William Blake was very different to other men, he grew up to hate the church although he was very religious. His family and himself were Dissenters, a breakaway denomination against the rulings of the church of England. From an early age Blake was different, he refused to go to school and was taught by his mother and spent a lot of his time reading the Bible as the dissenters took a very literal grasp on the teachings of the bible. As Blake grew older he considered cruelty to children one of the worst things imaginable as to him childhood...
though was much worse than those in the 1950's and today as there was no help or laws for the benefit of children.

The poems from Blake's day were so different to those from the fifties though the message was very alike. The language, rhyming and punctuation was very different in Blake's time to in the fifties when it is more or less the same today.

The one thing these poems have in common is that all of them are poems about unfortunate children and all of the poems are trying to get this suffering recognised and stopped.