Blake’s Lawgiver, Newton’s System, Reynolds’s Justice

Abstract

The figure of the Lawgiver plays a significant role in William Blake’s carnivalesque early text, now known to scholarship as An Island in the Moon. Offered here are documentary and iconographic materials principally drawn from metropolitan sources of the 1780s that bear both on the identity of this character and, at more length, on the contemporary meanings of the epithet Blake chose: “Steelyard the Lawgiver.”