The Blackness of the Chimney Sweep: Dickens, Illustrators, and Erasing Racial Complexity

Abstract:In this article I look at how Dickens's text and his illustrators' drawings work together to erase the racially complex reality of Victorian London. I explore how the representations of the chimney-sweep in a variety of genres situate the sweep at a nexus of anxieties about race and class. By looking at the history of representing the May Day Parade, which showed Black participants, I argue that when the parade appears in Dickens's work, there is a deliberate erasure of Black presence. I then trace the sweep in Dickensian illustration to show that every time the sweep appears they carry the visual markers of the sweep – burnished cap, brush, and often bag – to comfort the (white) viewer and reader that they are not seeing a Black child on the street.