A Romantic technologist and Britain's Little Black Boys

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Tim Fulford

Similarities to "The Little Black Boy" make "The Chimney Sweeper" of Songs of Innocence an exploration of the psychology of one who struggles to liberate himself from complicity with his position, racially and socially, as an inferior and an other. (6) Following the earlier poems, "The Chimney Sweeper" of Songs of Experience attacks a social and psychological system wherein churchgoers perpetuate repression in the name of charity and pity. They satisfy themselves of their righteousness and propriety, thereby licensing themselves to enslave others:

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
                                           (Erdman 22-23)

The final line brilliantly concentrates Blake's criticism with biting irony--like his aphorism "Pity would be no more/If we did not make somebody Poor" (Erdman).

Blake's indictment is one of the most radical of any poetic statements. The simple lines powerfully crystallize, as few other poems at the time did, the psychology of sanctimony and its connections with Church and State. The climbing boy, in Blake's verse, was a figure capable of exposing not only the cruelties of the commercial system but also the complicity of political institutions and religious reformers with that system. Not surprisingly, James Montgomery printed only "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence in his campaigning Climbing Boy's Annual. Its subtle and oblique criticism might go unnoticed. However, the poem in Songs of Experience leaves no doubt that Blake targets the sanctimony of those who offered pity and charity to the poor. The Sunday School abolitionists were, for all their good intentions, part of a system that preferred pity to equality, discipline to freedom, utility to love, industry to energy. In Blake's world, the climbing boy becomes a radical figure whose "innocent" words e xpose social hypocrisy--a little black boy with much to show the whites. As one of the very few climbing boys made to speak against those who acted and campaigned on his behalf, he should have the last words, words the children laboring in Rumford's workhouse and on West Indian plantations might have echoed if they could:

And because I am happy, & dance & sking,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Preist & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

NOTES

(1.) This article could not have been written without the originary research and ideas of Debbie Lee. I am grateful to her, and to Morton D. Paley for his comments on a draft.

(2.) Princess Lieven wrote that it "gives a vivid picture of chaos and the void. There is something positively hellish in the effect exerted by the sight of that opaque atmosphere." Quoted in Murray 101.

(3.) "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg," line 30. Wordsworth, IV, 276-78.