The Song of the Shirt

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.