Human Brooms Thousands of White children in Great Britain were forced to work as human brooms inside chimney flues and led miserable lives and died horrid deaths. The condition of these chimneysweepers reveals perhaps more than other form of White slavery, the attitude of the ruling class toward the most de- fenseless and oppressed segment of the “surplus” White poor. Chimney-sweeping had been practiced as a trade as far back as the Tudor era, but “the custom of forcing young boys to sweep flues with brushes and scrapers probably did not become general until the 18th century.” British cities in the Georgian era were festooned with forests of rooftop brick and mortar. Several flues were usually installed in each of the chimneys of a Georgian mansion to satisfy the 18th century demand for more comfortable indoor heating— a fireplace in nearly every room being the new yardstick of comfort. As the number of flues increased, their size decreased, the average being approximately ten by fourteen inches. Children were essential for their maintenance. The very architecture of Georgian England now reflected the throwaway status of the White pauper child. Like the White children en- slaved in the factories, they had been recruited from the workhouses as “pauper apprentices”: “Parish officials... tried to get rid of pauper children as soon as they were old enough by apprenticing them to any master who would take them.” These included the masters of chimneysweeps for whom thin, malnourished boys as young as four were considered ideal for their facility for entering narrow smoke channels. An 18th century eyewitness to the system of child chimneysweeps, Jonas Hanway, stated that it was “equal to any of the miseries which human nature seems capable of supporting... and if the evil is suffered to reign any longer, it must level us with nations whom we call barbarians, if it does not ulti- mately draw down on us the vengeance of heaven.” (Improving the Lot of the Chimney Sweeps, p. xxx). Chimney sweeping “was often little more than thinly-disguised slavery.” (Inglis, p. 30). It was not uncommon to send the children up the chimneys while they were still on fire, or to place flaming straw in the grate, beneath a child who had entered the chimney but refused to go all the way up. Skeletal deformities and crippling were common, as were fatal accidents.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 08:12:54 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015