Child labor in Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" and Dunn's "Hard Work"

¶ … CHIMNEY SWEEPER and "HARD WORK"

Obviously, William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper," published in 1794, and Stephen Dunn's "Hard Work," written in 1956 and published in the collection Work and Love in 1981, focus upon hard labor by children. In the first poem by Blake, the young worker is a chimney sweep or a person who cleans out chimneys and fireplaces by being lowered down by a rope in order to use a broom to sweep out the soot. In the second poem by Dunn, a similar situation involves a young boy working as a laborer at a Coca Cola plant, where he hauls empty Coke bottles to the assembly line to be re-filled. Certainly, both of these jobs, at least for a child, are very stressful and labor-intensive, and illustrate how society, especially during the 18th century in Great Britain, exploited young workers by placing them in often dangerous conditions.

Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper," part of his Innocence and Experience poetry collection, relates that a certain young boy was "sold" by his father when he was very young to work as a chimney sweep following the death of his mother. Blake points out that this young boy named Tom Dacre had to have his head shaved in order to work as a chimney sweep, a fact that is quite disturbing, due to a young boy having to undergo much humiliation in public by his peers. This job also gave him nightmares ("That thousands of sweepers... were all locked up in coffins of black") which shows that being a chimney sweep caused him much personal pain and distress. In Dunn's poem "Hard Work," we find a similar young boy who envies his friends away at camp while he labors in the Coke factory.