Exploratory Surgery: Changing the post-1800 view on Slavery

Poets of the post-1800 era saw an affliction on society, and they used their words and their wit and their work to make sure that the society that allowed it to happen was not allowed to let it happen in ignorance, shining a light into the darkest realms of their society and culture. This affliction was slavery. The poets William Blake and Charlotte Smith in particular saw slavery as a malignant tumour on the face of their country, and their words often showcased this fact. Slaves were often young and illiterate, and would have been unaware of the objection to their status that was printed on the page by someone of a higher social caste than they were. Instead Blake and Smith aimed their rhetoric at the slave owners in hopes that they might see the malady of slavery and slave ownership for what it was, changing the way their society thought and operated one reader at a time.

Blake takes aim at the particular social injustice of child slavery in his work time and time again, often with an air of frustration that it is still allowed to happen. His poem “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience is an out-and-out indictment of the treatment of the poor in the city around him.

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?

And so many children poor?

It is a land of poverty!

In dealing with the subject of the poor and of those enslaved, Blake rarely uses allusion or misdirection in his wording, leaving very little open for interpretation (though there is still some wiggle-room for interpretation in his work, chiefly in the less-heavy-handed Songs of Innocence). This, I think, is because Blake knew that a reader, when given room for interpretation, will see themselves on the page. They will imbue the poem and its meaning with their own values, thoughts and experience and miss the intent behind the words, and Blake was not writing to show the beauty of London or the elegance of daffodils, he was writing to correct the inherit social wrong of child poverty and slavery, and so he left no room open for interpretation or misunderstanding, stating his intent and his views lyrically to the reader that they might see how their own actions helped contribute to the fate of slave children. To force people to see a plight that had been invisible to them.

Blake continued this theme of harsh appraisal in his duel “The Chimney Sweeper” poems from both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In Songs of Innocence, Blake writes:

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

Again, as before, this is not a flowery or metaphorical view on the subject of slavery: it is cold, honest, descriptive and to-the-point. It tells the sad likely history of the majority of young slaves in London, either having been orphaned completely, having been sold, or some combination of the two. The poem goes on to portray religion and the promise of better things to come are used to keep these impoverished children in their place, always working in this world for the promise of something better in the next:

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

In Songs of Experience Blake goes one step further and damns the parents of these children as well, but again points the blame for their wretched condition at the society as a whole that created them: all of parent and priest and king and God are to blame in Blake’s view:

'And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and His priest and king, Who made up a heaven of our misery.

In blaming all those responsible for a child slave’s welfare from God right down to the lower-class citizen that happens to be the child’s parent, Blake is carefully blaming the system itself (“the system” being a term that Blake himself would have been unfamiliar with, having become popular in the mid-twentieth century). In only a few words Blake has deconstructed the system of society, culture and development that he sees around him to illustrate how it effects those at the lowest wrung of the social ladder, those with no control and no voice and no ability to change their situation. The poor are lied to by the priests and the kings to keep them in their place, who then in turn tell the same lies to their own children; showing the children to be the lower class of the lower class, much as Alice Walker did for African-American women in her 1982 novel The Color Purple. Blake has shown us a hole in society: a troubling gap in the way we did things at the time, and has illustrated which of us are the most likely to fall through that gap. But his later poem “The Human Abstract” from Songs of Experience tells us that it is not enough to simply feel bad for these poor disenfranchised children, one must take action against it:

Pity would be no moreIf we did not make somebody Poor; And Mercy no more could beIf all were as happy as we.

I believe all these poems, when viewed together like this, paint a clear picture not only of Blake’s views of slavery as the key evil in his society, but they also show his frustration in people not changing the events (or possibly even not getting that the events need to be changed or understanding his point of view) and stating them ever more bluntly. I believe that many reacted to his portrayal of the chimney sweep with pity, and that this was his indictment of them: that pity was not enough. Wow was not enough. Anything short of changing the way you live so that you, at least, are not responsible for this outcome were not enough.

This is similar to the way Charlotte Smith chose to portray her views on the state of the poor in her poem The Dead Beggar. In The Dead Beggar, Smith is also taking aim at the society which has allowed the poor and lower-class slavery to happen, but rather than aim at the wider landscape of priests and kings and parents as Blake did, Smith narrows the focus to deal with an individual:

Addressed to a Lady, who was affected at seeing the Funeral of a nameless Pauper, buried at the ex-pense of the Parish, in the Church-Yard at Bright-helmstone, in November 1792.

Whether the Lady she is addressing if fictional or not is irrelevant to the main crux of the poem, which (like Blake’s work) illustrates expertly how society used religion as a means to keep the poor in their place. Smith postulates that the Lady crying over the death of the nameless Pauper is not enough. To explain, that pity after the fact was not enough. That it is not sufficient to feel bad after an action has happened and never do anything to prevent it. Or, as Blake said above, that “Pity would be no more, if we did not make somebody poor.”

Both Blake and Smith make clear that a society that allows slavery and poverty to occur is a like a man that allows an illness and malady to run through him unchecked: that some illnesses need to be removed, not pitied or mourned afterward. Both poets took great pains to impart their messages of freedom and fairness into the minds of their readers, because they knew that only their readers could do what needed to be done to change their society for the better.