Wayback Machine Allows World Literature Class Trip to London in 1810 to Meet Poet and Painter William Blake

Writer Explains Support for Civil Disobedience and Revolution, Challenging Government and Church Restriction on Freedoms

While blizzards and ice storms pounded the Norwich campus this spring, a group of students enrolled in Gina Logan’s World Literature course (EN202) used the “newly-available technology of time travel” to escape the relentless Vermont weather and visit London during the year of 1810.  While touring the city, several class members met William Blake, renowned eighteenth-century poet and painter, and interviewed him for Work Sighted.  Logan reports that she was “delighted” that some of her students had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to “sit down in William’s Blake’s living room and have a conversation with him.”  As a result, Logan explained the “Wayback Machine” enabled the class to get beyond thinking of Blake as a “dead white male” and, instead, witness the “artist’s creative passions which produced work that resonates across the boundaries of time and space.”  Logan characterized the interviews as “wonderful, creative, engaging, and just amazing” examples of student scholarship.  Throughout the course of their visits, students were able to get Blake to explain why, as a British citizen, he supported the American and French revolutions as well as his contempt for his own government which increasingly sought to restrict free expression at the same time that it allowed economic distinctions between classes to grow.  Blake also shared his disdain for organized religion which he felt openly advocated conformity and blighted creativity and ingenuity.

Power to the People: Blake on What Happens When Governments Exploit by Miley P. Massed »

Blake: Hold Fast to Truth, Whether It Disturbs or Disrupts by Noah Lucia »

Rebellious Americans Lend Blake Inspiration by Victoria Wilson »