"THE Chimney Sweeper" (Songs of Innocence)

Annotated Bibliography

by Deborah Noel

One of the earlier readings of the poem can be found in Allan Cunningham's The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, 1830. He calls "The Chimney Sweeper" "rude enough truly, but not without pathos." He claims that Blake became a "hermit, in that vast wilderness, London," out of frustration at his inability to sell his work or be truly understood by his readers. He characterizes this poem as one of Blake's which depicts "...scenes of more than earthly splendour, and creatures pure as unfallen dew." Later, in 1868, Swinburne expresses a reluctant approval of the poem, finding it "so slight and seemingly wrong in metrical form," yet ultimately successful. He points out that Coleridge preferred "Night." David Lindsay, 1989, briefly discusses the mixed reception of "The Chimney Sweeper" by figures such as Coleridge, Swinburne and others. He claims that this poem is "the most complex of the dramatic monologues in Songs of Innocence."

Many critics of "The Chimney Sweeper" consider Blake's social and political commentary on the plight of the sweeps to be the most remarkable aspect of the poem. Links between Blake and the mid-late 18th-century campaign against the maltreatment of sweeps are noted in works such as S. Foster Damon's William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols, 1924. According to Damon, "The Chimney Sweeper" was "actually used as propaganda" by groups denouncing "the use of children as chimney sweeps." In 1964, Martin K. Nurmi argues that a knowledge of 18th-century sweep life is essential to our understanding of the poem's symbolism and irony. W. K. Wimsatt, in 1965, briefly treats "The Chimney Sweeper" during his discussion of "London." He also offers some historical background. In 1968, P. Berger points out that the soot covered bodies of the sweepers are their real "black coffins," since sweeps often died on the job. He suggests that these corporeal coffins "imprison the pure innocent souls of these children." W. H. Stevenson, 1971, points out that sweeps were often victims of "skin cancer caused by the soot which was literally never washed from their bodies." E. D. Hirsch, 1964, suggests that in "The Chimney Sweeper" of Innocence, Blake's "social protest is neither explicit nor angry." He contrasts the poem with its Experience counterpart, claiming that the earlier poem failed to make a direct connection between the exploitation of children and the social system.

Calling attention to the political climate in the late 18th century, Stanley Gardner, 1968, links "little Tom Dacre" to "the Lady Anne Dacre's Alms Houses." He argues that due to legislation in 1788 which was meant to protect sweeps from maltreatment "the way to reform seemed clear" for Blake, and this accounts for the hopeful tone of the poem. In 1987, Gardner suggests that the "totality" of the speaker's faith is real, though it does not "justify the oppression, much less the indoctrination of 'faith' for material advantage." He compares the two sweep poems, describing, in detail, the daily life of sweeps. G. E. Bentley, 1969, also places "The Chimney Sweeper" in its socio-historical political context by briefly discussing the state of sweeps in 18th-century London. He notes Charles Lamb's contribution of the poem to "a volume published by James Montgomery to arouse interest and money for the plight of the climbing boys." In Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 1985, Geoffrey Summerfield locates Blake's political radicalism in the poem. He also links the poem to 18th-century movements for legislative reform. He notes that in 1969, "the social historians Pinchback and Hewitt misconstrued the poem badly." He quotes them as saying: "For Blake, the chimney sweep's salvation lay in resignation, not legislative reform." Ronald Primeau, 1975, compares the chimney sweeper to the "Afro-American minstrel." He suggests that "...Blake's representation of the sweep places him in a revolutionary tradition and links him with later black writers from Richard Wright to LeRoi Jones." In 1981, Jonathan Cook examines the subject of childhood in late 18th-century England, noting that Blake's concern with childhood gave the Songs "a strong social historical reference." He reads the two sweeper poems as dialectically paired, depending on one another for meaning and clarity. He finds the speaker in Innocence "a smug ideologue who inducts his fellows into an official morality which denies their real interests."

The dramatic voice of the speaker in "The Chimney Sweeper" has also been a focal point for critics. In 1963, Harold Bloom stresses that the limitations of the dramatic speaker are central to the poem. He argues that the child-speaker's "illogic mounts to a prophetic and menacing sublimity." He characterizes the poem as "incomplete," a feature of Innocence. This "incompleteness" is "expressed as an inability to make a necessary moral judgment." According to Bloom's reading, the promise of the angel is both the "loving Fatherhood of God" and the dreamer's projection of "the Church's disciplinary promise to its exploited charges." The unconscious irony in the poem is an emblem of "self-deceiving" innocence. Martin Price, 1964, reads the poem as one about "naive faith" as a "means for survival." He compares the angel in this poem to those in "Night," locating the "New worlds to inherit" in Tom's dream-vision of heaven. He reads the last line ironically. D. G. Gillham also examines the dramatic structure of the poem in Blake's Contrary States: The "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as Dramatic Poems, 1966. He compares the sweeper poems, defining the opposing features of Innocence and Experience. Gillham argues that the speaker in Innocence is "neither ignorant nor naïve." Contrasting this "kindly" speaker with the "unpleasant" speaker in "The Chimney Sweeper" of Experience, Gillham suggests that naïveté can be a strength in Innocence. Paul D. McGlynn cautions against a "superficial reading" of the poem, arguing that the "unwarranted optimism" on the part of the speaker may confuse readers. For McGlynn, "the problem lies in the apparent acceptance of a situation that to readers of even minimal humanitarian instincts is morally unacceptable." Readers must recognize that Blake "has created...a dramatically ironic situation."

The irony of the last line in "The Chimney Sweeper" is addressed in Morton Paley's Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake's Thought, 1970. Paley argues that readers are "not led to endorse" the last line despite the affirmative quality of the speaker's innocence. The omniscient voice of the poet points to the irony of the conclusion. In 1974, Porter Williams also reads the last line ironically, but he suggests that Blake "wished his readers to understand that the sweeper is performing a spiritual duty by showing compassion towards Tom and that, of necessity, a practical aspect of that compassion is the sweeper's realistic advice that Tom and the others had best perform the duties assigned by their harsh master." James Harrison, 1978, argued that the "irony is more devastating since the tone of the poem is that of an innocent child."

In Reading Blake's Songs, 1981, Zachary Leader asserts that Blake's poetry can only be read in the form in which it was published: art and poem as one unit. He "reads" the poem, incorporating commentary from other critics such as Bloom and Nurmi. He focuses on the compassion or empathy expressed by the speaker sweep for the subject sweep, "Tom Dacre," as it contradicts the relationship of the reader to the poem, an interchange which is not meant to elicit sympathy. Leader calls the last line a "brutal indictment." Bloom again takes up "The Chimney Sweeper" in 1987, focusing on the tension between Innocence (the sweep, his dream) and Experience as it is embodied in the wielder of the sheers whom Bloom characterizes as "the exploiter of Experience." He also reads the poem ironically, until he approaches the last stanza which, he claims, is "more powerful for its lack of consciously directed irony."

"The Chimney Sweeper" of Innocence has often been read as a poem which illuminates the power of the human imagination and the importance of dreams. In 1928, Joseph Wicksteed suggests that the "duty" in the last line refers to the "dreaming of dreams." In 1959, Robert Gleckner locates Blake's voice in the poem by equating "The Piper" (Blake) and the angel of "The Chimney Sweep." In his reading, the main theme of the poem is the freedom of imagination. He draws a link between "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Chimney Sweeper" through "the tear" which "is necessary for the revelation of what transcends instinct or mere corporeal sight." Gleckner notes that "the sweeper's place is in innocence ... but vision is the only means of realizing it." In Blake and Tradition, 1969, Kathleen Raine notes that, for Blake, dreams represented "states of real insight into the world of the imagination." She suggests that Swedenborg's chimney sweeper vision may have influenced this poem. In 1983, Heather Glen reads the poem alongside Wordsworth's "Poor Susan," drawing distinctions between Wordsworth's "common language" theories and Blake's insistence that this "common language" was a "doubtful and displaced medium" which was "radically problematic." Glen finds that both poems contain an oblique protest, and both "explore the transforming power of the human imagination in the face of the most uncompromising circumstances." But, for Glen, these two poems are also very different because, in "The Chimney Sweeper," "the sentimental 'pity' which informs contemporary protest verse [which she locates in "Poor Susan"] is impossible, for Blake allows no position from which it might be unhypocritically directed." Edward Larrissy, 1985, suggests that the poem is marked with an ironic duplicity since dreams are positive, but they also reinforce "work discipline." For Larrissy, the dream-vision exposes hypocrisy while it reaffirms the existence of a "happy communal state."

In Blake, Lamb and The Chimney-Sweeper, 1991, Claire Lamont places both chimney sweeper poems in a historical context, pointing out that Blake's poems and Charles Lamb's essay, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," "are among the earliest literary works on the painful subject of the child chimney-sweeper." Lamont explicates the poems, highlighting their realism. Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. 42-3.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction in Modern Critical Interpretations: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Cook, Jonathan. "Romantic Literature and Childhood." In Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Literature 1765-1830. Routledge: London, Boston and Henley, 1981.

Cunningham, Allan. "Blake." In . 6 vols (1830), vol. ii. 143-88. Reprinted in Blake Records. by G.E. Bentley Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. London, Bombay and Sydney: Constable, 1924. 269-70.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake. London: Evans Brothers, 1968.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experienced Retraced. London: The Athlone Press, 1986.

Gillham, D. G. Blake's contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959.

Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Harrison, James. "Blake's 'The Chimney Sweeper.'" Explicator. XXVI (1978), 2-3.

Hirsch, E. D. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964, 26-7.

Lamont, Claire. "Blake, Lamb and the Chimney Sweeper." Charles Lamb Bulletin. LXXVI (1991), 109-123.

Larissy, Edward. William Blake. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Lindsay, David W. Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Atlantic Highlands: Humanties Press International Inc., 1989.

McGlynn, Paul D. "Blake's 'The Chimney Sweeper' (from Songs of Innocence)." In Explicator. XXVII (1968), Item 21.

Nurmi, Martin K. "Fact and Symbol in 'The Chimney Sweeper' of Blake's Songs of Innocence," Bulletin of the New York Public Library. LXVIII (1964), 249-256.

Primeau, Ronald. "Blake's Chimney Sweeper as Afro-American Minstrel." Bulletin of the New York Public Library. LXXVIII (1975), 418-430.

Paley, Morton D. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake's Thought. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Pinchback, I. and Hewitt, M. Children in English Society. 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 and 1973), vol. i.

Price, Martin. "Blake: Vision and Satire." In To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake, 1964. Reprinted by permission of the author and Southern Illinois University Press in Modern Critical Interpretations: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Stevenson, W.H. (ed.), The Poems of William Blake. London: Longman, 1971.

Summerfield, Geoffrey. Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Swinburne, A. C. William Blake: A Critical Essay. 2nd ed. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868, 115-116.

Wicksteed, Joseph H. Blake's Innocence and Experience: A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1928.

Williams, Porter, Jr. "'Duty' in Blake's 'The Chimney Sweeper' of Songs of Innocence." ELN. XII (1974), 92-96.

Wimsatt, W. K. Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965.

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