The Song of the Shirt

Hood was only one of many who attempted to spark social change through writing. Slightly before Hood’s time existed the Romantics: a group of poets who viewed the Industrial Revolution with suspicion and who criticized the cruel and unnatural treatment of human beings it caused. The Romantics included poets like William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and William Blake—the last of whom famously championed impoverished and victimized members of the working class in poems like “London” (1794) and “The Chimney Sweeper” (1794). This socially conscious strain started by the Romantics persisted in the writing of Thomas Hood and his peers.

Aside from “The Song of the Shirt,” Thomas Hood regularly wrote about the sufferings of the poor. His poem “The Lay of the Laborer” depicts the plight of a desperate rural farmhand unable to find employment, and “The Workhouse Clock” emphasizes how many workers from different occupations—including seamstresses and weavers—have been reduced to little more than “slaves” in “Civilization’s galley” (Line 22). Such distaste for Victorian-era capitalism and the zealous promotion of humanitarianism were not confined to poetry. Victorian writers had a “penchant” for “ultra-sentimental” literature portraying the hardships the poor faced, and such literature was quite popular among readers (“Comedy as Commodity: Thomas Hood’s Poetry of Class Desire,” Roger B. Henkle, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1988), p. 302). Many writers adopted similar subject matter in their novels and poetry, including Hood’s more famous peers Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Like Hood, Barrett Browning was deeply concerned about the state of the poor and working-class in London. Her poem “The Cry of the Children” vividly paints in grim detail the abuse of children in the workforce. Exposed to cruelty and hardship at such a young age, the children begin to long for death as an escape from the factories and mines where they work. Similar to Hood in “The Song of the Shirt,” Barrett Browning also rebukes the supposedly Christian society that would allow such abuse to occur, demonstrating how the children lack any kind of religious understanding since they have been forced to work their whole lives and have not had time for religious study. The children in her poem conflate God with the unfeeling and cruel manager who shouts at them—an idea that would have greatly alarmed and possibly prompted her Christian Victorian readers to intervene.

Dickens similarly pled the case of the poor in his novels and poetry. From orphan pickpockets in Oliver Twist to children raised in debtors’ prison in Little Dorrit, Dickens’s novels often emphasized the marginalized and lowest members of the city of London. His poem “The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers” closely resembles Hood and Barrett Browning’s poetry, as it gives voice to the poor workers—including children—whom society cruelly abandoned. As Hood did in “The Song of the Shirt” and “The Lay of the Laborer,” Dickens chastises the hypocrisy of his Christian countryfolk who accepts such atrocity and threatens that God shall judge them for their crimes. Like the Romantics before them, Dickens, Barrett Browning, Hood, and many of their contemporaries stressed humanistic charity and condemned their capitalist society for its treatment of the lower classes.