The speaker in this poem is a chimney sweeper, 'sold' by his father into child labour after the death of his mother (effectively equating child labour with slavery).

George Norton shows how William Blake’s Chimney Sweeper poems highlight the injustice and brutality suffered by child chimney sweeps in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Although many scholars and critics have successfully annotated both the Songs of Innocence (SoI) and the Songs of Experience (SoE) versions of William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” and have noted the poems’ social and political implications, Blake’s mention in SoI of an Angel with a “bright key” who frees “thousands of sweepers” who are “locked up in coffins of black” has been overlooked and rarely, if ever, mentioned in footnotes of anthologies and various editions of the poem.

In two poems, both entitled "The Chimney Sweeper", William Blake describes the deplorable circumstances working class children endured during Britain's greatest period of intensive urbanization. Blake utilizes the contrary perspectives in Songs of Innocence and of Experience to explore how differently children may perceive and react to being exploited by mainstream society.