The poems London and the Chimney Sweeper were both written by William Blake. Both poems were written around the same time and were written to show the cruelty of city life. Blake wanted to give us a strong visual picture in our minds of what workers in the 1800's went through.
             He wrote both these poems to show us that children working in the city saw death as a way to escape the harsh reality of life. This is a strong example of a paradox that Blake liked to use to illustrate what these children thought. At the age of 10 or even younger kids should not be even considering death. They should be worried about school and other activities. Instead they were worried about if they were going to have any food tonight, if they were going to have a job when they woke up, or if they were going to die at work. Both poems talk about the cry of fear in every infant. He talked about marks of weakness and marks of woe. In this time period no one ate enough protein, vitamin c, calcium, etc... So every person working in these factory's and mines didn't even have enough energy to keep themselves going. That is why there were so many fatal accidents during that time period. The kids were sold and were forced to do some jobs that you and I would never even consider doing. They were performing these tasks at 12.
             In this day in age we are lucky to have organizations that protect us from bad working conditions. The past headline was about Legionnaire disease. If this had happened back in the 1800's many people would have died. Ford had to close down their plant in order to fix the problem. They lost a lot of business in trying to fix the problem. We should be thankful to have OSHA and safety policies. Back then they didn't have a minimum wage. People got paid ten cents an hour, if that. We should be thankful of all the safety organizations we have today.
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