ITP 54: Jack in the Green: May Day Celebrations of the Chimney Sweeps of London, by Thomas Sevestre
In anticipation of May 1 and its traditional festivities, this week’s picture is Thomas Sevestre’s watercolour of a curious but now-defunct ritual: Jack-in-the-Green: May Day Celebrations of the Chimney Sweeps of London. The painter, who dated his work 1 May 1850, was an amateur, but although his image has no great pretensions as a work of art – perhaps even because of that – it is a strikingly direct eyewitness record of a fascinating fragment of history.
The liveliest account of the chimney sweepers’ May Day antics is to be found in Nathaniel Hone’s Every-Day Book, or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements:
“Here they are! The ‘sweeps’ are come! Here is the garland and the lord and lady! Poor fellows! This is their great festival. Their garland is a large cone of holly and ivy framed upon hoops, which gradually diminishes in size to an apex, … within it is a man who walks wholly unseen, and hence the garland has the semblance of a moving hillock of evergreens. The chimney-sweepers’ jackets and hats are bedizened with gilt-embossed paper… Their lord and lady are magnificent indeed: he wears a huge cocked hat, fringed with yellow or red feathers, or laced with gold paper: his coat is between that of the full court dress, and the laced coat of the footman of quality … His lady is sometimes a strapping girl, though usually a boy in female attire, indescribably flaunty and gaudy; in her right hand a brass ladle…
“When the garland stops, my lord and lady exhibit their graces in a minuet de la cour; in a minute or two they quicken into a dance… to the continued clatter of the shovel and brush held by each capering member of the sooty tribe. The dance concluded, my lord and lady interchange a bow and a curtsy; the little sootikins hold up their shovels, my lady with outstretched arm presents the bowl of the ladle, and ‘the smallest donations are thankfully received’ by all the sable fraternity.”
The procession which Sevestre painted took place 25 years after the one described by Hone and differed from it principally in including a pair of clowns, or so-called “zanies”, an addition which may be explained by the huge popularity of rubber-limbed clowns and acrobats in mid-nineteenth-century England.
The walking hedge or “Jack-in-the-Green” was a well-established version of the “Green Man” who, in one guise or another, has long haunted the Western imagination. A human face wreathed in leaves first appears in Roman sculptures of the first century AD, later metamorphosing into those sinister man-and-plant hybrids that decorate the fabric of medieval churches. Such imagery probably stood, in the Christian context, for base and unredeemed nature, but always retained traces of its pagan and festival origins, as the personification of springtime and the spirit of “summer is i-comen in”. That, plainly enough, is what the animated garland symbolised in the context of the sweeps’ festival. Their one-man-band accompaniment, a Victorian Bob Dylan with his drum and pipes, could even be playing that old standard of the English folk repertoire, “Jack-in-the-Green”:
“Now Jack in the Green is a very strange man
For he dies every autumn and he’s born every Spring
And each year on his birthday we’ll dance through the streets
And in return Jack he will ripen our wheat…”
The hopes of the new year were also symbolised, in another way, by the cavorting Lord and Lady, who stood (albeit parodically) for all that anyone could wish for: youth, beauty, health and wealth.
Sevestre’s picture, wonderfully informative though it is, leaves an unanswered question. How did the chimney sweeps of the Industrial Revolution come to be associated with the symbols of regeneration and fertility? Theirs was the only trade to process with a “Jack-in-the-Green”, a custom begun in the late eighteenth century, and they are said to have dealt promptly and viciously with anyone else trying to get in on their act. So the link was strong and exclusive - but also on the face of it rather puzzling. After all who could be further removed from nature, and greenness, than these stunted urchins, condemned to spend their days in the cramped and carcinogenic labyrinth of London’s chimney stacks?
Charles Newton, at the V&A, who has given some thought to this question, has an interesting hypothesis. “Going back much earlier in history, there’s a very old tradition of a blackened man, a man who’s darkened his face, playing an important part in spring ritual. Such a figure seems to have been identified with death, and the old year. He’d often use coaldust to blacken his face - sometimes he’d even carry a piece of coal as well – and I just wonder if that’s how the sweeps came to be involved.”
This seems convincing. On May Day the figure symbolising the old year was indeed to represent the very opposite of spring and summer, to stand for a kind of death-in-life. The idea that chimney sweeps might easily have played that symbolic role for their contemporaries is supported by William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience – poems written in the early 1790s, just as the sweeps’ procession was establishing itself as an annual event. In “The Chimney Sweeper” Blake describes a child who dreams of being set free from his “coffin of black” to run “leaping and laughing” through sunlit fields of grass. The poet draws exactly the same powerful contrast, between the blackened sweep and the ideal of a redeeming nature, that was so publicly exhibited in the May Day pageant.
You can still stand where Thomas Sevestre stood, at the Piccadilly end of Regent Street, looking north, as the boys’ procession passed in front of him. But these days instead of the smell of horse droppings (Sevestre noted five large turds, almost under his nose) there is only the smell of petrol fumes; while the shop on the left-hand corner, which used to belong to Sevestre’s father, a picture dealer; is now Tower Records; and the sweeps danced out of sight long ago - continuing merrily on their way, as they hoped, to some green heaven.
Date: 29-04-2001
Owning Institution: Victoria and Albert Museum
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
19th Century
In anticipation of May 1 and its traditional festivities, this week’s picture is Thomas Sevestre’s watercolour of a curious but now-defunct ritual: Jack-in-the-Green: May Day Celebrations of the Chimney Sweeps of London. The painter, who dated his work 1 May 1850, was an amateur, but although his image has no great pretensions as a work of art – perhaps even because of that – it is a strikingly direct eyewitness record of a fascinating fragment of history.The liveliest account of the chimney sweepers’ May Day antics is to be found in Nathaniel Hone’s Every-Day Book, or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements:
“Here they are! The ‘sweeps’ are come! Here is the garland and the lord and lady! Poor fellows! This is their great festival. Their garland is a large cone of holly and ivy framed upon hoops, which gradually diminishes in size to an apex, … within it is a man who walks wholly unseen, and hence the garland has the semblance of a moving hillock of evergreens. The chimney-sweepers’ jackets and hats are bedizened with gilt-embossed paper… Their lord and lady are magnificent indeed: he wears a huge cocked hat, fringed with yellow or red feathers, or laced with gold paper: his coat is between that of the full court dress, and the laced coat of the footman of quality … His lady is sometimes a strapping girl, though usually a boy in female attire, indescribably flaunty and gaudy; in her right hand a brass ladle…
“When the garland stops, my lord and lady exhibit their graces in a minuet de la cour; in a minute or two they quicken into a dance… to the continued clatter of the shovel and brush held by each capering member of the sooty tribe. The dance concluded, my lord and lady interchange a bow and a curtsy; the little sootikins hold up their shovels, my lady with outstretched arm presents the bowl of the ladle, and ‘the smallest donations are thankfully received’ by all the sable fraternity.”
The procession which Sevestre painted took place 25 years after the one described by Hone and differed from it principally in including a pair of clowns, or so-called “zanies”, an addition which may be explained by the huge popularity of rubber-limbed clowns and acrobats in mid-nineteenth-century England.
The walking hedge or “Jack-in-the-Green” was a well-established version of the “Green Man” who, in one guise or another, has long haunted the Western imagination. A human face wreathed in leaves first appears in Roman sculptures of the first century AD, later metamorphosing into those sinister man-and-plant hybrids that decorate the fabric of medieval churches. Such imagery probably stood, in the Christian context, for base and unredeemed nature, but always retained traces of its pagan and festival origins, as the personification of springtime and the spirit of “summer is i-comen in”. That, plainly enough, is what the animated garland symbolised in the context of the sweeps’ festival. Their one-man-band accompaniment, a Victorian Bob Dylan with his drum and pipes, could even be playing that old standard of the English folk repertoire, “Jack-in-the-Green”:
“Now Jack in the Green is a very strange man
For he dies every autumn and he’s born every Spring
And each year on his birthday we’ll dance through the streets
And in return Jack he will ripen our wheat…”
The hopes of the new year were also symbolised, in another way, by the cavorting Lord and Lady, who stood (albeit parodically) for all that anyone could wish for: youth, beauty, health and wealth.
Sevestre’s picture, wonderfully informative though it is, leaves an unanswered question. How did the chimney sweeps of the Industrial Revolution come to be associated with the symbols of regeneration and fertility? Theirs was the only trade to process with a “Jack-in-the-Green”, a custom begun in the late eighteenth century, and they are said to have dealt promptly and viciously with anyone else trying to get in on their act. So the link was strong and exclusive - but also on the face of it rather puzzling. After all who could be further removed from nature, and greenness, than these stunted urchins, condemned to spend their days in the cramped and carcinogenic labyrinth of London’s chimney stacks?
Charles Newton, at the V&A, who has given some thought to this question, has an interesting hypothesis. “Going back much earlier in history, there’s a very old tradition of a blackened man, a man who’s darkened his face, playing an important part in spring ritual. Such a figure seems to have been identified with death, and the old year. He’d often use coaldust to blacken his face - sometimes he’d even carry a piece of coal as well – and I just wonder if that’s how the sweeps came to be involved.”
This seems convincing. On May Day the figure symbolising the old year was indeed to represent the very opposite of spring and summer, to stand for a kind of death-in-life. The idea that chimney sweeps might easily have played that symbolic role for their contemporaries is supported by William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience – poems written in the early 1790s, just as the sweeps’ procession was establishing itself as an annual event. In “The Chimney Sweeper” Blake describes a child who dreams of being set free from his “coffin of black” to run “leaping and laughing” through sunlit fields of grass. The poet draws exactly the same powerful contrast, between the blackened sweep and the ideal of a redeeming nature, that was so publicly exhibited in the May Day pageant.
You can still stand where Thomas Sevestre stood, at the Piccadilly end of Regent Street, looking north, as the boys’ procession passed in front of him. But these days instead of the smell of horse droppings (Sevestre noted five large turds, almost under his nose) there is only the smell of petrol fumes; while the shop on the left-hand corner, which used to belong to Sevestre’s father, a picture dealer; is now Tower Records; and the sweeps danced out of sight long ago - continuing merrily on their way, as they hoped, to some green heaven.
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