William blake and glastonbury

MICHAEL WOOD ON…

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series, and is the author of several books including The Story of China (Simon & Schuster, 2021). His Twitter handle is@mayavision

PUTTING AWAY THE CAMPING GEAR AFTER THIS year’s Glastonbury Festival, I found myself reflecting on the idea of alternative cultures. Since its origins, Glastonbury has always been political, and hosts a huge number of side discussions, concerts and seminars. It still gives money to Greenpeace, WaterAid and Oxfam, in addition to a host of local charities. As a festival of music and arts, it plays an important part in public discourse in these deeply polarised times – when, for instance, a journalist from The Times recently argued that the humanities are a waste of effort.

I was involved with festival founder Michael Eavis’s Woods Stage this year, collaborating with West Country singer-songwriter Steve Knightley on a show exploring the Diggers, Peterloo, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists. During it, Steve sang part of William Blake’s poetry collection ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’. (Blake, we are told, often sang his own poems to friends.)

I like to see Blake (1757–1827) as a spiritual godfather of the Glastonbury Festival. Artist, illustrator, engraver, poet and activist, he conversed with spirits and saw angels in trees. Jacob Bronowski’s 1965 book William Blake and the Age of Revolution sets Blake’s voice in the context of the age of revolution. Often ridiculed, Blake sank into oblivion after his death, until the biography by Alexander Gilchrist, completed by his widow, Anne, and published in 1863. Since then, his status has only grown, confirmed by a stunning exhibition at Tate Britain not long ago.

Blake emerged from the mainstream of British historical experience going back to the Civil War. The English revolution of the 1640s failed: radicals lost their hopes of a new age of republican justice and equality when, as the Digger Gerrard Winstanley put it, all mankind might live “in the light and strength of pure Reason”. The climax of elation in 1649 was followed by the slow betrayal of the 1650s. The monarchy was restored, leaving writers and artists with the bitter taste of defeat. Among them was John Milton, who wrote that “it is intolerable and incredible that evil should be stronger than good”.

But out of the cataclysm came an explosion of religious groups. In the 18th century, nonconformist churches multiplied, though persecuted and denied higher education. Bla