All of those factors impacted chimney sweeps. Doing this created a complicated entanglement of pitch-black tunnels inside the home that required someone small to go inside of them in order to be cleaned.īut the tax wasn’t the only change occurring, The Industrial Revolution brought about several things among them was an increase in population which lead to the creation of a working class and urbanization (“Effects of the Industrial Revolution”). Builders started connecting flues of new chimneys with the older chimneys that already existed in order to save the homeowner from paying astronomical prices (Gurnett 1). However, when homeowners were expected to pay a shilling for every chimney, they had in their house in the seventeenth century, the process changed. They would stick a broom handle up the chimney and then sweep up the soot that came out (Mayhew 380 ch.8). Originally, a servant was expected to clean the flue.
Shaking hands with a chimney sweep mary poppins how to#
The biggest issue with a chimney was how to keep it clean. A fireplace represented social class, if someone could afford to have a brick chimney in their house then they were part of the elite. It all began in the sixteenth century when fireplaces became important in England (Polson 1). In this paper, I will be using history to showcase why chimney sweeps were needed and the struggles they faced on a daily basis.
However, reading The Water Babies opened my eyes to what being a chimney sweep was really like.
I was smart enough to understand that they weren’t singing and dancing on the job but, it never occurred to me that a grown man wouldn’t have been able to do the job because of his size and I never thought that sweeps were abused several times a day. Before I took this class, I assumed that a chimney sweep’s life was like the way that Disney portrays it in Mary Poppins.
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