Home › Glossary › Letter C

chimney sweep

Historical Office
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A historical laborer, frequently a child in 18th–19th century England, tasked with cleaning soot from chimneys—a figure of hardship in social poetry.

Detailed Definition
The chimney sweep appears in poetry as a poignant symbol of child labor and social neglect. Immortalized by Blake in “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” sweeps endured dangerous, degrading work. In verse, they evoke themes of innocence corrupted, systemic cruelty, and the invisibility of the poor. Their soot-stained presence contrasts sharply with images of domestic comfort, making them powerful moral indictments in social protest poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
In William Blake’s "The Chimney Sweeper," the child sweep embodies exploited innocence; Charles Lamb’s essays in verse mourn the sweep’s lost childhood; Victorian poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning link sweeps to systemic cruelty; In abolitionist verse, sweeps are compared to enslaved children; The sweep in Thomas Hood’s "The Song of the Shirt" shares the laborer’s invisibility; Chimney sweeps appear in Christmas poems as figures of pathos and redemption.
Additional Notes
Chimney sweeps, often children due to their small size, performed dangerous, soot-filled labor in urban homes; immortalized in Blake’s “Songs of Experience,” they symbolize exploitation, lost innocence, and social invisibility—understanding their working conditions and cultural perception deepens readings of Romantic and Victorian social protest poetry.
Also Known As
chimney sweeper sweep
Skip to main content