Jake Elliott

My project entitled “William Blake and London: The Artist Visualising London” places Blake’s poetic and visual representations of the metropolis in the context of London’s rapid expansion, as embodied in its proliferating print and publishing cultures, its material and architectural changes and its shifting artistic and political networks. In Blake’s work the city oscillates between the new Jerusalem and a series of disconnected processes, characterising London as a space of dynamic, and demonic, creation. This reflects the explosion of visual and conceptual iterations of the metropolis in this period: from the growth of print culture and hobbies like extra-illustration, to the growing debate around the need for a centralised police-force to patrol a uniform space, to the development of visual mediums such as the Panorama which seek to encompass the entirety of the metropolis. By placing Blake’s work within this context, I seek to both illuminate his own work and the multiform ways in which the metropolis was visualised, and conceptualised, in the Romantic period.

MA English: Issues in Modern Culture, UCL (2016)

BA English, Univeristy of York (2014)