The duties of the city government are handled by commissioners.

The wretched figure of the child sweep is a key emblem in Blake’s poems of social protest. Not only are the sweeps innocent victims of the cruellest exploitation but they are associated with the smoke of industrialisation, thus uniting two central Romantic preoccupations: childhood; and the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the natural world. A report to a parliamentary committee on the employment of child sweeps in 1817 noted that ‘the climbing boys’ as young as four were sold by their parents to master-sweeps, or recruited from workhouses. As the average size of a London chimney was only seven inches square, to encourage the sweeps to climb more quickly, pins were ‘forced into their feet’ by the boy climbing behind; lighted straw was applied for the same purpose. ‘Easy prey to those whose occupation is to delude the ignorant and entrap the unwary’, a sweep might be shut up in a flue for six hours and expected to carry bags of soot weighing up to 30lbs. Many suffered ‘deformity of the spine, legs and arms’ or contracted testicular cancer.[1] The practice was not abolished until 1875, nearly 50 years after Blake’s death.