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Updated: June 24, 2025
Here she founded the "Blue-Stocking" Club, and gathered round her many famous men and women. On May 1 every year she gave a feast to all the chimney-sweeps of London, "so that they might enjoy one happy day in the year," an expression hardly appreciated now when the lot of chimney-sweeps is so very different from what it was then. Timbs remarks of the house: "Here Miss Burney was welcomed and Dr.
Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely, but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair-menders, who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.
"This is a miserable tale," said Jeremy Stickles brightly; "hand me over the schnapps, my boy. What fools we are to spoil our eyes for other people's troubles! Enough of our own to keep them clean, although we all were chimney-sweeps. There is nothing like good hollands, when a man becomes too sensitive. Restore the action of the glands; that is my rule, after weeping.
At one of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the housetops, like a gull across the waves.
Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way of invading the houses of men. I thought of little chimney-sweeps, and `The Water Babies; but I decided that it was not that. Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime. Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
The shop windows were brilliant with gas, and bright silks, and satins, and jewels were all spread out in the windows in the most tempting manner; all was gayety, bustle, hurry, drive, and confusion; omnibuses, carts, carriages, drays, military, music; people flocking to concerts, shows, and theatres; people flocking in town, and people flocking out; fashions in one window coffins in the next; beggars and millionaires, ministers and play-actors, chimney-sweeps and ex-presidents, all in a heap.
"Look, look! oh, look, sir!" shouted the mate with a cry like one in a nightmare; and the next moment he fainted and fell on the top of Broomberg the mutineer. Two little girls, one little boy, and one little dog, all as black as chimney-sweeps, the girls with their arms in the air, now came wildly racing aft.
He became a voice for the poor and weak. He gave his life to reform acts and corn laws; he emancipated the enslaved boys and girls toiling in mines and factories; he exposed and made impossible the horrors of that inferno in which chimney-sweeps live; he founded twoscore industrial, ragged and trade schools; he established shelters for the homeless poor; when Parliament closed its sessions at midnight Lord Shaftesbury went forth to search out poor prodigals sleeping under Waterloo or Blackfriars bridge, and often in a single night brought a score to his shelter.
We would pause for half an hour and boil our little kettle, and have some tea and cake, and then go on again till quite late, getting well scolded when we reached home at last dead-tired and as black as little chimney-sweeps.
"Cobden, though bitterly hostile, was better than Bright." Even men whom on general grounds he disliked and despised such as Lord Beaconsfield and Bishop Wilberforce found a saving clause in his judgment if he could truthfully say, "He helped me with the chimney-sweeps," or, "He felt for the wretched operatives."
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