Books: Poor Blots

ENGLAND’S CLIMBING-BOYS (61 pp.) —George L. Phillips — Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (75¢).

To the Englishman of the 18th and 19th Centuries, who dearly loved his comforts, one of the most highly prized boons was a coal-burning fireplace in every room. Many fireplaces meant many flues — and a nasty job cleaning them. But then, most Englishmen reflected, there were people who did that sort of thing.

The people who did that sort of thing were children, some of them only four years old. The story of the frightful condition of these “poor blots,” as Charles Lamb called them, and of the century-long legal fight to rescue them, is told in England’s Climbing-Boys, a piece of careful, heart-wrenching research into one of the foulest flues of modern social history.

Cancer & Consumption. The only good thing about a climbing-boy’s life was that it was likely to be short. Most of them were sold, at five or six, to a master-sweeper, sometimes by their parents, sometimes by the overseer of an almshouse; many were kidnaped by unscrupulous masters.

“To induce these terrified infants to strip and climb the dark, evil-smelling flues,” writes Author Phillips, masters used “beatings with rods and ropes, straw lighted beneath them, pins stuck in their legs . . . kicks on their bottoms.” The rough flues rubbed great open sores on elbows and knees, which masters hardened with saltpeter; after about six months, they stopped hurting.

Soot filled every pore, inflamed the eyes, lodged in the scrotum and caused the horrid “sooty-wart” or “chimney sweeper’s cancer.” Many boys were made consumptive by the lack of food, the damp cellars where they slept on soot-bags, and the chill of early mornings when they tramped the streets crying, “Sweep for the soot O! Sweeeup!” at the top of their poor, frayed lungs.

“Boys Is Wery Obstinit.” Falls, the cruelty of masters, and the great weight of the soot-bags broke the limbs and bent the backs of almost all. The most dreaded hazard of the occupation was suffocation, if a fall of soot caught a boy at an awkward turning of a flue.

Just getting stuck in a flue was bad enough. Mr. Gamfield, the chimneysweeper in Oliver Twist, who labored under “the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death,” explained the attitude of masters to boys who got stuck: “Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy, gen’lmen, and there’s nothink like a good hot blaze to make ’em come down vith a run . . . vereas smoke ain’t o’ no use at all in makin’ a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that’s wot he likes . . . It’s humane too, gen’lmen, acause, even if they’ve stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes ’em struggle to hextricate theirselves.”

Death in a Flue. Not all masters were so “humane.” Phillips cites, among many others, the case of Master Joseph Rae who, after an eleven-year-old apprentice had tried for five hours to free himself from a narrow flue, “sent another apprentice up the flue to attach a cord to one of [his] legs. Despite the agonized shrieks of the tortured boy, Rae and another man hauled on their end of the rope with all their strength. Finally, when neither shrieks nor groans were heard, Rae, sensing that the boy was dead, drank a dram of whiskey and left the house.”

One of the first to take pity on the wretched climbing-boys was Philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who in 1770 formed a “Friendly Society” and in 1785 published A Sentimental History of Chimney

Sweepers to help them. In 1788, partly because of Hanway’s appeals, Parliament set the minimum age for climbing-boys at eight years.

Machines & Emancipation. In 1804, one George Smart invented a chimney-sweeping machine which made it unnecessary for human sweeps to climb the flues, but it was 1819 before a reform act passed the House of Commons. The House of Lords killed it with the admonition of one peer “to leave reforms of this kind … to the moral feeling of perhaps the most moral people on the face of the earth.”

Fifteen years later the House of Lords hesitantly passed a bill which merely raised the minimum age for climbing-boys to ten. It was 1840 before climbing-boys were legally abolished, and the law was still full of holes a small boy could get through. In 1864, under the sponsorship of the last, great champion of the climbing-boys, Lord Shaftesbury, the regulations were tightened, and in 1875 the practice was finally broken—67 years after Britain had abolished Negro slavery.