Blake Against the World

In William Blake’s poem “The Chimney Sweeper,” the speaker, a young boy, introduces himself and relays a common story among all lower-class individuals of the late-eighteenth and early- to mid-nineteenth centuries—that story being a life of woe and untimely death. Blake relays the plight of these victims of the Industrial Revolution in England by using the speaker, a chimney-sweep himself, to retell a story that his young friend told him—one taken from a dream, which, given its subject matter, strangely comforts the dreamer. And this boy, Tom, who is all but born into sorrow, takes solace in the thought of dying, of leaving his earthly toils behind for another, better life with God in heaven. In this poem, Blake essentially takes issue with two powerful forces in eighteenth-century England: a blind government and a pacifist religion.

The poem opens with an introduction of the speaker: “When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry ’weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” (ll. 1-3). The speaker’s pathetic circumstance is stressed here, and he quickly wins the sympathy of the reader; Blake makes this possible by quickly relating some but doubtfully all the previous sorrow that the speaker has endured. First, his mother died when he, and perhaps she, too, was quite young, a common occurrence in Industrial Age England, given the dismal shape of the inner city, which was host to such problems as over-crowding, poor hygienic practices and sub-par means of sanitation—all of which ultimately led to the deaths of thousands. Second, his father apparently sold him, or, more likely, forced him to work to supplement the family’s income. Child Labor laws had yet to be enacted in England in 1789, s...

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... exclusive to that as chimney-sweeps—as deplorable violations of those human liberties. Furthermore, his detestation of organized religion is weaved throughout the poem. Why is Tom so content upon waking from the dream? The answer, of course, is because the angel gave him conditions on which to live his life, i.e., do your duty and go to heaven, or don’t and suffer even more in the afterlife. The duty to which he is to devote himself to, then, is two-fold: a duty to the law, complemented by a duty to God and the Church. Therefore, Blake’s message in this poem is one against both the living and working conditions of the poor—which he believes to be ignored by the state—and against what Karl Marx called “the opiate of the masses,” or religion. Perhaps while writing “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake was contemplating an English Revolution something like the one in France.