At Home - Bill Bryson [221]
In the worst circumstances, children were sometimes given the most backbreaking of jobs. Those as young as six, of both sexes, were put to work in mines, where their small frames allowed them access to tight spaces. Because of the heat and to save their clothes, they often worked naked. (Grown men also traditionally worked naked; women usually worked naked to the waist.) For much of the year, those who worked in mines never saw sunlight, which left many stunted and weak from vitamin D deficiencies. Even comparatively light labor was often dangerous. Children in the ceramics factories of the Potteries in the Midlands cleaned out pots containing residues of lead and arsenic, inducing a slow poisoning that condemned many to eventual paralysis, palsies, and seizures.
The least envied child workers of all were the chimney sweeps, or “climbing boys,” as they were also known. They started earlier, worked harder, and died sooner than any other group. Most began their short careers at about the age of five, though the records show one boy articled into the profession at three and a half, an age at which even the simplest tasks must have been confusing and frightening. Little boys were needed because flues were tight and often wildly convoluted. “Some,” writes John Waller in The Real Oliver Twist, “turned at right angles, ran horizontally or diagonally, even zig-zagged or plunged downward before rising up toward the stack. One London chimney switched direction an amazing fourteen times.” It was brutal work. One method of encouraging the boys not to slack was to light a pile of straw in the grate to send a blast of heat up the chimney after them. Many climbing boys ended their short careers stooped and ruined by the age of eleven or twelve. Cancer of the scrotum seems to have been a particular occupational hazard.
In such a harsh and hopeless world, the case of Isaac Ware stands out as a happy miracle. Ware’s is a name that crops up regularly in architectural histories of the eighteenth century, for he was the leading building critic of the age and his opinions carried a great deal of weight. (It was he, you may remember from our visit to the cellar, who helped make red brick unfashionable in the mid-eighteenth century by pronouncing it “fiery and disagreeable to the eye.”) But Ware was not born to a life of eminence. He started, in fact, as a street urchin and chimney sweep, and owed his polish and success to a single extraordinary act of kindness. In about 1712, an anonymous gentleman—never formally identified but more or less universally assumed to be the third Earl of Burlington, the builder of Chiswick House and one of the tastemakers of the age—was walking up Whitehall in London when he spotted a young sweep making a sketch of the Banqueting House on the pavement with a piece of charcoal. The drawing showed such extraordinary talent that Burlington tried to examine it, but the boy, thinking he was in trouble, burst into tears and made to rub it out. The gentleman calmed him, engaged him in conversation, and became so impressed with the boy’s natural brightness that he purchased the boy’s freedom from his employer, took him into his own household, and began the long process of turning him into a gentleman. He sent him on a grand tour of Europe and had him trained in all the refinements of life.
Under this tutelage Ware became an accomplished if not brilliant architect, but his real gift was as an arbiter and thinker. His several important books included a respected translation of Palladio’s Quattro libri, and The Complete Body of Architecture, which became a kind of bible of taste and discernment for professionals and amateurs both. Yet he never entirely shed his humble origins. When he died in 1766, his skin, it was said, still bore the indelible sooty stains of the