Most people know of the happy, soot covered, singing and dancing chimney sweeper known as Dick Van Dyke from the beloved story of Mary Poppins, but the chimney sweeper for today’s topic isn’t written by P. L. Travers. William Blake is an author best known for the ballads he had composed in his two of his books The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Innocence and Experience, including “The Chimney Sweeper.” During the Fifteenth Century, People built fires daily in order to cook food and keep warm, and this caused a build of soot and ash within chimneys. These chimneys were often cleaned by children small enough to fit down inside the narrow brick structures. The problems that arose from kids doing this had a wide range of undesirable effects that could lead to an early death. Thankfully, though, these children had the comfort of religion when confronted with the possibility of death. William Blake, seeing the problem with this, uses his skills with words to show the injustice and inequality of child labor in his time through the use of his satirical ballad “The Chimney Sweeper.” The possibility of an early death was a threat at all times to the “diligent little workers,” and it would not be too far of a stretch to say that this thought haunted their naive minds. “As Time was a-sleeping he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.” (Blake 10-12) One of the little boys had a nightmare one night