“The Romantic era in Britain rose around the middle of the 18th century and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. The height of this Revolution was marked by the Victorian era, commonly referred to as the period of Queen Victoria's rule between 1837 and 1901 . The Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation which had a profound effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain. The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human social history; almost every aspect of daily life and human society was eventually influenced in some way.
One of the worst social effects of this Revolution was child labour, a phenomenon created long before but fully exploited during this time, in pityful need for workers on the rise of Capitalism. There was still limited opportunity for education, and children were expected to work. Employers could pay a child less than an adult even though their productivity was comparable; there was no need for strength to operate an industrial machine, and since the industrial system was completely new there were no experienced adult labourers. This made child labour the labour of choice for manufacturing in the early phases of the industrial revolution between the 18th and 19th centuries. Child labour had existed before the Industrial Revolution, but with the increase in population and education it became more visible. Before the passing of laws protecting children, many were forced to work in terrible conditions for much lower pay than their elders.
Reports were written detailing some of the abuses, particularly in the coal mines and textile factories and these helped to popularise the children's plight. The public outcry, especially among the upper and middle classes, helped stir change in the young workers' welfare.
Politicians and the government tried to limit child labour by law, but factory owners resisted; some felt that they were aiding the poor by giving their children money to buy food to avoid starvation, and others simply welcomed the cheap labour. In 1833 and 1844, the first general laws against child labour, the Factory Acts, were passed in England: Children younger than nine were not allowed to work, children were not permitted to work at night, and the work day of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours. Factory inspectors supervised the execution of the law. About ten years later, the employment of children and women in mining was forbidden. These laws decreased the number of child labourers; however, child labour remained in Europe up to the 20th century”. (Wikipedia)
Romantic poet William Blake and Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning both considered child labour a curse of their times. Blake saw the growing need for child labour a threat to their innocene, while Browning's cry gave them voice within society.
Blake's view on the matter is expressed in his two poems “The Chimney Sweeper”, written respectively in 1789 and 1794; the first one having been published in Songs of Innocence, while the second one was included in Songs of Experience. His capturing of the suffering of working children changes from the first to the second work, both clearly influenced by the events of the times. His is a slow awakening into cold reality, quite simply put, from innocence to experience.
Browning lives the full harshness of the Industrial Revolution. Clearly hers ia a plead to society by making hers the voice of the children and begging the world, the people, to stop their suffering.
“Blake was a lyric poet interested chiefly in ideas, and a painter who did not believe in nature. He was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion. He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself "a mental prince"; and was one.” (Kazin)
Blake wrote his first poem “The Chimney Sweeper” in 1789. This first piece shows a harsh yet idealistic view on the matter of child labour. The poet shows from the point of view of a child chimney sweeper, how innocence can have a hidden side of crude reality. The boy was put to work while “yet [his] tongue/ Could scarcely cry 'weep! Weep!”; so young he could not even pronounce “sweep” properly. The boy tells of Tom Dacre, who was deprived of his purity -hair that curled like a lamb's back--.That night Tom has a dream: “That thousands of weepers (...)/Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black”. An angel appears with a “bright key”, both alluding to light and Heaven, and “open'd the coffins & set them all free”. The children, the sweepers, play in meadows and wash and shine; they become pure, regain their innocence. Then, “naked and white”, they rise up to Heaven. The Angel tells Tom “ if he'd be a good boy, he'd have God for his father, & never want joy”, clearly refering to Heaven. Tom awakes, and returns to reality: cold, work, darkness. Yet Tom is “happy & warm”: “if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.” He has hope; perhaps ultimately the hope to die soon.
The plate Blake carved for his first Chimney Sweeper is sky-blue, with the thin shadows of little children walking up to Heaven: famelic children whose souls are leaving for a better good.
The overall tone is idealistic and hopeful, yet with an underlying taste of crude reality; more -however-- of a nuisance than a tragedy.
In 1789, there was a Revolution taking place at the other end of the British Channel. Many european artists were being influenced by the amazing explosion of ideas that was taking place in France, and Blake was one of them. As Kazin remarks: He [was] a pioneer Romantic of that heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters”. The Chimney Sweeper is clearly influenced by these strong principles and by Blake's idealisation of them; an overall hopeful view on life, a sort of La Vita é Bella of the 18th century: make the best of what life has to bring; all's well that ends well.
His second poem has a more overtly critical tone. It is now a bitter time, 1794, and war has broken out between Britain and France. A commercial depression is sweeping over the country and Blake is more aware of the harshness around him: he becomes more critical with the Church and with society, and more interested in politics. “Blake's work had become more overtly political after the upheavals in France in 1789. ” (http://www.lilith-ezine.com). He was especially concerned with the industrialisation of cities, the destruction of nature, those Dark satanic Mills: “Across from Blake's home in London was a factory. From this he created a sketch of what an entire landscape of factories and their destruction of the landscape would be like. Right down to the towering smokestacks and sewage waste. A prophetical image to say the least. The factory later burnt down mysteriously, and Blake moved to the more rural Lambeth in 1790.” (http://www.feministezine.com)
Blake expresses many of his ideas from this point on: he abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. He rejected all forms of imposed authority; Blake's views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the Church. His spiritual beliefs are evidenced in Songs of Experience (in 1794), in which he shows his own distinction between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God (Jesus Christ in Trinitarianism), whom he saw as a positive influence (Wikipedia). Blake has the mystic's tormented sense of the doubleness of life between reality and the ideal. But he tries to resolve it on earth, in the living person of man. Up to 1800 he also thought it could be resolved in society (...). Blake is against everything that submits, mortifies, constricts and denies. (...) He ceased to be a revolutionary in the political sense after England went to war with France and tried to destroy the revolution in Europe. That was less out of prudent cowardice—though like every other radical and free-thinker of the time he lived under a Tory reign of terror —than because he had lost faith in political action as a means to human happiness. (Kazin)
His second Chimney Sweeper is bitterer and darker; more worldly. Blake sees him barefoot and dirty, carrying a big bag of soot, walking under grey rain, with a sad expression on his face. The poem is bitter and sad and evokes lost innocence, hunger and abandonment. It is highly contrastive in its lexic and its imagery; scenes of innocent childhood are swept by pictures of darkness and suffering. Kazin describes Blake's concept of a child: “In his own time, when children were regarded as miniature adults, or as slaves or pets to those who ruled by their maturity, he showed that a child is not an abbreviated version of the adult, but a different being.” This child certainly is a perfectly aware being who still needs to feel joy, and knows who to blame for his untimely suffering. Someone asks, as he stands in the snow, alone, weeping: “Where are thy father and mother? Say? They are praying in church”. He had managed to bring happiness to harsh times, smiling “among the winters snow”, but was “clothed in the clothes of death [and] taught (...) to sing the notes of woe”. He bitterly tells “ Because I am happy & dance & sing,/ They think they have done me no injury:”. His parents, and everyone else, have gone to “praise God & his Priest & king,/ Who make up a heaven of our misery.”
The overtly critical tone of this second poem shows a definite evolution in the life of Blake, parallel to that of British society and political events as it drew into the last moments of the Romantic era. A necessary, yet bitter evolution from idealistic Innocence to realistic Experience.
Innocence is belief and experience is doubt. The tragedy of experience is that we become incapable of love. The tragedy of childhood is that we inflict our lovelessness upon it. That is what experience is for: to bring us from God the Father to the God that man alone creates. Experience is not evil; it merely shows us the face of evil as a human face, so that we shall learn that the world is exactly what man makes it, and that its ultimate triumphs occur within his understanding. Blake's thinking is always organic; it is always directed to the hidden fountains of our humanity. Having never lost the creative freshness of childhood, he challenged experience with it. (Kazin)
Revolutionary, idealistic, full of hopes and dreams, his first Chimney Sweeper is cheerful and sooty, with angels and coldness. By the end of the century, he has run out of hope and recieves but more dust from the grey rain falling from the sky. Blake was profoundly affected by the social, political and cultural changes taking between the production of these two works. His unwolrdly revolutionary ideas denote serious callowness, a certain 'purity wrapping' which has been necessarily rubbed off roughly by the evils of the Modern World.
“Blake's need of certainty, whatever its personal roots, is also one of the great tragedies of modern capitalist society; particularly of that loss of personal status that was the immediate fate of millions in the industrial England of the "dark satanic mills." Blake was only one of many Englishmen who felt himself being slowly ground to death, in a world of such brutal exploitation and amid such inhuman ugliness, that the fires of the new industrial furnaces and the cries of the child laborers are always in his work. His poems and designs are meant to afford us spiritual vision; a vision beyond the factory system, the hideous new cities, the degradation of children for the sake of profit, the petty crimes for which children could still be hanged. England has never recovered from its industrial revolution; Blake was afraid it could not survive it; the human cost was already too great.” (Kazin)
“In 1842–43, a parliamentary commission investigated the conditions of the employment of children in mines and factories; the commission's report was written by R. H. Horne, a friend and collaborator of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861). Many of the details of Browning's 1843 poem are taken from the report of the commission. (NAEL) Barrett Browning is generally considered one of the great English poets; she was learned and thoughtful, influencing many of her contemporaries, including Robert Browning. Her own sufferings, combined with her moral and intellectual strength, made her the champion of the suffering and oppressed. (Wikipedia)
“By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had created profound economic and social changes. Hundreds of thousands of workers had migrated to industrial towns, where they made up a new kind of working class. Wages were extremely low, hours very long — fourteen a day, or even more. Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less then men. Families lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing. Moved by the terrible suffering resulting from a severe economic depression in the early 1840s, writers and men in government drew increasingly urgent attention to the condition of the working class.
The Victorian poets responded to these growing pains in various ways. In the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning pictorial language is used to discuss the ills of innovation; Browning focuses on pointing out the injustices for the purpose of making a call to action in the Christian society of the time . In 1843, Browning wrote a poem called "The Cry of the Children," bringing to light the harmful effects of child labor in factories and mines through vivid images of these poor children, who "look up with their pale and sunken faces”. (Mohr)
“In her poem, Browning portrays the suffering of children in mines and factories. In The Condition of the Working Class (NAEL 8, 2.1564), Friedrich Engels describes the conclusions he drew during the twenty months he spent observing industrial conditions in Manchester. His 1845 book prepared the ground for his work with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto (1848), which asserts that revolution is the necessary response to the inequity of industrial capitalist society. (NAEL) This event proves just how consistently influential the Industrial Revolution was upon society. The world turned upside down, the rocks of civilisation were quickly rising up to sthe skies in the cities while children worked and died in man's modern factories. “As young as 4 years of age, children worked in the coalmining role of trapper. A retired miner called this "the worst job going" (Benson 48). For twelve hours, or more, a child would sit in a dark, damp mine shaft with a candle for light, if he could keep it lit. In these rat infested, cramped spaces, the trapper would quickly open and close a passageway trap door for a miner (Hammond 23). To compound the pitiful working conditions of these children, their mine-owned homes were over-occupied, rarely had sewage, and had access only to polluted water. Poor health care and misunderstanding of hygiene often put children at risk. They slept next to others who carried infectious diseases such as whooping cough and measles. In 1842, The Children’s Employment Commission published a report that exposed the insufferable employment conditions for children in the mines (Hammond 22).” (Lamana)
Browning's poem is presented by a quote from Medea, a reek mythological tragedy: “Alas, my children, why do you look at me?” Medea is a priestess who, in revenge for her husband's betrayal in becoming engaged to another woman, kills her husband's loover and the two children he had with Medea. Her children look at her as she is about to take their lives; she then blames her husband for their deaths; accusing him of outrage and adultery. The look Medea's children is the cry of Browning's children as they “look up with their pale and sunken faces”at the rest of society, while parents sell their children to cheap labour and blame others for their suffering and need.
Browning gave her poem thirteen parts in which she commences by first exposing the suffering of the children, then denounces society and the church for their aloofness and finally pleads for immediate action against a Revolution running on childrens' lives. She commences stating the matter: “ Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers? (...) They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,/ And that cannot stop their tears”. The children are “weeping bitterly (...) in the playtime of the others,/ In the country of the free”. Nature respects childhood, man will not, and a child's remedy is no longer a relief. England in the 1840s was a civilised nation; democracy, however, did not involve much freedom at the time. Part II goes on to mention the incongruence of the children's weeping: old souls may cry for old sorrows, but a child deserves a clean slate. They “look up with their pale and sunken faces (...),for man's hoary anguish draws and presses/ Down the cheeks of infancy”. They are tired out too young, even die before their time. “Little Alice died last year”; the children assume she must be happy as she can finally rest. “It is good when (...) we die before our time”. Browning sees horror in the thought: “Alas, alas, the children! They are seeking/ Death in life, as best to have”. She calls for revolt: “go out, children (...) sing out, children(...) laugh aloud!” But they are too weary to feel joy, too tired to run in meadows.”For all day the wheels are droning, turning (...) and sometimes we could pray, 'O ye wheels' (breaking out in a mad moaning)/ 'Stop! Be silent for to-day!'” They beg the machines to let them feel human for a moment, to touch and hear one another. “Let them prove their living souls against the notion/ That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!-” Yet their call is unheard. Browning compels the reader to as himself what concept they have of God: “Who is God that he should hear us?” the older ones that heir their sobs will not tend to them, “Is it likely God, with angels singing round him,/ Hears or weeping any more?” They know but two words of praying: “'Our Father!'” and they still hold the hope in their hearts that he who is “good and mild” will lend their chest to rest upon. But God does not hear them, “He is speechless as a stone”. “Of His image is the master/ Who commands us to work on”. Here Browning is making a clear statement angainst religoiusness as a means of salvation. “We look up of God, but tears have made us blind”. Browning wants to express her belief that true action must be taken against this terrible curse on society, and so she does: “O my brothers, what ye preach? For God's possible is taught by His world's loving, and the children doubt of each”. Browning goes on to defend the children: they are “worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly The harvest of its memories cannot reap, Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly. Let them weep! Let them weep!”. “But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper than the strong man in his wrath”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work The Cry of the Children is a true call to action: “How long, O cruel nation/ Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart?”. Hers is the voice of all children weeping for their pain, their untimely deaths and society's indifference. The Norton Anthology says of Elizabeth Barrett Browning that she “tried to find ways in poetry of giving voice to the poor and oppressed”; The Cry of the Children remains one of her strongest cries for change. A rapidly transforming system that was in need of revising, Browning used her art to help create laws that would eventually ban child labour from England forever.
“Perhaps most important was the shift from a way of life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution (...) had created profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns, where they lived in new urban slums. But the changes arising out of the Industrial Revolution were just one subset of the radical changes taking place in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain — among others were the democratization resulting from extension of the franchise; challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge, particularly of evolution; and changes in the role of women.”(NAEL)
It is clear that Britain, as Kazin stated, has never recovered form its Industrial Revolution, or any other industrialised country for that matter, as it is its legacy that is slowing killing our world: pollution, extreme poverty and social degradation are just some of the side effects of the changes that took place between the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. These changes, however, also included huge economical, social and scientific improvements. Thousands of children were abused during the time lapse running from the writing of each of these poets' work; however, thanks to the people's cry and the artists' word, decisive laws were established against the exploitation of children and women, Unions of workers were developed and working rights were secured across the world.
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