Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” ALAN RICHARDSON Biake's “The Little Black Boy” offers a particularly rich site for examining relations of lyric and ideology, with its obvious rele- vance to such contemporary social and political issues as colo- nialism, the antislavery movement, the question of religious education in the colonies, and its more subtle engagement with concerns over mass schooling and what Richard Altick calls the “literacy crisis” in England in the 1790s (67-77). And yet in a number of recent studies emphasizing the ideological signifi- cance and sociopolitical contexts of Blake’s poetry, “The Little Black Boy” is mentioned only in passing or not at all (Glen; Cre- hen; Larrissy; Ferber). This critical reticence, all the more puz- zling in relation to one of Blake's most widely anthologized and frequently taught lyrics, may stem from suspicions, articulated by S. Foster Damon as early as 1924, that “The Little Black Boy” reflects the racist assumptions underlying much antislavery writing (269), a charge most recently (and most forcefully) stated by the Kenyan writer Ngugi in his essay “Literature and Society.” In the context of his critique of colonialist discourse and of the “racist structure” of European languages, particularly English—“probably the most racist of all human languages” (14)—Ngugi cites “The Little Black Boy” as reflecting a “nega- tive” image of the African and, more insidiously, as embodying the “white liberal’s dream of a day when black and white can love one another without going through the agony of violent reckoning.” Liberalism, Ngugi goes on, “has always been the sugary ideology of imperialism: it fosters the illusion in the ex- ploited of the possibilities of peaceful settlement and painless es- 233234 PLL ALAN RICHARDSON cape from an imperialist violence which anyway is not called violence but law and order” (19-20). Ngugi’s critique situates Blake’s lyric as an exemplary text of the antislavery movement, which characteristically attacks slavery while supporting colo- nialism, rejecting violent solutions, and maintaining a conde- scending if not explicitly racist attitude toward black Africans while lamenting their plight. Earlier criticism of “The Little Black Boy” tends either to group it uncritically with the tradition of antislavery writing, as in Wylie Sypher’s standard account (157; cf. Dykes 19; Erdman 132), or to present it in more complex terms but with questions of race and politics in brackets, recognizing its “dramatic” char- acter (Adams 263) and multiple ironies but viewing them as expressing a “more universal meaning than antislavery propa- ganda” (Gleckner 106), whether that meaning is sought in terms of a “Christian paradox” (Hirsch 180) or of a critique of “Chris- tian dualism” (Bloom 40). My own view is that Blake's lyric crit- ically addresses the racist and colonialist attitudes informing most antislavery literature of the period, and that its complex ironies arise from Blake’s immanent critique of that movement's ideology; and, since the Christianizing of Africans made a key aspect of antislavery ideology, that questions of race and of reli- gion in the lyric should not be treated separately. Moreover, the form and genre of the poem also reflect its concern with the racist and imperialist subtext of antislavery literature, as issues of race and especially colonialism were related both discursively and institutionally to the development of children’s literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the Songs of Innocence, in which “The Little Black Boy” was first published in 1789, does not seem to have been marketed as a children’s book, it clearly situates itself in the tra- dition of children’s religious poetry and hymns represented by such writers as Watts, Smart, Wesley, and Barbauld. Blake was quite familiar with the newly emergent children’s book market as an illustrator of such volumes as Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1788), and had met a number of writers for children per- sonally through his association with Joseph Johnson, the pub- lisher of Anna Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth.' Children’s ‘For recent studies of Blake's relation to the children’s book industry and the chil-“The Little Black Boy” PLL 235 writers and writers of “popular” literature—forms which were not considered as particularly distinct at the time—were active in the antislavery movement; one thinks of Barbauld, Thomas Day, and Hannah More, who helped invent the popular fiction industry with her Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-98). Works for “the lower orders of people, and for children” (typically grouped to- gether by Sarah Trimmer in 1802 [I: 245]) often featured anti- slavery themes: Day’s Sandford and Merton, Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose, Aikin and Barbauld’s Evenings at Home, Ann and Jane Tay- lor’s Rhymes for the Nursery, Edgeworth’s Moral Tales and Popular Tales; and such popular tracts (or at least tracts distributed for popular consumption) as The Black Prince: A True Story and The Sorrows of Yamba in the Cheap Repository or Legh Richmond's The Negro Servant, published by the Religious Tract Society.? In addition to its didactic character and mass distribution, antislavery literature held deeper affinities with popular and children’s literature. If the antislavery movement had to deal, sometimes explicitly, always implicitly, with issues of colonialism, children’s and popular literature were themselves conceived of as instruments in colonizing a newly literate public, and the key trope of “primitive” was applied to children, “rural folk,” and colonized peoples alike. As Jacqueline Rose has argued, a central justification of colonialism and imperialism was implicated within the new conception of childhood innocence advanced in the eighteenth century by Rousseau and writers like Day and Barbauld: “Childhood is seen as the place where an older form of culture is preserved (nature or oral tradition), but the effect of this in turn is that this same form of culture is infantilised. At this level, children’s fiction has a set of long-established links with the colonialism which identified the new world with the in- fantile state of man” (50). Or as Ariel Dorfman states from a postcolonial Latin American perspective, “Since those communi- ties, classes, races, continents, and individuals who don’t fit the official mold tend to be viewed as ‘children,’ as incomplete be- ings who haven’t yet reached the age of maturity, it is children’s literature, or the infantilization of mass market adult literature, dren’s hymn tradition see Leader 1-37; Glen 8-32; Summerfield 208-40, *For Day, Aiken, Barbauld, and Edgeworth see Sypher; for the Taylors and Legh Rich- mond, see below. The Black Prince and The Sorrows of Yamba can be found in More, et al. 1: 173-87, 374-80.23600 PLL ALAN RICHARDSON which forms the basis for the entire process of cultural domina- tion” (8). The links theorized by Rose and Dorfman can be seen in Rousseau’s view of Robinson Crusoe as the only book fit for children to read (184), and in a whole line of children’s books, beginning with Sandford and Merton, which follow Defoe in de- veloping the scenario of a European stranded on and colonizing an island or desert area inhabited only by “savages” (a tradition extensive enough to constitute its own subgenre, the Robinson- nade).3 Those tendencies within later eighteenth-century and Romantic thought that led to the idealization of childhood, of rural laborers, and of “primitive” peoples also supported the view that all three groups were uncivilized and needed to be properly trained or educated—disciplined—if they were to fit into the industrialized society then in the process of emerging. Finally, some of the same institutions, using similar methods, took on the burden of civilizing children and “primitives” alike. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for example, was concerned with supporting Charity Schools and (later) Sun- day Schools in England and missions in the colonies, and pro- duced a great body of tract literature and educational material for both groups (Jones; Clarke). The Cheap Repository Tracts were distributed by the millions both among the poor in Britain and throughout the colonies (Altick 74-75); by 1797 Bishop Porteous (who took on the responsibility for distributing the tracts through missionaries) could write to More, “The sublime and immortal publication of the ‘Cheap Repository’ I hear from every corner of the globe” (qtd. in Pedersen 111). The Religious Tract Society and its offshoot, the British and Foreign Bible Society, were similarly concerned with “the circulation of small religious books and treatises in foreign countries as well as throughout the British dominions,” and in 1814 began publish- ing a series of children’s books (Religious Tract Society 12-13). Andrew Bell’s “Madras system” for educating poor children in England through a factory-like system of superintendents and student “monitors” was first developed in India as a means of socializing the abandoned “half-caste” children of British sol- diers (Byatt 186-94). A program of minimal or passive literacy (often including reading but not writing) and simplistic tract lit- erature inculcating basic religious principles and reinforcing do- For Sandford and Merton see Rose 51-54; for the Robinsonnade see Darton 106-19.“The Little Black Boy” PLL 237 cility and acceptance of the present order was deemed suitable for the lower classes in England and nonwhite peoples through- out the British empire alike. It should be added that, as Frank Klingberg points out in his study of the Society for the Propaga- tion of the Gospel, “identical arguments” were used against ed- ucating lower-class whites in Great Britain and black slaves in the Americas: the former would become “presumptuous and unruly,” and the latter “dissatisfied” with slavery and “unwilling to work” (5). If the colonization of childhood in the later eighteenth cen- tury helps account for Blake’s treatment of slavery in a children’s literary form, the infantilization of the colonial subject helps elucidate the terms in which Blake poses his dual critique of children’s and colonial discourse. For the antislavery literature of Blake’s time, which reached its peak in terms of number and diffusion of publications in 1788, the year before Songs of Inno- cence was published (Sypher 10—19), relied extensively on two re- lated tropes critically addressed in Blake’s lyric: Africa (and Africans) as culturally “dark” or “benighted,” and the “savage” as uncivilized or “untutored.” Although the image of Africa as the “dark” continent, metonymically extending the blackness of the African’s skin to African culture and Africa itself, is some- times said to be a Victorian invention (Hammond and Jablow 28; Brantliger), the trope of darkness or blackness comes up - throughout the antislavery literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In James Montgomery’s The West Indies (1807), for example, which has been called the “most represen- tative” work of antislavery verse (Sypher 228), the darkness of the African’s mind and that of the African continent are empha- sized and metaphorically connected: the “untutor'd” African Sees in his mind, where desolation reigns, Fierce as his clime, uncultur'd as his plains, Sees in his soul, involved with thickest night, An emanation of eternal light. (20) In Anne Yearsley’s Poem on the Inkumanity of the Slave-Trade, one of five major antislavery poems published in 1788, an enslaved African’s father is described in similar terms: he shuts out The soft, fallacious gleam of hope, and turns2380 PLL ALAN RICHARDSON Within upon his mind: horrid and dark Are his mild, unenlighten’d powers: no ray Of forc’d philosphy to calm his soul, But all the anarchy of wounded nature. (390) Hannah More's Slavery, A Poem, also published in 1788, makes use of a similar trope to describe the unequally distributed “Light” of liberty’s “partial day”: While the chill North with thy bright ray is blest, Why should fell darkness half the South invest? While Britain basks in 1 thy full blaze of light, Why lies sad Afric quench’d in total night? Although More’s use here of the darkness trope is not explicitly racist as in Day or Yearsley, it reflects the same underlying atti- tude of condescension. More refers elsewhere in the poem to the African’s “rude energy,” the “savage root” of his virtues, and de- fends the African’s humanity in the following terms: “Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel.”* What is constant throughout most antislavery verse is that, whether “noble” or “ignoble,” the African is first and foremost an uncivilized “savage,” childlike and “unenlightened.” The same emphasis on the African’s related darkness and ig- norance recurs throughout popular and children’s antislavery writings. In The Black Prince, for example, one of the Cheap Re- pository Tracts, Naimbanna, a noble savage, is brought to England and “delivered . . . from the state of darkness in which, in com- mon with millions of his countrymen, he had been lately plunged”; “rude and ignorant, with no just ideas of religion,” he embraces Christianity with a “child-like simplicity” and gives rise to missionary hopes that “those who now sit in darkness shall be brought, like Naimbanna, to know God and themselves” (More et al. 1: 177, 185-86). The title character (never otherwise named) of Legh Richmond’s The Negro Servant (1804), distrib- uted by the Religious Tract Society, is similarly changed from “the once dark, perverse, and ignorant heathen” to a “now con- vinced, enlightened, humble and believing Christian”; exempli- fying the “simplicity and sincerity of real Christianity,” he ‘More, Slavery 11.13-14, 17-18, 71, 74, 150.1 “The Little Black Boy” PLL 239 testifies: “God let me be made slave by white men, to do me good ... He take me from the land of darkness, and bring me to the land of light” (10-12). Underlying all of these texts is the system of discursive oppositions—white and black, civilization and savagery, good and evil, self and Other—which Abdul R. JanMohamed has termed, after Fanon, the “Manichean allegory” of colonialist writing (78). It is this system of dichotomies, to which one can add en(light)enment and darkness, and Christian and heathen, which Blake critically manipulates in “The Little Black Boy,” dis- tancing his own treatment of the African subject from that of most antislavery writers. The lyric begins disarmingly by seem- ing to confirm the same hierarchical valuations—white and Eu- ropean over black and “southern’—which inform nearly all contemporary antislavery no less than pro-slavery writing: My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white, White as an angel is the English child: But I am black, as if bereav'd of light.® Without (for the moment) considering where his notions come from, we can see here the black child’s own speech conforming to the Manichean ideology pervading the antislavery discourse of Blake’s time. Angels and souls are white; blackness is a purely negative (“bereav'd”) condition. It is only in the second stanza that one begins to sense the distance between Blake’s stance and that of Montgomery or of the tracts: My mother taught me underneath a tree And sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east began to say. It is worth pausing here to note that, at a time when “untu- tored savage” is stock poetic diction, Blake’s emphasis on the Af- rican mother’s teaching (which forms the subject of the design for the first plate) is extremely significant. It was essential to apologists for slavery and antislavery evangelists alike to view the African as untaught, uncivilized; Hume’s infamous remark that *My text for “The Little Black Boy” is the facsimile reproduction found in Blake (unpaginated), plates 9 and 10.240 PLL ALAN RICHARDSON Africans have “no ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences” (qtd. in Sypher 52) or Chesterfield’s that Africans are “the most ignorant and unpolished people in the world” (qtd. in Dabydeen 29) are only particularly harsh statements of a view shared by nearly all Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Ashton Nichols’s recent study of nineteenth-century exploration narratives shows, Africans were frequently portrayed during this period as not only without a civilization or a written language, but without language itself; in the phantasmal Africa constructed in these narratives, insofar as the “natives” made sounds to one another, theirs was “a lan- guage of demonstrated emotion rather than of ideas and com- munication” (8). Again, in regard to the Africans’ alleged lack of civilization, law, traditions, rationality, it makes little difference whether they are portrayed as “noble” or as “beastly” savages; as Dorfman remarks of the ideology of children’s and popular lit- erature, what he calls “industrial works of fiction” (85): All insubordination must be left by the wayside. If it has its origins in a plausible misunderstanding ... then we are in the presence of noble savages who will have no choice but to see the light of Rousseau and climb into the sheepfold of progress. If the savages are ornery, they will have to be exterminated or caged up. (36) Although the eighteenth-century convention of the “noble sav- age” is sometimes presented as a progressive (if ethnocentric) idea which lubricated Europeans’ sympathies and helped pave the way for eventual equality (George; Kain), it should be clear that, as JanMohamed insists, the notion of savagery (noble or ignoble) supported the larger colonialist project independent of the more temporary slavery question: “If... the barbarism of the native is irrevocable, or at least very deeply ingrained, then the European’s attempt to civilize him can continue indefinitely, the exploitation of his resources can proceed without hindrance, and the European can persist in enjoying a position of moral superiority” (81). Characterizations of “native” peoples as “bar- baric,” “savage,” or “primitive” participate in what Johannes Fa- bian, in his critique of Western anthropological discourse, calls the “denial of coevalness,” a strategy that, in implicit support of colonialism and neocolonialism, turns spatial relations into tem- poral ones, conveniently obscuring the geopolitical fact that the“The Little Black Boy” PLL 241 colonized “Other” is “ultimately, other people who are our con- temporaries” (31, 143). English perceptions of Africans as cul- turally backwards and “mentally defective,” well established by Blake’s time, remained dominant throughout the nineteenth century and were, if anything, intensified in support of the “col- onization, Christianization, and commercialization” of the Afri- can peoples (Lyons 52; cf. Curtin 28~57; Davis 446-82). It might at first seem that Blake’s lyric, as it goes on to repre- sent the mother’s teaching in the “wild,” confirms rather than departs from the colonialist image of the African as noble but childlike, presenting her in what Sypher calls the “pastoral” mode of antislavery writing, “a pseudo-African in a pseudo- Africa” (9): Look on the rising sun: there God does live And gives his light, and gives his heat away. And flowers and trees and men and beasts receive Comfort at morning joy in the noon day. And we are put on earth a little space, ‘That we may learn to bear the beams of love. And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice, Saying: come out from the grove my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. One could read these lines in terms of a “natural” theism, some- where in between pagan sun-worship (a conventional attribute of the “noble savage” [Sypher 120-30]) and Christian monothe- ism, and not unrelated in tone to the patronizing remark in Adanson’s Voyage to Senegal cited in the notes to Day’s Dying Ne- gro (1773): “It is amazing that such a rude and illiterate people should reason so pertinently in regard to the Heavenly Bodies” (7). It is at this point, however, that one must consider not only the divergence between the mother’s quoted statements and the quite different language of her son, but also what in the child’s experience makes this divergence possible. Heather Glen has ar- gued that what distinguishes Blake’s poems about children like the chimney sweeper and the black boy from those of his con-242) PLL ALAN RICHARDSON temporaries is that “the unprivileged . . . have their own distinc- tive voices: they are not the objects of sympathetic or protesting comment—of any comment at all” (31). But part of what makes these voices distinctive is that they are not the children’s “own” in any simple manner; in contrast to such single-voiced lyrics in the same collection as “The Shepherd” and “The Blossom,” “The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Little Black Boy” critically juxtapose several disparate discourses, each reflecting a differ- ent range of ideological commitments. These discourses conflict productively in a manner that Volosinov terms “lyric irony,” the “encounter in one voice of two incarnate value judgments and their interference with one another” (113). There are in fact three competing discourses implicated in the “distinctive” voice of “The Little Black Boy”—the mother's, as quoted by her child; his iteration of the Manichean allegory in the first stanza; and his articulation of the quite different perspective informing the last two stanzas. Critics like Bloom (39-41) and Hirsch emphasize the disparity between the mother’s African teaching (Hirsch calls it “the little heathen myth of the mother” [180]), quoted in the middle three stanzas of the poem, and her son’s Christian notions, developed in the framing stanzas, without considering where the black child has received the latter. It seems most likely that the little black boy has been in the hands of missionaries, or well- intentioned masters, or a Sunday school, either in the West In- dies, where some plantations sponsored mission schools—the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel itself owned a planta- tion with three hundred slaves managed with an eye to their “ameliorization and Christianization” (Klingberg 19)—or in En- gland, where the child might have come, as did many Africans in the later eighteenth century, by way of previous enslavement in the West Indies or elsewhere in the Americas (Walvin 46—79). Displaced from the “southern wild” to a region where he has contact with or at least direct knowledge of an English child, the black child has retained his mother’s “heathen” teaching while exposed, as the first stanza makes clear, to the Manichean dis- course characteristic of contemporary missionary tracts: guaran- teed his place in heaven, but taught to know his subordinate place on earth until then.“The Little Black Boy” PLL 243 But the poem’s two concluding stanzas represent a perspective distanced both from the missionary propaganda informing the first stanza and the child’s quotation of his mother’s teachings, which, rather than presenting blackness as negative or “be- reav'd,” instead celebrate it as a “shady grove.” The stanzas in which the mother is quoted, while they invert the dichotomy es- tablished in the first stanza, remain caught within- its discursive polarities, evoking the no less “Manichean” counter-perspective described by Fanon: “If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic ¢fluvia” (45). The final two stanzas, how- ever, represent an attempt to move beyond the binary opposi- tions governing the lyric up to this point by collapsing blackness and whiteness together as twin attributes of “cloud,” and by un- settling the hierarchical relation of the black child and his white counterpart: ‘Thus did my mother say and kissed me. And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear, To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me. ‘The notions expressed in these stanzas, sometimes compared to those of Swedenborg (Crehen 99), quite evidently were not received through Sunday school or plantation missionary efforts. Rather, the black child has at this point managed to revise the Manichean gospel taught him by his masters, and articulated in the poem’s first stanza, by subversively mingling it with his memories of his mother's African teachings, producing a self- affirming discourse of his own. His revisionist gesture bears a striking resemblance, in the foreshortened space of the lyric, to Eugene Genovese's account of how West Indian slave communi- ties transformed Christianity from an alienating, colonialist ide- ology into an empowering, assertive one through Africanizing it (168-82). This is not, of course, a matter of Blake’s intuiting or “anticipating” the developments described by Genovese but244 PLL ALAN RICHARDSON rather of his adapting a similar discursive strategy, most likely in reaction to the limitations and hypocrisy of the antislavery move- ment, which he would attack from a more uncompromising, anti-imperialistic postition in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Erd- man 226-42). As Frederic Jameson stresses in The Political Uncon- scious, Genovese’s approach to black religion “restores the vitality of these utterances by reading them, not as the replication of imposed beliefs, but rather as a process whereby the hegemonic Christianity of the slave owners is appropriated, secretly emp- tied of its content, and subverted to the transmission of quite dif- ferent oppositional and coded messages” (86). Through his use of lyric irony in “The Little Black Boy,” Blake constructs, from the imagined position of a Christianized African child, a simi- larly counter-hegemonic utterance. The mother’s view of black skin as a “shady grove,” at once a sign of the African’s closeness to god and a defense from god’s excessive light and heat, helps the “Little Black Boy” throw the colonialist mentality imposed upon him—“But I am black as if bereav'd of light’—back into question. Taught to feel inferior to the “little English boy’—his master’s child in Jamaica? his persecutor in England?—the black child is able to counter, through his intermixture of Christian teachings and what Blake presents as an African religious doc- trine, with a myth of his own devising that restores to him, if not a measure of real power, at least the potential for ideological re- sistance. Although he continues to portray himself in the role of servant to the English boy, the black child is able by the end of the poem to see white and black skin as “equally opaque” (Erd- man 239), and his own, “southern” ability to bear the divine heat as bringing him closer to God, and placing him in the role of older brother or protector to the white child. It might be objected that the lyric enacts not ideological resis- tance but rather, as Harold Pagliaro has recently put it, “psycho- logical escape” (10), perhaps even broaching a Nietzschean critique of institutionalized Christianity as a “slave religion” in its displacement of the black child’s desire for social amelioration to heaven. But Genovese’s caution against applying such a cri- tique too schematically to the religion of slave communities in the Americas is applicable to the representation of religious dis- course in “The Little Black Boy” as well. Slave religion was in- herently subversive because it “meant that the slaves hada “The Little Black Boy” PLL 245 achieved a degree of psychological and cultural autonomy” (148) and, if it looked to heaven, it helped set the needed precondi- tions for racial equality on earth: “The religious leaders first had to combat that sense of unworthiness and inferiority which the slaveholders constantly tried to infuse in the slaves. The doc- trine of spiritual equality and a future without white supremacy therefore had great positive value despite its restricted and con- servative political content” (266). Particularly as shaped by black preachers, Christian teachings could dissolve the ideological ground on which the principle of absolute mastery rested: “However much Christianity taught submission to slavery, it also carried a message of foreboding to the master class and of resis- tance to the enslaved” (165). Blake’s “Little Black Boy” achieves a still greater degree of “cultural autonomy,” more analogous to the slave religion of the West Indies than that of the American South, by supplementing Christian propaganda with African re- ligious beliefs to create a synthetic religious vision of his own, one subversive of or at least resistant to the Manichean opposi- tions of colonial discourse. Taking advantage of his otherwise difficult position between cultures, he is able (however provi- sionally) to establish an autonomous perspective which tempo- rarily reverses his relation to the English child, placing him in the role of instructor: “And thus I say to little English boy.” In rehearsing and then mingling the teachings of his mother and his Christian masters, the black child is able to take on some- thing of their authority as well, a position reflected in the de- sign for the second plate, which depicts him presenting the smaller white child to Christ as a catechist presenting his pupil. Whether we take the Songs of Innocence as a children’s book proper or as a “children’s book for adults” (Leader 32), it clearly addresses two implied readers (if not two actual readerships): the English child evoked by the language and conventions of con- temporary children’s religious poetry (and figured within the text by the “little English boy”), and an adult reader familiar (as the parent who selected, purchased, and often recited such po- etry) with the discourse of children’s literature and sophisticated enough to detect Blake’s frequently ironic relationship to it. ©For the children’s book as an “ambivalent” text, addressing two implied readers (child and adult), see Knoepflmacher 497-530; Shavit 63-71.246 PLL ALAN RICHARDSON “The Little Black Boy” addresses both readers in its marked de- partures from the conventions of children’s poetry and in its more subtle assertion of links between the discursive postion of the black child and that of his English counterpart. Through presenting the black speaker as an equal and, if anything, closer to God than the “English boy,” Blake offers the child reader of his time a powerful alternative to the lesson in condescension enacted in a poem like Ann Taylor's “The Little Negro” (72-73): Ah! the poor little blackamoor, see there he goes ‘And the blood gushes out from his half frozen toes, And his legs are so thin you may see the very bones, ‘As he goes shiver, shiver, on the sharp cutting stones. He was once a negro boy, and a merry boy was he Playing outlandish plays, by the tall palm tree; Or bathing in the river, like a brisk water rat, And at night sleeping sound, on a little bit of mat. By replacing the animalistic “outlandish plays” of the typical Af- rican of most children’s and popular literature with a scene of maternal instruction, Blake not only counters the “untutored savage” convention but also underscores the relation of the black child’s experience to that of the English child. The children of Blake’s time were themselves the subjects of an internal colonial- ist program unprecedented in British history, designed to con- tain the threat of a reading public through programs of minimal, mass education and a popular tract industry aimed at supplanting both the “intellectual vernacular” (Smith 35) of rad- icals like Paine and the carnivalesque anti-authoritarianism of the popular chapbooks.” In Blake’s representation of a black child’s attempt to challenge a crippling ideology through cre- ative subversion the English reader—child or adult—could find a discursive site for opposition and a rare lesson in dissent. “The Little Black Boy” both poses a critique of the colonialist dis- course informing antislavery poems and tracts, and offers a par- adigm for resisting the new forms of social discipline epitomized by industrial children’s fiction and tracts for the lower orders, a “popular” literature imposed from above. ‘7For the politics of children’s education and reading in Blake's time see, in addition to Smith, Altick 67-77; Jones; Pedersen; Webb 13-59; Richardson.e “The Little Black Boy” PLL 247 Works Cited ‘Adams, Hazard. 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