194 Ideals in the Modern World
call out to potential customers: “Sweep! Sweep!” But his actual
words, “weep, weep,” evoke both his extreme youth (he can’t yet
pronounce the word “sweep”) and his sad heart. The narrator, we
sense, has been a chimney sweep for some time and has grown ac-
customed to his lot. Onto the scene comes a new sweep, younger
and less experienced: little Tom Dacre, who cries when his head
“that curl’d like a lambs back” is shaved (10). There are practical
reasons for shaving Tom’s head; he needs to keep the soot from be-
fouling it. But compulsory head shaving is also the fate of convicts
and soldiers and students at certain kinds of academies. It’s a prac-
tice that submerges what is individual about the person— heads
shaved, we all look more alike. The personality is rubbed down.
The individual becomes more anonymous, more a part of a collec-
tive and less himself. It is, it seems, easier to mistreat a person whose
head has been shaved. He does not seem fully human. Our narrator
comes to comfort Tom— telling him that when his hair is gone there’s
no way that soot can stain it.
One feels that there is sweetness still latent in the narrator. He
acts from a certain sort of misguided compassion. (Volumes could
be written on the misuse of the Ideals.) He tries to cheer up little
Tom, ineptly enough, simply because crying will not do Tom any
good. If Tom continues to cry about his shaved head and lost hair,
he may give himself over completely to grief, fall into despair, and
die. The narrator wants to save Tom from the worst possi ble misery.
The best response may be to harden up, detach oneself, let the needs
and desires of the Self take over. If the Soul exposes itself in such a
world as this one, it will probably be crushed.
But Tom’s sensitivity goes beyond upset about his lost hair. He’s
also something of a visionary. He is a poet and a dreamer, more
tender than the fi erce prophet who chants the words to “London”
but comparably alight with imagination. The night Tom arrives
among the chimney sweeps, he falls asleep and has a blissful dream.