William Blake’s poem London was an early...

Editor's note: ...exposé of urban inequality, portraying a city where suffering is etched into every face and reinforced by what he calls "mind-forged manacles", the internalized limits imposed by power and social hierarchy. Blake connects the misery of exploited children, soldiers sacrificed to political ambition, and women driven into prostitution to the institutions that govern society, sharply implicating both Church and Crown. His image of blood (Blake wore a red bonnet while wondering the streets of London) running down "palace-walls" is a pointed accusation that royal authority (power is pathological) rests on the suffering of ordinary people. More than two centuries later, Blake’s poem still resonates as a critique of how entrenched power can normalize injustice and make it seem inevitable. London was a "nightmare city" of the rich and the poor just as in some respects London is returning to today. The concept of "Charter" means we have to be given permission to be on certain streets, we have to be there by "charter." All these social horrors are allowed by "charters" from Blake's poem London. Chartered CCTV cameras. Chartered surveillance systems. Chartered access. 
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London

I wandered through each chartered street,

      Near where the chartered Thames does flow, 

 A mark in every face I meet,

     Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man, 

   In every infant's cry of fear, 

In every voice, in every ban, 

   The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry 

   Every blackening church appalls,

And the hapless soldier's sigh

   Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets

   I hear How the youthful harlot's curse

Blasts the new-born infant's tear,

   And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

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Editor's note: In 18th-century Britain, loyalty oaths to the monarch functioned as a formal test of political conformity, requiring citizens in public roles to publicly affirm allegiance or face exclusion and suspicion. While modern London no longer compels ideological oaths, the city's extensive network of security infrastructure, including facial recognition cameras and pervasive surveillance, reflects a different method of maintaining public order and state authority. Both systems, though separated by centuries, reveal how governments respond to perceived threats by expanding mechanisms that monitor and regulate citizens, raising enduring questions about the balance between security, loyalty, and personal freedom in one of the world’s most watched capitals. William Blake and Thomas Paine moved in the same radical circles in 1790s London and shared revolutionary sympathies, and Blake is believed to have warned Paine of his impending arrest, helping prompt his flight to France, though there is no firm evidence they were close personal friends.