Blake’s critics have never attempted to illustrate in a systematic manner how Blake used information he learned from writings published by members of the circle of Joseph Johnson in his own works during the period 1790-95. Although Blake was a peripheral figure in the Johnson circle – known to them through his profession of engraving and marginalized on account of his social position and lack of university education – his works reveal a continuing engagement with topics addressed in the writings of authors associated with Johnson, perhaps signifying Blake’s desire to be recognized as an author participating, like them, in the literary deliberations of the public sphere. Chapter 1, ‘Blake, Priestley and Swedenborg’, examines Blake’s treatment in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of body and soul, the natures of God and Jesus Christ, and Swedenborgianism in relation to Joseph Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and Letters to the Members of The New Jerusalem Church (1791). Chapter 2, ‘The Voice of a Devil and the Printing House in Hell’, considers The Marriage as an attempt to join the Revolution controversy and compares this work with writings by Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. Chapter 2 also assesses the relationship between The Marriage and radical diabolism and Blake’s engagement with ‘energy’ as a distinctively radical concept in the work of Erasmus Darwin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Chapter 3, ‘Topical Representations in The French Revolution’, considers Blake’s engagement with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the Bastille in relation to responses to Reflections by Wollstonecraft, Paine and other authors published by Johnson. Chapter 3 concludes with an analysis of the response The French Revolution might have elicited from the Analytical Review. Chapter 4, ‘The French Revolution and Three Contemporary Discourses’, approaches this poem in terms of the discourses of ancient liberty, nature and the sublime, once again in comparison with responses to Reflections by members of the Johnson circle. My discussion of the sublime considers the possible influence on The French Revolution of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Bishop Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Chapter 5, ‘The Continental Prophecies: Prophetic Form and Contemporary Prophecy’, examines America, Europe and The Song of Los in relation to writings concerning prophecy published by Johnson (with special emphasis on Lowth’s Lectures and Priestley’s 1793 and 1794 Fast Day sermons). The second part of Chapter 5 compares aspects of the works of Blake and Richard Brothers with Priestley’s Fast Day sermons, suggesting that Priestley and Blake’s works of 1793 and 1794 are rather less dissimilar than traditionally assumed. Chapter 6, ‘Blake’s “Bible of Hell” and Contemporary Critics of the Bible’, discusses Urizen, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los in light of biblical criticism from the 1780s and 1790s (with particular reference to the Analytical and the writings of Alexander Geddes, Priestley and Paine). The final section of Chapter 6 reads Ahania in terms of the contemporary debate regarding the doctrine of the Atonement. The Conclusion, ‘ “melting apparent surfaces away”: Continuities in the Thought of Priestley and Blake’, revisits my discussion in Chapter 5 of similarities between Priestley and Blake and proposes that they are not so far apart in ideas and the content of their works as modern scholars usually argue.

Au sein de ce mémoire, nous analysons la contribution du théologien, scientifique et philosophe Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) aux débats des Lumières anglaises portant sur la question de la liberté humaine et sur le déterminisme. Nous procédons à l’exposition de l’ensemble des textes dans lesquels Priestley développe son nécessitarisme, notamment «The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated» (1777), et de ceux dans lesquels il répond aux critiques formulées par ses contemporains à l’égard de sa doctrine. Nous présentons et analysons les principaux arguments employés par Priestley pour inférer la vérité du nécessitarisme (et, du même coup, la fausseté de la doctrine du libre arbitre). Les arguments que nous identifions sont formulés à partir (1) de la considération des relations causales, (2) de la compréhension priestleyenne du fonctionnement de la volonté, (3) du matérialisme et (4) de la doctrine de la prescience divine. Nous expliquons qu’une compréhension adéquate du discours nécessitariste de Priestley requiert une compréhension de son effort d’importer, en philosophie morale, la méthodologie employée dans ses travaux de philosophie naturelle, et qui est fortement inspirée par les «regulae philosophandi» de Newton, dont il admire la fécondité. L’importance du rôle joué par l’associationnisme de David Hartley et par la théorie de la matière-force de Roger Boscovich dans l’élaboration du nécessitarisme priestleyen est aussi soulignée. Tout au long de notre étude, les particularités de la pensée de Priestley sont mises en évidence à l’aide de comparaisons faites principalement avec les écrits de David Hume, David Hartley, Richard Price et Thomas Reid.

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