Blake's unfinished novel, "Island in the Moone" (c. 1784), can safely be called Blake's experimental early prose. It is extremely far removed from the prophetic pathos and homespun metaphysics of his "illuminated books"; what we have here is a nonsense-soaked English vaudeville with frivolous couplets.

Painting a group portrait of the London intelligentsia of the late 18th century, Blake the satirist enthusiastically mocks the church, philosophy (and other sciences), Voltaireanism, painting, medicine, fashion, the plague, Parliament, the aristocracy, and, of course, good old England—even then mythical!—with its eccentric characters.