The Parallel Worlds and Shared Sentiments of Hawthorne and Blake

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence and Experience are massively influential works of American and British Romanticism. Although the American Hawthorne advocates breaking from past religious constraints and societal trends—especially those of British origin—his arguments share surprising similarities with William Blake, an Englishman. The clear parallels between these two authors stem from their shared skepticism about established political and belief systems, likely as a result of their exposure to the ideas of the radical social revolutions that occurred within their respective time periods and locations. First, both writers focus on common people and everyday subjects. Second, they also prioritize a reverence for physical nature. Third, they both take subjects on a journey from innocence to experience. Fourth, they also oppose traditional institutions of religious oppression and break with past authority. Discontented with their contemporaries’ intellectual and social agendas and fueled by their revolutionary climates, Hawthorne and Blake used their works to fuel new ideological growth.

Despite their different societies, both these tell stories that highlight the experiences of common people. The American author’s short story begins with “Young Goodman Brown” as he comes “forth at sunset, into the street of Salem village,” the infamous location of the Salem Witch Trials (Hawthorne 345). Living within a highly structured and religiously devout Puritan society, Brown is an American commoner with little authority over anyone but himself and his family. Hawthorne uses the name “Goodman,” which is the Puritan title equivalent to “Mister,” and the generic last name “Brown” to equate Brown with the common man.

When conversing with the devil at the beginning of his fiendish pilgrimage, Goodman Brown further claims that “I have nothing to do with the governor and council,” describing himself only as “a simple husbandman” (Hawthorne 345). But the devil merely laughs at his attempts to explain away the value of his social position. By writing from this approachable perspective, Hawthorne’s protagonist is an “everyman” that has a unique significance to American audience, as they are members of a new democratic government. The template of Brown’s character allows readers to evaluate their perspective through this manufactured character’s experience.

Similarly, William Blake’s protagonist is a chimney sweeper, another lowly commoner, who belongs to a silenced demographic in the majority of literary works. “The Chimney Sweeper” showcases an ignored and lowly group when compared with broader British society. These chimney sweepers were members of the lower class who went “with [their] bags and [their] brushes to work” scrubbing soot out of the chimneys of the wealthy at a young age (Innocence line 26). The child narrator reveals that after his mother died, his father sold him into personal hardship, and explains his relationship to the reader, saying “your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep” (Innocence line 4). Because the child shares his personal observations and emotions directly with his audience, “The Chimney Sweeper” is a lyric poem. Since lyric poems are lower on the hierarchy of poetry, this humbler form fits the humbler subject of the poem. By telling the arduous story of this unheard class, Blake sets the precedent for the romantic lens of sharing the experience of the outsider, a trend that Hawthorne’s work also follows.

Though they lived in different environments and climates, both writers also prioritize a reverence for physical nature. The majority of Hawthorne’s tale takes place in a forbidden, dark, woodland forest, which Faith — Brown’s loyal wife — wisely advises him to avoid, but Brown dismisses her plea. As he enters the wood,

The road grew wilder and drearier, and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness…The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees… while, sometimes the wind… gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. (Hawthorne 351)

The “dark” setting of the wood adds to the mysterious and vast presence of the natural realm. Furthermore, the personification of “Nature” gives it equal, if not more, power than the human characters in the story. Despite the “frightful” quality of the woods, the narrator notes that Goodman Brown, not the natural world, “was the chief horror of the scene,” drawing out Hawthorne’s warning that man is undeniably susceptible to evil (Hawthorne 351). In this manner, Hawthorne fashions this natural environment as a powerful entity that man should recognize as his better.

Just as Hawthorne’s tale upholds the power and mystery of nature, so too does Blake’s set of companion poems. In “The Chimney Sweeper” Blake juxtaposes a dark, manufactured urban setting with the life and freedom of the natural world. Initially, he uses harsh diction in verbs like “cried” “shav’d” and “spoil” in reference to the treatment that these children ensure while earning a living for themselves (Innocence lines 5, 6, 8). This specific word choice creates a harsh, negative tone that audience members then attribute to the dismal reality created by British urbanization for the working class.

However, Blake offers the chimney sweeper an escape from their “dark coffins of black” through the natural world’s angelic beauty (Innocence line 12). The portrayal of the chimney stacks as “coffins” emphasizes the man-made world’s mutability and man’s inevitable death. Blake’s vivid illustration of Tom Dacre’s vivid nature dream liberates the children to “wash in a river and shine in the Sun,” and later “rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind,” and relishing their natural surroundings (Innocence lines 15–16). The alliteration of “shine” and “Sun” associate the wonders of nature with internal, child-like joy. Although the reader discovers in the companion poem from Songs of Experience that the child truly could not escape into the dream, nor never see the “river” or feel the “Sun,” the dream of nature pervades their dim realities and makes Tom, at least for a brief moment, “happy & warm” (line 23). Like Hawthorne, Blake reveres the natural world as a force greater than his growing, urban society.

Finally, the American and the British writer also both take their subjects on a journey from innocence to experience. Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown begins as a naive young man who falls into a lifelong despair after a wayward venture into the woods. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him,’ he declares to the Devil on the forest path; ‘We have been a race of honest men and good Christians’” (Hawthorne 347). Deceived by the surface appearances of his kinsmen, Brown does not yet believe that his family would deviate from their good “Chistian” lives. But after “recogniz[ing] the voices of the minister and deacon Gookin” who were also in the woods and headed towards the devil’s gathering, Brown’s bright-eyed optimism fades (Hawthorne 350). It only takes seeing one “pink ribbon” that belonged to Faith that makes Brown cry out in despair: “My Faith is gone!” (351). Using the loss of “Faith” as the beginning of Brown’s despairing experience, Hawthorne gives her name its symbolic significance: that this story is about one’s journey from innocent faith into dark, experienced sin.

Over the course of his woodland journey, Brown comes to the agonizing revelation that the Godly members of his community were, in fact, sinful hypocrites that were in league with the devil; he returns to town and despairs until he was “borne to his grave” (Hawthorne 354). His earlier perception of his community was incorrect — or so it seems. Before the last paragraph, the narrator asks: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (Hawthorne 354). Dr. John S. Hardt, a professor and scholar at Loyola University weighs in on how this question adds nuance to the Romantic theme of experience. He writes “neither Brown, nor the narrator, nor even the reader, can ever answer this question… Hawthorne’s tale offers… [no] hints at resolving [this] uncertainty, for his narrator shares Brown’s limited vision” (Hardt 253). The uncertainty of the validity of Brown’s experience that Dr. Hardt identifies clashes with the clear experience of the chimney sweeper.

Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper” poems, one from Songs of Innocence and one from Songs of Experience, also narrate the distressing progression of an innocent child as he takes on the physical and emotional burdens of life. At first, in the poem from Songs of Innocence, the small child relays Tom’s bright dream, which ends in a seemingly sweet adage that sounds almost like catechism: “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm” (line 24). Dr. Stephen Berhendt, a Blake scholar and renowned author substantiates that this type of language, delivered by church leadership “indoctrinates” the youth and “defers responsibility for social injustice and inhumanity… as a means of perpetuating the status quo,” further suppressing the position and voice of the lower classes while promising them future treasures in heaven (57).

So, in the following companion poem from Songs of Experience, Blake directly addresses the hypocrisy of the Church of England’s teachings. The child realizes in the second “Chimney Sweeper” poem that the indifferent church succeeds due to the child’s suffering and “make[s] up a heaven of [his] misery” (Experience line 12). Blake offers a haunting portrait of the same child, calling him “a black thing among the snow” after he takes on the weight of life’s experience (line 1). Instead of laughing in the sun like the children in Innocence, the child in Experience can only cry out bitterly “weep weep, in notes of woe” (Experience line 2). Blake ironically repeats the words “weep, weep” that originally appeared in the Innocence poem, using similar alliterative “w” sounds to emphasize the parallel structure of an individual’s transition from idealized innocence to the reality of experience.

“Young Goodman Brown” and “The Chimney Sweeper” share these themes and outlooks as both of authors were writing after major political revolutions and during times of social upheaval. In Hawthorne’s case, he is remorseful for the social turmoil resulting from the Salem Witch Trials and concerned about what the future of the newly-formed United States holds after the initial shockwaves of the American Revolution. The American author illustrates how Goodman Brown and the newly formed United States both stand at the precipice of a new age, both having to make a critical decision about their identity: if they will stand for good or for evil. Like Blake, Hawthorne’s assertions infer the influential role of a nation’s culture upon the individual. He warns his readers of aligning closely with the ideologies of the past, after seeing the evil that his ancestors brought upon his community during the Salem Witch Trials. In this manner, Hawthorne sets the stage for a new kind of American perspective and understanding, not dislike Blake’s philosophy.

Across the Atlantic, several decades prior to Hawthorne, Blake also encountered the rise and fall of a social revolution: in this case, it was the French Revolution, before and after it descended into The Reign of Terror. A member advocate for the working class, Blake voices the concerns of those with lower social rank through works like Songs of Innocence and Experience. However, Blake proposed a new philosophy, a third state of human experience which he called organized innocence. Like Hawthorne’s blended ideology of the new American after a series of social trials, Blake’s organized innocence was a combined, third state of human experience; it intermarried innocence and experience, offering individuals the purity of innocence without naiveté, and the wisdom of experience without cynicism.

Like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence and Experience is centered on how individuals in power, both in the Church and the government, degrade the members of its lower citizens through their physical and emotional experience. In response to the failures of both their societies, the American and British author, Hawthorne with his new American perception and Blake with his new concept of organized innocence, emphasize the necessity for innovative ideas that combine the new and the old and imagine a more egalitarian future for the citizens of their respective nations.