Which image captures Blake’s focus on social oppression in London?

• A. The charter'd streets
• B. The mind-forg'd manacles
• C. The cry of every Man
• D. The marriage hearse

Answer: (B)

Blake shows oppression as something that seeps into people’s thinking because of the way society is arranged. The image of mind-forg’d manacles is the strongest because it literalises internal constraint: social systems—law, church, wealth, class—shape what people think and accept, so they’re “shackled” in their minds even if there’s no visible chain. That sense of mental bondage makes the misery Blake describes universal, heard in every cry across the city. The other images point to external conditions or consequences—spaces owned by power, collective suffering, or oppression within institutions—but the mind-forg’d manacles capture the deeper mechanism at work: oppression that is maintained by thinking itself.