McIntosh !

Brittany McIntosh

Dr. Kroeg

ENG 480

26 September 2019

Children Really Should Not Be Working in the Chimneys

In William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” he highlights how children are being forced

into hard labor which will have detrimental long term effects. With my meme I created, I

obviously agree with Blake’s thoughts and used the “Spongebob Mocking” meme to laugh at

how such an uncontroversial topic was seen in London at the time. Both of “The Chimney

Sweeper” poems show how children are dying of preventable illnesses rather than the adults

using common sense to not send children ten and under into chimneys to clean them.

This assignment showed me the severity of the topic while still being able to use comedic

relief to help get the point across. While I was fully aware children were forced into this type of

labor quite young, the meme I created shows how serious of a problem this was at the time;

pairing it with the poems, it helps further this point because the second chimney sweeper poem

has the child die. The child was reunited with his mother thankfully, but he died too soon and it

was due to the labor he was forced into. This political statement made me feel a connection to his

work because I was able to grasp imagining if it were my own child that got sent into the

chimneys and developed an illness we as a family could not come back from. When I read this, I

saw the children I taught dance to being sold into child slavery essentially and I could not even

truly imagine if that were the case. I already saw the purpose Blake was making, but having to
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make a meme creating a joke out of it showed me how serious of an issue it is. While the meme

is funny, the truth behind it is still there.

By using a children’s cartoon as well, it furthered the point that kids did not get to be kids

back then. Now, children can sit and watch cartoons while they eat their breakfasts and go to

school and learn, but back then there were no cartoons, and really, no fun ways for children to

pass the time like there are now. They had to suffer and it was not for quite a while that child

labor laws started to finally change. Thankfully, kids today do not need to support their families

like in Blake’s time. His purpose comes across even today because now we do have the laws we

have to keep kids in school, help them get an education, and not allow them to work under a

certain age so they have the ability to do the things they want to do with their lives.

This Spongebob meme may be common, but the literary theme of it is unique and

political. The top part of the meme is what logically society would think today and the bottom

part is making fun of how London did not see how unethical it is for kids to be doing this kind of

hard labor, which resulted in many deaths and illnesses. As strange as it sounds, this meme

brought me closer to the political aspect of why it was created and helped show me how far

along society has come to where I have the privilege of being in a college classroom, learning

about the fatalities those before me faced, and I get to be that opportunity for them.