The Powerpoint provides background information about chimney sweeper, young children forced into such labor, in order for students to better understand the context of Blake's poems.

1. Chimney Sweeper
by
William Blake
The Chimney
Sweeper" is the title of
two poems by William
Blake, published in
Songs of Innocence in
1789 and Songs of
Experience in 1794

2.  Address a
political issue
publicized
during the time
he was writing.
•Sweepers
were viewed
as subhuman
by many.

3.  Written to protest the living conditions,
working conditions, and the overall
treatment of young chimney sweeps in the
cities of England.
 In 1788, there was an attempt to pass an act
to improve the treatment and working
conditions of these young children. This
would have made many people, including
Blake, aware of the lives that these chimney
sweeps would live.

6. Master Sweeps would buy
young children from
orphanages and take in young
homeless children from the
streets and turn them into
indentured servants.
Small boys between the ages of
5 and 10, although most were
under the age of seven, and
some were even as young as
four.

7.  Sweep the chimneys naked so their
masters would not have to replace
clothing that would have been ruined in
the chimneys, and they were rarely
bathed.
 Children slept in cellars on bags of the
soot that they had swept and they were
poorly fed and clothed.

8.  Many killed by fires in chimneys or died
early anyway of either respiratory
problems or cancer.
 Left children with ankles
 and spines deformed and
 twisted kneecaps from
 climbing up chimneys
 that were about nine
 inches in diameter.

9.  Weren’t done until their heads poked out of the
chimney top.
 Because the chimneys were
 extremely narrow, many of
 the children were reluctant
 to wriggle into them.
 It was a common
 practice for the master sweep or his assistant
to actually light a small fire in the fireplace or
hold lighted straw under their feet or even
poke and prod the children with pins to force
them up to the top.

10.  Twisted spines and kneecaps, deformed ankles, eye
inflammations and respiratory illnesses.
 Many also suffered from the first known industrial
disease ‘chimney sweep’s cancer’ caused by the
constant irritation of coal tar soot on the naked skin.
 Climbing boys choked and suffocated to death from
inhaling the chimney dust or from getting stuck in the
narrow and convoluted chimney flues.
 Casualties were also frequent as many boys were
maimed or killed from falling or from being badly
burned.

11. Often slept in cellars on bags of soot and
used emptied soot bags as blankets.
Sickly, rarely bathed and begged
for handouts of food and clothing
from their customers as all the
money they earned went to their
masters