“There’s little Tom Dacre/ Who cried when his head that curved like a lamb’s back was shaved/ I said: ‘Hush Tom, never mind it, for you know that/ When you’re head is bear, the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’”
These lines demonstrate just how much the children suffered as chimney-sweeps. Yet, despite all this, Tom does not question the angel when he says:
“(And the angel said to Tom) if he’d be a good boy/ He’d have God for his father and never want joy.”
This implicit trust on the part of an innocent child is utterly characteristic of the ‘Songs of Innocence’, where everyone holds the view that they are living in a just world; a world where justice always triumphs and one in which there are only happy endings. This sentiment of trust on the part of the chimney-sweeps in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ is very contradictory to the plight and outlook of the chimney-sweep described in ‘London’, a poem from Blake’s ‘Songs of Experience’:
“And the chimney sweepers cry/ Every blackened church appalled,” goes the poem.
The chimney-sweeps from the ‘Songs of Innocence’, however, believed that if their moral compass pointed unwaveringly north they would always be looked after by God.
Therefore, armed with this naive view about the world, they got up each morning and got to work, forgetting entirely the cruelty that was inflicted upon them every day of their lives, regardless of whether or not they ‘did their work’. They forgot such things as the fact that they had come to be chimney-sweeps because their parents had sold them; they forgot that they had not a mortal soul to care for them. They thus woke up at the crack of dawn, every morning, after having ‘slept in soot’, in the belief that their good deeds would one day be rewarded.
However, unaware as they were that good things happen sometimes to the people who least deserve them, one wonders how their faith will be tested when they learn this.
