25 pages • 50 minutes read
The Song of the Shirt
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Themes
Willful Ignorance of Others’ Suffering
Perhaps the central theme in Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” is the idea that those in power willfully ignore the terrible conditions of London’s working class. Hood does not merely attempt to raise awareness of such suffering; his audience likely already knew of it. Seamstresses were “highly visible as well as plentiful” in Hood’s time (“A Voice, A Song, and A Cry: Ventriloquizing the Poor in Poems by Lady Wilde, Thomas Hood, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Hyson Cooper, p. 31), and Hood understood that “the wealthy were so accustomed to the sight of ragged children and seamstresses that they had become desensitized” (Cooper 32). While his poem paints a vivid picture of the poor’s sufferings, it does not exist solely to draw attention to something unknown to its audience. The poem also acts as a chastisement of those who are aware of these situations and choose to ignore them.
The seamstress begs men with “sisters dear” (Line 25) and “mothers and wives” (Line 26) to consider the impact their actions have on others. Men do not think twice about the clothes they are “wearing out” (Line 27), but somewhere a seamstress must tirelessly work at the expense of her own health to repair those clothes. The seamstress thus urges men to regard the “human creatures’ lives” (Line 28) they exhaust along with their clothes and appeals to a common Christian understanding of the Golden Rule: to treat others as one would like to be treated. She urges them to imagine the women they love in her position. The seamstress thus asserts her humanity by comparing herself to the more prosperous female relatives of her male audience, forcing men to face the uncomfortable reality of a human being’s suffering. The seamstress argues she is not an unfeeling machine in a factory or a “slave” (Line 13) to be exploited, but a fellow English citizen whose mistreatment is immoral to ignore.
Religious Hypocrisy
The hypocrisy of Christian society and institutions is a recurring theme throughout Hood’s oeuvre and writings of other sympathetic writers like Charles Dickens. In Hood’s other popular poem of this time, “The Bridge of Sighs,” the speaker laments the senseless suicide of a woman rejected by both neighbors and family after a sexual scandal. The speaker rebukes the lack of “Christian charity” (Line 44) towards “one of Eve’s family” (Line 28), asserting the woman’s humanity and kinship with her oppressors. In this poem and “The Song of the Shirt,” Hood admonishes the unfeeling Londoners who willfully ignore or accept the societal mistreatment of their Christian brothers and sisters.
The seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt” expresses a similar sentiment. Throughout the poem, she compares herself to a “slave” (Line 13), a “prisoner” (Line 52), and a “barbarous Turk” (Line 14). She suggests the casual cruelty of English society toward women in her profession is at odds with the ideals of a Christian country and more in keeping with the disregard shown to foreigners like the Turks. The seamstress also questions how the work she does could be considered virtuous or Christian. She describes sewing as “Christian work” (Line 16) “where woman has never a soul to save” (Line 15). The seamstress argues that there is no moral merit or value to her labor, as sewing has never enabled any woman to save a person’s soul, and that calling it “Christian work” (Line 16) is misleading. Such a descriptor deliberately euphemizes the true nature of her labor, which is grossly underpaid, debilitating, and unconscionable—especially in a supposedly Christian nation.
Women’s Work
Closely connected to Hood’s complaints about society’s religious hypocrisy, willful ignorance, and implicit support of exploitation, are his attempts to draw attention to and credit the labor of lower-class women. In “The Song of the Shirt,” the seamstress pleads with men and “the Rich” (Line 88) to consider the person performing the sewing. Significantly, Hood’s poem is titled “The Song of the Shirt”—a term “used specifically to refer to men’s clothing” during this period (“Rehearsing Social Justice: Temporal Ghettos and the Poetic Way Out in ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Song of the Shirt,’” Jennifer Maclure, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2015), p. 155). The seamstress labors to mend the shirts of men, not other women, who cannot be bothered to care about the struggles of the woman who serves them. The female industry of sewing, with all of its grueling repetition, is “generated by an economy that needs but disavows [the seamstress’s] labor” (Maclure, p. 157). The hardships and physical exhaustion the seamstress experiences are not addressed nor rectified, and the men who most benefit from her labor must be begged to give her suffering a second thought.
Not only is the work of women like the seamstress unappreciated by the male-dominated society, it is also personally unrewarding to the seamstress herself. She bemoans that her ceaseless work has only earned “rags” (Line 44), a structurally unsound roof, and “broken” (Line 46) furniture. Her profession has left her so financially insecure that taking even an hour-long break could be the difference between having a meal that day or going hungry.
The seamstress’s demanding work has not earned any physical comforts, nor has it given her any personal or spiritual fulfillment. Since women cannot hope to “save” (Line 15) souls with the work that has traditionally been their domain, there is no personal satisfaction nor sense that she has worked for a worthy cause. The seamstress works only for the rich who do not acknowledge her efforts; as a woman, she cannot strive and labor for any noble, evangelical purpose.
Furthermore, she does not even recognize the distinct piece of clothing she is sewing. The shirt blurs into a series of its component parts, and the seamstress can only recognize stitches (Lines 5 and 29), seams, gussets, and bands (Lines 21-22 and 53-54). Her work becomes meaningless, and the clothing’s shape unclear amidst the tedium of her day. The women’s work of sewing is of no use or benefit to herself; it is also unrewarded and unappreciated by the society and economy it benefits.
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