AO3 Holy Thursday (I)

• Blake's views here are influenced by Issac Watts's books and poems for children that were seen as morally worth and educational.
• Annual services for all the Charity Schools in London held in St Paul's since


  1782
• The annual services for the Charity Schools in London were held on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday in the Christian calendar
• Charity-school children of London took part in a special service of 'thanksgiving' for their benefactors in St. Paul's Cathedral


  Six thousand orphans, scrubbed clean and dressed in the coats of distinctive colours, were marched two by two under the control of their beadles, and sang in the cathedral
• The emotional effect of the singing of perhaps 5000 children, evidently felt by Blake, is testified to by a number of observers, including the composer Haydn
• Poverty was rife in London in the 1780s and 1790s
• Though the vast majority of people claiming relief were needy through no fault of their own, certain sections of society nevertheless believed that poverty was caused by the bad habits of the poor: their preference for drinking and gambling, for example, or through their own simple laziness
• To reduce the rising cost of poor relief some people argued that the act of receiving charity itself should be made less attractive and hence less likely to be sought after
• Parents might sell their children to become chimney sweepers (or girls could become prostitutes) and other menial jobs, often to increase the chance of their children surviving
• Some philanthropic initiatives attempted to address these issues, but asylums and charity schools were often linked to the exploitative apprenticeship system
• Blake often voiced dissatisfaction with charity because he saw it as a sign of a societal failure to confront the situations that resulted in the need for charity
• Perhaps the optimism in the poem is undermined by the contextual point that the poem first appeared as a satirical piece in Blake's 'Poetical Sketches' in 1784