[In the following excerpt, Phillips provides an overview of the practice of employing small children as chimney sweeps and notes the numerous references to them in literature.]

Climbing-Boys, shouting their shrill cry of “All up” from the chimney-tops, were heard more and more frequently throughout eighteenth century England as the demand for their services, resulting from narrow flues and coal fires, constantly increased. As an institution, the climbing-boys became a sociological and economic problem, peculiarly English. Not only were the hardships of their trade so horrible that Parliament was forced to enact various regulatory measures for their protection, but their ignorance and unstable habits, carried over from their climbing-days, unfitted them for entering other trades when they had grown too large to ascend flues. In the course of time the problem which they presented was solved but only after many hard battles had been fought in and out of Parliament and much needless suffering had been endured.

The need for climbing-boys would not have arisen in England if the construction of chimneys had not developed so remarkably from the hole in the roof of the medieval dwelling through the fireplace of the Elizabethan manor, placed against the wall with its single hollow flue conducting the smoke rising from the roaring log fires to the chimney in the roof, to the several flues hidden in each of the numerous chimneys of the Georgian mansion. To satisfy their clients' desires for warmth, architects installed fireplaces in every room so that the roof-tops of London under the Hanoverians presented a myriad of chimneys, their tops covered by pots to protect the flues underneath. Each flue stretched in zig-zag fashion, now vertical, now horizontal, down through the walls of the building to its respective hearth. As the number of flues increased, their diameters decreased so that in the Regency Period a few measured only six inches square; a larger number, eight or nine inches square; and the majority, perhaps, averaged nine by fourteen inches.

Along with discarding the wide hearths and spacious flues of his ancestors, the Englishman in the eighteenth century turned from wood fires to coal. Whereas the deposit from the smoke rising from the logs could be easily swept out of the chimney by servants or grown chimney-sweepers, the soot, resulting from the carbonaceous particles condensed from the coal smoke, so clung to the sides of the narrow flues that only climbing-boys could, by manual labor, clean them.

Although climbing-boys were used infrequently in such cities as Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, New York, and Philadelphia, the usual method for sweeping chimneys outside of England was, at first, by two men operating a rope weighted at one end and tied in the middle with a bush of furze or broom, which, when pulled up and down the flues, dislodged the accumulation of soot¹ and later, after 1805, by machinery invented for the purpose of cleaning flues. Once he had started to employ climbing-boys, the Englishman did not wish to change his habit; and the custom of sending small children (there are instances of girls as well as boys) up chimneys continued in a country noted for its tenacity in maintaining its traditions.

The earliest reference to a chimney-sweeper, signifying a man rather than a boy, is quoted in the New English Dictionary as appearing in Cocke Lorell's Book, dated about 1550, “Chimney swepers and costerde mongers.” Marlowe in Doctor Faustus has Envy say “I am Enuy, begotten of a Chimney-sweeper, and an Oyster wife.”² Shakespeare mentions the trade twice: in Love's Labour's Lost, “To look like her are chimney-sweepers black”³ and in Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”⁴ In 1602 the term was introduced into the title of an anonymous piece entitled Work for Chimney-sweepers: Or a Warning for Tabacconists—concerned not with chimney-sweeping but with “the pernicious use of tobacco.” In Epicoene Jonson has Truewit say, “marry, the chimney-sweepers will not be drawn in” and again, “that he never be trusted with trimming of any but chimney-sweepers.”⁵

The use of “chimney-sweeper” for describing a boy apparently started in the seventeenth century. John Cottington, alias “Mulled Sack,” who was born in Cheapside in 1611 and, after a romantic career as a highwayman, died on the Smithfield gallows in 1656, was apprenticed to a master chimney-sweeper at the age of eight. He ran away when he reached thirteen, considering that he was “as fully informed in the art and mystery of chimney-sweeping as his master.”⁶ Swift had a young boy in mind when he wrote in his Description of the Morning, 1727, “The small coal man was heard with cadence deep, Till drown'd in shriller notes of chimney-sweep.” In 1776 the Annual Register stated that while still a schoolboy, Edward W. Montagu, Jr., “exchanged clothes with a chimney-sweeper, and followed for some time that sooty occupation.”⁷

Credit for coining the phrase “climbing-boy,” meaning a boy small enough to climb narrow flues, may belong to Jonas Hanway who used it in the title of his third book on chimney-sweeping, A Sentimental History of Chimney-Sweepers, in London and Westminster, Showing the Necessity of putting Them under Regulations to Prevent the grossest Inhumanity to the Climbing Boys. With a Letter to a London Clergyman on Sunday Schools calculated for the preservation of the Children of the Poor.⁸ In 1788 James Pettit Andrew's An Appeal to the Humane on behalf of Climbing Boys employed by the Chimney Sweepers⁹ clearly differentiates in its title between the apprentice, or climbing-boy, and the grown chimney-sweeper, although this distinction was not always observed. Further references to climbing-boys may be found in the Act of 28 George III, c. 48, and in David Porter's Considerations.¹⁰ With the founding in 1803 of the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, by Encouraging a New Method of Sweeping Chimnies, and for Improving the Condition of Children and Others, Employed by Chimney Sweepers, the specific term “climbing-boy” was widely publicized and gradually replaced the more generic “chimney-sweeper.”

Although the trade of chimney-sweeping was established before Shakespeare's time, the custom of forcing young boys to sweep flues with brushes and scrapers probably did not become general until the eighteenth century.¹¹ In 1785 Jonas Hanway estimated that in London there were 100 established master chimney-sweepers, employing 200 journeymen and 400 climbing-boys, as well as 50 itinerant sweepers with 150 boys.¹² Seven years later, David Porter calculated that in the metropolitan area there were about 200 master chimney-sweepers with 200 journeymen and 500 boys.¹³ No doubt, the regulatory measure in the Act of 1834 for raising the age level from eight years to ten for apprentices, and the gradual encroachment of the chimney-sweeping machines changed the balance between master and apprentice so that in 1841 Henry Mayhew declared that London alone contained 619 male and 44 female chimney-sweepers of 20 years of age and upwards with 370 male chimney-sweepers under 20 years—these he classified as apprentices.¹⁴ No figures are available for the number of master chimney-sweepers and apprentices through the rest of England from 1785 to 1841 but surely there were several thousand.

When Parliament abolished Negro slavery in 1808, the flues of its august chambers were being climbed by boys of four, five, and six years of age, sold by their parents to chimney-sweepers for prices ranging from a few shillings to two guineas—the smaller the child, the better the price—or apprenticed with low premiums by callous parish overseers of almshouses to men like Mr. Gamfield in Oliver Twist who liked boys of “a nice small pattern, just the very thing for register stoves.” When an undernourished, puny boy became lodged in an avalanche of soot in the dark bend of a narrow flue, he faced the horror of immediate suffocation, or, if rescued, the possibilities of being maimed. Mr. Gamfield, who labored under “the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death,” explained to the Board of Overseers his method of persuading terrified boys to extricate themselves: he did not smother his lads as so many of his colleagues did

“acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make 'em come down agin … that's all smoke, and no blaze; 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. 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. It's humane too, gen'lmen, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves.”¹⁵

Few workhouse orphans were as fortunate as Oliver Twist to escape from the clutches of chimney-sweepers of Mr. Gamfield's ilk. From 1794, when the Annual Register noted the suffocation of John Brewster while sweeping a flue at Stradishall, Suffolk,¹⁶ to 1875, when the Times reported the death of George Brewster as a result of his having swallowed a quantity of soot while sweeping the chimneys of Fulbourn Lunatic Asylum,¹⁷ newspaper accounts, reports of humane societies, and Parliamentary records contain hundreds of instances of climbing-boys injured and killed, beaten and burned, deformed and diseased. Perhaps one of the most cold-blooded examples of cruelty was brought to light in Edinburgh, in 1817, at the trial of Joseph Rae, a master chimney-sweeper, indicted for the murder of his eleven-year-old apprentice, John Fraser, who sought for five hours to free himself in a narrow flue. At last, Rae, realizing that threats of using gun-powder to blow him out were useless, sent another apprentice up the flue to attach a cord to one of Fraser's 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. A mason was quickly summoned to open a hole into the flue. He found Fraser “lying on his belly, with his hands stretched above his head. He was lying at a turn in the vent, and his head jammed at the head of the turn; had a towel around his head, and a shirt all around his neck.”¹⁸ This was the last, but it was not the only time that Rae had made the boy suffer. One witness testified that in 1816, the year before the murder, Rae had commanded the helpless boy to “strip himself perfectly naked” and then proceeded to “beat him on the back with the single end of a sweep's ropes, apparently with all his strength. The boy cried much. About ten o'clock at night the panel took the boy to a back room, and made him go naked up and down the chimney, till one o'clock Sunday morning.”¹⁹ Another witness claimed that he saw Rae “tie the deceased to a chest, gag his mouth with a stick, and beat him with ropes till the blood came, and then put saltpetre on him; has seen panel make deceased eat the vilest offal.”²⁰ So greatly did boys hate climbing flues, that it is not strange to read of one lad who gladly consented to the amputation of a leg, crushed in a fall in a flue, when the surgeon assured him that with one leg he could never ascend another chimney.²¹

Less startling than the publicized cases of cruelty and death, but equally shocking, were the diseases and deformities occasioned by the trade of chimney-sweeping: sleeping on soot-bags in damp unheated cellars and walking the streets before dawn in inclement weather caused many boys to have coughs and asthma; undernourishment and inadequate clothing led to consumption; irritation from soot particles gave them red-rimmed eyes and inflamed eyelids; soot cached in the unwashed folds of the scrotum brought to many of them the dreaded “chimney-sweeper's cancer.” Carrying heavy bags of soot malformed the boys' spines, legs, and arms; ascending rough-plastered flues produced knocked-knees and swollen ankle joints; falling down flues onto blazing fires burned their young flesh.

Despite the repeated efforts of philanthropic individuals and humane societies to persuade Parliament to rescue the children from their miseries, legislative reaction was slow, often ineffectual, perhaps for the reason that John Holland gave:

The chimney-sweeper is a little slave,
Whose presence and whose horrible employ
Are so familiar with our earliest thoughts
That we forget to question their humanity;(22)

The House of Lords, for example, emasculated the regulatory clauses in a bill passed to relieve the climbing-boys in 1788; in 1804, 1818, and 1819, the Lords persisted in killing measures for improving the working conditions of the apprentices because they would restrict the trade of chimney-sweeping and necessitate the alteration of flues to permit the accommodation of machines. Even when in 1834 public opinion forced the Lords to approve a bill, passed by the Commons, the Duke of Hamilton voiced the hesitation of his reactionary colleagues in declaring that the measure before them for regulating the trade of chimney-sweeping and construction of chimneys would force individuals to erect their chimneys “after a particular fashion.”²³ This, he thought, was carrying legislation a little further than was necessary. The Act of 1840, however, did give protection to the boys, and the later acts of 1864 and 1875 strengthened its provisions so that the long-continued practice of employing climbing-boys was finally abolished.

This report, then, on England's climbing-boys, refers to that phase of child labor connected with the trade of chimney-sweeping and traces the history of the long struggle waged between a reactionary privileged class to maintain the status quo of the climbing-boys and a liberal-minded, socially conscious group of persons striving to do away with child labor in sweeping flues by winning enough popular support to persuade Parliament to outlaw the accursed social and economic evils of the practice.

Notes

1. The Domestic Encyclopaedia or A Dictionary of Facts and Useful Knowledge, 5 vols., ed. by H. F. M. Willich, Philadelphia, 1804, II, 120.

2. Scene 6, 11, 145-46.

3. Act 4, scene 3, line 266.

4. Act 4, scene 2, lines 262-63.

5. Act 1, scene 1, line 197 and Act 3, scene 2, line 218.

6. Charles G. Harper, Half-Hours with the Highwaymen: [Picturesque Biographies and Traditions of the ‘Knights of the Road.’ London, Chapman and Hall, 1908.] 2 vols., London, II, 26. There is an illustration of “Mulled Sack” in frontispiece of Volume I.

7. Annual Register, 1776, London, 1788, 4th ed., pp. 34-36.

8. In 1785. Place of publication, apparently London, is not given.

9. Published in London, in 1788.

10. David Porter, Considerations on the Present State of Chimney Sweepers, with Some Observations of the Act of Parliament, Intended for their Regulation and Relief, London, 1792. Another edition, with revisions, appeared in 1801.

11. “It is a fact but little known, that the practice of employing Climbing Boys is of little more than a century's duration in this country,” A Short Account of the Proceedings of the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, London, 1816, p. 14.

12. Hanway, [Sonas] Sentimental History, [of Chimney-Sweepers in London and Westminster. London, Dodsley, 1785.] Letter XVI.

13. Porter, [David] Consideration, [of the Present State of Chimney Sweepers. London, Printed for the Author, 1792.] 1792, p. 27.

14. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work, 3 vols. in one, London, 1851, II, 345.

15. Charles Dickens, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, London, 1838, Ch. III, p. 16.

16. Annual Register for the Year 1794, Vol. 36 (1795), 30.

17. Times, March 25, 1875.

18. The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album, arranged by James Montgomery, London, 1824, p. 45.

19. Ibid., pp. 45-46.

20. Ibid., p. 47.

21. Times, March 13, 1819.

22. John Holland, “An Appeal to the Fair Sex,” Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, p. 279.

23. T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, London, XXIV (1834), 419.