Child Chimney Sweeps

Year after year children were bought and sold to a life of dirt and suffering, ended for many of them by a revolting form of cancer due to directly to their occupation; year after year a child or two from the miserable number reached local notoriety by being suffocated in a flue; year after year persons otherwise kindly and humane continued to have their chimneys swept by children.

It is a strange story, and if we ask the reason why the practise continued, the answer must be sought in some curious attitude connected with the Englishman’s home is his castle, and to dictate the method in which his chimney should, or should not, be swept, a dictation which might even involve an alteration in that chimney, meant an interference. Thus it happened that the House of Lords were long the champions of domestic privacy, protecting what they called the “rights of property”. The arguments by which they resisted reform were often ludicrous in character, but they were reinforced in practise by a solid mass of housewifely prejudice, deaf to all appeal, convinced that soot would be scattered and furniture injured if machinery were used in place of boys.

Appeals to the conscience of the housewife actually had the effect of encouraging the employment of boys, for uneasy feelings about the “dear little boys” prompted presents of coppers and food, with the result that, as the children received more money than would keep them in clothes, and more food than they could eat, they were more profitable to their masters than a machine, which cost money to buy and was not rewarded with coppers or scraps of food.

The evidence given by sixty-three witnesses before a commission in 1862 was enough to shake the confidence of the firmest believer in “the moral feelings of perhaps the most moral people on the face of the earth”. There were tales to show that child’s tender flesh had to be hardened for the work by rubbing with brine. At first children would come back from their work with their arms and knees streaming with blood, and the knees looking as if the caps had been pulled off. Then they had to be rubbed with brine and perhaps go off to another chimney. There was the same forcing of terrified children up the dark narrow flues; one master sweep remarked that bit of mortar no bigger than an egg, or even smaller, might fix you tightly wedged in the chimney. All children “want a deal of coaxing or driving at first”, and if, as often happens, a boy is gloomy or sleepy, you must ill treat him somehow, either with the hand or brush or something.