CHILD LABOR IN LITERATURE: INSIGHTS OF ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Children are the gift of God only when they are groomed in a perfect society with proper education and care. On the other side, the same children become society’s burden when they get engaged into slavery for society’s advancement; that society becomes a curse for these little children and their lives then. The Romantic and Victorian Era of English Society denoted the progressions in manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and profoundly affected cultural conditions and socioeconomic in England however one of the worst conventional effects of this advancement was child labor, an occurrence made well before and fully exploited during these spans. The Romantic poet William Blake and the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning both considered child labor as a curse of their age. The current study investigates Blake's quest for the rising interest of child labor as impendence to their serenity in his poem "The Chimney Sweeper", and Elizabeth Barret Browning’s presentation of child ache due to the hard labor in “The Cry of the Children”.