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Frontispiece to William Blake's
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) |
Dr David Fallon has published an essay entitled 'Philoprogenetive Blake' in
Blake, Gender and Culture (Pickering & Chatto, 2012). David contextualises Blake’s apocalyptic representations of sexuality,
especially female sexuality, within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
discussions of British population. Until the first British census in
1801 and Thomas Malthus's
Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), radicals, led by Richard Price, were ‘philoprogenitive’, promoting population growth as a
sign of a lively body politic. They believed that Britain’s population
was in decline, reflecting the failures of its
despotic government to deliver the peace and plenty necessary to a
burgeoning population. The essay traces Blake’s links to the
Enlightenment population debate and its contributors, especially his
hostility to Malthusianism, and notes the importance of philoprogenitive
discourse to a number of his poems, including
Visions of the Daughters of Albion,
America, and
The Four Zoas.
Blake’s repeated modifications of this discourse emphasise qualitative
female sexual pleasure, which complicates both the traditionally
quantitative language of philoprogenitivism but also recent feminist
assessments of Blake as a misogynist.
