The speaker of the poem "London" shows his anger at the city of London, which represents English civilization, by focusing his attention on its negative features. The people he sees walking in the street look unhappy, he explains as the poem opens, their faces showing marks of "weakness" and "woe." He doesn't distinguish between rich and poor: "every" person looks strained and sad.

Further, we learn as the poem continues, the speaker is angry because the society, in which he hears cries in the voice of adults and children, doesn't have to be organized in the unjust way it is. These are "mind-forged manacles" or handcuffs: people have chosen to forge or built this kind of society, and people's minds continue to perpetrate its fear and injustice.

The speaker then moves to express his anger at the powerful institutions he holds responsible for the way his society is structured. The economic system allows the exploitation of children as chimney sweeps. He describes the institutional Church as a "blackning" force that "appalls"; points to "hapless" soldiers, representing the army and violence; and lashes out at the aristocracy, who are responsible for the suffering of the common soldiers whose blood is shed to protect their privilege (as the speaker puts it, the soldiers' "blood" runs "down Palace walls").

In the final stanza, the speaker describes the streets of London at night, where harlots, or prostitutes, spread venereal diseases that turn the marriage coach into a "marriage hearse."

Like many Romantics of his era, Blake saw society as humans organized it as having fallen away from the purity, equality, and beauty of God's plan for the universe, which was expressed more fully by the natural world.