ABSTRACT
Discussion of the London May Day ritual is inseparable from humanitarian concerns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The yearly enactment of May Day, in which chimney sweeps had a prominent role, allowed the humanitarian issue to be brought into public view. From 1782, the London bluestocking and society hostess, Elizabeth Montagu held an annual party on the lawn of her home, Montagu House in Portman Square, in celebration of May Day. Southey, Hunt, Lamb, Hazlitt, Hood and Dickens all comment on the working conditions of the climbing boys in the context of discussions of the London May Day festival. Blake's pastoral May Day in Songs exhibits a dialectical relationship with the sweep poems and the other urban poems of social oppression in the collection. The May Day celebration on the village green is a central pastoral image in Innocence a paradise recurring in moments of extreme happiness and security.
