Here they are! The “sweeps” are come! Here is the garland and the lord and lady! Poor fellows! this is their great festival. Their garland is a large cone of holly and ivy framed upon hoops, which gradually diminishes in size to an apex, whereon is sometimes a floral crown, knots of ribbons, or bunches of flowers; its sides are decorated in like manner; and within it is a man who walks wholly unseen, and hence the garland has the semblance of a moving hillock of evergreens. The chimney-sweepers’ jackets and hats are bedizened with gilt embossed paper; sometimes they wear coronals of flowers in their heads; their black faces and legs are grotesquely coloured with Dutch-pink; their shovels are scored with this crimson pigment, interlaced with white chalk. Their lord and lady are magnificent indeed; the lord is always the tallest of the party, and selected from some other profession to play this distinguished character: he wears a huge cocked hat, fringed with yellow or red feathers, or laced with gold paper: his coat is between that of the full court dress, and the laced coat of the footman of quality; in the breast he carries an immense bunch of flowers; his waistcoat is embroidered; his frill is enormous; his “shorts” are satin, with paste knee-buckles; his stockings silk with figured clocks; his shoes are dancing pumps, with large tawdry buckles; his hair is powdered, with a bag and rosette; he carries in his right hand a high cane with a shining metal knob, and in his left a handkerchief held by one corner, and of a colour once white. His lady is sometimes a strapping girl, though usually a boy in female attire, indescribably flaunty and gaudy; her head in full dress; in her right hand a brass ladle, in her left a handkerchief like to my lord’s. When the garland stops, my lord and lady exhibit their graces in a minuet de la cour, or some other grave movement; in a minute or two they quicken into a dance, which enables my lord to picture his conceptions of elegance; the curvilinear elevation of his arm, with his cane between his finger and thumb, is a courtly grace, corresponding with the stiff thrown-back position of his head, and the strait fall of the handkerchief in the other hand. My lady answers these inviting positions by equal dignity; they twirl and whirl in sight of each other, though on opposite sides of the dancing garland, to the continued clatter of the shovel and brush held by each capering member of the sooty tribe. The dance concluded, my lord and my lady interchange a bow and a curtsy; my lord flings up his cane-arm, displaces his magnificent hat with the other hand, and courteously bends, with imploring looks, to spectators at the adjacent windows or in the street; the little sootikins hold up their shovels, my lady with outstretched arm presents the bowl of her ladle, and “the smallest donations are thankfully received” by all the sable fraternity. This is the chimney-sweepers’ London pageant on May-day 1825; but for the first time, there was this year added a clown, a-la-Grimaldi, to one or two of the sweeping processions; he grimaces with all his might, walks before Jack-in-the-green on his hands or his feet, as may be most convenient, and practises every antic and trick that his ingenuity can devise, to promote the interest of his party.
It is understood, however, that the offerings on the festival are not exclusively appropriated to the receivers; masters share a certain portion of their apprentices’ profits from the holiday; others take the whole of the first two days’ receipts, and leave to the worn-out, helpless objects, by whom they profit all the year round, no more than the scanty gleanings of the third day’s performance.
ELIA, AND JEM WHITE’S FEAST TO THE SWEEPS.
Elia, the noble heart of Elia, responds to these humble claimants upon humanity; they cry and have none to help them; he is happy that a personal misfortune to himself can make one of them laugh; he imagines “all the blood of all the Howards” in another; he conceives no degradation by supping with them in public at “Bartlemy Fair.” Kind feelings and honesty make poets and philosophers. Listen to what Elia says:—
“I have a kindly yearning toward these dim specks—poor blots—innocent blacknesses—
“I reverence these young Africans of our own growth—these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimnies), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind.
“When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation! to see a chit no bigger than one’s-self enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni—to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark, stifling caverns, horrid shades!—to shudder with the idea that ‘now, surely, he must be lost for ever’—to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light—and then (O, fulness of delight) running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the ‘Apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand rises.’
“Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester.
“I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the populace; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young sweep with something more than forgiveness.—In the last winter but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame enough—yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened—when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth—but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pie-man—there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever—with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth—for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it—that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and his mockery till midnight.
“I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket, presumably holding such jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to ‘air’ them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when