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Industrial revolution child labour
Industrial revolution child labour
William Blake's portrayal of children in songs of innocence and experience
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Chimneys have been around for years and they aren’t the cleanest places in the home. There is a whole lot of soot that gathers in the stacks and gets stuck on the inside of the chimney that you can't see unless you get in there to see. Just like any mess, someone has to clean it. Nowadays we have an easier method of doing such dirty jobs, but back in the day, easy is not how chimney cleaning was described. In order to actually fit in the chimneys, you would have to be very small. Children were given the unfortunate task of cleaning these chimneys.
The children that were assigned to clean the chimneys were sometimes as young as four years old and the majority of them were orphans. The job was also dangerous. Children could get stuck and suffocate or get burned and bruised on a regular basis. This was obviously something that poet William Blake felt strongly about.
William Blake, one of the world’s greatest romantic poets entitled not one but two of his poems “The Chimney Sweeper”. One of them is in his Songs of Innocence collection and the other lies in the Songs of Experience co...
In the agricultural industry the children would harvest crops and sewing. If the children were working in the mining industry it was very dangerous. The conditions were very poor, it was very dirty and not pleasant. The boys were called “Breaker Boys” they broke down raw coal into different pieces for certain furnaces. The coal bearers would carry coal on their shoulders, and the smallest children worked as trappers, they would open trap doors in the mines to move the coal. As for the manufacturing industry, the children would work in dark and dirty conditions. They worked around sharp tools and and machines, which caused a lot of injuries to them.
The fact that they feel they can sit about the knee of their mother, in this stereotypical image of a happy family doesn’t suggest that the children in this poem are oppressed... ... middle of paper ... ... y has a negative view of the childish desire for play which clearly has an effect on the children. The fact that they the are whispering shows that they are afraid of the nurse, and that they cannot express their true thoughts and desires freely, which is why they whisper, and therefore shows that Blake feels that children are oppressed. I feel that the two poems from innocence which are ‘The Echoing Green,’ and ‘The Nurses Song,’ display Blake’s ideological view of country life which I referred to in my introduction, and show his desire for childhood to be enjoyed.
The specs help in their survival because the fire is the main priority on the Island. It cooked the food that the hunters kill. Without cooking the food they can’t eat anything except berries and plants. These things run out and are not as nutritional. The kids need meat to survive. The fire kept the kids warm during the nighttime. At night it gets cold out and the kids could get sick if they are exposed to extremely hot or cold temperatures. This would cause the kids to get sick and maybe even die. Also, the fire was used as a signal. The fire signaled the boat that rescued them from the Island. The boat wouldn’t have come to save them if it didn’t see the smoke made by the fire. The fire is an absolute necessity on the Island. The kids would have had no chance of living without the fire.
"The Lamb," "The Little Black Boy," "The Chimney Sweeper," and "The Garden of Love," by William Blake, are unique in their simple structure and simple choice of words but complex concepts on life and life's experiences. His poems continue to twist and turn minds for centuries due to his style of setting up his poems with both questions and unanswered predicaments, and this is what sets William Blake apart from the rest of the other poets in British literature.
William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper" gives us a look into the unfortunate lives of 18th century London boys whose primary job was to clear chimneys of the soot that accumulated on its interior; boys that were named "climbing boys" or "chimney sweepers." Blake, a professional engraver, wrote this poem (aabb rhyme), in the voice of a young boy, an uneducated chimney sweeper. This speaker is obviously a persona, a fictitious character created by Blake, as it is apparent that he wasn't a child or a chimney sweeper at the time he wrote this poem.
...his was because at the time, thanks to machinery, a worker only needed a small skill set, to accomplish a job that was formerly difficult. They were also employed for their size. This did not come without it’s problems. Child workers faced harsh conditions. They were beaten and abused. They were also paid much less than any regular worker. 13
England was a society dominated by children. During the reign of Queen Victoria one out of three of her servants were under the age of fifteen. Child labor was a prominent issue, because there were no systems to ensure the safety of children. During the start of the industrial revolution, there was a “high demand” for labor (Robson 53). Many families moved from rural areas to new, industrialized cities. After a while things weren’t looking as “promising” as they did before (Boone 23). In order to maintain, families had to put almost all of their family members to work. This led to a rise in the number of child labor. Children were “mistreated, underpayed and overworked” (Kincaid 30). Using children to do all of the hard work, the mining companies believed, was the most sensible and efficient way to get the job done. Because the children were a lot smaller, it was easy for them to “maneuver through tight spaces” and on top of that the children demanded little or no pay at all(Boone 43 ). These wages were enough to persuade companies to use children for all sorts of dangerous jobs such as coal mining and chimney sweeps. Children were called to do many other “horrible” jobs, jobs that adults in this era could not bear, just so long as the bills were paid (Robson 18). The working conditions and treatment of young children during this era was horrible and a lot was done to put an end to it.
The children work in various conditions, suffering numerous injuries. In boot factories, children are forced to sit so close together that they poke each other with needles: “many have lost an eye in this way” (595). The children work “unreasonably long hours” (595). Chimney sweepers in particular work long hours, starting at about four a.m. and working for twelve hours. These chimney sweepers sleep in bags of soot, wrapping themselves in the bags and straw. They are subjected to suffocating steam, heat, flying hot metal, and the “unhealthiest kind of grinding known” (595). Those who are employed in mills endure lung problems, scrofula, mesenteric diseases and asthma.
Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)
Can changing the mindset the story is told from change the outlook of a story? Can two stories with the same topic, written by the same author make you feel two very different ways? William Blake illustrated this to a perfection with the poems “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence and “The Chimney Sweeper” from the Songs of Experience. The two poems have the same concept but are told from two different perspective. One from an innocent view of the world and one from someone with the experience of the world. Songs of Innocence contrast with Songs of Experience from the speaker of poem to the tone it is told to the imagery each poem possess.
Abstract: William Blake's Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into a dialogue with each other and with the works in his companion work, Songs of Experience. He also saw each of the poems in Innocence as operating as part of an artistic whole creation that was encompassed by the poems and images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised a fanatical degree of control over his publications during his lifetime, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material that he intended to accompany them.
In the poem, The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake (1789), the poet attempts to shine a light on the social injustice inflicted upon children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free them from their nightmare existence. He uses a child’s voice as the vehicle to deliver his message in order to draw attention to the injustice of forced child labor. The speaker is a young boy whose mother has passed away. He has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake cleverly uses sound, imagery, irony, and symbolism in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane treatment and exploitation inflicted upon young children by forcing them into the chimneys.
When Blake was inspired to write about these boys, their barbaric lives were not only common knowledge, but accepted. Throughout the passing years, however, history has lost sight of the horror they faced everyday. Therefore, familiarity with such details does help the reader to see more clearly Blake's indictment of a society that allows children to be subjected to almost unbelievable wretched conditions, and it also gives more force and point to the realism and imagery. (Nurmi, 15) History reveals that children usually began these lives at the age of 6 or 7 or even earlier. The job tormented their small bodies, leaving them to die with deformed ankles, twisted kneecaps and spines, or with "chimney sweeps cancer." The boys began their days long before sunrise until about noon when they "cried the streets" for more business. When it was time to return these young boys carried heavy bags of soot to the cellars and attics where they slept. Even the task of sleeping was torture. The boys owned nothing and were given nothing, leaving them with only the bags of soot that had swept for a bed.
In 1789, English poet William Blake first produced his famous poetry collection Songs of Innocence which “combines two distinct yet intimately related sequences of poems” (“Author’s Work” 1222). Throughout the years, Blake added more poems to his prominent Songs of Innocence until 1794, when he renamed it Songs of Innocence and Experience. The additional poems, called Songs of Experience, often have a direct counterpart in Blake’s original Songs of Innocence, producing pairs such as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” In Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake uses musical devices, structure, and symbolism to develop the theme that experience brings both an awareness of potential evil and a tendency that allows it to become dominant over childhood
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence.