ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to situate Blake in relation to the diversity of radical positions available in the 17905 and more specifically develops a parallel between Blake's brand of millenarian radicalism and the politics of Richard "Citizen" Lee, a little-known fellow inhabitant of London's sub-cultures of politics, publishing, and religious enthusiasm. I proceed on the assumption that any attempt to think about Blake and radicalism must recognise that the socalled Revolution controversy of the 1790s was neither simply a "debate" over prinCiples nor, alternatively, only a matter of "practical" political activity but also a contest over a variety of symbolic practices. Over recent years cultural historians, including lain McCalman and James Epstcin in the British context and Roger Chanicr and Lynn Hunt in the French, have shown that the circulation of signs in songs and (Oasts, nags and banners, as well as a variety of popular texts and images, constituted the very fabric of poli tics: "These were not merely the trimmings of political culture, but often went to the heart of what was ultimately at issue: how power at all levels of the state and civil society was to be defined and exercised" (Epstein 71 J. My own approach to these mailers describes the issues of definition and ownership not just in terms of polit ics narrowly conceived but also in relation to recent critical reconsiderations of JOrgen Habermas's understanding of the emergence and development of the public sphere. I believe that Blake's "Everlasting Gospel" is part of a counterenlightenment, part of a response to the formation of the classical bourgeois public sphere whose own authority lay in its appeal to Reason.
