, as argued by Bindman, the little black boy is submissive, relinquishing his place to those who he thinks superior. The pronoun ‘he’ in the final line of the poem, however, invites speculation; who is ‘he’ who will love the little black boy: is it the little white boy or Jesus? Jesus, after all, declares, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). Blake’s empathy can be felt and it is that empathy that makes Blake relevant to all aspects of our lives. I think that there is no time to waste, because discussing ‘The Little Black Boy’ will not only shed light on the significance of Blake’s art and poetry, it will also unite us in the attempt to find meaning.
The Cambridge exhibition got me thinking about how we – as Trustees of The Blake Society – want to talk about Blake. As we are gearing up for Blake200 in 2027 and are exploring avenues of how best to promote interest in Blake across the globe, we recognise the importance of being inclusive and diverse in our approach to Blake. At The Blake Society we are asking the big questions and we do not shy away from difficult conversations. We must listen to all those who want to work with us and where appropriate amplify their voices. During the last AGM in January 2024, I pledged that I, in my role as Chair, would review and update the Society’s Diversity Policy. The consultation process has begun.
Dr Sibylle Erle (Chair of The Blake Society)
Further Reading
Bindman, David and Esther Chadwick, William Blake’s Universe [exhibition catalogue] (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, in Association with Philip Wilson Publishers, 2024)
Elaref, Abdelnaeim Ibrahim Awad, ‘Dismantling Otherness or Empowering Racism: William Blake’s Little Black Boy Reconsidered.’ Qena Faculty of Arts 33.62 (2024): 35-64.
Gress, Timothy, ‘Illuminated Blake: Why Multiple Copies Matter.’ New York Public Library (5 July 2023)
Peh, Li Qi, ‘Stedman’s Horror, Blake’s Indifference.’ ELH 90.2 (2023): 367-91.
Perris, Jonathan, ‘God Lives in the Sun: The Critique of Evangelical Abolitionism in William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy.”‘ European Romantic Review 34.6 (2023): 629-45.
Lennon, Wendy, ‘‘‘The Little Black Boy” by William Blake.’ Ten-Minute Book Club. University of Oxford (18 April 2023)
