Reading Blake, I was reminded of a novel called “My Brilliant Friend”, written by Elena Ferrante. Ferrantes novel focuses on many aspects of childhood that are similar to Blakes, with violence and physical injury being the main similarity. In My Brilliant Friend, children live in Naples during a time when it is a violent place to grow up. A character writes, “I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence.” Children in the book grow up seeing violence in different ways and are almost immune to the shock of it. Blake is also focused on how children are used by society and the sad way they are almost disposed of, and the parents who “lease them out”. Blake writes about children being used by their parents, and I felt sad when he used the words “weep” instead of “sweep”, because he was showing how little the child must have been, that he had a lisp and wasn’t even able to pronounce the thing he was doing. In Ferrantes work, children also grow up with the expectation that they will start working for their parents from a young age, whether it’s around the house or in the family business, and it is seen as a privilege to continue with school. Children only know the small world that they are in, and they live for each day with passion because of the violence. “Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now…”. This is similar to the chimney sweeper, where children are living in the small world that they are in, and it is normal to see violence and destruction.
In “The Chimney Sweeper”, Blake describes the child as being clothed like death. During this time, it was common for children (mostly boys?) to start working as a chimney sweep from the age of five. The injuries and health issues sustained doing this type of work must have been terrible. This struck me as a particularly cruel, since most five year olds I have met can’t even always articulate what it is they want to say, let alone how they feel, and are not physically able to perform hard labor. In “My Brilliant Friend” Ferrante uses working children to convey the sad state that many of them grow up in, and to help the reader understand what it is like to be a child during the time period. Ferrantes novel is set in the 1950’s, and even though there is a huge gap in time between when Blake wrote his poetry, children are treated similarly in both. For Blake to have written multiple pieces about child chimney sweepers, it must have been an absolute epidemic. But I think sometimes for public opinion to shift on issues like child labor, people need to see something in print that forces them to examine the behavior. Setting the agenda is something that a lot of writers and artists help with, and political movements sometimes start with someone writing about something that is seen as acceptable because no one talks about it. Ferrante uses very matter of fact ways to describe the way violence is experienced by children in her novels, and it helps set the tone for the novel and underscores the way that society views children, also as slightly disposable, or not worth thinking about too much. Both texts highlight how childhood varies but is also similar in the way things were for many children, across different time periods and also countries.
