Plate 84
London led by a Child

The light falls dramatically on a child leading a bearded old man on crutches past a domed church towards a Gothic abbey, as the sun sets behind a distant hill.

This design illustrates lines 11-12 of plate 84: 'I see London, blind & age-bent begging through the streets/Of Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down his beard'. In fact, this design (though reversed) is identical to that for the poem 'London' in Songs of Experience. The scholar Morton D. Paley observes that the baroque dome of St Paul's (which the two characters pass by) signifies the hollowness of established religion, while the gothic Westminster Abbey, their final destination, represents true religion.