How does William Blake present his views on the treatment of children?

Blake courted divisive opinion throughout his life — because he hated the cruelty that common children were subjected to

Blake’s poetic visions as a radical Romanticist led him to risk arrest and punishment under treason — his scathing views on the Establishment’s mistreatment of children are nothing short of revolutionary, and today remain entirely engaging.

In the Songs of Innocence — we take on the perspective of a working class child citizen in the poem “The Chimney Sweeper”. While today we might mistake the first person narrative as being simple and sentimental, the poem in its time was seen as a protest: a strong and powerful statement against child labour and child slavery or the “chain”— two horrific concepts understood in the 1700s and early 1800s by many as quite normal.

Blake’s character in this poem, “Tom Dacre” — which is phonetically similar without accident perhaps, to ‘tomb dark’ — helps to cement the ghostly metaphor that emanates from the poem’s lexicon:

“head…shav’d…white”