I was a little shocked to learn recently, those chimney sweep boys actually crawled up the chimneys to clean them. I always figured they were just shoving those ass big broom things in the chimney, but no they actually had the little orphan boys scramble up them with a hand broom. Sometimes they'd get stuck and they'd have to tie a rope to them to yank them out, or they'd run into a hot patch of the chimney and get burned. It was so bad even people of the time began condemning it as a horrible inhumane practice and began passing regulations on chimney cleaning to do away with it.