“By the end of the 18th century this tradition of plebeian and tradesman Dissent had drifted a great distance away from the polite and rational religious culture – a culture which, with its uneasy memories of the Commonwealth, still feared ‘enthusiasts’. And the derisory judgments which the learned and the accomplished then made upon these enthusiasts still imposes itself upon us today. We see them only as eccentrics or as survivors. At a casual glance it seems self-evident that those who turned their backs upon rational (and historical) biblical criticism, and who even ignored or traduced all the advanced findings of the natural sciences (as did the Philadelphians, Hutchinsonians and Muggletonians), must have been locked into a religiose fantasy-world; they are quaint historical fossils. Donald Davie, who has cast a casual and a partial eye upon the ‘antinomian and heretical sects’ which ‘effectively influenced Blake’, has concluded that ‘as specifically religious insights, their ideas are beneath contempt.’ And he asks whether we may not have, in Blake, ‘a case of an imaginaitve genius born into a stratum of religious experience too shallow to sustain him...’...

“The danger is that we should confuse the reputability of beliefs, and the reputability of those who professed them, with depth or shallowness... That is, if we accept the view that in most societies we can observe an intellectual as well as institutional hegemony, or dominant discourse, which imposes a structuree of ideas and beliefs – deep assumptions as to social proprieties and economic process and as to the legitimacy of relations of property and power, a general ‘common sense’ as to what is possible and what is not, a limited horizon of moral norms and practical probabilities beyond which all must be blasphemous, seditious, insane or apocalyptic fantasy – a structure which serves to consolidate the existent social order, enforce its priorities, and which is itself enforced by rewards and penalities, by notions of ‘reputability’, and (in Blake's time) by liberal paronage or by its absence – if we accept this large mouthful, then we can see that these antinomian sects were hegemony's 18th-century opposition.”

—E. P. Thompson, Witness Aginast the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, 1993, CUP, pp107-09.

Happy New Year to All RFN Readers!
17:09pm, 4 January 2004: Well, I had a “mixed” xmas, some days lovely, some very trying – but the following anecdote (from, of all things, Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, as recounted by Thomas Jones in the LRB) cheered me up no end on my return to London. So I’m sharing it, just in case YOU need cheering up:

“Within hours of Hitler’s suicde, General Hans Krebs set out to pay a visit to General Vasily Chuikov, the Soviet commander. He arrived shortly before 4am on 1 May 1945, taking Chuikov by surprise. With the Russian general were the writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the poet Evgeny Dolmatovsky and the compser Matvei Blanter. As Blanter didn’t have a uniform, he was made to hide in a cupboard and keep quiet. Krebs informed Chuikov that Hitler and his wife had killed themsleves in his bunker. Chuikov, who wasn’t even aware that there was a bunker under the Reich Chancellory or that Hitler was married, calmly said that he always knew. He wasn’t prepared to negotiate: it was unconditional surrender or nothing. A few hours into the meeting, which went on into the afternoon, Blanter tumbled noisily out of the closet, unconscious. He was lifted from the floor and carried into another room without a word of explanation to Krebs.”