The jaunty image of the Victorian child chimney sweep is indelibly romantic, evoking the picturesque London glamorized in Mary Poppins. But the truth is that chimney sweep kids – and children living in Dickensian squalor, in general – usually led lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short," to quote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The history of chimney sweeps is, in many ways, the history of London itself. After the Great Fire of London gutted half the city in 1666, chimneys were rebuilt to minimize the risk of inferno. Their new, narrow, winding structures meant that children were the only humans small enough to fit through them.

The horrors of child labor were, of course, legion; and the repercussions were dire for these small workers.



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