Chimney Sweeps, Climbing Boys and Child Employment in Ireland, 1775–1875

Abstract

The identification of the involvement of young boys in cleaning chimneys as a social problem in the late eighteenth century, and its effectual elimination in the second half of the nineteenth, provides a yardstick against which one can measure changing attitudes to child labour during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The involvement of children as young as five in this trade and the injuries and illness to which they were subject prompted an incrementally more vigorous demand for its elimination that was fuelled by the increasing societal influence of the respectable. Based on an analysis of the practice, the abuses it permitted and the efforts of reformers to convince the public and politicians that the invention of the sweeping machine meant it was no longer necessary to involve children in this dangerous trade, the article explains how the combination of revulsion at the mistreatment of climbing boys, organised opposition and an attitudinal shift brought about a change in the law that effectively brought it to an end and established the principle that child labour was immoral as well as unnecessary.