Chimney Sweep - Literature

Literature

Chimney sweeps were often depicted in Victorian literature as heartless scoundrels who abused their child workers. They are typified in The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. The English poet William Blake portrayed the chimney sweep as an abused child who hoped for a better life. In both "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience", Blake showcases the life of a common sweeper and exposes those who allowed barbaric actions against them to take place. In Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist a particularly vicious chimney sweep called Gamfield wants to take Oliver as an apprentice, but at the last minute the magistrate refuses to sanction the move ("Mr Gamfield did happen to labour under the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death already." )

In "The Shepherdess and the Sweep" (1845), a fairy tale by the Danish poet and writer Hans Christian Andersen, a porcelain chimney sweep sits upon a table top near his love, a porcelain shepherdess. When the two are threatened, the chimney sweep gallantly conducts his love safely to the rooftop through the stove pipe.

In Michael Crichton's novel The Great Train Robbery, Clean Willy Williams was an accessory to the gold heist. An apprentice chimney sweep who later became a "snakesman" (a burglar adept at climbing and wriggling through small spaces), he uses his skills to escape from Newgate Prison and to gain access to the railway office where important keys are stored.

With the development of the newer brush system and the end of child labour, the occupation changed its image to one of agile and good natured men, the chief example being in the book series Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers and the Walt Disney film adaptation which has an extended dance sequence in which the jovial workers celebrate the end of the workday with fearless acrobatics. Their leader, "Bert", played by Dick van Dyke, sings "Chim Chim Cher-ee" which won the Oscar for "Best Song" in 1965. The chorus refers to the traditional association of chimney sweeps with good luck: "Good luck will rub off when I shake 'ands with you, or blow me a kiss ... and that's lucky too".

Barbara Vine's novel The Chimney Sweeper's Boy has as a central plot device a moth of that name, more formally identified as Epichnopterix plumella, which represents the main character's transformation and identity.