<P> The Songs of Innocence and Experience were originally hand - printed and illustrated by Blake in 1794 . </P> <P> Blake suggests that the experience of living there could encourage a revolution on the streets of the capital . This could have been influenced by the recent French revolution . The use of the word "Chartered" is ambiguous and goes against control and ownership . It may express the political and economic control that Blake considered London to be enduring at the time of his writing . Blake's friend Thomas Paine had criticised the granting of Royal Charters to control trade as a form of class oppression . However, "chartered" could also mean "freighted" and may refer to the busy or overburdened streets and river or to the licensed trade carried on within them . In the original draft, the word used was simply "dirty" ("I wander through each dirty street / Near where the dirty Thames does flow"). Blake makes reference to the "Blackening church" suggesting that the church as an institution is not only physically blackening from the factories of Victorian era London, but is actually rotting from the inside insinuating severe corruption . </P> <P> Ralph Vaughan Williams set the poem to music in his 1958 song cycle Ten Blake Songs . The poem was set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake . </P>

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