This article highlights the main summary & analysis of the poem Chimney Sweeper. The description of literary devices with stanza analysis & exercise.
The Chimney Sweeper: Summary & Question Answer
Introductin 'T he Chimney Sweeper' is a Bleak poem told from the perspective of a chimney sweeper, a young boy living in 1700s London who has to earn a living doing the dangerous work of cleaning soot from people's chimneys. The poem makes no efforts to romanticize this life, portraying it as intensely impoverished and tough.
The poem is set against the dark background of child labour that was prominent in England in the late 18th and 19th centuries. At the age of four and five, boys were sold to clean chimneys due to their small size.
These children were oppressed and had a diminutive existence that was socially accepted at the time. Children in this field of work were often unfed and poorly clothed. In most cases, these children died from either falling through the chimneys or from lung damage and other horrible diseases from breathing in the soot. In the earlier poem, a young chimney sweeper recounts a dream by one of his fellows, in which an a…
