Social Criticism in William Blakes Chimney Sweeper

Social Criticism in William Blake’s â€Å"The Chimney Sweeper† ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ by William Blake criticises child labour and especially society that sees the children’s misery but chooses to look away and it reveals the change of the mental state of those children who were forced to do such cruel work at the age of four to nine years. It shows the change from an innocent child that dreams of its rescue to the child that has accepted its fate. Those lives seem to oppose each other and yet if one reads the poems carefully, one can see that they have a lot in common too. The poem was inspired by the first laws that were supposed to make the chimney sweeper’s life better, but since those laws were loosely enforced Blake wanted to draw†¦show more content†¦So at the end the reader does not have a choice but to deal with this reality and think about the boy’s situation which is what Blake intended The conditions of the places the children slept in were another point that Blake criticises. ‘He sleeps in soot instead of the early mother’s bosom or lap. But just as the mother shields the child from the intense beams of God’s love until he is able to bear them alone, so the sweeper’s soot is ironically his shield’ (Nurmi 19). As this quote states the child should sleep on the mothers lap instead of soot that a child is supposed to be loved and taken care of but instead it is sold and surrounded by blackness. I disagree with the second statement that ‘the mother shields a child from the intense beams of God’ and what it is compared to; the reason why I disagree is that Blake was not a very religious person for his time and I doubt that he meant to draw a connection between the mothers loving shield to an ironic shield of soot. This interpretation is going away too much from the original statement and there is too much imagination in this thought. Blake criticises that children were so young when they were sold to be chimney sweepers that they couldn’t talk properly yet. The reason for this was that the chimneys were so narrow an older child would not be able to crawl through. 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