What It Was Like to Be a Chimney Sweeper In the Victorian Era

The jaunty image of the Victorian child chimney sweep is indelibly romantic, evoking the picturesque London glamorized in Mary Poppins. But the truth is that chimney sweep kids – and children living in Dickensian squalor, in general – usually led lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short," to quote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The history of chimney sweeps is, in many ways, the history of London itself.