A Romantic technologist and Britain's Little Black Boys

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Tim Fulford

Revelry and gourmandry did not appeal to the dedicated evangelical middle classes who campaigned to ban the use of boys as chimney sweeps. These men and women, tireless social reformers, pursued a disciplinary agenda. Rumford's fireplaces and soup kitchens would, they hoped, reform characters of the poor and alleviate their suffering. From 1807, the campaigners instituted their own version of the climbing boys' annual feast in Sheffield, even publishing poems and propaganda pieces to move the public to action. Their leader, James Montgomery, knew that such feasts, like the fairs with which they were linked, were remnants of carnival. In his propaganda poem "Easter Monday at Sheffield," his boy-narrator declares of the Sheffield dinner "I thought the world turn'd upside down" (Montgomery 427). But, in practice, Montgomery was not prepared to tolerate even a day's inversion of the social order. The Sheffield dinner featured roast-beef and plum pudding, but the boys were fed morality, discipline and piety with t heir dinners:

Books, pretty books with pictures in,
 Were given to htose who learn to read,
Which showed them how to flee from, sin,
 And to be happy boys indeed. (Montgomery 427)

The books, and the dinner itself, were inducements to go to Sunday School. Both were parts of a supervisory regime aimed at moral reform, which Rumford would have recognized. Only the boys already learning to read at Sunday School received the books, thereby forcing those excluded to look on as their peers enjoyed the pretty pictures. Once again, punishment took the form of an isolated voyeurism--looking at pictures that belonged to others. But reform was also a matter of inspection: it was by learning to look at books that the climbing boys would "improve," as they linked pretty pictures with moral truths. Viewing books was the "good" labor that would redeem the sweeps from the perceived evils of their degrading work.

Visual inducement worked. Montgomery congratulated himself that twenty-two of the twenty-four boys who sat down to dinner later attended the Sunday School, where they learned to read the Bible and heard lessons such as this:

He loves the poor, He always did;
 The little ones are still his care:
I'll seek Him,--let who will forbid,--
 I'll go to Him this night in prayer.
                                       (Montgomery 428)

Like Rumford, Montgomery believed that poor laborers needed discipline as much as they did full bellies. So did others in the abolition campaign, and they moved to institutionalize climbing boys in order to reform them; just as Rumford had the poor children of Munich. The supposed "depravity" of the little sweeps became a vital part of the abolitionists' case. Campaigners told Parliament that boys who had neither schooling nor religion became young men given to theft and vice. Potentially, the child-victim became the hardened criminal. The boy raised the frightening spectre of a violent and disordered working class with no respect for property. His sooty skin symbolized the "moral diseases" thought to emanate from the "foul air" of the slums where he lived (Southey II, 134-35). If he was a black slave, he was also an "imp of fiendish make," a protege of the adult devils of London's gloomy courts and rookeries. (4) He must be brought into the light, be taken from his murky haunts, to institutions where improve ment could be inculcated and inspected and where he could be returned to whiteness.