Word: chimneys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Soot filled every pore, inflamed the eyes, lodged in the scrotum and caused the horrid "sooty-wart" or "chimney sweeper's cancer." Many boys were made consumptive by the lack of food, the damp cellars where they slept on soot-bags, and the chill of early mornings when they tramped the streets crying, "Sweep for the soot O! Sweeeup!" at the top of their poor, frayed lungs...
...first to take pity on the wretched climbing-boys was Philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who in 1770 formed a "Friendly Society" and in 1785 published A Sentimental History of Chimney...
Machines & Emancipation. In 1804, one George Smart invented a chimney-sweeping machine which made it unnecessary for human sweeps to climb the flues, but it was 1819 before a reform act passed the House of Commons. The House of Lords killed it with the admonition of one peer "to leave reforms of this kind ... to the moral feeling of perhaps the most moral people on the face of the earth...
...well-swept, uncluttered story of Sam, a little boy who is sold into service as a chimney sweep, then rescued by the five children of the house where he is sweeping, moved swiftly along; and Benjy Britten's simple but satisfying score, written in eight days, did not slow it down. Most popular chorus: the Night Song, in which the audience is divided, for singing purposes, into owls, herons, turtledoves and chaffinches. After they had joined gleefully in the final Coaching Song, there was nothing left to do but applaud themselves and the opera's makers. Curly-haired...
...feet long and nine feet high. The wall the police broke through was an amateur's job of lath and inch-thick cement. Half-inch ventilation holes were drilled through another wall into a hallway. The only other opening was a hole six by eight inches in the chimney that formed one wall; it was covered with a clean white cloth. The windowless room had electric lights, three radios, no chair. At about three feet below the ceiling a shelf cut down the head room so that Makushak, who is 6 ft. 1 in., could barely stand erect...