Blake's two chimney sweepers

Article by: Linda Freedman

Themes: London, Romanticism
Published: 15 May 2014

Songs of Innocence and of Experience contains two poems about young chimney sweepers: one in 'Innocence'
and one in 'Experience'. Dr Linda Freedman considers how this allows for a complex, subtle engagement with
the figure of the sweep.

The Notebook of William Blake

William Blakes notebook draft of The Chimney Sweeper for Songs of Experience.

In Blakes London, the fate of chimney sweeps was a cruel one. Little boys as young as six were often sold by
families who could not afford to feed them and apprenticed to the trade. They were sent terrified up the
dangerous and dark chimneys and, if they dared refuse, they were frequently terrorised by their new masters,
who threatened to return them to the life of poverty and starvation from whence they had come. As the House
Report on Sweeps shows[1], the job was not only horribly frightening but also profoundly dangerous. Sweeps
suffered high rates of cancer from exposure to soot, along with respiratory diseases, broken bones and stunted
growth. Sweeps usually chose the chimney over starvation but whatever choice they made, their lives were
haunted by a fear of death.

William Blake wrote two poems about the young sweeps he saw suffering in the streets of London. He placed
one in the Songs of Innocence and the other in the Songs of Experience. The Songs of Innocence and Experience
was printed in two phases. In 1789, Blake printed the first few copies of The Songs of Innocence and, in 1794,
he bound these together with more illuminated plates and titled the work The Songs of Innocence and
Experience: shewing two sides of the human soul. Blake therefore declared his interest in duality on the very
first page of the 1794 edition. When he took the fate of chimney sweeps as the subject for a poem in both
Innocence and Experience, he gave us at least two ways of seeing the same social predicament.

The Title-page to William Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794.

By comparing Blakes two Chimney Sweeper poems, we can get some sense of his feelings about innocence
and experience as contrary states. The sweep in Innocence doesnt understand the life in which he finds
himself. He is sold while yet [his] tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep, weep weep. Weep sounds very
like sweep. This is a poetic strategy with which Blake suggests that as there is little difference in the way the
words sound to our ears, so there is little difference in what the words mean to the child. But the childs
language is not adequate to make sense of his sorrow. He does not know that he has been taught a false
language, which makes him believe that sadness must be a fact of everyday life.

The little child who narrates the Song from Innocence is, therefore, unable to comprehend the world in which he
finds himself. This makes innocence a much more frightening state than experience. The chimney sweeper of
Experience knows his position is one of misery and angrily berates society for it. Like the child of Innocence
he cries weep weep and Blake again puns on the similarity of sound between weep and sweep. The
difference is that the child of experience knows this life has been forced upon him and he realises that he has
been taught the language of the sweeps sorrowful life. Unlike innocence, Blake suggests that experience is a
state of knowledge and control.

The child of experience directs his anger at the organised religion of the church. In the last line of the poem, he
implies that the church profits from the miserable life that he leads and therefore make[s] up a heaven of our
misery. This suggests that organised religion is built upon innocent pain. It also suggests that the church
weaves a fiction of happiness, pretending that children like the sweep are satisfied instead of suffering. The sin
of organised religion, as Blake sees it, is to prevent people from seeing things as they are by training them in the
fallacy of received wisdom. So Blake implies that social problems are intimately connected with spiritual
problems. Just as the childs parents fail to perceive his misery, so they fail to perceive the lack of spiritual truth
in the doctrines and practices of the church.

Report into employing boys as chimney sweeps

From the report made by the Parliamentary Committee on the employment of children as chimney-sweeps,
1817.

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

The Chimney Sweeper from William Blakes Songs of Innocence, 1789.

In The Chimney Sweeper of Innocence, the speakers friend, little Tom Dacre, has a dream, which discloses
the malicious fiction that suffering in this world is relieved by salvation in the next. Without the tools of
experience, which would equip him to see this falsehood for what it is, Tom Dacre, like the innocent narrator, is
little more than a ventriloquial voice for institutional control. In the last line of the poem he parrots the doctrine
of oppression: So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm. Like the innocent narrator, he has internalised
the language of abuse and does not have the vocabulary with which to criticise it.

Blakes illuminated plates depict noticeably different kinds of figures. In The Songs of Innocence the small,
dancing forms of children seem natural extensions of the vines and leaves and curling calligraphy. Three little
figures at the top of the plate are barely distinguishable from it. All the children, here, have a light and unearthly
quality, far removed from the life of the chimney sweep. The green in the foreground suggests a paradisial
landscape. The adult figure in the bottom right-hand corner is reminiscent of Blakes depictions of Jesus. This is
the platitudinous image of salvation, not a depiction of the real conditions of suffering.

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794.

By contrast, the plate from The Songs of Experience shows a child bent over, hardly able to withstand the
onslaught of winter weather and hard work. His face is turned accusingly towards the viewer and turned
upwards. This puts us in an uncomfortably similar position to the parents, who are gone up to the church to
pray. Unlike the plate from Innocence, where the figures are slender and free of earthly restraint, this boy is
heavyset. The snow drives down and the sky is dark. The colouring of the plate is black, white and a kind of
muddy brown, suggesting a winter scene where nothing can grow or thrive.

These two poems are not only about the atrocious fate of chimney sweeps in Blakes society. They are also a
comment on the contrary states of innocence and experience. Innocence, here, seems a more frightening
condition because the innocent have no way of understanding the world in which they live. By contrast, the
child of experience is a vocal social critic. Blake entwines this social criticism with criticism of organised
religion precisely because he sees both issues as manifestations of the same fundamental problem of blinkered
perception. This, for Blake, is the real barrier to social progress. But only the child of experience is able to see
the platitudes of church and state for what Blake believes they are: the malice that keeps little boys chained to a
terrifying and dangerous life.

The Cries of London

Sweep! Sweep ho! Sweep! From Sam Syntaxs Description of the Cries of London, 1821.

Footnotes

[1] Houses of Commons, Report from the Committee of the House of Commons on the employment of Boys in
sweeping of Chimneys, ed. by William Tooke the Younger (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817).

Written by Linda Freedman

Dr Linda Freedman is a Lecturer in British and American literature at University College London. She is
the author of Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (CUP, 2011) and has a forthcoming book
on William Blake and America. Her research and teaching interests range from the Romantic period to
the present day and she is particularly interested in connections between literature, theology and the
visual arts.

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.

William Blakes Chimney Sweeper poems: a close

reading
George Norton shows how William Blakes Chimney Sweeper poems highlight the injustice and brutality
suffered by child chimney sweeps in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

The Notebook of William Blake

William Blakes notebook draft of The Chimney Sweeper for Songs of Experience.

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The wretched figure of the child sweep is a key emblem in Blakes poems of social protest. Not only are the
sweeps innocent victims of the cruellest exploitation but they are associated with the smoke of industrialisation,
thus uniting two central Romantic preoccupations: childhood; and the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the
natural world. A report to a parliamentary committee on the employment of child sweeps in 1817 noted that the
climbing boys as young as four were sold by their parents to master-sweeps, or recruited from workhouses. As
the average size of a London chimney was only seven inches square, to encourage the sweeps to climb more
quickly, pins were forced into their feet by the boy climbing behind; lighted straw was applied for the same
purpose. Easy prey to those whose occupation is to delude the ignorant and entrap the unwary, a sweep might
be shut up in a flue for six hours and expected to carry bags of soot weighing up to 30lbs. Many suffered
deformity of the spine, legs and arms or contracted testicular cancer.[1] The practice was not abolished until
1875, nearly 50 years after Blakes death.
Report into employing boys as chimney sweeps

From the report made by the Parliamentary Committee on the employment of children as chimney-sweeps,
1817.

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Usage terms: : Public Domain

Innocence

The Innocence poem, a dramatic monologue, spoken by a sweep in the simplest language and in rhyming
couplets, opens with a direct, almost documentary account of precisely the process the parliamentary report
outlines: the boy explains that he was sold by his father after the death of his mother. The reader, too, becomes
implicated in his exploitation: So your chimneys I sweep (my italics), he declares, though the suggestion is
Blakes; the speaker seems unaware of his own degradation.

Central to the poem is the dual contrast between the grim realities of the sweeps lives and the ecstatic vision of
liberty contained in the dream of Tom Dacre, a new recruit to the gang. Tom dreams:
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black,
And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing they run,
And wash in a river and shine in the sun.
Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.

Where, in reality, their lives are restricted, death-infected (the image of the black coffins), in the dream, they are
free, leaping, running, sporting in the wind. The dream takes place in a pastoral idyll a green plain where
there is colour, light, pleasure and laughter; the real world is monochrome, dark, subject to the pressures of city
life, and a capitalist economy where the boys can only weep over their degradation.

This liberation, though, comes at a price. The angel who releases the sweeps with a bright key tells little Tom
if hed be a good boy / Hed have God for his father and never want joy. This stipulation is repeated in the
poems last line: the boys need not fear harm if all do their duty. Such a submission seems an unlikely
prescription from a social critic like Blake. While it is true that the dream helps Tom endure his misery (he feels
happy and warm when he wakes up), it becomes clear that Blake is not advocating passive acceptance of
earthly misery in order to gain the joys of the kingdom of heaven after death.

Through the ironic use of the child-like anapaestic rhythm (two unaccented syllables followed by an accented
one) which exposes such overly-simplistic, inane sermonising, Blake attacks the established church for
perpetuating these insidious myths which maintain the dispossessed in a state of what Marx would later call
false consciousness. Marx argued: To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their
real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about theexisting state of affairs is the demand to give up a state
of affairs which needs illusions.[2] Although starting from a very different philosophical position (Blake was
hardly a materialist), Blake had come to an identical position half a century earlier.

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

'The Chimney-Sweeper in Songs of Innocence.

Experience

The Chimney-Sweeper in Songs of Experience is an even bleaker poem. Nine of the 12 lines are spoken by the
sweep but poem begins with another speaker who spies A little black thing among the snow. The colour
palette here is distinctly monochrome with none of the brightness and green of Toms dream in the Innocence
poem; the sweep is depersonalised, a thing. The imagery is typical of the Experience poems: its set in winter
and whereas the sweeps in Toms dream are naked, free of the clothing which in Blake often symbolises
social convention or restriction, the speaker here wears the clothes of death and sings the notes of woe
(unlike the laughing in the dream).

The speaker, though, remains determinedly happy. His instincts, like any child in Romantic writing, are
positively driven even though, unlike the boys in the Innocence poem, he understands his oppression. Indeed,
his happiness seems to be the reason that his parents sell him into slavery:
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winters snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

It also serves to absolve them from feelings of guilt as They think they have done me no injury. Having forced
their son into enslavement, teaching him to sing the notes of woe, the parents then head to church to praise
God and his priest and king, who, the boy tells us, make up a heaven of our misery. Interestingly, in an
earlier draft, Blake wrote that this grim trio wrap themselves up in our misery, suggesting that they take
comfort from the misery of others. The final version is far more powerful; the speakers parents collude with
Church and State, actively constructing a heaven out of the misery of others, or, as Nicholas Marsh argues,
they make up a heaven where, in fact, there is misery.[3]

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794.

Critiquing social injustice

Both Chimney-Sweeper poems show Blake to be a radical critic of the social injustices of his age. His
indictment of desperate material conditions and those institutions which perpetuate them is passionate and
powerful, but his greatest anger is reserved for the forces the established Church, mercenary and uncaring
parents that restrict our vision and prevent us from understanding both our oppression and the infinite
possibilities of true perception.

Authors Note

My readings of these poems have been developed through discussions with many English students at Paston VI
Form College but especially with Sophie Smith and Nell Burnham.

Footnotes

[1] Report from the Committee of the House of Commons on the employment of Boys in sweeping of
Chimneys, House of Commons, 1817.