They changed their world

When I was around the tender age of five or six one of my aunts, for a birthday present, gave me a copy of "The Water Babies", by Charles Kingsley,

As my elder sister Anne read it to me, impressions were laid into my tender mind and memory that remain with me to this day.

Kingsley used his considerable skills as a writer to champion the cause of the child chimney sweeps. These diminutive people were forced to crawl up the broad-breasted flues of the large houses in London and brush down the ash and soot from the brick faces. It was truly a taste of hell for them. They were bruised, scarred, gassed and burnt. Numerous were the times when these poor mites suffocated  above the hobs of the kitchens, their bodies pulled down with the ropes attached to their ankles.

It took an intellectual country preacher to turn the tide of their misfortunes. He inveighed from the pulpit, wrote scalding letters and penned books like the Water Babies to rouse the social conscience of Victorian England. And he succeeded. Before his death the last of the chimney sprites was liberated and sent to a worse fate.......  school!

Jubilate.

Ian.

Quotation from Kingsley about a fellow intellectual.

"He possessed almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them."