And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Any fan of English choral music will recognise the second verse of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and put to music by Hubert Parry in 1916. It is a quintessentially English hymn, was sung at Will and Kate’s royal wedding, and is David Cameron’s suggestion for the English national anthem if ‘God Save the Queen’ were replaced.

Blake finishes the poem with a call to arms to Englishmen to ‘build Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land.’

There has been much commentary about the symbolism of the London Olympic opening ceremony. It is a left-wing conspiracy according to some, and a right-wing conspiracy according to others. For those who follow the culture wars, there was plenty to chew on.

As it was, it was a real show: Mary Poppinses, NHS patients, Mr Bean, James Bond, and the Queen – it had it all.

These events are always stylised versions of a nation’s narrative – often more closely resembling dictator kitsch than is comfortable – but you do at least expect them to bear some resemblance to a nation’s actual history.

Yet there it was, England’s green and pleasant land where people skipped around to music supplanted by Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of industrialisation – good agrarian people forced into the city to work in sweatshops with lungs chock full of coal dust and traditional English freedom lost.

However, this is a willful misinterpretation of English history. Before the Industrial Revolution, the English countryside was extremely poor and people flocked to cities to get work in the newly industrialised cities. It is true that many of these factories, particularly in the early stages of industrialisation, were hellholes. However, they still represented better opportunities than being dirt poor and illiterate in the country.

The England built on the back of the Industrial Revolution saw unprecedented improvements in the material living standards of ordinary people, built an empire, and saw important institutions such as property rights, rule of law, and Westminster-style democracies spread throughout the world.

Blake is an extremely important figure in England’s literary canon, but stylising his misanthropic version of Industrial Revolution is both misleading and historically incorrect.