Childhood was a markedly different experience during the Romantic period than it is today. Whereas there are myriad laws in place to keep children safe from abuse inside and outside the home, and free from the burden of work, in the time of the Romantics, children were simply seen as little adults, with much higher expectations on them. For example, when Charles Dickens was twelve years old, his father, mother, and younger siblings were all thrown into prison because of debts that Dickens’ father had incurred. Dickens was not imprisoned, because it was his responsibility to earn the money that would pay off the debts and allow his family to regain their freedom (Pope-Hennessy). So the young Dickens stopped going to school, moved into rooms that an elderly lady had for rent, and headed to work each day at a shoe blacking factory, affixing labels to the glass jars that would hold the blacking. If his grandmother had not passed away, leaving the family enough money to pay off their debts, it is not certain how long the rest of the Dickens’ would have stayed in prison. While Dickens would turn to writing Romantic novels, the Romantic poets, from Blake to Shelley, penned many verses about the innocence that is supposed to belong to a child, and the experiences of childhood. Blake wrote two different poems entitled “The Chimney Sweeper” – one in Songs of Innocence and another in Songs of Experience. Both poems express parts of the life of a chimney sweeper, relating that to the notions of innocence and experience.
One of the elements of Blake’s poetry that makes it so transcendent is his ability to disrupt and subvert the notions that give us peace and contentment. Poems that do this can describe scenes in compelling ways, while leaving the very ground under the reader shaking violently. In the “Chimney Sweeper” that appears in Songs of Innocence, both the speaker and Tom Dacre, in their poignantly quiet acceptance of their fates, turn a harsh light on those arrangements that permit the buying and selling of children, so that they can be sent off to do work that will ultimately kill or maim them. The relationship between parents and children was much more tenuous than it is today, especially among the poor, many of whom saw children more as beings that required the expenses of feeding and care rather than one’s descendants that deserved love and nurturing. With this the case, the speaker’s father has no problem selling him “while yet [his] tongue / Could scarcely cry ‘’weep!’”(2-3). The young speaker’s life quickly became one if filth, living and sleeping in soot. The hair of young Tom Dacre curls “like a lamb’s back” (6) – a clear allusion to innocence and purity. As his hair is shaved, he cries; his innocence and purity are falling away from him, just as surely as his locks of hair hit the floor.
This traumatic change leads to an intriguing dream, though: Tom sees an angel freeing all of the chimney sweepers, letting them out of rows and rows of coffins. These are not the literally dead; instead, they are those who live the short, unhealthy life of the chimney sweep. This angel has been taken to represent the Church of England, which held the keys to salvation in the time after the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII’s establishment of his own national church. The Church did not protest the use of such small children as chimney sweeps; to make things even worse, the Church forbade the dirty children from entering the churches, because they did not want soot to get onto the pews or other decorative items. Whether this angel is representative of the Anglican church, or the misleading promises that attend obedience to God, coming from the church, it is clear that the angel tricks the young speaker into believing the bromide that “if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”(24). In this case, the Church has collaborated with industry to enslave the working class, particularly children, in an arrangement that kept the Church from having to go to the trouble of protesting the mistreatment of the poor. By using the threat of eternal damnation, the church can indeed tell these young boys that “if [they’d] have God for [their] father and never want joy” (20). The key to this complicity, of course, lies in the word “good” (19). This means something different in the New Testament than it means here, though. When Jesus was asked, in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, what one had to do to gain everlasting life, he told the rich young ruler that it was necessary to follow all of the commandments and then to sell all of his worldly possessions to come and follow Jesus. In 19th century England, the requirements for being “good” were much less grandiose: they involved following the orders of one’s bosses at work, arising in the dark, cold mornings for another day of sweeping out chimneys. The fact that the Church would allow this to go on for so long, without protesting any of it, is a moral failure. The good news that the dream of young Tom imparts is that those who do possess innocence still have the ability to imagine an earth where things are completely different: where justice and purity are still valid concepts, and where one might yet be able to “rise upon clouds and sport in the wind” (18).
The “Chimney Sweeper” poem from Songs of Experience is shorter, and much more explicit in its protest, than its sister poem. For this reason, it is more cynical and, as a result, less poignant. This typifies, though, the difference between innocence and experience. While innocence does permit the holder to believe in better things, the expedience of experience allows one to see the world through heavily jaded eyes, realizing that what one sees is all that there is ever likely to be. One can imagine that the young sweeper in this poem is the same speaker from the poem from Songs of Innocence, while the speaker is now an older person, questioning the young, suffering child, nothing more than a “little black thing among the snow, / Crying “’weep! ‘weep!’ in notes of woe”(1-2), trying pitifully to drum up business in the midst of winter. Ironically, the young child’s parents have “gone up to the church to pray” (4). Even in the context of the early 19th century, it is difficult to imagine parents literally sending a child out to beg for work as a chimney sweep on a Sunday morning. However, on a metaphorical level, these parents can be seen as the wealthy in England, heading blissfully off to church on a Sunday morning while there are young children in the land who still have to work in such privation in order to survive to the next day. The fact that the young sweep had still looked innocent “[a]nd smiled among the winter’s snow,”(6) not enough people thought it amiss to take advantage of his poverty, clothe him in a sweep’s uniform, and teach him “to sing the notes of woe”(8). Even now, with the sweep able to “dance and sing” (9), the wealthy walk by and “think they have done [him] no injury” (10). This allows the wealthy to “praise God and his Priest and King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery” (11-12). Clearly, the young sweep is suffering, and is bitter beyond the ability of his years, as his cynical mention of the Church and the monarchy indicates. Both the Anglican Church and the British nobility forgot about the poor and have left them to their own suffering. It is one thing to consider an adult in poverty as being responsible, at least in part, for his own situation. To consider a child in poverty to be responsible, though, is beyond the realm of plausibility.
Both poems show the dreadful lives that awaited chimney sweeps – particularly those who started out in the position as young children. Tom’s dream of the “resurrection of the young chimney sweeps from black coffins all attest to the bitter, loveless and cruelly abbreviated lives of child laborers” (Lawrence 10). The cruelest part of both poems, though, is the fact that both Church and Crown overlooked the plight of the most helpless, simply allowing the poor to languish and starve, without the most basic of necessities. It is this outrage, of course, that informed much of the writing of the early 19th century in England, and which led to reformations of the Poor Law, and the formation of relief agencies in the country. The poems of Blake, Shelley and the other Romantics regarding the poignancy of childhood in a land where such outrages could take place were just one element that spurred a sense of reform in the public. The writings of Charles Dickens, whose character Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol served as a young symbol of the poor, sick innocent for the entire British reading public, led to many changes in the way that the rich and the poor would interact – particularly in the provision of basic needs.
The purpose of poetry is to turn reality not on its head but slightly askew, so that the inner workings that normally percolate unseen can make their way into the overall consciousness of the reader. In Blake’s England, the young chimney sweeps would have been fixtures, making their way from home to home, trying to drum up enough money for another day’s sustenance. The fact of their ubiquity, though, meant that they became invisible. They were there; they were supposed to be there; they seemed happy; it wasn’t a problem. Blake’s poems take the young sweeps and give them a voice, showing the reader an actual insight into their plights. Whether one looks at the chimney sweep through the filter of innocence or experience, it remains true that the brutal oppression of unchecked poverty robs children of the first and gives them far too much of the second.
Works Cited
Blake, William. “The Chimney-Sweeper” (from Songs of Experience).
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wblake/bl-wblake-soe-chimney.htm. Web.
Lawrence, et al. The McGraw-Hill Guide to English Literature, 2. New York: McGraw, 1985.
Print.
Pope-Hennessy, Una. Charles Dickens 1812-1870. London: Chatto and Windus, 1945. Print.
