William Blake Thesis

Their Ignorance
During the Industrial Revolution in England in the 18th century, numerous children were forced into the child labor to support the growing economy. These children were deprived of their childhood and William Blake the author of “ The Chimney Sweeper” wanted to depict society’s ignorance of child labor and raise awareness towards its injustice. Blake appeals to the reader’s sense of morality to draw attention to the corruption that was sweeping the nation through child labor. Blake cleverly uses tone, diction, imagery, metaphor and irony in order to provoke an outrage against the inhumane treatment of child labor in his readers and expose the wrongdoings by the church and society.
Blake himself didn't live a life as a chimney
Later on in his life, Blake used his talent as an artist and a writer to express his experiences and also bring about a change in the social order and the minds of men (Reinhart). Blake wanted to expose the life of a chimney sweeper because he wanted the society to acknowledge its wrongdoings in stealing the sweepers’ childhoods. Written in 1789, “The Chimney Sweeper” starts its first stanza with two speakers, one representing the society and the other representing child labor. The first speaker's tone is untroubled by the condition of the child. This is a representation of how society viewed chimney sweepers in immoral, uncaring way. Right away in the first line of the poem the first speaker is addressing the child as “A little black thing among the snow” to dehumanize the child (Blake 1). Blake not only shows the speaker's voice as harsh but also uses imagery to display the amount of black soot that the child is covered in compared to the white snow in order to highlight the child’s physical conditions. Sold by their parents at a young age, chimney sweepers entered a life of torture and hardship. Then, to draw the reader’s attention to the corruption caused by the forced child labor Blake uses a
The poet used irony and savage criticism of the pretension about the church’s holiness and false religiousness (Emdad). Blake uses irony to convey that the church holds itself to a high moral standard and perceives itself as glorified while at the same time the church’s ignorance and self-interest lead to the death of the chimney sweepers. There is evidence for this in the implied metaphoric reference to the deadly medical conditions when the poem states “they clothed me in the clothes of death” (Blake 7). This metaphoric line in this poem is a reference to the dangerous conditions that led chimney sweepers to experience deadly diseases, deformities and sometimes death. Most of the chimney sweepers were from very poor families whose parents left them to work for wealthy families and survive off of their owner's mercy. The chimney sweepers wore no clothing while working in the chimneys, subjecting them to abrasion and causing soot to become embedded in the skin (“Percivall Pott”). As bathing was infrequent for society in general, the chimney sweepers were rarely clean; The London's St Bartholomew's Hospital which claimed children only washed themselves once every five or six years (“Percivall Pott”). On top of this, the chimney sweepers were