How Does Blake Create Sympathy For Adversity?

In his poems Blake uses imagery and diction to contrast how children meet adversity with naive hope while adults meet adversity with delusion and denial. In the 1789 version of “Chimney Sweeper,” Blake describes the situation through the eyes of a child. He invokes sympathy from the reader by creating images of a poor young boy slaving away and sleeping in “soot” (Blake 4). To show how the boys are mistreated, Blake dehumanizes one boy by comparing him to an animal. The comparison of the boy to a “lamb” being shaved also indicates that the boy’s innocence has been violated because of the inhumanity he endures (Blake 6). However, in the 1794 poem, the laboring boy is described as a “thing” (Blake 1) rather than a “lamb,” further dehumanizing the boy (Blake 6).

Instead of using pathos to create sympathy for the children, Blake’s style becomes more distant and cold towards the young, suffering boys. The adults are in denial of the boys’ suffering because they see the abuse of child labor and are unable to justify it. Instead of recognizing the injustice of child labor, they see the boys “danc[ing] and sing[ing]” (Blake 9) and automatically believe that they are content, clinging to the belief that they have caused the boys “no injury” (Blake 10). However, the boys are not as joyful as they appear on a surface level. Instead, they are in “misery” (Blake 12). The adults turn a blind eye to the suffering that is plain before them to maintain a facade of virtue. They know that if they acknowledged the injustice, then they would have to also recognize that they too had sinned by allowing the labor to take