Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Writing in Britain and its Colonies 1660-1832, ed. Brycchan...

Discourses of Slavery andAbolition

Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838

Edited byBrycchan Carey, Markman Ellis and

Sara Salih

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition

This page intentionally left blank

Discourses of Slavery andAbolitionBritain and its Colonies, 1760–1838

Edited by

Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara SalihPublished in association with the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Editorial matter and selection © Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis and Sara Salih 2004Chapter 4 © Candace Ward 2004All other chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

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First published 2004 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataDiscourses of slavery and abolition : Britain and its colonies,

1760–1838/edited by Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, Sara Salih.p. cm.

“Published in association with the Institute of English Studies, Centre forAdvanced Study, University of London.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1–4039–1647–0 (hardback)1. Slave trade – Great Britain – History. 2. Slave trade – Great Britain –

Colonies – America – History 3. Slavery – Great Britain – History.4. Slavery – Great Britain – Colonies – America – History 5. Slave trade inliterature. 6. Slavery in literature. I. Carey, Brycchan, 1967– II. Ellis,Markman. III. Salih, Sara.

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Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1

Brycchan Carey and Sara Salih

Part I Discourses of Slavery 9

1 ‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race in the

Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the

Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century 11

Peter Kitson

2 Abolishing Romance: Representing Rape in Oroonoko 26

Sue Wiseman

3 ‘Incessant Labour’: Georgic Poetry and the

Problem of Slavery 45

Markman Ellis

4 Sensibility, Tropical Disease, and the

Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Novel 63

Candace Ward

Part II Slavery from Within 79

5 ‘The Hellish Means of Killing and Kidnapping’:

Ignatius Sancho and the Campaign against the

‘Abominable Traffic for Slaves’ 81

Brycchan Carey

6 Who’s Afraid of Cannibals? Some Uses of the Cannibalism

Trope in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative 96

Mark Stein

v

7 ‘From His Own Lips’: The Politics of Authenticity in

A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica 108

Diana Paton

8 The History of Mary Prince, the Black Subject, and the

Black Canon 123

Sara Salih

Part III Discourses of Abolition 139

9 Henry Smeathman, the Fly-Catching Abolitionist 141

Deirdre Coleman

10 Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby

Porteus’s Anti-Slavery Sermon 158

Bob Tennant

11 Slavery, Abolition, and the Nation in Priscilla

Wakefield’s Tour Books for Children 175

Johanna M. Smith

12 Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things’:

Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro’, Plantation

Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade 194

Frances R. Botkin

13 Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840): Towards a Dialectical

History Painting 209

Leo Costello

Bibliography 223

Index 229

vi Contents

List of Illustrations

Figure 9.1 After Henry Smeathman. ‘The hill-nest raised by the

Termites bellicosi’. Plate VII from ‘Some Account of the

Termites, Which are found in Africa and other hot

climates. In a Letter from Mr. Henry Smeathman, of

Clement’s Inn, to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S.’, in

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 71 (1781), pp. 139–92.

Source: From the original in the Rare Book and

Special Collections Library, University of Sydney. 152

Figure 13.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851),

The Slave Ship (Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on), 1840. Oil on canvas.

90.8 � 122.6 cm (353/4 � 481/4 in.).

Source: Photograph © 2003 Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston. 210

vii

Acknowledgements

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition originated in a conference held at the

Institute of English Studies, University of London, in 2001. The editors

would like to thank IES staff members past and present for their support

and assistance, in particular: Michael Baron, Francesca Bettocchi,

Warwick Gould, Megan Hickerson-Carey, Jon Millington, and Joanne

Nixon. We gratefully acknowledge the British Academy for supporting

the conference with a British Conference Grant. We also wish to thank

the Departments of English at Kingston University, Queen Mary,

University of London and the University of Kent at Canterbury for

supporting both the conference and this publication. For particular

assistance at important stages of this project we thank Vincent Carretta,

Rod Edmond, and Jason Edwards. Finally, for ensuring a smooth and

uneventful route to publication, we would like to thank Janey Fisher,

Paula Kennedy, and Emily Rosser, our editors at Palgrave.

viii

Notes on Contributors

Frances R. Botkin is Assistant Professor of English at Towson University,

Baltimore. Her publications include contributions on Maria Edgeworth

and William Wordsworth in a collection of essays on regionalism in

nineteenth-century literature; she also has forthcoming a piece on the

figure of the Keener in the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish novel for a

collection of essays on Maria Edgeworth. In addition, she has published

an essay on the culture of AIDS for a Gender Studies textbook. Professor

Botkin has delivered papers internationally on Maria Edgeworth,

William Wordsworth, Lady Morgan, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott.

Currently she is working on Ancestral Voices: Maria Edgeworth and OtherOrphans of British Literature.

Brycchan Carey is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston

University in London. He has published articles on Ignatius Sancho,

Olaudah Equiano, The Spectator, William Wilberforce, John Wesley, and

J. K. Rowling. A monograph entitled British Abolitionism and the Rhetoricof Sensibility: Sentiment and Slavery is forthcoming from Palgrave

Macmillan. He is also editing, with Karen Lipsedge, a collection of essays

called Olaudah Equiano: Identity, Representation, and Reality.

Deirdre Coleman is Associate Professor in the Department of English

at the University of Sydney. Author of Coleridge and ‘The Friend’,1809–1810 (Oxford University Press, 1988), she has published widely in

the field of Romanticism, including an essay on Anna Laetitia Barbauld

for Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain,1770–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and an article entitled

‘Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire’ for Eighteenth-CenturyStudies (2003). She is the editor of Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies:Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Leicester University Press,

1999), and has recently completed Romantic Colonization and BritishAnti-Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Her edited volume of

colonial Australian letters will appear in Women Writing Home, 6 vols

(Pickering and Chatto, 2005).

Leo Costello is Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston. In 2002, he completed a doctoral dissertation in the

Department of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, entitled

ix

The Center Cannot Hold: The History Painting of J. M. W. Turner in the Ageof Revolution. He has also published on American art and artists of the

twentieth century and was co-curator of the exhibition John Clemmer:Exploring the Medium, 1940–1999 at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Markman Ellis is Reader in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought

at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Politicsof Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (1996)

and The History of Gothic Fiction (2000). He is currently completing a

monograph on the history of the coffee-house for Weidenfeld and

Nicolson. He has also published several articles on the topic of literary

representations of slavery and the British Empire.

Peter Kitson is Professor of English at the University of Dundee. He has

published extensively on both Romanticism and the literature and

thought of empire and slavery. His recent relevant publications include

Placing and Displacing Romanticism (Ashgate, 2001); Travels, Explorationsand Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770–1835,

vols 3–4 (Pickering and Chatto, 2001); Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation:Writings from the Romantic Period 1780–1830, ed. with Debbie Lee, 8 vols

(Pickering and Chatto, 1999); Coleridge and the Armoury of the HumanMind: Essays on his Prose Writings, ed. with T. N. Corns (Frank Cass:

London, 1991); Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire,

1780–1830, ed. with Tim Fulford (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Diana Paton is Lecturer in Caribbean History at the University of

Newcastle. Her edition of A Narrative of Events, since the First of August,1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (Duke

University Press, 2001) was selected as a John Hope Franklin Center

book for 2001. Her book, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, andGender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870, will be published by

Duke University Press in 2004, and she is editing, with Pamela Scully, a

collection of essays entitled Gender and Slave Emancipation in the AtlanticWorld (Duke University Press). Her articles have appeared in Slavery andAbolition and the Journal of Social History.

Sara Salih is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Toronto.

She is the editor of the Penguin edition of The History of Mary Prince(2000) and is preparing the Penguin edition of Wonderful Adventures ofMrs. Seacole in Many Lands. She has published Judith Butler (Routledge,

2002) and edited a collection of Butler’s writings for Blackwell (TheJudith Butler Reader, 2004). At Oxford, she completed a D.Phil. on

Frances Burney, and she has published articles on Burney and ‘race’ and

x Notes on Contributors

Burney’s two editions of Camilla. She is also a contributor to the

Routledge Companion to Black British Culture and the RoutledgeInternational Encyclopaedia of Women. She has reviewed for the TimesLiterary Supplement, and is at present working on a book about represen-

tations of ‘mixed’ women in Britain and Jamaica from the eighteenth

century to the present day.

Johanna M. Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Texas-Arlington, where she specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century British literature and women’s studies. She has published

extensively on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers from Sarah

Scott to Joseph Conrad, including her book Mary Shelley (Twayne, 1996).

Her recent publications include the co-edited Anthology of Life-Writingsby British Women of the Long Eighteenth Century (Northeastern University

Press, 2000) and a revised edition of Mary Shelley: ‘Frankenstein’ (Bedford,

2000). She is currently completing a book on British women’s interven-

tions in the public sphere, 1762–1868.

Mark Stein is Junior Professor for Theories of Non-European Literatures

and Cultures in the Department of English and American Studies at the

University of Potsdam in Germany. His Black British Literature: Novels ofTransformation is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. He is

currently writing a study of Jackie Kay’s work for Northcote House and

co-editing Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial for Rodopi. He

has also published several articles on postcolonial theory, colonial dis-

course analysis, and on African, Caribbean, and Black British literatures.

Bob Tennant is an elected official of the British Transport and General

Workers Union and a political journalist. As well as journalism and

pamphlets on political and economic policy issues, he has published on

John Locke and Christopher Smart, with work in progress on William

Wordsworth, John Wesley, and William Romaine. He is preparing a book

on the cultural and political role of the Anglican sermon in the long

eighteenth century, and the associated emergent theories of political

and economic empire.

Candace Ward is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University

at Tallahassee, where she teaches eighteenth-century British literature and

women’s studies. She previously worked as an editor at College English,

South Atlantic Review, and Dover Publications. Her articles have appeared

in Victorian Poetry, European Romantic Review, and Studies in the Novel. Acritical edition of Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or Little Female Academy is

forthcoming from Broadview Literary Press (Spring 2004). She is working

Notes on Contributors xi

on a book called Desire and Disorder: Fever Narratives and SentimentalFictions of the Long Eighteenth Century.

Sue Wiseman is Reader in Early Modern Studies in the Department of

English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. She

is the author of Aphra Behn (Northcote House, 1996) and Drama andPolitics in the English Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1998). She

has edited, with Isobel Grundy, Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740(Batsford, 1992); with Julie Sanders and Kate Chedgzoy, Refashioning BenJonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon (Macmillan, 1998); and

with Erica Fudge and Ruth Gilbert, At the Borders of the Human: Beasts,Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Macmillan,

1999). She has also published widely in journals and collections.

xii Notes on Contributors

1

IntroductionBrycchan Carey and Sara Salih

I

The ‘long eighteenth century’ might also be called the age of slavery,

abolition, and emancipation, bracketed as it is by the foundation of the

Royal Adventurers into Africa in 1660, the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Act in 1807, and the emancipation of slaves in British colonies in 1838.1

During this period, slavery and the slave trade were intimately bound up

with British culture and society at every level. Slavery, including both

the trade in slaves between Africa and the Americas, and the slave labour

plantations in the American colonies, was the most profitable enterprise

known to British commerce.2 From the first moments of the British

national slave trade in the seventeenth century, critics had questioned

its legality and morality. Yet apologists for the slave trade argued that

these profits legitimated the business. James Houston, a physician of the

Royal Africa Company in Guinea, defended this ‘glorious and advanta-

geous Trade’ as ‘the Hinge on which all the Trade of the Globe moves’.3

To Britain and its colonies in the mid eighteenth century, commerce was

simultaneously the foundation of liberty, power, and refinement.

Slavery was something of a paradox: an enormously profitable business

whose moral status was deeply problematic. Considered in its legal,

moral, or theological dimension, slavery was not easily conformable to

notions of British liberty or Christianity, yet such was the importance of

slavery to the British economy that these questions were overlooked and

ignored. Commenting on the ‘Several Objections … raised against the

Lawfulness of this Trade’, William Snelgrave remarked with disturbing

frankness in 1734 that ‘Tho’ to traffic in human Creatures, may at first

sight appear barbarous, inhuman and unnatural; yet the Traders herein

have as much to plead in their own Excuse, as can be said for some other

branches of Trade, namely, the Advantage of it.’4 During the abolition

debate in parliament in 1791, Thomas Grosvenor (MP for Chester)

acknowledged slavery was ‘not an amiable trade; but neither, said he, is

the trade of a butcher, and yet a mutton chop is, notwithstanding, a

very good thing.’5 In the late eighteenth century, British involvement in

slavery and the slave trade presented a problem which is addressed and

disputed in the ‘discursive explosion’ of the abolition debate. In a wide

range of texts, including poetry, fiction, essays, and tracts, the question

of slavery was narrativized, represented, and discussed by a variety of

writers in Britain and its colonies.

Africans, however, had long represented themselves in poems, autobi-

ographies, testimonials, and polemical pamphlets. England’s African

population consisted of both freed people and slaves, along with visitors

who came directly to England from Africa. The slave’s legal status in

England was anomalous, since, as William Blackstone put it in his

Commentaries on the Laws of England, ‘the spirit of liberty is so deeply

implanted in our constitution, and rooted in our very soil, that a slave

or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection

of the laws and so far becomes a free man, though the master’s right to

his service may possibly still continue’.6 Blackstone’s observation was at

least partially confirmed by a legal case in 1772 when Lord Mansfield

judged that James Somerset’s master could not deport him to Jamaica

and return him to slavery. The Mansfield decision was widely misinter-

preted as signalling the emancipation of all slaves in Britain. In reality, it

provided only that their owners could not forcibly send slaves out of the

country. Nonetheless, reports of this and other cases in the 1770s and

1780s drew attention to the conduct and continuation of the slave trade

in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Indeed, towards the end of the century

popular sentiment turned against slavery, prompting the organization

of protest groups. Thomas Clarkson was prominent among those who

founded the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in

1787 (it became the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823), and numerous local

outlets such as the Ladies’ Society of Birmingham for the Relief of British

Negro Slaves (later the Birmingham Female Society for the Relief of

British Negro Slaves) campaigned for ‘the melioration of the condition

of the unhappy children of Africa’.7 Opponents of slavery and its

supporters entered into dialogue with one another, giving rise to the

discourses of slavery and abolition discussed in the essays collected here.

So, for example, well-known and widely circulated non-fictional

works including Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) and Bryan

Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the

2 Brycchan Carey and Sara Salih

West Indies (1793), are cited as sources for fictional texts (for example,

Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro’ [1806] or Charlotte Smith’s TheWanderings of Warwick [1794]). Similarly, narratives such as The History ofMary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831) and James Williams’s A Narrativeof Events since the First of August, 1834 (1837) implicitly intersect with

one another, sharing certain features generic to testimonials and slave

narratives.8 The cultural records of the age of slavery and abolition also

include visual depictions of Africans, slaves, and slavery – for example,

Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Ignatius Sancho, J. M. W. Turner’s

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on (called

The Slave Ship), William Blake’s etchings for John Stedman’s Narrative ofa Five Years Expedition to Surinam, 1772–1777 (1796), as well as numerous

illustrations, cartoons, advertisements, handbills, and music composed

both by and about Africans in the Caribbean colonies.

Scholars such as Marilyn Butler and Olivia Smith have usefully

analysed the ‘war of ideas’ which took place in print format between

radicals and conservatives in the wake of the American and French

Revolutions.9 Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century debates

about slavery, abolition, and emancipation undoubtedly belonged to

this climate of radicalism and reaction, and the essays in this volume are

broadly concerned to identify and analyse what Felicity Nussbaum has

called eighteenth-century sites of struggle over cultural meaning.10

Unlike Butler and Smith, we extend the chronological and spatial focus

so that what Edward Said would call the ‘contrapuntal’ relationship

between Britain and its Caribbean colonies is assumed to be represented

in histories, novels, paintings, children’s writing, journals, and other

textual forms. Building on the work of such recent scholars and theorists

as Vincent Carretta, Phillip D. Curtin, David Dabydeen, Paul Edwards,

Markman Ellis, Paul Gilroy, Felicity Nussbaum, and Edward Said (this

list of ‘debts’ is by no means exhaustive), the essays collected here

analyse the complex interactions between cultural productions and

historical events. Texts are connected to their specific historical

moments and to the other texts within those moments, and the essays

in this volume are informed by the underlying assumption that slavery,

abolition, and emancipation were material events as well as constituting

what Foucault calls ‘discursive formations’.11 Such an approach is con-

cerned with the ways in which subject positions (whether ‘racial’, socio-

economic, or political) were simultaneously controlled and produced

during this era, so that the texts under discussion in this collection are

not viewed merely as historical ‘source material’ or symptoms of con-

temporary attitudes towards ‘race’, slavery, and abolition. Rather, the

Introduction 3

texts themselves are cultural events which took place within, and were

structured by, the specific discursive formations of slavery, abolition,

and emancipation.

II

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition is divided into three sections. The first,

on ‘discourses of slavery’, examines representations of slavery and ‘race’

from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, focusing on

the period after 1760 when slavery increasingly came under attack. Peter

Kitson opens the collection with a review of emerging racial ideologies

in slave trade debates occurring between 1780 and 1815. Kitson argues

that racial ideology was largely absent, surprisingly, from the pro-slavery

arguments of the West India Interest. Despite this, many abolitionists

felt the need to address the issue of race in making claims for the

humanity of the slaves. Kitson’s discussion arises from readings of polit-

ical, philosophical, and scientific texts, while Sue Wiseman’s article elu-

cidates some of the ways in which literary texts represented race and

slavery from at least as far back as the seventeenth century. Centring on

the abolitionist appropriation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and

Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of the novella (staged throughout the

eighteenth century from 1695 onwards), Wiseman’s analysis of the

threat of rape in both texts shifts attention from Oroonoko to Imoinda.

Markman Ellis is also concerned with literary constructions of slavery,

and his reading of mid-eighteenth-century georgic poetry argues that

this form is based on an ideology of happy labour that is ideally suited

to representations of plantation slavery. Yet, as Ellis shows in his exami-

nation of James Grainger’s poem The Sugar Cane (1764), the georgic

reveals the central and objectionable fact of sugar cultivation: namely,

that the celebrated profit and prosperity of picturesque sugar planta-

tions on Caribbean island colonies are built on the blood of forced

labour. The notion that only Africans were physiologically capable of

withstanding the rigours of plantation labour was often cited as a justi-

fication for the continuation of the slave trade. This issue is addressed in

Candace Ward’s essay on sensibility, tropical disease, and the eighteenth-

century sentimental novel, where Ward reveals the paradoxical nature

of the discourse of sensibility as it is deployed in contemporary senti-

mental prose fiction. A refined sensibility was deemed to render

Europeans more vulnerable to tropical diseases, but others maintained

that sensibility could guarantee good health through regular conduct.


Sensibility was invoked in order to decry and to vindicate the slave trade,

unwittingly exposing some of the contradictions and tensions within

a culture that was grappling with the complex physical and moral

implications of its exploitative activities in the Caribbean.

The essays in the second section discuss self-representations by four

key black writers: Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, James Williams,

and Mary Prince. Published posthumously in 1782, Ignatius Sancho’s

Letters were cited by abolitionists as proof ‘that an untutored African

may possess abilities equal to an European’.12 Nevertheless, twentieth-

century critics and historians have tended to downplay Sancho’s contri-

butions to early abolitionist discourses, whereas Brycchan Carey argues

that Sancho was central to the abolitionist debates which his epistolary

writings helped to initiate. By contrast, Olaudah Equiano’s role as an

active abolitionist has never been in doubt. His Interesting Narrative(1789) has been categorized as autobiography, spiritual narrative,

voyage literature, and abolitionist polemic, and it is only recently that

critics have placed it in the context of contemporary literary works.

Exploring the book’s parallels with writings by, for example, Swift and

Defoe, Mark Stein suggests that Equiano subverts representations of

cannibalism in order to expose slavery itself as a form of anthropophagy,

with England as a ‘devourer’ of Africans. By dislodging cannibalism

from the putative realm of the real, Equiano’s textual strategies suggest

that anthropophagy is primarily a discursive construct and therefore

subject to Equiano’s own skilful textual manipulations. Textual control

is also central to Diana Paton’s reading of the neglected testimonial

A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams,An Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, published in London in 1837. One of

a few pamphlets of its kind, the text raises important questions

concerning genre and truth, since persuasiveness and authenticity were

crucial to its political success. Paton argues that the Narrative deployed a

number of familiar methods in order to establish its truthfulness, while

employing other, more radical means such as the unprecedented repre-

sentation of Williams’s Jamaican Creole speech. The diglossic nature of

the text, along with its contradiction of some of the central claims that

are put forward in its own white-authored frame narratives, lead Paton

to conclude that Williams is at least partly in control of the text he

helped to create. Like Williams’s Narrative, The History of Mary Prince,a West Indian Slave (1831) was a collaborative testimony that was

recorded and framed by white abolitionist activists. Taking issue with

recent critical attempts to ‘canonize’ the text and its putative author,

Sara Salih argues that feminist-essentialist and black-canon-building

Introduction 5

approaches tend to elide both the instability of ‘Mary Prince’ and

the extraordinarily complex nature of The History. On the other hand,

the dual dangers of presentism and essentialism may be circumvented

by engaging in intra-textual, inter-textual readings that raise critical

questions about the black canon and the notion of an essential, inaugu-

ral black subject.

Questions of inter- and intra-textuality are also crucial to the essays in

the final section of Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, where the impor-

tance of religious and scientific writing, children’s literature, and the

relationship between visual culture, slavery, and abolition are brought

to the fore. In her discussion of Henry Smeathman, who initiated the

Sierra Leone resettlement project in 1787, Deirdre Coleman argues that

Smeathman shared with other abolitionists the imperial dream of estab-

lishing free plantations in Africa which would end slavery by under-

mining the economy of the Caribbean sugar islands. This fantastic

project (which ended in disaster) was represented, Coleman argues, in

Smeathman’s allegorical account of African termites, where Virgil’s

Georgics and Smeathman’s own entomological fieldwork provided the

central metaphor of an army of ceaselessly labouring insects. Taking as

his starting point the Church of England’s economic reliance on income

from its plantations in Barbados, Bob Tennant discusses a sermon

preached in 1783 by Beilby Porteus, then Bishop of Chester. Porteus’s

position as Bishop and his rhetorical use of the sermon conferred social

and theological respectability on the idea of abolition four years before

the formation of the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave

Trade. Tennant’s contribution is timely, since examination of the

deployment of abolitionist discourses in the sermons of this period has

been neglected. Johanna Smith also draws attention to an understudied

area by focusing on representations of slavery and abolition in geogra-

phies and travel books for children. While forming a contribution to a

wider debate about the cultural status of eighteenth-century children’s

literature, Smith’s insights into the political alignments of such texts

further elucidate some of the interconnections between ‘literary’ and

‘politico-historical’ discourses. The final essay in the collection also

draws attention to the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate

discursive forms. J. M. W. Turner’s adolescent years coincided with

the abolition movement of 1787–93, and his celebrated painting TheSlave Ship was exhibited in 1840, two years after slavery had officially

been ended in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Departing from the views of

other art historians, Leo Costello argues that The Slave Ship does not rep-

resent a single event, but contains a number of chronologically diverse


historical and literary references. By presenting a dialectical history of

British involvement in slavery and the slave trade, Turner manages to

reflect some of the conflicts and complexities of slavery, abolition, and

their historico-political representations.

Taken collectively and interconnectedly, it is hoped that the essays in

this volume will contribute to the ongoing study of the many cultural

productions which were structured and framed by slavery, abolition,

and emancipation. Ranging across space, time, cultures, and genres, our

discussions draw attention to the myriad interconnections between the

‘literary’ and the ‘historical’, the ‘artistic’ and the ‘material’, suggesting

that the relationship between text and world is by no means one-way,

and confirming the usefulness of interdisciplinarity in the analysis of

specific discursive formations.

Notes

1. Recent general historical studies of British slavery, slave trade, and abolition

include: Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848(London: Verso, 1988); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery:From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); Hugh

Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870(London: Picador, 1997); James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery(London: HarperCollins, 1992).

2. J. R. Ward, ‘The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies,

1650–1834’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 31 (1978), 197–213.

3. James Houston, Some New and Accurate Observations geographical, natural andhistorical … of the Coast of Guinea (London: J. Peele, 1725), p. 43.

4. William Snelgrave, A New Account of some Parts of Guinea, And the Slave Trade(London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1734), p. 160.

5. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790–1820, ed. R. G. Thorne

(5 vols, London: Secker & Warburg, 1896), vol. IV, p. 116.

6. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 16th edn, 1825, I,

p. 127. Blackstone changed the wording of his comments on slavery several

times. See Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain(London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 121 n.

7. ‘Third Report of the Ladies’ Society of Birmingham for the Relief of British

Negro Slaves’, 1828 (unpaginated).

8. These are analysed by James Olney in James Olney, ‘ “I was born”: Slave

Narratives, their Status as Autobiography and as Literature’, in The Slave’sNarrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1985), pp. 148–75.

9. Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Olivia Smith, The Politics ofLanguage 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

Introduction 7

10. Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

p. 2.

11. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969, repr. London:

Routledge, 2000), pp. 31–9.

12. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Carretta

(London: Penguin, 1998), p. 4.


Part I

Discourses of Slavery

11

1‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea ofRace in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and EarlyNineteenth CenturyPeter Kitson

I

The ‘race’ issue, the origins of the ‘race’ idea and its growth, articulation,

and continued pervasiveness, is one that preoccupies a great deal of

contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Historians of race and

slavery have noted that there is a congruence between the development

of a systematized sense of human difference in the natural sciences and

the period of the most sustained debate about the validity and morality

of the Atlantic slave trade. George Mosse has declared that ‘Eighteenth-

century Europe was the cradle of modern racism’ and Roxann Wheeler

has argued that a kind of paradigm shift occurs towards the end of the

eighteenth century in ideas about the differences between peoples and

cultures, one that signals a move from an interest in cultural to physical

or bodily markers.1 When discussing slave trade discourse, Wheeler

draws our attention to the paradoxical fact that ‘the anti-slave trade

position relied more heavily on appeals to racial similarity than slavery

advocates relied on appeals to racial difference’.2 This view is supported

by the work of Philip Curtin who comments that ‘Men most connected

with the slave trade, and even the West Indian planters … were less

inclined to emphasize racial factors than those who stayed in England.’3

Although it is clear that some plantocratic voices did justify slavery in

terms of race thinking, when looking at the abolition debate itself it

seems that, whatever their private opinions, actual public racialist

justifications of slavery and the slave trade in the period 1780–1815

were comparatively rare. Most historians of the slave trade come to the

conclusion that the primary arguments for the trade and the institution

were not racial but economic, although it is also true that in the United

States scientific defences of slavery as an institution were available in the

racist anthropology of Samuel Morton, Louis Agassiz, Richard H. Colfax,

William Frederick van Amringe, Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon.4 We

are still left, however, with the curious fact that a number of abolitionist

writers, such as James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and William

Wilberforce, as well as Black British writers, such as Olaudah Equiano

and Ottobah Cugoano, felt the need to argue for the full humanity of

the African slave and to contradict those recent hypotheses that argued

for the racial inferiority of African peoples.

II

Historians of slavery have long accepted the presence and importance of

racial ideas in the debate about slavery and the slave trade and they have

debated the nature of the relationship between capitalist expansion and

the development of racial and racist ideologies.5 The focus of this essay

is narrowed to consider the importance of one of the languages

of racism, what is often called ‘classic racism’, the ‘racism of ideology’,

or ‘scientific racism’. In this essay the term ‘racialist’ is used to refer to

those theories of human difference which indicate a biological element

to racial difference, empirically determined, whereas the term ‘racism’ is

used to denote views and attitudes which stress the relative inferiority of

groups of people but which are not articulated in biological or scientific

terms. It may well be that this constitutes merely a discussion of the sur-

face language or one of the idioms of racism and not the deep structure

or grammar of the ideology that David Theo Goldberg attempts to delin-

eate in his account of racist ideology.6 Nevertheless, by juxtaposing an

understanding of this idiom in the context of the slavery debates, we

may still gain some understanding of how the deep structure of racism,

the underlying bass notes of the symphony, reveals itself in persistent

themes.

When looking at prominent works about the natural history of

humanity it is surprising that many of the most notable proponents of

notions of racial inferiority seldom supported the slave trade, or, after

its abolition, the institution of slavery itself even though all such

discourses, including those supportive of human equality, were clearly

infiltrated by racist thinking in other ways. One central issue domi-

nated the debate about human variety in the period: whether or not

humanity was one species with a common origin. Theorists of human

12 Peter Kitson

difference in the period generally held one of two opposing views.7 The

first was that humanity was one family, and that variety occurred from

an originary race. This was known as the monogenist hypothesis. In the

writings of natural historians like the French naturalist the Comte de

Buffon and J. F. Blumenbach, this process occurred through environ-

mental and climatic pressures and was the result of a process described

as ‘degeneration’, whereby races or varieties degenerated from an

originary, European ancestor. This theory was compatible with scripture

and it was the view subscribed to by the majority in the period.

Monogenists, however, seldom, if ever, dispensed with the principle of

racial hierarchy itself. Both Buffon and Blumenbach held that the

European race was primary and a more beautiful variety than its subse-

quent degenerations. Monogenesis remained the orthodox scientific

account of the period. Alternatively, human difference could be

accounted for by the theory of separate origins or creations, which was

known as the polygenist hypothesis. Adherents of this view argued that

human difference appeared so marked and permanent that it could only

be explained by a series of separate creations not mentioned in scripture.

Those holding this view were often Christian but they could also be

materialist and sceptical. Both positions, monogenist and polygenist,

must be discussed under the heading of scientific racism, though the

former did not need to be expressed as a general Christian Universalist

belief. Polygenesist belief is usually traced back to Isaac La Peyrère’s

hypothesis, in Praeadamitae (1655), that the story of Adam only applied

to the Jews and that there had been other and earlier creations. The most

notable, indeed, infamous, spokesmen for this polygenist account of

separate species was, however, Edward Long, a bureaucrat and judge in

Jamaica for twelve years.8 Although not a champion of the plantocratic

cause as such, Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) argued that the African,

or ‘Negro’, constituted a separate species from that of the white

European. For Long, the Negro was an intermediate group between

humanity and the higher apes, in particular, the orang-utan. He thus

divided the genus Homo into three distinct species: European and

similar races, the ‘Negroes’, and the ‘orang-outangs’. He thus provided

a pseudo-scientific and allegedly empirical justification for notions of

black inferiority as a justification for the institution of slavery:

When we reflect on … their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must

we not conclude, that they are a different species of the same

genus? … Nor do [orang-utans] seem at all inferior in the same intel-

lectual faculties to many of the Negroe race; with some of whom, it is

‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race 13

credible that have the most intimate connexion and consanguinity.

The amorous intercourse between them may be frequent … and it is

certain, that both races agree perfectly well in the lasciviousness of

disposition.9

Long argued that the institution of slavery thus benefited the African

by civilizing him as well as benefiting Britain commercially. In his pam-

phlet, Candid Reflections (1772), he had argued that African slaves were

essential for the survival of the sugar colonies because their biology

made them more suitable for plantation labour than white Europeans:

‘the nature of the West India climate, and the impossibility of clearing

and cultivating the soil there, by any other than Negroe labourers, as it

was first the occasion of employing them, so it must ever remain, so

long as the colonies exist’. Long argued that ‘Nature’ and the ‘Divine

Will’ appropriated the African for work in ‘these climates’.10 Certainly,

he was regarded as the leading proponent of polygenist views of Africans

in the period. Historians have disagreed about how influential Long’s

arguments were, and his History certainly contained severe attacks upon

the morals and behaviour of the planters themselves, which were used

by Wilberforce in his own speeches against the trade. As Anthony Barker

points out, Long had few defenders among West Indian planters.11 The

most notable was John Kemeys who explicitly used polygenist ideas to

justify black servitude. Kemeys’s Free and candid reflections occasioned bythe late additional duties on sugar and on rum (1781) represented Africans

as ‘Barbarians, amongst who, perpetual war is raging even for the horrid

practice of eating their enemies’ and as a people ‘but a few degrees

removed from the ouran-utang’. Kemeys repeats Long’s slur, derived

from Buffon, that female Africans may ‘copulate’ with ‘those brutes’.12

As we shall see, most planters and defenders of the trade, such as Bryan

Edwards, James Tobin, and William Beckford Jr, explicitly denied that

the racial status of the African, as described by Long and Kemeys, was in

any way an issue for them. Nevertheless, Long’s History did show how

allegedly scientific theories of the gradation of mankind, derived from

Linnaeus and others, could be used to provide a support for slavery even

if few were interested in then taking it up.

It is also true, however, that such vehemently racialist ideas as those

espoused by Long did not necessarily lead to a wholehearted support of

slavery itself. Long’s most obvious British follower in the period leading

to abolition was the Manchester surgeon and obstetrician, Charles

White. White, in his Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799),

argued that ‘everyone who has made natural History an object of study,

14 Peter Kitson

must have been led occasionally to contemplate the beautiful gradation

that subsists amongst created beings, from the highest to the lowest.

From man down to the smallest reptile … Nature exhibits to our view an

immense chain of beings.’13 White drew upon the comparative anatom-

ical work of the seventeenth-century English anatomist Edward Tyson,

the German anatomist Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, the British

surgeon John Hunter, as well as the writings of Johan Casper Lavater and

the polygenist theories of Long. He also used his own measurements of

a handful of African people who lived in, or visited, Manchester and

Liverpool. As Thomas De Quincey noted in his Autobiography, White

‘had by one whole generation run before the phrenologists and

craniologists – having already measured innumerable skulls amongst

the omnigenous seafaring population of Liverpool, illustrating all the

races of man’.14 From these researches White concluded that the ‘Negro’

‘seems to approach nearer to the brute creation than any other of the

human species’ and that ‘various species of men were originally created’.

He concluded that the European may be considered ‘the most beautiful

of the human race’.15

White claimed that the Mosaic account did allow for the separate cre-

ation of other species, and also that the Bible was not meant to function

as a handbook for natural history. Despite his closeness to Long in sub-

ject matter, if not in tone, White was not a supporter of slavery. He

declared in his Account that the slave trade was ‘indefensible on any

hypothesis, and he would rejoice at its abolition’.16 The ‘Advertisement’

to the Account states his desire that his work should not further ‘the per-

nicious practice of enslaving mankind’ and he states his position to be

that not only of an abolitionist but also a total emancipationist. Of

course White’s ideas, whatever their author’s stated beliefs, could be

used to further the aims of the slave trade, but White did not make that

argument himself. Thus it would seem that although the notion of the

separate creation of African peoples could be used to justify slavery, it

was seldom used in that way. It is salutary to recall that Voltaire, the

eighteenth-century Enlightenment voice of reason and humanity, and

staunch opponent of the slave trade, also declared himself in favour of

the notion that Africans were a distinct species from the European when

he declared that ‘bearded whites, fuzzy Negroes, the long-maned yellow

races and beardless men are not descended from the same

man. … Whites are superior to these Negroes, as the Negroes are to apes

and apes to oysters’.17

The monogenist view of human origins, however, did not guarantee a

clear rejection of slavery. This view could be expressed in terms of


contemporary natural philosophy or as a more general faith in the

universalism of Christian thought. One of the most significant state-

ments of the monogenist programme was that of the American

Presbyterian minister, Samuel Stanhope Smith. His Essay on the Causes ofthe Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1788) attacked,

in particular, Lord Kames’s polygenist position which Smith saw as an

assault on the validity of the scriptural account. Smith put forward the

classic environmentalist argument that physical variety among

humankind was due to natural and social causes, not to the existence of

separate species. Implicit in this account was a literal understanding of

scripture. In 1810, Smith published a substantially enlarged and more

fully informed edition of his Essay to vanquish Charles White and the

panoply of polygenist thinkers from the scientific field. Again Smith

stressed the importance of natural, environmental, and social factors as

causes of human variety. Following Buffon, Smith argued that blackness

was caused not only by such factors as extreme heat and cold, but also

by the state of savagery itself; thus the more civilized a people the fairer

they became. This process he claimed to witness among those slaves

who were domesticated on the plantations of good masters.

Descendants of Africans, he claimed, were ‘gradually losing these pecu-

liarities so offensive to our eye’. In ‘Princeton and its vicinity’, he con-

cluded, ‘I daily see persons of the African race whose limbs are as

handsomely formed as those of the inferior and laboring classes, either

of Europeans, or Anglo-Americans’.18 The temperate climate and civiliz-

ing influence of America were transforming the African into a ‘white’

person. The temperate climate of America would thus render all its

inhabitants a single people, negating the need for the institution of

slavery itself. As Winthrop Jordan puts it, in Smith we can see how ‘thor-

oughly the assumption of racial inferiority had infiltrated the citadel of

equality’.19 Smith was, however, not a supporter of slavery – he

elsewhere criticized the institution – nevertheless, the tenets of TheEssay, which is strangely silent on the subject, could provide as strong

an argument for using black slave labour in the Southern states as that

which the polygenist racialists, such as Morton, Nott, and Gliddon,

would later provide.

One of the foremost British authorities on race in the period was the

comparative anatomist and surgeon, William Lawrence. Lawrence was a

monogenist who rejected the notion of gradation and who accepted a

modified version of J. F. Blumenbach’s fivefold typology of human vari-

ety, which developed through the process of degeneration determined

by a form of sexual selection. He dispensed with the scriptural account

16 Peter Kitson

of the origin of man, which he believed to be irrelevant to scientific

research. More narrowly biological and zoological in method than

Smith, Lawrence was concerned to make precise comparisons between

men and animals, and between the different human races. The first part

of his Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (1817)

are concerned with such observations. He argued that generation and

heredity, not environment, were the sources of racial formation, and

proposed that racial variation was the result of spontaneous alteration,

perpetuated by isolation and breeding, along the same lines as animal

variation. Although Lawrence believed in the essential unity of

mankind, he nevertheless maintained that the European was racially

superior to the Ethiopian, and his discussion of that category is clearly

racialist. Like Charles White, Lawrence was an opponent of the institu-

tion of slavery but not an advocate for human equality. He had no doubt

about the ‘inferiority of organization’ and the ‘corresponding inferiority

of faculties’ of the African and he criticized both the abolitionist and the

pro-slavery lobbies alike:

The abolitionists have erred in denying a natural inferiority, so clearly

evinced by the concurring evidences of anatomical structure and

experience. But it was only an error in fact; and may be more readily

excused, as it was on the side of humanity. Their opponents com-

mitted the more serious moral mistake of perverting what should

constitute a claim to kindness and indulgence into justification or

palliation of the revolting and antichristian practice of traffic in

human flesh; a practice branded with the double curse of equal

degradation to the oppressor and the oppressed.20

Lawrence here shows that the issue of race inferiority was certainly a

counter which was used in the debate. Along with White and others,

he demonstrates how a firm ‘scientific’ belief in the racial inferiority of

the African does not necessarily lead to a defence of slavery or the slave

trade. He also shows how natural philosophers on the monogenist

side and the polygenist side could both use scientific arguments to claim

the inferiority of Africans.

III

Evidence that the planters themselves did not articulate their racism in

terms of polygenist scientific theory is not difficult to find. In fact,

Richard Ligon’s comment from his History of the Island of Barbados of


1657 that among the slaves were ‘as honest, faithfull, and conscionable

people as amongst those of Europe, or any other part of the world’ is not

atypical of a great deal of historical and travel writing about the West

Indies.21 In his History Civil and Commercial of the West Indies (1793), the

merchant and historian Bryan Edwards gives a detailed account of the

dispositions of the various African peoples that were transported to

Jamaica as slaves. When describing the ‘Eboes’ he observes that ‘the con-

formation of the face’ resembles ‘that of a baboon’ and that this is more

visible in these slaves than any other. However, he adds that such an

observation does not imply the ‘natural inferiority in these people’ as it

is ‘perhaps purely accidental’ and can be ‘no more considered as a proof

of degradation, than the red hair and high cheek bones of the Natives of

North of Europe’.22 Edwards, regarded as one of the more liberal and

humanitarian voices of plantocracy, defended the slave trade and slavery

on the grounds that they were necessary evils essential for the economic

health of the colonies and mother country.23 Maria Nugent, the wife of

the Lord George Nugent, the Governor of Jamaica from 1801 to 1805,

similarly does not regard the African slaves in racialist terms. She records

in her journal her sympathies for the ‘poor blackies’ whose ‘want of exer-

tion’ proceeds not from biological causes but from the institution of

‘slavery’ itself. Although Nugent regards Toussaint L’Ouverture, then in

the ascendant in neighbouring St Domingue, as ‘a wonderful man …

intended for very good purposes’, she still expresses herself in contem-

porary racist terms; when seeing two baby boy Africans, she comments

that they ‘were exactly like two little monkeys’. Assiduous in promoting

Christianity among her black servants, she believes abolitionist claims

that the slaves are ill treated to be exaggerated. Generally, she sees the

slaves as good-natured children, and a subject for sentimental discourse.

If the whites would only set a better example by behaving less licen-

tiously, then the African would propagate and remove the necessity for

the existence of the slave trade. Nugent does, however, claim that the

planters consider ‘the Negroes as creatures formed merely to administer

to their ease’ and confesses difficulty in persuading ‘those great and supe-

rior beings, our white domestics, that the blacks are human beings, or

have souls’.24 This does not seem to be a prejudice shared by the slaves’

owners, however. The historian John Stewart, in his Account of Jamaica(1828), describes the variety of African slaves and their various disposi-

tions but generally sees them as capable of civilization:

The Negroes, though so rude and ignorant in their savage state, have

a natural shrewdness and genius which is doubtless susceptible of

18 Peter Kitson

culture and improvement. Those who have been reared among the

whites are greatly superior in intellect to the native Africans brought

at a mature age to the country. Many are wonderfully ingenious in

making a variety of articles for their own use, or to sell.25

Stewart also points to the example of Toussaint L’Ouverture who

‘though an uneducated slave, acquitted himself as a general and a states-

man’, confounding those ‘who maintained that Negroes were incapable

of intellectual improvement’.26

The planter spokesman James Tobin claimed that the racialist

arguments were ‘not of much consequence’ and that it ‘has never been

pretended that the slaves were, or are, any way inferior to their masters,

except in strength, policy, or good fortune’. If his antagonist James

Ramsay ‘feels any triumph in the idea of having confronted the opin-

ions of Hume, Voltaire, Lord Kaims, Long &c he is welcome to enjoy it

without the smallest interruption from me’. Tobin made the familiar

argument that the slaves were better treated than the labouring poor of

Great Britain and that if freed they would do no work at all. He never-

theless repeats the racist slurs that Africans are ‘lazy, sensual and cruel’

and ‘totally averse to the least civilization’, as well as reiterating Long’s

fears relating to ‘the dark and contaminated breed’ that results from

miscegenation.27 Like Edwards, Tobin justified the ‘odious traffic in the

human species’ as an evil necessary for the maintenance of the

colonies.28 He also argued that enslaved Africans were ‘the only class

that will stand the climate, and, at the same time labour’.29 As ‘Philo-

Xylon’ brusquely put in a letter to the Barbadoes Gazette in 1788, ‘I shall

not take up your Time, in an useless discussion of white Men and Negroes:They are both admitted to be of the human Kind; and both species have

all the necessary Abilities, of Mind and Body suitable to their being

Cultivators of the Soul, which is to feed them.’30

The planter advocate William Beckford Jr did admit that the ‘poor

Negroes are seldom considered as human creatures’ in Jamaica, but goes

on to say that their situation under a ‘kind owner’ is superior to that of

the majority of British labourers. Beckford denies that the slaves are ‘of

a different species’ from the European: ‘The sun that shines on all,

enlightens them; and if genius be the consequence of heat, and the

beams that fertilize the earth, irradiate the mind; the African in genial-

ity of climate, and warmth of soul would blaze; when the inhabitants of

Europe would freeze.’31 In his picturesque Descriptive Account of theIsland of Jamaica (1790), Beckford denied that it ‘was the colour of the

skin … that degrades humanity’ but claimed that ‘Providence’ thickened


the slaves’ skins ‘to enable them to bear what would otherwise be insuf-

ferable’. For Beckford, those that claim that the Africans are ‘but one

degree removed from vegetable existence’ argue both weakly and

impiously; nevertheless he can still claim that ‘the negroes are slaves by

nature’.32 The planter and pro-slavery view, then, does not rely on

Long’s polygenist argument. It did not need to. Pro-slavery writers could

justify just about anything they wanted to with regard to the practice of

plantation slavery by recourse to the view that humanity was of one

species, providing one understood that Africans were at a lower social

and cultural level. The pro-slavery writers were delighted to refute

Long’s theories with their Enlightenment and atheistic associations.

Certainly, whatever their private opinions were, the official spokesmen

of the plantocracy saw no merit in publicly arguing for slavery and the

trade on the grounds of the Long’s scientific racism. If pro-slavery writ-

ing reinforced any of the beliefs in human variety, it was that of the

monogenist camp with its stress on the determining powers of environ-

ment, climate, and savagery to thicken and blacken the skin of the

African to allow him to stand strenuous labour in the field and the

excruciating punishment of the whip if he slackened.

IV

One therefore wonders why defences of the humanity of the African

slave were prominent in abolitionist writing. The fourth chapter of

James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves(1784) contains a detailed rebuttal of Long’s opinions (along with those

of David Hume) and a statement of the full humanity of the African

slave. Ramsay minimized the importance and permanence of physical

characteristics, arguing that a black skin was as accidental a response to

climatic change as a freckle: ‘for a freckle may be defined a partial black

skin; a black skin an universal freckle’. For Ramsay, such physical char-

acteristics did not predetermine moral or intellectual capacities: ‘the

soul is a simple substance, not to be distinguished by squat or tall, black,

brown, or fair.’33 Ramsay also dismissed the notion of gradation and the

facial angle as put forward by contemporary anatomists.

We have seen how James Tobin simply conceded this argument to the

abolitionists, claiming that it had no bearing on the issue of the slave

trade and plantation slavery, but it remained a theme in much aboli-

tionist writing, which continued to argue as if this were one of the main

planks of the plantocratic argument. Perhaps the classic iteration of the

Christian Universalist view of human difference comes in Thomas

20 Peter Kitson

Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1788).

This substantial essay serves to confute the whole range of arguments

concerning colonial slavery. It also includes Clarkson’s own speculations

about human difference, which combine a Christian essentialism with

contemporary scientific awareness. In his discussion of skin colour,

Clarkson, like Ramsay, seeks to minimize its importance. He postulates

that the colour of ‘dark olives; a beautiful colour, and just medium

between black and white’ was probably the complexion of Noah and of

all humanity’s ancestors. He does not see white as the primary colour,

and he accepts its equivalence with black; ‘there is great reason to

presume, that the purest white is as far removed from the primitive

colour as the deepest black’.34 Clarkson’s insistence on the relativity of

our perceptions of the primacy or beauty of skin colour is not unprece-

dented: Sir Thomas Browne, Joshua Reynolds, and others had made the

same point. What is new is Clarkson’s attempt to confute pseudo-

scientific racialists such as Long, by giving his arguments a scientific

underpinning. His speculations into the origin of colour lead him

to minimize the key difference as simply resulting from the ‘mucosumcorpus’ which lies under the skin. The actual skin of the ‘blackest negroe’

is of the same transparency as ‘that of the purest white’. He assumes that

‘the epidemic complexion’ in all its many and various gradations to

result from climate. Clarkson adopts Ramsay’s hypothesis that colour

might ‘be justly considered as an universal freckle’. In adopting the

hypothesis of the ‘universal freckle’, Clarkson is attempting to efface the

sign of difference between white and black, unsettling such binary

oppositions by positing a dark olive as the primary colour, so removing

the grounds for the workings of any Manichean allegory based on such

an opposition. Although he does not explicitly state them, Clarkson

must have realized the implications of his discussion in decentring

Western assumptions of white as privileged and primary.35

Ironically, then, it is in the writings of the abolitionists that the ideas

of ‘scientific racism’ are probably most apparent, albeit under pressure of

refutation. While much abolitionist writing might be considered posi-

tive on issues of race and equality, the parameters of its world-view are

limited to a Christian Universalism which stressed a humanity

grounded on feeling rather than on reason. As Hannah More puts it:

‘They still are men, and men should still be free’ because ‘though

few can reason, all mankind can feel’.36 While not in the category of

Long’s or White’s extreme speculations about difference, Ramsay’s

hypothesis of the ‘universal freckle’, which both Clarkson and Smith

adopt, is dismissive of blackness which, in the contemporary parlance of


scientific racism, is usually seen as a degeneration from a primary racial

colour of white or ‘dark olive’. Thus the relationship between the slave

trade, slavery, and the emergence of scientific racialist thinking is an

ambiguous and contested issue in which the various combatants line up

in confusing ways. Certainly scientific racialism began to emerge more

strongly at this time and it did feature as a part of the debate about

slavery and the slave trade, but it was not a necessary argument for the

‘West-India Interest’ at this stage. Pro-slavery writers could argue just

about everything they needed to within the parameters of Christian

Universalist thinking, a world-view that could encompass both vehe-

mently racist thoughts and practices as well as ideas that we can recog-

nize as humanitarian and progressive. Once the authority of the biblical

account began to decline, other, sceptical and secular, versions of the

natural history of mankind were needed to justify the domination of the

whites. Certainly, in Althusserian terms, it seems that the ideology of

racism is possessed of a relative autonomy that allows it to change its

idiom without a direct causal relationship to material conditions.

Commentators on race matters, such as Albert Memmi and David Theo

Goldberg, are thus right to highlight the racist aspect of group domina-

tion and subordination which express themselves in a variety of ways

beyond the merely physical and somatic. Goldberg and Wheeler are also

right to point out that this is a change in the grammar of racial discourse

rather than a specific attempt to justify the class interests of the West

India planters and their mercantile supporters. However, we should also

maintain the space for those ideas and thoughts that challenged and

upset the prevailing orthodoxies of race thinking in the period, as well

as understanding that racialist notions of hierarchy and inferiority infil-

trated the discourses of human equality and could be seen to be

supportive of exclusions and oppressions based on racial constructs,

even if their adherents were themselves opposed to slavery and the slave

trade.

Notes

1. George Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 1; Roxann Wheeler, TheComplexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture(Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 291. The literature

in this area is now substantial but the following are especially notable:

H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth Century Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999)

and Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (London: Thoemmes, 1996);

22 Peter Kitson

Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1987); Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in

the Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 11–36; Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and theEnlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); George Frederickson,

Racism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Peter J. Kitson,

ed., Theories of Race, volume 8 of Slavery, Emancipation and Abolition, ed. Peter

J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999); ‘Coleridge

and “the Oran-utan Hypothesis: Romantic Theories of Race” ’, in Coleridge andthe Science of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),

pp. 91–116; ‘ “Bales of living anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in

Writing of the Romantic Period’, ELH, 67, 2 (2000), 515–37; Ivan Hannaford,

Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1996); Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origins of

Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-CenturyStudies, 29 (1996), 247–64; Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity,Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1995); Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Basis

of Eighteenth-Century Racism’, in Racism in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, vol. 2, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland and

London: Press of Case Western University, 1973), pp. 245–62; Londa

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body (London: Pandora, 1994); William Stanton, TheLeopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America 1815–59 (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1960); Nancy Ley Stepan, The Idea of Race inScience: Great Britain (London: Macmillan, 1982); Robert J. C. Young, ColonialDesire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (Routledge: London and New York,

1995); Suzanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Conquest, Family, and Nation inPrecolonial German, 1770–1870 (Durham, NJ and London: Duke University

Press, 1997).

2. Wheeler, Complexion of Race, p. 237.

3. Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850(Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 27.

4. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (New Jersey:

Humanities Press, 1975); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of theAtlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York and London: Picador, 1997); David

Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’,

in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed.

P. J. Marshall (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),

pp. 440–63. For nineteenth-century American race thinking, see Stephen Jay

Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); Stanton, TheLeopard’s Spots; Young, Colonial Desire; Reginald Horsman, Race and ManifestDestiny: The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1981).

5. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1975); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Robin Blackburn,

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988) and TheMaking of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800(London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 517–18; Winthrop D. Jordan,


White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 133–190;

Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American LiteraryCriticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Figures in Black: Words,Signs and the ‘Racial’ Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and

‘Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes’, in ‘Race’, Writingand Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1–20; James

Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),

pp. 72–95; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2, The Originof Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 1997), p. 351; Ruth

Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters(New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Anthony J. Barker, The African Link:British Attitudes to the Negroes in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807,

(London: Frank Cass, 1978), p. 159; Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy andPornography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 141–80, 346–97.

6. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 1–84, and

‘Introduction’ to Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. xvi–xxiii.

7. For a summary of this debate see: Kitson, ‘Introduction’, Theories of Race,pp. vii–xxxii; Augstein, Race; Augstein, James Cowles Prichard.

8. The most recent discussion of Long’s work is Wheeler, Complexion of Race,pp. 209–33. Although Wheeler stresses the non-biological racism of Long’s

thought, I focus on the somatic aspects of his work because these were the

elements that most influenced his contemporaries.

9. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols (London, 1774), II, p. 356.

10. Edward Long, Candid Reflections Upon the Judgement latterly awarded by theCourt of the King’s Bench on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause (London,

1772), pp. 13–14, 21.

11. Barker, African Link, pp. 41–58, 157–71.

12. John Kemeys, Free and candid reflections occasioned by the late additional dutieson sugar and on rum (London, 1783), pp. 71–2.

13. Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in DifferentAnimals and Vegetables (London, 1799), p. 1.

14. Thomas De Quincey, Autobiography, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, vol. 19 of TheWorks of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto,

2000–3), p. 257; see also pp. 257–60.

15. White, Account, p. 153.

16. Ibid., p. 137.

17. Voltaire, Treaté du métaphysique, ed. W. H. Barber, The Complete Works ofVoltaire, vol. 14 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), p. 423.

18. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexionand Figure in the Human Species, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 157.

19. Winthop D. Jordan, ‘Introduction’; Smith, Essay, p. xlvi.

20. William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History ofMankind, 3rd edn (London, 1823), pp. 312–13.

24 Peter Kitson

21. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657),

in Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777,

ed. Thomas W. Krise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 28.

22. Bryan Edwards, History Civil and Commercial of the West Indies, 3 vols

(London, 1798), I, pp. 73–4.

23. See Bryan Edwards, A Speech delivered at a Free Conference between theHonorable Council and assembly of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 1789), in

Peter J. Kitson, ed., The Abolition Debate, vol. 2 of Slavery, Abolition andEmancipation, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and

Chatto, 1999), pp. 325–47.

24. Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of her residence in Jamaica from 1801to 1805 (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), pp. 13, 14, 33, 43, 45,

86–7, 98.

25. John Stewart, An Account of Jamaica and Its Inhabitants, by a Gentleman longResident in the West Indies (London, 1808), p. 256.

26. Ibid., p. 265.

27. James Tobin, Cursory Remarks upon the Rev. Mr Ramsay’s Essay (London, 1787),

pp. 141, 69, 116, 129, 122, 118.

28. James Tobin, A Short Rejoinder to Mr Ramsay’s Reply (London, 1785), p. 1.

29. James Tobin, Farewel Address to the Rev. Mr. J. Ramsay [in reply to a letter fromhim] (London, 1788), p. 11.

30. Letters of Philo-Xylon, first published in the Barbados Gazette, during the Years1787 and 1788 (Barbados, 1789), No. VIII.

31. William Beckford Jr, Remarks Upon the Situation of Negroes in Jamaica (London,

1788), pp. 30, 39, 86, 84.

32. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (London,

1790), I, pp. 200–1; II, pp. 60, 350, 383.

33. James Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in theBritish Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), pp. 216, 235.

34. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species(London, 1788), p. 134.

35. Ibid., pp. 134–8, 144–5.

36. Hannah More, ‘Slavery A Poem’, line 184, in Women Romantic Poets1785–1832, ed. Jennifer Breen (London: Dent, 1994), p. 15.


26

2Abolishing Romance: Representing Rape in OroonokoSue Wiseman

I Oroonoko and modernity

In historical and literary critical writing on Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko(1688), a text which stands on the threshold of modernity, a tension

exists concerning whether it should be seen as fully participant in the

concerns and genres of modernity or whether it is crucially bound to ear-

lier ways of thinking and writing. In general, readings that emphasize the

modernity of Behn’s text emphasize novelistic features and see various

kinds of plantation slavery as a key context; those that seek to link the

text to earlier features emphasize romance and the politics of the

moment of production or setting.1 At stake in this concern is the dura-

bility versus the provisional nature of the categories by which Anglo-

American late modernity experiences its pasts. That, at times, for critics

Oroonoko stands in an allegorical and didactic relationship to late moder-

nity is suggested by its framing in relation to studies of eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century slavery in North America. The deployment of such

contexts arguably illuminates our desires for the text to perform ideolog-

ical work in late modernity as much as, or more than, the categories it

explores itself.2 Sometimes described as an ‘imperialist’ text, Oroonoko is

so, indeed, in the wake of subsequent historical trajectories. Yet Oroonokoalso evidently considers itself as telling its reader some things about free-

dom that are not formed in the light of solidified colonialist discourse

but were expressed at a moment when the future of plantations and slav-

ery, though fascinating, was uncertain. As critics discussing the text

repeatedly recognize, Oroonoko’s formal and ideological ‘symptoms’ (to

borrow Suvir Kaul’s resonant term) are and are not those of modernity.3

This essay returns to the tensions of that text as they were used,

resolved, and transformed in responses written in the century after its

publication. In an attempt to explore some of the ways in which Behn’s

story of slavery imagined freedom, this essay works on a small scale to

pursue two, connected, issues: Imoinda’s colour, and master–slave rape.

The first section of the essay concentrates on Behn’s Oroonoko and its

adaptation as a play by Thomas Southerne in 1695. The second section

explores the reworkings of Southerne’s drama, as slavery became a rec-

ognized and then (for some) abhorred institution, whose significances

touched British life. It examines tragedies by John Hawkesworth (1759),

John Ferriar (1788), and the farce The Sexes Mis-match’d; or a New Way toget a Husband (1741), and asks what happens to the question of female

slavery and freedom as Behn’s text is reincarnated on the stage and,

later, as the play is rewritten in the service of abolition.

While it seems unlikely that readers of Behn or audiences for Southerne’s

play directly correlated the question of rape with the experience of the law,

the law appears to have reinforced the strong cultural association between

female servitude and rape, female freedom, and the key question of sexual

virtue. Matthew Hale’s uncontroversial dictum that rape occurs ‘when one

has carnal knowledge of any woman…against her will’ coincides with

case law, literary representation, and affective and political discourses on

female virtue.4 However, not all women were equally in possession of the

fragile humanity which made the crime possible. For free women, sexual

virtue was theirs to lose: Lucretia was used as an example of female desire

and concupiscence as well as virtue. According to Hilary Beckles, in

Barbados ‘as elsewhere in the British Caribbean until the closing years of

slavery, the rape of an enslaved black woman was not an offence by law’.5

While Mieke Bal astutely argues that rape is often ‘an obscuring term’ in

the discussion of early modern culture, the relationship between rape and

slavery makes the same term, in the case of this story, a significant way of

distinguishing a woman’s human status.6

II Behn and Southerne

Oroonoko’s relationship with the discourses underpinning colonial

expansion is famously incoherent and shifting.7 Indeed, the unstable

quality of Aphra Behn’s text’s relationship to the colonial situations

which are part of what it describes is positively announced in the

oxymoronic status of the ‘royal slave’. Accordingly, I concentrate on one

aspect of this complex text – sexual threat – in relation to its disjunc-

tures and mixedness of vocabulary, ideology, and genre.

That Behn is at pains to make both Imoinda and Oroonoko slavehold-

ers, amongst other details, ensures that the text is complicated in its

Abolishing Romance: Rape in Oroonoko 27

moral assessment of slavery and far from ‘proto-abolitionist’. At some

moments Oroonoko is presented as much more ‘civil’ than the

Europeans he encounters, at others he is described in terms emphasizing

the nobility of mind and body which distinguishes him from the other

African slaves. The colonial politics of Surinam echoes with the domestic

politics of the moment of the text’s production.8 Moreover, while the

text maintains a distinction between the native inhabitants in Surinam

and the imported slaves, these groups and the Europeans are more mixed

than might initially strike the reader. Thus, we read of the native inhabi-

tants, ‘[W]e dealt with ’em with Beads of all Colours’, which they use ‘as

Adam and Eve did the Fig-leaves; the Men wearing a long Stripe of Linen,

which they deal with us for’.9 The paradoxically Edenically coded wear-

ing of a product grown in the colonies for Europeans, like Oroonoko’s

attachment to his pipe of tobacco in his, and the text’s, final throes, sug-

gests the enmeshed cultural relationships that went alongside European

political and economic dominance, and the text’s awareness of this.10

Oroonoko implies that the dominance of the Europeans brought

ambiguous circuits of connection and mixture – as signalled, for

example, in the inclusion of knives in the ‘trinkets’ sold to the

Surinamese. However, the connections remain implicit and paradoxical,

shifting in meaning from one part of the text to another, never deci-

sively separated into clear discursive strands. As Margaret Ferguson and

others remind us, the evasive female narrator is a crucial part of this

positional uncertainty.11 As told by this narrator, the relationships

between Trefry, Oroonoko, and Imoinda, as well as between Oroonoko

and Imoinda and Oroonoko’s grandfather, suggest strongly the text’s

instability in its presentation and critique of European dominance.

Tracing these relationships also allows us to see the different vocabular-

ies and their moral status in the narrative.

Oroonoko is bought from the treacherous captain by Trefry, ‘a young

Cornish gentleman … a man of great wit, and fine learning’, who was to

deputize for the Lord Governor (p. 106). The end of three days’ journey

by river to the plantation finds Oroonoko and Trefry closely bonded.

Trefry’s love for Oroonoko was ‘as his dearest brother’ and Oroonoko

trusts him. At the final destination Oroonoko, now renamed Caesar, is

recognized. The slaves ‘found he was that Prince who had, at several

times, sold most of ’em to these Parts’ (p. 89), a recognition to which

they respond by crying adoringly ‘Live, O King!’ Moreover, when they

find Oroonoko is, like them, enslaved, they make a great banquet of wel-

come, attended by Oroonoko and ‘several English’ (p. 90). Oroonoko’s

passage into slavery is told in a way which emphasizes that nobility

28 Sue Wiseman

(signifying in this text access to ‘civilized’ values, developed moral

faculties, linguistic abilities, and hierarchy) and servility (suggesting

subjection to desire or money, deceit, political, and personal treachery

as much as enslavement) do not readily mesh with either economics or

hierarchy. The emphasis is on the contradictions of the situation:

Oroonoko gives up his robes for a slave’s garb but his nobility is recog-

nized; he is given a slave name, but it is that of Caesar; we learn that he

has sold many of those who greet him into slavery yet, on finding he too

is a slave, they nevertheless treat him as a king. Oroonoko, though

himself a trader in slaves, is not understood by those he has sold to be a

traitor or betrayer of ‘his’ people, and he and Trefry are understood to be

friends.12 The instability of the categories, and the way in which

antitheses fuse, passes without overt comment by the narrator.

At and after this banquet the discourses of rape which have circulated

around Imoinda throughout the text come to their first climax. We have

heard of ‘an hundred white men sighing after her’ and it is Imoinda’s

claims that she has been ‘ravished’ by Oroonoko which has provoked

the ancient king-general to sell her into slavery. In an exchange between

Oroonoko and Trefry concerning rape in a slave society the ethical

implications of rape are crystallized. Most of these ‘Slaves were undone

in Love, with a fine she Slave’ – Clemene/Imoinda – and, with them,

Trefry too ‘had done nothing but Sigh for her ever since she came’

(p. 90). Thus, Trefry and Oroonoko, master and male slave, canvass

the special availability of a woman ‘sold like a common slave’ and trade

the scenario of master–slave rape. This conversation is a trading of

amorous discourse between two fraternal equals.13 The discussion of the

master’s rape of the slave, first raised in Clemene’s behaviour, ‘so retir’d,

as if she feared a Rape even from the God of Day’ is introduced by

Oroonoko who does not wonder ‘that Clemene shou’d refuse Slaves’ but

is surprised ‘she escapes those who can entertain her as you can do; or why,being your Slave, you do not oblige her to yield’ (p. 90). Oroonoko is pre-

sented as recognizing the position of the slave while – at this point –

apparently seeing it from the perspective of the master.

Thus, here, Oroonoko shows Oroonoko and Trefry sharing a position.

Each recognizes the coercive power of slavery but each pits against that

individualized virtue and nobility – qualities which can exist even in a

slave. Trefry says:

I have been ready to make use of those advantages of Strength and ForceNature has given me. But oh! she disarms me, with that Modesty andWeeping so tender and so moving, that I retire, and thank my Stars she


overcame me. The Company laughed at his Civility to a Slave, and

Caesar only applauded the nobleness of his Passion and Nature, since

that slave might be Noble, or, what was better, have true Notions of

Honour and Vertue in her. (pp. 90–1)

The presentation of master–slave rape participates in the text’s overall

pattern of ambiguity, implication, and ambivalence in which Trefry also

participates when he imagines himself as crossing from master to ‘gen-

uine’ lover and friend.14 Ultimately, Oroonoko resolves the problem of

Imoinda’s sexual vulnerability so vividly put before him by Trefry, by

murdering her. Dead, she cannot ‘be first Ravished by every Brute’,

exposed to ‘nasty Lusts, and then a shameful Death’ (p. 113). The thought

of Imoinda’s rape and its reflection upon his, but also her, honour is

attributed to Oroonoko at this juncture, but it also puts within another

framework of possession and freedom the question of her honour and

virtue canvassed throughout.

Imoinda is not raped in Behn’s Oroonoko, merely murdered. However,

throughout the text she is threatened by rape. Her abduction by

Oroonoko’s relative, the old king, is followed by her husband’s unknow-

ing conference with her master, and ultimately the reason Oroonoko

gives for her murder is the threat of rape.15 And if, in a text which offers

many possible readings, this aspect of the text is emphasized it could be

argued that Imoinda’s place in the narrative, far from being that of a

cipher, is as the repeatedly threatened repository of subjecthood, affect,

loyalty; she becomes empathetically important as well as acting as a

test of the moral value of the other figures. The question of master–

slave rape, raised in connection with Imoinda, is dispelled in

vocabularies which have force amongst truly noble humans – the

languages of romantic love, romance, and nobility. These, sometimes

incompatible, languages are brought into alliance by an ideal of female

honour and virtue which at moments Imoinda embodies. Thus, sexual

threat illuminates the way in which the text treats the colonial situa-

tion in three ways. First, its use of rape acknowledges the power

relations of European domination in a slave society but, secondly, it

does so in a way which nevertheless leaves the text’s protagonists with

a potential to heroism. Thirdly (and, evidently, within terms which

universalize European values), the text’s description of the colonial

situation is characterized by an emphasis on the mingling of noble

and servile potentials in European and African men and women, lead-

ing to its presentation of a network of the noble based on mutual

recognition.16

30 Sue Wiseman

Comparison of the place of rape in Behn’s Oroonoko, and Thomas

Southerne’s play Oroonoko (staged successfully by Rich’s company at the

Theatre Royal in November 1695) prompts us to consider questions of

female freedom in association with colour, for Southerne makes

Imoinda white.17 Far from being an anti-slavery tract, Southerne’s play

was deemed grotesque and, as we shall see, was later purged to become

‘pure’ tragedy. Southerne’s play may nevertheless illuminate attitudes to

slavery and, specifically, to female status and African status as a subject

in the circulation of the Oroonoko story. If Behn’s text is at pains to

present the colonial situation as mixed in terms of noble versus servile

human qualities, then Southerne’s adaptation polarizes and thereby

literalizes power politics left implicit in Behn’s text and, further,

Southerne replaces mixture with a semi-racialized conceptual organiza-

tion. Two elements may be connected here. In the transformation from

fiction to drama the narrator – source of some of the language of

romance heroism – disappears and a comic plot is joined to that

concerning the royal slaves; Ferguson notes that the new comic plot of

colonial husband hunting in part realizes the potentially sexual interest

of Behn’s ambiguous narrator.18 Behn’s fiction precipitates the uneasy

feelings provoked by unexpected connections, the trading of places,

generic tensions between romance, fiction, and heroism, and ideologi-

cal dissonance. In Southerne’s text the mixture is formal and generic: it

appears in the splicing of comic and tragic plots.19 It was the close par-

allelism of a comic marriage plot with the story of Oroonoko which crit-

ics and rewriters of the play felt needed sorting out. Indeed, most later

criticism of Southerne’s play was reserved for what was perceived as

Southerne’s tasteless combining of pathos and comedy. Thus, in 1788,

John Ferriar commends John Hawkesworth for having evicted

Southerne’s ‘absurd, and insufferable underplot’, describing Southerne’s

as a ‘mixed play’ capable of ‘delighting the gross and depraved audi-

ences of that time’.20

In Southerne’s play, master–slave rape is significant in the plotting of

the comic strand and in relation to the question of whiteness: it con-

nects formal and thematic issues. Following the opening in which the

disguised Welldon has discussed the brutality of the London marriage

market where a woman may spend her dowry setting herself out for

marriage and, in a little time, become used goods (valueless because too

often viewed), the slave auction which is to inaugurate the

Oroonoko–Imoinda plot serves to juxtapose slavery with another form

of devaluation – here from the human to the bestial. The issue of

marriage in the comic plot foregrounds the tension between necessary


yet forbidden female agency in the marriage market and the commodity

value of femininity. Charlotte (disguised) and Lucy have traded fallen

stock in London for the hoped-for copiousness of a colonial sexual

economy where husbands ripen ‘thick as oranges’ and a woman need

merely ‘spread your apron in expectation’ (I. i. 6, 9–10). That the play

puts the marriage market in a complex relation to the literal commodi-

fication of slaves is foregrounded, but the nature of that relation is not

resolved.21

In the second scene, when the slaving captain approaches Lucy,

Welldon repels him with words which, for all the saving irony of

Welldon’s disguise, emphasize for the audience that markets institute

equivalence. Welldon says, ‘This is your market for slaves; my sister is a

free woman and must not be disposed of in public’ (II. ii. 126–7). The

sexual economics of slavery as founded in part on master–slave rape is in

the same scene more fully disclosed by the strangely hybrid, knowing

and unknowing, figure of the Widow Lackitt, complaining about her

‘lot’ of slaves:

Enter Captain Driver, teased and pulled about by Widow Lackitt andseveral Planters. Enter at another door Welldon, Lucy, Stanmore [and

Jack Stanmore].

WIDOW: Here I have six slaves in my lot and not a man among

’em, all women and children; what can I do with ’em, Captain? Pray

consider, I am a woman myself and can’t get my own slaves as some

of my neighbours do.

1 PLANTER: I have all men in mine. Pray, Captain, let the men and

women be mingled together, for procreation sake, and the good of

the plantation. (I. ii 10–16)

This exchange brings together the two plots – the sisters’ quest for men

and the relationship of Oroonoko and Imoinda. The superfluity of one

sex or the other extends the theme of sexual imbalance which Lucy and

her ‘brother’ have complained existed in London. Simultaneously, the

structure of desire in a slave culture is promptly exposed by Widow

Lackitt who cannot ‘get’ her own slaves as some of her neighbours do,

but it is exposed comically – like much else Widow Lackitt says, for the

audience it is a joke, a serious one, about the economics of slavery.22

In the same scene, the governor, who replaces Trefry as a more direct

representative of the colonizing power, complains that ‘if fortune had

favoured me in the last sale, the fair slave had been mine’. He is ‘Every

day more in love’ with Clemene (I. ii 5–9). Southerne’s play could be

32 Sue Wiseman

seen as condensing roles much less determinate in Behn’s fiction (the

governor, Trefry, Imoinda, the Indian mistress) into a single situation

with only ownership as a discursively productive complicating factor.

Certainly, the play emphatically exposes the economic and ideological

connections between the areas it examines. It connects the metropoli-

tan sexual market with the slave economy and reveals the rhetoric of

romance as concealing the power relations of the plantation. Here, fra-

ternal and heroic virtue do not counter the sexual tyranny on which the

audience’s attention is focused. It soon becomes clear that, if the gover-

nor had had Clemene in his lot, romantic rhetoric would have been

abolished by the uninhibited access of master to slave. Romantic dis-

course is sustained only because economic possession by another puts a

barrier in the way of possession: Clemene cannot be raped by the gover-

nor simply because she is owned by another planter.

Thus, Behn’s text keeps the possibility of Clemene/Imoinda’s rape in

play but forestalled by feminine virtue articulated in the discourse of

romantic love. As Oroonoko and Trefry’s conversation about raping

Clemene indicates, romantic love and romance (not coterminous but

linked by a hierarchy of innate nobility) co-exist with economic neces-

sity and, at times, the discourse of colonial economics in Behn’s text.23 In

Southerne’s play, on the other hand, the governor’s attempts to seduce

Clemene are forestalled by ownership. The two modes of interruption to

the rape prompt the audience both to think about and to anticipate the

meanings and consequences of Clemene’s rape. In Southerne, the gover-

nor’s insistently cynical characterization of feminine virtue as a hypo-

critical covering over of desire prompts the audience to see Clemene as

virtuous. A similar effect is organized when in the fifth act we encounter

the governor – still planning to rape Imoinda:

GOVERNOR: I would not have her tell me she consents:

In favour of the sex’s modesty

That still should be presumed, because there is

A greater impudence in owning it

Than in allowing all that we can do.

This truth I know, and yet against myself

(So unaccountable are lovers’ ways)

I talk and lose the opportunities

Which love and she expects I should employ. (V. iv. 1–9)

The governor’s Ovidian and libertine language, designed to blur rape

and seduction, must prompt the audience to recognize that his claims to


know and understand female desire are flawed and refuse full subject-

hood to the woman. The alienated language of seduction, implying

rape, is exposed as a rhetoric dissociated from ethical grounding.

Recognizing that Southerne makes Imoinda wholly subject to the

coercive sexual power of slavery, we can analyse the significance of

further details changed from Behn’s text. Significantly, in Southerne’s

play Imoinda’s father was, as Oroonoko tells Blandford, ‘a white, / The

first I ever saw of your complexion’ (II. ii 72–3). Oroonoko and Imoinda

meet when Oroonoko returns to court after Imoinda’s father has

stopped the poisoned dart meant for Oroonoko: ‘He left an only daugh-

ter, whom he brought / An infant to Angola’ (II. ii. 83–4). Southerne’s

play also makes literal the incestuous plot suggested in Behn’s fiction:

it is Oroonoko’s own father, the king, who sends for Imoinda. Her

‘fatal beauty’ reaches the paternal ear and, ‘raging to possess her’

(II. i. 101, 104), he has her brought to court. Imoinda and Oroonoko are

already married in Southerne’s play and in a further changed detail we

find that she is with child. She is forced to confess herself Oroonoko’s

wife and ‘The furious king / Started at incest’ (II. ii. 105–6) and so – in a

return to Behn’s storyline – ‘in mad revenge’ (II. ii. 108) gets rid of

Imoinda; as we later learn not by poison but by selling her into slavery.

That considerations of staging seem to have been crucial to the

decision to make Imoinda white, and that the play condenses several

figures to make romance-influenced fiction into a Restoration play,

reminds us of the interplay of technical and ideological questions.

However, while the process of the interaction of ideology and staging

seems to have left no record, the nature of adjustments and changes

themselves reshape the choices and identifications offered to audiences

and readers in significant ways. The changes in genre and detail shape

the question of master–slave rape. First, the play polarizes representa-

tions of rape. Rape is represented as integral to the slave system (Widow

Lackitt’s casual mention of her inability to ‘get her own’ slaves signals

the play’s assumption that sexual relations between masters and slaves

were usual). On the other hand, the play heightens the shockingness of

rape by making the rapaciously libertine governor part of the ruling

power and using the unmixed wickedness of this figure to focus care-

fully the audience’s sympathy on Imoinda. The literalization of incest

also works to condense and sharpen that threat of rape for the audience,

as does the removal of the moral effectiveness of the rhetoric of roman-

tic love found in Behn’s text and the direct power of the governor (in

Southerne’s). Southerne’s play emphasizes that Imoinda and Oroonoko

are already married, and that she has been pregnant since before the

34 Sue Wiseman

play began. This makes the meeting of Imoinda and Oroonoko a recon-

stitution of a ‘family’ and, therefore, directs the nature of the audience’s

sympathy for the parents of a child born into slavery through sympathy

with the participants in a marriage rendered similar to those known to a

London audience.24

Finally, in the most telling and critically discussed detail which

licenses the other intensifications of the extremity of Imoinda’s plight,

the audience know that Imoinda is by descent ‘white’.25 She looks white

and it is, arguably, this whiteness which naturalizes the representation

of the governor’s attack on her as rape. The audience, knowing of her

pregnancy, are in possession of a fact which exacerbates the governor’s

attempt. Although the significance of Imoinda’s whiteness most clearly

registers anxieties about staging blackface, within this lie a number of

questions. One question can take the counterfactual form: within the

world of Southerne’s Oroonoko, could a black Imoinda have been

‘enough’ of a subject to be raped? The text may or may not answer this

question in the negative when it supplies her with a white parent, but

the white pedigree and colour she acquires more certainly removes any

potential obstacle to the audience’s empathetic identification with

the scene.

The implications of Southerne’s reshaping of the story for a play are,

most obviously, that we can see the distinct categories that Behn’s text

works with and that those categories are mixed. ‘European’ is important

for Behn, rather than precisely ‘white’, for example. Colour is important

to Behn but it is a qualitative continuum rather than racially hybrid

black and white: ‘blacks so called’ (p. 60); ‘beautiful Black-Wives; for

most certainly, there are Beauties that can charm of that Colour’ (p. 61);

‘gallant Moor’ (p. 61); ‘rusty Black’; ‘perfect Ebony’ (p. 62); ‘fair Queen

of Night’ (p. 64). But most important are qualities of conduct. The

comparison of these two generically distinct fictions yields some signif-

icant details. To return to the category of master–slave rape, in Behn’s

text Trefry is an owner, and Imoinda is an African slave, and rape is

restrained by feminine virtue articulated in the discourse of romantic

love. In Southerne’s play the governor is restrained from raping a

woman whom we, the audience, know to have a white father and,

implicitly, a white mother. Neither heroine is raped, and both are in dif-

ferent ways used as locations of affective properties but also, in different

ways, articulators of affective and moral sentiments. In each case, their

status as fully human female subjects makes the rapacious threat to

them important, but also makes it possible that they should be threat-

ened with that crime.


Comparison of these two texts reveals the presence of one question,

present in each, but rendered much more apparent by comparison. Each

text holds within it not only the oft-addressed question of what the

nature of Oroonoko’s ‘freedom’ might be, but, precisely because of the

continuously threatened rape, the question of what kind of subject – or

human – a female slave might be. Each text implicitly provides an answer

to the question of how the female slave can be positioned in relation

to the category human – indeed both show Imoinda as human-yet-

enslaved, but the answers offered are distinct. Behn’s text mixes up

virtues and vices amongst Europeans and Africans, and their binary rel-

ationship is triangulated by equally mixed representations of peoples.

Imoinda is given human status in the representation of both the fact and

way in which she is threatened with rape and, at the same time, within

the text’s self-referential understanding of difference – she is clearly rep-

resented as an African subject. Southerne’s Imoinda is ensured human

status by the threat of rape which is contrasted to the general reproduc-

tive mechanics of the slave economy and its inclusion of forced sex not

defined as rape – signalled by Widow Lackitt’s comment that she cannot

‘get’ her own slaves. The humanity of Southerne’s Imoinda, though, is at

least shored up – perhaps guaranteed, arguably determined – not by the

exercise of virtue (as in Behn’s story) but by the careful insertion of a

white father, and implicitly, a white mother into her pedigree. Southerne

is at pains to make Behn’s Imoinda human, but not in the terms offered

in Behn’s text (where nobility of soul guarantees humanity) but in terms

of tragic narrative, affectingly overdetermined, and which seems to

anticipate the fated heroine of later narratives of miscegenation.

Two conclusions may be suggested. First, in terms of the female sub-

ject, Behn’s text situated subjectivity in behaviour: Africans – including

African women – as much as Europeans, might be noble. Perhaps this

emphasis on behaviour contributes to the instability of her text in ideo-

logical terms. For Southerne, what guarantees Imoinda’s status as subject

is her white lineage: a white slave is already a subject, or enough of one,

to be raped. Clearer still, the audience are not required to negotiate the

question of black female subjecthood and slavery. Thus, if we see the

two texts as investigating issues of freedom and bondage, Behn’s text

sees Africans and Europeans as partaking of virtues which make them

free, Southerne’s use of a white Imoinda turns the play’s emphasis

towards physical whiteness as key to subject status in Imoinda’s (though

not Oroonoko’s) case. Although many resemblances between the two

texts remain, a comparison of rape in the two texts illuminates just how

different is their understanding of female access to subjecthood.

36 Sue Wiseman

III The cleansing of romance: didactic Oronooko

In 1788, a year after the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African

Slave Trade was founded, John Ferriar wrote that ‘The Story of Oronooko

appear’d particularly adapted’ to the purpose of moving hearts against

the slave trade, because of its ‘authenticity, as well as its pathetic

incidents’.26 As Ferriar’s reference to ‘the story’ hints, the eighteenth-

century progress of Oronooko was one of ideological, formal, and generic

reinterpretation. Several things happened to Imoinda’s whiteness and

the place of rape in Oronooko as it became caught up in eighteenth-

century abolitionism. As the ‘Oronooko legend’, the story was felt to

have a descriptive truth, a forensic purchase on events in the slave trade

which seems to have derived from its perceived authenticity (itself

obscurely tied to the fantasies concerning Behn’s relationship to her

male protagonist).27 Eighteenth-century theatrical reworkings are gener-

ally based on Thomas Southerne’s dramatic interpretation, as are three

in 1759–60 (one anonymous, one by Hawkesworth, and one by Francis

Gentleman) and Ferriar’s The Prince of Angola (1788).28 Following

Southerne, Imoinda is sexually accounted for by marriage to Oroonoko,

organized for stage tragedy as white. And at times, theatrically as well as

visually, these adaptations draw on Shakespeare’s Othello.29

The cutting of Southerne’s husband-hunting comic plot made these

plays into tragedies, as we shall see. But it had a second effect of bring-

ing early to the reader’s attention the lieutenant-governor’s intention to

rape Imoinda, and so Imoinda’s colour. In these often didactic rewritings

there is a tendency, if not for Imoinda to become whiter and whiter, cer-

tainly for her to be described as white as soon as possible. The texts

hurry to let us know that the Imoinda we are about to see is not black,

not African. In the seventh line of Act I scene i of Gentleman’s adapta-

tion Oroonoko (1760) she is ‘fair’. The frontispiece of the 1775 edition of

Hawkesworth’s adaptation shows a white Imoinda. Early in Act I, the

Fourth Planter tells us ‘squire Blandford has got one that they say is not

of their complexion’ (I. i).30 The explicitly pro-abolition play The Princeof Angola (1788) follows Southerne in making Imoinda white.31

Throughout this period, as Jane Spencer reminds us, the black Imoinda

of fiction co-existed with the white Imoinda of the plays.32 There is no

doubt that whiteness becomes key to Imoinda’s position in relation

to the power of the governor and the tragic power of the plays.

The governor is put before us early as an example of a bad use of

power (variously understood) instanced by his rapacious attitude to

Imoinda. Thus, Gentleman’s version has the governor declaring his love


in the first scene and this scene canvasses rape versus the duty of the

owner as Blandford tells him: ‘You have my consent to try all gentle

means’, but ‘Humanity obliges me to stand / Her guardian against

violence – ’. In Ferriar’s abolitionist Prince of Angola, the second scene

finds the governor chasing Imoinda around the stage: ‘Nay if you strug-

gle with me, I must take – ’ to which she replies, ‘You may my life, that I

can part with freely.’33 Looking back to Behn and Southerne’s texts, the

early answering of the questions those texts ask about Imoinda and

about rape make the eighteenth-century plays, notwithstanding their

differences from each other, connected in the way they use colour and

rape. Rape sexualizes Imoinda even as it makes colonial power absolute

and abusive. Concomitantly, although Imoinda is in some plays a force-

ful advocate of freedom, any canvassing of the issue of the subjecthood

of the female slave is shaped by her whiteness.

The operations of generic change and their implications are uneven

and to some extent contradictory. With regard to the systemic sexual

relations of slaves, in being rendered more abolitionist, Southerne is also

to be more tasteful and less comic. Thus Hawkesworth and Ferriar, for all

that it would prove their point, fudge Widow Lackitt’s commentary on

slave breeding: Hawkesworth tones it down, while Ferriar removes it

altogether.34 Moreover, not only was Southerne found to have added

comedy to tragedy, but to have allowed the tragic plot to be infected

with romance. Ferriar’s Preface castigates Southerne’s use of romance:

‘[a]fter Oroonoko has been deceived, chained, and imprison’d he

still speaks the insipid language of romance.’35 As discussed earlier,

Southerne’s dramatization had limited the role of the language of

romance. The language which carries most moral force in Behn’s mixed

fiction is attenuated rather than central in Southerne. Ferriar neverthe-

less finds it the largest obstruction to his desire to catch the conscience

of his audiences with a judicious mix of tragedy and description.

Responding to an image of Oroonoko worshipping the sun – ‘Thou God

ador’d! thou ever-glorious Sun!’ – Ferriar makes clear what unmixing

Southerne’s too mixed story requires. Authenticity demands that the

values of romance are not promiscuously mixed amongst races: ‘Critics

have long complained that Poets will needs convert Turks, Tartars,

Africans and Indians into learned Mythologists: How Oroonoko came to

believe the doctrine of the Apotheosis, will not be easily understood, by

those who know, that an African’s highest religion is the Mumbo

Jumbo.’36

As this implies, Ferriar understands his audience as accounting for

Oroonoko’s language by reference to the situation of contemporary

38 Sue Wiseman

slaves rather than the vocabulary of European virtue and without con-

sideration of genre. In the interests of truth, facts, Ferriar’s ‘unhappy

Africans’ are stripped of romance, honour, and religion in the service

of a supposedly factual ‘description’ which makes them unhappy with-

out the access to high-status languages and ideals that Behn, and for

Ferriar, Southerne, provided.37 To convince his Manchester audience of

the cause of abolition, Ferriar writes ‘it is less necessary to reason than

describe’; the ‘facts’ will convince ‘honest and uncorrupted natures’.38

To schematize, if Southerne’s play mixed comedy and tragedy, Ferriar,

apparently drawing on the story’s reputation for authenticity, mixes

tragedy and forensic evidence. Laura Brown rightly describes Behn’s fic-

tion as seeing only ‘the mirror of its own culture’, but the paradox of

Ferriar’s drive to convey the truth of slavery is that (even) the mirroring

languages of pathos used in the earlier plays – romance, virtue, nobility –

are to be purged from the slave’s evocation of slavery.39 His play may

offer a polar opposite to Behn in the importance he accords to the recog-

nition of authentic difference – the ‘facts’ of difference – which leaves

him with blackness and whiteness signifying an absolute cultural divide

and Imoinda as an intense signifier of that. The progress of Oroonoko is a

progress of genre and the question of the terms of freedom, specifically

female freedom and slavery, is inseparable from this. For Ferriar, the

languages offered by the material he is using will not do.

If the didactic tragedies work to streamline, tightly genericize, and

order the Oronooko story and its audience, that was not the only

response to the play. At least one reworking of Southerne’s play picks up

the material which the tragedies seek to suppress. The farce, The SexesMis-match’d; or a New Way to get a Husband (1741) shifts Southerne’s play

to Gibraltar and splices it with John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas.Borrowing Southerne’s vilified Lucy–Welldon–Lackitt plot, it builds a

compressed run of disguises, bed-tricks, and familial violence. By way of

climax, Monsieur Thomas is taken to the house of Widow Longfort to

visit his beloved Maria. Left alone with what he thinks is the sleeping

Maria, Thomas grabs the candle: ‘By your leave Light, I’ll see how she

pouts in her Sleep, and then her soft whitish Bubbies.’ But where he had

expected Maria he finds a ‘Blackmoor’. Furious and humiliated, Thomas

rages: ‘Thomas: be thou Devil, or his Dam, I’ll give thee a wakning;

here’s a Curry for thy Morrocco Hide [ jolts her roughly] hah! A noise, the

Widows Family will bait me to Death.’40 Indeed, he beats her so that

after he goes off she protests: ‘I’m bruis’d into Mummy, a little Spice,

and I’m fitted to pot up for Venison. I’ll lye no more with your

Sweetheart, if he huggs this Way, let him hugg you Mistress.’41


Standing structurally where Oroonoko and Imoinda appear in

Oroonoko, the Thomas–Blackmoor plot raises some issues related to that

play in farcical guise. Seen in relation to the politics of whiteness and

rape traced above, the Blackmoor suggests the blacked-up, potentially

comic and servile, Imoinda which the didatic reworkings refused. The

sexual assault, within the comic form of the bed-trick actually takes

place and is directed by the man’s lover – something which almost

seems to rework Behn’s morally ambiguous narrator, although this is

obviously not an intentional parallel. Rather than working as a deliber-

ate parallel, The Sexes Mis-match’d suggests tangentially the problems

and audience responses that had to be forestalled if Oroonoko was to be

didactic – responses which include laughing at blackface/black figures

and the wrong kind of – lascivious, comic – attention being paid to the

sexual availability of the slave.

IV Unmodernizing Oroonoko?

We can tentatively reach some conclusions about the story’s transfor-

mation. First, the story which is, generally, seen as stemming from

Behn’s Oroonoko is made quite distant from that text. Southerne’s inter-

pretation of Behn’s colonial and romance world reshapes questions of

freedom to concern colour. It is as much Imoinda’s colour as her virtue

in Southerne’s racialized hybridization which renders Imoinda human

enough to be threatened as a subject – with horrors including rape.

Thus, consideration of rape and colour in Behn’s and Southerne’s texts

illuminate the shifts in the alignment and distribution of humanity,

nobility, and colour as Southerne rewrites Behn. What is lost in the exci-

sion of Imoinda’s blackness from what, as it turned out, was to be an

important story in the campaign for abolition is the potential that

Behn’s prose text offers for discussion not only of categories of reason

and freedom (taken up in the texts that follow her story) but also for a

specific address to the particular category of the subjecthood of women

outside the gradually solidifying understandings of the categories of

colour and race, terms which, as I have suggested, tend to pre-empt

some of the questions Behn’s text explores – questions of action, tests

of conduct, noble behaviour, and the text’s others amongst men and

women, Africans and Europeans.

If the didactic interpretations of the eighteenth century strive to

streamline the story as tragedy, then perhaps The Sexes Mis-match’d can

suggest to us some of the interpretative possibilities these texts sought to

avoid. Yet, the removal of Southerne’s comic plot in the interests of

40 Sue Wiseman

genre has other effects – to condense, simplify, and to an extent even

solve early in the first act the problems of nobility, power, and colour

with which Behn’s text and to a lesser extent Southerne’s had been con-

cerned. Ferriar’s 1788 version tells us how different the concerns of his

play must be, seeking to have it tested against the plight of contempo-

rary slaves rather than the modes and languages which it inherited from

older literary genres. Yet, paradoxically, this forensic emphasis does per-

haps covertly draw on another part of the Oronooko myth – the idea of

its authenticity – which, a generation earlier, was connected to the

rumour of Behn’s own relation to an actual Oroonoko. Thus the ambi-

guities and mixedness of Behn’s text arguably went on making them-

selves felt in the very determination of its adapters to clean and

modernize the story they so much wanted. We find Oroonoko strongly

desired by eighteenth-century writers but requiring linguistic, ideologi-

cal, and generic transformation (disinfection) of a kind so intense as to,

at times, leave the connection of the interpretation – like The Prince ofAngola – to the desired object – the ‘story’ – more mythic than adaptive.

Perhaps their struggles to apprehend the story register the importance of

the very aspects of the story they hope to dispel, such as the knowledge

of the sexual economics of slavery (particularly by women like Lackitt),

the audience’s relationship of desire, and some of the complexities of

freedom. In its complex desire to take hold of slavery through the

Oroonoko story and its urgent need to make it didactic, the eighteenth-

century tradition of theatrical interpretation may have some secret

intelligence for late modern literary critics as we seek to place Oroonoko

and Imoinda’s story in a myth of modernity.

Notes

I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust who made possible the research for this

essay. For comments and discussion I am very grateful to Tim Armstrong,

Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, Hilda Smith, and John Stokes.

1. Writers variously addressing the question of Oroonoko’s historical and historio-

graphical status, including both the vexed question of the text’s relationship

with slavery in the seventeenth century, and its generic and ethical relation-

ship with modern concerns, include: Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings:British Anti-Slavery Literature in the XVIIIth Century (1942; repr. New York:

Octagon Books, 1969); Laura Brown, first published as ‘The Romance of

Empire’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed.

Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, 1987),

pp. 41–61; Margaret Ferguson, ‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and

Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, in Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the EarlyModern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge,


1994), pp. 209–24, especially pp. 209, 212, 223; Suvir Kaul, ‘Reading Literary

Symptoms: Colonial Pathologies and the Oroonoko Fictions of Behn,

Southerne, and Hawkesworth’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994), 80–96.

Texts contextualizing Oroonoko by addressing Behn’s life and the life of her

texts also engage with these questions: Janet Todd, The Secret Life of AphraBehn (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996); Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

2. Oroonoko can be considered a text bound to the colonial concerns of the

seventeenth-century Americas. It is a question, though, how far Behn’s

Oroonoko can be read in terms of the later history of Southern plantation slav-

ery in what, much later, became the United States. Particularly significant is

what it means to place Behn’s text, as critics at times place it, in relation to

the specific history, historiography, and literary history of American slavery.

Arguably the naturalized rather than dialectical deployment of such post-hoc

contexts literalizes (and so symptomatizes rather than productively analyses)

the mythic-didactic aspect of the concerns of late modernity in which this

text is (as we receive it) inevitably implicated. See Joyce Green MacDonald,

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2002), pp. 91–101.

3. Kaul, ‘Symptoms’, p. 80.

4. Martin Kilmer says slaves were considered fair game sexually. See his ‘Rape

in Early Red-Figure Pottery’, in Rape in Antiquity, ed. Susan Deacy and

Karen F. Pierce (London: Duckworth and Classical Press of Wales, 1997),

pp. 123–41 (p. 124).

5 Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women inBarbados (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 43. Beckles

notes that, in Barbados, it was only in 1826 that rape came to carry a small

monetary fine (p. 43).

6. Bal argues illuminatingly that, first, ‘the word “rape” is itself a metaphor that

obscures the story it implies and, second, that this obscuring locks us up in a

dilemma that needs to be overcome’ (Mieke Bal, ‘Scared to Death’, in ThePoint of Theory, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 1994), pp. 32–47 (p. 38) ).

7. See Brown’s discussion of the ‘radical contemporaneity’ of Behn’s text gener-

ated by its ‘failures of discursive coherence’, in ‘Romance of Empire’,

pp. 41–61.

8. See Todd, Secret Life, pp. 377–9, 417–21.

9. Aphra Behn, Oronooko, or, The Royal Slave, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed.

Janet Todd (London: William Pickering, 1995), vol. 3, p. 58. Subsequent ref-

erences are given in the text.

10. As Robin Blackburn notes, ‘The English success in establishing plantation

economies in the Americas in the seventeenth century critically depended

on the fact that England itself was becoming the largest European market for

tobacco, sugar, cotton, dyestuffs and spices’ (The Making of New World Slavery:From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997) p. 219).

11. Margaret Ferguson, ‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender’,

pp. 209–24; William C. Spengemann, ‘The Earliest American Novel: Aphra

Behn’s Oroonoko’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38 (1984), 384–414; Stephanie

Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcón, ‘Oroonoko’s Gendered Economies of

42 Sue Wiseman

Honour/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas’,

American Literature, 65, 3 (1993), 415–43 (p. 428). Stephanie Athey and Daniel

Alarcón build on this insight to argue that the female narrator’s control of

discourse means that the text’s discourses of rape must be viewed as a ‘textual

transaction between women’ (p. 428).

12. See Brown, ‘Romance of Empire’, pp. 57–8.

13. The aspect of fraternal competition is emphasized when the next day Trefry

‘designedly’ takes Oroonoko to walk past the ‘Cottage’ where Clemene lives.

14. Where should this way of writing and thinking in Behn’s text be contextual-

ized – in terms of place (Surinam, London), genre (romance, histoire, travel

writing), politics (royalism, the canon of Tory virtues)? All these have a

bearing. However, it seems indisputable that both formally, with its gestures

to both romance and history writing, and in terms of the way it represents

events in Surinam, the emphasis is on interchange, exchange, and intermin-

gling which produce a society not able to draw absolute and clear borders

between – for example – European as human, slave as inhuman, and

therefore unable to draw clear borders between Europeans and slaves as the

subjects of romantic, rather than brutalized, sexual desire.

15. Using a substantially wider understanding of rape than is used here, Athey

and Alarcón also characterize the competition between Oroonoko and the

king in the Coromantien section of the narrative as rape: ‘each man attempts

to rape Imoinda before the other does’ (‘Gendered Economies’, p. 433).

16. The place of the Amerindians is also significant in the distribution of virtue,

honour, and complicity with the dishonourable. See Suvir Kaul, ‘Symptoms’,

p. 83. In addition, the issue of sexual relations between planters and others is

also addressed and obscured with regard to the governor. After the rebellion,

the narrator initially receives news that the governor was ‘dead of a Wound

Imoinda had given him’ but instead ‘his Indian Mistress’ heals him, ‘by

Sucking the Wound’ (p. 111). The governor and his ‘Indian’ mistress are a foil

to Imoinda’s sexual and military virtue, at this point ensuring romance hero-

ism by contrast with the briefly, ironically, mentioned sexual realpolitik of

‘government’ power.

17. In 1695, Jane Rogers played Imoinda and Francis Maria Knight played

Widow Lackit. See Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 103–4,161–2, 185–9.

18. Ferguson, ‘Juggling’, p. 214.

19. See for example the discussion in Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko, ed.

Maximillian E. Novak and David Stuart Rodes (London: Edward Arnold,

1976), pp. xix–xxxvi.

20. John Ferriar, The Prince of Angola, A Tragedy Altered from the Play of Oroonoko.And Adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times (Manchester: J. Harrap,

1788), p. ii.

21. For a discussion of this debate see MacDonald, Women and Race, pp. 108–10.

22. As Beckles and MacDonald both note, at least in late-eighteenth-century

material the question of female slave-holders’ sexual relationship to their

slaves is canvassed. See MacDonald, p. 97. Beckles writes of a woman in 1796

examining the genitals of a black slave ‘with all possible indelicacy’ (NaturalRebels, p. 141).

23. See also Brown, ‘Romance of Empire’, pp. 49, 55, 61.


24. One aspect of the parallel plot itself, in which Lucy and Charlotte Welldon

engineer marriages through Charlotte’s disguise and entrapment of the

widow, is that it invites a contrast between European manners within mar-

riage and marriage negotiations with those of Oroonoko and Imoinda.

Where Imoinda is threatened by the staples of an heroic drama: incest, rape,

murder, and suicide, Lucy and Charlotte (as victims and perpetrators in a

sexual and marital system driven by economic needs) are located in a world

much closer to that of the audience’s experience.

25. See the discussion of Oroonoko and recent criticism in MacDonald, Womenand Race, pp. 87–123.

26. Ferriar, ‘Preface’, Prince of Angola, p. ii.

27. Spencer discusses the extensive literature on this in Aphra Behn’s Afterlife,pp. 223–6. See also Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, pp. 106–9.

28. Todd, discussing material founded on Behn, does not assess plays founded on

Southerne (Janet Todd, The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn (Columbia, SC:

Camden House, 1998) ).

29. For echoes of Othello/Desdemona see Francis Gentleman, Oroonoko: or theRoyal Slave. A Tragedy. Altered from Southerne by Francis Gentleman (Glasgow:

Robert & Andrew Foulis, 1760), IV. i, p. 72.

30. Oroonoko, a Tragedy, as it is now acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane withAlterations by John Hawkesworth, Lld (London, 1775).

31. Ferriar’s Prince of Angola also offers a critique of Behn’s version.

32. Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife, pp. 62–4, 85–8, 95–100.

33. Ferriar, Prince of Angola, I. ii, p. 16.

34. Hawkesworth excludes from Widow Lackitt’s speech the question of getting

slaves, using ‘Pray consider I am a Woman myself’. Ferriar removes the idea

that Widow Lackitt cannot get her own slaves and substitutes discussion of

a child having gone with another lot.

35. Ferriar, Prince of Angola, ‘Preface’, p. vi.

36. Ibid., p. v.

37. Ibid., p. viii.

38. Ibid.

39. Brown, ‘Romance of Empire’, p. 48.

40. The Sexes Mis-match’d; or a New Way to get a Husband (London, 1741) p. 187.

41. Ibid., p. 188.

44 Sue Wiseman

45

3‘Incessant Labour’: Georgic Poetry and the Problem of SlaveryMarkman Ellis

James Grainger’s poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) relates the history of that

plant and the manner of its cultivation in the colonies in the Caribbean,

especially St Kitts where the author was resident between 1759 and his

death in 1766.1 The poem extends over 2,500 lines of verse, in four

books, with extensive prose footnotes. The topic of the sugar cane is

considered as a subject of natural history, of agricultural practice, and

aesthetic description. As an account of slavery, The Sugar-Cane is both

evocative and detailed, but the poem is in no sense abolitionist. Indeed,

much of its fame, or rather notoriety, in the last century has been as an

‘apology and rationalisation’ of slavery.2 Evidence for this view is not

hard to find in the poem. In Book III, the poet describes how the bands

of slave labourers approach their work with eager anticipation:

The Negroe-train, with placid looks, survey

Thy fields, which full perfection have attain’d,

And pant to wield the bill: (no surly watch

Dare now deprive them of the luscious Cane:)

Nor thou, my friend, their willing ardour check;

Encourage rather; cheerful toil is light. (III. 96–101)

The georgic was a form especially concerned with the representa-

tion of labour (with toil and industry), and embeds a particular notion

of the value of labour, encapsulated in the lines above in the Protestant

oxymoron of ‘cheerful toil’. The representation of slave labour in this

poem consistently claims that it is neither arduous nor immiserating:

indeed the slaves pant with anticipation to wield the bill or machete.

This essay will argue that this intensely ideological view can be attrib-

uted to the poem’s particular poetic form, that of the georgic. Almost

despite itself, the poem’s georgic form reveals to the reader the essential

incongruity between the labour of slave and free workers and, in this

way, the poem stands as a significant, albeit macabre, monument on the

road to abolition. Adopting the form of the georgic allows Grainger to

describe the wealth and prosperity that flows from industrious applica-

tion to sugar husbandry. But his treatment of slavery exposes the limits

of both his chosen form of the georgic, and the ideology of the planta-

tion system it describes.

I Georgic poetry and the representation of labour

Due to its great length and low subject matter, the georgic can seem a

faintly ridiculous poetic ‘type’, especially to twenty-first-century readers

habituated to the lyric imagination of Romantic poetry. In fact, the

georgic enjoyed great prestige in the mid eighteenth century. The term

‘georgic’ refers to a poem about farming, reflecting the word’s Greek ety-

mology, which suggests work upon the earth, or the activities of the

husbandman, the tiller of the soil. The name derives from the classical

model of Virgil’s Georgics, a long poem in four books, written between 37

and 30 BC.3 Despite Virgil’s declaration in the opening line’s invocation

to the muse that his poem is ‘simply’ about agriculture, it offers the

reader a complex and sophisticated account of contemporary Roman

politics and culture. Written against a time of great political instability

after the death of Caesar, Virgil’s poem looks forward to the restored

civic order and stability (the peace of Augustus) by describing the pacific

virtues of rural life and manners.4 As Grainger would have known, the

bucolic delights of Roman rural life depicted in the Georgics depended

on the labour of slaves.

The significance of Virgil’s poem in England was cemented by

Dryden’s translation in 1697, prefaced by a rule-fixing essay by Joseph

Addison.5 Other translations and imitations followed: Alastair Fowler

calls the georgic ‘the most creative mode’ of eighteenth-century poetry.6

While the form evolved some important generic hybrids, such as

Thomson’s The Seasons or Cowper’s The Task, the century also saw the

production of formal georgics (or ‘correct’ georgics), such as John

Phillips’s Cyder (1708), John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757), and James

Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764). To an important extent, the revival of

interest in the genre reflects its patriotic ‘Augustan’ attitudes: a celebra-

tion of the return of peace after civil unrest, in which the world of agri-

culture implies both a healthful attitude to work, and a culture of stable

civility. Grainger wrote immediately after the end of the Seven Years War

46 Markman Ellis

in 1763, which had seen the extent of British colonial possessions

greatly extended.7 Describing this extraordinary growth (just before the

rebellion of the thirteen North American colonies), the geographer John

Entick estimated that: ‘The British Empire is arrived at that height of

Power and Glory, to which none of the States and Monarchies upon

Earth could ever lay the like Claim. Rome, in all her Grandeur, did not

equal Great Britain; either in Constitution, Dominion, Commerce,

Riches, or Strength.’8 Pursuing the Augustan analogy (that the British

Empire could be modelled felicitously on the Roman), the georgic was

an appropriate mode to describe the prosperity and grandeur of the

British Empire.9

In his review of Dyer’s The Fleece for the Monthly Review in 1757,

Grainger declared the poem to be an example of that ‘beautiful and use-

ful species of poetical composition, … viz. the Didactyc’. Grainger

declared that ‘the laws’ of this ‘species of writing’ are encompassed by

Addison’s ‘excellent discourse prefixed to Dryden’s translation’.10

In Addison’s ‘short scheme of rules’, the georgic was a descriptive

poem, whose purpose was ‘giving plain and direct instructions to the

reader’. Although agriculture was the ‘meanest and least improving’ sub-

ject, Virgil had rendered it ‘most pleasing and delightful’ through ‘those

beautiful descriptions and images which are the spirit and life of Poetry’.

Addison summarizes (in italic) ‘A Georgic therefore is some part of the sci-ence of husbandry put into a pleasing dress, and set off with all the Beautiesand Embellishments of poetry.’ As the ‘science of Husbandry’ is of ‘a very

large extent’, Addison demonstrates that the ‘Poet shews his skill in sin-

gling out such precepts to proceed on, as are useful, and at the same time

most capable of ornament’. The process of selection, adumbration, and

connection of this wide range of topics gives the georgic its signal poetic

effect of tangential digressive progression. As Addison continues, the

‘art’ of treating the ‘fit precepts’, he says, is so ‘that they may fall in after

each other by a natural unforced method, and shew themselves in the

best and most advantageous light’. The digressions should be connected

by some internal relevance, and the transitions seamless: ‘They should

all be so finely wrought together in the same piece, that no coarse seam

may discover where they join; as in a curious brede of needlework, one

colour falls away by just degrees, and another rises so insensibly, that we

see the variety, without being able to distinguish the total vanishing of

the one from the first appearance of the other.’

In this manner, tangential digression brings its own kind of didactic

purpose: the embellishments or ornaments of poetry allow the presen-

tation of precepts and moral ideas by entertainment and diversion.

Georgic Poetry and the Problem of Slavery 47

Addison’s insight here illuminates the georgic mode’s curious balance

between forces of digression and unity, fragment and whole. The most

problematic aspect of the georgic kind of poetry was its ‘stile’: the poet

had ‘to be careful of not letting his subject debase his stile, and betray

him into a meanness of expression’. Instead, the poetry of the georgic

elevates base subjects to greatness. But lowness of expression – ‘a

Plebeian stile’ in Addison’s words – constantly threatens bathos. In

response, Addison praises Virgil’s success ‘with Metaphors, Grecisms,

and Circumlocutions’.11 Again, the poetic diction of georgic is flexible

and lively, allowing a complex interplay of high and low language,

bucolic and heroic by turns. In Grainger’s Preface, the potentials of this

model are noted: as ‘the face of this country [the West Indies] was

wholly different from that of Europe, so whatever hand copied its

appearances, however rude, could not fail to enrich poetry with many

new and picturesque images’. But there was potential too for failure:

‘terms of art look awkward in poetry’, as do some of the ‘obscure

words’ of Caribbean flora, fauna and medicine (Preface, pp. 89–90).12

Nonetheless, Grainger’s reflections on the georgic in his prefaces and

literary criticism express considerable confidence in the genre’s

adequacy to the task.

Having been educated as a physician in Edinburgh, Grainger had

forged extensive links amongst the literary elite of London in the 1750s,

including Samuel Johnson, Thomas Percy, William Shenstone, Robert

Dodsley, John Armstrong, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

His own poetry and criticism was published under the patronage of this

influential group: his ‘Ode to Solitude’ appeared in Dodsley’s Collectionin 1755, to the praise of Johnson and Percy.13 Grainger’s literary career

was, however, damaged almost before it was begun when his translation

of Tibullus received a hostile review from Tobias Smollett in The CriticalReview in 1758, which Grainger exacerbated by an ill-tempered reply.14

While Grainger figured himself as an outraged author, he appeared to

many as a ludicrous figure, something of a hack. It was after this that he

decided to seek his fortune in the colonies, travelling as a physician (for

£200 per annum) with a young, wealthy slave-owner, John Bourryau, to

St Kitts in April 1759. On the island Grainger married Daniel Matthew

Burt, the daughter of one of the foremost planter families,15 and estab-

lished himself in a profitable medical practice. His wife’s uncle (Daniel

Matthew) entrusted him with the management of a sugar estate, so that

in 1764 he entertained plans for purchasing a plantation for himself,

either on St Kitts or on the islands recently ceded to the British at the

end of the Seven Years War. His writing projects continued too.

48 Markman Ellis

On Percy’s instigation, he made enquiries after poetry of the Indians or

‘Charibbeans’, and contributed a ballad of his own composition, ‘Bryan

and Pereene’, to the Reliques of Antient English Poetry.16 In his time in the

Caribbean he also wrote a medical treatise, Essay on the more commonWest-India Diseases (1764), specifically addressing the medical care of

slaves for the use of the plantocracy, but also offering ‘Some Hints on

the Management, &c. of Negroes’.17 Grainger turned these researches to

further use in the composition of his georgic poem.

But although Grainger wrote in the West Indies, the cultural context

of the poem was broadly metropolitan. Following the model of Virgil

and Dyer, the poem purports to offer agricultural advice directly to the

husbandman or farmer. Nonetheless, the georgic’s proper addressee is

the urban elite, who, it proposes, have forgotten how their urban pros-

perity relies on rural industry. In this sense, the apparent addressee of

the ‘West-India georgic’ is the planter in the colonies, but the implied

audience is the metropolitan political and literary elite. The purpose of

the georgic is to advertise its subject, making the glories of the sugar

islands visible to an audience over the horizon. Grainger exerted much

effort to securing an elite cultural location for his work. His poem claims

allegiance to the West India Interest, the powerful parliamentary lobby

which supported the sugar industry and slave colonies in the eighteenth

century, through its dedication to men in high office (specifically to

‘Aurelius’ or George Thomas, Governor of the Leeward Islands (1753–66),

and ‘Imperial George’ or George III (1760–1820)). Grainger sent the

manuscript of his ‘Cane Piece’ to Thomas Percy in June 1762 for his

advice, suggesting that it be published on fine paper and by subscrip-

tion. When he returned briefly to England after the death of his brother

in 1763, he sought the support of his friends amongst the literary elite,

seeking encouragement from established authorities such as Lord Kames

and Samuel Johnson. The poem was published in a prestigious folio edi-

tion in May 1764, albeit after some wrangling, by the renowned pub-

lishing house of Robert and James Dodsley, specialists in poetry and

fiction.18 The poem received considerable critical notice, including two

reviews by Johnson: one favourable and one equivocal.19 The Sugar-Canereceived three editions in two years. It is clear to both producers and

consumers of such poetry that the georgic was a prestigious genre,

demanding education, erudition, and eloquence in its writers and read-

ers. Having accrued this metropolitan esteem, Grainger reported that it

also sold well amongst the slave-owning planters of the Caribbean, per-

haps because it afforded evidence of their own cultural standing in the

metropolis. This fame lasted for several generations, and Grainger’s


works were included in all the major editions of ‘the English poets’ of

the Romantic period (such as those by Anderson (1793), Chalmers

(1810), Park (1808), Sanford (1819), and The British Poets (1822)). There

was even a project, begun in 1799 by Percy and Anderson, for a com-

plete works and biography, which was finally published, in reduced

form in 1836.20 This was probably the high water mark of his reputa-

tion, which had been severely damaged by a malicious anecdote told by

Boswell (his competitor for Johnson’s attention).21 By the middle of the

nineteenth century the critical estimation of georgic poetry had waned,

from which it has only begun to recover in the last few decades (at least

in historicist literary criticism). Grainger’s brave experiment in ‘West-

India georgic’ has also benefited from the new attention paid to colonial

writing by critics in post-colonial discourse studies. In the 1970s,

Edward Kamau Brathwaite contended that the poem was not ‘West

Indian’ but ‘tropical English’, with metropolitan models, proper diction,

and English speech patterns.22 Nonetheless, in recent years, the poem

has found new readers and some significant critics seeking to under-

stand the history of slavery, colony, and empire through the lens of lit-

erature.23 The poem has also received new editions, both in anthologies,

and in its first modern critical edition, edited by John Gilmore.24

II Georgic and the problem of labour

According to the form’s apologists in the eighteenth century, writers of

English formal georgic were simply following Virgil’s model by finding

in the ordinary work and labour of the shepherd the origin of the har-

monies and virtues of rural life and manners. Georgic was a verse form

that didactically addressed itself to pragmatic problems of the real

world. In this sense it seems possible to tie the georgic to other attempts

to encompass ordinary realism, such as the novel. By comparison with

its closest verse ally, the pastoral, which told it like it should be, the

georgic told it like it was. In his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry (1704), Pope

enjoined (with some irony) that ‘We must therefore use some illusion to

render a Pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing only the best

side of a shepherd’s life, and in concealing its miseries.’25 Throughout

the eighteenth century, formal invention in the pastoral tradition

remained proximate to this injunction. By contrast, georgic makes the

physical work of agriculture visible and, in this visibility, finds the origin

of the endeavour of civilization. In this new realism about labour, the

georgic situates the agricultural worker within a wider project of

improvement and progress. In The Fleece, the agricultural labourer

50 Markman Ellis

through his work participates in the extensive civilizing project of empire.

The Fleece records this by translating its topic, wool, from the field to the

market, from the farm to the city, from the island to the wider world, in

ever increasing spheres of influence. Such a reading of georgic locates the

values of civilization amongst the culture of the simple and vulgar, rather

than the high and mighty. Despite its prestigious packaging, the creative

potential of georgic expresses a profound radical impulse, revealed in the

praise of the toil of the lowly rural labourer.

This equation of virtue and labour has gained the georgic its most

enthusiastic readers in recent years. While the pastoral typically featured

the shepherd singing to his flock in a moment of rest (a view of the pas-

toral widely contested in the eighteenth century in poetic parodies and

critical utterances), the georgic depicted rural life as a place of labour

and industry. In English studies this work constitutes some of the form-

ative documents of the turn to historicism in eighteenth-century studies

in the late 1970s, such as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City(1973), Richard Feingold’s Nature and Society (1978) and John Barrell’s

The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980), and English Literature in History,1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (1983).26 In cognate disciplines, such as

art history and historical geography, this approach yielded important

readings by Hugh Prince, Ann Bermingham, and others.27 Barrell argues

that the georgic promotes a particular vision of ‘happy Britannia’, a soci-

ety where a comfortable and secure existence can be achieved by anyone

prepared to work hard.28 Georgic, in this view, is associated with the

positive depiction of rural labour and ‘improved’ agricultural practices.

The broad historicist argument here is the location of the English

georgic within the reformative practices of improvement, and the agri-

cultural economy of the eighteenth century. Changes in farming prac-

tice in the period brought about a ‘revolution’ in agricultural output and

productivity, and in land-holding and social relations.29 While legions

of historians debate the nature and extent of this ‘revolution’ in Britain,

it is clear that Grainger considered the colonial sugar plantations within

the remit of agricultural improvement.30 Reform of agrarian practice

produced a great deal of writing: writing which considered itself as one

of the improving practices of the agricultural revolution. In the georgic,

and in the other modulations of descriptive poetic form, we can see lit-

erary writers using established literary forms to directly engage in agri-

cultural improvement. Dyer, in The Fleece, saw poetry as an important

medium for the dissemination of ideas about agrarian reform, including

the idea of improvement itself. When Grainger wrote his sugar georgic

there was almost no printed advice on plantation management: it was


not until 1767 that the first society dedicated to dissemination of

agricultural research on the West Indies was established.31 Grainger’s

The Sugar-Cane makes an innovative and important contribution to

improvement of the sugar estates, whilst also addressing its metropoli-

tan audience. As Grainger develops his case, he argues that the georgic

vision of the virtue of labour is one of the new techniques of cultivation

and commerce associated with the improvement of the estate in Britain

and its colonies. This is appropriate to the form. When Grainger advises

the West Indian planter that ‘Fair Fame and riches will reward thy toil’

(I. 285), he urges them to ‘improvement’, to doubt ‘Ancient modes’ and

to adopt ‘new’ techniques readily. While the georgic tradition invokes

labour as the imperative to prosperity, it is clear that this labour might

be intellectual, concerning the management of the estate. Addressing

the sugar planters, Grainger proposes the ‘enlightenment’ of improve-

ment as the labour that will civilize.

But while georgic might seem in this reading an unapologetic cham-

pion of agricultural development, it also reveals some fundamental

ambiguities within that ideology. In his discussion of The Fleece, Feingold

argues that the georgic vision of the virtue of work and the triumph of

commercial prosperity systematically overlooked the negative conse-

quences of these reforms, and it did so through the rhetorical enthusiasm

of the poetry. This is the georgic wager: poetic diction and ornament can

be deployed to manage the discomforting truths exposed by the georgic’s

realist vision. Feingold argues that Dyer’s The Fleece possesses ‘a celebra-

tive mode with a rhetoric surging blindly past some discomforting

facts’.32 The telling moment in The Fleece is Dyer’s apparently uncritical

celebration of the work house, where with ‘tender eye’ children, ‘the

maim’d’, and ‘the lame’ toil happily at their mechanical looms, their ‘lit-

tle fingers turning to the toil’, delighted and nimble (The Fleece,

II. 79–84). In The Sugar-Cane, the consequence of adopting the georgic

form has an important impact on his treatment of the subject of slave

labour. The georgic reveals the central tension within the slave-owning

plantation economy: that the same economic process that established

these enterprises and rendered them so profitable, also led to the adoption

of that alienated and violent form of labour organization, slavery – a

contradiction which will eventually destroy it. While the poem is

ineluctably pro-slavery, the intelligence of the poetic form is abolitionist.

III Consequences of form to subject

It has often been observed that Grainger’s posture with regard to

slavery is not clear. In part, his obscurity centres on his contradictory

52 Markman Ellis

representation of slave labour. His depiction of the harvest of the ripened

canes, for example, in Book III (91–110), lauds the ‘Negroe-train’ (an

organized gang of slave harvesters, 96) for their ‘willing ardour’ as they

pant to wield the bill (or machete). He concludes with the approving

exhortation, ‘Muse, their labour sing’ (110). The next stanza continues

by detailing how no part of the plant is wasted, and further describes the

activities of the ‘favoured gang’ (126) of slaves, from whose virtuous toil

even the lazy and the lame should not be omitted (their indolence can be

reformed by this light work). But here, Grainger has been led astray by

the georgic muse: the slaves labour not for joy, but because they are

slaves subject to violent coercion. Grainger seems to be aware of this con-

tradiction: in the next stanza he draws a parallel back to the Lincolnshire

pastures celebrated in The Fleece. Dyer argues here that some activities of

sheep husbandry occasion pain or suffering: he notices shearing, putting

tar on the wounds occasioned thereby, and branding. The pain of these

activities is nonetheless accompanied by the choral song of the swains

(agricultural workers): the whole is a happy scene of georgic toil. In a sim-

ilar fashion, Grainger says, the sugar-cane fields resound to the inhuman

crack of the slave-driver’s whip. This may be a painful noise, but it is as

realistically a part of the agricultural scene as is holing the cane.

Nor need the driver, Æthiop authoriz’d,

Thence more inhuman, crack his horrid whip;

From such dire sounds the indignant muse averts

Her virgin-ear, where musick loves to dwell:

’Tis malice now, tis wantonness of power

To lash the laughing, labouring, singing throng. (III. 141–6)

Nonetheless, the muse recoils from the sound of the whip: Grainger can-

not make the spectacle of slave labour, with its attendant punishments,

cohere to the ideology of the joy of labour.

Through his invocations of the muse, and his obedience to her direc-

tions, Grainger can pretend that someone else, namely his female and

English muse, dictates our attention to the details of slave plantation

life.33 As the invocation of the muse in Book I establishes, the muse is

the poetical embodiment of the disciplinary force of the genre: she is the

muse of georgic.34 In this manner, the nature of this ambiguity about

coercion in slave labour is identified but passed over. Nonetheless, the

poem continues to be fascinated with half-pursued digressions on the

spectacular and hyperbolic violence encountered in the slave planta-

tions: in tales of slaves being punished by being ground up in the mill

(165–9), or of the ‘Fell acts of blood, and vengeance’ exacted by rebellious


slaves (IV. 604). The poem repeatedly illustrates that most activities on the

plantation can only be accomplished by an ever present system of coer-

cion. As slaves, these labourers are not free to choose their work.

In Book IV, Grainger’s consideration of slave labour also makes a com-

parison with other forms of unfree labour. This occurs in the notorious sec-

tion which offers advice to planters on buying slaves: Samuel Johnson, in

his generally favourable review of the poem in The Critical Review (October

1764) remarked that ‘The poet talks of this ungenerous commerce without

the least appearance of detestation; but proceeds to direct these purchasers

of their fellow creatures with the same indifference that a groom would

give instructions for chusing a horse.’35 This book begins by asking the

‘Genius of Africk’ (‘dread Genius’) to join the georgic muse, to give specific

advice and information on the trade in, and management of, African

slaves. Grainger’s georgic muse expresses her distaste for slavery:

A muse that pities thy distressful state;

Who sees, with grief, thy sons in fetters bound;

Who wishes freedom to the race of man. (IV. 14–16)

The georgic impulse, Grainger recognizes, is inimical to the coercive vio-

lence and alienation of slavery. Such complex muse-play suggests that

the contradiction Feingold detects in the georgic is, in this poem, self-

conscious.

In choosing slaves at the market, Grainger suggests the utility of buy-

ing those that might be habituated to field labour with ease:

Let gentle work,

Or rather playful exercise, amuse

The novel gang: and far be angry words;

Far ponderous chains; and far disheartning blows. (IV. 131–4)

As Grainger suggests here, coercive methods are not far distant. In miti-

gation of the ‘field labour’ of the slaves he compares it ‘to that in lead-mines’ and observes that field labour ‘is not only less toilsome, but far morehealthy’ (Argument to Book IV).36 While the field labour of the slave is

onerous, it is no more so than other trades:

Nor, Negroe, at thy destiny repine,

Tho’ doom’d to toil from dawn to setting sun.

How far more pleasant is thy rural task,

Than theirs who sweat, sequester’d from the day,

54 Markman Ellis

In dark tartarean caves, sunk far beneath

The earth’s dark surface. (IV. 164–70)

As Grainger elaborates, he refers in this section to the coal- and lead-

miners of Scotland and Hungary (the Drave), describing the ‘intense

severity of pain’ afflicted on them by their conditions of work. Finding

an equivalence between the labour of the miners and the slaves,

Grainger domesticates the labour of colonial slavery, and renders it less

exceptional in legal and social terms.

The comparison between Caribbean slavery and mining was a con-

ventional one. Like slavery, mining was understood as a socially alien-

ated and miserable employment. In The Fleece, Dyer contrasts the

civilizing profits derived from ‘cheerful … labours of the loom’ (III. 361)

with the illegitimate gold won from:

Deep Peruvian mines, where slaves

(Wretched requital) drink, with trembling hand,

Pale palsy’s baneful cup. (III. 364–6)

As John Gilmore remarks, the coal-miners, blackened by dust, make a

visual allusion to the slaves.37 But Grainger probably has in mind a legal

allusion too, as coal mining in Scotland operated a form of bonded labour

called ‘life-binding’, a contract of service for life. The collier’s life-bond

gave coal-masters legal right over the body of their workers, placing them

and their children in indefinite servitude. Colliers could not change

employment without certificate of leave from their master. Those who

absconded without such a document were considered to have stolen

themselves from their masters and could be ‘punishet in their bodyes’ as

thieves if they were discovered within a year and a day. But they were not

simply slaves: they were not beyond the law, were not simply property,

and were comparatively well paid.38 Nonetheless, the collier’s life-bond

was widely described as a form of slavery in the mid eighteenth century,

especially by the colliers. Granville Sharp noticed the labour organization

of the Scottish colliers in 1769 in his Representation of the Injustice andDangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery.39 A Mr Johnson, ‘Citizen of

Edinburgh’, described the colliers in 1793 as being ‘in a state of slavery,

which attached them and their children to the occupation, to the soil,

and to the spot where they were born, had placed them in a state of degra-

dation; they were looked upon with pity and contempt by other ranks’.

The colliers’ poverty, their brutally physical labour, and their exclusion

from religion, education, and society, rendered them in his eyes ‘savage


and brutal in their manners. Destitute of all principles of religion and

morality; perfectly indifferent to the opinion of the world, they had no

motives of emulation to incite their industry.’ The colliers were, he con-

cluded, ‘a distinct race’.40 Another mine-owner, Archibald Cochrane, Earl

of Dundonald (1749–1831) drew the connection firmly with the

Caribbean slaves: observing ‘a great similarity between negroes and col-

liers, in colour, in manners’. Cochrane argued that those who proposed to

release the colliers from their life-bond were misguidedly following the

argument of the abolitionists: ‘This is an age of sentiment, novels, and

over-strained refinement,…where abundance are to be met with courting

the appellation of philanthropists, or sailing with the tide of popular and,

at times, misguided phrenzy or opinion, making a bustle about Slave

Trade, Freedom, and emancipation of Negroes.’41 A ‘West-India reform’, he

believed, was simply a convenient cover for the seditious agitations of

British radicals and revolutionaries. Grainger’s knowledge of the condi-

tion of the Scottish miners may have derived from his father, who was

ruined ‘in consequence of some unsuccessful speculations in mining’;42

or from agitation for the amelioration of their condition in Edinburgh

and London in the early 1760s.43

Grainger draws a firm comparison between the Scottish colliers and

the Caribbean slaves: ‘With these compar’d, ye sons of Afric, say / How

far more happy is your lot?’ (IV. 199–200). He insists the slaves are

happy, because their ‘custom’d labour’ is healthful, unlike that of the

miners. Again, the role of labour is central to their proposed happiness:

‘Ye Negroes, then, your pleasing task pursue; / And, by your toil, deserve

your master’s care’ (IV. 204–5). In these lines the georgic equation of

labour and virtue can be seen in a kind of negative mirror: through

labour, the slaves might deserve non-violent treatment. The next lines

make this clearer: some slaves will be subdued by ‘soft-soothing words’

and ‘presents’, others will need ‘menaces’, and ‘some I’ve known, so

stubborn is their kind, / Whom blows, alas! could win alone to toil’ (IV.

205–10). This blunt statement of the endemic violence of the plantation

system provokes in Grainger a reflective reversal, and he calls out ‘Yet,

planter, let humanity prevail. –’ (IV. 211). After speculating on various

origins of slavery, he allows a sentimental language to colour his depic-

tion of the slaves:

Ah pity, then, these uninstructed swains;

And still let mercy soften the decrees

Of rigid justice, with her lenient hand. (IV. 229–31)

56 Markman Ellis

The intensity of the georgic ideology is shown here as Grainger reappro-

priates the slaves as ‘swains’ (a rustic or farm labourer, characteristically

describing a rural sweetheart in pastoral poetry). In this quiescent senti-

mental rhetoric, mercy might be shown to the slaves, but only at the

behest of planter inclination. But Grainger pushes on to a more radical

call for the abolition of slavery. He calls on the ‘muse’ (IV. 232) to:

Knock off the chains

Of heart-debasing slavery; give to man,

Of every colour and of every clime,

Freedom. (IV. 235–8)

The point of his proposition is a georgic vision of virtuous toil: ‘Servants,

not slaves; of choice, and not compell’d; / The Blacks should cultivate

the Cane-land isles’ (IV. 242–3). But we need to note the place of the

muse here, for it is the ‘tender muse’ who nurtures the ‘fond ambition’

of emancipation. Unfortunately, as a mere woman, and a poetic fancy,

Grainger admits she does not ‘possess the power’ to ‘quell tyrannic

sway’ (IV. 232–5). Not only is the emancipation proposition fanciful,

Grainger states, but also it is a fantasy induced by literary convention.

To Grainger, the sugar plantation might be represented as a contradic-

tion or paradox: that despite the fertility and exotic beauty of St Kitts

(I. 50–65), the extraordinary wealth generated by the sugar plantations,

and the evidence of considerable toil, the labour does not bring with it

the comfortable and self-affirming virtue that Dyer observed in the

wool trade. The colonies are quite clearly not being morally reformed

and civilized by the improvement of sugar cultivation. There is no happy

labour on the sugar islands. The georgic muse alights on the central and

objectionable fact of colonial sugar cultivation: that the much celebrated

profit and prosperity of the sugar plantations is built on the blood of

forced labour. Nonetheless, the georgic is a felicitous place to phrase and

articulate such contradictions, because it is a form that allows, in some

sense, paradoxical observations to sit next to each other without explor-

ing how their contradiction is significant. For Grainger, the georgic

resolves the aesthetic challenge posed by the sugar colony, even as it does

not offer a solution to its historical paradoxes.

The responses of some of Grainger’s earliest readers reveal the contra-

dictory impetuses of his analysis of slavery. Nathaniel Appleton, a mer-

chant of Boston, Massachusetts, in his Considerations of Slavery in a Letterto a Friend in 1767, contrasted ‘a Briton’ (like himself) and a ‘negro slave

in America’:


A Briton has the free disposal of his time, to employ it in that way he

likes best; all he gains by his industry he hath sole right to. … Happy

Briton! The slave has neither command of his time, nor choice of his

employ; must labour incessantly during his master’s pleasure; can

make no claim to the produce of his own industry.

To reinforce his arguments against the immorality of slave labour,

Appleton quoted from Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane, published only three

years earlier (IV. 211–43). The lines he chose are those in which the ‘ten-

der muse’ proposes the georgic amelioration of the slave’s labour, so that

they might labour as servants, working by choice rather than coercion (IV.

242–3).44 The anonymous author of a poem entitled Jamaica, published in

1777, comprehended a different reading of Grainger’s georgic.45 As he

describes in the preface, the 18-year-old author made a stay of some

months at Drax Hall in 1776, one of the Jamaican sugar estates owned by

the absentee planter, and author, William Thomas Beckford.46 The poet

describes how he was moved to verse by the cruelties he witnessed on the

slave plantation. The poem itself responds loco-descriptively to the exotic

tropical landscape of Jamaica, but also considers how poetry might

describe the sugar cane and its cultivation in the georgic mode. Without

naming him, the poem recalls the georgic project of Grainger’s work:

But how could I forget the sugar cane?

The soil’s warm sun, and planter’s sweat-bought gain?

How, by the mill comprest, the liquor flows?

Boil’d by the jetty race, how sugar glows? (172–5)

Allowing his poetic diction to become even more georgic in style, the

poet parodies Grainger’s characteristic tone:

Here I could sing what soils and seasons suit,

Inform the tap’ring arrow how to shoot;

Under what signs to plant the mother cane. (179–81)

But the task of georgic description is not adequate to the facts of slave

labour witnessed at Drax Hall:

Th’ingrateful task a British Muse disdains,

Lo! tortures, racks, whips, famine, gibbets, chains,

Rise on my mind, appal my tear-stain’d eye,

Attract my rage, and draw a soul-felt sigh;

58 Markman Ellis

I blush, I shudder at this bloody theme,

And scorn on woe to build a baseless fame. (185–90)

In this poet’s estimation, the poetic enthusiasm for labour upon

which the georgic relies cannot be reconciled with the repertoire of vio-

lence and coercion experienced by the slave. In response, the poet and

his British muse dissolve in a sentimental display of their fellow feeling,

both tearful and angry. The Jamaica poet demonstrates that the georgic

hypothesis of the ameliorative effect of work is ideological, and the

project of Grainger’s georgic is ruined.

Notes

1. James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes (London:

R. and J. Dodsley, 1764). The edition preferred here is John Gilmore, ThePoetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s ‘The Sugar Cane’ (London:

Athlone Press, 2000). All references to the poem incorporated in the text, are

to Gilmore’s edition.

2. Arthur D. Drayton, ‘West Indian Consciousness in West India Verse:

A Historical Perspective’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9 (1970), 66–88

(p. 80).

3. Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–IV, trans.

H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, No. 63

(London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

4. John Chalker, The English Georgic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969),

pp. 4–8.

5. John Dryden, The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics and ÆneisTranslated into English Verse (1697), in Poetical Works, ed. G. R. Noyes,

rev. edn. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).

6. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres andModes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 202.

7. Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793,

2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), I, p. 3.

8. John Entick, The Present State of the British Empire, 4 vols (London: B. Law,

E. and C. Dilly, Faden and Jeffrey, and R. Goadby, 1774), p. 2.

9. Karen O’Brien, ‘Imperial Georgic’, in The Country and the City Revisited, ed.

Donna Landry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 160–79;

Markman Ellis, ‘Islands of Empire: Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry and

the West Indies’, Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmund and

Vanessa Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 43–62.

10. [James Grainger], ‘[Review of] The Fleece: A Poem. In Four Books. By John

Dyer’, Monthly Review, XVI (April 1757), 328–40 (pp. 329, 331).

11. Joseph Addison, ‘An Essay on the Georgics’, in Dryden, Virgil (1697), repr. in

The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols

(London: G. Bell, 1914), pp. 3–11.

12. Grainger, Sugar-Cane.


13. Monthly Review, XVI (April 1757), 328–40.

14. Grainger to Percy, 10 Jan. 1759, in John Nichols, Illustrations of the LiteraryHistory of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (London: J. B. Nichols, 1848), VII,

p. 268; James Grainger, A Letter to Tobias Smollett, M.D. (London: T. Kinnersly,

1759), in John Gilmore, ‘Tibullus and the British Empire: Grainger, Smollett

and the Politics of Translation in the Mid-18th Century’, The Translator, 5, 1

(April 1999), 1–26.

15. Her masculine sounding names were of family origin. See Grainger, Sugar-Cane, p. 13.

16. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Antient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley,

1765), I, pp. 313–16.

17. James Grainger, An Essay on the more common West-India Diseases (London:

T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1764).

18. H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work inEngland, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (London: Bibliographical

Society, 1930).

19. After publication, Johnson helped Percy write a favourable notice for TheLondon Chronicle (5 July 1764), but also wrote a much more equivocal review

for The Critical Review, XVII, 10 (October 1764), 270–7. Further reviews were

provided in The Scots Magazine, July 1764; and in the Gazette Litteraire del’Europe of Paris (Nichols, Illustrations, VII, p. 291). For an account of

Grainger’s reception see Grainger, ed. Gilmore, pp. 36–53.

20. Nichols, Illustrations, VII, pp. 76–94.

21. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev.

L. F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), II, pp. 453–5, 532–5.

22. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Creative Literature of the British West Indies dur-

ing the Period of Slavery (1970)’, in Roots: Essay (Havana, Cuba: Premio Casa

de las Americas, 1986), pp. 127–70.

23. In addition to those already noticed, see David Shields, Oracles of Empire:Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1990); Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice:Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2000); Keith Sandiford, ‘Grainger: Creolizing the Muse’, in The CulturalPolitics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 67–88.

24. Recent anthologies include Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature ofthe West Indies, 1657–1777, ed. Thomas W. Krise (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1999); The White Man’s Burden: An Anthology of British Poetryof the Empire, ed. Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (Exeter: University of

Exeter Press, 1996); and Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery,1660–1810, ed. James G. Basker (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 2002).

25. Alexander Pope, ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ (1704), The Poems of AlexanderPope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 119.

26. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; repr. London: Hogarth,

1993); Richard Feingold, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses ofthe Pastoral and Georgic (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978); John Barrell,

The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840

60 Markman Ellis

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); John Barrell, EnglishLiterature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson,

1983), pp. 91–102.

27. Hugh Prince, ‘Art and Agrarian Change, 1710–1815’, in The Iconography ofLandscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of PastEnvironments ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 98–118; Ann Bermingham, Landscapeand Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1987).

28. Barrell, Dark Side, pp. 37–8.

29. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of theAgrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996), p. i; The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Volume V: 1640–1750,

2 vols ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

30. On sugar planters as agricultural improvers see J. H. Galloway, The Sugar CaneIndustry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 94–105, and J. R. Ward, ‘New

Husbandry’, in British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process ofAmelioration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 61–119 (on St Kitts see

pp. 74–9).

31. Selwyn Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,1775–1810 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002), p. 136.

32. Feingold, Nature and Society, p. 93.

33. Compare Gilmore: ‘Often when Grainger talks about his muse, it is simply a

periphrasis for himself’ (Grainger, Sugar-Cane, p. 216). For evidence of the

female muse see the opening 22 lines of Book II (and numerous other places).

34. I. 6–14 lists Hesiod, Virgil, Dyer, Phillips, Smart, and Somerville as the poets

the muse has previously guided.

35. Samuel Johnson, Critical Review, XVIII (October 1764), 270–7.

36. Grainger, Sugar-Cane, p. 145.

37. Ibid., pp. 292–4.

38. Chris Whatley, Serfdom: A Species of Slave: Serfdom in Scottish Coal Mines, c. 1606–1799 (Newtongrange, Midlothian: Scottish Mining Museum,

1989), p. [2]; Baron F. Duckham, ‘Serfdom in Eighteenth Century Scotland’,

History, 54, 181 ( June 1969), pp. 178–97; T. C. Smout, A History of the ScottishPeople, 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969), pp. 167–70, 403–12.

39. Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency ofTolerating Slavery (London: Benjamin White and Robert Horsfield, 1769),

p. 4 n.

40. [Mr Johnson], Considerations on the Present Scarcity and High Price of Coals inScotland; and on the means of procuring greater quantities at a cheaper rate(Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1793), pp. 23, 24.

41. Archibald Cochrane, Description of the Estate and Abbey of Culross. Particularlyof the Mineral and Coal Property (Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1793), pp. 72–4.

42. W. E. K. Anderson, ‘Life of Grainger’, in Anderson, ed., A Complete Edition ofthe Poets of Great Britain, 14 vols (London: J. and A. Arch; Edinburgh: Bell and

Bradfute, 1792–5), X, pp. 891–4. See also Grainger, ed. Gilmore, p. 3.


43. ‘Memorial for the Colliers of Scotland, July 23, 1762’, in P. E. H. Hair, ‘Slavery

and Liberty: The Case of the Scottish Colliers’, Slavery and Abolition, 21, 3

(2000), 136–51, pp. 139–47.

44. Nathaniel Appleton, Considerations of Slavery in a Letter to a Friend (Boston:

Edes and Gill, 1767), pp. 4, 15–16.

45. Jamaica, a Poem, in Three Parts. Written in that Island, in the Year MDCCLXXVI(London: William Nicoll, 1777), p. v.

46. Douglas V. Armstrong, The Old Village and Great House: An Archaeological andHistorical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 25–30.

62 Markman Ellis

63

4Sensibility, Tropical Disease, andthe Eighteenth-CenturySentimental NovelCandace Ward

In recent years, the novel of sensibility has staged a critical comeback,

attributable in part to critics’ recognition of the genre’s role in eighteenth-

century slavery politics. As Markman Ellis points out in The Politics ofSensibility, ‘if we seek to understand more of the sentimental novel by

reading the history of slavery, so too we might understand the history of

slavery better by reading the sentimental novel’.1 Ellis’s observation

points up a dialectical relationship between the literature of sensibility

and the politics of eighteenth-century imperialism, and challenges pre-

vious readings of sentimental texts as solely a domestic, feminine liter-

ary phenomenon. In keeping with this reassessment, I shall examine

how discourses of sensibility inform both fictional and non-fictional

constructions of ‘race’, by looking at a number of these constructions in

medical treatises and sentimental novels of the abolition era, in particu-

lar, those that feature Caribbean settings and the diseases that struck

colonial bodies there.

Two mid-century novels, Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of DavidSimple, Volume the Last, In Which His History Is Concluded (1753) and Sarah

Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), are especially significant in

what they reveal about the relationship between discourses of sensibility,

non-fiction theories of tropical disease, and constructions of race. Widely

read as representative novels of sensibility, both works valorize the ‘Man

of Feeling’ and privilege the emotionally charged ‘language of the heart’

that characterized sentimental literature.2 Both incorporate Jamaican

settings – Scott’s to a greater extent than Fielding’s – and both feature

colonial bodies stricken by disease. In their representations of the sick,

sensible colonial body, Fielding and Scott draw on contemporary medical

accounts that sought to explain the tropical diseases responsible for

thousands of European fatalities in the Caribbean. But, as I shall discuss

below, the relationship between fictional and non-fictional represen-

tations of disease was not simply a matter of novelists fictionalizing

so-called scientific accounts. In fact, as my examination of medical texts

reveals, physicians writing about tropical disease, like sentimental

novelists, regularly deployed discourses of sensibility, particularly in their

representations of a white colonial body vulnerable to diseases like

yellow fever and malaria. Unlike sentimental novelists who used the

language of sensibility to forward the abolitionist cause, however, most

tropical disease theorists used it to justify the slave trade. In other words,

discourses of sensibility were deployed both by abolitionists and by pro-

slavery writers. More importantly, the diseased colonial body in these

texts was a primary site on which competing political agendas were

played out.

I

By the mid eighteenth century, as medical historians observe, physi-

cians had accepted that diseases of the ‘Torrid Zones’ struck on a scale

and with an intensity unknown in Europe. Throughout the long

eighteenth century, British settlement of the Caribbean, and the mili-

tary campaigns that facilitated it, were accompanied by massive death

tolls: over the three-year period from 1793 to 1796 alone, over 40,000

British troops died from yellow fever and malaria.3 Although the high

cost in lives and the virulence of tropical fevers were widely recognized,

medical practitioners had no way of identifying viral and parasitic infec-

tions, and no way of linking those infections to the Aedes aegyptimosquitoes that transmitted yellow fever or the Anopheles mosquitoes

that carried malaria. Given the limitations of eighteenth-century disease

theory, it is no surprise, then, that practitioners emphasized the kind of

body struck by tropical fever – the vulnerable, ‘sensible’ white colonial

body – as much as they emphasized the diseases they could not cure.

Beliefs about this body derived from theories of the nervous system

integral to widely held notions of sensibility. It was commonly accep-

ted by physicians and lay people, for example, that an individual’s

sensibility – his or her responsiveness to internal and external stimuli –

depended on the constitution of the nervous system. The more delicate

or ‘lax’ an individual’s nerve fibres, the more sensible that individual

was. Sensibility was believed to manifest itself bodily (by blushes, sighs,

tears, throbbing pulses, and, of course, vulnerability to sickness), but it

also carried an emotional, moral component that, like its physical mark-

ers, was a result of impressions on the nerves. Thus, scientific writings

64 Candace Ward

about sensibility and nervous disorders were as often concerned with

ethical questions as was sentimental literature.4

Writers in the age of sensibility – whether physicians or novelists – paid

particular attention to the relationship between moral and physical well-

being, most maintaining that by exercising control over the body and its

passions, one could preserve good health. As James MacKenzie pointed out

in The History of Health and the Art of Preserving It, ‘He who seriously resolves

to preserve his health must previously learn to conquer his passions, and

keep them in absolute subjection to reason; for let a man be ever so tem-

perate…yet still some unhappy passions, if indulged to excess, will prevail

over all his regularity.’5 According to MacKenzie, the unhappy passions

included anger, fear, grief, envy, hatred, malice, revenge, and despair –

passions that, if indulged, ‘weaken the nerves’; ‘moderate joy…chearful-

ness, contentment, hope, virtuous and mutual love, and courage in doing

good’, on the other hand, invigorate them.6 The ill effects of indulged pas-

sions were often recorded in sentimental novels, from Clarissa Harlowe’s

excessive and fatal grief over being raped in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissato Marianne Dashwood’s dangerous fever, occasioned by her passion for

Willoughby in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. One lesson in these nov-

els, and in medical texts like MacKenzie’s with its morally charged lan-

guage, was that a person of sensibility needed to subordinate the passions

to reason and to exercise moderation to maintain good health.

If practitioners advocated moderation for the British subject at home,

they considered it even more important in the tropics. In fact, many

commentators, like Charles Leslie, believed that if newcomers to the

sugar islands ‘were more careful to live moderate, … they might live as

happily and free of Diseases’ in the Caribbean as in more temperate cli-

mates.7 Certainly this was the view of James Lind, a naval doctor and

respected author of An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in HotClimates (1768). As Lind explained, in the Caribbean:

The passions of the mind have a much quicker and more violent

effect on the body, than in a poorer and cooler air. An excess of anger,

or grief, will immediately produce a jaundice, or the yellow fever, the

sight of a corpse or any object of horror, and even a shocking story

told to a person, have been often known, through an impression of

fear upon the mind to bring on a delirium, … and have some-

times … carried off the patient in twenty-four hours.8

Writing nearly fifty years after Lind, Dr Robert Collins expressed the

same theory in Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment

Sensibility, Disease, and the Sentimental Novel 65

of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (1811), but for a different reason. In

an effort to explain why whites were more vulnerable to tropical fevers

than blacks, Collins suggested that they, unlike whites, were insensible,

and thus unlikely to die of yellow fever.9 Fear, he suggested:

Is a very powerful agent. … When a white man is seized with a

fever … he considers the first derangement of his pulse as a summons

to the grave. … He mediates incessantly on the catastrophe, which he

conceives to be inevitable. … From this danger negroes are rescued by

their insensibility. … As they are without any such fear, having never

speculated on the subject of death, and neither apprehending, nor

caring much about it, they only suffer the actual diseases of the body,

which, without the intervention of the mind, is unable to effect their

destruction.10

Here, white sensibility, registered by an inability to control fear, puts the

colonist at a physical disadvantage, yet implies racial superiority as well.

Collins’s racism, repugnant and far-fetched as it appears, nevertheless

reveals a source of anxiety within Caribbean society, one produced by

the disproportionate number of whites killed by tropical fevers relative

to blacks. As Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas note, black

peoples’ resistance to malaria and yellow fever was tied to ‘blood anom-

alies which discourage[d] the proliferation of the various protozoa of the

malaria types’ and to immunity developed by surviving bouts of fever in

childhood.11 Without the technology to understand tropical disease

pathology, however, the only ‘fact’ that eighteenth-century practition-

ers recognized was that these diseases did not devastate the black

population as they did the white. This recognition, given the already

disproportionate number of blacks to whites in the Caribbean colonies

and the ever present threat of slave rebellions, greatly increased white

fear of disease.

Collins’s theory of black insensibility – which rested on racial

attitudes that shaped and were shaped by eighteenth-century disease

theories – was only one rationale for the discrepancy between white and

black deaths from fever. Contemporary scientists believed, for example,

that ‘Nature’ had formed the British constitution to function best in ‘the

particular climate in which she hath stationed [it]: so constituting the

nice and delicate movements of the animal machine, that we cannot,

without peril, expose ourselves to sudden or violent transitions’.12

As physicians repeatedly remarked, the transition from England to the

heat of the tropics rendered emigrants vulnerable to ‘bilious’ or yellow

66 Candace Ward

fevers. Moreover, just as European constitutions were thought to be

designed for a temperate climate, black people were thought to be con-

stitutionally fitted for tropical environments: as Dr George Pinckard

observed, ‘the negro of the West Indies, from always living in a high

degree of heat, has no susceptibility’ to tropical fevers.13

The climate theory of disease, aligned with notions of black insensi-

bility, provided an ideal rationale for pro-slavery writers who used it to

support the use of slave labour in a disease environment that often inca-

pacitated whites. Working on the assumption that blacks easily with-

stood hard labour in the tropics, Lind defended the slave trade on the

grounds that excessive manual labour contributed to tropical fever

among whites. Citing ‘numberless instances’ of British troops clearing

land who were ‘taken ill in the morning and dead before night’, Lind

argued that ‘If the purchasing of Negroes on the coast of Guinea can be

justified it must be from the absolute necessity of employing them in

such services.’ He goes on to declare that ‘It does not seem consistent

with British humanity, to assign such employments to a regiment of gal-

lant soldiers, or to a company of brave seamen.’14 He continues with the

hope that his argument will ‘excite some tender feelings of humanity in

such as have the direction of our trade and ships abroad; as nothing can

be more inhumane than sending unseasoned Europeans’ to perform

such deadly tasks.15

Lind’s conversance with the language of sensibility – his pathetic

appeals and expressions of tender humanity – was not unusual among

medical writers of the period, who often positioned themselves as men

of feeling as well as men of science. During the 1792 parliamentary

investigations of the slave trade, for example, William Wright, a naval

surgeon turned slave-owner, deployed similar language to support his

contention that whites were physically more vulnerable to heat and

tropical disease than blacks. ‘The heat of the sun is so far from being

hurtful, [the Negro slave] takes delight in it’, Wright asserted, adding

that in being brought to the Caribbean, Africans had changed their ‘cli-

mate and condition for the better’.16 Wright’s comments signalled a

change from his earlier denunciation of slavery, but as his anonymous

memoirist/apologist explains, sensibility informed all his opinions,

whether pro- or anti-slavery:

It is impossible to doubt the fact, that the situation of the individuals

[slaves] who had providentially been rescued from such a state of bar-

barism [in Africa], and placed under the guardianship of a man,

whose heart overflowed with the milk of human kindness, was


immeasurably improved. … In his original reprobation of the practice

of slavery, as well as in subsequently yielding to the prevailing habit

of the country, Dr Wright was equally guided by the influence of

good and honourable feelings.17

Lind’s and Wright’s comments are particularly significant as they

expose the complex role that sensibility played in eighteenth-century

constructions of race. Both men privilege white sensibility in its physical

and moral manifestations, and direct their appeals to an equally sensible

audience. Lind’s primary aim is to alleviate the sufferings of British navy

personnel, and Wright’s to persuade Parliament that the slave trade is

good for the health of white colonists and black slaves. In both cases

sympathy and compassion – the hallmarks of sensibility – are invoked to

promote the argument for the continuation of the slave trade. But the

language of feeling so prominent in these texts also reveals certain con-

tradictions. Lind’s claim, for example, that the slave trade can be justi-

fied by ‘the absolute necessity’ of preserving the health of British troops

limits the objects of his ‘tender feelings of humanity’ to the white sol-

dier or seaman – in his argument there is no room to sympathize with

the ‘Negroes on the coast of Guinea’ whose liberty must be sacrificed to

the more delicate health of Europeans. In contrast, according to

Wright’s biographer, benevolent sensibility should be exercised on

behalf of slaves. But here, as in Lind’s argument, the mantra of sensibil-

ity undercuts the pro-slavery argument. ‘Rescue’ by a sensible master is,

after all, providential. In other words, ‘good and honourable feelings’ –

though often pleaded in pro-slavery literature – cannot be legislated,

particularly in a system based on the indisputable and absolute power of

white masters over black slaves.

Of course, pro-slavery arguments that deployed discourses of sensibil-

ity to rationalize the necessity of black slave labour obfuscate the eco-

nomic underpinnings of Caribbean slavery, and, more indirectly, of

disease theory itself. As Richard B. Sheridan points out, by the end of the

seventeenth century, ‘It was not that whites were incapable of hard

labour on West Indian plantations, but rather that they were too few

and too costly.’18 The African slave trade, on the other hand, provided a

seemingly inexhaustible supply of labour – despite high mortality rates

among slaves during the Middle Passage and after their arrival in the

Caribbean – that was cheaper and easier to command than free or inden-

tured white labour. ‘Having become utterly dependent on African

labour’, Walter Rodney suggests, ‘Europeans at home and abroad found it

necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms.’19 In theorizing

68 Candace Ward

tropical disease, eighteenth-century medical writers contributed to the

project of rationalization not only by using racially biased scientific lan-

guage but by using discourses of sensibility – like those used by senti-

mental novelists to argue against the slave trade – to construct a white

colonial body superior to but dependent upon the black slave.

II

To acknowledge that economic factors and racism influenced non-

fictional explanations of tropical disease does not minimize the physical

effects those diseases had on Europeans, or the anxiety colonists must

have felt on arriving in the Caribbean. But, despite the health threats

associated with the region, many whites emigrated in hopes of bettering

their financial positions. One of the earliest literary expressions of the

tension between the promise of Caribbean wealth and the threat of trop-

ical disease appears in Sarah Fielding’s Volume the Last (1753). This

novel, like The Adventures of David Simple (1744), dramatizes one of sen-

timental literature’s central themes, the devaluation of sensibility’s

virtues – generosity, compassion, and benevolence – in a consumer cul-

ture that was marked by a ‘love of Gain’ and that was increasingly

dependent on slave-produced goods.20 In both works, for example, the

eighteenth-century ethos of accumulation is replaced by a valorization

of communal living and shared property. But, whereas Fielding’s first

novel limits its critique to the commercial metropole of London, Volumethe Last extends it to the slave-based economy of the Caribbean, where

Valentine, David Simple’s brother-in-law and fellow ‘Man of Feeling’,

dies after emigrating to Jamaica.

Unlike expansionist literature that depicted emigration as a ‘noble

design’, Volume the Last presents it as the only available means to save

the Simple family from destitution.21 When the Governor of Jamaica

offers a job and a plantation to Valentine, for example, he accepts

because it represents freedom from a life of dependence on patrons

whose attitudes and behaviours run counter to those of the Simples.

There is, of course, a peculiar ‘distress’ arising from such a ‘Prospect

of … Advancement’ – the equally likely prospect of dying from tropical

disease.22 In fact, Mrs Orgueil, the Simples’ wealthy patroness, proposes

the scheme only after she hears that Jamaica ‘was very unhealthy, and

that many of the English had lately died there’.23 Motivated by jealousy

of Valentine’s wife, Cynthia, Mrs Orgueil sets the enterprise in motion

with the hope that Cynthia won’t be able to survive the ‘Heat of the

Climate’.24 Although Cynthia doesn’t succumb, Valentine falls victim to


a ‘raging Fever’ just as his prospects of financial success – and by extension,

those of Cynthia, David, and the rest of his family back in England –

promise to exceed ‘beyond his warmest Expectations’.25

The timing and cause of Valentine’s death, of course, accentuate the

conflict between promises of Caribbean wealth and risks to European

health in the region. But, set against the backdrop of the novel’s wider

examination of eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism, it also signals

Fielding’s awareness of the codified special dangers that colonial expan-

sion posed for the ‘Man of Feeling’. For Valentine’s expectations arise

from his possession of a plantation and his position in a legal system that

codified slavery. His death, however, prevents the actual accumulation of

slave-produced wealth and effectively short-circuits the possibility that

his sensibility might be compromised by prolonged participation in an

economy predicated on the enslavement and suffering of others.

Fielding’s readers – well versed in the conventions of sensibility and

inundated with publications about Caribbean life – would have sympa-

thized with the moral threat confronting Valentine in Jamaica, an island

renowned at mid-century for its brutal practice of slavery. Indeed, most

British readers accepted that, just as the transition from a temperate to a

hot climate shocked the physical constitution, so the transition from

Great Britain, where ‘Christianity was professed’, to an island where

British colonists ‘did not scruple the buying and selling Slaves’ shocked

the moral fibres, and threatened a kind of spiritual contagion.26 The

shock that most newly arrived colonists experienced when faced with

the horrors of slavery was eventually overcome, however. Indeed, the

majority of those residing in the Caribbean for any length of time not

only grew accustomed to slavery, but also came to accept beliefs about

its necessity and about Africans’ inherent and biological inferiority – the

same racist beliefs that informed tropical disease theories. Such was the

case of Dr Wright, who declared soon after arriving in the Caribbean in

1760 that ‘no one endowed with the common attributes of humanity,

can witness [the Negroes’] suffering, and reflect on their hard fate, with-

out pity’.27 However, as is clear from Wright’s parliamentary testimony

of 1792, his attitude toward slavery – like that of the majority of white

colonists – changed markedly after a prolonged residence in the

Caribbean. In Fielding’s text, the possibility of such a transformation is

precluded by tropical fever: Valentine dies before he becomes ‘seasoned’

to either Jamaica’s climate or culture.28 On one level, then, the inci-

dence of tropical fever in Fielding’s text severs Valentine’s connection to

slavery and abruptly halts the influx of slave-produced wealth into a

familial community celebrated for virtuous sensibility. Yet Valentine’s

70 Candace Ward

death – predicated on Fielding’s incorporation of the vulnerable white

colonial body into her text – precludes the possibility of any active

resistance to the institution of slavery. In this sense, Fielding, though

critical of slavery, circumvents any deep engagement with the issue by

taking Valentine out of the arena of conflict.

III

Not all fictional immigrants suffered Valentine’s fate, of course, and

characters returning to England from the colonies with improved

fortunes – and deteriorated health – became well-known figures in sen-

timental fiction, from Frances Sheridan’s Ned Warner in Memoirs of MissSidney Bidulph to Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lord Elmwood in A Simple Story.

Another such character is George Ellison, the eponymous hero of Sarah

Scott’s The Adventures of Sir George Ellison. In this work, the relationship

between sensibility, slavery, and disease is realized more fully than in

Volume the Last, though it, too, reveals the contradictions generated by

the sick colonial body.

Scott’s hero, unlike his literary predecessor Valentine, has no qualms

about travelling to Jamaica to set up as a sugar and spice merchant.

Despite his willingness to embrace a commercial vocation – an activity

that often debars characters from the ranks of sentimental heroism –

Ellison exhibits a refinement and delicacy worthy of any man of feel-

ing.29 Even so, in Scott’s text, Ellison’s colonial body doesn’t bear the

signs of moral or physical disease in the way that Valentine’s does:

his sensibility doesn’t prevent him from participating in the slave

economy, and, though his constitution is ‘much hurt by the heat of the

climate’, it does not lead to death by tropical fever.30 Ellison’s virtuous

sensibility does, however, ensure his success in Jamaica: ‘The more

generally he became known, the more extensive his trade grew. … His

fortune daily increased beyond his hopes; and … his industry, sobriety

and temperance, shewed that he had a just title to more than uncom-

mon increase of riches.’31

Given that sentimental texts often based pathetic appeals on the

impoverishment of central characters (as in Volume the Last), the associ-

ation of commercial success with moral exemplariness in George Ellisonis striking. Even more striking, though, is the explicit connection

between Ellison’s fortune and slavery, which is fully revealed when he

marries a wealthy Creole widow whose wedding portion includes ‘a con-

siderable plantation, cultivated by a numerous race of slaves’.32

Although Ellison abhors slavery, he nonetheless marries a woman who


‘never flinched at any punishment her steward thought proper to

inflict’ upon her slaves.33 And although Ellison acknowledges that ‘his

affairs’ could not ‘go on without them’, he does not feel compelled to

free the slaves he acquires through marriage: ‘According to the present

state of the island he was sensible he could not abolish this slavery, even

on his own estate, and saw no means of rendering happy the poor

wretches, whose labours were to yield him affluence.’34

Resigned to his inability to abolish slavery, Ellison sets about institut-

ing reforms on his plantation to ameliorate the condition of his slaves.

He is so successful that soon his estate is the envy of the neighbouring

planters, who, impressed by the increased productivity of his slaves,

adopt many of his initiatives. These men, however, are driven by self-

interest, not by benevolence. But even though the text insists that

Ellison’s sensibility distinguishes him from other slave-owners, his (and

Scott’s) ameliorative position is not far from pro-slavery writings that

call for the humane treatment – including adequate medical care – of

slaves. Ellison, for example, provides sick slaves with immediate and

‘proper relief’, and ‘by the encouragement he gave to such old women as

nursed them well, secured them every comfort their condition could

admit’.35 Similarly, the anonymous author of Considerations Which mayTend to Promote the Settlement of Our New West-India Colonies (1764)

advises planters to provide ‘a very commodious sick house or hospital,

furnished with every necessary and comfort for the sick, especially good

nurses, and a sensible practitioner’.36 Given this overlap, indicative of

the way sensibility was deployed by both abolitionist and pro-slavery

writers, it becomes difficult to determine absolutely whether Scott’s

position represents a ‘seemingly categorical endorsement of the status

quo’ as Moira Ferguson argues, or whether, as Eve Stoddard suggests,

‘her specific proposals for the reform of slavery are among the earliest

and most progressive in the eighteenth century’.37

Further insight can be gained, however, by looking at the way Scott

depicts the sick colonial body. In most eighteenth-century novels refer-

ring to Caribbean life – as in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Tobias Smollett’s

Roderick Random, and Fielding’s Volume the Last – depictions of illness are

limited to the sufferings of white colonists. In The History of Sir GeorgeEllison, however, Scott depicts not one but two sick slaves. Moreover,

neither suffers from the yellow or malarial fevers so prominently

featured in other colonial writings. Instead, both succumb to over-

excitement, to the kind of emotional upheaval discussed earlier, which

was believed to contribute to European colonists’ susceptibility to dis-

ease. In Scott’s novel, the slaves’ over-excitement stems from Ellison’s

72 Candace Ward

reforms. Abolishing corporal punishment on the grounds that gentle

treatment will guarantee the slaves’ ‘good behaviour’ by ensuring their

‘gratitude and prudence’, Ellison negates the need for physical coercion.

Some form of discipline is deemed necessary, however, so Ellison sets up

a graduated scale of punishments, ending with the sale of the offender

to a master ‘whose chastisements may keep within the bounds of duty

the actions of that man, whose heart cannot be influenced by gratitude,

or his own true interest’.38 In other words, only those slaves sensible to

Ellison’s benevolence can benefit from it.

For the most part Ellison’s system works, but it does not go unchal-

lenged. One slave, persuaded that his master’s sensibility will prevent

him from following through with the final punishment, tests him –

only to be summarily sold. Away from Ellison’s paternal care, ‘the poor

fellow’s dejection of spirits … undermined his health, and rendered him

so weak’ that, after a year, his new master happily sells him back. When

he learns that Ellison has purchased him, the slave experiences a joy

that – like his previous dejection – proves nearly fatal by threatening to

‘overpower his spirits’.39 The happiness the reformed slave enjoys, cou-

pled with Ellison’s forgiveness, produces a ‘disagreeable event’, however:

another slave flatters himself that Ellison will not exercise the same

severity again (‘since it had proved so painful’ to him), and therefore

determines to ‘become more the master of his own actions’.40 To his

horror, he too finds Ellison willing to make an example of him. Just

before the sale, however, the slave is ‘seized with a violent fever’, height-

ened by ‘the terrors of his mind’ at the prospect of being sold:

The thought of the execution of the sentence he had incurred,

increased his malady so much as rendered it improbable he should

recover, and made him desirous not to do so. Preferring death to slav-

ery under another master, he refused to take the remedies prescribed,

and earnestly begged they would suffer him to die.41

Ellison rescinds the sentence and pardons the man, although not with-

out a stern warning about future offences. As in the case of the first

slave, the man reforms, ‘cured’ by Ellison’s forgiveness, which instils a

sense of calm: ‘His mind being at ease, his strength was superior to the

violence of his disorder; he recovered from his fever and his perverseness

together; carefully avoiding, from that time, all possibility of incurring

the punishment from which he had so happily escaped.’42

The slaves’ simultaneous recovery from fever and ‘perverseness’ sig-

nals Scott’s use of one of the most common tropes in the sentimental


novel: sickness as moral cure. Indeed, both slaves – like Miss Milner in

A Simple Story and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility – are

taught by near fatal fevers to subdue their passionate excesses and to

assume the passivity so highly prized by eighteenth-century moralists

(and slave-owners). But the Caribbean context of Scott’s novel adds

another dimension to her depiction of sickness and sensibility, for the

slaves suffer from ‘nervous fever’. According to contemporary physi-

cians, nervous fever was caused by emotional suffering, grief, and anxi-

ety. Individuals who suffered ‘long and great Anxiety of Mind’ and

‘Dejection of Spirits’ were considered especially vulnerable, as were

those who possessed ‘more tender and delicate Constitutions’ – that is,

men and women of feeling.43 In other words, Scott confers on the

enslaved black body a marker of white privilege, a full-blown medical

condition typically suffered by sentimental heroes and heroines and

read as a measure of their sensibility.

In this way, Scott effectively counters theories of black insensibility

and challenges notions of white superiority found in pro-slavery tropi-

cal fever writings like Collins’s Practical Rules. Moreover, by constructing

the slave body as a sensible body, Scott legitimates its participation in

the give and take of feeling that constitutes the sympathetic economy of

sensibility. But even though the sensible slaves facilitate George Ellison’s

engagement with issues of slavery (an engagement absent in Fielding’s

sentimental novel), that engagement ultimately depends on the

text’s construction of the slaves as passive and docile. Indeed, once their

good behaviour is guaranteed by the sympathetic exchange between

white and black sensibility, the need for institutional change is obviated.

Ellison is free to leave the problem of slavery behind in Jamaica and

return to England – to engage in other philanthropic activities funded

by his Caribbean fortune. In George Ellison, then, the construction of the

sensible slave body facilitates rather than disrupts the smooth operation

of the slave-based economy.

IV

Clearly, discourses of sensibility were routinely deployed in eighteenth-

century non-fiction as well as fiction, and shaped the relationship

between theories of tropical disease, perceptions of race, and attitudes

toward slavery. In the medical texts discussed above, in George Ellison,

and in Volume the Last, this relationship often appears inconsistent and

contradictory, demonstrated most clearly by the texts’ construction of a

highly sensitized but vulnerable colonial body – whether white or black,

74 Candace Ward

whether invoked to justify or condemn slavery. But the contradictions

that surface when we examine the constructed nature of this body are

those that provide the greatest insights into the culture that produced it:

a culture grappling with the physical and moral costs of Caribbean

slavery.

Notes

1. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in theSentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 50–1.

For more on the relationship between the culture of sensibility and novels

that argued for the amelioration or abolition of slavery, see Betty Rizzo’s intro-

duction to Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. ix–xlii; Eve Stoddard, ‘A Serious Proposal for

Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28

(1995), 379–96; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writersand Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

2. ‘Man of Feeling’ was a widely recognized descriptor of sentimental heroes

noted for their sensitivity. Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and Henry

Mackenzie’s Harley in The Man of Feeling (1771) are among the most represen-

tative of these characters. For more on the ‘language of feeling’ and the ‘heart

as the source of writing itself’, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: TheLanguage of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1988), pp. 61–3.

3. For further statistics, see Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, ‘Race,

War and Tropical Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean’, in WarmClimates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900,

ed. David Arnold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 65–107, especially pp. 68–71.

4. For more on the relationship between fiction, morality, and nerve theories,

see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 1–36, and

Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses inSocial Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

5. James MacKenzie, The History of Health and the Art of Preserving It: or,An Account of all that has been recommended by Physicians and Philosophers,towards the Preservation of Health, from the most remote Antiquity to this Time,3rd edn (Edinburgh: William Gordon, 1760), p. 388.

6. Ibid., p. 389.

7. [Charles Leslie], A New History of Jamaica, from the Earliest Accounts, to theTaking of Porto Bello by Vice-Admiral Vernon. In Thirteen Letters from a Gentlemanto His Friend, 2nd edn (London: J. Hodges, 1740), p. 49.

8. James Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates. Withthe Method of Preventing Their Fatal Consequences, 5th edn (London: J. Murray,

1792), pp. 176–7.

9. Although slaves were not considered especially vulnerable to yellow fevers,

they were prone to other diseases like yaws, neonatal tetanus, and mald’estomach (dirt-eating). As Kiple and Kiple point out, these diseases, although


considered race-specific by eighteenth-century practitioners, were the result

of various vitamin deficiencies and unsanitary living conditions. See

Kenneth Kiple and Virginia Kiple, ‘Deficiency Diseases in the Caribbean’,

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11, 2 (1980), 197–215.

10. [Robert Collins], Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment ofNegro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies, by a Professional Planter (London: J. Barfield,

1811), pp. 259–61.

11. Kiple and Ornelas, ‘Race, War and Tropical Medicine’, p. 71.

12. George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies: Written during the Expedition underthe Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby: Including Observationson the Island of Barbadoes, and the Settlements Captured by the British Troops,upon the Coast of Guiana; Likewise Remarks Relating to the Creoles and Slaves ofthe Western Colonies, and the Indians of South America: With Occasional Hints,Regarding the Seasoning, or Yellow Fever of Hot Climates, 3 vols (London:

Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), III, pp. 417–18.

13. Ibid., p. 432.

14. Lind, Diseases Incidental to Europeans, pp. 142–3.

15. Ibid., p. 148.

16. Memoirs of the Late William Wright, M.D., Fellow of the Royal Societies of Londonand Edinburgh. With Extracts from His Correspondence, and a Selection of HisPapers on Medical and Botanical Subjects (Edinburgh: William Blackwood;

London: T. Cadell, 1828), p. 16.

17. Ibid., p. 17.

18. Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British WestIndies, 1623–1775 (Kingston: Caribbean Universities Press, 1974), p. 238.

See pp. 235–7 for figures on white indentured labour transported to the

Caribbean in the seventeenth century.

19. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture,

1972), pp. 88–9.

20. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, ed. Peter

Sabor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), p. 23.

21. Anonymous, Considerations Which may Tend to Promote the Settlement of OurNew West-India Colonies (London: James Robson, 1764), p. 1.

22. Fielding, Volume the Last, p. 263.

23. Ibid., p. 288.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., pp. 284, 298.

26. Fielding, David Simple, p. 104.

27. Memoirs of the Late William Wright, pp. 15–16.

28. ‘Seasoning’ is generally defined as the process by which a person becomes

hardened or inured to a strange climate or environment. The term most

often referred to the initial bout of fever that white colonists were expected

to contract soon after arriving in the tropics, or to the process by which

transported slaves became inured to the condition of slavery. I use the term

here to describe white newcomers’ psychological acclimatization to the bru-

tality of the Jamaican slave trade, a process similar to what Edward

Brathwaite calls ‘creolization’: ‘a cultural action – material, psychological,

spiritual – based upon the stimulus/response of individuals within the soci-

ety to their environment and – as white/black, culturally distinct groups – to

76 Candace Ward

each other’. Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica,1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 296.

29. For example, in Sidney Bidulph (1761) Ned Warner, who has ‘passed his life in

business, and in acquiring riches’ in Jamaica, is tender hearted, but also gruff,

coarse, and indelicate, qualities that are somewhat smoothed out by his asso-

ciation with the novel’s heroine (Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss SidneyBidulph, ed. Patricia Koster and Jean Coates Cleary (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995), p. 372).

30. Scott, George Ellison, p. 38.

31. Ibid., p. 7.

32. Ibid., p. 10. Ferguson, Stoddard, Rizzo, and Ellis have all raised important

points about the incongruities between George Ellison’s sensibility, his role

as a slave-owner, and his colonial wealth. See also Alfred Lutz, ‘Commercial

Capitalism, Classical Republicanism, and the Man of Sensibility in TheHistory of Sir George Ellison’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 39, 3

(1999), 557–74.


34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., p. 14.

36. Anonymous, Considerations … to Promote the Settlement of Our New West-IndiaColonies, p. 46.

37. Ferguson, Subject to Others, p. 104; Stoddard, ‘Serious Proposal’, p. 383.


39. Ibid., p. 18.

40. Ibid., p. 19.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. John Huxham, An Essay on Fevers. To which is Now Added, a Dissertation on theMalignant, Ulcerous Sore-Throat, 3rd edn (London: J. Hinton, 1757), pp. 16,

79–80; Sir Richard Manningham, The Symptoms, Nature, Causes, and Cure ofthe Febricula, or Little Fever: Commonly Called the Nervous or Hysteric Fever; theFever on the Spirits; Vapours, Hypo, or Spleen (London: T. Osborne, 1746), p. vi.


Part II

Slavery from Within

81

5‘The Hellish Means of Killing and Kidnapping’: Ignatius Sanchoand the Campaign against the‘Abominable Traffic for Slaves’Brycchan Carey

THE Editor of these Letters thinks proper to obviate an objec-

tion, which she finds has already been suggested, that they

were originally written with a view to publication. She declares,

therefore, that no such idea was ever expressed by Mr. Sancho;

and that not a single letter is here printed from any duplicate

preserved by himself, but all have been collected from the

various friends to whom they were addressed. Her motives for

laying them before the publick were, the desire of shewing that

an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an

European; and the still superior motive, of wishing to serve his

worthy family. And she is happy in thus publicly acknowledg-

ing she has not found the world inattentive to the voice of

obscure merit.

Frances Crew’s editorial note to The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782)1

Frances Crew’s note, well intentioned though it may have been, has had

the unfortunate effect of obscuring Ignatius Sancho’s participation in

the construction of the text for which he principally known: The Lettersof the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. It also masks the extent to which

he was prepared to see his own letters used for the purpose ‘of shewing

that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European’.

Indeed, the title of this essay alludes to a paradox inherent in study of

the literary and personal achievements of Ignatius Sancho. Sancho

could not have belonged to the campaign to abolish the slave trade in

any formal sense since he died seven years before the establishment of

the society founded to effect its abolition. Accordingly, some critics and

historians, as we shall see, have suggested that he may not have infor-

mally opposed the trade either, describing him as assimilated, obse-

quious, and nationalistic, a white Englishman in all but colour, who had

little to say, either about other Africans in England, or about the institu-

tion of slavery itself. By contrast, others have argued that he was not

only deeply aware of the institution of slavery, but did all within his

power to oppose it through a combination of personal politicking with

the deployment of a literary ‘ironic strategy’. Yet while all would agree

that Sancho could not have joined a formal abolition society, it is nev-

ertheless true that during the 1760s and 1770s, when most of Sancho’s

letters were written, an informal anti-slavery campaign was being devel-

oped by proto-abolitionists such as the Philadelphia Quaker Anthony

Benezet, the British Evangelical Granville Sharp, and the founder of

Methodism, John Wesley. Working alone or at the end of tenuous net-

works of correspondence, much of their campaign centred either on reli-

gious arguments arising largely from sectarian doctrine, or on the legal

battle to define the status of slaves in England. Even without the help of

a formal abolition society, the case of James Sommerset occupied many

column inches in the newspapers in the early 1770s, and ultimately led

to the celebrated Mansfield ruling of June 1772. There may not have

been an Abolition Society in Sancho’s lifetime, but there certainly was

an incipient abolition movement.

Both sectarian theology and legal wrangling were jobs for specialists,

and there is no indication that Sancho had any training or more than a

common interest in either secular or ecclesiastical law. Nevertheless,

I argue that Sancho’s anti-slavery efforts between 1766 and 1780 show

that he was actively opposed to the trade, writing both publicly and pri-

vately against it, and seemingly gearing up for more extensive efforts

against it at the time of his death. Indeed, and more contentiously,

I argue that The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African was con-

structed and deployed, both by Sancho himself and by his editor, in the

form of an epistolary novel of sentiment illustrating the immorality of

slavery. By this I do not mean that Sancho positively and deliberately

arranged or organized his letters with a view to publication in the exact

shape in which they were indeed published: no new evidence has

emerged to prove that thesis – although close reading of the Letters is

suggestive. Rather, I take into account the considerable existing evi-

dence showing that Sancho was keen on seeing his work in print, com-

bined with the observation that in his lifetime he consciously

82 Brycchan Carey

constructed a sentimental self-image that was consistent throughout his

writing. This combination is significant because in the 1770s, when

Sancho wrote most of the letters, and in the early 1780s, when they were

published, what little anti-slavery writing that existed was found mostly

within the pages of what we might call ‘literary’ rather than ‘political’

writing. Indeed, the works of Benezet, Wesley, and Sharp notwithstand-

ing, the most common media for the dissemination of anti-slavery

literature were the pages of sentimental novels, poems, and plays.

Accordingly, Sancho’s Letters should be seen not as peripheral or unique

but, rather, as fully integrated into the literature of the early abolition

movement. To sustain these arguments, I consider the recent critical and

historical debate about Sancho’s views on slavery and the deployment of

his work by the abolition movement, before reading his letters on race

and slavery in the context of the emerging anti-slavery debate being

conducted in contemporary sentimental literature.

Critical enquiries into the extent of Sancho’s commitment to

abolitionism are bound up with questions about the extent to which he

was, in Paul Edwards’s words, ‘a man thoroughly assimilated into the

middle-class English society of his day’.2 The debate has been

thoroughly rehearsed in several places and the early material has been

extensively trawled. Given the number of times the word is quoted and

rebutted, one imagines that James Walvin might regret having described

Sancho as ‘obsequious’ in a passing comment in a book published in

1973.3 Nonetheless, his and Paul Edwards’s early discussion of Sancho’s

assimilation into middle-class English society, a discussion that reflected

British debate about immigration and multiculturalism in the 1960s and

1970s, structured much of the ensuing debate. However, while Edwards

continued in the 1980s to refer to Sancho as ‘a man largely assimilated

to English middle-class society’, Walvin had always argued that ‘his

assimilation was far from complete’ and that ‘frequently his remarks

reveal the tensions and contradictions inherent to black experience in a

white society’.4 More recently, Walvin’s view has been developed and

given new purpose by Keith Sandiford in his book Measuring the Moment.Sandiford argues that ‘Sancho was sufficiently assimilated to [English]

society to observe its codes of civilized conduct; but he was also enough

of an outsider to subvert those very codes’.5 For Sandiford, Sancho’s use

of the forms of polite literature is strategic, a type of protest making

conscious use of irony to alert his readers, both to the ‘tensions and

contradictions’ of his life and to the moral problem of slavery in the

wider world. Sandiford’s view has been expanded upon and refined in

recent years, while the Edwards and Walvin views have been further

Ignatius Sancho and the Campaign 83

challenged. Sukhdev Sandhu hopes that his reading of Sterne and

Sancho ‘will help to end the perception of him as a fusty and assimila-

tionist lackey whose letters are full of obsequious and uncritical apings

of Georgian discourse’.6 Markman Ellis, likewise, has declared that

‘rather than being an example of assimilation, obsequiousness or mim-

icry, as many of Sancho’s recent critics have contended, the form and

substance of Sancho’s Letters repeatedly declare a culturally combative

exceptionalism that makes his book both transgressive and radical’.7

While fewer critics now argue that Sancho was assimilated or obse-

quious, the attention given to what we might call the ‘assimilation

debate’ has largely masked two other important and related threads in

Sancho studies: discussion of his commitment to anti-slavery and discus-

sion of his personal and literary relationship with other Africans,

whether free or enslaved. Yet it is in this arena, one supposes, that

Sancho’s alleged radicalism is most likely to be deployed. In fact, critics

have been prepared to voice divergent views on this aspect of Sancho’s

Letters but, from when modern critical thought about Sancho emerged in

the 1940s to the present day, they have been less willing to engage with

each other’s views on the subject. ‘Sancho’, says Wylie Sypher, one of the

earliest modern critics to comment on the Letters, ‘has little enough,

aside from his correspondence with Sterne, to say on the enslaving of his

race’.8 While the Letters is certainly no abolitionist polemic, Sypher does

overstate the case somewhat. As we shall see, many of Sancho’s letters

touch on slavery in one respect or another: the letter to Laurence Sterne,

a conscious appeal to the author to produce some abolitionist writing, is

merely the most famous. Although he does not allude directly to Sypher,

Edwards writes in a similar vein when he remarks that ‘apart from flip-

pant asides about his colour, only occasionally do we hear the voice of

the African and former slave’.9 Again, this understates Sancho’s willing-

ness to tackle the issues of race and slavery. Walvin, on the other hand,

notes that Sancho was ‘swift to spot a friend to his people’ and, although

‘overt political pleading was never foremost in his letters … by constantly

nagging his correspondents about the condition of the Blacks, he kept

the issue alive in their thoughts’.10 Likewise, Vincent Carretta argues that

Sancho’s comments on slavery ‘are as direct as almost any made during

the century by Black or White writers and are especially noteworthy

because they were made before sustained opposition to the African slave

trade began’.11 For Walvin and Carretta, discussion of race and slavery

permeates rather than punctuates Sancho’s Letters.Although their tone is very different, Walvin and Sypher agree about

the usefulness of the Letters to the abolition movement. While Sypher

84 Brycchan Carey

argues that ‘to bluestockings who found genius in milkwomen, [Sancho]

must have seemed a convincing instance of natural talent’, Walvin notes

that the Letters ‘seemed to offer tangible proof of black attainments and

black perfectibility and was adopted by the humanitarian campaign as

evidence and proof of their arguments’.12 Likewise, few subsequent writ-

ers have disagreed that Sancho’s most substantial contribution to the abo-

lition movement was both posthumous and accidental and that

abolitionist campaigners discovered in Sancho’s Letters not arguments

against slavery but rather, in Sandiford’s words, ‘eloquent proofs that the

African slave had the right to possess his own body and to determine the

disposition of his labor’.13 Indeed, contemporaries were in no doubt

about the message of Sancho’s Letters, and it assumed an immediate sig-

nificance and utility beyond its literary value. This was not accidental. In

her editorial preface to the Letters, Frances Crew claimed that ‘her motives

for laying them before the public were, the desire of shewing that an

untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European’. This piece

of practical anti-racism was mirrored in the way Sancho’s letters were used

by contemporary critics and by participants in the slavery debate. The

reviewers led the way, with the European Magazine and London Review argu-

ing that the Letters ‘will be read with avidity and pleasure by those who

desire to promote the common elevation of the human race’.14 Ralph

Griffiths’s now celebrated comment in the Monthly Review was ‘let it no

longer be said, by half-informed philosophers, and superficial investiga-

tors of human nature, that Negers, as they are vulgarly called, are inferior

to any white nation in mental abilities’.15 While these early comments

were clearly directed against various forms of racism, they were not nec-

essarily abolitionist insofar as they did not explicitly call for the abolition

of either slavery or the slave trade. By the mid 1780s, however, abolition-

ist writers such as Peter Peckard and Thomas Clarkson were citing Sancho

in exactly the way Crew appears to have intended, Peckard describing

Sancho as ‘a rational and moral writer’ and Clarkson assuming that

Sancho and his Letters ‘are too well known, to make any extract, or indeed

any farther mention of him, necessary’.16 More notoriously, Thomas

Jefferson felt the need to dismiss Sancho’s achievements as an aberration,

arguing that, while Sancho’s writing compares favourably with writing by

other Africans, ‘when we compare him with the writers of the race among

whom he lived and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has

taken his own stand, we are compelled to enrol him at the bottom of the

column.17 Jefferson also hinted that the Letters might be a forgery. Clearly,

such a strong attack on Sancho would not have been necessary had many

others not been making the opposite case.


It is thus plain to see that the Letters was an important, if posthumous,

component of the discourse of slavery and abolition. Yet, although

adopted by abolitionists, and attacked by those who argued against abo-

lition, it is still sometimes asserted that Sancho, in Sypher’s words, ‘has

little enough, aside from his correspondence with Sterne, to say on the

enslaving of his race’. This is a fundamental misreading of the Letters,the anti-slavery slant of which is not merely confined to the way they

were used after his death. Sancho’s response to slavery and racism,

although not his major theme, is nonetheless a significant and sus-

tained part of the Letters and, in many places, Sancho addresses the sub-

ject directly. In his most famous letter, written to Laurence Sterne in

1766, he tells the novelist that ‘I am one of those people whom the vul-

gar and illiberal call “Negurs” ’, an insult which had clearly been levelled

at him.18 The letter, which had been inspired by a reading of Sterne’s

Sermons of Mr Yorick, is an explicit call for ‘humanity’ in the slave trade,

even if not a clear demand for abolition, as Sancho asks the author ‘to

give one half hour’s attention to slavery, as it is at this day practised in

our West Indies’. By asking Sterne to publicize the condition of ‘my

brother moors’, Sancho publicly aligns himself with those who opposed

slavery, and makes a conscious anti-slavery statement as significant as

any made by more celebrated members of the abolition movement.19

Yet the Sterne letter is not the extent of Sancho’s discussion of race and

slavery. On one occasion, he reflects with relief that he and his family

‘were gazed at – followed, &c. &c. – but not much abused’ on a day out,

which suggests that racial taunting was a regular occurrence in their

lives.20 This personal experience is matched by an opposition to slavery

informed by extensive reading on the subject. In a letter to John Ireland

written in 1779, Sancho applauds the works of Granville Sharp, whose

publications Sancho thought ‘of consequence to every one of humane

feelings’.21 In an uncompromising letter to Jabez Fisher, identified by

Carretta as a Philadelphia Quaker, Sancho condemns the ‘unchristian

and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes’ and describes the

African-born poet Phillis Wheatley as ‘Genius in bondage’.22 In a letter

to Jack Wingrave, a young man out in India in 1778, Sancho condemns

the ‘abominable traffic for slaves – and the horrid cruelty and treachery

of the petty Kings – encouraged by their Christian customers – who

carry them strong liquors – to enflame their national madness – and

powder – and bad fire-arms – to furnish them with the hellish means of

killing and kidnapping’.23 Although not dominant, genuine and

informed opposition to slavery is nonetheless a recurring theme

throughout the Letters and clearly demonstrates that, in his lifetime,

86 Brycchan Carey

Sancho was committed to persuading his friends and correspondents to

adopt a stance similar to his own.

Sancho’s rhetoric on matters of race and slavery, expressed in letters

both to private friends and to public figures, seems to be matched by

recognition of his important position in the London black community.

As a former butler to an aristocratic family, and as a property owner at a

time when only property ownership could confer the full rights of a

citizen, Sancho’s opinion carried weight. Giving Charles Browne, a stew-

ard to the Baronet Sir Charles Bunbury, a reference for an unnamed

black servant in August 1775 is, for the person involved, a serious

business. Yet the tone of voice seems incongruous with the seriousness

of the task. Sancho writes:

If I knew a better man than yourself – you wou’d not have had this

application – which is in behalf of a merry – chirping – white tooth’d –

clean – tight – and light little fellow; – with a woolly pate – and face

as dark as your humble; – Guiney-born, and French bred – the sulky

gloom of Africa dispelled by Gallic vivacity – and that softened again

with English sedateness – a rare fellow! … As I believe you associate

chiefly with good-hearted folks – it is possible your interest may be of

service to him. – I like the rogue’s looks, or a similarity of colour

should not have induced me to recommend him. – Excuse this little

scrawl from your friend, &c. IGN. SANCHO.24

The flippancy belies the importance of the occasion and may mask

Sancho’s anxiety about finding a place for this young man. More likely,

it is a rhetorical self-construction, establishing Sancho in a position of

social equality or superiority with regard to Charles Browne. Sancho

alludes to his race, but there is no clear sense that this alters the rela-

tionship between the two. Rather, there is a tone of camaraderie in this

correspondence between a pair of upper servants to influential members

of the aristocracy. But the letter also tells us much about Sancho’s place

within the London black community of the 1770s. Clearly, Sancho is

someone who is respected both by black workers and by white employ-

ers otherwise he would not be giving the reference at all. His comments

about the ‘sulky gloom of Africa’ may seem problematic to modern read-

ers, but of course they may well be ironic, a strategy to defuse racial prej-

udice by bringing it into the open where its power can be safely

dissipated. And Sancho’s claim that he is not writing the reference

merely because of ‘a similarity of colour’ rather contradicts the fact that

the act of writing this letter is itself an act of solidarity. The letter thus


encompasses two of Sancho’s social identities: Sancho as one of the net-

work of upper servants and property-owning tradesmen and Sancho as a

member of the London black community.

Sancho’s position in the London black community can be seen in

other letters, particularly in those to another black servant, Julius

Soubise. In the first of these, written in October 1772, Sancho offers

advice to this famously wayward youth, whose indiscretions were later

to be splashed across the newspapers. This advice includes one of

Sancho’s strongest condemnations of slavery: ‘Look round upon the

miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour – superadded to

ignorance, – see slavery, and the contempt of those very wretches who

roll in affluence from our labours superadded to this woeful catalogue –

hear the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar.’25 The

moral is that Soubise should think himself lucky in comparison with

others of his ‘unfortunate colour’ – and behave accordingly. Although pre-

sented in the Letters as a personal letter, Sancho must surely have intended

this stern warning to have reached a wider audience than Soubise alone.

Crew claims in her editorial note that ‘not a single letter is here printed

from any duplicate preserved by himself, but all have been collected from

the various friends to whom they were addressed’. In this case this could

not have been true as Soubise had left for India in July 1777 and had not

returned. Either Soubise had distributed this letter himself before leaving,

which is unlikely given its admonitory tone, or Sancho had indeed

preserved a copy, either as a keepsake or with an eye to publication. As

Carretta has noted, this one instance ‘suggests that Sancho made copies of

the letters he wrote, a common practice’.26 This is one of only a few letters

that we are sure could not have been collected by Crew, but its subject

matter no less than its recipient are suggestive. Given the public interest

in Soubise’s activities (albeit some years after this letter had been written)

and given Sancho’s clear willingness, amply demonstrated in his letter to

Sterne, to use celebrity to advance anti-slavery ideas, it is more than

tempting to speculate that Sancho’s advice to Soubise was being kept in

reserve to make public the anti-slavery sentiments it expresses. In either

case, the fact that this is included in the Letters undermines Crew’s claims

that all the letters were collected posthumously from the recipients, and

provides powerful evidence that Sancho had more control over which let-

ters would appear in print than Crew admitted.

This point is worth examination. Sancho’s death was neither sudden

nor unexpected and it is inconceivable that in his last days Sancho did

not give some thought to how both his family and his work would

survive after his death. His letters in the months leading up to his death,

88 Brycchan Carey

on 14 December 1780, are full of references to his own illness and his

own mortality. In June 1780 he tells John Spink that: ‘in truth my eyes

fail, I feel myself since last winter an old man all at once – the failure of

eyes – the loss of teeth – the thickness of hearing’.27 In November, his

illness is so severe that he is forced to ‘go upon all fours – the conflict has

been sharp, I hope the end is near – I never remember them to have

swelled so much’.28 Clearly he had time to plan how his letters might be

published after his death. Under these circumstances, on 9 September

1780, three months before his death, he wrote to Crew, with injunctions

of secrecy, to tell her about a project that was occupying his mind:

I HAVE the honour to address you upon a very interesting, serious, crit-

ical subject. – Do not be alarmed! it is an affair which I have had at

heart some days past – it has employed my meditations more than

my prayers. – Now I protest I feel myself in the most aukward of situ-

ations – but it must out – and so let it. – But how does my good, my

half-adored Mrs. C[ocksedge]? And how does Mrs A—? … – I would

not wish you to mention what I so boldly advanced in the beginning

of this letter. – No; let it die away like a miser’s hope.29

The letter, which switches abruptly to playful but inconsequential

gossip and, just as abruptly, back again, concludes with a postscript

promising ‘the remainder in our next’. This promised next letter is not

included in the Letters but, since Sancho lived for another three months,

there was no reason why it would not have been written. There is also

no indication of what this affair might be about. Sancho’s reference to

the ‘serious, critical subject’ might be no more than an ironic ploy to

expose the inconsequentiality of the gossip. However, the abruptness of

the switch, and the conjunction used: ‘but’, suggest that he is switching

topics completely. The exaggerated triviality of the gossip serves to high-

light the importance of the hidden topic rather than merely to satirize

the conventions of social chit-chat. Given that Crew did in fact present

the world with Sancho’s hoard of letters, the suspicion must be that the

letter quoted here marks the first stage in the inception of the Letters, amoment when Sancho invited Crew to be, in effect, his literary executor.

If that is the case, then this letter has been included by Crew as a key,

hinting at the real process masked in her editorial note. If so, then it is

plausible to argue that Sancho may have played a far more active role in

the construction of the Letters than has previously been thought.

Whether or not Sancho conspired with Crew in the weeks before his

death, and whether or not he planned that his letters might be collated


into a cohesive whole, it is nonetheless not disputed that he constructed

for himself a sentimental persona that remains consistent throughout

the Letters. This aspect of the text has frequently attracted comment.

Indeed, Markman Ellis has suggested that ‘the book asks to be read as a

kind of Shandean epistolary novel, rather than as a biography in

letters’.30 As Ellis’s argument implies, the book is neither biography nor

autobiography, nor is it a slave narrative of the sort later made famous

by Olaudah Equiano. (The nearest we have to that is Joseph Jekyll’s brief

Life of Ignatius Sancho, which appears at the front of the Letters.31) And

the book is undoubtedly sentimental. We might, of course, expect that

to be the case, given that the sentimental novel – and perhaps especially

the epistolary novel of sentiment – was arguably the most popular liter-

ary form of the late eighteenth century, competing only with sentimen-

tal poetry and with devotional literature, much of which was itself

sentimental in nature. For an example of the latter, we need look no fur-

ther than Sterne’s Sermons of Mr Yorick, the text that had inspired Sancho

to write to Sterne in 1766. But the contention that the Letters can be read

as a sort of sentimental novel has a more immediate significance to the

question of Sancho’s abolitionism, since it is in this literature that we

can discern the development of popular anti-slavery sentiment in the

1760s and 1770s. Certainly, a few works of anti-slavery polemic had

appeared by the time of Sancho’s death in 1780, almost all, as we have

seen, written by Benezet, Sharp, and Wesley. However, despite some

notable triumphs in the courts, their works had not prompted a mass

movement against slavery and there is little evidence that they were

widely read. The latter at least was not true of literary writers. As far back

as 1766, Sarah Scott had condemned the worst excesses of slavery in her

popular sentimental novel The History of Sir George Ellison.32 In 1773,

John Bicknell and Thomas Day produced a best-selling sentimental

poem, The Dying Negro, an epistolary poem with an overtly abolitionist

theme.33 And in 1777, Henry Mackenzie, the celebrated author of TheMan of Feeling, appeared to question the brutality of plantation slavery

in his epistolary novel Julia de Roubigné.34 It is in this context, therefore,

that we might read the Letters and view it not as merely sentimental but

also as an early statement in an emerging discourse of anti-slavery

sentiment.

Of course, it is one thing to argue that Sancho coincidentally wrote in

the same popular style as those who articulated early abolitionist

sentiment, and quite another to argue that he did this deliberately for

abolitionist purposes. As we have seen, Sancho was clear in his opposi-

tion to slavery and may well have taken a hand in the construction of

90 Brycchan Carey

the Letters. Reading between the lines, however, is no substitute for

incontrovertible proof. The evidence outlined above is persuasive but

circumstantial, and we do not have a clear indication that Sancho

intended to publish his letters as a single volume. However, we do know

that he was not averse to publication. In the first place, he had already

published four books of music in his own lifetime.35 In addition, we

know that he wrote to the newspapers since much of this public corre-

spondence appears in the Letters and two further letters have recently

been located.36 As Ellis has shown, several of his letters were antholo-

gized in 1778 and, had Sancho lived longer, this may have been the start

of a more extensive literary career.37 In April 1779, Sancho received a let-

ter from Edmund Rack, an editor of anthologies, asking if Sancho would

be prepared to allow some of his letters to be included in a forthcoming

anthology (which apparently never appeared) with the suitably senti-

mental title Letters of Friendship. Rack’s letter anticipates Crew’s editorial

note in that it asserts a specifically polemical purpose to publication.

Rack, ‘fully persuaded’ that God ‘regards the natives of Africa with equal

complacence as those of this or any other country’, hopes that the

letters, ‘if published, may convince some proud Europeans, that the

noblest gifts of God, those of the mind, are not confined to any nation

or people’. Sancho replied that if Rack believed:

The simple effusions of a poor Negro’s heart are worth mixing with

better things – you have my free consent to do as you please with

them – though in truth there wants no increase of books in the epis-

tolary way, nor indeed in any way – except we could add to the truly

valuable names of Robertson – Beattie – and Mickle – new Youngs –

Richardsons – and Sternes.38

The modesty is strategic, of course, and Sancho is plainly willing to see

his letters in print and clearly willing that they be used to make exactly

the same anti-racist point that Crew asserts as her motivation for editing

the Letters. He also appears to have a very good notion of where they

belong in the literary marketplace. His list of his reading, like his letters,

is eclectic but sentimental. He concludes with his favourite, Laurence

Sterne, so it is plausible that Samuel Richardson is a close second.

Significantly, Sancho brackets his own work with the work of these nov-

elists, and thus seems to be positioning his own letters as – potentially at

least – part of a sentimental epistolary tradition. Indeed, in many ways

the Letters does belong to this tradition. Whether or not the original idea

to publish had come from Sancho, the book itself was completed by


Crew, who compiled it from a collection of carefully ‘discovered’ manu-

scripts. This device is commonly found in the eighteenth-century novel,

and Crew’s editorial note resembles both those prefixed to novels com-

prised of supposedly discovered manuscripts and those attached to epis-

tolary novels (although, of course, so-called editorial notes to fictional

works themselves mimic those in bona fide collections). In this note,

Crew assures the reader that Sancho’s letters are private, that he kept no

duplicates, and that the letters which appear in the Letters have all ‘been

collected from the various friends to whom they were addressed’. She

thus effaces any hint of Sancho’s editorial contribution, while also

attempting to disguise the extent of her own intervention. The letters,

like those ‘presented’ by the purportive editors of epistolary novels, are

not described as being ‘ordered’, ‘arranged’, or ‘selected’. Rather, Crew

speaks only of ‘laying them before the publick’ as if they were a

complete and unified body of work that she had passively discovered.

Despite this, however, Crew’s editorial role was clearly not entirely

passive. Several of the letters have footnotes, and the collection as a

whole is prefixed with a biography specially commissioned for the occa-

sion. Crew was clearly selective, a point now established by Carretta’s

discovery of two previously unpublished letters and by John Ralph

Willis’s publication of a number of letters likely to have been written by

Sancho.39 The letters may either have been collected from friends or col-

lected as a complete bundle from the dying Sancho but, in either case,

Crew had the opportunity to edit and arrange them according to any

system she chose (and even if Sancho did have a hand in the project, she

could still have overridden his wishes). While the chronological

arrangement she adopted might seem obvious and logical, it was not

necessarily so. She could have chosen other arrangements with both

precedent and justification, and there is no reason why she should not

have ordered the letters by subject matter or by recipient. However, the

decision to place the letters in chronological order gives the Letters a

narrative structure rather than a structure based on argument, style, or

relationship. Although the Letters records many friendships, it is not the

anthologized Letters of Friendship that Edmund Rack had planned but,

instead, letters recording the life, friendships, and decline of a particular

individual. These letters tell the story of a middle-aged man at the cen-

tre of a domestic and commercial network operated through the literary

device of letters in which are disseminated breaking news, political

opinions, homely wisdom, poignant if light satire, and opinions on the

advantages of benevolence, Christian piety, and responsible commerce.

The subject matter is thus as sentimental as the style, and Sancho

92 Brycchan Carey

himself is cast in a role strongly reminiscent of the sentimental hero of

a sentimental novel, a role that might not have been apparent had his

letters not been given the chronological structure common to senti-

mental epistolary novels. Moreover, this is the tradition in which he

himself, in his letter to Rack, positions his work.

In this reading, the Letters is more closely integrated with the

mainstream of early anti-slavery writing. Sancho becomes a sentimental

hero who would be recognizable as such to the readers of Scott and

Mackenzie as well as to the readers of Sterne and Richardson. His heroism

is demonstrated through a series of sentimental vignettes that finally add

up to overarching narrative ‘shewing’, in Crew’s words, ‘that an untu-

tored African may possess abilities equal to an European’. The Letters can

thus been seen as a sustained work of sentimental rhetoric emerging

from the literary tradition of anti-slavery that Sancho clearly knew well,

and available as a further and persuasive text in that tradition. Moreover,

despite those who lament Sancho’s seeming unwillingness to engage

with anti-slavery sentiment, the collection offers many personal and

political arguments against slavery, and shows some evidence of having

been constructed, perhaps by Sancho himself, with those arguments in

mind. As such, the Letters can be ranked among the best and the most

successful examples of abolitionist rhetoric produced in the years leading

up to the establishment of a formal abolition movement.

Notes

1. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Carretta (London:

Penguin, 1998), p. 4. All quotations from the Letters are taken from this

edition.

2. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, facsimile with an introduction by Paul

Edwards (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), p. i.

3. James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945(London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 61.

4. Paul Edwards, ‘Black Writers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in

The Black Presence in English Literature, ed. David Dabydeen (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 50–67 (p. 52); Walvin, Black andWhite, pp. 85–6.

5. Keith A. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-CenturyAfro-English Writing (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), p. 79.

6. Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne’, Research in AfricanLiterature, 29, 4 (Winter 1998), 88–105 (p. 103).

7. Markman Ellis, ‘Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the

Politics of Form’, in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed.

Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,

2001), pp. 199–217 (p. 212).


8. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eigh-teenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 149.

9. Edwards, Letters (1968), p. i.

10. Walvin, Black and White, p. 87.

11. Vincent Carretta, ‘Introduction’ to Letters, pp. ix–xxxii (p. xxxi).

12. Sypher, p. 149; Walvin, Black and White, p. 87. The ‘milkwoman’ Sypher has

in mind is Ann Yearsley, also known as ‘Lactilla, the poetical milkmaid of

Bristol’, who published several collections of verse (including a sentimental

anti-slavery poem), as well as plays and a novel, between 1785 and 1803.

13. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment, p. 88.

14. European Magazine and London Review, 2 (1782), 199–202.

15. Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal, 69 (1783), 492–7.

16. Thomas Clarkson, An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species,particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was honouredwith the first prize in the University of Cambridge, for the year 1785 (London:

T. Cadell and J. Phillips, 1786), p. 175; Peter Peckard, Am I not a Man? And aBrother? With all Humility Addressed to The British Legislature (Cambridge:

J. Archdeacon, 1788), p. 19.

17. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: J. Stockdale, 1787),

p. 139.

18. Letters, p. 73.

19. Ibid., p. 74. For the sermon that inspired Sancho, see Laurence Sterne,

‘Sermon X: Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, Considered’,

The Sermons of Mr Yorick, 2 vols (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760), II,

pp. 73–105.

20. Letters, p. 95. In a footnote, Carretta argues that this was ‘not necessarily

racially motivated abuse; members of the London mob frequently harassed

their social betters’. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that this was not‘racially motivated abuse’ either, and the suspicion must remain.

21. Ibid., p. 164.

22. Ibid., pp. 111–12.

23. Ibid., p. 131.

24. Ibid., p. 60.

25. Ibid., p. 46.

26. Carretta, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi.

27. Letters, p. 230.

28. Ibid., p. 241.

29. Ibid., p. 236.

30. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in theSentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 81.

31. For a detailed discussion of the problematic nature of Joseph Jekyll’s ‘Life of

Ignatius Sancho’, see Brycchan Carey, ‘ “The extraordinary Negro”: Ignatius

Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography’, British Journal forEighteenth-Century Studies, 26, 1 (2003), 1–13.

32. Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 1996).

33. Thomas Day and John Bicknell, The Dying Negro (London: W. Flexney, 1773).

For more on the relationship between Sancho’s Letters and The Dying Negro,

see Carey, ‘ “The extraordinary Negro” ’, pp. 8–9.

94 Brycchan Carey

34. Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, A Tale, in a Series of Letters, 2 vols

(London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777).

35. These appeared between 1767 and 1779. They have more recently appeared

together in facsimile. See Josephine R. B. Wright, Ignatius Sancho(1729–1780), an Early African Composer in England: The Collected Editions of hisMusic in Facsimile (London and New York: Garland, 1981).

36. Letters, pp. 81–2, 113–15, 214–15. Another newspaper letter, on pp. 119–20,

was ‘inserted unknown to Mr. Sancho’. See also Vincent Carretta, ‘Three West

Indian Writers of the 1780s Revisited and Revised’, Research in AfricanLiterature, 29, 4 (1998), 73–86, in which Carretta reproduces two further let-

ters, both to the Morning Post.37. Ellis, ‘Ignatius Sancho’s Letters’, pp. 205–6.

38. Letters, pp. 151–2. Carretta points out that, although dated as January 1779

in the first edition, later editions confirm that these letters were in fact writ-

ten in April. See Letters, pp. 300–1.

39. J. R. Willis, ‘New Light on the Life of Ignatius Sancho: Some Unpublished

Letters’, Slavery and Abolition, 1 (1980), 345–58; Carretta, ‘Three West Indian

Writers’.


96

6Who’s Afraid of Cannibals? Some Uses of the CannibalismTrope in Olaudah Equiano’sInteresting NarrativeMark Stein

None of his predecessors asserts his or her identity as a Briton

more fully than Equiano. … he adopts the cultural, political,

religious, and social values that enable him to be accepted as

British. Yet he always retains his perspective as an African who

has been deracinated and thus has the advantage of knowing his

adopted British culture from both the inside and the outside, a

perspective that W. E. B. Du Bois calls the double consciousness

of the Black person in a predominantly White society.1

Like Odysseus embarked for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on

Rocinante, Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella has

become a figure in the collective consciousness of the West,

transcending the book which – in its multitude of editions,

translations, imitations, and adaptations (‘Robinsonades’) –

celebrates his adventures.2

The cannibal is a fleeting creature, hard to come by, resident at the limit

of time and space. He is more a creature than a feature, by which I mean

that the practice of cannibalism is the abstraction of all things evil

rather than one particular ethnographic feature of a social collectivity.

Given its volatile and ephemeral character, first-hand evidence of can-

nibalism is scarce.3 Indeed, William Arens, in his study The Man-EatingMyth, treats cannibalism as just that, a myth.4 Arens demonstrates his

radical scepticism towards the practice of anthropophagy, or rather

towards the evidence anthropologists have relied upon to underscore its

existence. The significance of anthropophagy to anthropology made

Arens suspicious and highly critical of his own discipline, much to the

chagrin of fellow practitioners. The insistence on cannibalism as an

established fact – although it is so hard to observe and although it seems

to vanish as you look for it – tells us more about the anthropologist,

Arens concludes, than about their subjects of enquiry. Since the publi-

cation of his controversial study, a particular type of Kulturkritik has

developed; this cultural critique of cannibalism assumes that our

thoughts of the Other are in need of unpicking as they are at once reflec-

tions on the Same.

Cannibalism is a powerful trope, and a potent rhetorical weapon,

rather than a feature of a given social group with many characteristics,

one of which might be the symbolic, strategic, or even ‘real’ practice of

anthropophagy under certain circumstances. Cannibalism cancels out

any further traits, an overriding marker empowered to annul all other

ethnographic features. Peter Hulme has observed that ‘Cannibalism is –

as practice or accusation – quite simply the mark of greatest imaginable

cultural difference and therefore the greatest challenge to our categories

of understanding.’5 As the ultimate mark of otherness, of difference, of

barbarity even, it is conceived to reside in an interstitial space; it not

only marks but is relied upon to constitute the distinction between civ-

ilization and otherwise. When African British writers of the eighteenth

century articulated themselves, this was, on one level, an attempt sym-

bolically to leave behind this interstitial space.6 In reading Olaudah

Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, I want to look at how the cannibalism

trope is used; and how Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa) challenges our cate-

gories of understanding, as he does when describing being taken aboard

a slave ship for the first time: ‘I no longer doubted my fate; and quite

overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and

fainted. When I recovered a little I found some black people about

me. … I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with

horrible looks, red faces, and long hair.’7

From the early modern period onwards, the charge of cannibalism had

been used to justify belief in an inherent dichotomy between ‘savage’

and ‘civilized’; a perceived dichotomy that contributed in turn to the

discourses of legitimization wielded in defence of the transatlantic slave

trade and the institution of chattel slavery. In this context, it is signif-

icant that Equiano inserts his own fear of being eaten up at several

places in his narrative, and repeatedly demonstrates that he is afraid of

being eaten by the white men he encounters. Yet in the course of his

narrative, Equiano also demonstrates his ability to conquer his fear.

The first instance of Equiano fearing cannibalism occurs when the

young boy is kidnapped and put on board the slave ship in West Africa.

Who’s Afraid of Cannibals? 97

He experiences the vessel as ‘a world of spirits’ and considers his diag-

nosis confirmed by the crew’s whiteness, their hair texture, and their

language.8 A reading of phenotypic features, which in colonial discourse

mark out Africans as barbaric, is in turn performed on Europeans. A few

lines further on, when Equiano observes a huge copper pot, he is afraid

that he and the other black people are ‘to be eaten by those white men

with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair’.9 Equiano eventually allows

himself to be persuaded otherwise, but not before reversing the canni-

balism trope, dislodging it from its usage in colonial discourse and

reapplying it to the English crew. The effect is the undermining, the rel-

ativization even, of the trope’s unconstrained force. Simultaneously, the

one-sided reading of the signification of African physiognomy is unset-

tled and relativized by performing a reading of European physiognomy.

The next instance of Equiano fearing cannibalism takes place in the

passage describing his arrival in the Caribbean: ‘We thought by this we

should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us; … at last the

white people got some old slaves from the land to pacify us. They told

us we were not to be eaten, but to work … This report eased us much.’10

Equiano’s respite from the fear of cannibalism, with which his skills as a

cultural reader provide him, is temporary. On arrival in Barbados the

slaves are ‘examined … attentively’ by their potential buyers, and when

his fear resurfaces Equiano is not alone in thinking ‘we should be eaten

by these ugly men’.11 Significantly, it is the words of older slaves which

interrupt his fear of white cannibalism. Indicating the reliance on medi-

ators and collaborators to establish and uphold slavocracy, the older

slaves are brought in to pacify the new arrivals, reassuring them that

they will be worked and not cooked.

The Interesting Narrative is, of course, written by the mature Equiano

rather than by the child who is undergoing the journey into slavery.

When Equiano reports his first experiences of enslavement he purpose-

fully exposes himself as ‘naïve’ in thinking that the valuable cargo deliv-

ered by the slave ship might simply be eaten by Barbadian planters. This

belief is strategically ‘naïve’ – it serves to expose the avarice of the plan-

tation economy which is not satisfied by eating up a slave body only

once. This rhetorical ploy has been the subject of some critical atten-

tion. Henry Louis Gates Jr discusses the important strategy by which

Equiano uses ‘two distinct voices’ in his chapter on ‘The Trope of the

Talking Book’ in The Signifying Monkey, while Vincent Carretta draws on

W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of the ‘double consciousness’ to describe this

feature of Equiano’s text.12 Equiano’s use of this rhetorical strategy, con-

joined with his appropriation of the discourse of cannibalism, is put to

98 Mark Stein

effective use at this stage of his Interesting Narrative: by praising his

owner for not selling slaves by their weight, he reveals that to simply eat

up a slave once would short-change the planter who can expect a much

higher yield by putting his slaves to work and by ensuring their repro-

duction.13 In this way, he foregrounds the reality that African slaves can

still be bodily incorporated by the plantation economy and, indeed, are

thereby consumed more effectively. The cannibalism trope is thus

reconfigured: it is made to signify the plantocracy, and by extension

Europe, feeding on African bodies by carefully exploiting their maximum

potential.

Alan Rice has suggested that Equiano describes ‘slavers as inhuman, can-

nibalistic demons’ and that transportation in ‘the belly of ships that often

become literal graves is thus shown to be an equivalence to the barbarism

of cannibalism’.14 Yet it would seem that Equiano goes further than merely

suggesting an equivalence between the slave trade and cannibalism.

William Piersen argues that ‘As a mythopoeic analogy it does not seem far-

fetched to portray chattel slavery as a kind of economic cannibalism; and

in that sense, a mythic sense, stories of white man-eaters were true

enough.’15 Equiano, however, goes beyond relating chattel slavery to can-

nibalism, and transcends their mythical analogy. He carefully constructs

an African childhood at the beginning of his narrative, a childhood which,

in the light of Vincent Carretta’s recent work, could be considered a fic-

tional chapter of his autobiography.16 Yet Carretta’s findings substantiate

the strategic importance of the particular beginning chosen by Equiano. In

other words, if we take the opening section as not autobiographical but

fictional, then we acknowledge that Equiano chose carefully to devise the

opening’s effect on his readers. Describing social and familial institutions,

cultural practices, and even language systems, Equiano paints a vivid pic-

ture of an African culture which is deliberately jeopardized and destroyed

by the kidnapping and systematic separation of families, and by the inter-

mingling of ethnic groups in the Americas.17 In Equiano’s words, the

planters are the ‘ministers of that destruction’ and therefore mere ‘nomi-

nal Christians’.18 This wilful destruction, too, can be considered a form of

cultural anthropophagy, a depletion of the social systems devised to satiate

the plantocracy’s need for labour. In what can be called an abolitionist nar-

rative, then, Equiano exposes slavery itself as a form of anthropophagy.19

It is one of the text’s rhetorical strategies to turn a celebrated justification

for colonial expansion, cannibalism, into a figure critiquing the institution

of slavery.20

A third instance of the cannibalism trope occurs on Equiano’s first

journey to Europe, on board the Industrious Bee. The journey takes


twelve instead of the more usual six weeks and therefore provisions are

running low:

The ship had a very long passage; and on that account we had very

short allowance of provisions. … In our extremities the captain and

people told me in jest they would kill and eat me, but I thought them

in earnest, and was depressed beyond measure, expecting every

moment to be my last. … I did not know what to think of these white

people; I very much feared they would kill and eat me.21

Equiano reports his fear of being turned into provisions. Again, the

mature Equiano and implied author uses as focalizer his younger self who

apparently mistakes a joke for a serious intention. It is interesting that

Equiano stresses the jocular nature of the threat (‘told me in jest’). This

indicates that, from the perspective of the mature writer, the threat could

also have been a genuine one. The white captain is thus presented as a

potential cannibal, even if this image is crossed out as soon as it is con-

jured up by labelling the discourse humorous and Equiano’s youthful

perception as erroneous. Yet the distorted image of an English captain,

whose cannibalism is first evoked and then erased, endures under erasure.

The passage covers the better part of three pages in the ninth edition

and while Equiano not only lives to tell the tale, he ensures the particu-

lar significance of his reference is recognized. Equiano is this time

confronted with survival cannibalism. In Cannibalism and the ColonialWorld, Peter Hulme cites a number of sources supporting the existence

of ‘a long tradition of shipboard and other survival cannibalism’.22

Irrespective of whether Michael Henry Pascal, lieutenant in the Royal

Navy, now commanding a trading ship, was talking in jest or not, sur-

vival cannibalism was not unheard of. Equiano reminds his readers of

the uncomfortable fact.

Having insinuated survival cannibalism on board the Industrious Bee,Equiano, like a trickster, proceeds to translate survival cannibalism into

ritual cannibalism:

One night we lost a man overboard; and the cries and noise were so

great and confused, in stopping the ship, that I, who did not know

what was the matter, began, as usual, to be very much afraid, and to

think they were going to make an offering with me, and perform

some magic; which I still believed they dealt in. As the waves were

very high, I thought the Ruler of the seas was angry, and I expected to

be offered up to appease him … every time I was called I used to think

100 Mark Stein

it was to be killed. … However, all my alarms began to subside when

we got sight of land; and at last the ship arrived at Falmouth.23

Again, Equiano clearly distinguishes between his former and his present

beliefs when he expects that ‘they were going to make an offering with

me, and perform some magic’. This misreading of the crew’s intentions

mimics English misreadings of African cultural practices, but it also

inserts a hopeful note as it shows the scope for growth and for develop-

ment towards cogent cross-cultural readings, as exemplified by the

mature Equiano.24 But Equiano’s own development is not only a sign of

the possibility of mutual understanding; his translation of survival

cannibalism into ritual cannibalism enhances the text’s subversive

potential in that the latter form of anthropophagy was considered far

less acceptable to Equiano’s contemporaries. If cannibalism amongst

English crews goes ‘deeper’ than survival cannibalism born out of neces-

sity, then the trope can serve less well as a divide between Europe and its

Others than Equiano’s readers might have presumed. In fact, the trope

may become an unstable marker of this divide – if not a marker of the

divide’s instability. Moreover, by mimicking colonial discourse (in

lodging accusations of cannibalism) and by translating one form of

anthropophagy into another, Equiano stresses the tropicality of canni-

balism. Equiano’s textual tricksterdom dislodges cannibalism from the

realm of the real to suggest that its foremost existence is discursive.

Therefore, it is subject to the textual and rhetorical principles over

which Equiano displays skilful command.

It is while on board a ship bound for Europe that Equiano experiences

the most sustained threat of cannibalism, and his transformation of the

trope from marker of Otherness to rhetorical weapon takes place en route

to England. The way in which Equiano translates one form of cannibal-

ism into another, and the implications this has for his readers, is literally

brought home with the Industrious Bee. The seamen insist he is bound for

home, England, to where Equiano returns the cannibalism trope: the

man-eaters are brought in from the fringes of time and space to be rein-

serted into the ‘heart of whiteness’. In this act of creative appropriation,

Equiano makes strategic use of a trope designed to keep him in place. Not

only by authoring a narrative, by telling his life story, and by supporting

the abolitionist cause, does the author become an agent; it is through

his textual tricksterdom, too, that Equiano wields agency. He thereby

turns the Industrious Bee, and by extension England, into a ‘contact zone’,

to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term.25 The ship, and England, are spaces

where different cultures meet, where, more specifically, representatives of


different cultures engage. But Equiano, as his narrative attests, inhabits

an enmeshed position and is not strictly speaking a representative of any

one culture. He claims an African childhood, reports on his life in the

New World, and relates the episodes in England; all of which have

imprinted themselves on his identity.26 In the context of Pratt’s ImperialEyes, Equiano has not so much crossed various national and cultural bor-

ders but has lived in contact zones, zones which are shaped by him and

which have shaped him. Although these relationships of colonial

encounter are regularly marked by discrimination, antagonism, and

force, contact zones are not characterized by unilateral assimilation, but

by two-way or multi-directional influence across cultural divides.

Equiano is confronted with cannibalism precisely as he is approach-

ing England. Metaphorically, he brings cannibalism home to England.

He does not himself represent the cannibal figure; he does not himself

inhabit a role which would render him dangerous but at once recognizable

and therefore innocuous. Instead, he holds up a mirror to his contem-

porary readers, one that reflects a distorted image of white (or red)

English cannibals. Note that these are not cannibals with a capital C;

they are men, they are sailors, they are British subjects – and, poten-

tially, they also practise cannibalism. Cannibalism becomes one feature

amongst others and is thereby relativized. Such a conceptualization of

cannibalism undermines the attempt to banish the abject from the cen-

tre; Equiano returns projected fears to the centre and thereby empties

out the cannibalism trope.

While holding Igbo culture in high esteem, the Anglophile Equiano

also demonstrates an admiration for English culture. But rather than

swallowing English culture wholesale, he appropriates it, transforms it,

and partly adapts it. London had a large number of black residents in

the late eighteenth century: Peter Fryer, in Staying Power, puts the figure

at 10,000.27 Their presence critically and irrevocably changed England,

creating a multiculturalism avant la lettre, memorably reinvoked by

S. I. Martin in his historical novel Incomparable World.28 The hybrid ‘cul-

tural work’, to borrow Jane Tompkins’s term, and the new configura-

tions it enables, was reflected and partly brought about by writers such

as Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano.29 Equiano

both ‘swallows’ English culture and is ‘swallowed’ by it; distinctions are

blurred and processes of mutual transformation, though not balanced,

are in fact multi-directional ones.

The Interesting Narrative can be read in the context of an array of

genres: autobiography, spiritual autobiography, travelogue, picaresque

text, testimonio/confession, ethnography, and economic treatise

102 Mark Stein

among them. In some respects the Narrative can also be considered

a Robinsonade. Equiano’s travelogue and autobiography was first

published in 1789 as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of OlaudahEquiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, Written by Himself, seventy years

after the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures ofRobinson Crusoe … Written by Himself (1719). Both Crusoe and Equiano

are ‘self-made men’, although as a slave Equiano was not well placed for

this role. At the same time ‘self-making’ was of particular importance to

him – he had to constitute himself by retrieval from an institution

which rested upon the negation of his subject status. Crusoe, on the

other hand, had to remake himself outside society. Both Crusoe, who

comes to live on a Caribbean island, and Equiano, who eventually

settles in the British Isles, are alone and isolated; when enslaved Equiano

is at times without people who speak his language, while in England it

is cultural and political factors which isolate him. Both men were once

enslaved themselves and, significantly, both themselves use slave

labour.

Still, why consider the story of a ‘middle class white mercantilist

colonialist Protestant adventurer’ – as Robinson Crusoe has been dubbed –

alongside the autobiography of a black slave turned abolitionist intel-

lectual?30 The most striking parallel between the two texts, perhaps, is a

thematic feature. Crusoe and Equiano both fear engulfment: they are

afraid of becoming the victims of cannibalism. Robinson Crusoe’s fear of

anthropophagy may be understandable, given the contemporary

European discourse of cannibalism. It is remarkable, though, how

deeply ingrained and how persistent his fear is: he spends twenty years

on a Caribbean island without overcoming the fear of the Other. While

the earth and the sea both threaten to devour Crusoe as he encounters

storms and earthquakes, this fear of death is quickly diffused, despite

very real threats. Conversely, the fear of cannibals runs much deeper,

although at first there is no trace of anthropophagy. Peter Hulme has

therefore called Crusoe’s fear ‘psychotic inasmuch as it constantly dis-

avows all contradictory evidence’.31

The relationship between Crusoe and Equiano has been noted else-

where, and as early as 1808, in De la Littérature des Nègres, the Abbé

Henri-Baptiste Grégoire (1750–1831) observes an intertextual bond

between Equiano and Crusoe: ‘The work is written with that naivete,I had almost said, that roughness of a man of nature. His manner is that

of Daniel de Foe, in his Robinson Crusoe.’32 The French abolitionist here

suggests that Equiano self-consciously employs a particular mode to nar-

rate his story, and that the complex double narrative, the juxtaposition


of his younger with his mature self, is inspired by Defoe. It is, then, not

merely the castaway theme which connects the two texts, but also a for-

mal property. Grégoire’s correlation of Equiano with Crusoe, of Vassa

with Defoe, is significant in that it takes the Narrative as a literary text

rather than reducing it to an abolitionist treatise.

In view of these formal and thematic parallels it is tempting to

consider Olaudah Equiano as a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe. However,

Equiano not only grows rich, as Crusoe does, he also transforms himself

into an abolitionist, thereby gaining moral ground over Crusoe. A fur-

ther significant difference between the two life stories is that Equiano

becomes separated from his home and family, and ultimately develops

into an adventurer, not of his own volition but as a result of being kid-

napped and enslaved. The separation from his family is a consequence

of his enslavement and it is his struggle for freedom that turns him into

an adventurer. Conversely, it is Crusoe’s desire to leave behind his family

and his home town, Hull, which turns him into an adventurer. After his

departure, while in North Africa, he too is kidnapped and enslaved.

Unlike Equiano, this remains but a short episode in the early part of his

tale, but it is here that Crusoe gains experience as a slave-holder. He

makes his escape together with Xury only to enslave his friend after-

wards. In that slavocracy often entailed the systematic splitting up of

ethnic and linguistic groups, and even families, Equiano’s separation

from kin and country can be seen to be a consequence of slavery – and

this remains true regardless of whether we accept Equiano’s own

account of his African birth and subsequent kidnapping, or whether we

accept Carretta’s suggestion that Equiano was born into slavery in South

Carolina. While Equiano expresses a desire to return to Africa (ironically,

given their later strong association with the colonizing process, as a mis-

sionary), but never actually does succeed in his ambition, Crusoe’s desire

to leave his island and return to England does not last long once it is

consummated; soon after his return he leaves England, yet again of his

own volition.

The matrix of the white male bourgeois subject who decides to be

divorced from his family and society contrasts strongly with Equiano’s

enforced separation from kin and country. Equiano’s intertextual refer-

ences to Defoe do not seem to be a deliberate attempt to produce

a Robinsonade, employing a popular and tested form that might yield a

potboiler. His considered departures from the fold point to the limita-

tions of the Robinson Crusoe mode for a black writer and for black

self-expression. Many shared features – such as travel across the Atlantic,

enslavement, growing wealth, owning slaves, the desire to return – have

104 Mark Stein

a thoroughly distinct significance in Equiano’s text. In using the Crusoemode, Equiano adapts it to his own needs and thereby transcends the

sources he cannibalizes.

The texts converge again, however, in the protean nature of their

protagonists and their reception. Like Robinson Crusoe, The InterestingNarrative was not only a best-seller in the author’s lifetime; today it is

again a best-seller, with a range of editions in competition with each

other. The text appears in many different formats, from Norton’s Critical

Edition to the X-Press’s popular abridged version.33 Defoe’s RobinsonCrusoe and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative derive their power from their

mutability. Admittedly, The Interesting Narrative does not command the

large textual following of Robinson Crusoe. But Equiano can certainly

count as an ancestor figure of black British literature, as his influence on

writers such as Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen,

S. I. Martin, and others suggests.34 Given the notion of Britain as a con-

tact zone, and Equiano’s resurgent popularity, a modification of the lines

by J. M. Coetzee, quoted at the start of this chapter, may be in order:

Like Odysseus embarked for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on

Rocinante, like Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella,

Equiano going to the North Pole has become a figure in the collective

consciousness of the West, transcending the book.

Notes

1. Vincent Carretta, ‘Introduction’, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings,ed. Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. xvii. Subsequent references to TheInteresting Narrative are from this edition.

2. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Introduction’, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999), p. v.

3. See Peter Hulme, ‘Introduction: The Cannibal Scene’, Cannibalism and theColonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–38.

4. William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1979).

5. Hulme, ‘The Cannibal Scene’, p. 20.

6. See C. L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 17–19.

7. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, p. 55.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 60.

11. Ibid.


12. Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American LiteraryCriticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 153;

Carretta, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii.

13. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, p. 110.

14. Alan Rice, ‘ “Who’s Eating Whom”: The Discourse of Cannibalism in the

Literature of the Black Atlantic from Equiano’s Travels to Toni Morrison’s

Beloved’, Research in African Literatures, 29, 4 (1998), 107–21 (p. 113).

15. Cited in Hulme, ‘Introduction’, p. 35.

16. Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an

Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity’, Slavery and Abolition 20, 3 (1999),

96–105.

17. Equiano poignantly comments upon this practice and the suffering it entails

in Chapter V of his narrative (Interesting Narrative, p. 110).

18. Ibid., p. 61.

19. The text can be considered an abolitionist narrative even though the author’s

own dealing in slaves, before turning his attention to the abolition of the

slave trade, complicates the matter somewhat.

20. We can compare Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), which pursues

the consequences of the trade in bodies on British attitudes toward her

colonies. Here Swift interprets the British relationship with Ireland as one of

bodily consumption. See Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 83, and Charlotte

Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery,1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 49–80.

21. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, pp. 64–5.

22. Hulme, ‘The Cannibal Scene’, p. 24.

23. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, pp. 66–7.

24. Carretta has suggested that ‘Equiano appears to offer the transformation of

his own attitude toward the varieties of eighteenth-century slavery as a

model for the moral progress of his readers as individuals of the society he

now shares with them’ (Carretta, ‘Introduction’, p. xx).

25. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:

Routledge, 1992), p. 4.

26. Such an imbricated identity, drawing upon a range of influences, can be

accounted for in the context of Paul Gilroy’s study The Black Atlantic: Modernityand Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), an analysis of such engage-

ments between the African diaspora and the West. The Black Atlantic is a model

which enables a historicized notion of blackness, one that draws upon various

influences, as opposed to an essentialist conception that can be traced back

only to the African continent. Gilroy has been criticized by Laura Chrisman in

her recent study Postcolonial Contraventions (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 2003). For a comment on the confluence of Britain and the figure of the

slave ship see my ‘Undoing Empire: Work and Leisure in the Gallery of Trade

and Empire’, Journal for the Study of British Culture, 7, 2 (2000), 153–67.

27. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto

Press, 1984), p. 203.

28. S. I. Martin, Incomparable World (London: Quartet, 1996).

29. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

106 Mark Stein

30. Kevin L. Cope, ‘All Aboard the Ark of Possibility; or, Robinson Crusoe Returns

from Mars as a Small-Footprint, Multi-Channel Indeterminacy Machine’,

Studies in the Novel, 30 (1998), 150–63 (p. 151).

31. Peter Hulme, ‘Robinson Crusoe and Friday’, Colonial Encounters: Europe andthe Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 175–222

(p. 194).

32. Henri Grégoire, An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, andLiterature of Negroes, trans. David Bailie Warden, ed. and intro. Graham

Russell Hodges (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 97. See also

S. E. Ogude, ‘Olaudah Equiano and the Tradition of Defoe’, African LiteraturesToday, 14 (1984), 77–92, and Bill Overton, ‘Countering Crusoe: Two Colonial

Narratives’, Critical Survey, 4, 3 (1992), 302–10.

33. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, theAfrican, Written by Himself, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Norton Critical

Editions, 2001); The African: Olaudah Equiano (London: X-Press, 1998).

34. Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); Fred D’Aguiar, Feedingthe Ghosts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997); David Dabydeen, A Harlot’sProgress (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); S. I. Martin, Incomparable World.


108

7‘From His Own Lips’: The Politics of Authenticity in A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an ApprenticedLabourer in JamaicaDiana Paton

In January 1838, the abolitionist newspaper the British Emancipatorintroduced its description of the ill-treatment of George Robinson, a

Jamaican apprentice (former slave), with the claim that: ‘the following

brief history of the cruel wrongs and sufferings endured by this innocent

victim of the accursed system of apprenticeship may be relied on with

as much confidence as the “Narrative of James Williams” ’.1 The text

referred to was A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, byJames Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica.2 This incidental

remark confirms that, although it has now been largely forgotten, James

Williams’s Narrative of Events was widely known immediately after its

publication in 1837. The Narrative went through at least seven editions

in 1837 and 1838, and was also reprinted in whole or in part in newspa-

pers in both Britain and Jamaica.3 Williams’s sufferings and struggles

were, briefly, so well known that they could be used to guide British

readers’ expectations and understandings of other similar stories. The

introduction to the account of George Robinson’s experiences also indi-

cates the centrality of evaluations of truth-claims and authenticity in

the publication and reception of this and other writing by and about

enslaved and apprenticed people. In order to assure readers of the truth

of the report that is to follow, the author invokes Williams’s book as

an example of testimony that ‘may be relied on with … confidence’,

bolstering the status of Williams’s Narrative of Events in using it to

support another first-person testimony.

A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834 is a unique text.

It shares much with the genre that has come to be known as slave

narrative. However, its target is not slavery itself, but apprenticeship, the

system of coerced labour that replaced slavery in the British Empire from

1834. Like slave narratives, Williams’s Narrative was produced for a polit-

ical purpose: in this case, the mobilization of the British public to cam-

paign for the full abolition of apprenticeship. And like slave narratives,

the persuasiveness of its claim to truthfulness was critical to its political

success. The producers of A Narrative of Events used some familiar textual

means to establish the pamphlet’s authenticity, for example, framing it

with documents that use the testimony of others to assert its reliability.

They also employed some unusual and potentially radical methods to

do so. In particular, the Narrative is written in language that attempts

to represent James Williams’s Jamaican Creole speech. This chapter

critically assesses these strategies, placing them in the context of the

political constraints within which the Narrative’s producers worked. It

suggests that apparently patronizing and controlling authenticating

strategies were in this case more subversive than they at first appear.

James Williams’s Narrative has not, as yet, been integrated into the

emerging canons of African diasporic or African Atlantic writing. In

part, this is due to the brevity of the text, which runs to a mere 10,000

words. Moreover, the Narrative was produced by Williams in conjunc-

tion with a white amanuensis, Archibald Palmer, and thus makes no

claim to have been ‘written by himself’. The critical hierarchy that val-

ues writings claiming sole black authorship above those produced in

more complex conditions contributes to the marginalization of works

like Williams’s. As Rafia Zafar has recently argued, although texts ‘pro-

duced under the direction of white[s] … suffer … in their estimation by

modern critics, from that limitation’, such texts can be interrogated for

the ‘experiments in literary masking’ at work within them.4 Meanwhile,

the Jamaican–British routes by which Williams travelled the Atlantic

make him irrelevant to those attempting to establish a US-focused

African American canon.5 Post-nationalist and diasporically oriented

approaches to the history and literature of African-descended peoples in

the Americas may mean that Williams’s Narrative receives more critical

attention in future.6

James Williams was born to enslaved parents in 1819. He grew up on

Penshurst pimento plantation, in the parish of St Ann in the north of

Jamaica, a time and place marked by increasing conflict over slavery.7

The growing influence of the British anti-slavery movement put

pressure on planters, with contradictory results for enslaved people.

The Politics of Authenticity in A Narrative 109

While outside monitoring of planter behaviour meant that extreme

atrocities committed on slaves could no longer be easily hidden,

slave-owners’ bitterness at what they perceived as an infringement on

their liberties often increased their vindictiveness towards slaves. The

ending of the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807 also exacerbated

the exploitation of enslaved people in the colonies, as planters attempted

to maintain the profits extracted from a declining population of workers.8

In 1834 Williams, along with all slaves in the British Empire, became

an ‘apprentice’ under the provisions of the 1833 Abolition Act. The

change promised much, including the prospect of eventual freedom,

which was to arrive after a six-year period of ‘apprenticeship’. In the

short term, however, apprentices remained subject to the authority of

their former owners, who were entitled to unpaid labour and obedience

from their former slaves. The system led to intense conflict between app-

rentices and apprentice-holders, apprentices and state officials, and

apprentice-holders and state representatives.9 Many British abolitionists

opposed apprenticeship. Most prominent among them was Joseph

Sturge, a Quaker businessman, who in 1837 went to the Caribbean to

collect material for an exposé of the cruelties of apprenticeship.10 He

spent much of his time in Jamaica, where a Baptist missionary put him

in touch with James Williams. Sturge, who may well have been looking

for a likely candidate to produce a first-person account of his or her suf-

ferings, paid for Williams to purchase his freedom, brought him to

England, and arranged for the production of his Narrative.11

A Narrative of Events is made up of three sections. Immediately after

the title page is a 400-word ‘Advertisement’ signed by Thomas Price, the

minister of the East Devonshire Baptist church, Bishopsgate, East

London. The Advertisement assures readers that what follows is truthful

and authentic, and attempts to guide their responses to it, asserting, for

instance, that ‘that heart must be callous and brutal, the deepest feelings

of which are not stirred by his narrative’.12 The Advertisement is fol-

lowed by the main text of the pamphlet, Williams’s Narrative itself, writ-

ten in the first person. This, the longest section, narrates Williams’s

experiences since the beginning of apprenticeship, as well as the experi-

ences of other apprentices on the same plantation and in the local

prisons where Williams was several times incarcerated. Williams

describes his repeated victimization by his master and mistress since

apprenticeship began. He details his frequent floggings, and discusses

his multiple periods of imprisonment, almost always as punishment

for events beyond his control. In a moving passage he describes how an

elderly African man, Henry James, was beaten to death. The Narrative

110 Diana Paton

describes a systematic pattern of sexual violence committed against

women imprisoned in the house of correction, and asserts that the

special magistrates, who were supposed to ensure that the law was fairly

administered, routinely colluded with apprentice-holders to punish

apprentices illegally. Whereas the Advertisement provides an interpreta-

tion of the meaning of Williams’s experiences, the Narrative itself does

not overtly make more general points about apprenticeship, nor does it

directly address the reader.

The final section of A Narrative of Events – unsigned but probably also by

Thomas Price – moves back to referring to Williams in the third person. It

exhorts the reader to take action to bring the apprenticeship system to an

end. Directly addressing ‘British Christians’ and the ‘people of England’,

it argues that they are responsible for the suffering detailed in the main

text: ‘it is with your connivance, and will henceforth be with your sanc-

tion, that these outrages are perpetrated. Shall they be continued, or shall

they cease for ever? We wait in confidence, but with thrilling interest for

your reply.’13 The polemical language of the last few pages contrasts

starkly with the bare descriptive prose of the main section of the Narrative.James Williams’s Narrative is most usefully understood in its political

context: the campaign for the end of apprenticeship and the establish-

ment of complete juridical freedom in the British colonies. It was a

context in which the question of whether a former slave was telling the

‘truth’ loomed large. Abolitionist claims that apprentices were routinely

victimized depended largely on apprentice testimony. James Williams’s

Narrative was designed to communicate with members of an audience

who had not themselves experienced the oppressions it recounted. Like

other politically motivated life-writing, the text aimed to convey not

only what had happened, but also what it felt like to be at the receiving

end of oppression. However, the purpose was not simply to explain the

situation and induce empathy among the audience, but also and more

importantly to inspire readers to take political action. As the Narrative’sfinal sentence put it: ‘let the country be aroused – let the people, with

one voice, instruct their representatives peremptorily to demand the

instant, the unconditional, and the everlasting annihilation of the

accursed system’.14 The people would speak with one voice only if read-

ers were convinced of the truth of what was conveyed in the text.

Convincing a British audience of the truth of James Williams’s story

was not a straightforward matter. As William Andrews has argued, black

writers, especially those who had been enslaved, could not assume

that readers of their autobiographical texts would extend to them the

same trust that was routinely granted to white autobiographers.15


Where white autobiographical narrative was generally assumed to be

true unless proved otherwise, black autobiographical texts were written

in the presumption that unless they could prove the truth of what they

said, they would be discounted. In Andrews’s words, the black narrator

had to prove that he or she was ‘despite all prejudice and propaganda,

a truth-teller, a reliable transcriber of the experience and character of

black folk’.16

It was not only the defenders of slavery who refused to extend trust to

ex-slave narrators. White abolitionists were also frequently sceptical of

black stories, positioning themselves as judges of the truth of an

enslaved person’s story and of his/her suitability as a slave narrator.

Abolitionist anxiety about black truthfulness increased after 1838, in the

wake of the scandal surrounding a slave narrative by another former

slave called James Williams: Narrative of James Williams, an AmericanSlave, who was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation inAlabama.17 A few months after its publication, the Narrative of this

James Williams was exposed by defenders of slavery as false, much to the

embarrassment of Williams’s abolitionist sponsors.18

Discussion of the amanuensis–narrator relationship, and in particular

of the amanuensis’s control of the narrator’s words, has become a staple

of work on slave narrative.19 John Sekora, for instance, argues that white

control of the production of slave narratives meant that their ‘black

message’ was ‘sealed within a white envelope’.20 While this work helps

us to understand the complexity of these texts, it risks abstracting both

former slave and abolitionist amanuensis from their wider political con-

text. By focusing on the white writer’s choices, and considering the

resulting texts primarily as literature rather than as political interven-

tions, scholars such as Stepto, Olney, and Sekora give the impression

that it would have been possible for producers of slave narratives to

ignore the authenticity imperative – to send the black message without

any envelope, so to speak.

In fact, the responses to the Narratives of both the Jamaican and the

American James Williamses demonstrate that to do so would have

incurred grave political risks. On publication of A Narrative of Events,articles and letters in the Jamaican press attacked both Williams and

Sturge. The Narrative was called a ‘tissue of falsehoods’; Williams was

dismissed as a ‘bad character’ and a thief.21 That these attacks did not

succeed in discrediting Williams was due in part to the authenticating

strategies adopted by the producers of Williams’s text, as well as to the

findings of the official enquiry that followed publication.22 In short,

although from today’s scholarly point of view the question ‘did this

112 Diana Paton

really happen?’ is one of the least interesting questions to be asked of a

piece of autobiographical writing, it is anachronistic to act as if such a

position was either open to or – more importantly – would have been

useful to James Williams, Joseph Sturge, or others involved in the pro-

duction of Williams’s text. Indeed, even in today’s intellectual climate,

the truth-claims of life-writings become newly significant when current

political issues are at stake. Recent examples include the questioning of

the authenticity of testimonies and memoirs by Rigoberta Menchú and

Edward Said.23 In both cases, attacks on the authenticity of these

narratives of oppression mattered politically for attempts to mobilize

solidarity with the Guatemalan and Palestinian struggles respectively.

The success or failure of similar attacks on the integrity of ex-slave nar-

rators mattered at least as much during the era of slavery. The question

of authenticity in life-writing designed to mobilize political action could

not then and cannot now be avoided. The textual demonstration of

such authenticity can be done, however, in different ways, with differ-

ent implications for the power relations between narrator and authenti-

cator. The rest of this chapter explores the implications of the specific

methods by which James Williams’s truth-claims were supported.

By the 1830s, there was already a significant history of framing narra-

tives by former slaves with texts that sought both to interpret and

guarantee the truth of the former slave’s words. The main text of TheInteresting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, for instance, was pre-

ceded by a series of letters from gentlemen who testified to the author’s

good character, included in response to press articles that aimed, accord-

ing to Equiano, ‘to hurt my character, and to discredit and prevent

the sale of my Narrative’.24 The most immediate and important

British/Caribbean predecessor to Williams’s Narrative was the 1831 nar-

rative The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself,which contained a preface by the white abolitionist Thomas Pringle.25

Almost invariably, the truthfulness of a slave narrator’s story was tex-

tually established with reference to the testimony of white men. For

instance, Pringle’s preface to Prince’s narrative describes how after the

narrative was written he ‘carefully examin[ed]’ Prince on ‘every fact and

circumstance detailed’ with the help of Mr Joseph Phillips, a white man

who had known Prince in Antigua.26 Pringle thus assumes that readers

will find his own and Phillips’s truthfulness self-evident. Prince’s claims

become dependent on Pringle and Phillips.

Thomas Price’s Advertisement in Williams’s Narrative is similarly con-

cerned to establish Williams’s truthfulness. Price affirms that he has seen

documents that convince him that ‘horrible as is the account which


Williams gives, it is entitled to the full confidence of the British pub-

lic’.27 Price’s Advertisement, though, differs subtly but importantly from

Pringle’s preface in the manner by which it makes its claim. Although

Price’s authorship of the Advertisement is proclaimed through

the printing of his name at the end, he is not, it turns out, himself able

to guarantee the Narrative’s authenticity. Indeed, it is not clear that Price

had actually met Williams; unlike Pringle’s discussion of his relationship

with Prince, Price does not mention any personal interviews with

Williams. Rather, Price’s ability to establish the authenticity of the

Narrative rests on the word of black people. ‘I have now before me’, he

writes, ‘a document, signed by two free negroes and six apprentices, all

members of a Christian church in Jamaica, in which they affirm, that

they have known the narrator from his infancy, and that he “is steady,sober, industrious, of good moral character, and that his word may be reliedupon” ’ (emphasis in text).28 To give the names of these witnesses would

put them in danger, Price says, asking readers to believe his representa-

tion of the document. Readers are thus required to trust not only Price

but also eight anonymous ‘negroes’. The phrasing strongly suggests that

it is their status as ‘members of a Christian church’ that makes them

trustworthy. Nevertheless, for a slave narrative to be authenticated by

black knowledge and truthfulness is, as far as I am aware, unique. In that

it makes black rather than white knowledge the ultimate source of

authority about Williams’s truthfulness, the Narrative complicates the

paternalist relationship between Williams and his white sponsors

that was otherwise established in the structure of the Narrative and in

the actual relationship between Williams and Sturge.29

Another edition of the Narrative, published in Glasgow under the title

Narrative of the Cruel Treatment of James Williams, a Negro Apprentice inJamaica, likewise relies on the word of the anonymous black Christians

for its proof of authenticity. In this edition, the claim is presented more

succinctly, and the numbers involved are reduced: ‘Joseph Sturge has in

his possession a document, signed by six members of a Christian

church, who had all known James Williams for several years, and in that

document they bear testimony to his character for veracity.’30

Interestingly, in this version the Christians are not specifically marked

as black. Readers may well have assumed that they were white people.

As well as the guarantees provided by Price and the black Christians,

Price asks readers to interpret the very language of the Narrative as a sign

of its status as truth. The Narrative, says Price, has been ‘taken down

from his [Williams’s] own lips’.31 Like the use of external authenticators,

this claim directly echoes Thomas Pringle’s statement, in the preface to

114 Diana Paton

Mary Prince’s History, that the narrative ‘was taken down from Mary’s

own lips by a lady who happened to be at the time residing in my fam-

ily as a visitor’.32 The immediate and unmediated transcription from lips

to page is presented as authoritative in both accounts. However, there is

again a difference: Pringle undermines Prince’s claims to intelligence

and intelligibility by referring to her ‘repetitions and prolixities’ and

noting the need for alterations ‘to exclude redundances [sic] and gross

grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible’.33 Prince’s

History is written almost throughout in standard English, with a Creole

voice partially breaking through only at the very end. Of Williams, Price

instead writes that ‘It was deemed better to preserve his own peculiar

style, rather than by any attempt at revision, to endanger the self-

evident proof of fidelity, which his account bears.’34 Williams’s Narrativeis written throughout in an Anglicized version of Jamaican Creole.

Despite the claim that Williams’s ‘peculiar style’ was entirely

preserved in the text, Williams’s idiom was almost certainly altered. The

use of Creole in Williams’s Narrative is limited, as the following charac-

teristic example suggests. The passage describes the routine collusion

between Williams’s master, Gilbert Senior, and Dr Thompson, one of the

stipendiary magistrates employed by the British imperial state to ensure

that the apprenticeship law was followed correctly:

When Dr. Thompson come to the parish, him call one Thursday, and

said he would come back next Thursday, and hold court Friday morn-

ing. He come Thursday afternoon, and get dinner, and sleep at

Penshurst, and after breakfast, all we apprentices called up. Massa try

eight of we, and Dr. Thompson flog every one; there was five man,

and three boys: them flog the boys with switches, but the men flog

with the cat. One of the men was the old driver, Edward Lawrence;

Massa say he did not make the people take in the pimento crop clean;

he is quite old – head quite white – haven’t got one black hair in it,

but Dr. Thompson ordered him to be flogged; not one of the people

been doing any thing wrong; all flog for trifling, foolish thing, just to

please the massa.35

In this example, Williams’s speech is marked as Jamaican through the

use of tense and pronouns. Where standard English would narrate a pas-

sage like this primarily in the past tense, the Narrative uses unmarked

verbs for events in the past, telling how Thompson ‘come … get din-

ner … sleep at Penshurst’ (my emphasis). Readers must infer temporality

from context. Likewise, the Narrative mostly follows Jamaican Creole


usage of pronouns, using, for instance, ‘him’, ‘them’, and ‘we’ where

standard English would use ‘he’, ‘they’, and ‘us’: ‘him call’ rather than

‘he called’, ‘them flog the boys’ rather than ‘they flogged the boys’;

‘massa try eight of we’ rather than ‘eight of us’. Other features of

Jamaican are used only partially. Jamaican Creole, in common with

other Creoles, does not inflect nouns to indicate number, but sometimes

uses the suffix ‘dem’ to indicate a plural. The Narrative never employs

‘dem’, and vacillates between English and Jamaican treatment of plural

nouns. Thus the passage above refers to ‘five man’ but ‘three boys’.36

James Williams was, no doubt, proficient at moving along the

‘continuum’ between Jamaican Creole and Standard English.37 His

speech when talking to the amanuensis Palmer, a white Scottish-born

man who had spent more than twenty years in Jamaica, would no doubt

have differed from his speech to Sturge, which would be different again

from how he talked to other black Jamaicans. One could argue, on this

basis, that Palmer simply transcribed James Williams’s speech to him,

and that the Narrative is a record of the language used by black

Jamaicans when talking to British-born whites who had extensive expe-

rience in Jamaica.38 It would be naïve to read the Narrative simply as

transcription, however. I would suggest that its use of language is more

complicated and strategic, and that its limited use of Jamaican

grammatical features results both from Williams’s manipulation of his

spoken language and Palmer’s management of the Narrative’s written

language. Palmer aimed to produce the impression of difference, of non-

standard speech, without deviating so much from Standard English that

British readers found the text difficult to understand. If the intended

audience was put off by unfamiliar language, the political value of the

pamphlet would, after all, have been undermined.

The Narrative’s use of even a limited version of Creole was innovative.

As far as I am aware, Williams’s is the only slave narrative to use dialect

or Creole as the dominant narrative language. What was the political

import of this decision? Many other slave narrators shy away from non-

standard English, or reserve it for representing the speech of slaves other

than themselves.39 They frequently employ a high-register literary

English in order to demonstrate their own intelligence and distance

from slavery, and thus to represent their race’s humanity and intelli-

gence. This tradition, in conjunction with the long history of derisive

white representations of black language, might imply that the Narrativeuses Creole as a kind of minstrelsy, as a technique that makes Williams

appear simple and uneducated. It is certainly possible that contempo-

rary British readers understood the creolized English of the main part of

116 Diana Paton

the Narrative, sandwiched as it is between Price’s lurid Standard English

prose, as demonstrating Williams’s simplicity. There are, though, other

possible ways of reading the Narrative’s use of language.

Rather than seeing it primarily as negative and patronizing, I would

argue that the Narrative’s use of Creole demonstrated the power of

Williams’s language, its ability to evoke a scene and to convey both

analysis and a range of emotions. It is noteworthy that the indications

of Creole are always in syntax and lexicon rather than phonology; the

‘dems’ and ‘dats’ with which whites have frequently depicted Black

English do not feature in the Narrative. In his practice, Palmer to some

extent anticipated the African American poet Sterling Brown’s 1930

advice to his co-workers on the Federal Writers Project who were

involved in interviewing former slaves. Brown argued that attempts to

represent black pronunciation, given the non-phonetic nature of

English, were inevitably patronizing. However, he suggested that in

order to give integrity to a speaker’s voice, their choice of idiom should

be recorded.40 As Pringle’s comments about Mary Prince’s language illus-

trate, a speaker of an African-Caribbean Creole could not produce a text

without confronting the greater prestige and power of Standard English.

If the Narrative had been written in Standard English, this would have

suggested that Creole was an inferior language. As many Caribbean

artists and intellectuals have argued and others have demonstrated in

their work, to write only in Standard English or the dominant forms of

other European languages implicitly accepts the dominant language’s

claim to be the marker of intellectual capacity.41 However, as noted

above, the Narrative’s potential to disrupt the greater power of Standard

English was limited by Palmer’s sense that communication had to be on

the terms of the British audience.

Today’s readers of James Williams’s words are less likely to be

concerned with the extent to which Williams can be assumed to be a

truth-teller than were the readers for whom the Narrative was intended.

The political struggle in which Williams was involved has long been

won, although in many circumstances black people remain devalued,

marginalized, and untrusted in Western cultures. Contemporary readers

are likely, though, to have other concerns about the text’s authenticity.

In particular, since it was told to a white writer, the Narrative cannot be

treated as Williams’s work alone. Thomas Price claimed that ‘his

[Williams’s] narrative will speak for itself’, but despite this, A Narrative ofEvents does not represent the unmediated voice of a former slave.42 It

was recorded by an amanuensis, for specific political purposes, and in

circumstances when James Williams was in a strange country, away from


anyone he knew, and thus entirely dependent on Joseph Sturge. What is

the impact of the amanuensis on the text? Can Williams’s Narrativereally be described as ‘his’?

It can, but only partially. For A Narrative of Events belongs ultimately

neither to its black narrator nor to its white co-producers. By imposing

two alternative readings on the Narrative, as either the true voice of

James Williams or the appropriated product of white abolitionists, the

question ‘Is the Narrative really James Williams’s?’ refuses the possibility

of a hybrid text, reinstating the single author as the standard by which to

judge autobiographical writing. As Gillian Whitlock argues in relation to

The History of Mary Prince, it is illusory to hope to ‘retrieve an authentic

subject’ from such texts.43 We would do better to judge A Narrative ofEvents as a campaigning pamphlet, collectively produced and activating

multiple subjects – not just Williams, but also fellow apprentices. In that

sense, it belongs not only to James Williams and to the white abolition-

ists involved in its production, but also to Amelia Lawrence, William

Dalling, Henry James, and the other apprentices whose experiences it

describes, many of whom later gave evidence at the enquiry that the

publication of the Narrative provoked.

However, the Narrative can be seen as Williams’s – although not only

as his. It contains a catalogue of horrific abuses taking place under

apprenticeship, exemplifying the abolitionist critique of that system,

but tensions within the text suggest that the Narrative is not moulded

entirely according to the abolitionist need for an exemplar of appren-

tices’ suffering. As Walter Johnson suggests with regard to slave narra-

tives from the United States, we should not ‘ignore the possibility that the

narrators themselves had some bargaining power in their negotiations

with their editors’.44 James Williams’s Narrative demonstrates this

bargaining in action. It is less conventional than the abolitionist intro-

duction suggests. Thomas Price, in his Advertisement, claims that the

‘revolting picture’ drawn by the text is made bearable only by Williams’s

Christ-like ‘enduring patience’, conjuring up a long-standing image of

the nobly suffering slave-victim.45 This image is not, however, borne out

by the events described in the Narrative itself. For instance, Williams

reports a confrontation with the magistrate who had colluded with his

master to punish him. The incident took place just after Williams had

received twenty-five lashes:

I went in to where the court was sitting, and I said to Mr. Rawlinson;

You don’t do justice betwixt I and master. … Mr. Rawlinson say I have

been before him eight or nine times already; I say, if I have been

118 Diana Paton

twenty times before you, you ought to do justice ‘twixt I and massa.

He said, He do justice. I told him, You don’t do justice.46

Rather than accept his own victimization, then, Williams here returns to

confront his oppressor. His Narrative includes accounts of his adoption

of many other strategies of resistance, including running away, appeal-

ing to state authorities to intervene on his behalf, verbally confronting

his master, and stealing from him. Williams, as produced through the

Narrative, is characterized more by a willingness to challenge authority,

despite risk, than by patience. Given abolitionist interest in perpetuat-

ing an idea of slaves and apprentices as unresisting victims, it seems

likely that the text’s emphasis on resistance derives from Williams’s

own, oral, self-representation. In that the published version of his Narrativecontradicts some of the central claims of those whose words frame his

story, then, James Williams is at least partially in control of the text he

helped to create.

Reading the narratives of slaves and former slaves requires attention

not only to the relationships among the individuals present at their cre-

ation, but also to the political context in which, and purposes for which,

they were produced. A primary focus on literary value and the construc-

tion of a literary tradition, national or otherwise, tends to depoliticize

such texts. Their promoters’ recurrent need to demonstrate the authen-

ticity of slave narratives does not simply demonstrate abolitionist

racism. It was also a product of the wider climate of racial hierarchy in

which slave narratives were produced, and which such texts were partly

designed to attack.

Notes

Some of this chapter was published as part of the ‘Introduction’ to James

Williams, A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, anApprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, ed. Diana Paton (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2001 (1837)). I would like to thank the editors of this volume, especially

Sara Salih, for their astute readings of my work.

1. ‘Case of George Robinson’, The British Emancipator, 31 January 1838.

2. James Williams, A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by JamesWilliams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (1837), ed. Diana Paton (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

3. For details of the editions see Williams, Narrative of Events, pp. lvii–lxii. For

another reference in passing to ‘James Williams’ sufferings’ see John Candler,

Extracts from the Journal of John Candler whilst Travelling in Jamaica Part II(London: Harvey and Dalton, 1841), p. 34.


4. Rafia Zafar, We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature,1760–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 9–10.

5. For one such work see Zafar, We Wear the Mask, which unpacks racial essen-

tialisms while remaining resolutely tied to a nationalist paradigm of

‘American writing’. Other important recent work in this tradition includes

Dickson Bruce, The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Blyden Jackson, A Historyof Afro-American Literature, vol. 1: The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), and the canon-forming

volume edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier

Harris, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997).

6. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Vincent Carretta and

Philip Gould, eds, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); George B. Handley,

Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

7. For more on Penshurst and on Williams’s family, see my Introduction to

Williams, Narrative of Events, pp. xxi–xxx.

8. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara SlaveRebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mary Turner,

Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

9. On apprenticeship, which was abolished after four years, in 1838, see

Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaicaand Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1992), part 1; Swithin Wilmot, ‘Not “Full Free”: The Ex-Slaves and the

Apprenticeship System in Jamaica, 1834–1838’, Jamaica Journal, 17 (1984),

2–10.

10. The results of his investigations were published as Joseph Sturge and Thomas

Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1838).

11. For more detail on Sturge’s relationship with Williams see Williams, Narrativeof Events, pp. xix–xx, xliv–xlv, and the letters from Sturge on pp. 95–105.

12. Ibid., p. 3.

13. Ibid., p. 25.

14. Ibid., p. 26.

15. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-AmericanAutobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 1–4.

16. Ibid., p. 1.

17. James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, who was forSeveral Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (New York: American

Anti-Slavery Society; Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838).

18. The controversy is discussed in Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘From Wheatley to

Douglass: The Politics of Displacement’, in Frederick Douglass: New Literaryand Historical Essays, ed. Eric. J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), pp. 47–65, and Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, pp. 87–9.

19. Robert B. Stepto, ‘Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in

Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of 1845’, in Afro-American Literature: The

120 Diana Paton

Reconstruction of Instruction, ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto (New York:

Modern Language Association, 1979), pp. 178–211; Robert Stepto, From Behindthe Veil: A Study of Afro-American Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1979), ch. 1; John Sekora, ‘Black Message/White Envelope: Genre,

Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative’, Callaloo, 34

(1987), 482–515; James Olney, ‘ “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, their Status as

Autobiography and as Literature’, in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis

and Henry Louis Gates Jr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 148–75.

20. Sekora, ‘Black Message/White Envelope’, p. 502.

21. St. Jago de la Vega Gazette, Spanish Town, 22–9 July 1837; Jamaica Despatchand New Courant, Kingston, 15 August 1837.

22. For extracts from this enquiry see Williams, Narrative of Events, pp. 45–86.

23. Menchú’s testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed.

Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (London: Verso, 1984), was attacked in David Stoll,

Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO: Westview

Press, 1999). For discussions see Arturo Arias, ed., The Rigoberta MenchúControversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Justus Reid

Weiner attacked Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2000)

in ‘ “My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’,

Commentary, 108, 2 (1999), 23–32. For discussion see, among others, Amos

Elon, ‘Exile’s Return’, New York Review of Books, 18 November 1999, and

Harvey Blume’s interview with Said, ‘Setting the Record Straight’, The AtlanticUnbound, 22 September 1999 (also online at �http://www.theatlantic.com/

unbound/interviews/ba990922.htm�, accessed 13 July 2003).

24. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789), ed.

Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 5–14 (p. 5).

25. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself(1831), ed. Sara Salih (London: Penguin, 2000).

26. Prince, History, p. 3.

27. Williams, Narrative of Events, p. 4

28. Ibid., p. 3

29. On Sturge’s relationship with Williams, including his decision shortly after

the Narrative of Events was completed to send Williams back to Jamaica in

order to ‘bring him to a proper sense of his situation’ see Williams, Narrativeof Events, pp. xliv, 95–105.

30. Ibid., p. lviii.

31. Ibid., p. 3.

32. Prince, History, p. 3.

33. Ibid., p. 3.

34. Williams, Narrative of Events, p. 3.

35. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

36. On Jamaican Creole see Frederic G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Yearsof the English Language in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1961); F. G. Cassidy

and R. B. LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967), 2nd edn (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980); Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa, eds,

Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole (Tuscaloosa:

University of Alabama Press, 1990).

37. For the concept of the ‘creole continuum’ see David DeCamp, ‘Toward a

Generative Analysis of a Post-Creole Speech Continuum’, in Pidginization and


Creolization of Languages, ed. Dell Hymes (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1971), pp. 349–70 (p. 350).

38. Lalla and D’Costa, Language in Exile, p. 165, interpret the Narrative in roughly

this way, using it as a source of ‘mesolectal’ Jamaican Creole.

39. Andrew Levy, ‘Dialect and Convention: Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Lifeof a Slave Girl’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 45, 2 (1990), 206–19, argues that

this is how Harriet Jacobs uses dialect.

40. Sterling Brown, ‘On Dialect Usage’, in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T.

Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See

also Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘Dis and Dat: Dialect and the Descent’, in Figures inBlack: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self (New York: Oxford University Press,

1987), pp. 80–97. This point is not intended to deny the use by Caribbean

writers of phonological representations of Caribbean speech, as recognized

in, for instance, Richard Allsopp and Jeanette Allsopp, Dictionary of CaribbeanEnglish Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

41. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Carolyn Cooper, Noisesin the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture(London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993); Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau,

and Rafael Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, Bilingual

Edition, trans. M. B. Taleb Khyan (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).


43. Gillian Whitlock, ‘Volatile Subjects: The History of Mary Prince’, in Genius inBondage, ed. Carretta and Gould, p. 75.

44. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 227. See also Rafia

Zafar’s argument that the narrators of co-authored slave narratives ‘are not so

helpless as other critics have assumed’ (We Wear the Mask, p. 54).


46. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

122 Diana Paton

123

8The History of Mary Prince,the Black Subject, and the Black CanonSara Salih

James Olney’s essay, ‘ “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, their Status as

Autobiography and as Literature’, identifies a paradox and a problem for

contemporary readers. Referring to African American texts, Olney points

out that although slave narratives do not necessarily ‘qualify’ as either

autobiography or literature, the African American literary tradition

may be traced back to slave narratives, in theme, content, and form.1

Olney’s observations raise the question of where and how slave narratives

should be reprinted, anthologized, and criticized almost two centuries

after the eras of abolition and emancipation and whether it is useful to

regard them as ‘inaugural’ in some sense.2 Following the recent flurry of

editorial and critical activity in this area, it seems important to reflect on

current critical approaches to early black writing, particularly with

regard to a text such as The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave.Related by Herself (1831), published, as it was, at a specific historical

juncture for a specific political purpose.3

As Olney observes, slave narratives are likely to share certain identifi-

able formal and substantive features. They are focused on the same

objective reality, they are addressed to a defined audience, and they

have a clear motive: ‘to reveal the truth of slavery and so to bring about

its abolition’.4 It is probable that this desire to establish ‘the truth’ of

slavery no longer motivates most contemporary readers of slave narra-

tives (although this is not to imply that bearing witness to the historical

truth of slavery is not an important contemporary issue), but without

that explicit impetus, literary critics and editors appear to be at liberty to

reconstruct a text such as The History of Mary Prince, to recruit it for a

variety of black canons, and to ‘canonize’ its putative author in another

sense by describing her as a figure of resistance and the founder of a

national or racial tradition. I will argue that to install ‘Mary Prince’ and

The History of Mary Prince as inaugural and canonical overlooks the insta-

bility of the former along with the striking intra- and inter-textuality of

the latter. I have placed inverted commas around ‘Mary Prince’ to sug-

gest from the outset that she is the construction of critics and editors

and, although I shall drop the convention from now on, throughout

this essay I shall differentiate The History (the sequence of texts con-

tained within the covers of a single volume) from ‘the history’: the por-

tion of the text Prince is said to have dictated to Susanna Strickland in

1831.5

This is not to call into doubt ‘the facts’ of Prince’s life, or indeed the

fact of her existence. Rather, emphasizing that The History did not have

a single, stable black subject as its author will lead me to reflect on con-

temporary critical readings which take an opposite approach. Vincent

Carretta’s recent work on Olaudah Equiano/Gustavas Vassa and the

‘question of identity’ has demonstrated the importance of reading a text

such as The Interesting Narrative contextually and historically.6 All the

same, the discovery ‘that Vassa manipulated some of the facts [concern-

ing his place of birth] in his autobiography’ clearly does not have the

same impact or significance for twenty-first-century readers as it would

have if Equiano/Vassa’s ‘manipulations’ had been brought to light in

1789 when the text was first published.7 Then, it is likely that anti-

abolitionists would have used the ‘revelation’ that Equiano/Vassa may

not have been born in Africa to discredit The Interesting Narrative’s

descriptions of slavery, as well as Vassa’s own political activities. On the

other hand, since contemporary readers are no longer seeking to estab-

lish ‘the truth of slavery’ as an incentive to abolitionist activism,

perhaps it is not altogether clear what we should do with such extra-

textual information, how – or indeed, whether – we should incorporate

it into our interpretations.

Carretta’s research and the hermeneutic issues it raises beg a wider

question concerning the relationship of text to world. Edward Said

writes perceptively about this issue in The World, the Text and the Critic,where he elucidates the ways in which the text–world relationship

imposes constraints on interpretation. Texts place themselves in the

world and in turn solicit the world’s attention, as ‘[t]he closeness of the

world’s body to the text’s body forces readers to take both into consider-

ation’.8 Said’s insight seems particularly apposite in the context of slave

narratives and their successive generations of readers, for while ‘truth’

may not be a goal for contemporary readers, it is impossible to ignore

the contexts in which narratives such as The History were produced. If

The History solicits the reader’s attention, it is by representing the ‘body’

124 Sara Salih

of a specific world in order to convince the reader that such a world –

here, Caribbean slavery – really existed. The very form of the text, which

resembles nothing so much as a lawyer’s ‘bundle’ with its witness state-

ments, depositions, and corroborating evidence, insistently draws atten-

tion to its ‘worldly’, intertextual contexts as well as to the intra-textual

relationship of the documents that make up The History.

It seems curious, then, that recent responses to The History have tended

to elide its context as well as its inter- and intra-textuality by reading the

text according to narrow feminist-essentialist, black-canon-building

agendas. In scrutinizing this mode of critical response, I will suggest that

the dual dangers of presentism and essentialism may be circumvented by

engaging in two complementary moves. First, it is crucial to read TheHistory amidst its extended textual supplementation, paying close atten-

tion to the texts that were published with ‘the history’ (Gillian Whitlock

erroneously calls these ‘marginalia’), while further supplementing these

with documents that did not originally appear with the text.9 The second

counter-move to onto-essentialist, canonical readings follows as a conse-

quence of the first, since recognizing The History’s inter- and intra-

textuality will seriously undermine any attempt to install Prince as the

narrator/author of a text which seems extraordinarily vulnerable to

under-reading (The History as evidence of triumphant and timeless black

female selfhood) and over-reading (The History as uniquely authored/

uttered by Mary Prince). By discussing two specific examples of intra-text

and inter-text in The History and thereby destabilizing the notion of an

authentic ‘black female’ author-subject, I hope to establish that it is

essential to approach the text in its historical articulation, rather than as

autonomous, self-contained, or foundational.10

To read The History in the light of recent theoretical formulations of

black subjectivity is by no means anachronistic (or ‘presentist’), since it

merely confirms that the black subject has always been shifting, unsta-

ble, and complex. In ‘an article that has become somewhat notorious’,

Stuart Hall insists on the importance of understanding ‘black’ as a polit-

ically and culturally constructed category that is unfixed and without

guarantees in nature, and it would surely be a mistake to divorce this

insight from the ‘retrieval’ of black-authored texts that has been taking

place over the last few decades.11 Critical efforts to create accessible

archives of early black writings have coincided with theoretical shifts

that have necessitated the placing of inverted commas around the word

‘black’ in precisely these contexts, and yet it sometimes seems as though

work such as Stuart Hall’s or Paul Gilroy’s (or Michel Foucault’s, or

Judith Butler’s) has made little impact on the study of early black

Mary Prince, Black Subject, and Black Canon 125

writing. Henry Louis Gates’s response is perhaps not untypical: while

Gates goes so far as to accept Derrida’s critique of the Western male sub-

ject, he also reserves the right of ‘exploring and reclaiming our [i.e.

‘black’, ‘African American’] subjectivity’. In his essay, ‘The Master’s

Pieces’, Gates invites his readers to consider the irony of black people

and ‘other Third World peoples’ finally gaining the means to define

black subjectivity within the republic of Western letters, only to be told

by theorists ‘that there ain’t no such thing as a subject, so why should

we be bothered with that?’12

Of course, Gates is simplifying ad absurdum, and he does not consider

the foundationalist and exclusionary implications of the desire to

‘[reclaim] our subjectivity before we critique it’ [my italics]. To question,

critique, and destabilize a putative black subject is not the same as saying

there ain’t no such thing, neither is it such a straightforward matter to

‘explore and reclaim’ a subjectivity that has always been marked by its

instability. Paul Gilroy has pointed out that ‘exemplary’ eighteenth-

century figures such as Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis

Wheatley have left a textual legacy that is ‘a mix, a hybrid. Its recombinant

form is indebted to its “parent” cultures but remains assertively and insub-

ordinately a bastard. It reproduces neither of the supposed anterior purities

that gave rise to it in anything like unmodified form. Here at least identity

must be divorced from purity.’13 For Gilroy as for Hall, identity is not an

essence or a given, but a protean, accretive entity that has never deferred

to what Gilroy calls ‘the scripts of ethnic, national, racial or cultural abso-

lutism’.14 These ethnic, national, and racial ‘scripts’ are still circulating

within the academy, where onto-genetical, essentialist assumptions fre-

quently form the basis of endeavours to construct literary canons, black or

otherwise. Indeed, as Gilroy has also observed, black canon construction

seems to proceed on an exclusively national basis, necessitating the appro-

priation and ‘canonization’ of early black writers as figures of resistance

and inaugurators of racial or national literary traditions.15

Accordingly, Prince is at once a ‘champion of the abolitionist move-

ment’ (Whitlock) and ‘the first Black British woman to have escaped

from slavery’ (Whitlock, Ferguson), while The History is ‘a triumphant

narrative of emergent West Indian subjectivity in the gendered space of

a black woman and a slave’ (Pouchet Paquet).16 A glance at recent antho-

logizations and editions of The History similarly reveals both the critical

tendency towards nationalist nomenclature and the onto-essentialist

bases of canon construction. Originally published as a pamphlet over

170 years ago, The History is now a staple component of anthologies of

early black writing, slave narratives, black Atlantic writing, and black

126 Sara Salih

women’s writing. Ferguson’s edition of The History was published in

1987, the same year as Gates’s Classic Slave Narratives, where the text was

included alongside works by Equiano/Vassa, Frederick Douglass, and

Harriet Jacobs.17 The following year, The History was anthologized in SixWomen’s Slave Narratives as part of Gates’s Schomburg Library of

Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, a series that claims on its

blurbs to have ‘rescued the voice of an entire segment of the African-

American Literary Tradition’.18 Prince’s inclusion alongside Old

Elizabeth, Harriet Jacobs, Kate Drumgoold, and Annie L. Burton seems

highly anomalous, unless ‘African American’ here is intended to denote

‘the Americas’, in which case it might describe a person born in

Bermuda, who, as far as we know, never set foot in America.

Canonization, anthologization, and literary criticism are modes of

ontological description, so that to include The History in a volume of

‘classic slave narratives’, or in a series that purports to ‘recover’ specifi-

cally African American texts, or in a volume of writings by black women,

is to constitute it as such. Yet the text does not slot easily into any of the

available categories, and what is most striking about such ‘taxonomic

anthologizations’ is the sheer number of them – The History is at once a

slave narrative, African American, black-authored, a black woman’s text,

a ‘daughter of Africa’.19 In each case, textual contiguity reveals the selec-

tive assumptions that have been made in the course of constructing

national or racial canons, where convenient sobriquets tend to elide the

differences between texts that are distinct in crucial ways. The frequent

anthologization of The History alongside Mary Seacole’s autobiography,

which was published in England only twenty-five years later, is a case in

point. Both Marys are given entries in Africana, and extracts from TheHistory and Wonderful Adventures are included in Busby’s Daughters ofAfrica as well as in Dabydeen and Edwards’s Black Writers in Britain and

Ferguson’s Nine Black Women. Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures has, like

The History, been published in the Schomburg Library series (although it

is even more difficult to see how Seacole could be designated ‘African

American’) and Wonderful Adventures is forthcoming as a Penguin Classic

to take its place alongside The History. Perhaps it is publications such

as these that lead Sandra Pouchet Paquet to cite Mary Prince’s Historyas belonging to the genre of ‘West Indian autobiography’, ‘a literary

tradition’ that Pouchet Paquet claims has its inception ‘in the oral

literature of the folk, and in the accomplishments of Mary Prince,

Mrs. [sic] Seacole’ and others including Claude McKay and C. L. R. James.20

The History and Wonderful Adventures are very different texts, produced

in widely divergent circumstances, and to regard them as inaugurating a


single ‘literary tradition’ exemplifies what Cornel West has succinctly

dubbed ‘the pitfalls of canon formation’. Discerning ‘a defensive pos-

ture’ in the African American drive to canonize, along with a tendency

to yoke together texts ‘by talented though disparate women writers with

little more than their gender and color in common’, West calls for black

writers to be read historically and contextually so that the ‘specific crises

in particular historical moments’ out of which they arose may be appre-

ciated and understood.21 While some critics of The History adopt this

careful approach, others have tended towards decontextualization and

ahistoricism. Two pieces which appeared in 1992 best exemplify what

have been called ‘appropriations’ and over-readings of The History:22

Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s article, ‘The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave’,

and Moira Ferguson’s section on Prince in the penultimate chapter of

Subject to Others.23 Neither Pouchet Paquet nor Ferguson says much

about the complex, at times confusing, textual makeup of The History,

since the notion of a stable text authored by a single, protesting subject

is crucial to both critics’ ideological agendas. Ferguson alludes only

briefly to the ‘mediated’, ‘refracted’ nature of the text, and she insists

that Prince did not surrender The History to the narrative rule of Thomas

Pringle or Susanna Strickland.24 So Prince makes ‘statements’ that are

‘mimicking and deadpan’, her ‘sparring voice [is] audible only to initi-

ates’, and she uses a ‘double-voiced discourse’ to construct a counter-

insurgent narrative that gives her access to the master discourse.25

Further, Ferguson describes how, by asserting her status as an interlocu-

tor, Prince effects ‘an unemphatic power reversal’ whereby she casts her

amanuensis, Susanna Strickland, in the archetypical role of slave-other

whose role it is to take orders and generate wealth.26

An autonomous if not enslaving ‘Mary Prince’ is also central to Sandra

Pouchet Paquet’s analysis, where The History is assumed to be a straight-

forwardly autobiographical text in which Prince expresses her essential

interiority (the titular ‘heartbeat’), deploying distinctly ‘West Indian’

discursive techniques when she addresses a ‘West Indian’ community of

readers.27 The ‘lyric’ vernacular voice with which Prince ‘crafts’ both her

narrative and her interior self in dialogue with her fellow slaves inaugu-

rates what Pouchet Paquet calls ‘a new literary tradition rooted in the

values of a transplanted and transformed African community in the

Caribbean’.28 Pouchet Paquet herself seems to sacrifice accuracy for

lyricism and cultural uplift when she describes the ‘gender-specific,

all-inclusive ancestral voice’ with which Prince ‘delineates the essential

tropes of return and self-parody in images shot through with the

dialogic overtones of a community fashioning self out of resistance’.29

128 Sara Salih

Pouchet Paquet concludes that ‘the heart’, a symbol of Prince’s unassail-

able interority, is reproduced and refashioned in ‘an elaborate pattern of

signification that reflects the myriad voices and values of the text as

managed element of [Prince’s] own voice and heart. … Mary Prince’s

heart is the caged bird that sings the definitive song of freedom to let her

people go.’30 ‘Songs of Freedom’ might invoke a Caribbean, specifically

Jamaican legacy, but the allusion to a ‘caged bird’ and the injunction to

‘let my people go’ hint at an African American context. Still, both

Pouchet Paquet and Ferguson assume the existence of a single and sin-

gular Caribbean/‘West Indian’ identity, and they impose that identity

on a text that is by no means culturally coherent or singular (if such sin-

gularity and coherence are indeed ever possible).31

On the other hand, the ‘facts’ of Prince’s life reveal what Hall has

called ‘the process of cultural diaspora-ization’ at work.32 Born in

Bermuda, Prince was sent to work in Turks Islands, returned to Bermuda,

then taken to Antigua from where she travelled to England; The Historygives no indication, implicit or otherwise, that it is addressing a black

community, either in Britain or in the multiple Caribbean locales it

describes, although Ferguson speculates that Prince became ‘acquainted’

with the former, while Pouchet Paquet states quite categorically that

Prince speaks out of a pronounced sense of ethnic and racial solidarity.33

Ferguson gives little sense of the contingent, shifting, and unstable posi-

tionalities represented in The History, while Pouchet Paquet’s insistent

invocation of roots, tribes, and ancestors implies the existence of an

eternally fixed ‘West Indian’ identity that is shared by all Caribbean

writers across the centuries.34 Both accounts of The History assume that

a stable black sovereign subject authored and manipulated ‘her’ text in

order to resist racism and slavery on behalf of others, while simultane-

ously expressing an authentic interior self. Reading outwards from this

black/Caribbean/‘West Indian’ identity, Pouchet Paquet and Ferguson

assume that The History and its ‘author’ are inaugural, canonical, and

essential in precisely the ways that Gilroy, West, and Hall have interro-

gated. For Ferguson, Prince (single-handedly it seems) initiates a black

female counter-offensive to ‘pro- and anti-slavery Anglo-Africanism’,

while Pouchet Paquet sees the narrative as ‘mak[ing] permanent the

foundations of a roots-derived national self-consciousness in West

Indian autobiography’.35

‘Rootedness’, national or otherwise, is not an effective contestation

of historico-racist ideas, since celebrations of the innocent, black/

Caribbean, protesting subject serve only to perpetuate essentialist theo-

rizations whose own ‘roots’ are dubious, to say the least.36 Nationalism


and ethnocentrism might appear to present convenient modes of under-

standing or categorizing early black writings, yet as critical responses

they are inadequate to the task of addressing the complexities of a text

such as The History, which was not authored by a single subject with a

clear sense of cultural ‘mission’. Before I discuss inter- and intra-textual

approaches to The History, it may be useful briefly to schematize its

extraordinarily composite structure. As it was originally published, the

text consisted of a Preface by Thomas Pringle (writing in his capacity as

Prince’s employer, rather than as Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society),

‘the history’, Pringle’s ‘Supplement to the History of Mary Prince by the

Editor’, an appendix added in the second edition, and the narrative of

Louis Asa-Asa, ‘a captured African’. Page-to-page in the Penguin edition,

‘the history’ is almost exactly matched in length by the ‘supplementary’

texts, which total thirty-two printed pages to ‘the history’s’ thirty-one

printed pages. As the editor of this edition, I have added to the ‘supple-

mentary’ material by including a thirty-four page introduction, seventeen

pages of notes and twenty-six pages of appendices, including the

evidence Prince gave in a libel trial two years after The History’s publica-

tion (see below). In her 1987 edition, Ferguson also expands the text

with a preface by Ziggi Alexander, an introduction, and a sequence of

appendices. Somewhat confusingly, Ferguson has changed the text’s

original order, inserting an extra appendix directly after ‘the history’

(‘Appendix One: Mary Prince’s petition presented to Parliament on June

24 1829’), followed by Pringle’s ‘Postscript to the second edition’, which

actually appeared at the end of his preface, before ‘the history’. Ferguson

also includes the original appendix (the testimonial letter signed

by Martha Pringle, Susanna Strickland, Susan Brown, and Martha A.

Browne), and the ‘Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa’ as appendices three and

four (in the original edition, Martha Pringle’s letter was merely

‘Appendix’, and the ‘Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa’ was not cited as an

appendix at all).37

Ferguson’s textual reorganizations indicate the extent to which con-

temporary editors are engaged in re-constructing and re-producing TheHistory. Gillian Whitlock observes that, no less than Thomas Pringle,

modern editors ‘guide the reader’s entry and exit [from the text] with

great care’, a gesture that perpetuates one of the generic features of slave

narratives in the United States which were frequently printed with

authenticating documentation.38 This was deemed necessary because, as

James Olney points out, the lives described in the narrative – the slave

narrator’s, and those of the slaves on whose behalf s/he might speak – are

not represented for their intrinsic or unique interest, but because they

130 Sara Salih

exemplify what slavery is ‘really like’.39 The slave narrator must not be

perceived as emplotting, fictionalizing, or engaging in acts of textual poe-

sis, but s/he must provide a clear, sequential, unfalsified, authentic

account.40 Olney’s observations – which make Pouchet Paquet’s and

Ferguson’s notion of a self-consciously manipulated text seem even more

unlikely – refer specifically to African American slave narratives, but there

are numerous ways in which The History fits his descriptive template. For

one thing, establishing ‘the truth’ was one of The History’s key aims when

it was published in 1831, so that it was the perceived task of the ex-slave

narrator to convey the realities of slavery to an apparently incredulous

British readership.41 And yet, since ‘truth’ in The History is contingent

upon corroborating, extra-textual evidence, it was necessary to include a

bulky supplemental apparatus which would verify the assertions made in

‘the history’. Pringle’s ‘Supplement’ accordingly includes a detailed

account of how he first met Prince in 1828, the legal advice he received

concerning her case, and the subsequent petition to Parliament that was

made on her behalf. In forensic mode, Pringle includes as ‘evidence’ the

letter Prince’s owner, John Wood, gave her when she left his house in

London, and he also quotes Wood’s letter to the secretary of the Governor

of Antigua in which he insists on ‘the woman Molly[’s]’ bad character.42

Having refuted the latter point by point, Pringle produces a sequence of

testimonials for Prince – from ‘Mr Joseph Phillips of Antigua’, her

ex-employer Mrs Forsyth, as well as Pringle’s own endorsement.

It is Joseph Phillips’s letter that most precisely illustrates the invo-

luted, unstable nature of The History, and the textual chain effect that is

created in the course of attempting to establish ‘the truth’. The letter,

which is quoted in full in the ‘Supplement’, establishes Phillips’s con-

nection to Wood (Phillips was his clerk) and his reliability as a witness.

Having given a positive account of Prince’s character, Phillips concludes

with a resounding corroboration of ‘the history’ (p. 52):

I see no reason to question the truth of a single fact stated by her, or

even to suspect her in any instance of intentional exaggeration. [The

narrative] bears in my judgment the genuine stamp of truth and

nature. Such is my unhesitating opinion, after a residence of twenty-

seven years in the West Indies.

In order for Phillips’s own statement to bear ‘the genuine stamp of

truth’, it was necessary that he establish his credentials as a faithful and

veracious observer, especially since by the time his name appeared in

The History, he had been attacked by anti-abolitionists for his charitable


activities on behalf of ‘poor deserted slaves’ in Antigua. Accordingly,

Phillips’s lengthy ‘Postscript’ to his letter contains a detailed account of

the libellous statements made against him by James McQueen, editor of

the Glasgow Courier and an opponent of emancipation. As a counter to

McQueen’s calumnies (which are based on the information of one

‘Dr. T. Coull’), Phillips quotes extracts from ‘The Report of the Birmingham

Ladies’ Society for 1830’ in a footnote to his postscript. The ‘Report’

quotes McQueen’s statements concerning both the Ladies’ Society and

Phillips, along with ‘a testimonial to Mr Phillips’s good character’

signed by the Editor of the Antigua Weekly Register, members of the

Antigua House of Assembly, a collector of customs, and named Antigua

merchants.43

The layering is extremely dense, the texts compressed tightly together.

Pringle cites Phillips who, in a footnote to a postscript to a letter, quotes

the Birmingham Ladies’ Society report, which in turn quotes McQueen

and the Antigua dignitaries’ comments on Phillips’s character. It is easy

to forget that the aim of this long sequence of interconnected texts is to

confirm Prince’s reliability as a witness of slavery. Both Prince and

Phillips must establish their truthfulness so that they may validate a

larger claim – in Prince’s case, that slavery is evil; in Phillips’s, that

Prince is a person whose statements concerning the evils of slavery may

be relied on, and that his own evidence concerning Prince may be

trusted.

From this brief sample of The History’s complex intra-textuality, it

should be clear that the narrative Prince dictated to Susanna Strickland

is by no means self-authenticating, but it is supplemented by materials

which themselves require extensive circumstantial supplementation.

The History is therefore best described as a concatenation of mutually

validating and interlinked documents and not a single-authored, auto-

biographical narrative. Moreover, the documentary material included in

Pringle’s ‘Supplement’ – Phillips’s letter, the Birmingham Ladies’ Society

report, along with Pringle’s numerous citations from and cross-

references to the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter – repeatedly direct

the reader back to the ‘worldly’ contexts in which The History was pro-

duced, making it impossible to read the text as straightforwardly literary

or autobiographical. Indeed, as a number of critics have pointed out, the

notion of Prince’s ‘authorship’ is highly questionable, not just as a con-

sequence of The History’s textual multiplicity, but because ‘the history’

itself has been mediated through an amanuensis.44 Susanna Strickland’s

somewhat ghostly presence in The History is crucial, since it entirely

destabilizes the notion of Prince as the sole ‘author’ of the text. Gillian

132 Sara Salih

Whitlock and A. M. Rauwerda have scrutinized Strickland’s possible role

in the construction of The History and they usefully draw attention to

the fact that she was the author of fiction, poetry, and, ultimately, auto-

biography.45 In the light of Strickland’s literary career and her retrospec-

tive representations of Mary Prince, Rauwerda wonders to what extent

Strickland ‘imposed her literary and romantic ideals on Prince, creating

her as suitably feminine and meek’.46

If ‘the history’ has been mediated by an amanuensis as well as by an

editor, it is clearly erroneous to suggest that Prince attempts nuance,

extemporizes, and gives play to the reader’s imagination (Ferguson). It

also seems strange to assert that Prince ‘reproduce[s] and revise[s] images

of the heart in an elaborate pattern of signification’ (Pouchet Paquet),

when the text has, in obvious and overt ways, been ‘reproduced and

revised’ by members of the Anti-Slavery Society.47 Although it is not

clear from the ‘Preface’ whether it was Pringle or Strickland who under-

took to ‘prune’ Prince’s account into what the former calls ‘its present

shape’, reading The History in conjunction with evidence Prince gave in

court two years after its publication reveals that she attributed a number

of omissions to Strickland.48 In The Times report of Wood’s libel trial

against Pringle in 1833, Prince’s evidence, given in the third person,

includes the assertion that ‘[t]he history of her life was written down by

Miss Strickland at her … request; and she told that lady the truth’.49 ‘The

truth’ it may have been, but in her evidence, Prince admits that the

account she dictated to Strickland contained several omissions: she is

reported as revealing that Mr Wood bought her at her own request, and

‘[s]ome years afterwards, when [Mr Wood] was about to sell her, she

went on her knees and entreated Mrs. Wood to persuade him not to sell

her. She did not mention that fact to Miss Strickland.’50 Strickland’s own

omissions are even more significant. Prince claims that she told her

transcriber about her relationship with one Captain Abbott, her rivalry

with a ‘friend’ over him, her cohabiting with Oyskman, a free man who

‘made a fool of her by telling her he would make her free’, and the

classes she missed at the Moravian Society as a consequence of her

relationship with Abbott. ‘She told all this to Miss Strickland when that

lady took down her narrative’, The Times reports, but ‘These statements

were not in the narrative published by the defendant.’51

The cross-examination at the libel trial was evidently designed to dis-

credit The History by drawing attention to the ways in which Strickland

and Pringle – not to mention Prince – may have ‘compromised’ the

truth, and modern readers may wish to reflect on the relationship of

the Times reports to The History. By including in the Penguin edition of


the text a four-page extract from Prince’s courtroom evidence, I sought

not only to shed light on what happened to Prince after the publication

of The History, but also to suggest that it is a complex, multi-authored,

inter-textual entity that demands carefully contextualized readings. At

the very least, the textual and ontological agency which Ferguson and

Pouchet Paquet ascribe to Prince looks increasingly unstable in the light

of this courtroom deposition, which might be regarded as an alternative

‘history’ (no less mediated and no more ‘authentic’ than ‘the history’) to

set alongside the official version published by the Anti-Slavery Society.

There are critics who have engaged in such inter-textual readings. Like

Gillian Whitlock, Jenny Sharpe considers The History amidst its

extended supplementation, an approach that leads her to question

Ferguson and Pouchet Paquet’s implicit equation of agency with the

autobiographical act.52 Instead, Sharpe suggests that ‘a black female

subjectivity’ such as Prince’s cuts across apparently incompatible docu-

ments, including pro-slavery propaganda such as James McQueen’s arti-

cle and the reports of Prince’s court testimony I have discussed. Such

texts must be incorporated into ‘feminist readings of slave women’s

lives’, Sharpe asserts, an approach that complements Carole Boyce

Davies’s assertion that ‘[b]lack women’s writing … should be read as a

series of boundary crossings and not as a fixed, geographical, ethnically

or nationally bound category of writing’.53 Since legal/legalistic verifica-

tion is no longer the impetus behind reading The History, it is possible,

indeed necessary, to adopt Boyce Davies’s approach by relinquishing the

comforting illusion of a single black subject who protested against the

evils of slavery in a self-authored, mono-vocal, mono-cultural text.

Contextualized cross-readings such as Rauwerda’s and Sharpe’s will

make it more difficult for critics and commentators to assume that TheHistory is the straightforward expression of an authentic black subject.

At the same time, notions of a putative texual integrity – already

compromised by the Preface, supplement, appendix, and Asa-Asa

narrative – are further called into question when The History is expanded

to include journal articles and newspaper reports.

What I have called the composite, multi-authored nature of TheHistory also makes it difficult to slot it neatly into a single black canon:

why, for example, include the text in a canon of ‘black women’s writing’

if at least half of it is not written by a black woman, and is not, more-

over, addressed to black women? The question is not entirely specious,

since it reveals the essentialism underlying canon-building attempts,

while at the same time suggesting that the ‘right’ asserted by Gates to

explore and reclaim ‘our’ subjectivity, may no longer be a necessary or a

134 Sara Salih

useful mode of interpretation. The Anti-Slavery Society is still waging a

world-wide campaign against slavery, but the need for abolitionist

activism has passed, and with it the incentive to read The History for ‘the

truth’ of slavery (in an unproblematized sense) or the essential black

author-subject.54 The text does not urge contemporary readers to engage

in immediate political action, but the decisions modern editors and crit-

ics make regarding where to publish and anthologize The History, and in

what idiom to discuss it, are nonetheless inevitably politicized. It is

undoubtedly mistaken – if not distasteful – to celebrate The History as a

straightforward piece of literary autobiography, and it may even be

misleading to anthologize it alongside single-authored autobiographies

such as Equiano/Vassa’s Interesting Narrative or Seacole’s WonderfulAdventures.55 As far as form and content are concerned, The History is

more similar to the documentary accounts of abuse reported in the

issues of the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter that Pringle cross-references so

insistently in his ‘Supplement’, yet it would clearly be problematic to

publish those texts as ‘Penguin Classics’.56 This is not to suggest that TheHistory should be ejected from ‘the black canon’ because of its formal

complexities and the harrowing nature of its subject matter: rather, it is

to throw into sharp relief the problematic assumptions underlying black

canon formation, its onto-essentialist criteria for inclusion, and the

overdetermined critical approaches encouraged by canon-building

attempts. Of course, as the editor of a recent edition of The History,

I recognize that I am implicated in the ongoing production and com-

modification of ‘Mary Prince’, and I am troubled by certain aspects of

the process of ‘Penguin Classification’ – the categorization of the text as

‘Literature/Autobiography’ for example, along with the erroneous infer-

ence on the front cover that Mary Prince is ‘the author’ of The History.

Nonetheless, it is hoped that preserving The History’s original order and

adding further supplementary material to its already dense layers, will

facilitate careful intra-textual, inter-textual readings that will at the very

least raise questions about the black canon and the ‘essential’ black

subject.

Notes

1. James Olney, ‘ “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, their Status as Autobiography

and as Literature’, in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis

Gates Jr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 148–75 (p. 168).

2. In Britain, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807; full eman-

cipation did not take place until 1838. In the United States, the slave trade was

outlawed in 1808 while slavery itself was abolished in 1865.


3. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With aSupplement by the Editor, 1st edn (London, 1831).

4. Olney, ‘ “I Was Born” ’, p. 154.

5. All citations are from The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related byHerself (1831), ed. Sara Salih (London: Penguin, 2000).

6. Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an

Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity’, Slavery and Abolition, 20, 3

(December 1999), 96–105.

7. Ibid., p. 103.

8. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1983), p. 39.

9. Gillian Whitlock, ‘Autobiography and Slavery: Believing the History of MaryPrince’, in The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London:

Cassell, 2000), pp. 8–37 (pp. 13, 21). See A. M. Rauwerda, ‘Naming, Agency,

and “a tissue of falsehoods” in The History of Mary Prince’, Victorian Literatureand Culture (2001) 397–411, and Jenny Sharpe, ‘ “Something Akin to

Freedom”: The Case of Mary Prince’, differences: A Journal of Feminist CulturalStudies, 8, 1 (1996), 31–56, for useful readings of this kind. Both articles are

discussed below.

10. For ‘articulation’, see Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Stuart Hall: CriticalDialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen

(London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 441–9 (p. 444).

11. Stuart Hall, ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, ibid. pp. 465–75

(p. 465); ‘New Ethnicities’, 443. For recent discussions of black canon forma-

tion, see Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and

the African-American Tradition’, in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 17–42; Paul Gilroy, The BlackAtlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 33;

John McLeod, ‘Some Problems with “British” in a “Black British Canon” ’,

Wasafiri, 36 (Summer 2002), 56–9; Cornel West, ‘Black Critics and the Pitfalls

of Canon Formation’, in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New

York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 33–43.

12. Gates, ‘The Master’s Pieces’, p. 35.

13. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 115, 117.

14. Ibid., 117.

15. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 33.

16. Whitlock, ‘Autobiography’, 20; The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave.Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1993), p. 1; Whitlock, ‘Autobiography’, p. 10; Sandra Pouchet Paquet,

‘The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince’, AfricanAmerican Review, 26, 1 (1992) 131–45 (p. 131).

17. The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr (New York: Penguin,

1987).

18. Six Women’s Slave Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

19. Sections of The History also appear in: Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen, eds,

Black Writers in Britain 1760–1890: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1991), pp. 154–64; Moira Ferguson, ed., Nine Black Women: AnAnthology of Nineteenth-Century Writers from the U.S., Canada, Bermuda and the

136 Sara Salih

Caribbean (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 47–66; Margaret Busby, ed.,

Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Womenof African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (London: Vintage,

1992), pp. 27–30. Although Prince has an entry in Kwame Anthony Appiah

and Henry Louis Gates Jr, eds, Africana: The Encyclopaedia of the AfricanAmerican Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 1551, she is not included

in Gates’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature, along with

Equiano/Vassa. The History has not, as far as I know, appeared in a literary

anthology, but the text has been read (erroneously) as making use of Gothic

literary conventions. See Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Colonial and

Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in The Cambridge Companion to GothicFiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 229–57 (p. 232).

Paravisini-Gebert cites The History among other narratives as a text in which

‘Gothic conventions play a crucial role in unveiling the atrocities of the slave

system’. Bizarrely, The History is said to have been published in Barbados in

1831.

20. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian Autobiography’, in African AmericanAutobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William L. Andrews

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp. 196–211 (p. 198).

21. West, ‘Black Critics and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation’, pp. 40, 43.

22. On ‘over-reading’; see Whitlock, ‘Autobiography’, p. 31; on the issue of

appropriation, see Rauwerda, ‘Naming’, p. 406.

23. Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian Autobiography’, pp. 131–45; Moira Ferguson,

Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New

York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 281–98.

24. Ferguson, Subject to Others, p. 283.

25. Ibid., p. 284.

26. Ibid., p. 292.

27. Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian Autobiography’, pp. 131, 136–7.

28. Ibid., pp. 137, 136, 142.

29. Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian Autobiography’, pp. 132, 142. Ferguson also

refers to Prince as a ‘community historian’ (Ferguson, Subject to Others,p. 293).

30. Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian Autobiography’, p. 143.

31. Ibid., p. 131; Ferguson, Subject to Others, pp. 293, 292.

32. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, p. 447.

33. Ferguson, Subject to Others, p. 291; Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian

Autobiography’, p. 138.

34. Pouchet Paquet, ‘West Indian Autobiography’, pp. 142, 143.



36. See Hall, ‘What is This “Black” ’, p. 472: ‘The moment the signifier “black” is

torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a bio-

logically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very

ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct.’

37. In fact, ‘Mary Prince’s petition presented to Parliament’ is not the petition

(this has not been preserved), but the record of the presentation of it. See

History, p. 99.

38. Whitlock, p. 13. See also pp. 29, 32.


39. Olney, ‘ “I Was Born” ’, p. 154.

40. Ibid., pp. 150–1.

41. The History, p. 38.

42. See Rauwerda, ‘Naming’, p. 402, for a discussion of Prince’s multiple names.


44. See The History, pp. 3, 38, 65, for references to Susanna Strickland.

45. Rauwerda, ‘Naming’, pp. 404–6; Whitlock, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 26–9.

46. Rauwerda, ‘Naming’, p. 405. In places, it seems that Rauwerda is constructing

Strickland as she claims that Strickland constructed Prince. See especially

p. 406.




49. Ibid., p. 102.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., pp. 102–3.

52. Sharpe, ‘Something Akin to Freedom’, p. 42.

53. Ibid., pp. 52, 48, 53. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity:Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4.

54. See the Anti-Slavery International website at �http://www.antislavery.

org/index.htm�

55. Although there is no evidence that Wonderful Adventures was ghost-written,

an editor’s initials appear on the title page, and Seacole refers to her editor in

the course of the text.

56. The History, pp. 58–9, 84–5 n, 86 n, 87 n.

138 Sara Salih

Part III

Discourses of Abolition

141

9Henry Smeathman, the Fly-Catching AbolitionistDeirdre Coleman

I Abolitionist colonialism

In his landmark study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,1770–1823 (1975), David Brion Davis linked the first two decades of the

anti-slavery movement to increasing domestic concern in Britain about

the problems of under-employment, labour discipline, and labour

management. Scrutinizing the writings of many leading abolitionists,

including prominent Quakers, Davis argues that they were less con-

cerned with how emancipated slaves might express their capacity for

freedom than with devising substitute schemes for the labour discipline

of slavery.1 This essay examines the imperial dream, popular with some

abolitionists, of making the transatlantic slave trade redundant by set-

ting up free plantations in Africa to raise West Indian crops. While the

aim of this scheme was to end slavery by undermining the sugar islands’

economy, there were of course commercial motives for developing

Africa’s rich natural resources. Furthermore, linked to these commercial

prospects were speculations on both sides of the slavery debate as to

how Africa might compensate Britain for the financial loss of its

American colonies. Many, like the British parliamentarian Temple

Luttrell in 1777, contemplating ‘the débris of this once mighty empire,

when America shall be no longer ours’, fantasized about the profits aris-

ing out of a trade in African goods in ‘quantities beyond arithmetical

calculation’.2 Foremost amongst those desired trade goods were sugar,

cotton, and tobacco, all of which required a large labour force for their

production.

Plantation schemes which envisaged Africa as a vast reservoir of

human labourers and raw materials offer a rich testing ground for

Davis’s theory that anti-slavery was less about humanitarianism than

about devising new forms of labour exploitation. In the 1780s, as the

American colonies achieved independence and the abolition movement

gathered momentum, a trickle of intermittent speculation about the

possibility of free African plantations became a torrent of utopian ideas

and fantasies about the sorts of traffic and exchange that might be con-

ducted on the west coast of Africa.3 One of the most curious of these

fantasists is the entomologist, philosophical traveller, and citizen of the

world, Henry Smeathman (1742–86). Smeathman is little known today

but he has a number of claims to fame. He was an early propagandist for

abolition, credited by his friend George Cumberland as one of the first

to impress on the British public the infamy of the slave trade. He is also

generally regarded as the founding father of the Sierra Leone colony,

publishing in 1786 a Plan of a Settlement to be made near Sierra Leona,4 a

little pamphlet in the shape of a contract with London’s ‘Blacks and peo-

ple of Colour’ to settle them as ‘freemen’ in West Africa. A keen sup-

porter of the new American republic, Smeathman also envisaged a

transatlantic dimension to his plans for Sierra Leone. Black American

loyalists, longing for a place where ‘color would be no reproach’ and

where they would not be excluded by whites from land or the legislature

would, he argued, also leap at the opportunity of sailing for the West

African coast, as would the so-called ‘free’ people of colour of the West

Indies, labouring under ‘intolerable oppression and insults’.5

Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, the son of a distiller and brandy mer-

chant, Smeathman early showed a great enthusiasm for natural history,

especially insects.6 In 1771, this enthusiasm took him to Africa and the

West Indies, where he spent approximately four years in each place. His

travels were financed by a powerful group of sponsors, including Joseph

Banks, just returned from the Pacific, and the eminent London Quaker

physicians, Dr John Fothergill and Dr John Coakley Lettsom. These

sponsors sent Smeathman to the Banana Islands, just south of Sierra

Leone, to study West African plants, insects, and minerals, the general

purpose of the adventure being (in Smeathman’s words) ‘the encourage-

ment of arts and sciences, the advancement of medicine, manufactures,

and commerce’.7 Four years’ residence on the African coast, where he

was obliged to receive payment in the local currency, namely in ‘Slaves,

Rice, Ivory or any other commodity’, loosened his anti-slavery princi-

ples, so much so that at the beginning of 1774 Smeathman accepted an

agency with William James Esquire, a leading Liverpool merchant and

slave-trader with no fewer than thirty-seven ships involved in

the African trade.8 A year later, he fully reversed his African plans for

undermining the West Indian plantation system by sailing to Grenada,

142 Deirdre Coleman

lured by the planters’ offer of £20,000 to whoever could rid their fields of

the ants attacking the sugar canes.9 Extensive experience of the brutality

of plantation slavery appears to have restored him to his original scru-

ples, and he returned to England in 1779. Unfortunately, his great sup-

porter and patron, Dr Fothergill, died shortly afterwards, and, despite

strenuous efforts to gain new sponsors, Smeathman never got back to

Africa to found his agricultural and commercial colony, dying in London

in 1786, aged 44. In the five years before his death, however, he enjoyed

fame with his essay on termite colonies, a work which fascinated his con-

temporaries and which is still cited by entomologists today.10

Historians of the Sierra Leone colony have always been somewhat

uneasy about Smeathman, especially on the question of his commit-

ment to abolitionism. In 1786, the year he died, Jonas Hanway,

Chairman of the ‘Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor’, criticized

Smeathman for his intention of ‘trafficking in Men, so far that he would

buy although he would not sell’.11 The charge is undeniable, but

Smeathman made no secret of his scheme ‘to deal in human creatures’,

as he bluntly described redemption to Cumberland.12 Even Granville

Sharp approved of Smeathman’s scheme, provided that the labour

accrued through redemption was owned by the colony as a whole,

rather than by individuals.13 The method proposed involved buying

slaves direct from the ships, then setting them at liberty on the coast

with tools ‘for making plantations, and establishing themselves’. To

potential sponsors, Smeathman stressed the central role of natal alien-

ation in achieving political and social cohesion in his new colony.14

Slaves purchased from different parts of Africa would (he believed) will-

ingly surrender their different ‘customs, manner and language’ in

exchange for ‘liberty’, assuming instead a newly confected transnational

identity. This new non-identity, neither British nor ‘African’, would

engender dependency, leading them to agree ‘to be governed by what

they term WHITE-MAN’S fashion’ (Smeathman to Knowles, New-JerusalemMagazine, pp. 290–1). Built as it was upon the infrastructure of the very

system it aimed to abolish, the plan to re-birth slaves as freemen cer-

tainly had some disturbing features to it. The pitfalls of ameliorative

schemes like Smeathman’s would later cause the young Pantisocrat

Robert Southey to joke that his only companion in the wilderness of

America would be ‘some poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to

emancipate’.15

Smeathman’s most elaborate thinking on the nature of free plantation

colonies is to be found in his allegorical essay on West African termites,

‘Some Account of the Termites, which are found in Africa and other hot

Henry Smeathman, the Fly-Catching Abolitionist 143

climates’, cast as a letter to his fellow ant enthusiast, Sir Joseph Banks,

and read to the Royal Society in February 1781.16 An African georgic,

with a termitary substituted for Virgil’s beehive, Smeathman’s essay

explores a range of human activities and conditions, such as freedom

and slavery, the social and labour organization of colonies, flight and

emigration, sexual reproduction and labour. As an allegory the essay

operates on a number of different levels, shifting between high and low,

the universal and the particular, the global and the local. At one point

the termitary images a colony of Africans; at another point it moves

outwards to mirror imperial and commercial relations between Britain

and Africa. In tandem with this, Smeathman’s anthropomorphic lan-

guage expands and contracts, with the termites allegorizing either all

peoples or Africans alone. Moreover, like the beehive, in which the sex

of the ruling bee had traditionally switched between male and female,

depending upon the sex of the allegorist’s reigning sovereign, the termi-

tary offered Smeathman great versatility in projecting his own political,

social, and labour ideals.17

Following Virgil, who extolled the bees for their highly efficient, patri-

otic, and collective qualities, Smeathman praises the termites as

admirably industrious colonizers who repress all individuality for the

greater good of the community. What Smeathman celebrates most is the

white ants’ social organization (their ‘economy’), the foundation of

which is a highly narrow, specialized, and strictly regimented labour

force. This highly specialized labour organization is precisely what

Smeathman had diagnosed as lacking in African society. In his African

journal and letters home during the early 1770s, he had repeatedly

denounced pre-modern Africans as ‘dilatory’, ‘lazy’, ‘indolent’, and

‘improvident’. Furthermore, they owned no ‘law, order or management’

in their housekeeping, or domestic economy. The reforming agenda of

Smeathman’s allegory is a quasi-totalitarian one, exhibiting some dark

and grimly futuristic projections for his ideal West African ‘free’ com-

munity. The termites’ world may be free of visible slavery, but its econ-

omy is dedicated nevertheless, like slave labour, to the aim of mass

production, propelled forward by an unremitting, factory-like discipline,

incessant vigilance, and blind obedience from the workers. But true to

its Virgilian prototype, Smeathman’s essay also contains a recognizably

mystical and pantheistic vision of the natural world, best seen in Book IV

of the Georgics, where the bees participate in a divine intelligence per-

vading all things: ‘Thro’ Heav’n and Earth, and Oceans depth he throws /

His Influence round, and kindles as he goes’, a universe in which every

living thing not only draws its life from the Creator, but returns to him

144 Deirdre Coleman

as well.18 Like Virgil’s bees, Smeathman’s termites symbolize the eternal

and elementary processes of generation, creation, and destruction at

work in the universe.

Sexuality, populousness, and eternal self-renewal: these are all key fea-

tures of the termitary, so much so that Smeathman claimed that the

essay’s main value lay in its investigation of ‘a mode of propagation …

singular and wonderful in itself’.19 Propagation was the key to the colo-

nization of Africa, for it was only in population that Britain could hope

(as Southey would later put it) for ‘security, power, glory and dominion’.

Britain’s destiny to be ‘the hive of nations’, casting ‘her swarms’ across

the globe, would be simply achieved through conforming to the

commandment, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and

subdue it’.20 Smeathman, imperial fantasist, was prepared to do his per-

sonal best for the colonization of Africa. With polygamy considered

‘bon ton’ for European residents,21 he married three times into the

African and Afro-European families who ruled the part of the coast on

which he settled, joking to one of his sponsors Dru Drury that he would

have to take a fourth wife if he could not get his hands on more books.22

To Banks, he confided that a man could keep ‘half a dozen ladies for less

than one would cost him in London’, the expense being not much more

than ‘two or three guineas a year’ for each wife, and at that price she

would be ‘as well rigged out’ as the local queen.23 Smeathman chose his

wives well, his ‘Temporary’ fathers-in-law, as he called them, being all

prominent power brokers. His first marriage took place on the Banana

Islands, seven months after his arrival in Africa, the alliance forming a

key part of his plan to ‘set up house’ quickly so that he could start the

arduous and long-term business of establishing a garden on the island

and collecting specimens for his patrons. Referring to himself face-

tiously as the ‘flycatcher’, Smeathman enjoyed cutting a figure in his let-

ters home, such as the effeminized dilettante obliged to mix with

brutish slave-traders, or the botanist-lover dedicated to scientific mas-

tery of the new world around him.24 The botanist-lover persona can be

seen in his jokey description of the first ‘flycatcher’s nuptials’, written

for the entertainment of his friend and wealthy sponsor Dru Drury, and

including a glimpse of his most important specimen to date, his ‘little

Brunetta with her wooly topping’, laid in bed beside him and ‘smiling

every now & then’. She was ‘not above thirteen, and a shape like the

Venus of Medicis – with two pretty, jutting, dancing hills upon her

breast’, just the companion to grace an island he described as ‘amazingly

fertile’. Smeathman’s description of his black Venus exemplifies the

curioso’s pleasure in gazing and naming new specimens, a pleasure


which he then shares with his patron, allowing him a voyeuristic peep

at his prize whilst nevertheless asserting prior and sole proprietorship.

After describing the ‘hills’ of her chest, he warns: ‘hold you dog! If you

put a finger there – I’ll! – ’25 Drury was clearly broad-minded, but even

Smeathman’s more conservative Quaker patrons seem to have been

untroubled by the liberal propagation of their employee’s seed in Africa.

Indeed, Lettsom admired Smeathman’s ‘enterprising spirit’ in forming

such strategic marriage alliances, given that the greater end of his

labours would be the abolition of slavery from this part of the coast.

Regrettably, Lettsom later told a correspondent, the wives all died before

Smeathman left the coast, and he ‘forgot to inquire of him, whether he

had any prince or princess by them’.26 Lettsom would probably not have

been so pleased to hear Smeathman punning about fly-catching a few

years later in a letter to Banks, well known for his unfussed attitude

towards slavery. Playing on the figure of Psyche, and the association of

souls with butterflies, Smeathman quips that he is all set to turn ‘a dealer

in souls as well as a merchant of butterflies and nettles’, his long-term

view for the coast being to discover if ‘some specimens of the Primateshere, will be likely to meet with an agreable [sic] reception from the col-

lectors in our Colonies’.27

Smeathman’s chief success as an African collector was in insects, of

which he sent a large number to England, ‘many of them rare’, accord-

ing to Dr Fothergill.28 Indeed, Smeathman boasted that his collections

enriched ‘most of the cabinets in Europe with singular and beautiful

genera and species’.29 Well-off patrons like Drury, possessor of the finest

entomological collection in England, were eager to expand their range

of exotic specimens, many of which were valuable precisely because,

Drury wrote, of the ‘exceedingly unhealthy’ countries in which they

were gathered, ‘where collectors, in procuring them, have perished by

the severity of the climate’.30 So high were the risks that Linnaeus him-

self, musing on the ‘melancholy fate’ of so many botanists, wondered

‘whether men are in their right mind who so desperately risk life and

everything else’ through their love of collecting.31 If the collectors were

at risk, so too were the specimens, which often journeyed precariously

on long sea voyages. The neat fit between collecting and slavery, so

deftly captured by Smeathman’s pun on fly-catching, was in fact any-

thing but smooth or straightforward. For while Smeathman claimed

that his position as Liverpool agent on the coast would facilitate his

activities, enabling him to send his specimens to Europe much more

frequently, the long detour via the West Indies took a deadly toll. In a

letter to Linnaeus, Fothergill complained that not a single seed or plant

146 Deirdre Coleman

had reached him from Smeathman in three years, the reason being that

the specimens shared the same fate as that ‘wickedest of cargoes’, the

slaves – ‘everything dies’.32

II Colonizers extraordinaire

Under Smeathman’s microscope, the termitary mirrors, on a miniature

scale, an image of imperial greatness, consisting of a revered Queen

termite – a fecund African Queen – at the heart of a complex and organic

society of strictly ordered citizens behaving with martial efficiency and

precision. Outstanding architects and visionary builders of subterranean

cities, the termites also display ‘wonderful oeconomy’ and ‘good order’ in

everything they do (‘Some Account’, p. 139). Their ‘great commonwealths’

function as elective monarchies, consisting of one male and one female at

the top, the common parents of the whole, followed by three orders or

castes of insects, ‘apparently of very different species, but really the same’

(ibid., p. 144). At the bottom of this hierarchy are the labourers, or work-

ing insects, the smallest and by far the most numerous of the termites that

with great military regularity and industry repair any breaches to the walls

of their fortified cities. In the middle are the fighting insects or soldiers,

who make up about 10 per cent of the population and, at the top, the

nobility or gentry, the winged or ‘perfect insects, which are male and

female, and capable of propagation’. These perfect insects ‘neither labour,

or toil, or fight, being quite incapable of either, and almost of self-defence’.

Their importance, indeed the very essence of their being, consists in their

reproductive potential: their ability to ‘establish new kingdoms, or perish

within a day or two’, as Smeathman bluntly put it (ibid., p. 145). Thus, just

as Linnaeus had placed the sex life of the plant at the centre of botany,

Smeathman foregrounds the central importance of the termites’ nuptial

flight – that moment once a year, at swarming time, when the workers

breach the walls of their normally inviolable cities so that their future

kings and queens can fly off and found new colonies. Furnished with fully

developed eyes and sex organs, plus four large wings, these colonizers

extraordinaire roam ‘through the wide air, and explore new and distant

regions’. Like plants disseminating seed, they spread over a large area, most

of them perishing in the process but a few surviving to found new colonies

(ibid., p. 166). Certainly, in the termites’ nuptial flight, Smeathman could

not have hit upon a better metaphor for the fabled wealth and terrible

mortality of Africa. Allegorically, the prospective colonizer’s movement

from home to the tropical disease environment of Africa was a moment

both of extreme glory and extreme vulnerability.


No matter how great the external threat to the termitary, labour is

strictly divided in termite society. The labourers never fight, and the

soldiers never build; the only thing they share is ‘loyalty and fidelity’ to

their king and queen, the labourers camouflaging the royal chamber

under attack, and the soldiers ‘dying under its walls’ rather than surren-

dering (ibid., p. 187). That the termites under attack show ‘more good

sense than the bulk of mankind’ can be seen in their military precision

in an emergency, the labourers suddenly retreating so that the soldiers

can come forward to defend the nest, ‘a wonderful instance of good

order and discipline, seldom seen in populous cities, where we

frequently find helpless people, women, and children, without any ill

intention, intermixing in violent tumults and dangerous riots’ (ibid.,

p. 186). The seemingly supernatural order governing the termitary, what

Eugene Marais would later call the termites’ ‘group soul’ or psyche,33

means that no insect exists as an individual; they all work in concert for

the good of the whole community. By the time Smeathman returned to

England, it was this highly organized, industrious, and altruistic society

which lay at the heart of his utopian vision for Africa. Having moved

beyond the abusive epithets provoked by his actual experience on the

coast, Smeathman embarked on a more theoretical diagnosis of the

natives’ problem, which was that, not living in large communities,

Africans enjoyed ‘little advantage from being in society’. Instead of

combining ‘their strength and their skill’ to achieve large objectives in

agriculture, manufactures and commerce, they exhausted the ‘force of

their strength … upon solitary and trivial exertions’, with the same man

engaged in numerous small tasks, such as weaving, thatching, fishing,

and hunting. There was no policy of uniting and co-operating for

‘mutual benefit’. Being himself ‘a person of indefatigable industry’, and

a devotee of the virtues of hard physical labour, especially in hus-

bandry,34 Smeathman fantasized about regulating and disciplining the

local Africans through the division of labour, a process which would be

assisted by European machinery and European purchasers (Smeathman

to Knowles, New-Jerusalem Magazine, pp. 284–5). In this way Africans

would rise above the production of mere necessaries to achieve a ‘great

superabundance’, and it is this excess which would enable them to stop

selling their own people. Unlike Oliver Goldsmith who looked back

with nostalgia to a time ‘When every rood of ground maintained its

man; / For him light labour spread her wholesome store, / Just gave what

life required, but gave no more’,35 Smeathman exemplifies the ‘accumu-

lationist and mercantile view of empire’ which, according to Kathleen

Wilson, characterizes British thinking at this time – the belief ‘that

148 Deirdre Coleman

empire was at heart about trade, commerce, accumulation, and

consumption’.36 Furthermore, in adhering to the virtues of the division

of labour, Smeathman was promulgating one of the most original argu-

ments of that other insect fabulist, Bernard Mandeville, who in his Fableof the Bees (1729) argued that savage people would never improve and

become useful to one another until ‘one will wholly apply himself to the

making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third

builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils’. As long as

each ‘promiscuously’ attempts to do a number of different tasks, the sav-

age would never be able to improve his condition; he would never be

able to rise from a subsistence to a surplus economy.37

Whereas bees have been primarily associated with monarchies, ants

are renowned for their republicanism, their societies forming what

Milton described as a ‘Pattern of just equality’.38 This made them attrac-

tive to pro-Americans like Smeathman and his French contemporary

J. Hector St John De Crèvecœur, who also wrote admiringly of ant

republics in Virginia.39 Another difference between bees and ants was

that, while the high degree of organization and productivity of bees had

pastoral associations, ant society was associated with darkness and ruth-

less efficiency, often prompting military and imperialist analogies.40 The

contrast between the two insects can be clearly seen in Virgil’s similes in

The Aeneid. In Book 1 Aeneas, the prototype of the Western colonizer

and empire builder, marvels at the spectacle of Dido’s people founding

their city, like ‘Bees in flow’ry Plains’. When duty dictates that Aeneas

must leave in order to found his own city, the grief-struck Dido sees the

departing Trojans as an army of ants ‘that blacken all the Shore’, all of

whom ‘ply their sev’ral Tasks, and equal Toil sustain’.41 Moved by higher

necessity than that of love, Aeneas is here ‘Imperator’, the future

founder of Rome and the leader of a military society. Of the different

types of termites examined in his essay, it is significant that Smeathman,

the theorist of colonization, devotes most of his time and attention to

the largest and the most aggressive of the West African termites, the

Termes bellicosus.A Gibbon-like preoccupation with the fragility of civilizations gives

Smeathman’s essay a rich rhetorical colouring.42 At the same time that

the termites excel all other insects in the ‘arts of building, as much as the

Europeans excel the least cultivated savages’, they are also the most

extraordinary destroyers, marching ‘at a great distance from their

habitations’ in order to carry on ‘a business of depredation and destruc-

tion, scarce credible but to those who have seen it’ (‘Some Account’,

pp. 142–3). This work of destruction is secret, and almost supernatural in


its impact, so that stepping on a seemingly solid log can be like stepping

‘upon a cloud’; and when the termites take possession of Smeathman’s

microscope, they build their cells around the ‘pedestal and the tube’, eat-

ing everything except the glass or metal, and leaving a ‘cloud of a

gummy nature’ upon the lenses (ibid., pp. 182, 179). But if the termite

colonists are Luddites when it comes to the latest technological inven-

tions, their prowess for destruction is also extremely beneficial, for they

unlock the energy and nutrients contained in dead plant material, thus

enabling these to be circulated beneficially throughout the ecosystem.

Although Smeathman does not use these terms, or declare, as modern

entomologists have done, that the earth would rot without these invalu-

able insects,43 he views the underlying scheme of the world as a dynamic

and paradoxical process, in which creation and destruction are insepara-

ble: the termites are constantly clearing away decayed trees and deserted

villages so that new growth and new towns can take root. The extremely

purposeful nature of destruction is presented as part of the divine plan,

according to which ‘when any thing whatever is arrived at its last degree

of perfection, the Creator has decreed it shall be totally destroyed as soon

as possible, that the face of nature may be speedily adorned with fresh

productions in the bloom of spring or the pride of summer’ (‘Some

Account’, pp. 146–7). In this way, Smeathman mirrors the optimistic and

progressive understanding of history implicit in Gibbon’s first volume,

with every civilization bequeathing something of benefit to its succes-

sors, even as it declines and disappears.

The rise and fall of the great forests has a levelling effect, evoking in turn

a cyclical view of history in which natural and periodic revolutions bring

about timely alternations between national virtue and corrupting excess.

Rapacity and ferocity are crucial to the ‘wonderful order and beauty’ of

creation, Smeathman argues, quoting from the ‘Hymn’ which concludes

James Thomson’s The Seasons to reinforce his point about a divine provi-

dence which benignly sets in motion the earth’s deep generative powers:

Mighty hand,

Which, ever busy, wheels the silent spheres;

Works in the secret deep; shoots, streaming, thence

The fair profusion that o’erspreads the spring:

Flings from the sun direct the flaming day;

Feeds every creature; hurls the tempest forth;

And, as on earth this grateful change revolves,

With transport touches all the springs of life.

(‘Some Account’, p. 178)44

150 Deirdre Coleman

The Seasons, with its deist celebration of the four seasons as ‘the varied

God’, must have been one of Smeathman’s favourite poems, for he

quoted from it as he was approaching the Banana Islands for the first

time in December 1771, describing in his journal the mating of two

Grampus whales ‘tumbling about as the Poet expresses it “in unwieldy

joy” ’ – an appropriate harbinger of his own nuptial frolics on the

island.45 There were many reasons for liking Thomson: a shared belief in

agricultural work as ‘the surest foundation of wealth and national pros-

perity’, and a conviction of the link between agriculture and a global

mercantile empire. Thomson’s reactivation of the symbolic currency of

the plough and the cultural links between ancient Rome and the British

Empire must also have been deeply congenial to a man who would later

map out for his sponsors a ‘new state’ in Africa to be governed by him-

self in the guise of ‘Romulus’.46

But just as the termites are crucial to the earth’s cycle of production

and destruction, they also participate in that levelling rise and fall, with

their nobility metamorphosing into a most unhappy and vulnerable

race. As we have already seen, no sooner do these insects achieve their

most mature and perfect form as emigrants and colonizers, complete

with wings of generation, than they are almost completely annihilated,

with ‘probably not a pair in many millions’ getting into a place of safety.

In other words, it is only in the almost complete obliteration of one

empire that a few survivors will go on to ‘fulfil the first law of nature, and

lay the foundation of a new community’. Those few surviving pairs,

found by labouring termites scouring the ground, ‘are elected KINGS and

QUEENS of new states’ and immediately installed ‘in a small chamber of

clay suitable to their size’. Here they are waited upon by their devoted

‘voluntary subjects’ who ‘charge themselves with the task of providing for

the offspring of their sovereigns as well as to work and to fight for them

until they shall have raised a progeny capable at least of dividing the task

with them’ (ibid., pp. 167–70). From such precarious beginnings, and

over the course of several years, the new colony struggles to establish

itself. Just as the founding of empires involves great loss as well as glory,

Smeathman’s belief in his destiny as a ‘perfect winged insect’ is tinged

with an ironic awareness of the contingency of his role as colonizer.

Although the exteriors of the giant hill-nests were well known to trav-

ellers in warm climates, they were nevertheless extremely enigmatic (see

Figure 9.1). Banks recorded in his Endeavour journal that the New Holland

hill-nests resembled old stones in ‘English Druidical monuments’, while

his companion, Dr Solander, likened them to the ‘Rune Stones’ of

Sweden.47 Smeathman’s chief claim to originality lies in his dissection of


the even more mysterious interior of the large hill-nests, of which very

little was known at that time. Combining microscope technology with

local indigenous knowledge of the ‘Bugga Bugs’ – the latter symbolized

by the African labourer whose hand directs our gaze towards the hill-

nest’s centre – Smeathman probes deep into the layers of mystery sur-

rounding the termites’ society. What we see exposed, and what is

expounded in the text, is the visionary architecture of a vast subter-

ranean city, containing an intricate labyrinth of galleries and different

apartments, supported and intersected by turrets, bridges, well-turned

arches and flying buttresses, ledges, and giant staircases. At the centre of

this teeming citadel is the royal chamber containing the king and

queen, surrounded by royal apartments full of attendants, up to 100,000

in number, and nurseries full of eggs, with chambers leading off these to

vast magazines of provisions and other stores. In the infant state of the

colony, ‘the nurseries are close to the royal chamber’ but as the nest

grows, requiring incessant renovation, the first nurseries are ‘taken to

pieces, rebuilt a little farther off a size bigger, and the number of them

encreased at the same time’ (‘Some Account’, p. 153). Here we move

from an image of colonization on the coast to more global connections,

such as the enlargement of Britain’s commerce, the disposal of her rap-

idly growing population through emigration, and, finally, the ideal rela-

tionship underpinning relations between the mother country and her

infant colony. Importantly, the queen termite does not actually govern

152 Deirdre Coleman

Figure 9.1 After Henry Smeathman. ‘The hill-nest raised by the Termites bellicosi’.

Source: From the original in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Sydney.

or lead her colony but is instead its ‘common mother’. As an image of the

state she embodies large-scale production, described as ‘one vast matrix

full of eggs’, her abdomen swelled to an enormous size, ‘fifteen hundred or

two thousand times the bulk of the rest of her body, and twenty or thirtythousand times the bulk of a labourer’ (ibid., pp. 170–1). The image is a

somewhat alarming one, reminiscent of Goldsmith’s baroque kingdoms

‘to sickly greatness grown’ through luxury, or Gibbon’s Rome, ‘swelled

into an empire’, the ‘stupendous fabric’ of which inevitably ‘yielded to

the pressure of its own weight’.48 But at no point does the mother termite

sink under her own weight. Instead, her monstrous hypertrophy fits well

with fantasies about the limitless resources of Africa, and how these

might be exchanged for the teeming manufactures of Britain. Passive and

dependent, the Queen’s eggs are ‘instantly taken from her body by her

attendants … and carried to the nurseries. … Here, after they are hatched,

the young are attended and provided with every thing necessary until

they are able to shift for themselves, and take their share of the labours

of the community’ (‘Some Account’, p. 172). The nurseries – evocatively

described by Crèvecœur as ‘the cradles of their rising generations’49 – are

the new colonies, the repositories of Britain’s massively increased manu-

facturing output. Thus, instead of becoming, as Goldsmith imagined

England, a ‘bloated mass of rank, unwieldy woe’, sinking under its own

weight and spreading ruin all around, the mother country, or queen

termite, is constantly relieved of her excess, at the same time as she is

speedily and efficiently breeding vast numbers of colonists to deal with

the ‘incalculable numerousness’ of her empire.50

In his breakfasts at Symond’s Inn Chambers in the early 1780s,

Smeathman’s free scientific lectures on termites ‘to people of all ranks of

society’ invariably concluded with philippics against the slave trade.

George Cumberland has left us a vivid description of Smeathman the

lecturer, his voice ‘unnecessarily loud’ and ‘his manner coarse and vio-

lent’, but ‘his facts were incontrovertible, and his humanity indis-

putable’. Under his ‘rough outside’ there was ‘a heart that did honour to

human nature’.51 Proof of the general fame of these lectures can be seen

in Hester Piozzi’s popular European travel book, Observations andReflections (1789). Describing the invasion of Europe by the admirably

energetic and manly Goths, she reminded her readers of Smeathman’s

vivid story ‘about twelve years ago’ of:

How an immense body of African ants, which appeared, as they moved

forwards, like the whole earth in agitation, covered and suddenly

arrested a solemn elephant, as he grazed unsuspiciously on the plain; he


told us too that in eight hours time no trace was left either of the dev-

asters or devasted, excepting the skeleton of the noble creature neatly

picked: a standing proof of the power of numbers against single force.52

It could be argued that the period’s fascination with ‘the power of num-

bers’ is related to a world increasingly founded upon commerce – upon

what J. G. A. Pocock has described as ‘the exchange of forms of mobile

property and … modes of consciousness suited to a world of moving

objects’.53 An army of tiny ants overwhelms a huge unsuspecting ele-

phant in an allegory of the triumph of modern military and commercial

imperialism over monarchical and feudal stagnation. For Piozzi,

Smeathman’s anecdote functions rather differently, as a mildly comical

allegory of the still peaceful revolution of 1789 occurring across the

Channel, with the ‘noble’ body of the monarch succumbing to his fate at

the hands of his numerous subjects. The massive solidity of the French

monarchy is as transitory as Rome’s civilization, overwhelmed by the

northern barbarians. But the passive succumbing of Piozzi’s elephant

glosses over the horror of what Smeathman actually recorded about its

fate. Noting everywhere in his journal the marching of the ants’ ‘formi-

dable’ little armies, he records the grim local lore that these ‘rapacious little

monsters … creep up the proboscis of the Elephant & torment him so

much that he beats himself to death, after which they soon pick his bone

clean’.54 As colonists, the termites may be great founders and builders of

cities but they are just as notable for their aggressive destructiveness.

Notes

This essay forms part of a larger research project on colonization in the Romantic

period. Further material on Smeathman, his life, his letters, and his colonial

projects, is discussed in my Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). I thank Carol Willock for her

transcriptions and research assistance, and Christopher Fyfe for participating in

‘Smeathmania’.

1. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823(London: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 358, 455, 30.

2. ‘Debate in the Commons on the State of the African Company, and of the Trade

to Africa’, in Parliamentary History of England from the earliest Period to the Year1803.…, 36 vols, repr. (New York: AMS, 1966), XIX (1777–8), pp. 306, 308.

3. The trickle appears to have begun in the 1760s. In an anonymous pamphlet,

Plan for improving Trade at Senegal (London, 1763), it was argued that free

labourers in Africa would be far more productive than those working under a

coercive system.

4. Henry Smeathman, Plan of a Settlement to be made near Sierra Leona, on theGrain Coast of Africa (London: Stockdale, 1786).

154 Deirdre Coleman

5. ‘Copy of two Letters addressed to Dr. Knowles, on the Rice Trade of Africa. By

Dr. Smeathman’, The New-Jerusalem Magazine, or a Treasury of Celestial,Spiritual, and Natural, Knowledge: By Several Members of the London UniversalSociety for Promotion of the NEW CHURCH (London: Printed for the Society, 1790),

279–94 (p. 290); dated 21 July 1783; hereafter abbreviated to Smeathman to

Knowles, New-Jerusalem Magazine. Smeathman’s transatlantic ambitions were

later to be achieved by Thomas Peters, an ex-slave and loyalist soldier who

led his people to Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia.

6. An account of Smeathman’s life was given by his sister-in-law Elizabeth to

John Coakley Lettsom, in a letter of 3 January 1787; see Thomas Joseph

Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the late John Coakley Lettsom, witha Selection of his Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees,

Orme, and Brown, 1817), II, pp. 252–62.

7. John Coakley Lettsom, The Works of John Fothergill, M.D. … with some accountof his Life (London: Charles Dilly, 1784), p. 576. Other sponsors were the col-

lector Dru Drury, the botanist Marmaduke Tunstall, Dr William Pitcairn, and

the Duchess of Portland.

8. See his letter to Drury, 15 January 1774 [Extracts from Mr. Smeathman’s

Letters to Mr. Drury], Uppsala University Library, MS D.26, p. 37.

9. On Smeathman’s role in this, see John Castles, ‘Observations on the Sugar

Ants. In a Letter from John Castles, Esq. To Lieut. Gen Melvill, F.R.S.’,

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 80 (1790), 346–58

(pp. 349–50).

10. For a recent reference to Smeathman’s work on termites, see Edward O.

Wilson, The Insect Societies (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

11. Stephen Braidwood quotes Hanway in Black Poor and White Philanthropists:London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–1791(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), p. 101.

12. Smeathman to Cumberland, 10 October 1783, British Library, Cumberland

Papers, Vol. IV, 1783, 1784, BL Add. 36494, fo. 168.

13. Braidwood outlines Sharp’s position on this in Black Poor, pp. 17–18.

14. I take the term ‘natal alienation’ from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and SocialDeath (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 7–8.

15. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Bedford, 14 December 1793, in Life andCorrespondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols

(London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849–50), II, p. 196.

16. ‘Some Account of the Termites, which are found in Africa and other hot

climates. In a Letter from Mr. Henry Smeathman, of Clement’s Inn, to Sir

Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ofLondon, 71 (1781), 139–92; hereafter abbreviated in text to ‘Some Account’.

For Banks’s admiration of weaver ant colonies in New Holland, see TheEndeavour Journal of Joseph Banks: The Australian Journey, ed. Paul Brunton

(Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1998), pp. 93–5.

17. In the unsettled 1780s, for instance, it was reported that instead of being

neuter, all working or common bees were ‘females in disguise’, a discovery

leading to the ‘new and singular’ doctrine that it was from ‘common’ eggs

alone that queens were reproduced; see review of the new edn of Chambers’s

and Rees’s Cyclopœdia: or, an Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, inCritical Review; or, The Annals of Literature, 65 (Jan. 1788), 4–5.


18. The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis. Translated intoEnglish Verse by Mr. Dryden, 2nd edn (London: Jacob Tonson, 1698), p. 186.

19. Lettsom, Works of John Fothergill, p. 580.

20. Robert Southey, unsigned review of P. Colquhoun’s Propositions for ameliorat-ing the Condition of the Poor [Treatise on Indigence, 1806], in Quarterly Review, 8,

16 (December 1812), 319–56 (p. 355).

21. See Paul Erdmann Isert, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: PaulErdmann Isert’s ‘Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia(1788)’, trans. and ed. S. A. Winsnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the

British Academy, 1992), p. 149. Isert gives a detailed account of how these

marriages worked in his ‘Ninth Letter’, pp. 156–7.

22. Smeathman to Drury, 5 March 1774 [Extracts from Smeathman’s Letters],

Uppsala University Library, MS D.26, p. 37.

23. Henry Smeathman to Joseph Banks, Bananas, 12 April 1773, Waller Manuscript

Collection, Uppsala University Library, gb-01577, p. 5a [fo. 162/p. 9].

24. For Banks in the 1770s as both ‘The Fly Catching Macaroni’ and the serious

man of empire, see Gillian Russell, ‘An “Entertainment of Oddities”:

Fashionable Sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s’, in A New Imperial History:

Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed.

Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

25. For the link between scientific observation and sexual voyeurism, see Alan

Bewell, ‘On the Banks of the South Sea’, in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany,and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 173–93.

26. Pettigrew, Memoirs of Lettsom, I, p. 135.

27. Smeathman to Banks, 12 April 1773, p. 5a.

28. Fothergill to Linnaeus, April 1774, in Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters ofDr John Fothergill of London, 1735–1780, ed. B. C. Corner and C. C. Booth

(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 409.

29. Lettsom, Works of John Fothergill, p. 579.

30. Dru Drury, printed description of his entomological collection in 1788,

quoted in Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 215.

31. Linnaeus in 1737, quoted in David C. Stuart, The Plants that Shaped ourGardens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. x.

32. Fothergill to Linnaeus, April 1774, Chain of Friendship, p. 409.

33. Eugene Marais, The Soul of the White Ant [1937], trans. Winifred de Kok

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

34. See William Dickson and Joshua Steele, Mitigation of Slavery, in two Parts(London: R. and A. Taylor; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814),

p. 454. Also, ‘I attribute all the extreme good health I enjoyed by intervals in

Africa, with the soundness of my constitution at this hour, to the great quan-

tity of hard labour I then sustained’ (Smeathman to Knowles, New-JerusalemMagazine, p. 292).

35. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), 58–60.

36. Kathleen Wilson, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and

the Politics of Identity in Georgian England’, in The Consumption of Culture,1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. A. Bermingham and John Brewer


156 Deirdre Coleman

37. Bernard Mandeville, ‘Sixth Dialogue’, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye,

2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), II, p. 284.

38. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), VII,

485–9.

39. See ‘Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America’, in J. Hector St John de

Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer: and Sketches of Eighteenth-CenturyAmerica, more Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York:

New American Library, 1963), p. 247; hereafter cited as Letters. The chapter

‘Ant-hill Town’ was not published until 1925.

40. Maurice Maeterlinck believed that termite civilization, ‘although fierce, sin-

ister and often repulsive’, was superior to that of bees, ants, and even man

himself; see The Life of the White Ant, trans. A. Sutro (London: Allen and

Unwin, 1927), pp. 18–19.

41. Dryden, Works of Virgil (1698), pp. 269, 363.

42. The first volume of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire appeared in 1776.

43. Edward O. Wilson, ‘Little Things that Run the World’, Conservation Biology, 1,

4 (1987), 344–6.

44. James Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. James Sambrook

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 159–60.

45. [‘Extract from Mr. Henry Smeathman’s Journal, Book 1’], Uppsala University

Library, MS D.26, p. 9. The copulating whales appear in The Seasons, p. 25

(‘Spring’, I. 821).

46. Smeathman to Knowles, New-Jerusalem Magazine, p. 291; and Pettigrew,

Memoirs of Lettsom, II, p. 276.

47. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, p. 54.

48. Goldsmith, Deserted Village, 391; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Declineand Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols (New York: Modern Library Edition,

1995), II, p. 1219.

49. Crèvecœur, Letters, p. 247. In his dedication to Letters from an AmericanFarmer, Crèvecœur refers to the provinces of North America as ‘the cradle of

future nations’, p. 29.

50. Goldsmith, Deserted Village, 394. For British fascination with imperialist

accumulation, and the association of women with empire, see Laura Brown,

‘The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves’, in TheNew Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity

Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 197–221.

51. George Cumberland, ‘To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. Mr. Cumberland’s

Plan for the Protection and Restoration of Females’, Monthly Magazine, 37

(1 April 1814), 199–203 (p. 200).

52. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections made in the Course of aJourney through France, Italy, and Germany, 2 vols (London: A. Strahan and

T. Cadell, 1789), I, p. 127.

53. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought andHistory, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1985), p. 109.

54. [Extract from Smeathman’s Journal], Uppsala University Library, Uppsala,

MS D.26, p. 37.


158

10Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus’s Anti-Slavery SermonBob Tennant

It is commonsensical to see the anti-slavery movement as a campaign to

stop the trade and free the victims. This, however, is not necessarily to

identify precisely either what its participants thought they were doing

or what their aims were, but only to summarize the ultimate result of

their efforts. Historically, what matters is the result – the dismantling of

one of the greatest institutional evils of modern history. At the time

what mattered was the process – the achieving of a consensus of opinion,

programme, and action. This essay discusses a sermon which, because of

the importance of its author, audience, and occasion, was pivotal in the

process of organizing Britain’s political and ecclesiastical establishment

actually to deliver this practical consensus. It argues that the ‘sentimen-

tal’, as expressed in Anglican evangelicalism, was a significant factor,

and developments in pulpit (and parliamentary) rhetoric an essential

tool in helping to transform a climate of opinion into a theory of empire

and practical politics. Part of this process was the projection of state and

church authority into overseas territories which, mostly acquired by pri-

vate venture, were not fully subject to British law or governance.

On Friday, 21 February 1783 Beilby Porteus, then Bishop of Chester,

gave the sermon at the annual meeting of the Society for the

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (referred to hereafter as ‘the

Society’) in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside. Its title, as given in

his collected Sermons on Several Subjects (London, 1789) was ‘The civi-

lization, improvement, and conversion of the Negroe-slaves in the

British [Caribbean] islands recommended.’

For many years, Porteus was the sole member of the bench of bishops

openly supportive of the developing evangelical movement. As Bishop of

Chester from 1776 to 1787 and of London, from 1787 to his death in

1808, he was a member of the House of Lords, and from 1777, of the

Privy Council’s committee for trade and foreign plantations, initially as

substitute for the ailing Robert Lowth. Born in York of Virginian parents,

he was the first senior Anglican clergyman to interest himself consis-

tently in the welfare of slaves in the British plantations. Earlier mission-

ary interests had been directed mainly towards the Native Americans, the

conversion of slaves being a priority mainly for dissenting sects such as

the Moravians, something which is several times referred to in the

Society’s own annual reports as well as in Porteus’s sermon and tracts. His

principal works in this area are the present sermon, reprinted several

times both singly and in collections, a tract based on it (1807), and his

1808 Letter to the Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations, inthe British West India Islands.1 He was active as a parliamentarian for

twenty-five years in the cause of emancipation, supporting, for example,

Sir William Dolben’s unsuccessful ‘Slave-Carrying Bill’ of 1788, which

aimed to regulate the transport of slaves in British shipping. He founded

the Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction of the Negroes

in the West Indies, and succeeded in transferring to that Society a

bequest for missionary work in America made in 1691 by Robert Boyle,

as well as donating large sums from his own pocket. Towards the end of

his life, he sought to adapt for the ministry to the West Indian slaves a

model developed under his auspices in India. He was a close associate of

William Wilberforce and, while Wilberforce is the greater figure in the

anti-slavery movement, Porteus can claim priority in that his sermon

predated Wilderforce’s own public activity, which didn’t really get going

until 1787, the year in which Porteus acquired ex officio responsibility for

the Anglican communion in all territories beyond the British Isles. By

1783, however, the question of slavery, as a political rather than juridical

matter, had not been put in Lambeth or Westminster. Porteus chose to

start this process, an action not entirely without risk to his status as

de facto designate Bishop of London.

There was a long, if ineffectual, tradition of commitment to religious

missions to the slaves in the Americas. In 1731, George Berkeley, for

example, gave one of the Society’s earlier sermons and, in a 1724

Proposal, pointed out that the slaves had been left without instruction

and had been denied baptism.2 Berkeley feared that Protestantism was

losing ground to Roman Catholicism, threatening ‘the utter extirpation

of our colonies’.3 Joseph Butler preached to the Society in 1738 about

their civic and spiritual rights:

Of these our colonies, the slaves ought to be considered as inferior

members, and therefore to be treated as members of them; and not

Sentiment, Politics, and Empire 159

merely as cattle or goods, the property of their masters. Nor can the

highest property, possible to be acquired in these servants, cancel

the obligation to take care of their religious instruction. Despicable as

they may appear in our eyes, they are the creatures of God, and of the

race of mankind, for whom Christ died: and it is inexcusable to keep

them in ignorance of the end for which they were made, and the means

whereby they may become partakers of the general redemption.4

However, there was little discussion of emancipation as such from the

Anglican pulpit before Granville Sharp’s legal victory in 1772 in the

James Sommersett case, which reversed some early eighteenth-century

legal rulings and, by virtue of the state of public opinion, in effect put a

stop to slavery in Britain (it was generally taken to mean ‘that as soon as

any slave sets his foot upon English territory, he becomes free’, which,

while inaccurate, was based in the recognition that English law did not

apply to possessions beyond the home territories). As for the Society, its

priority, as revealed in successive annual reports, was to serve the British

settlers in the colonies. The mission to the Native American peoples and

the African slaves was limited by financial and human resource factors

and, as it admitted, by the constitutional and ideological consideration

that the Anglican Church ministered to the English nation. However,

under the provisions of the will of General Christopher Codrington

(1668–1710), the Society had become a slave-owner, holding estates in

trust on condition that:

A convenient number of professors and scholars were … main-

tained … all of them to be under the vowes of poverty, chastity, and

obedience [and] obliged to study and practice physick and chirurgery,

as well as divinity, that by the apparent usefulness of the former to all

mankind they may both endear themselves to the people, and have

the better opportunity of doing good to men’s souls, while they are

taking care of their bodies.5

The Society so mismanaged the bequest that it was forced to farm out

the estates to the very slave-owners of whom the Society was critical.

Frederic Keppel, Bishop of Exeter, says in his sermon at the 1770 annual

meeting:

It is with great satisfaction also that we observe the humane and ten-

der treatment of those negro slaves, who are become [the Society’s]

possession, and we may reasonably hope that our good example will

160 Bob Tennant

have its proper effect upon other masters. How savage, how much

more barbarous is it, to treat these human beings, not only outwardly

like brutes, but inwardly also, as if they had no souls to be saved, no

sense to hear, no reason to discern, no faculties to enjoy the benefits

and blessings of the Gospel.6

This represents a drastic retreat from Butler’s teaching. Porteus, by

contrast, will be found feeling his way in a fundamentally progressive

direction. He regarded the non-Christian and non-European perspective

as valid; several times in his works he refers to new discoveries of peoples

in the South Seas by James Cook and others, drawing attention to

systems of belief about the human condition which are shared with

Christians: ‘So general a suffrage … is surely a very strong presumption

of its truth.’7 The method is Butler’s, but the application is an early

attempt at culturally neutral thinking. Porteus always reminds his con-

temporaries that the slaves suffered not through cultural or intellectual

inferiority but through ‘the reproach of [Britons] having delivered

[Africans] over … to a most heavy temporal bondage’.8

Despite the contemporary political crisis – the meeting took place

only three months after the outline peace treaty ceding independence to

the North American colonies – Porteus set out a drastic change of prior-

ities for the Society. He was chiefly interested in spiritual welfare, seek-

ing social reforms because ‘a certain degree of improvement and

civilization has always been found necessary to prepare the mind for the

admission of the divine truths of Revelation’ (p. 21). He suggested

that the Society take a lead on the plantations of the Codrington trust. The

slaves should be given Sundays off, have Saturday afternoons available

for work on their own allotments, legal protection from ill-treatment

and gross exploitation, education for their children, provision of pas-

toral and devotional leadership from the Church of England, and provi-

sion for a process of emancipation through repayment of the purchase

price, which might be earned by additional paid voluntary labour on the

owners’ plantations. We should note that the proposal to allow slaves to

do additional paid work and thus buy their freedom to become full wage

earners and full members of society has its origin in Locke’s work on the

social contract. All male wage earners could aspire, however distantly, to

the property qualifications for the electoral franchise and were thus full

members of society, if currently without full privileges. Porteus’s pro-

posal would place the slave within the consensual polity in which slav-

ery could be superseded. ‘We must … attach them and their families

inseparably to the soil, must give them a little interest in it …,’ he argues


(p. 21). The same proposal is used by James Ramsey,9 whose work is

given a generous tribute in a footnote to the first edition of Porteus’s ser-

mon (p. 14). It is also used by Josiah Tucker in A Sermon Preached … onWednesday May the 7th, 1766: in this Tucker argues for the introduction

of paid work for charity school children (teachers should be unsalaried

but get ‘a Bounty of so much in the Pound’).10 ‘Enjoy[ing] the Fruits of

their own Labour’ is the route out of the condition of slavery in which

charity children are placed.11

By inviting Porteus to preach, the Society was also committing itself,

by convention, to publishing his sermon. He was thus able to force into

the public record a doctrinal and political programme. Before this

sermon the question of slavery was the prerogative of the noncon-

formists, ecclesiastically marginal Anglicans like John Wesley, and ‘sen-

timental’ literati like Laurence Sterne. After it, notable dates in the

process of emancipation come thick and fast. A major interest is, there-

fore, the type of argument which Porteus builds up, and the situational

dynamic, rather than the details of his programme.

The occasion was physically intimate: the assembly had packed into the

church vestry – forty men in a room fifteen feet by forty-five – and its

members knew each other well. It was also an exceptionally prestigious

gathering; from 1748 to the end of the century every invited preacher

was a bishop and this year, in addition to Porteus himself, the assem-

bly comprised the Archbishop of York, nine other bishops (Salisbury,

Peterborough, Rochester, Bangor, Oxford, Exeter, Lichfield and Coventry,

Gloucester, and Bristol, most of whom had given or would give the

annual sermon themselves and were his colleagues in the House of Lords),

seventeen other clergy and twelve laymen, several of whom were promi-

nent philanthropists. The Society’s Secretary, Dr William Morice, had just

presented the Annual Report, with details of donations and expenditure

and the work in each of various colonies in the Americas and the Gold

Coast. He had reported that in 1782 the Society had employed sixty-one

overseas staff, with a further two dozen vacancies. He had estimated that

about 150,000 ‘of our own people [and] many thousands of Indians and

Negroes have been instructed and baptized’ during the Society’s eighty-

two years of activity. A balance sheet was not given since, as the main mis-

sion to the British overseas territories, the Society’s accumulated deficit

was periodically made good from the Privy Purse.

Those present in the church, the Society, and any sympathizers and

members of the public who dropped in, might have expected the ser-

mon to be of a very definite type: what was becoming known as the

Tillotson ‘three-decker’. The large majority of eighteenth-century

162 Bob Tennant

Anglican sermons derive their structure and style from John Tillotson

(Archbishop of Canterbury, 1691–94). His dual status as the leading

preacher and the appointed ecclesiastical leader of the post-1688 Whig

establishment ensured that he set the style of sermons for almost the

next hundred years. The Tillotson sermon was a tripartite construction,

moving from a preliminary exposition of doctrine to a discussion and

thence to an application of it, usually through analysis of a particular

case or problem (this was itself typically set out in triple form). Sermons

ended with a brief peroration which returned to the salient points of

doctrine. It aimed at stating doctrine clearly, stopping controversy, and

eliminating political ambiguity. This simple model describes perhaps

90 per cent of Anglican sermons in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Although as a form it was past its peak of vigour and relevance by 1783,

it was used by Porteus for all his published sermons except this one. The

Tillotson model carried conviction because it implied that behind its

theme and structure lay a body of scholarship and an established logical

method. On this occasion, however, Porteus sought not to close down

debate but to open it up. He therefore improvises a method so unusual

for its time, and with so little contact with established rules of composi-

tion, and even secular rhetoric, that it is not possible to describe its free-

dom of flow in terms of contemporary theory: he uses the ‘pulpit’ – his

status, the occasion, and certain lines of argument – in a way calculated

to stimulate discussion while denying the legitimacy of counter-attacks.

The sermon’s rhetoric is both improvisatory and exceptionally

complex. Porteus has four themes: (1) the lovingness of Jesus; (2) the

healthiness of the Christian soul (including the souls of African

converts); (3) a programme of spiritual and social development for the

slaves; and (4) a vision of an Anglican British Empire. He treats these

consistently from a spiritual viewpoint – we must remember that, for

Porteus, social and economic emancipation is important mainly as a

pre-condition of spiritual growth and redemption. His treatment of the

Holy Spirit identifies five areas, or levels, of activity: (1) in Jesus; (2) in

Christians; (3) (absent) in those who reject Christ (the Jews of Luke 4

and the planters); (4) in the unconverted (slaves); and (5) in the nascent

empire (considered as a dynamic process, not an institution).

As an example of Porteus’s rhetorical method, let us consider the fol-

lowing episode, which immediately follows an account of what slaves’

lives would be like in a reformed system:

A scene such as this, which is far, I am persuaded, from being a vision-

ary idea, would be delightful to humanity; would form a new school


for piety in the western world, a seminary of religion for all the slaves

of the neighbouring plantations and islands, perhaps ultimately for

the whole coast of Africa; would be an example of decency, of order,

of harmony, of industry, of happiness, which the other planters

would find impossible to resist; and would more effectually confute

the various objections that have been made to the conversion of the

African slaves than all the speculative arguments in the world. (p. 29)

This passage has a single theme – the programme of the slaves’ spiritual

and social development. It operates, however, on a variety of levels:

Porteus moves rapidly to and from considering this programme from

the perspectives of the spiritual welfare of Christians, presently unre-

generate planters, presently unconverted slaves, and – ‘a new school for

piety in the western world’ – an imperial dimension too. This multi-

layered episode is typical of the fast-flowing persuasiveness of the whole

sermon.

Thus Porteus rose to deliver a forty-minute sermon (based on a reck-

oning that its 5,500 words were delivered at approximately 150 per

minute) which not only set out a detailed programme for his listeners’

implementation but did so through a sustained emotional appeal disci-

plined by an elaborate doctrinal context, an emphatic statement of

ecclesiastical authority, and, at key points, the use of pulpit theatricality.

His device is to build up a sense of passionate, yet measured, conviction

by accelerating and elaborating the play of thematic material and then,

by a reverse process of deceleration and simplification, to create a

progressive weightiness of effect.

First comes the text, Luke 4. 17–20. This in itself is very unusual in

Porteus’s published works: twice as long as any other he used. In only

two other published sermons does he use a text of more than a single

verse. The text, from the Authorized Version, is:

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias.

And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was

written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed

me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the bro-

kenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of

sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach

the acceptable year of the Lord.

And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and

sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were

fastened on him.

164 Bob Tennant

Then follows the sermon. Because it is not easily available to the mod-

ern reader I offer a précis (throughout which the first person plural and

possessives refer to the members of the Society). This preserves the argu-

ment, but not the proportions of the original:

Jesus’s mission was always characterized by dignity and tenderness.

The Jews’ reaction to it was anger, but it fills Christians with love and

reverence. We recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit and the

accomplishment of Isaiah’s prophesy. Jesus’s teachings delivered peo-

ple from spiritual captivity but also broke down the system of slavery

throughout Christendom. We, who are appointed to teach and prop-

agate his religion, must imitate him in these benevolent works and go

above all to the ignorant, helpless, and wretched. A large part of the

world remains to be evangelized, but the African slaves in the West

Indies best fit our priorities. Most are not baptized or given religious

instruction. There are over 400,000 in the British islands alone,

leading lives of gross immorality. This is not because Africans are

incapable of receiving knowledge but because of the planters’ objec-

tions and the lack of legal protection. They have not received the

same degree of attention from us as other peoples within the domin-

ions. We must not abandon them. We will redouble our efforts.

Present circumstances are favourable. Practical proposals are being

developed which will decrease the planters’ opposition and engage

the Government. The French have already provided a code of laws.

Some planters have voluntarily established humane conditions. Once

converted, Africans prove to be good workers. War-time disruptions to

the slave trade will compel improvements, so as to create a self-

sustaining population. This will make an educational system possi-

ble. We should begin with our own slaves in Barbados. They are

degraded and deprived of the social organization which is a prerequi-

site of true religious conversion. We must give them an interest in the

land and their work, legal rights, and a way of earning their freedom.

We must prove to the planters that these reforms will increase

productivity. We must regain direct control of our trust estates, which

have been farmed out. We will not abandon our mission to post-

revolutionary North America; in Canada we must establish an

Anglican presence, which is completely lacking. We must train

missionaries – which is consistent with our project in the islands. We

must first create model plantations, each a properly functioning

society. Ultimately the islands will prove a base for evangelizing

Africa and North America. It will be glorious for England and Great


Britain to undertake this enterprise. Since it has been the European

country most active in the slave trade it must be the most active in

reform. In doing this it will follow Christ’s example.

‘In this manner’, Porteus begins (referring to his scriptural text), ‘did

our gracious Redeemer open his divine commission’, emphasizing that

manner as well as matter was central to the Christian mission and that

liberation from slavery was not only fundamental to Christ’s doctrine

but the actual starting point of his mission on earth. Nevertheless, it is

the outer verses of his text (4. 17, 20) which are the most important.

They establish Christ’s authority as a prophet and messiah, fulfilling

Isaiah’s prophecy and taking a central role in a liturgical act, receiving

the book, reading from it, and returning it. This is emphasized by one of

two pieces of clerical theatre which Porteus introduces. ‘The eyes of all

them that were in the synagogue would be fastened on [Jesus]’ (p. 4); so,

of course, were the eyes of the Society’s meeting fastened on Porteus.

That people look at speakers is obvious and necessary. But Porteus, who

is expounding the scriptures, goes on to draw explicit links between

Christ’s ministry and his own, something which is very unusual in the

eighteenth-century Anglican Church, except among evangelicals. ‘It is

therefore incumbent on those who are the appointed teachers of his reli-

gion [to fulfil the prophecy by campaigning against slavery].’ More than

in any other of his sermons he builds up both his own clerical authority,

and that of the other bishops who had crowded into the meeting. He is

drawing on all the resources of the Anglican/Whig establishment; doc-

trinally and constitutionally the Society could not but support his posi-

tion, including his identification of each priest’s mission with Christ’s.

Moreover, as we have noted, the Bishop of London was the nominal pas-

tor of all Anglicans beyond the home territories: Lowth’s health was in

terminal decline and Porteus was his substitute in the Lords. In effect,

Porteus, anticipating his translation, was claiming a special sacerdotal

authority, something which was rare and even controversial in the

Anglican pulpit after the bruising debates over the Test Acts eighty years

previously and the spread of deism. Contemporary evangelicalism,

located in the new Methodist movement, in the Low Church, and in

Old Dissent, was necessarily incompatible with sacerdotalism. Here we

see Anglicanism feeling its way towards combining the two. Preaching

the doctrine of sacerdotal authority was so unusual and offensive to pre-

vailing opinion that at one point a priest physically occupied the pulpit

to prevent the prototype Anglican evangelical William Romaine from

lecturing along these lines.

166 Bob Tennant

Porteus goes further than identifying his ministry with Christ’s. He

reminds the Society not only that this episode narrates Christ fulfilling

the prophecy of Isaiah but also that, in being driven from the city by the

people of the synagogue, Christ reveals important aspects of his person-

ality: ‘dignity and tenderness … mildness, gentleness, mercy, and

humanity’. Christ’s human qualities, he says, are also typical of true

Christians. It is incumbent upon the Society ‘to tread as nearly as they

can in the steps of their heavenly master, and carry on, to the best of

their abilities, that gracious and benevolent work which [ Jesus] began’.

Christianity, both in the teachings of Christ and the souls of Christians,

is not merely a body of doctrine; it is the thoughts and actions of per-

sons who have been educated by the Holy Spirit. To emancipate slaves

from spiritual and economic bondage is a fundamental part of the

Christian mission, partly because the actual, lovable, personality of Jesus

inclined him towards it:

He [ Jesus] preached a doctrine which not only released from spiritual

bondage those that had been enthralled and led captive by their sins,

but so softened and subdued the most ferocious minds, and diffused

throughout the earth such a spirit of mildness, gentleness, mercy, and

humanity, that the heavy chains of personal slavery were gradually

broken in most parts of the Christian world; and they that had been

for so many ages bruised by the cruel and oppressive hand of pagan

masters, were at length set free. Thus did our blessed Lord accomplish

what the prophet foretold. (pp. 5–6)

Another of Porteus’s sermons is entitled The character of our Lord, asdelineated in the Gospel, one convincing proof that he was the Son of God.12

In this, God is in the process of becoming a Romantic hero. If action

against slavery follows from Jesus’s personality, and if it could be sup-

posed that Christ might have had a different personality, it could follow

that emancipation might be less central to being a Christian. Thus the

doctrinal and the personal are united in Christ’s incarnate being.

Such an appeal to the authority of Christ’s human personality is new.

It is the language of ‘sentiment’. Not the sentimentality of Sterne’s

novels and sermons, with its tendency towards self-absorption, but the

ethical sentimentality of Oliver Goldsmith, with its socially reformist

implications, of writers like Thomas Secker (whose Life Porteus wrote),13

William Warburton, and Philip Dormer Chesterfield, all widely quoted

by Porteus in his sermons and other works, and ultimately of George

Crabbe and William Wordsworth. When Porteus says that the slaves’


condition ‘excites the compassion of every feeling heart’, he is staking

out territory which is both psychological and theological. In one sense,

Porteus is following Warburton in analysing the social and constitu-

tional through the psychological and spiritual. In his sermon ‘The

Benefits of Heresy’, Warburton had spoken of the common people,

whose feelings are typically ‘violent’, but who are persuaded to turn to

‘moderation’ and ‘Faith and Charity’ by the ‘moral evidence’ of seeing

the wholesomeness of the orthodoxy of ‘men, whose learning, parts and

piety they hold in reverence’. Preaching before the Society in 1766,

Warburton had referred to the ‘shock [to] the feelings of humanity’

caused by slavery, dismissing the claim that slaves are happier on the

plantations – ‘who are You, who pretend to judge of another man’s hap-piness?’ – and identifying the spiritually destructive effects of slavery and

luxury on the planters. In a Thanksgiving sermon of 1759 – the year of

Minden, Quebec, Lagos, and Quiberon Bay – he had urged the duty of

‘join[ing] together … in discharge of that immense debt of gratitude we

owe to our heavenly Protector [and] our NATIONAL CHURCH’. Conflating

theology and psychology, Warburton adopted celebration and emula-

tion as components of a strategy of social and spiritual reform.14

It is the Christological element which takes Porteus beyond

Warburton’s analysis. Porteus writes that ‘[The] principal excellence of

the gospel morality … is this; that it prefers a meek, yielding, complying,

forgiving temper[,] … that it regulates … our affections’, while the thesis

of his sermon, The superior excellence of Christ’s preaching, and the causesof it explained, may be sufficiently inferred from the title.15 Christians

have a special psychological and spiritual kinship to Christ’s own feel-

ings when he expresses his ‘sublime and affecting declaration of his

intentions’. ‘Our natural feelings’ are not overpowered by these ‘preju-

dices and passions’, which rule unregenerate, or degenerate, persons like

the Jews in the Luke text or the West Indian planters. Indeed, to create a

reformed and regenerative environment for the slaves would make it

impossible for the planters to ‘resist’ the happiness thus created.

Having expounded his text, Porteus now begins a complex presenta-

tion and manipulation of his themes, moving to and from the need of

true Christians to express themselves through reform but always return-

ing to specific acts of oppression and the political nature of the task of

reform. His tactic is to intersperse these with criticisms of the planters,

identifying political difficulties and praising, with a deliberately heavy

hand, the religious and secular organs of the French and Spanish states

with which Britain had been at war for much of the century and which

had, at least in theory, granted the slaves comparatively generous

168 Bob Tennant

benefits, including a notional route to acquiring freedom. Thus the ser-

mon has a curiously shifting quality. At one point he consoles the

Society for lack of progress in a direction which it has not hitherto con-

templated by reflecting on the incompleteness globally of Christianity’s

evangelizing mission. The Society is the potential leader of change. It

‘has not been sparing either of labour or expence. But it must be owned

that our endeavours have not hitherto been attended with the desired

success’ (p. 11). He sets as the Society’s priority, improvements in the

education, material welfare, pay, and conditions of service of the West

Indian slaves.

Then, with a delicious directness, he continues: ‘Whenever this

resolution is taken, we shall undoubtedly think it necessary and right to

begin with the Negroes on our trust-estates in Barbadoes’ (p. 18),

moving straight into his most programmatic passage, which is about

10 per cent of the whole sermon. With a second theatrical gesture, he

glances at the Society’s Annual Report:

In the present situation of the [Society’s Barbadian] estates [reform]

cannot very well be attempted. The embarrassments, in which, by a

series of the most unfortunate incidents, [the estates] have for some

time been involved, have rendered it necessary for the Society to part

with the management of them for a few years out of their own hands,

which will render it unadvisable, and indeed impracticable, to estab-

lish for the present, in their full extent, the regulations now

proposed. Yet still if any thing here suggested should seem to deserve

the Society’s attention, they may at least allow it to have some share

in their deliberations; they may be forming, digesting, and arranging

their future measures, and be gradually preparing the way for the

compleat execution of them at a proper time; in which there can be no

doubt but they will have the hearty concurrence and assistance of

that worthy and benevolent member of the Society to whom they

have for the present consigned their West Indian property.

(pp. 24–5)

Thus, he again uses the physical intimacy of the occasion, turning to

the philanthropist John Braithwaite,16 one of those present, who had

provided funds to stabilize the estates. However, the estates’ local man-

agers are not exempted from criticism, as Porteus reminds his audience

that the ‘expences incurred on account of our West Indian estates are

now in a train of being gradually repaid’ (p. 30). A more crushing

condemnation of the Society’s mismanagement could hardly have been


uttered, given the constraints of civility. Typically, this criticism is

immediately blunted by an episode rallying the Society in the light of

the American Revolution, which put in jeopardy North American mis-

sionary work; this ‘will never be willingly abandoned by this Society’

(p. 25).

Having talked the language of priorities in offering a face-saving

excuse for the Society’s inaction in Barbados, Porteus switches to an area

of the highest contemporary strategic importance to Britain: loyalist

Canada, noting that in the colony ‘there are no more than three

Protestant clergymen, and those all foreigners’. Promising a long-term

campaign to change planters’ attitudes, he appeals to the same patriot-

ism to spur missionary work:

It is impossible that the generosity, the humanity, I will add, the

justice, of the English nation can suffer near half a million of their

fellow-creatures to continue in the most deplorable state of hea-

thenism, irreligion, and vice, without giving the Society every assis-

tance … It would be glorious to Great Britain to take the lead in this

benevolent and truly Christian enterprise. (p. 31)

The word ‘glorious’ has a special connotation in the mid eighteenth

century: the 1688 Glorious Revolution is transformed through virtually

continuous foreign wars, into a mission of fighting, and beating, the

French and Spanish. Porteus is saying that a victory over ourselves as the

English slave-owning nation is equivalent to the victories of, say, George

Anson at Finisterre, George Rodney at The Saints, or Edward Hawke at

Quiberon Bay. In this, of course, he is anticipating a core mission of the

nineteenth-century Royal Navy: the suppression of the international

slave trade under the Palmerston doctrine. Characteristically, Porteus

opposes the trade in slaves because ‘the constant importation of fresh

slaves from Africa [obliterates] in a few weeks all those sentiments of

morality and religion which it had been the work of years to impress

upon their minds’ (p. 18). Writing at a time of political reverses, Porteus

is saying that, to rebuild its empire, Britain must find itself a new

ideology. In this he is close to the poet Christopher Smart, who, during

the Seven Years War, celebrated by turns the Royal Navy’s victories (in

odes) and God’s glory (in hymns), writing of one victorious admiral

that ‘Grace has no worthier chief inspir’d / Than that sublime,

insuperable man’ and, of admirals in general, that they ‘have no sense

of self’.17 Naval operations thus directly transform both culture and

spirituality.

170 Bob Tennant

It is notable that when the last version of this sermon’s programme

was published in 1808, the language of empire has become even more

explicit:

You will, I think, feel a generous pride in following the example of

every other branch of the British Empire, and in concurring with

them in the comprehensive and noble plan which they have

adopted. These are truly Imperial works, and worthy of the British

name. These will immortalize it to the latest posterity, and distin-

guish it most honourably from every other nation in the world. Let

these, then, be the characteristic features of the English Nation.18

In the earlier editions, the language of empire is less explicit, and

Porteus further praises the French colonial administration in a footnote,

before moving to a peroration which is patriotic, not conventionally doc-

trinal, in content. In this, he demands that the nation follow the anti-

slavery lead which he ascribes to the Society. Interspersed are passages

about the need to carry through politically contentious reform and about

the suffering of the slaves. The simplicity and vigour of his language

denies the existence of anything more than local irony; the dominant

note is of a measured but passionate sincerity, projected with the full

power of episcopal authority, a holistic concern for the spiritual health of

the Society, slaves, planters, and Empire: ‘Let then our countrymen make

haste to relieve, as far as they are able, the calamities they have brought

on so large a part of the human race’ (p. 33). When his peroration returns

to the doctrine expounded from his text, it is transformed by the convic-

tion that the Society must take a lead in a political and cultural process of

empire built on liberty and the abolition of slavery. Thus we see a major

step in the building of a coalition of ecclesiastical and parliamentary

forces and ideologies which were to help transform Britain.

The Society was not immediately wholly won over. When the sermon

was published, Porteus added a footnote to the effect that ‘If the Society

should think fit to adopt the measures here proposed, a plan for carrying

them into execution will, in due time, be submitted to their considera-

tion’ (p. 31). The tract he had offered to produce for the Society had not,

therefore, been commissioned immediately. However, in the next year,

1784, his publisher was able to write as an advertisement in the popular

edition of his sermon, intended for mass sale in the West Indies, that:

At the earnest desire of some friends to humanity and religion, this

sermon is (with the consent of the author, and of the Society for the


Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts) reprinted in a smaller and

cheaper form than that of the original edition, with a view of giving

it a more extensive circulation, not only in this Kingdom, but also in

North America, and the West Indian islands.19

Three things are worth noting. The first is the tactical suggestion that

forces beyond Porteus and the Society are demanding a popular edition –

in other words, that Porteus is located inside the Society, as a fully loyal

member, not as a marginal or disruptive element. The second is his

expressed intention of promulgating his sermon in North America, car-

rying Anglicanism and the anti-slavery agenda into his parents’ native

land, the newly independent United States. The third is that, from this

point onwards, the Society’s agenda was changed and slavery became a

central concern of the sermons at the annual meetings. By 1786, for

example, Thomas Thurlow, Bishop of Lincoln, could preach in these

terms, far removed from Keppel’s words quoted earlier:

We are not unmindful of the deplorable situation of those, who, torn

from their native country, experience the wretchedness of slavery in a

foreign land. [The Africans are] sold as cattle at a market – doomed to

perpetual bondage; – subjugated to the caprice of tyranny – detained

in brutal ignorance – in the midst of Christians living without the

knowledge of God – amidst the light of the gospel of truth plunged in

the darkness of error and heathenism. This is such a complication of

misery, as in a Christian country is not to be paralleled.20

The Society’s 1783 meeting was the first time that a programme of

emancipation had been voiced by someone of Porteus’s ecclesiastical

and political standing. It was not until 1808 that he could write to the

planters and colonial governments with the authority not only of

Bishop of London but also (through his involvement in the 1807

Abolition Bill) of a successful legislator against the slave trade. Once

again, he speaks the visionary, aspirational language of sentimental,

Christian empire: ‘You [the planters] will, I think, feel a generous pride

in following the example of every other branch of the British Empire,

and in concurring with them in the comprehensive and noble plan

which they have adopted.’21 This letter was his swansong, but for the

intervening quarter-century, in his dual capacity as Bishop of London

and member of the House of Lords, Porteus had held open the door

through which more famous reformers passed.

172 Bob Tennant

Notes

1. Beilby Porteus, A Sermon preached before the Incorporated Society for thePropagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: T. Harrison and S. Brooke,

1783). See also: Beilby Porteus, ‘An Essay towards a Plan for the more effec-

tual Civilisation and Conversion of the Negroe Slaves on the Trust Estate in

Barbados’ (1784), in The Works of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D., 4th

edn, 6 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), VI, pp. 159–208; Beilby

Porteus, A Letter to the Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations, inthe British West India Islands (London: Luke Hansard and Sons, for T. Cadell

and W. Davies, T. Payne, and F., C., and J. Rivington, 1808).

2. George Berkeley, A proposal for the better supplying of churches in our foreignplantations, and for converting the savage Americans to Christianity (London:

H. Woodfall, 1724), p. 9. Berkeley refers to plantation workers, who were, of

course, slaves.

3. Ibid., p. 17.

4. Joseph Butler, Sermon [on Matthew 24. 14] preached before the IncorporatedSociety for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 16 February 1738–39,

in The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1897), vol. 2, pp. 242–3.

5. Christopher Codrington, ‘Last Will and Testament’, reprod. in Vincent

T. Harlow, Christopher Codrington 1668–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1928), pp. 217–20 (p. 218).

6. Frederic Keppel, A Sermon [on Matthew 28] preached before the … Society for thePropagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: E. Owen and T. Harrison,

1770), p. 17. Porteus was already a member of the Society at this date.

7. Beilby Porteus, A summary view of the … evidences of a future life, in Sermonson Several Subjects (London: T. Payne, and T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies,1797),

p. 99.

8. Porteus, A Sermon preached before the Incorporated Society (1783), p. 33.

Throughout this chapter a page number without further reference refers to

this sermon.

9. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in theBritish Sugar Colonies (London: J. Phillips, 1784), pp. 281–98, a work adver-

tised [p. 3] in the 1784 popular edition (London, J., F., and C. Rivington) of

Porteus’s sermon.

10. Tucker, Josiah, A sermon preached in the parish-church of Christ-Church, London,on…May the 7th, 1766: being the time of the yearly meeting of the children educatedin the charity-schools (London: J. and W. Oliver; John Rivington, 1766), p. 12n.

11. Ibid., p. 18.

12. Beilby Porteus, The character of our Lord, as delineated in the Gospel, one convincingproof that he was the Son of God, in Works of Beilby Porteus, III, pp. 335–59.

13. Beilby Porteus, ‘The Life of Archbishop Secker’ (1770), in Works of BeilbyPorteus, VI, pp. 7–106.

14. William Warburton, Sermons and Discourses on Various Subjects, vol. 3

(London: J. and R. Tonson, and A. Millar; T. Cadell, 1767), pp. 179–81, 82–7,

and 199–200 respectively.

15. Beilby Porteus, ‘The Truth and Divine Origin of the Christian Revelation’, in

Tracts on various subjects: all of which have been published separately before; and


are now first collected into one volume (London: Luke Hansard and Sons, for

T. Cadell and W. Davies, T. Payne; and F., C., and J. Rivington, 1807), p. 471;

Beilby Porteus, The superior excellence of Christ’s preaching, and the causes of itexplained, in Works of Beilby Porteus, III, pp. 267–87.

16. Beilby Porteus, A Sermon preached before the Incorporated Society for thePropagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: J., F., and C. Rivington,

1784), p. 25 n.

17. Christopher Smart, ‘Ode to Admiral Sir George Pocock’ (1763), The PoeticalWorks of Christopher Smart, vol. IV: Miscellaneous Poems English and Latin, ed.

Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 339–41, 33–4, 30.

18. Porteus, A Letter to the Governors, p. 33.

19. Beilby Porteus, A Sermon, 1784, p. 3.

20. Thomas Thurlow, A sermon preached before the Incorporated Society for thePropagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at their anniversary meeting inthe parish church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday February 17, 1786 (London:

T. Harrison and S. Brooke, 1786), p. 19.

21. Porteus, A Letter to the Governors, p. 33.

174 Bob Tennant

175

11Slavery, Abolition, and the Nation in Priscilla Wakefield’s Tour Books for ChildrenJohanna M. Smith

F. J. Harvey Darton, first historian of the genre, acknowledged that chil-

dren’s literature has always been ‘the scene of a battle between instruc-

tion and amusement’, and recent critical attention has turned towards

the multiple and disparate forms of ‘cultural work’ children’s books can

do.1 Children’s literature might reflect or maintain dominant ideologies,

but it might also shape or undermine dominant ideologies, by offering

children ‘tools for reappraising their social and political situation’.2 My

subject is the ways that eighteenth-century geographies in general, and

Priscilla Wakefield’s travel books for children in particular, represented

slavery and the abolition movement so as to shape a future public opin-

ion on these issues.

Although geographies and travel books designed for children have

received very little critical attention, the cultural work they do repays

examination. This is so in part because geography lends itself to ideo-

logical uses, for its ‘tropes of mimesis which claim to represent accu-

rately and objectively’3 are in fact rhetorical devices that discourses of

the Other can turn to account. The geographers who mapped, collected,

and recorded for the East India Company, for instance, ‘created and

defined the spatial image of the Company’s Empire’, and the Travels of

explorer Mungo Park was crucial to a Romantic discourse of ‘Western

ideological assumptions in the guise of geographical objectivity’.4 What

purports to be ‘the empirical datum of geographical space’, in other

words, constitutes what Rob Shields calls ‘zone[s] of the social imagi-

nary’, and so it can be used to construct ‘imaginary geographies’.5 In

such geographies, descriptions of spatial divisions come to express social

and cultural divisions, as certain sites come to be associated with certain

values. Witness the many eighteenth-century Christian geographers for

whom Asia’s chief significance was that ‘Our Saviour [was] born here.’6

My particular focus is the construction in children’s books of imagi-

nary geographies of the nation. If nation is defined, in Benedict

Anderson’s words, as ‘an imagined political community’, and if Great

Britain was ‘invented’, as Linda Colley claims, in the eighteenth century,

then the geographies of that period have much to tell us about the forms

this new nation took.7 Because eighteenth-century texts written for chil-

dren often incorporated material from those written for adults,8 chil-

dren’s books devoted to or including geography display a particularly

wide range of nation-building. Specifically, they show how the imagined

community of ‘Britain’ took shape ‘in response to contact with the

Other, and above all in response to conflict with the Other’, and also

that ‘a cult of commerce became an increasingly important part of being

British’.9

Of particular relevance for both constructs of Britain was the study

known as political geography. Rather than focusing on topography,

political geography divided the earth’s surface into states or political

communities, and it also categorized those communities according to

‘persons and habits’ or ‘genius and temper’.10 Children’s as well as

adults’ texts constructed political geographies. In one children’s geogra-

phy of 1748, for example, ‘Great Britain’ becomes a union of three peo-

ples: the English (‘Great Lovers of Liberty and Learning, generous,

sincere, hospitable, industrious’), the Scots (‘temperate and frugal, good

Soldiers, zealous for their Religion and Liberty’) and the Welsh (‘hardy

and valiant’ if somewhat ‘choleric’).11 This nation-building function is

especially apparent in records of contact – or conflict – with the foreign

other. As the Geography for Children (1737) puts it, the need for geo-

graphical knowledge had ‘never been more apparent, than in the late

wars’.12 Occasionally political geography warned against a derogatory or

Orientalist othering: in 1749 Thomas Salmon professes himself

‘extremely concerned’ that so many nations represent other nations as

‘barbarians’ and then ‘invade and extirpate them’.13 Yet British geogra-

phers often made such remarks primarily to characterize French or

Spanish colonial practice as inferior to Britain’s, and geography took on

many such patriotic functions. Indeed, as commerce became ‘a vehicle

for national greatness’ and thus ‘an interest of the state’,14 geography

became a study of national importance. Salmon claimed that his NewGeographical and Historical Grammar would be of use to ‘the senator and

politician’, ‘the divine’, and ‘the merchant and marine officer’, and

many other geographers considered a knowledge of their subject partic-

ularly ‘useful’ to ‘a trading nation like this’.15 By 1750, an Essay uponEducation was arguing that children need some knowledge of ‘the several

176 Johanna M. Smith

Parts of the World’; and since education’s ‘most important End’ was ‘to

qualify Men for the Service of the Public’, geography in effect became a

foundation of masculine public service.16

As proto-public servants of this trading nation, boys were provided

with imaginary geographies. John Holmes, master of Sir John Gresham’s

Free Grammar School in Norfolk, used a deck of playing cards for this

purpose: ‘While Nature gives to Europe generous HEARTS, / To Asiasparkling DI’MONDS she imparts; / While to Black Africans she SPADES

affords, / Americans feel CLUBS and Spanish Lords.’ As this rhyme sug-

gests, Holmes’s geography is racialized, and it is also egregiously racist:

the ten of spades, for instance, is a mnemonic for the ten areas of

Caffraria, ‘the home of the stupid Hottentots’.17 But if geographies were

racializing the Other for children’s comprehension, they were doing so

in multiple ways. Just three years before Holmes’s book, for instance,

Newbery’s geography for children made a point of stating that

Hottentots were ‘not such fools as they have been represented’.18

Children’s geographies, then, might construct imaginary national com-

munities, but they might also indicate communities in conflict.

In the 1790s, one area of conflict was the slave trade. As early as 1748,

Geography made familiar and easy to Young Gentlemen and Ladies had

called the trade indefensible ‘either upon the Foot of Religion or

Humanity!’19 By 1790, the New Moral System of Geography, a schoolbook

for young ladies, was asking ‘who can reflect on the cruelties’ suffered by

slaves ‘without shedding the tear of humanity, and feeling horror at the

barbarity’ of slave-owners.20 As the title phrase ‘new moral system’

indicates, such geographies might aid in constructing an abolitionist

community that crossed class lines and included women as well as men,

children as well as adults. We know, for example, that children signed

abolitionist petitions, and more than one abolitionist urged women to

declare against the slave trade ‘publicly and in print’.21 Among women’s

most significant contributions to the movement were the books they

wrote to educate children on the evils of the slave trade.

Of course, men too were writing fiction designed to shape the public

opinion of the coming generation. My point is to stress women’s role in

this process, in what Habermas calls the structural transformation of the

public sphere, that ‘realm of our social life in which something

approaching public opinion can be formed’.22 Feminists have critiqued

Habermas’s idea of a new public sphere, claiming that it ‘depends

crucially on … capacities for consent and speech’ deemed ‘at odds with

femininity’, and hence that ‘the exclusion of women from the bourgeois

public sphere’ was ‘central to its incarnation’.23 But the growing

Priscilla Wakefield’s Tour Books for Children 177

importance of extra-parliamentary politics enabled the ‘patriotic

activism’ by which women, ‘[c]onsciously or not, … were staking out a

civic role for themselves’.24 As the abolitionist W. A. Crofton put it,

‘even those who have no vote, are nevertheless comprehended in our

idea of the public mind’.25 Involving themselves in the abolition

campaign, British women of every region and class were recognized by

others, and perceived by themselves, as ‘members of the public’.26

Sarah Trimmer, influential writer of and watchdog over children’s

books, will serve as a brief example of more problematic forms of such

public-formation. Trimmer consistently used geography to construct an

imagined community of the favoured few. The series ‘A Comparative

View of Foreign Countries’, a regular feature she wrote for her FamilyMagazine (1788–89), was frankly designed to teach ‘Englishmen, even of

the lowest ranks’, to be ‘thankful to Providence that they were born on

BRITISH GROUND’.27 In her later writings, Trimmer’s take on geography

became ever more paranoiac. Self-appointed ‘guardian of education’ (the

title of the monthly journal she wrote from 1802 to 1806), she became

increasingly obsessed with the ‘conspiracy against CHRISTIANITY and allSOCIAL ORDER’.28 To forestall ‘the nefarious designs of the enemy’, Trimmer

kept a weather eye on ‘every modern book of education’, and geogra-

phies too became ‘objects of suspicion’ as the forces of evil made sinister

‘alterations’ in the sections on ‘Religion and Government’.29 Her strictures

on Priscilla Wakefield’s The Juvenile Travellers (1801), a geographical tour

book for children, indicate these suspicions: Trimmer finds it ‘very

improper for an English author’ to describe certain ‘foreign principles

and manners’ to young people without disapproval, and Wakefield’s

account of France in particular reveals ‘a partiality for republican man-

ners and institutions, which does not become a British subject’.30

In contrast to Trimmer’s efforts to indoctrinate children in rigid

Christianity and Britishness, then, I turn to the works of Priscilla

Wakefield, Quaker philanthropist, feminist, abolitionist, and author of

children’s books. The first of these books to discuss the slave trade,

Mental Improvement (1794), follows in the ‘mentorial tradition’ of moral

mothers.31 Women in this tradition wrote children’s books using the

‘familiar’ format, a dialogue or conversation between mother or parents

and children. Such a didactic dialogue would demonstrate ‘domestic

and maternal female authority’, but its conversational format might also

give children an opportunity for their own ‘conversion experiences’.32

Ostensibly about sugar, actually about the slave trade, Conversation 10

of Mental Improvement exemplifies both these elements of the familiar

format.


The conversation opens with Mrs Harcourt teaching her children and

their friend Augusta that Caribbean plantation labourers, originally

‘natives of Africa’, had been enslaved by ‘violence’.33 ‘I am ashamed to

confess’, she continues, that England participates in this slave trade, and

daughter Sophia responds with proper feminine emotion – ‘How much

my heart feels for them!’ She then asks why African kings allow the

trade, a question which enables her mother to point out that Europeans

have either ‘corrupt[ed] these ignorant rulers’ or ‘fomented jealousies’

and wars among them.34 Note the double message: European rulers are

culpable, but African rulers are ignorant. When Augusta in effect extrap-

olates from this that ‘negroes’ are ‘not much superior to the brutes’,

Mrs Harcourt again responds ambiguously: on the one hand, ‘there is no

reason to suppose that they differ from us in anything but colour’; on

the other, ‘the poor negroes’ do ‘suffer from want of cultivation’ because

masters neglect their slaves’ ‘religious and moral instruction’.35 At this

point, son Charles states that the slave trade should be abolished and

Mr Harcourt adduces William Wilberforce’s labours in that cause. There

seems to be a shift here away from feminine moral feeling and toward

masculine moral effort, but it is not quite that simple, for Mr Harcourt

admits that Wilberforce’s efforts have failed. And, when he hopes the

coming generation will ‘prefer justice and mercy, to interest and policy’,

it is daughter Cecelia who responds first.36 All the children then ‘con-

vert’ when they pledge to abstain from sugar – an abolitionist tactic

generally associated with women – and it is Mrs Harcourt who draws the

final lesson that the children should always listen thus to ‘the voice of

nature and virtue’.37 Yet, the conversation ends not with this moral

lesson but on a practical note, that developing the maple-sugar industry

might replace cane-sugar cultivation and so ‘silence the arguments of

the planters’ for the slave trade.38 The open-endedness of the familiar

format here works toward the moral education of English children not

only about the slave trade but also about the various issues and conflict-

ing tactics of the abolition campaign.

In addition to her other books, Wakefield wrote a series of five

geographical tours for children. To compose these fictions based on fact,

Wakefield adapted travel books written for adults to the ‘taste and capac-

ity of young readers’ by presenting geographical data ‘interwoven with

a narrative’.39 Believing that children should be acquainted with ‘the

character and manners of the inhabitants of other countries’40 – in other

words, with political geography – she altered and added to her sources so

as to comment not only on other countries but also on Britain. Like

eighteenth-century geographies and travel books written for adults,


then, Wakefield’s tour books for children produce what Chloe Chard

calls an imaginative topography, ‘a network of rhetorical and theoretical

strategies for understanding and appropriating the foreign’.41 But

Wakefield’s series also helps children to understand Britishness in a

particular way. My focus here is Excursions in North America (1806) and

The Traveller in Africa (1814), because they include striking representa-

tions of slavery and constructions of Britain. These books thus show that

women abolitionists were not simply confronting ‘an established and

fixed public sphere’ but rather ‘constructing, reinforcing, utilising,

negotiating, subverting or more rarely challenging’ its boundaries.42

Excursions in North America takes an epistolary form which allows the

presentation of information about and attitudes toward slavery and

the slave trade. The travellers are 16-year-old Arthur Middleton, impul-

sive and imprudent but warm-hearted, and the older and wiser Henry

Franklin, brother to Arthur’s tutor and providing something of the same

‘paternal care’.43 Henry has been recruited by ‘a nobleman of high rank’

to explore North America and to produce a ‘complete description’ of it;

his and Arthur’s letters to their families do that, but they also function

toward the moral education of the child reader.44 Henry’s first letter, for

instance, details the history of the abolition movement in the United

States, and argues that abolitionist efforts have ‘improved’ the condition

of slaves and that many freed slaves have prospered, and expresses the

emancipationist hope that freed slaves, treated as ‘rational beings, and

co-heirs with us of immortality’, will eventually share ‘the common

benefits of liberty and independence’.45 Arthur’s encounters with slaves

seem designed to show young readers how to realize this hope. He first

feels ‘the warmest compassion’ for the ‘oppressed race’ of Negroes; he

then experiences ‘painful reflections’ on the fact that slaves are ‘the

property of their fellow-creatures, and subject to every indignity’; when

he sees that children who have child slaves develop ‘habits of tyranny

from their infancy’, he gives the young despots ‘lessons of humanity

and moderation’.46 Finally, at a slave auction, Arthur is moved by a man

being sold away from his wife, and his pity is not the ‘useless kind that

only laments’: he borrows money from Henry to buy the slave, Sancho,

and free him (I will return to the significance of Sancho’s name).47 What

had been characterized as Arthur’s imprudence is here recast as a ‘noble

generosity of disposition’. Specifically, where Arthur had earlier been so

‘provoked’ at seeing a young European emigrant sold into indentured

servitude that he rashly attempted to rescue the boy, here his ‘tender

sympathy’ for Sancho’s ‘distress’ leads him to more deliberate action.48

It is perhaps to foster this change that Henry at first rejects Arthur’s plan


for Sancho. When Henry objects to ‘the insufficiency of redeeming an

individual’ because ‘so many thousands’ are still enslaved, Arthur

reminds him that they need a servant; when Henry in turn reminds

Arthur that Sancho has a wife, Arthur explains that ‘happily’ she may

remain with her ex-mistress ‘whilst we want Sancho’ and until they

arrange for Mr and Mrs Sancho to live ‘by their own industry’.49

Yet there is something unpleasant, nay ungenerous, in this nit-picking

deliberation. One might argue, as moderate emancipationists did, that

such care and surveillance were necessary to prepare the ex-slave for

freedom. Henry has already suggested this model by praising the

Barclays, a merchant family, for not only ‘generously’ freeing the slaves

on their Jamaica plantation but also transporting them to Philadelphia,

apprenticing them to trades, and educating their children.50 And it is

not irrelevant that the David Barclay on whom this incident is loosely

based was Priscilla Wakefield’s great-uncle. For the Sancho of her book,

however, such Barclayesque oversight seems otiose. Judging from his

knowledge of American customs and landscape, he does not require

acculturation; he is already ‘faithful’ and hard-working to a fault; once

established by his benefactors as a cooper in Nantucket, his ‘neatness of

workmanship, punctuality, and industry’ ensure him an almost effort-

less prosperity.51 Most striking is Wakefield’s emphasis on the propriety

of Sancho’s emotions, his ‘gratitude and attachment to his young mas-

ter’; in fact, once he has left Arthur’s service he becomes ‘our friend (for

his gratitude and fidelity entitle him to that appellation)’.52 Sancho’s

final appearance in the book attests his exemplary status: having

‘invested his little capital’ in a fur-trading venture, he encounters Arthur

and Henry in Canada and there has yet another ‘opportunity of testify-

ing his gratitude and attachment to his young master and benefactor’ by

saving him from a shark.53 Even though this rescue ‘rendered their

obligations equal’, and even though Arthur attempts ‘by every conde-

scending attention, to diminish the distinction between them’, Sancho

remains mindful of the ‘disparity in their circumstances’ and continues

‘the most respectful conduct toward his liberator’.54

If Sancho does not need to be prepared for freedom, what is his func-

tion in this text? His misery at the prospect of being parted from the wife

he ‘tenderly loved’ might be meant to show child readers that blacks feel

the same domestic affections as whites.55 This theme is common in

sentimental abolitionist propaganda: the children’s book Little Truths(1796), for instance, uses ‘the bitter lamentations of a husband, when

torn from the arms of a beloved wife’, as an emotive argument against

the slave trade.56 As I have already noted, however, it is Sancho’s


attachment to his young liberator that Wakefield stresses; indeed,

despite Arthur’s sympathy for Sancho the husband, not until Arthur has

no further need of him is Sancho allowed to rejoin his wife. If there is a

whiff of the homosocial in the vexed and negotiated friendship between

the two young men, more pertinent is the economics of Wakefield’s

effort to recast the master–slave relation.

Sending Sancho back to his wife, Arthur rejoices that the erstwhile

slave is now ‘a free man’ with ‘an independent right to whatever he may

acquire by his industry’.57 Here, as throughout the characterization of

Sancho, however, a stress on freedom and independence is also an

emphasis on labour and industry. To clarify what is at stake here, recall

the incident of the indentured emigrant; Arthur tried to rescue him

because, in Henry’s words, indentured servitude is like slavery – ‘another

species of bondage … that rouses the indignation of an Englishman’.58

The proper form of bondage appears in Henry’s description of the

tobacco industry. For ‘a poor Englishman’ to enjoy his pipe, a ‘great

number of hands’ is required; ‘Thus are we indebted to each other for the

smallest gratifications; nor can the richest or most powerful individual

boast that he is independent of his fellow creatures: for our Heavenly

Father has bound us all in one chain of mutual fellowship and good

offices’ (italic added).59 Surely this discourse of dependence and

bondage is purposeful. Wakefield was familiar with contemporary

economic theory; her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex(1798), for example, opens with Adam Smith on ‘productive labour’ and

cites Josiah Child’s much reprinted A New Discourse on Trade.60 If her

effort in Excursions in North America is to criticize ‘the horrid slave-trade’

and to publicize the abolition campaign,61 it is also to show the freed

slave as productive worker and thus the superiority of a wage economy

to a slave economy. And material rewards ensue, at least in the idyllic

economy of Nantucket: here Sancho will prosper, for there is no ‘luxury’

or ‘display’ of wealth and ‘every one enjoys his gains in the comforts of

life, and sharing them with his neighbours’.62 As we follow Arthur from

a master–slave through a master–servant to an uneasy friend–friend

relation with Sancho, we arrive at an ideal politico-economic order. But

their final encounter in Excursions in North America indicates the

difficulties involved, for its effect is to reinforce the status distinction

between freed black worker and freeborn English gentleman.

Independence and interdependence are important thematics in the

next of Arthur’s tours, The Traveller in Africa, published in 1814.

Although Britain’s involvement in the slave trade had ended in 1807,

abolitionists continued their efforts to ban the trade from Africa and


other nations. In 1814, for instance, an address from the House of Lords

requested, with ‘humility’ but ‘earnestness’, that the Prince Regent urge

the heads of European states to end their trade in slaves;63 this year also

saw renewed public discussion of emancipation for West Indian slaves.

The question of freedom thus takes on a particular resonance in

Wakefield’s book. The death of Arthur’s mother, who had discouraged

his wanderlust, leaves him free to make ‘a voyage of discovery’;64 specif-

ically, he wants to further the interdependence of Europe and Africa, to

facilitate the communication between them that will benefit both and

also ‘promote the improvement and increase the comforts’ of Africans.65

As an adult, Arthur no longer needs a paternal guide, and his independ-

ence is further highlighted by the return of a similarly unencumbered

Sancho – his wife having died, Sancho has decided to ‘devote the rest of

his life to the service of his master and benefactor’.66 It is all the more

noteworthy, then, that in their first adventure Arthur and Sancho are

captured by Moors, examined ‘as is common in a slave-market’, and

allotted to an owner.67 Later they are sold to a slaver, and although they

are soon purchased and freed by a British merchant, as Christians they

remain nominal slaves to the Emperor of Morocco.

This incident owes much to the adventures of Mungo Park, whose

Travels Wakefield drew on. It was perhaps also inspired by the notoriety

of what one pamphlet title called ‘The Cruelties of the Algerine

Pirates’.68 The episode of Arthur’s captivity, in other words, sketches an

imaginary topography of an Africa in which ‘the principal article of

commerce is the Christian slaves’ taken by the Barbary pirates or cor-

sairs.69 In the same year as Wakefield’s book, Sir W. Sidney Smith

founded the Knights Liberators of the White Slaves in Africa, to free the

Christians captured by Barbary coast Corsairs and enslaved or held for

ransom. For Sir Sidney, this white slave trade was ‘revolting to human-

ity’, but it also ‘fetter[ed] commerce in the most disastrous manner’,

because merchant vessels went in fear of ‘being carried off by pirates’.70

The relations between this campaign against the white slave trade and

that to abolish the black slave trade seem to have been vexed. ‘There is

a fashion in humanity as in every thing else’, complained one propa-

gandist, so the same people who ‘speak with Horror of the Negro Slave

Trade’ feel only ‘apathy’ at the plight of white slaves in Algiers.71 But Sir

Sidney, the most active campaigner against the white slave trade, invited

William Wilberforce to join the Knights Liberators, and he frequently

argued for abolition of the ‘shameful traffic in slaves, both white and

black’.72 And even the author of Cruelties of the Algerine Pirates thought

that both abolition campaigns evidenced the nineteenth century’s


‘improving sense of the relative duties of man’ to ‘general society’.73

In Wakefield’s book too, we may see the plot of Arthur’s and Sancho’s

captivity as evidence of this concern with the many forms of slavery still

extant. ‘You may perceive’, says Arthur of the privileges enjoyed by

Mamelukes or military slaves, ‘that the word slave has a different signi-

fication’ in Cairo than in the West Indies.74

Yet even in captivity Arthur is himself privileged, in ways that display

the advantages of being British. Because an Emperor’s slave is ‘held

sacred’, he and Sancho are ‘at liberty’ to travel, and he often reacts with

Orientalist, indeed Trimmer-like, musings on the Others he encoun-

ters.75 When the King of Abyssinia asks a question revealing his scant

‘knowledge of geography’, says Arthur, ‘I could scarcely command my

risible muscles’; while Egyptians are subject to their beys’ ‘rapacity and

tyranny’, he tells his siblings, remember that ‘the meanest peasant in

England enjoys his property and his rights, and rejoice that you were

born in that happy country’; the lack of liberty in Abyssinia leaves him

‘blessing myself that I was an Englishman’; and so on.76 Occasionally

Arthur describes African customs from something like an ‘anti-conquest’

position, Mary Louise Pratt’s term for a relational or mutual engagement

between ‘seeing man’ and his surroundings.77 Unlike the many

travellers who thought Hottentot customs were simply ‘bizarre’, the

anti-conquest Arthur recognizes that the Hottentots’ practice of smear-

ing themselves with grease, ‘though very disgusting to Europeans’,

functions to protect the skin.78 In this mode, he sees ‘a lesson to some

bigoted Christians’ in one Muslim’s religious toleration.79 And the

‘noble generosity of disposition’ with which Arthur was credited in

Excursions does reappear in his indignation over the ‘degrading’,

‘horrible’, and ‘infernal’ slave trade.80

When Arthur comes into contact with slavery itself, however, his

privileging of Britishness returns. His encounters with slavery in

Excursions in North America were a process of moral education; in TheTraveller in Africa they indicate a fixed standard of racial and British

superiority. His descriptions of the South African Boers, for example,

exemplify one phase of what J. M. Coetzee terms ‘the Discourse of the

Cape’: ‘idleness and improvidence’ are seen as the prime Boer character-

istics, and their ‘squalor and sloth’ becomes ‘the true scandal’ because it

seems to ‘confirm the dictum … that slaveholding corrupts the slave-

holder’.81 Certainly, this is the view held by one of Wakefield’s sources,

John Barrow’s Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (1801–4), and

Arthur’s descriptions of the Boers are sometimes taken word for word

from Barrow. Arthur is much struck by the squalor of the Boers, their


‘wretched hovels’ and the lack of ‘those comforts … necessary to civi-

lized life’, and by the sloth and ‘most listless inactivity’ of the Boer

women.82 The scandal of Boer men, however, is not idleness but

‘tyranny’ and ‘cruelty to their slaves and the poor unprotected

Hottentots’.83

Arthur then contrasts the Boers’ tyranny with the philanthropy of the

Moravian missionaries. The Moravians seem to have become part of a

discourse of the Cape after Britain took possession of the South African

colony in 1795. An example is the letters of Lady Anne Barnard, wife of

the first British governor’s colonial secretary, which wax lyrical about the

Moravian settlements.84 So does Barrow’s Travels into the Interior, and

Barrow caps his panegyric on the Moravians with an outburst against the

‘brutality and gross depravity’ of Boers who hate the priests for teaching

the Hottentots ‘the use of their liberty, and the value of their labour’.85

Wakefield’s description of the Moravians borrows liberally from Barrow’s:

‘These wise men have combined the blessings of civilization with the

duties of religion’ so successfully, says Arthur, that the settlement is a

model of ‘industry and order’ and the Hottentots there provide ‘a strik-

ing contrast to the wretched slaves of the colonists’.86 Arthur’s remarks

also show that Britons ‘found a way to talk about themselves, individu-

ally and collectively as a nation, by inventing the “Hottentots” ’: thanks

to the Moravians, Arthur adds, the Hottentots’ huts have ‘the comforts of

an English cottage’.87 In addition, Wakefield’s text uses the Hottentots to

draw a contrast between British and Dutch colonial practice: under the

Boers’ cruelty and tyranny, the Hottentots’ state is ‘more terrible even

than that of the Negroes in the West Indies’.88 This contrast between

West Indian and Hottentot suggests that the British are less heinous as

slave-holders than the Dutch, and the point is made again when Arthur’s

companions tell a group of Bosjemans that ‘the English had taken

possession of the colony, and would treat them well’.89

The last comments demonstrate how Wakefield sometimes changed

her sources to soft-pedal the similarities between British and Dutch

tyranny in South Africa. Arthur’s conversation with the Bosjemans

elides two episodes from Barrow’s Travels into the Interior. In the first

episode, Barrow meets several ‘Kaffer chiefs’, records approvingly their

complaints about the dearth of ‘sense of honour, regard for truth, or

feelings of justice or humanity’ among the Dutch, and reassures the

chiefs that the colony now belongs to ‘a great and powerful sovereign,

the king of England’.90 It is true that in this text Barrow often presents

himself as ‘naturalist, geographer, and ethnographer’, so as to play down

his official position as secretary to Lord Macartney and thus participant


in the ‘Eurocolonial territorial enterprise’ in South Africa.91 In the inci-

dent that Wakefield adapts, however, Barrow is fairly explicit about his

role as an ‘ambassador’ of the British government.92 He also serves as an

‘eye-witness’ to the Boer farmers’ punitive expeditions against the

natives, and his meeting with the Bosjemans in this capacity is the sec-

ond incident that Wakefield alters.93 In Arthur’s version, the encounter

is peaceful and the Bosjemans promise to cease their raids on the farm-

ers in return for ‘assurances of friendship’ from the British.94 In Barrow’s

version, he intends to treat peacefully with the Bosjemans but is unable

to prevent the Boers from firing on their kraal. Although the parties do

come to the agreement which Arthur records, Barrow’s account focuses

instead on his group’s ‘directly hostile’ approach to the Bosjemans and

its ‘unwarrantable, because cruel and unjust’, attack on them.95 As a

result, Barrow’s insistences that the British government ‘will no longer

sanction the cruelties’ of the Dutch past ring somewhat hollow.96

Wakefield, however, chooses to mute the elements of her source that call

British colonial practice into question.

For Arthur’s final words on Britain’s presence in Africa, Wakefield is

most indebted to Sir William Young, secretary of the African Association

and particularly bullish on the prospects for British commerce. The

African Association was founded in 1788 to ‘Promot[e] the Discovery’ of

inland Africa, and by 1798 it had ‘opened new objects to commercial

enterprize’.97 The Association engaged Mungo Park to explore Africa east

from the river Gambia, and Frederick Horneman to travel the country

west of Cairo. Wakefield consulted the accounts of both journeys, and

she made extensive use of the introduction written by Sir William Young

for Horneman’s Journals. In the ‘new race of commerce’ between

England and France for trade with Africa, says Young, ‘shame indeed

would it be’ if ‘British credit and enterprise’ did not manage to create an

African ‘demand for our country’s manufactures’.98 Crucially, he blends

humanitarian and commercial motives for thus developing Africa’s

‘germs of civilization’: ‘whither could enlightened philanthropy better

tend, to humanize and improve? whither could the spirit of trade better

direct its course?’99 Young was writing in 1802, before the abolition of

the slave trade, and his concept of profitable philanthropy was common

among abolitionists eager to distinguish ‘moral’ from ‘immoral’

commerce.100 Moral commerce, the conjunction of philanthropic and

financial ‘motives of colonial expansionism’, was ‘exemplified’ in Sierra

Leone, the colony founded by British abolitionists for freed slaves,101

and Wakefield’s final comments on British colonization use Sierra Leone

as a model. Arthur gives a history of the African Association’s ‘benevolent


exertions’ there, both to substitute ‘a fair commerce’ for the ‘disgraceful

traffic in slaves’ and to develop ‘the still more important benefits of

religion, morality, and civility’.102 Hence he hopes that in South Africa

too, ‘the degrading traffic in men’ will soon give way to ‘a friendly

intercourse’ between Europeans and Africans and an ‘exchange of the

productions congenial to each climate’.103

One might expect fur-trader Sancho to be included in this brave

new commercial world. But he is not, so again we must ask what his

role is in the text. As in Excursions in North America, Sancho’s functions

in The Traveller in Africa are multiple. He is again the ideal servant, for

his ‘cleverness equals his fidelity’ and he is ‘ever vigilant for [Arthur’s]

safety’.104 Arthur often follows Sancho’s advice, which suggests the

equality of friendship, and Sancho’s fidelity is sometimes represented

as more than friendship: when Arthur falls ill with a fever, Sancho

nurses him with ‘tender care’ and ‘the affection of a brother’.105 Sancho

is also shown to be a loving son. As they near his early home, he joy-

ously prepares for a reunion with his parents; he is in ‘despair’ when

he learns that they too have been sold into slavery, and only after

several months has he ‘nearly recovered’ from his grief.106 To emphasize

Sancho’s courage and resourcefulness, Wakefield alters a particularly

fraught portion of James Bruce’s Travels: in Bruce’s text it is his own

‘eloquence’ that soothes his fractious attendants following a simoom,

but in Wakefield’s text it is Sancho’s words that ‘calm’ Arthur’s group.107

Like Excursions in North America, however, The Traveller in Africa seems

unable finally to come to terms with Sancho’s race. Again, Wakefield’s

alteration of her sources is pertinent. In a section adapted from Barrow’s

Travels, she inserts an episode in which Sancho shares his scanty

allowance of water with some suffering Hottentot children; Arthur

calls this a ‘noble act of humanity’, but he adds that Sancho is a

‘generous man, though a Negro’.108 And when Arthur and Sancho are

again captured, it is Arthur who is freed; Sancho is sold into slavery.

Although Arthur laments his separation from ‘so faithful a friend’, the

episode reinforces Arthur’s privileged position as a Briton, which

later gives him ‘the happiness of releasing [Sancho] a second time’ from

slavery.109

The representation of slavery in The Traveller in Africa is further

illuminated by returning to the question of Sancho’s name. Wakefield

does not mention The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African(1782), but they are discussed in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State ofVirginia (1787), one of her sources, and surely the name of Arthur’s

slave/servant is meant to remind readers of this celebrity freed slave.


Granted, Jefferson uses Ignatius Sancho’s writings to make his tortuous

case that blacks may be ‘inferior to the whites’ in ‘the faculties of rea-

son and imagination’ and that this inferiority is ‘not the effect merely

of their condition of life’, that is, of slavery.110 But this is emphatically

not Wakefield’s view, and Ignatius Sancho was often cited as an argu-

ment for blacks’ intellectual capacities. In her poem ‘On the Abolition

of the African Slave Trade’ (1789), for example, Elizabeth Bentley says

of him: ‘Bright sense was his, by nature’s hand bestow’d, / Which

proves – in their uncultur’d minds are sown / The seeds of knowledge

equal with our own.’111 Furthermore, as slave turned butler, then writer,

composer, and industrious grocer, Ignatius Sancho might conceivably

function as the Sancho of Excursions in North America does, to show a

successful transition from slave to free labourer. Yet the Sancho of

Wakefield’s texts is not the Ignatius Sancho of the Letters. Ignatius

Sancho comments on contemporary events such as the American war

and the Gordon riots;112 he discusses Sterne, Young, Wheatley, and

other writers he admires;113 he gives unexceptionable advice to his pro-

tégé Julius Soubise but also mocks himself for such ‘dull sermon[s]’ and

‘picked up common-place sayings’;114 he writes jokey letters to friends,

calling them ‘noddy’ or ‘Snoodlepoop’ and himself ‘a poor Blacky gro-

cer’ or a ‘Blackamoor dunderhead’.115 Although he criticizes ‘gambling

Dames’ and ‘ladies … turned orators’, his several references to his wife –

‘the chief ingredient of my felicity’ – are frankly uxorious.116 Most

significantly, Ignatius Sancho excoriates slavery. He urges Sterne to take

up the cause of ‘my brother Moors’, and his letters abound with criti-

cism of slavery: the profits ‘clogged with the tears and blood of the poor

natives’; the condition of ‘my miserable black brethren’; the ‘contempt

of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours’;

‘the unchristian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes – the

illegality – the horrid wickedness of the traffic – the cruel carnage and

depopulation of the human species’.117 If Ignatius Sancho identifies

himself with blacks, however, at other points in the Letters he uses

‘Negro’ as a derogatory. This usage is often ironic, but not always: a

politician he dislikes is ‘a Negro state-botcher’, and the Gordon rioters’

excesses in the name of ‘true British liberty!’ are ‘worse than Negro

barbarity’.118

Paul Edwards interprets these contradictions as Ignatius Sancho’s

efforts to ‘come to terms with his assimilated experience’,119 and he

identifies another such conflict that is relevant to my discussion. Here is

the pertinent passage, from a letter where ‘Sancho the African, and ex-

slave’ is also ‘Sancho the business man’.120


The grand object of English navigators – indeed of all christian navi-

gators – is money – money – money – for which I do not pretend to

blame them – Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to

diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part – to unite

mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love – society – and

mutual dependence: – the enlightened Christian should diffuse the

riches of the Gospel of peace – with the commodities of his respective

land – Commerce attended with strict honesty, and with Religion for

its companion, would be a blessing to every shore it touched at.121

In Wakefield’s text, it is not Sancho but Arthur who makes these argu-

ments for mutual dependence and Christian commerce. And unlike

Ignatius Sancho, Henry and Arthur represent those ideals as particularly

British.

Paraphrasing Gayatri Spivak, we might say that Wakefield here

silences a black man to enable white men to make a white woman’s

argument for abolition of the slave trade. In this passage as throughout,

Wakefield’s geographical tour books for children often expose the

strains and ‘general murkiness’ of abolitionist discourse.122 More

broadly, these texts demonstrate how many disparate national and

colonial interests might be served by imaginary geographies. And

finally, Wakefield’s tour books show a woman writer engaged in the

structural transformation of the public sphere.

Notes

1. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life(1932), 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. v; Alan

Richardson, ‘Romanticism and the End of Childhood’, Literature and the Child:Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations, ed. James Holt McGavran Jr

(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), pp. 13–43 (p. 25).

2. Norma Clarke, ‘ “The Cursed Barbauld Crew”: Women Writers and Writing for

Children in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Opening the Nursery Door: Reading,Writing, and Childhood 1600–1900, ed. Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor

Watson (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 91–103 (p. 93).

3. James Duncan, ‘Sites of Representation: Place, Time, and the Discourse of the

Other’, in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley


4. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of BritishIndia, 1765–1843 (1990) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 2;

Ashton Nichols, ‘Mumbo Jumbo: Mungo Park and the Rhetoric of Romantic

Africa’, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan

Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1996), pp. 93–113 (p. 94).


5. Rob Shields, Places in the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London:

Routledge, 1991), pp. 30, 29.

6. A Small Sketch of Geography (Dublin: James Porter, 1775) p. 30.

7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spreadof Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging theNation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 5.

8. James A. Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery: Tom Telescope and the Philosophy

of Tops and Balls, 1761–1838’, History of Science, 23 (1985), 127–51 (p. 129).

9. Colley, Britons, pp. 6, 61.

10. Thomas Salmon, A New Geographical and Historical Grammar (London:

William Johnson, 1749), p. 39.

11. John Newbery, Geography made familiar and easy to Young Gentlemen andLadies (London: John Newbery, 1748), p. 186.

12. Pierre Nicolas Langlet du Fresnoy, The Geography of Children: or, A Short andEasy Method of Teaching or Learning Geography (London: Edward Littleton,

1737), p. iv.

13. Salmon, New Geographical, p. vii.

14. Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy inEighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),

pp. 127, 153.

15. Salmon, New Geographical, p. vi; The Gentleman, Tradesman, and Traveller’sPocket Library, by a gentleman of the Bank of England (London: John

Newbery, 1753), p. 1.

16. S. Butler, An Essay upon Education, intended to shew that the Common Method isdefective, in Religion, Morality, our own Language, History, Geography, andthat the Custom of teaching Dead Languages, when little or no Advantage canbe expected from them, is absurd (London: Owen, Robinson et al., 1750),

pp. 92, 8.

17. John Holmes, The Grammarian’s Geography and Astronomy Ancient andModern, Exemplified in the Use of the Globes Terraqueous and Celestial (London:

W. Strahan, 1751), pp. 25, 111.

18. Newbery, Geography made familiar, pp. 258–9.

19. Ibid., p. 251.

20. New Moral System of Geography, vol. 6 of Riley’s Historical Pocket Library; or,Biographical Vade-Mecum, 6 vols (London: G. Riley, 1790), p. 140.

21. J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of PublicOpinion against the Slave Trade 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1995) p. 147; quoted in Judith Jennings, The Business ofAbolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997)

p. 60.

22. Quoted in Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing

Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed.

Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 289–339 (p. 289).

23. Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas

and Gender’, Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 1987), pp. 31–56 (p. 44); Joan B. Landes, Women and the PublicSphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1988) p. 7.


24. Colley, Britons, pp. 274–5.

25. Quoted in Jennings, Business of Abolishing, p. 45.

26. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 23.

27. Sarah Trimmer, The Family Magazine; or, A Repository of Religious Instructionand Rational Amusement, 2 vols (London: John Marshall, 1788–1789), I, p. 38.

28. Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education, 6 vols (London: J. Hatchard,

1802–6), I, p. 3.

29. Ibid., p. 207.

30. Ibid., pp. 135–7.

31. Ann B. Shteir, ‘Introduction’, Mental Improvement: Or, the Beauties andWonders of Nature and Art, by Priscilla Wakefield, 1794–97, ed. Ann B. Shteir

(Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1995), pp. ix–xxi (p. x).

32. Ibid., p. xii.

33. Wakefield, Mental Improvement, p. 74.

34. Ibid., p. 75.

35. Ibid., p. 76.

36. Ibid., p. 77.

37. Clare Midgley, ‘Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base

of British Anti-Slavery Culture’, Slavery and Abolition, 17 (1996), 137–62;

Wakefield, Mental Improvement, p. 78.

38. Ibid., p. 82.

39. Priscilla Wakefield, Excursions in North America, described in letters from a gen-tleman and his young companion, to their friends in England (London: Darton

and Harvey, 1806) p. iii; Priscilla Wakefield, The Juvenile Travellers; containingthe Remarks of a Family during a Tour through the Principal States and Kingdomsof Europe: with an account of their Inhabitants, natural Productions andCuriosities (London: Darton and Harvey, 1801), p. iii.

40. Wakefield, Juvenile Travellers, p. iii.

41. Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing andImaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1999), p. 10.

42. Midgley, Women against Slavery, p. 5.

43. Wakefield, Excursions, p. 1.

44. Ibid., pp. 2, 3.

45. Ibid., pp. 19, 22.

46. Ibid., pp. 9, 19, 66.

47. Ibid., p. 73.

48. Ibid, pp. 24, 73.

49. Ibid., p. 24.

50. Ibid., p. 22.

51. Ibid., pp. 74, 192.

52. Ibid., pp. 74, 194, 192.

53. Ibid., pp. 415, 419.

54. Ibid., p. 420.

55. Ibid., p. 73.

56. [William Darton], Little Truths better than Great Fables: Containing Informationon divers Subjects, for the Instruction of Children, 3rd edn (Dublin: by John

Gough, 1796), p. 71.



58. Ibid., p. 24.

59. Ibid., p. 50.

60. Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; withsuggestions for its improvement (London: Joseph Johnson, 1798), pp. 1–2, 74–5.


62. Ibid., p. 192.

63. Quoted in John Barrow, The Life and Correspondence of Admiral Sir WilliamSidney Smith, G.C.B., 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), II, pp. 367–8.


65. Priscilla Wakefield, The Traveller in Africa: Containing some account of the an-tiquities, natural curiosities, and inhabitants, of such parts of that continent and itsislands, as have been most explored by Europeans (London: Harvey and Darton,

1814), p. 4.

66. Ibid., p. 2.

67. Ibid., p. 6.

68. The Cruelties of the Algerine Pirates, shewing the Present Dreadful State of theEnglish Slaves, and other Europeans, at Algiers and Tunis, 4th edn (London:

W. Hone, 1816).

69. Wakefield, Traveller, p. 47.

70. Quoted in [E. Howard], Memoirs of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, K.C.B. &c., 2 vols

(London: Richard Bentley, 1839), II, p. 196.

71. Cruelties of the Algerine Pirates, p. 3.

72. Quoted in Howard, Memoirs, II, p. 327.

73. Cruelties of the Algerine Pirates, p. 10.


75. Ibid., pp. 15, 8.

76. Ibid., pp. 173–4, 67–8, 162.

77. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:

Routledge, 1992), pp. 38–9.

78. Linda E. Merians, ‘What They Are, Who We Are: Representations of the

“Hottentot” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 17

(1993), 14–39 (p. 22); Wakefield, Traveller, p. 268.


80. Wakefield, Traveller, pp. 41, 332, 344.

81. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Idleness in South Africa’, White Writing: On the Culture ofLetters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 12–35

(pp. 16, 25, 28–31).

82. Wakefield, Traveller, pp. 256, 261, 256.

83. Ibid., pp. 266, 256.

84. Lady Anne Barnard, ‘Extracts from the Journal of a Residence at the Cape of

Good Hope, and of a short Tour into the Interior’, Lives of the Lindsays, by

Lord Lindsay, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1849), III, pp. 369–476

(pp. 429–36).

85. John Barrow, Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, in the years 1797 and1798, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801–4), pp. 354–5.


87. Merians, ‘What They Are’, p. 32; Wakefield, Traveller, p. 289.

88. Ibid., p. 266.


89. Ibid., p. 284.

90. Barrow, Travels into the Interior, p. 174.

91. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 58.

92. Barrow, Travels into the Interior, p. 184.

93. Ibid., p. 269.


95. Barrow, Travels into the Interior, pp. 274, 291.

96. Ibid., p. 399.

97. Quoted in Barbara Maria Stafford, Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated TravelAccount, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 335; Sir William

Young, ‘Introduction’, The Journals of Frederick Horneman’s Travels, from Cairoto Mourzouk, the Capital of the Kingdom of Fezzan, in Africa. In the years 1797–8,

by Friedrich Horneman (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1802), pp. i–xv (p. ii).

98. Ibid., pp. vii–viii.

99. Ibid., p. iii.

100. Jennings, Business of Abolishing, p. 45.

101. Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 42.

102. Wakefield, Traveller, pp. 343–4.

103. Ibid., p. 335.

104. Wakefield, Traveller, pp. 58, 98.

105. Ibid., p. 106.

106. Ibid., p. 309.

107. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the years 1768, 1769,1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773, 5 vols (Edinburgh: G. G. J. and J. Robinson,

1790), IV, p. 558; Wakefield, Traveller, p. 223.

108. Ibid., p. 287.

109. Ibid., pp. 317, 343.

110. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: John Stockdale,

1787), pp. 235–8.

111. E[lizabeth] Bentley, ‘On the Abolition of the African Slave Trade’, GenuinePoetical Compositions on Various Subjects (Norwich: Crouse and Stevenson for

the authoress, 1791), pp. 19–23 (p. 21).

112. Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782), ed.

Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 107, 177, 230, 217–24.

113. Ibid., pp. 54, 101, 112.

114. Ibid., pp. 46, 147–9, 41, 37.

115. Ibid., pp. 40, 134, 189, 182.

116. Ibid., pp. 172, 213, 68.

117. Ibid., pp. 74, 116, 74, 46, 111.

118. Ibid., pp. 216, 218, 217.

119. Paul Edwards, ‘Introduction’, The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, ed. Paul Edwards

and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 1–21

(p. 13).

120. Ibid., p. 11.

121. Sancho, Letters, pp. 130–1.

122. Deirdre Coleman, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and

English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s’, ELH, 61 (1994), 341–62

(p. 341).


194

12Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things’: MariaEdgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro’, Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave TradeFrances R. Botkin

When Maria Edgeworth published her seemingly simple moral tale, ‘The

Grateful Negro’ (1804), she introduced a text that critically engaged in

an ongoing and contestatory conversation about the slave trade.1 ‘The

Grateful Negro’ has evinced a variety of contradictory textual interpre-

tations, even in discussions that make use of much of the same support-

ing material. George Boulukos, for example, has argued persuasively

that Edgeworth was a ‘lukewarm, ameliorationist supporter of slavery’.2

By contrast, I locate her firmly in the progressive, abolitionist camp. In

this chapter, I examine the web of intertextual references that

Edgeworth weaves throughout ‘The Grateful Negro’, references ranging

from Bryan Edwards’s pro-slavery discourse to Aphra Behn’s proto-

feminist voice, and I argue that the tensions between these texts resist

and subvert the notion that Edgeworth’s tale relies upon and contributes

to discourses unambiguously supportive of slavery and the slave trade.

‘The Grateful Negro’ tells the story of a slave, Caesar, who foils a slave

insurrection out of gratitude to his master, Mr Edwards. Edwards had

bought Caesar and his fiancée, Clara, from Mr Jeffries, the irresponsible

neighbouring planter. Unlike Jeffries, Edwards treats his slaves kindly,

allowing them time and resources to cultivate their own plots of land,

even paying them small sums of money for extra work. This generosity

makes even more painfully evident to Jeffries’s slaves the cruel treat-

ment they receive from the sadistic overseer, Durant. Consequently,

Caesar’s vengeful tribe member, Hector, and Esther, an Obeah witch,

instigate a slave rebellion designed to overthrow the entire Jamaican

plantocracy. With Caesar’s assistance, Edwards and his slaves thwart the

rebellion, but only after the rebels ruin Jeffries and punish Durant, who

‘died in tortures, inflicted by the hands of those who had suffered most

by his cruelties’.3

‘The Grateful Negro’ may be read as an explicit but gentle warning to

the plantocracy, suggesting that rebellion can be avoided by employing

what Anne Mellor terms a ‘family-politic’: gradual reform ‘instituted by

enlightened rulers, achieving gender and race equality without turmoil

or rebellion’.4 At the same time, the partially averted slave insurrection

and the rebellious Esther reflect pressures that Edgeworth knew legiti-

mately threatened the stability of an imprudent ascendancy. With

Esther, Edgeworth establishes an important and distinctively feminine

presence in the text, disrupting an otherwise seemingly conservative

discourse. The tensions between revolutionary forces and the power

structure that contains them bring into sharp relief serious moral and

ethical issues of the slave trade.

Edgeworth was no stranger to issues of power. Her social and cultural

positioning – as a member of the Protestant ascendancy in a predomi-

nantly Catholic Ireland during a period of volatile political change –

familiarized her with the repercussions of social upheaval. Edgeworth

sympathized with the Irish Catholics, supporting Catholic

Emancipation and better living conditions for her Irish tenants, a posi-

tion that parallels her views on West Indian slaves. When she composed

‘The Grateful Negro’ for inclusion in her 1804 Popular Tales (a collection

of moral tales addressing a variety of social and economic issues), she

introduced a complex and polemic subject to children. Edgeworth,

however, refrained from making overt or explicit judgements, leaving

such work to her readers. Her reserve in ‘The Grateful Negro’ is especially

marked because the subject matter was particularly delicate at that his-

torical moment. It was written in the turbulent wake of the French

Revolution and shortly after the chaos of peasant uprisings in Ireland

(1798) which had driven her family to a nearby Protestant stronghold.5

Most pertinently, the violent slave insurrections in Santo Domingo in

1791 concretized Western suspicion of black slaves while reinforcing

European anti-Jacobin paranoia.

Edgeworth’s apparent reluctance to stake concrete political claims

stems in part from her status as a woman writer. She openly declined

engaging in what she viewed as the male realm of politics. Statements

such as her frequently cited and self-deprecating remark, ‘I am like the

“needy-knifegrinder” – I have no story to tell’, seem to efface all traces of

individual voice which could reveal her authority as a writer.6

Edgeworth’s controlling father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, often penned

Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro’ 195

the prefaces and introductions to his daughter’s work, reflecting the cir-

cumscription of patriarchal authority over female works. For example,

the Preface to Popular Tales patronizingly reads, ‘Among the ancients

wisdom required austere manners and a length of beard to command

attention; but in our days, instruction in the dress of innocent amuse-

ment is not denied admittance among the wise and good of all ranks.’7

This introduction legitimizes Edgeworth’s work, assuring her reader-

ship that it is harmless, amusing, and innocently didactic. Richard

Edgeworth perhaps suspected that his daughter’s works could be

mistaken for something other than ingenuous didacticism. Yet, in

writing a tale specifically about a rebellion on a slave plantation,

Edgeworth raises a highly charged issue. The ‘Grateful Negro’ resonates

with literary, historical, and cultural implications that infuse the text

with layers of meaning.

‘The Grateful Negro’ articulates a continuum of political approaches

to a controversial issue. By naming the fictional slave master after the

author and plantocrat, Bryan Edwards, Edgeworth evokes his apologist

stance, defending the institution of slavery and suggesting that slaves as

well as planters benefit from the arrangement. The fictional Edwards

proposes amelioration, a policy of gradual plantation reform which

emerged, in part, in response to the anti-slavery movement.8 Con-

tradictorily, at other points in the text, Edwards explicitly supports the

abolition of slavery as well as of the slave trade. In addition, he adopts

the ideology of Adam Smith, indicating that wage labour would provide

a more efficient and economically sound system than slavery, a position

that supports emancipation.9 Edwards argues:

Granting it to be physically impossible that the world should exist

without rum, sugar, and indigo, why could they not be produced by

freemen as well as by slaves? If we hired Negroes for labourers, instead

of purchasing them for slaves, do you think they would not work as

well as they do now? Does any Negro, under the fear of an overseer,

work harder than a Birmingham journeyman, or a Newcastle collier,

who toil for themselves and their families?10

The trajectory of this multivalent text moves circumspectly towards

abolition, a position more boldly addressed in Edgeworth’s earlier

works.

Edgeworth had regular access to informed anti-slavery sentiments and

politics because of her close association with abolitionists such as Anna

Laetitia Barbauld, Anna Seward, Erasmus Darwin, and Thomas Day.

196 Frances R. Botkin

Although Edgeworth was distinctly less radical than her company,

the difference is of degree rather than of kind. Her early moral tale,

‘The Good Aunt’, for example, demonstrates the influence of her

friends. ‘The Good Aunt’ relates the story of Frances Howard (the good

aunt) who sells her plantation because she is morally troubled about

owning slaves, and she insists that the elderly slaves be given their man-

umission.11 Subsequently, Howard helps an ex-slave find work as a

seamstress, proving (like ‘The Grateful Negro’) that wage labour is a

more productive and self-affirming option than slavery, and an option

that will ultimately benefit society as a whole. Written in 1787, ‘The

Good Aunt’ reflects an optimism that would increasingly be diminished

by the events of Santo Domingo five years later and the near collapse of

the abolition movement shortly thereafter. Consequently, Frances

Howard emerges as both more sympathetic and enlightened than

Edwards, implying perhaps that women – the moral arbiters of England –

might have the right idea. Edgeworth’s 1801 domestic novel Belindareintroduces similarly sensitive issues, but with a discretion easily

explained by the anxieties unleashed by events in France and in the

West Indies.12

The first edition of Belinda famously included an interracial relation-

ship between a black servant, Juba, and a white servant girl, Lucy.

However, Edgeworth’s father urged her to edit out this ‘scandalous’ rela-

tionship for the third edition. Instead, Edgeworth substituted Jackson,

a white servant, for Juba, writing, ‘My father says that gentlemen

have horrors upon this subject, and would draw conclusions very

unfavourable to a female writer who appeared to recommend such

unions; as I do not understand the subject, I trust to his better

judgment.’13 Despite this deferential omission, Edgeworth slyly leaves in

place a reference to another text featuring an interracial marriage:

Thomas Day’s renowned abolitionist poem The Dying Negro.14 One of

Belinda’s two suitors, the gaming, slave-owning Creole, Mr Vincent

(Juba’s master), endeavours to impress his beloved by reading aloud

Day’s sentimental poem. The Dying Negro relates the true story of a black

man who intends to marry a white fellow servant, but he is caught and

sent on board a ship bound for the Caribbean, where he shoots himself

in the head. The tragic story sparked public controversy because it was

published shortly after Lord Mansfield’s legal judgement of 1772 which

ruled that slaves could not be sent out of the country against their will.

Although the morally suspect Mr Vincent recites the poem, Edgeworth

positions it symbolically within a text that is clearly preoccupied with

issues of race and amalgamation. Perera smartly argues that ‘Belinda


reveals deep anxiety about the possibility of revolution but also allows

for the expression and interrogation of the insurrectionary aspirations

embodied in feminism, abolition and “amalgamation” .’15 In other

words, Belinda creates a space where revolutionary possibilities may be

explored.

‘The Grateful Negro’, too, permits the expression of ‘insurrectionary

aspirations’, perhaps best seen in the partial success of the rebels. The

slaves win a crucial battle by effecting the just demise of Jeffries and his

overseer, thus exposing the assimilation of immoral practices into the

power structure. The narrator explains that Jeffries might have stopped

Durant’s relentless lashings and tyranny had he not been out ‘carousing’

with a party of jovial West Indians:

The sufferings, which had been endured by many of the

wretched Negroes … were never once thought of by these selfish epi-

cures. … Yet, so false are the general estimates of character that all

these gentlemen passed for men of great feeling and generosity! The

human mind, in certain situations, becomes so accustomed to ideas

of tyranny and cruelty, that they no longer appear extraordinary or

detestable; they rather seem part of the necessary order of things.16

By calling into question the perceived ‘necessary order of things’, ‘The

Grateful Negro’ challenges the ways in which the hegemony justifies

the tyranny and cruelty it legitimizes. Even benevolent patriarchs like

Edwards accept or internalize behaviours that enslave an entire people

by governing with the belief that slavery is a necessary evil:

This Gentleman … wished that there was no such thing as slaves in

the world; but he was convinced by those who have the best means

of obtaining information, that the sudden emancipation of the

Negroes would rather increase than diminish their miseries. His

benevolence, therefore, confined itself within the bounds of reason.

He adopted those plans for the melioration of the state of the slaves,

which appeared to him most likely to succeed, without producing

any violent agitation or revolution.17

In expressing these humanitarian views, Edwards remains within the

range of social possibilities acknowledged by Edgeworth’s more

conservative readers. Here, Edgeworth attaches one of several footnotes

referring to Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of theBritish West Indies; Bryan Edwards, Edwards’s apparent namesake,


ostensibly represents ‘those who have the best means of obtaining

information’.

As George Boulukos points out, Edwards shares Bryan Edwards’s fear

of ‘violent agitation or revolution’, but it is significant that Edgeworth

emphasizes that she ‘adopts’ rather than ‘steals’ ideas from Bryan

Edwards.18 Edwards’s ideas help authenticate Edgeworth’s text by

asserting her knowledge of the discourse he represents; however, she

appropriates his mainstream, patriarchal discourse for her own use

which, I believe, is to illuminate to her readers the brutal mistreat-

ment of the slaves by the overseers and the negligence of the planters.

The narrator’s comment that Edwards’s ‘benevolence confined itself

within the bounds of reason’ bears investigation, because here the con-

ventionally masculine realm of reason is challenged by an implicitly

feminine text, intimating that slavery may be as irrational as it is inhu-

mane. In short, Edgeworth’s text confronts the patriarchal forces that

circumscribe reason, and Edwards’s voice echoes a brainwashed ascen-

dancy that accepts the tenets of ‘those who have the best means of

obtaining information’. The ultimate significance of Bryan Edwards’s

work ironically questions the status of the fictional Edwards as heroic

slave-owner.

Published in 1793, Edwards’s History contributed significantly to the

rise of pro-slavery literature.19 Sanctioned by the British Crown and

widely read, Edwards became an important voice in the discourse of

West Indian literature and history. In a move that goes some way to

establish his own legitimacy, in the preface to his work, Edwards identi-

fies his sources as such renowned, if controversial, historians as Edward

Long (author of The History of Jamaica) and Thomas Campbell (former

speaker of the assembly in Jamaica).20 Thus informed, Edwards claims

his first object as ‘truth’, which he has found in ‘personal knowledge

and actual experience’.21 Yet, as one of the ‘threatened’ Jamaican

plantocracy, Edwards undermines his claimed intention of providing

objective truth. His sympathies obviously lie with the plantocracy, and

he attempts to exonerate them from accusations of tyranny and corrup-

tion; this sympathy clearly biases his perceptions of the slaves, perpetu-

ating public fears that they are violent and dangerous.

Edgeworth nonetheless relies upon Edwards for germane ethno-

graphic facts. Edwards’s volume on slavery and insurrection describes

‘Koromantyns’ as distinguished by ‘firmness both of body and mind:

ferociousness of disposition but withal, activity, courage, and a

stubbornness … which prompts them to difficulty and danger’.22 He

later describes the ‘Eboe’s’ ‘constitutional timidity, and despondency of


mind’.23 Edgeworth’s description of Caesar, Hector, and Clara follow

Edwards’s model closely. Hector and Caesar embody Koromantyn traits

while Clara, prone to despondency and timidity, is stereotypically Eboe.

Edgeworth writes:

When Caesar and Clara heard that they were not to be separated,

their joy and gratitude was expressed with the ardour and tenderness

peculiar to their different characters. Clara was an Eboe, Caesar a

Koromantyn Negro: the Eboes are soft, languishing, and timid; the

Koromantyns are frank, fearless, martial, and heroic.24

Although Edwards admits that the ‘softer virtues’ of the African’s natural

disposition are distorted by slavery, he maintains that because of their

innate stubbornness, ferociousness, and propensity to danger, they must

be enslaved for their own – as well as for British – best interests. By con-

trast, Edgeworth focuses primarily on the more honourable traits such as

ardour, tenderness, fearlessness, and heroism (although, as I argue below,

the figure of Esther is an exception). By borrowing rather than stealing

from Edwards, Edgeworth uses his materials for her own purposes.

Edgeworth’s frequent reference to Bryan Edwards reveals her familiar-

ity with his opinions, but she also includes material that is oppositional

to them. For example, a brief footnote to ‘The Grateful Negro’ cites

August Von Kotzebue’s politically charged anti-slavery drama, The NegroSlaves (1796). Published in English translation in 1796, it is probable

that The Negro Slaves had been widely read and discussed by German as

well as English intellectuals although there is no evidence that it was

ever performed in Britain.25 The footnote refers to the play as ‘a fine

drama, by Kotzebue’, and it adds: ‘It is to be hoped that such horrible

instances of cruelty are not now to be found in human nature. Bryan

Edwards, in his History of Jamaica, says that most of the Planters are

humane; but he allows that some facts can be cited in contradiction of

this assertion.’26 The citation of Kotzebue, in tandem with the narrative

about Jeffries and Durant, coyly, perhaps ironically, contradicts

Edwards’s assertion that most planters are humane and suggestively calls

into question Edwards’s reliability.

Although Edgeworth remains cautious in overtly asserting her views

on the slave trade, ‘The Grateful Negro’ reflects the larger psycho-social

context of European guilt over slavery. A lengthy discussion between

Edwards and Jeffries delineates the controversial discourse about slavery

in England at the turn of the century. Jeffries justifies his position on the

slave trade by pointing out that the interests of the plantocracy are


‘protected by the laws of the land’. However, Edwards critiques the very

foundation of this claim, stating, ‘The law in our case, seems to make

the right: and the very reverse ought to be done – the right should

make the law.’ Edwards reminds Jeffries that:

The instant a slave touches English ground he becomes free. Glorious

privilege: Why should it not be extended to all her dominions: If the

future importation of slaves into these islands were forbidden by law,

the trade must cease. No man can either sell or possess slaves without

its being known; they cannot be smuggled like lace or brandy.27

This quotation not only reflects abolitionist sentiments, but explicitly

proposes emancipation by suggesting that all slaves ought to be freed.

Edgeworth misrepresents the 1772 Mansfield ruling (a common misper-

ception), because slaves were not free once upon English soil but were

merely protected from deportation; nonetheless, this exchange

examines the incongruous relationship between Britain’s ethical theory

and legal practice. Edgeworth’s tale interrogates the institution of the

slave trade, focusing extensively on planter practice and attitudes. In

this sense, the story functions didactically in typical Edgeworthian fash-

ion, suggesting that good masters will beget good slaves. In choosing

being grateful over being free, Caesar embraces this paternalism, and he

defends his master rather than joining the rebellion: ‘The principal of

duty conquered every other sensation … His heart beat high at the idea

of recovering his liberty; but he was not to be seduced from his

duty … Gratitude overpowered his manly heart.’28 With his loyalty and

sentimentality, Caesar carries with him a complex legacy that links

Edgeworth to a women’s literary – and anti-slavery – tradition as well.

Significantly, ‘The Grateful Negro’ can be linked to Aphra Behn’s

Oroonoko (1688), a text which Moira Ferguson credits with generating an

anti-slavery paradigm for British colonialist discourse.29 Oroonoko tells

the story of a Koromantyn prince, his enslavement (and subsequent

renaming as Caesar), his initial acquiescence, and his attempted rebel-

lion. Restored to his tribal leadership position, Caesar mobilizes his fel-

low slaves with an inspiring speech which Ferguson uses to position

Oroonoko as an anti-slavery work.30 Ultimately, the ill-fated rebellion

fails when the other rebels retreat, and Caesar is publicly tortured and

executed. Although the two Caesars meet very different fates, the texts

similarly reproduce ideological inconsistency.

Like ‘The Grateful Negro’, Oroonoko may be read alternatively as

abolitionist and apologist, and has spawned a wide variety of critical


interpretations. Heidi Hutner, for example, sees Oroonoko as a feminist-

emancipationist reading of the double oppression of women and slaves

by a white male ascendancy.31 Conversely, A. G. Starr views the novel’s

attitude towards slavery as a ‘regretful shrug’ at a horrible but inevitable

institution.32 The range of textual interpretations for both texts may be

attributed in part to the authors’ vexed social positions. Where

Edgeworth’s allegiance to her own class complicates her sympathy for

the Irish lower classes and her beliefs about Catholic Emancipation,

Behn’s role as a Tory propagandist and royalist complicates her feminist

views. Both women, to some extent, comply with the established order

that contains them, perhaps as a means to publish in a man’s world;

subsequently, both women encode the anxieties of ideological conflict

onto their writings, producing texts fraught with tension.

Edgeworth may not have read Behn’s work, but she certainly would

have been aware of Thomas Southerne’s widely known stage adaptation

of Oroonoko. Southerne’s version of Behn’s text was first staged in 1695

and, for forty years, was probably the most commonly produced of all

the post-Shakespearean tragedies. Moreover, it provided the anti-slavery

movement from the late 1750s onward with a plot for its abolitionist

campaign.33 Interestingly, Southerne significantly changes the story to

incorporate an interracial relationship between Oroonoko and Imoinda,

a topic which (in Belinda for example) clearly interested Edgeworth.

Edgeworth’s close ties with educated and public abolitionists indicate

that she would have been familiar with the Oroonoko story, and her

combination of genres, contexts, and allusions throughout the ‘The

Grateful Negro’ suggests that she constructs her hero with knowledge of

his complex legacy.

Whether or not Edgeworth knew that Behn was behind Oroonoko,

Behn’s influence resonates in Edgeworth’s tale. The unusual slave –

royal, noble or grateful – is a familiar and recurrent figure in British colo-

nialist discourse. Embodying European standards of merit, Oroonoko

and Caesar at once illustrate and call into question the notion of the

‘desirable’ slave; in other words, they may be classified as both foreign

and familiar. In addition, both slaves are feminized by their captivity, by

their name changes, and by their possession of conventionally female

traits such as loyalty, gratitude, and compliance. This figure of the exem-

plary slave demonstrates the method by which women authors in par-

ticular dissociate themselves from and domesticate otherness. Ferguson

asserts that women writers homogenoeusly conceptualized Africans as

‘pious converts, moribund slaves, collaborators, and rebels’, and in so

doing, mediated their own ‘unconscious sense of social invalidation,


through representations of the colonial other … a silent or silenced indi-

vidual in need of protection and pity who must always remain “under

control” ’.34 Whether models of obedience or of revolt, the fictional

slave fulfilled roles that female authors would have recognized in litera-

ture about slavery as well as in their own lives.

While Edgeworth’s construction of the ‘grateful’ slave complies with

one set of hegemonic expectations, it simultaneously speaks to the prob-

lems provoked by unquestioned submission. In other words, Edgeworth

introduces the conditions that understandably kindle rebellion, giving

voice to its proponents. The figure of the Obeah witch, Esther, functions

as a repository of undomesticated and dangerous energy; with Hector,

she constitutes the other half of Ferguson’s model: collaborator and

rebel. Esther in particular embodies the symbolic and political signifi-

cance of ‘The Grateful Negro’. Edgeworth links Esther to Obeah – an

African system of beliefs based on spirituality, witchcraft, healing,

magic, and spells – and subsequently she also associates her with rebel-

lion and retaliation. The term Obeah can be traced back to the Ashanti

word obayifo (witch or wizard), and its practitioners played a significant

role in slave societies, functioning as community leaders and as bearers

of culture.35 Suvendrini Perera remarks that Obeah represents the sur-

vival of African culture and religion on the plantation: ‘It was immedi-

ately recognized by slave owners as a vehicle of resistance and defiance,

and brutal measures were taken to crush its (often female) practition-

ers.’36 Edgeworth approaches the topic of Obeah with scepticism, noting

that the accounts of their powers are ‘so wonderful that none but the

most unquestionable authority could make us think them credible’.37

For this unquestionable authority, Edgeworth again directs her readers

to Brian Edwards.

Edgeworth’s long footnote on Obeah documents the suppression of

and punishment for its practitioners, observing that most slaves and some

planters feared ‘the dangerous tendency of the Obeah practices’, and that

these practices often led to the destruction of entire plantations.38

Edgeworth’s description of Esther coincides with Edwards’s conceptual-

ization of slaves, and it is precisely Edwards’s authorization that seems to

legitimize Esther’s presence in the text. Edgeworth therefore employs

Edwards to demystify beliefs that she finds childishly superstitious, but, at

the same time, she demonstrates their cultural centrality to West Indian

plantation life. Esther closely follows Edwards’s model for the Obeah prac-

titioner, and her mystical fetishes and spells terrify her followers. She

manipulates the frightened Clara into trying to recruit Caesar to the side

of the rebels, and tries to blackmail Caesar as well. When Caesar addresses


Esther directly, she threatens to kill Clara if he does not join the rebellion.

She proclaims, ‘Here is the bowl of poison in which the Negro knives are

to be steeped … and they will bear down everything before them –

Victory, Wealth, Freedom, and Revenge will be theirs.’39 The traumatized

Caesar pretends to conform, because he fears Esther’s influence enough to

hide his stronger commitment to his benefactor.

Planters and slaves alike feared Obeah practitioners whom they per-

ceived to be at once sexually, socially, and spiritually dangerous. Where

Esther frightens Clara and Caesar into submission, she inspires Hector

with an almost sexual passion. ‘He ardently longed for the moment

when he might satiate his vengeance.’40 Esther, then, conflates images

of women and people of colour as dangerous and mysterious. Actively

pursuing the possessions of white men (victory, wealth, and freedom),

she poses a literal threat to the established order, subverting patriarchal

frameworks and carving out a powerful feminine space.

Although Obeah practitioners can be male as well as female, it is

significant that, in Edgeworth’s tale, the practitioner is a woman. The con-

nection between mysterious witchery and women recalls Julie Kristeva’s

assertion that women who step outside circumscribed boundaries are in

fact witches: ‘woman is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a baccha-

nalian…a marginal speech with regard to the science, religion, and phi-

losophy of the polis’.41 Kristeva posits that in order to have any voice in

politics or history, women must identify with ‘the father’; any divergence

from this identification disturbs the status quo. She explains that one can

find the suppressed feminine by identifying disjunctions or contradictions

within a text by ‘recognizing the unspoken in speech…by calling atten-

tion at all times to whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed…incompre-

hensible, disturbing to the status quo’.42 I suggest that we can associate

much of Edgeworth’s text with ‘the father’ (with Bryan Edwards or with

Richard Edgeworth, for example), but that Esther embodies that which

must be suppressed. Impenetrable and dominating, Esther emblematizes

female power, calling into question both white and black women’s oppres-

sion by men as well as slaves’ oppression by the white plantocracy.

The Obeah witch is one of a variety of disruptive females that appear

in Edgeworth’s texts, and she appears strangely fascinated by this partic-

ular figure. She also introduces an Obeah woman in Belinda. The

Bildungsroman of the eponymous character, Belinda documents her sea-

son in London under the care of the charismatic but problematic

Lady Delacour and under siege by Lady Delacour’s former friend,

Harriot. A cross-dressing, Wollstonecraft-spewing, duel-fighting, French

Revolution-supporting female rake, Harriot Freke (as her name suggests)


represents the freakishly radical counterpart to the sensible, mild-

mannered Belinda. Fond of disruptive ‘frolics’, Harriot disguises herself as

an Obeah witch to frighten Juba, the black servant who has affronted her.

Juba believes that he has been followed to England by an ‘obeah-woman’:

He told that the figure of an old woman, all in flames, had appeared to

him in his bedchamber at Harrowgate every night, and that he was sure

she was one of the obeah-women of his own country, who had pursued

him to Europe to revenge his having once, when he was a child, tram-

pled on an egg shell that had contained some of her poisons.43

The terrified Juba sinks into a lethargic depression, paralleling Clara’s

state when Esther threatens her with Obeah.44 Juba calms down only

when Belinda demonstrates how Harriot used phosphorus to create the

appearance of the blazing Obeah woman.

In addition to loving a good frolic, Harriot draws attention to more

serious subjects, voicing polemic sentiments about the social role of

women and merging them with her views on slavery. In a conversation

with Mr Vincent (Juba’s Creole master) and Mr Percival (an ‘enlight-

ened’ absentee slave-owner) she exclaims:

‘This is just the way you spoil women’, cried Mrs. Freke, ‘by talking

to them of the delicacy of their sex, and such stuff. This delicacyenslaves the pretty delicate dears.’

‘No; it enslaves us,’ said Mr. Vincent.

‘I hate slavery! Vive la liberté!’ cried Mrs. Freke. ‘I’m a champion of

the Rights of Women. … You may say what you will, but the present

system of society is radically wrong – whatever is, is wrong.’45

Harriot’s strident proclamations clearly evoke Mary Wollstonecraft as

well as French Revolutionary propaganda, marking her as a dissident,

especially when juxtaposed with the enlightened benevolent patriarchy

espoused by Mr Percival (who is modelled on Mr Edgeworth). Harriot

Freke thus conflates feminism, Jacobinism, and insurrection, a pro-

foundly threatening triumvirate.

Harriot, like Esther, briefly brings to the surface troubling issues that

Edgeworth recognized as central concerns of her time. The recurrence of

the Obeah figure in two contemporaneous texts suggests that she was

struck by its significance. Although clearly a dangerous emblem of

rebellion, the Obeah witch also represents the consequences of

oppression and tyranny. It may be argued that Esther represents the


projection of women’s rebellious impulses and that Edgeworth mediates

her experience under patriarchy through this subversive figure while

simultaneously disassociating herself from it.46 By giving Esther voice,

then, Edgeworth permits her to reveal the truth about patriarchy and its

institutions: slavery and misogyny. In so doing, she gives the text a

distinctly feminine or feminist tenor.

Although Esther seems to occupy a position of violence and revenge, her

name evokes the biblical Esther who saved the Jews, and her name – like

those of the other characters – therefore transmits meaning. Firdous Azim

has argued that the act of naming is related to the notion of possession,

classification, and ordering.47 Edgeworth’s conscious act of naming thus

establishes herself as a dominant subject, as an author, and her choices

therefore mean something. Caesar’s name reverberates with at least dual

meaning: he is simultaneously the giver of empire and the destroyer of

republic. Hector’s name, too, conjures unsettling images. Unquestionably

defeated, but the primeval ancestor of empire, Hector denotes a noble

cause that anticipates future success. Both named from classical epic or his-

tory, they recall Edwards’s construction of the Koromantyns, possessing

what a classical ethos would have deemed ‘elevation of the soul’.48 The

resulting subtext provides historical, literary, and cultural signs that chal-

lenge the apparent (over)text of a masculine literary tradition, erected by

the Bible, classical literature, and even Edwards’s text. As a powerful female

figure, Esther represents the most poignant challenge to the dominant nar-

rative. Esther may have, like her biblical namesake, in fact saved her peo-

ple by liberating them from the likes of Jeffries and Durant.

Edgeworth’s web of intertextuality in her prismatic tale generates ten-

sions that disrupt normative discourses about slavery. The subsequent

contradictions within her text underscore the complicated nature of the

debate in England at the turn of the century. As Boulukos’s essay demon-

strates, ‘The Grateful Negro’ resists an absolute interpretation of

Edgeworth’s views on slavery; yet, ultimately, he argues that Edgeworth

‘tells a story driven by a … desire to both reform and preserve slavery’.49

Conversely, I contend that Edgeworth tells a story that encourages the

eradication rather than the preservation of slavery. Edgeworth, I believe,

felt that emancipation could happen only gradually because slaves and

planters alike must slowly change what has been perceived as the

‘necessary order of things’. Finally, for a woman who claimed to

have ‘no story to tell’, Edgeworth writes a text that articulates provoca-

tive sentiments. She in fact makes ‘The Grateful Negro’ her own by

employing subtle shifts of emphasis that are not so subtle when their

contemporary socio-political charge is taken into account.


Notes

1. Maria Edgeworth, ‘The Grateful Negro’, Popular Tales, 3 vols (London:

J. Johnson, 1804), III, pp. 193–240. Subsequent references are to this edition

of the text. Popular Tales was reprinted several times in the nineteenth cen-

tury on both sides of the Atlantic. A new scholarly edition is forthcoming in:

The Works of Maria Edgeworth, 12 vols, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering

and Chatto, forthcoming), XII.

2. George Boulukos, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s “Grateful Negro” and the Sentimental

Argument for Slavery’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 23, 1 (February 1999), 12–29

(p. 22).

3. Edgeworth, ‘Grateful Negro’, p. 239.

4. Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 80.

5. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1972), pp. 137–8.

6. Ibid., p. 9.

7. Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, Popular Tales, I, p. iii.

8. James Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 2.

9. Boulukos, ‘Sentimental Argument for Slavery’, p. 24. See also Andrew

McCann, ‘Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial

Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’, Novel, 30 (Fall 1996),

56–77 (p. 68); and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writersand Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 232.

10. ‘The Grateful Negro’, p. 202.

11. Maria Edgeworth, ‘The Good Aunt’, Moral Tales for Young People, 2nd edn,

3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1806), II, pp. 1–144.

12. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford


13. Quoted by Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 495.

14. Thomas Day, The Dying Negro: A Poetical Epistle, Supposed to be written by aBlack (Who lately shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames;) to hisintended Wife (London: W. Flexney, 1773).

15. Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth toDickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 34.

16. Edgeworth, ‘The Grateful Negro’, p. 227.

17. Ibid., p. 195.

18. Boulukos, ‘The Sentimental Argument for Slavery’, p. 17; Edgeworth, ‘The

Grateful Negro’, p. 195.

19. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies,2 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1793).

20. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica. Or, general survey of the antient andmodern state of that island: with reflections on its situation, settlements, inhabi-tants … , 3 vols (London: T. Lowndes, 1774).

21. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, 5vols (New York: AMC Press, 1966), I, p. 21.

22. Ibid., p. 75.

23. Ibid., p. 89.



25. August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue, The Negro Slaves, a Dramatic-Historical Piece, in Three Acts. Translated from the German of the President DeKotzebue (London: T. Cadell Jr and W. Davies, 1796).


27. Ibid., p. 202.

28. Ibid., p. 224.

29. Ferguson, p. 29; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or The Royal Negro, in The NortonAnthology of British Literature, 6th edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993),

vol. 1, pp. 1866–1910.

30. Ferguson, p. 29.

31. Heidi Hutner, ‘Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: The Politics of Gender, Race, and

Class’, in Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender

(New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1992), pp. 39–51.

32. A. G. Starr, ‘Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling’, ModernPhilology, 87 (1990), 362–72 (p. 366).

33. Mary Vermillion, ‘Buried Heroism: Critiques of Female Authorship in

Southerne’s Adaptation of Behn’s Oroonoko’, Restoration: Studies in EnglishLiterary Culture, 1660–1700, 16 (1992), 28–37.

34. Ferguson, p. 4.

35. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Religious

Syncretism and Caribbean Culture’, in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santría,Obeah, and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth

Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 6. For

an excellent discussion of Obeah in this volume, see Alan Richardson,

‘Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797–1807’, pp. 171–94.

36. Perera, Reaches of Empire, p. 21.


38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., p. 234.

40. Ibid., p. 219.

41. Julie Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows, 1st pub. 1977

(New York: Marion Boyars, 1986), p. 35.

42. Ibid., p. 37.

43. Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 221.

44. Here, too, Edgeworth uses a footnote to refer her readers to Edwards’s History.

45. Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 229.

46. Gilbert and Gubar somewhat reductively suggest that the figure of the wild,

unethical, masculine woman in nineteenth-century literature dramatizes a

self-division that demands that women authors simultaneously accept and

reject patriarchal strictures (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwomanin the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 79).

47. Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 55.

48. Edwards, History, p. 75.

49. Boulukos, ‘The Sentimental Argument for Slavery’, p. 17.


209

13Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840):Towards a Dialectical History PaintingLeo Costello

J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoncoming on, also known simply as The Slave Ship, was first shown in the

annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1840 (see Figure 13.1). It has

since acquired one of the most extensive and colourful critical histories

of any of Turner’s paintings.1 As was often his practice, Turner attached

a verse-tag, which he wrote himself, to the painting’s entry in the

exhibition catalogue. Along with the lengthy title, the verse-tag, to

which I shall return below, made the painting’s relevance to the issues of

the slave trade and abolition very clear. Exactly how the visual content

of The Slave Ship relates to these issues, however, is much less certain.

Indeed, since the middle of the last century, a number of scholars have

sought specific sources and meanings for the painting’s rather enigmatic

imagery. This research has produced a great deal of important informa-

tion about Turner’s artistic practice and several very sophisticated inter-

pretations, but still the precise nature of Turner’s comment on slavery

and abolition remains a matter of debate. In this essay, my point of con-

tention with these scholars will lie not so much in the question of which

sources are most relevant to the painting, but rather in how Turner’s

conception of slavery and abolition, and historical change more gener-

ally, can be understood, particularly in relation to other artistic and

literary representations.

Central to this discussion will be the models of historical time which

have been applied to The Slave Ship. Scholars have generally seen this

painting as representing a single historical incident or episode in the

slave trade, an approach which has led them to view Turner’s vision of

history as progressive and linear. On the contrary, I will demonstrate

that this painting depicts more than one point in time and was thus a

more complex statement on the questions of slavery and abolition than

has yet been realized. Calling into question the linear progression of

time and civilization, Turner’s painting prompts a reading which con-

siders the interplay of past and present and places the burden of inter-

pretation on the viewer, whose own time is implicated. Painting in

1840, Turner refused to locate British involvement in slavery and the

slave trade purely in the past, showing instead how it persisted even in

the wake of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Furthermore, this

non-linear temporal model resists presenting an optimistic vision of the

future. As a result, I will refer to The Slave Ship as a dialectical history

painting, as its conception of historical change is based in this constant

negotiation of past and present.

One of the historical incidents that scholars have identified as a

source for Turner’s painting is the notorious incident of the slaver Zongfrom 1781.2 That incident is recounted in Thomas Clarkson’s history of

the British abolition movement, originally published in 1808, but

printed in a second edition in 1839, the year before Turner’s The SlaveShip was shown at the Royal Academy. As Clarkson describes it, during

the Middle Passage, the Zong’s captain, facing a shortage of water,

210 Leo Costello

Figure 13.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), The Slave Ship (Slaversthrowing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on), 1840.

Source: Photograph © 2003, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

ordered the sick and dying slaves thrown overboard, knowing that he

could collect insurance on slaves ‘lost at sea’ but not on those who died

aboard.3 The only sign of that action in Turner’s painting is the shackled

leg, hands and chains of the drowning slave in the foreground, but it is

referred to directly in the verse-tag, which reads:

Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;

Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds

Declare the typhon’s coming.

Before it sweeps your deck throw overboard

The dead and the dying – Ne’er heed their chains

Hope, Hope, Fallacious Hope!

Where is thy market now?

The art historian Albert Boime accepts the identification of the scene

as a depiction of the Zong.4 Boime places the visual and thematic struc-

ture of the painting within the context of various economic and social

issues of around 1840, and argues that the imagery stages the struggle

between the plantation system of slavery and the new forces of laissez-

faire industrialism of the nineteenth century.5 According to Boime, the

painting’s fiery sunset is a metaphor for the ‘passing of the outmoded

institution [of slavery] in the context of the new industrialized state’.6

For this metaphorical interpretation to function, British participation in

the slave trade needs to be seen as purely historical, so that it can be

completely eclipsed by a new economic order. In this regard, the identi-

fication of the ship as the Zong is crucial because it places the scene in

precisely that historical context, dating to the eighteenth century. This

is to say, Boime’s interpretation of the ship’s conflict with the storm as a

representation of the eclipse of slavery by the new capitalist forces of the

nineteenth century can work only if British slaving is a purely historical

issue, without any contemporary reference.

John McCoubrey, however, has argued that just such a contemporary

reference exists in the imagery of The Slave Ship.7 While the British par-

liament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, a number of

other nations, including Spain and Portugal, were still slaving in 1840,

the year of Turner’s painting. British warships patrolled the waters of the

West Coast of Africa with the ostensible goal of preventing such activi-

ties, but because captains were only given prize money for slaves

captured on the open sea, many captains allowed the slave ships to leave

the coast before pursuing them. A frequent result of this tactic was that

the slavers jettisoned slaves to lighten their ships as they tried to outrun

Turner’s Slave Ship 211

the patrol.8 This issue of pursuit and jettison was widely reported in the

press in 1840, a year which also saw the Anti-Slavery League conference

in Exeter Hall opened by Prince Albert. McCoubrey asserts that Turner

depicts such a scene of pursuit and jettison in The Slave Ship. However,

McCoubrey shares with previous scholars such as Boime the desire to see

a single historical incident represented on Turner’s canvas, as he asserts

that The Slave Ship in no way illustrates the Zong incident.9

This complete exclusion of the Zong as a reference, however, seems mis-

guided. In the first place, McCoubrey overlooks the reference to the ‘dead

and dying’ in the title and verse-tag which, although it has little to do

with the jettison issue, does refer to an important aspect of cases where

sick and dead slaves were thrown overboard so that insurance could be

claimed. Indeed, if the slave ship had recently left the harbour, it would

be much less likely to have large numbers of dead and dying slaves than a

ship some weeks into the Middle Passage. The Zong was the most well-

known example of such a case, and the reissue of Clarkson’s book in 1839

had placed it in the public eye again. Secondly, if this is an illustration of

jettison then where is the pursuer? Certainly, no other ship appears any-

where on the canvas. We might think of the storm as a metaphorical pur-

suer but, as McCoubrey himself points out, the ship is headed straight for

the storm, not away from it.10 As a result of reading the image as the por-

trayal of a particular episode, or type of episode, dated around 1840,

McCoubrey is able to produce an allegorical view of abolition. Based

on iconographic details such as the broken chains around the raised limb

of the drowning slave, McCoubrey interprets The Slave Ship as an allegory of

hope for the future end of the trade and slavery and for a period of free-

dom, peace, and prosperity to follow.11 I would argue, on the contrary,

that this image simultaneously represents at least two historical periods of

Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. More importantly, because the

painting moves back and forth between these periods rather than moving

forward, I will suggest that the painting resists the kind of optimistic alle-

gorical representation McCoubrey describes.

There is every reason to suppose that McCoubrey is correct in noting

the relevance of the issue of pursuit and jettison to Turner’s painting. It

seems very likely from the evidence he provides that this painting would

have evoked this issue in the minds of contemporary viewers. Where I

take issue with McCoubrey is with his exclusion of the Zong incident

and the model of allegory that this exclusion allows him to apply to the

painting. Because the Zong case had been made extremely well known

by abolitionist literature and would have been equally fresh in the

reading public’s mind because of the recent reissue of Clarkson’s book,

212 Leo Costello

there is every reason to suppose that the painting referred both to the

Zong and to the Royal Navy’s involvement in jettison in the late 1830s.

One writer who acknowledges the possibility of simultaneous reference

is Jan Marsh, who accepts that The Slave Ship refers to the Zong, but notes

also the continuing relevance of jettison as argued by McCoubrey.12

Marsh asserts that ‘[Turner’s] picture can stand as a dramatic commen-

tary on a long Abolitionist movement’.13 But she does not see this as a

tremendously complex statement on the matter, suggesting instead that

Turner added the drowning figure in the foreground at a late stage of his

painting process to tap into a contemporary patriotic and humanitarian

concern.14 The Slave Ship indeed speaks historically to Britain’s involve-

ment with the slave trade, but its dual reference to the Zong and to pur-

suit and jettison is integral to painting’s formal structure, not a last

moment addition as Marsh suggests. To imply that the slavery issue was

a sort of gloss imposed on the image at such a late date is to ignore the

work of scholars such as John Gage and Eric Shanes, who have shown

that, in general, subject matter was central to Turner’s concerns as a

painter and to his very working methods.15

By referring to the Zong, The Slave Ship points to Britain’s role in the slave

trade during the eighteenth century, while reference to the navy’s role in

jettison and pursuit indicates the persistence of that involvement in the

wake of abolition. Such a juxtaposition is suggested by the 1839 reissue of

Clarkson’s book itself, which includes a preface decrying the Royal Navy’s

role in the jettisoning of slaves.16 But Turner’s image denies linear progres-

sion from the earlier period to the later, juxtaposing them instead uncom-

fortably within the same pictorial space. This contrast of historical periods

is visible in the distribution of information on the canvas. While much of

the painting is devoted to the sweeping seascape and atmospheric forces,

specific details such as the slaves and the sea creatures are concentrated in

two areas of the foreground, while the ship itself is shown in the left back-

ground. Visually, these sites of information are separate from one other,

divided by the heaving seas and the trough created by the reflection of the

powerful rays of the sun. This division is further emphasized by the ambi-

guity created by the distance of the ship from the drowning woman in the

foreground. The use of the present tense in the title and the verse-tag

seems to indicate that the action of throwing slaves overboard is happen-

ing as we look at the painting, but this sense is contradicted in the imagery

because the ship is already some great distance from the slave. The fate

that she faces and the fate of the ship greeting the storm are quite separate.

This view of The Slave Ship as representing two historical episodes is

consistent with Turner’s general pictorial practice. Turner frequently


made multiple historical references to allow his images to speak to

broader issues of human existence. In Rome, from the Vatican, of 1819, for

instance, Turner shows Raphael at work in one of the loggie of the

Vatican. The Rome that stretches into the background, as Gerald Finley

has noted, however, is that of Turner’s own period, and includes Bernini’s

colonnade, not built until over a century after Raphael’s death. Further,

according to Finley, by including the river god sculpture to the left of

Raphael, Turner also alludes to Rome’s historical past, thus allowing one

image to make reference to disparate historical periods.17 But The SlaveShip is more complex than Rome, from the Vatican. In the latter, the vari-

ous eras are comfortably harmonized within the same pictorial space, so

that the combination of Raphael and Bernini’s piazza looks believable.

Furthermore, Rome maintains a certain chronology, if read from front to

back, moving from the past in the foreground to the present in the dis-

tance. In The Slave Ship, however, the two historical references are left

unresolved by the formal structure of the painting. Rather than moving

easily from one period to the next, the painting constantly shifts back

and forth the between the two periods. The painting’s statement on abo-

lition is defined by this dialectical movement and the rest of this essay

will assess some of the implications of this mode of history painting.

To begin doing so, we should note that McCoubrey’s model of allegory

shares much with another representation of the slave trade that has been

cited as a source for Turner’s painting, a passage from James Thomson’s

poem ‘Summer’, of 1727, in which the end of the slave trade is expressed

allegorically in the description of the wreck of a slave ship in a violent

storm at sea.18 Thomson’s storm overturns the slave ship, pitching both

slavers and slaves into the sea where they are devoured by a hungry shark:

His jaws terrific armed with threefold fate,

Here dwells the direful shark. Lured by the scent

Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death,

Behold! He rushing cuts the briny flood,

Swift as the gale can bear the ship along;

And from the partners of that cruel trade

Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons

Demands his share of prey.19

In the painting, a number of sea-dwellers, including one large fish with

a wide, open mouth, seem to swarm around the figure of the slave in the

water in the right foreground.20 For Thomson, the storm symbolized the

ancient Fates delivering the judgement of the Gods, punishing mankind

214 Leo Costello

for participating in the evils of slavery: ‘The stormy fates descend: one

death involves / Tyrants and Slaves.’ This metaphorical destruction of

slavery is followed in Thomson’s poem by an evocation of a peaceful

and prosperous England, which, having ridded itself of the evils of

the slave trade, is now smiled upon by God.21 The bright future

of Thomson’s poem depends upon this scene in which abolition is

achieved and all signs of slavery are wiped out in a single moment.

A number of other poems similarly used the destruction of a slave ship

to symbolize the complete eradication of slavery.22 For instance, Hugh

Milligan’s ‘The Lovers, An African Eclogue’ of 1784 describes the after-

math of the sinking of a slave ship in these terms: ‘Now all their fears,

and tears, and sufferings cease / The Gods are good; and take their souls

to peace / Guilty and guiltless now are seen no more.’23

Turner’s image undoubtedly shares much with ‘Summer’, including

the fiery storm, which both painter and poet describe as a ‘typhon’, and

the depiction of slaves perishing in the sea. But they also differ in several

important ways. As I noted above, Thomson describes how the storm

threw the slavers into the water where they were drowned along with

the slaves. The separation of the drowning slave and the ship in Turner’s

painting, however, also marks their fates as distinct, so that they do not

drown together, as in ‘Summer’. Furthermore, by referring to one

historical episode from before abolition in 1807, and one after, Turner’s

painting makes it clear that the evils of the slave trade have persisted in

the wake of the parliamentary Act. In 1840, Turner was able to see that

abolition had brought an end neither to the suffering caused by the

slave trade, nor even to British guilt. Rather than showing the Zong pun-

ished by the storm, symbolically marking the end of the slave trade, this

painting points to the persistence of the slave trade in Europe and the

continuing British profit in slavery, by referring to the issue of jettison.

In so doing, Turner denies Britain its post-abolition role as the force of

liberty in Europe. More precisely, then, Turner has taken Thomson’s

storm and divested it of allegorical power. The slave ship may be

wrecked by the storm or it may not but, in any case, the evils of slavery

will continue.

The stark, almost terrifying naturalism of Turner’s painted storm is a

crucial aspect of its lack of allegorical function as compared to

Thomson’s storm. Throughout his career, Turner paid very careful atten-

tion to the precise appearance of natural phenomena and, by 1840, he

had developed the means to represent in paint the swirling winds and

driving rain of a storm at sea.24 Because of this specificity, Turner’s storm

can be seen less as an expression of the Greco-Roman god of the storm,


Typhon, as the title would suggest, and more as the representation of an

actual, individual natural phenomenon. Being thus transformed, the

storm can no longer perform allegorically within the painting, repre-

senting instead one storm about to overcome one ship at sea. This is

certainly not to suggest that there is not symbolism in The Slave Ship.

Ruskin, for instance, cited the blood-red sky as Turner’s symbol for the

death of multitudes and given the subject matter of this image this is

certainly a plausible interpretation.25 But Turner’s multiple historical ref-

erences prevent the incorporation of that symbolism into an overall

allegorical structure, conducive to abolition, similar to that of Thomson.

In so doing, Turner tacitly acknowledges not only that the effects of

slavery and the slave trade cannot be abolished as if they never existed,

but also that they cannot be represented in simplistic artistic terms.26

We can assess more clearly Turner’s use of a dialectical mode of history

painting by broadening this discussion to consider two aspects of aboli-

tion as a historical phenomenon. First, it is interesting to note that the

model of abolition offered by Thomson and others is a vision of what

historian David Brion Davis has described as an ‘emancipation

moment’; a single instant in which the effects of slavery are washed

away forever. Thomson’s poem, of course, was written before an aboli-

tion movement as such had even formed, but a similar conception

played a crucial role in later accounts of abolition. According to Davis,

abolitionists understood the results of emancipation in terms of the

Judaeo-Christian idea of a deliverance from sin.27 With such a model in

mind, abolitionists such as Ralph Wardlaw could celebrate the emanci-

pation of slaves in the British colonies in 1833 as an event that would

bring immediate freedom, purge Britain from sin, and create peace and

prosperity. In practice, however, the emancipation of the slaves in the

British colonies was very different. A system of apprenticeship was cre-

ated to smooth the transition from slave to wage labour, but unfortu-

nately, it soon became clear that many of the evils of slavery had

continued under apprenticeship – and even persisted after its abrupt end

in 1838. Not only did the suffering of the slaves in the colonies continue

to be an issue, but also, beginning in the mid eighteenth century,

England itself had been home to an increasingly large and often very

poor population of former slaves and their families. Indeed, according

to historian James Walvin, ‘In the early years of the nineteenth century

the black population of London was large, prominent, and the subject

of heated public and private discussion.’28 Living in London in 1840,

Turner would therefore have been in a position to see that, just as

abolition in 1807 had not ended the slave trade, neither the partial

216 Leo Costello

emancipation of 1833, nor the full emancipation of 1838, were decisive

‘moments’ at all but, rather, small components of a complex and difficult

process. By allowing no sense of progression to a time of freedom, it is

the continued suffering of the slaves that Turner literally foregrounds in

The Slave Ship by placing the body of the drowning female slave close to

the lower edge of the picture. With her body tilting diagonally back-

wards, and her head cut off by the edge of the frame, she almost seems

to be emerging into the viewer’s own space, connecting us to the

painted scene. The intensity and horrific nature of her suffering stands

in permanent, cruel contrast to the extraordinary beauty of Turner’s

sunset in The Slave Ship.29

It is also significant that Turner declined to make use of the kind of

religious allegory employed by the authors whose writing influenced

The Slave Ship. As I noted above, Thomson’s storm symbolizes the Fates

delivering the judgement of the Gods on the entire system of slavery.

Similarly, in Thomas Clarkson’s history of abolition, the movement is

depicted in specifically Christian terms, as he sees the benevolence of

the abolitionists to be the result of the guiding force of Providence act-

ing upon an inherent goodness in man, allowing Britain to alleviate a

gross injustice.30 The work of historians in the last century, of course,

has made this model obsolete, but it was the dominant framework avail-

able to Turner in 1840. His rejection of that framework becomes even

more remarkable when we consider the place of abolition within the

overall history of political activism in Britain. Seymour Drescher has

argued that abolition and emancipation were ultimately the products of

political mobilization on a public scale totally unprecedented in British

history.31 While Drescher acknowledges the importance of the Quaker

movement in the early stages of abolition, he argues that its real success

was possible only when it had become the most widespread political

issue of the period. By 1792, anti-slavery agitation had become the most

widespread public issue in Britain and it galvanized into activity large

segments of the population who had previously been without political

voice.32 The next 50 years were ones of almost constant political

activity, which can be traced directly to the mobilization that occurred

in the anti-slavery movement, which provided the impetus and the

very means of agitation used by subsequent generations of political

activists.33 It is thus appropriate to discuss an alternative mode of his-

torical representation in a painting concerning abolition and slavery in

Britain because this was a political issue unlike any that had come before

and one which dramatically affected the course of British history as a

whole.


Turner’s unwillingness to deliver the history of abolition over to the

kind of allegory employed by Thomson and others must be considered

within this context. To employ such a model here would have been to

have made the success of the abolition movement seem inevitable and

the result of larger than human forces, whether divine will or economic

development. But abolition did not come about because of faith in

higher powers, but instead from the work of large numbers of political

activists. Turner developed a pictorial structure for The Slave Ship that

could respond to these issues and a key aspect of that structure was his

use of the sublime. The sublime, of course, is a tremendously complex

and varied aesthetic and philosophical concept, but for the purposes of

this discussion of Turner it will be sufficient to note a central feature of

the sublime as it was discussed in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiryinto the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, written in 1757.

While his theory is known for its emphasis on the experience of terror,

for Burke, the crucial dynamic of the sublime was a certain elevation of

the mind caused by the contemplation of phenomena that were

overwhelmingly vast, powerful, or boundless. Boundlessness, according

to Burke, by provoking the contemplation of that which is far beyond

human comprehension, created a tension in the human nerves in

response to which the mind could expand, like muscles growing from

exercise. ‘Infinity’, Burke wrote, ‘has a tendency to fill the mind with

that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest

test of the sublime’.34 The dramatic emotions of the sublime were thus

rooted in a sort of unresolvable conflict between a human consciousness

and that which is vastly beyond its control.35 The result of that

encounter, however, provided that the subject is not in actual danger, is

an elevation of the mind and a heightened awareness of its own capaci-

ties. Implicit to Burke’s sublime is a sense of the individual subject’s abil-

ity to overcome apparently overwhelming threats and situations.

The open sea, inhospitable to man, was a common source of the

sublime for Turner.36 In The Slave Ship, Turner renders the threatening

quality of the sea in vivid terms, with massive, heaving swells of furiously

swirling water, whipped up by the approaching storm. In addition, the

painter has heightened the effect of the sublime by offering only a very

few small areas of clearly defined forms where the viewer’s eye might

rest.37 What is remarkable about The Slave Ship is that Turner combines

these visual dynamics with a historical and moral subject, for one of

these areas of concentrated information is the drowning slave in

the foreground. As the viewer’s eye is forced back to this figure, he or she

is faced with the overwhelming moral terror of the slave trade, for

218 Leo Costello

whose atrocities the woman slave stands. Indeed, Clarkson himself

admitted his inability to find language to convey the overwhelming hor-

rors of the Middle Passage. ‘Where’, he asked, ‘shall I find language to

paint in appropriate colours the horror of mind brought on by thoughts

of their future unknown destination, of which they can augur nothing

but misery from all that they have yet seen?’38 This moral aspect of the

painting exists within the overall structure of the sublime, which in

Burke’s account is a function of the mind of the perceiving individual

rather than any exterior phenomenon. Just as the viewer’s mind, there-

fore, is given a heightened sense of its own capacity in relation to the ter-

rifying natural scenery of The Slave Ship, so too is it invested with a sense

of power to overcome the moral horror of the slave trade. Rather than

using a Thomsonian allegory to provide a reassuring image of divinely

ordained historical progression, which would absolve the viewer of

responsibility, Turner’s use of the sublime forces the viewer to grapple

with this difficult issue. Such a representation is uniquely appropriate to

the subject of abolition, in which activists had, in fact, overcome the

apparently implacable interest of the slave-traders and slave-owners.

The extent to which Turner, the individual, may have intended this

painting as a critique of British policy and history can only be a matter of

speculation. His views on slavery and abolition are simply not known

beyond the evidence of this painting. Nevertheless, he would no doubt

have been familiar with the cause of abolition. His close friend and patron

Walter Fawkes stood for Parliament on the abolition platform with

William Wilberforce in 1806 and, in 1828, Turner dedicated a print of TheDeluge to the late Lord Carysfort, a prominent abolitionist.39 Still, during

the years of Turner’s closest association with Fawkes, he also worked

extensively for Jack Fuller, a slave-owner who was a vehemently pro-

slavery Member of Parliament for Sussex. This indicates that Turner’s feel-

ings on the issue were not strong enough to prevent him from accepting

a profitable commission.40 It is worth noting that the critical and public

success of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire being Tugged to its Last Berth, a

history painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839, suggests that

Turner could create a patriotic vision of history when he chose to do so,

making the critical nature of The Slave Ship seem even more pointed.41

The subject matter of The Fighting Temeraire, however, is considerably less

complex than that of The Slave Ship because the legacy of Nelson and

Trafalgar could be kept comfortably in the past to be celebrated in a way

that abolition certainly could not. Seen in this way, it may be that Turner

found that the complex nature of the issues of slavery and abolition made

it more difficult to produce an unequivocal statement in The Slave Ship.


In any case, Turner seems to have been uniquely willing to allow these

questions to inform his work and to explore them, rather than attempt-

ing to eliminate them. This willingness to tell history differently, in a

manner that does not emphasize the actions of heroic individuals or

attribute change to divine will, is significant in Turner’s work and, in a

longer study, I argue that there is considerable evidence throughout

Turner’s career of such a willingness.42 Finally, it is striking that Turner’s

dialectical history painting should have arisen at approximately the

same time that Marx and Engels were developing their dialectical inter-

pretation of history. By no means do I want to suggest that Turner was a

proto-Marxist, but only to point out that his history painting shares

with the writings of Marx and Engels a conception of history as formed

by the actions of men and women, as well as an interest in maintaining

a detailed view of the effects of historical change on individuals. Both

Turner’s history painting, and the dialectical materialism of Marx and

Engels, emerged from a period when mass politics transformed Europe.

The Slave Ship, a painting in which Turner acknowledges the importance

of political activism by refusing to provide a history of abolition that

allows the viewer to place his or her faith in divine will, nature, eco-

nomics, or even governmental legislation to create change, is very much

a painting of that time.

My argument in this essay, that The Slave Ship presents a dialectical

history of British involvement in slavery and the slave trade, is sup-

ported by the evidence of the picture itself and by Turner’s pictorial

practice as a whole. But even more central has been the idea that

Turner’s use of such a history was the result of awareness that the issue

of slavery was a difficult one and that British involvement in it would

not be and could not be abolished as if it had never existed. Instead,

Turner seemed to recognize that the effects of slavery were long-lasting,

difficult to undo, and not easily grappled with. That this was so should

not be surprising, however. Even in the twenty-first century, Western

society continues to attempt to come to terms with racism and the

legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine

how Turner’s painting, executed just two years after the final emancipa-

tion of the slaves in the British West Indies, could have been anything

but a complex, conflicted, and divided representation.

Notes

1. For sources before 1984 and a discussion of contemporary critical responses,

see Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, rev. edn,

220 Leo Costello

2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), text volume,

pp. 236–7. Other references not cited in this essay include Paul Gilroy, ‘Art of

Darkness’, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture (London:

Serpent’s Tail, 1993), pp. 74–85 (pp. 81–4), and Marcus Wood, Blind Memory:Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 74 n. 79. On Mark

Twain’s reaction to The Slave Ship see Jerrold Ziff, ‘What a Red Rag is to a Bull’,

Turner Studies, 3, 2 (Winter 1984), 28.

2. This connection was first made by T. S. R. Boase, ‘Shipwrecks in English

Romantic Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 22, 3–4

(1959), 334–46 (pp. 341–2).

3. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of theAbolition of the Slave-trade by Act of Parliament, 2nd edn (London: J. W. Parker,

1839), pp. 80–1.

4. Albert Boime, ‘Turner’s Slave Ship: The Victims of Empire’, Turner Studies, 10, 1

(1990), 34–43 (p. 36). Boime does note that similar incidents were reported

in the press contemporaneously with Turner’s painting, but only sees this as

adding relevance to Turner’s depiction of the Zong.

5. Ibid., p. 41.

6. Ibid., p. 40.

7. John McCoubrey, ‘Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception’,

Word & Image, 14, 4 (October/December 1998), 319–53 (pp. 323–34).

8. Ibid., pp. 325–9.

9. Ibid., p. 322.

10. Ibid., p. 336.

11. Ibid., pp. 338–45.

12. Jan Marsh, ‘Ruskin and Turner’s Slavers: Patriotic, Political and Pictorial

Issues’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2, 1 (2001), 47–63 (p. 48).

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 50.

15. See, for instance, John Gage, J. M. W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’ (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Eric Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape(London: Heinemann, 1989); Kathleen Nicholson, Turner’s ClassicalLandscape: Myth and Meaning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);

and Gerald Finley, Angel in the Sun: Turner’s Vision of History (Montreal:

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999).

16. Clarkson, pp. 5–7.

17. Finley, pp. 39–43, 114–20.

18. The first scholar to connect Turner’s painting to these verses was Ann

Livermore in ‘J. M. W. Turner’s Unknown Verse-Book’, The Connoisseur YearBook (1957), 78–86 (p. 80).

19. James Thomson, ‘Summer’, In The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson,

ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), pp. 1013–20.

20. Another possible source for the sea creatures is Thomas Gisborne, Walks in aForest, 9th edn (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1814), pp. 47–8.

21. Thomson, ‘Summer’, 1371–79.

22. Another example is Mary Robinson’s ‘The Negro Girl’ (1800), in Slavery,Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, ed. Peter

Kitson et al. (London: Pickering and Chatto), IV, pp. 260–7. McCoubrey notes


the importance of this motif and includes a number of other examples

including Thomas Day’s A Dying Negro (London: W. Flexney, 1773). See

McCoubrey, ‘Turner’s Slave Ship’, pp. 329–30.

23. Hugh Milligan, ‘The Lovers’, in Kitson and Lee, Slavery, Abolition andEmancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Pickering

and Chatto), IV, p. 29.

24. A number of oil sketches, dated by Butlin and Joll to the mid 1830s, reveal

Turner’s interest in observing and representing storms at sea. See Butlin and

Joll, pp. 462, 463, 466.

25. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1878), IV,

p. 336. Eric Shanes, in Turner’s Human Landscape, has discussed Turner’s use

of effects of weather and light to complement the human significance of his

landscapes (pp. 95–137).

26. Jack Lindsay, in J. M. W. Turner, His Life and Work: A Critical Biography(St Albans: Panther Books, 1973), comes the closest to my interpretation when

he suggests that Turner’s painting recognizes ‘that the guilt of the slave trade

was something too vast to be wiped out by any belated act of Parliament’

(p. 250). But Lindsay does not expand upon this observation.

27. David Brion Davis, The Emancipation Moment (Gettysburg, PA.: Gettysburg

College, 1983), p. 8.

28. James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945(London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 189.

29. This contrast was pointed out to me by Eric Shanes.

30. Clarkson, pp. 5–8.

31. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization inComparative Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1986).

32. Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers (Lexington,

KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 32–5, and Drescher, pp. 67–88.

33. Ibid., p. 72.

34. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of theSublime and the Beautiful, 2nd edn (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757, facsim-

ile reproduction, London: Scolar Press, 1970), pp. 129–30. These ideas are

expressed in Burke’s texts in numerous other places; on vastness, see

pp. 127–39 and 257–64.

35. Ibid., pp. 99–122.

36. For a comprehensive introduction to this aspect of Turner’s work see Andrew

Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, exhibition catalogue (New Haven: Yale


37. Norman Bryson, ‘Enhancement and Displacement in Turner’, The HuntingtonLibrary Quarterly, 5, 49 (1986), 47–65.

38. Clarkson, p. 14.

39. Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin, and Luke Hermann, eds, The Oxford Companion toJ. M. W. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 104, 304.

40. Eric Shanes, Turner’s Rivers, Harbours and Coasts (London: Chatto and

Windus, 1981), p. 5.

41. On the Temeraire, see Richard Stein, ‘ “Remember the Temeraire”: Turner’s

Memorial of 1839’, Representations, 11 (1985), 165–200.

42. Leo Costello, ‘The Center Cannot Hold: The History Painting of J. M. W.

Turner in the Age of Revolution’, unpub. PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2003.

222 Leo Costello

223

Bibliography

This is a bibliography of academic work about slavery, abolition, and emancipa-

tion in Britain and its colonies, in relation to writing, art, and music – with the

emphasis on writing. We have not included all the texts cited in individual

chapters: for these references, see the endnotes to each chapter. Some works of

history are included, as are some titles that examine the wider relationship

between culture, colonization, and empire, but for more substantial bibliograph-

ical information on these topics the reader is recommended to look elsewhere.

We have three main suggestions to make. The first is the final volume to TheOxford History of the British Empire, a separate 756-page volume discussing the

history of historical writing on the subject—the scale illustrates the vast quantity

of academic research that has been conducted in the field. See Robin Winks, ed.,

The Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1999). The second suggestion is the two-volume Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, edited by Joseph C. Miller (Armonk, NY:

M. E. Sharpe, 1999). Finally, we suggest Andrew Porter, ed., Bibliography ofImperial, Colonial, and Commonwealth History since 1600 (Oxford: Oxford


This bibliography is divided into two parts. The first part lists anthologies of

primary texts about slavery, or writing by slaves and former slaves. In many cases,

these anthologies also contain important introductions or supporting essays. The

second part lists major monographs, collections, essays, articles, and shorter

works that discuss discourses of slavery and abolition. The aim has been to

include as many titles as possible, while still maintaining a tight focus on our

field. Specialists will immediately notice omissions. However, we hope it will be

of benefit to both students and scholars of slavery and abolition.

Anthologies of primary material

Adams, Francis D. and Barry Sanders, eds, Three Black Writers in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1971).

Andrews, William L., ed., Six Women’s Slave Narratives (New York: Oxford


Basker, James G., ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery,1660–1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

Bown, Lalage, ed., Two Centuries of African English: A Survey and Anthology of Non-Fictional English Prose by African Writers since 1769 (London: Heinemann,

1973).

Brooks, Chris and Peter Faulkner, eds, The White Man’s Burden: An Anthology ofBritish Poetry of the Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996).

Brooks, Joanna and John Saillant, eds, ‘Face Zion Forward’: First Writers of the BlackAtlantic, 1785–1798 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002).

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Index

229

Abolition of the Slave Trade Act

(1807), 1, 172, 210, 211

Abyssinia, 184

Addison, Joseph, 46, 47–8

Africa, 6, 68, 87, 97, 141–54, 179,

182–7, 211

Africans, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12–21, 35–6,

67–8, 70, 87–8, 98, 102, 109,

165, 177, 185–6, 203

see also Abyssinia, Algiers, Banana

Islands, Barbary Coast, Gold

Coast, Morocco, Sierra Leone,

South Africa

African Association, 186–7

Agassiz, Louis, 12

agriculture, 51–2

Alabama, 112

Alexander, Ziggi, 130

Algiers, 183

amanuenses, 112, 132–3

amelioration, 56, 59, 143, 161–2, 196

America, 16, 99, 109, 112, 123, 126–7,

128, 129, 149, 165, 172, 177, 180

British colonies in, 42n10, 47, 141,

162

slavery in, 26, 42n2, 57, 143, 159

see also American Revolution,

Native Americans, United States

American Revolution, 3, 47, 142, 161,

170

Amringe, William Frederick van, 12

Anderson, Benedict, 176

Andrews, William, 111–12

Anglicanism, see Church of England

anthropophagy, see cannibalism

Antigua, 113, 129, 131, 132

Antigua Weekly Register, 132

Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, 132, 135

Anti-Slavery Society, 2, 130, 133, 134,

135

Appleton, Nathaniel, 57

Considerations of Slavery in a Letter toa Friend, 57–8

apprenticeship, 109, 110, 111, 118,

216

Arens, William, 96–7

Armstrong, John, 48

Asa-Asa, Louis, 130, 134

Ashanti, 203

Asia, 175, 177

see also India

Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility, 65,

74

Azim, Firdous, 206

Bal, Mieke, 27

Banana Islands, 142, 145, 151

Banks, Joseph, 142, 144, 145–6, 151

Barbadoes Gazette, 19

Barbados, 27, 98, 165, 169

Barbary Coast, 183

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 196

Barclay, David, 181

Barker, Anthony, 14

Barnard, Lady Anne, 185

Barrell, John, 51

Barrow, John, Travels into the Interior ofSouthern Africa, 184–6

Beckford, William, 14, 19, 58

Descriptive Account of the Island ofJamaica, 19–20

Beckles, Hilary, 27, 43n22

Behn, Aphra, 26–41, 194, 201–2

Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave, 4,

26–41: altered by

late-eighteenth-century

dramatists, 40–1; altered by

Southerne, 31, 35; and

American slavery, 26, 42n2;

attitude towards slavery, 28;

and freedom, 27, 36; and ‘The

Grateful Negro’, 201–2; rape in,

29–30

Benezet, Anthony, 82

Bentley, Elizabeth, ‘On the Abolition

of the African Slave Trade’, 188

Berkeley, George, 159

Bermingham, Ann, 51

Bermuda, 127, 129

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 214

Bible, 13, 15, 164, 166

account of creation, 13, 15, 16–17,

22

Bicknell, John, 90

Birmingham Female Society for the

Relief of British Negro Slaves, 2,

132

Blackburn, Robin, 42n10

Blackstone, William

Commentaries on the Laws ofEngland, 2, 7n6

Blake, William, 3

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 13, 16

Boers, 184–6

Boime, Albert, 211

Bosjemans, 185–6

Boston (Massachusetts), 57

botany, 146

Boulukos, George, 194, 199, 206

Bourryau, John, 48

Boyce Davies, Carole, 134

Boyle, Robert, 159

Braithwaite, John, 169

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 50,

76n28

British army, 68

British Emancipator, 108

Brown, Laura, 39

Brown, Sterling, 117

Brown, Susan, 130

Browne, Charles, 87

Browne, Martha A., 130

Browne, Sir Thomas, 21

Bruce, James, 187

Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte

de, 13

Bunbury, Sir Charles, 87

Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Enquiryinto … the Sublime and Beautiful,218–19

Burt, Daniel Matthew, 48

Burton, Annie L., 127

Butler, Joseph, 159–60, 161

Butler, Judith, 125

Butler, Marilyn, 3

Caffraria, 177

Campbell, Thomas, 199

Canada, 165, 170

cannibalism, 5, 96–105

cultural history of, 96–7

in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, 103

in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,97–102

canons, establishment of, 109, 123–4,

126–8, 134–5

Cape Colony, see South Africa

Carretta, Vincent, 84, 88, 92, 98, 99,

106n24, 124

Carysfort, John Joshua Probyn, first

Earl of, 219

Catholicism, see Roman Catholicism

Chard, Chloe, 180

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope,

fourth Earl of, 167

Child, Josiah, A New Discourse onTrade, 182

children’s literature, 6, 175–89

Christ, see Jesus Christ

Christian Universalism, 13, 20, 21, 22

Christology, 168

Church of England, 6, 158–72

missionary work, 159–60, 170

slave ownership, 160

see also Society for the Propogation

of the Gospel in Foreign Parts

Clarkson, Thomas, 2, 12, 85

Essay on the Slavery and Commerce ofthe Human Species, 20–1, 85

History of the … Abolition of theAfrican Slave Trade, 210–11, 212,

213, 217, 219

coal, 55–6

Cochrane, Archibald, ninth Earl of

Dundonald, 56

Codrington, Christopher, 160

Coetzee, J. M., 96, 105, 184

Colfax, Richard H., 12

Colley, Linda, 176

colliers, 55–6

Collins, Robert, Practical Rules for theManagement … of Negro Slaves,65–6, 74

colour (of skin), 16, 20–2, 35, 40, 87–8

see also race

230 Index

Committee for the Relief of the Black

Poor, 143

Considerations Which may Tend toPromote the Settlement of our NewWest-India Colonies, 72

Cook, James, 161

Coromantien, see Koromantyn

Corsairs, 183

Crabbe, George, 167

Creole, 109, 114–17

de Crèvecœur, J. Hector St John, 149,

153

Crew, Frances, 81, 85, 88–9, 91–3

The Critical Review, 48

Crofton, W. A., 178

Cruelties of the Algerine Pirates, 183

Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, 12, 102

Cumberland, George, 142, 143, 153

Curtin, Phillip, 11

Dabydeen David, 105, 127

D’Aguiar, Fred, 105

Dalling, William, 118

Darton, F. J. Harvey, 175

Darwin, Erasmus, 196

Davis, David Brion, 141, 216

Day, Thomas, 90, 196

The Dying Negro, 197

Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 72,

103–5

De Quincey, Thomas, Autobiography, 15

dialectical conception of history, 220

discourse, 3, 63–4, 101

disease, 4, 49, 63–75, 89

and diet, 75n9

immunity to, 66

malaria, 64

nervous disorders, 64–5

and racial ideology, 68

and sensibility, 64–9

yellow fever, 64, 66–7

Dodsley, James, 49

Dodsley, Robert, 48, 49

Dolben, Sir William, 159

Douglass, Frederick, 127

Drave, 55

Drax Hall, 58

Drescher, Seymour, 217

Drumgoold, Kate, 127

Drury, Dru, 145–6

Dryden, John, 46, 47

DuBois, W. E. B., 98

Dundonald, Archibald Cochrane,

ninth Earl of, 56

Dutch colonists in South Africa, 185–6

Dyer, John, 47

The Fleece, 50–1, 52, 53, 57

East India Company, 175

Eboe, see Igbo

Edgeworth, Maria, 194–207

Belinda, 197–8, 202, 204–5

‘The Good Aunt’, 197

‘The Grateful Negro’, 3, 194–207:

economic arguments, 196; and

emancipation, 196, 198, 201,

206; insurrectionary

aspirations, 198; and Obeah,

203–6; and Oroonoko, 201–2;

racial ideology, 200; warning to

plantocracy, 195

Popular Tales, 195, 196

Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 195–6,

197, 204

Edinburgh, 48, 56

Edwards, Bryan, 14, 19, 194, 196, 203,

204, 206

The History, Civil and Commercial, ofthe British Colonies in the WestIndies, 2–3, 18, 198–200

Edwards, Paul, 83, 84, 127, 188

elephants, 153–4

Ellis, Markman, 63, 84, 90, 91

emancipation

in British Caribbean colonies, 110,

160, 181, 198, 206, 216–17

Catholic, 195, 202

in England, 2, 160, 201, 216–17

Engels, Friedrich, 220

Entick, John, 47

Equiano, Olaudah, 5, 12, 96–105, 113,

124, 126, 127

identity debate, 104, 124

The Interesting Narrative of the Life ofOlaudah Equiano, 97–105, 135:

and cannibalism, 97–102; and

Robinson Crusoe, 103–5; and

testimony, 113

Index 231

Essay Upon Education, 176

European Magazine and London Review, 85

evangelicalism, 158, 166

Family Magazine, 178

Fawkes, Walter, 219

Federal Writers Project, 117

Feingold, Richard, 51, 52

feminism, 177–8

Ferguson, Margaret, 28

Ferguson, Moira, 126, 127, 128–9,

130, 131, 133, 134, 201, 202–3

Ferriar, John, 31, 37

The Prince of Angola, 37, 38–9

Fielding, Sarah

The Adventures of David Simple, 63, 69

Volume the Last, 69–71, 72

Finley, Gerald, 214

Fisher, Jabez, 86

Fletcher, John

Monsieur Thomas, 39

Fothergill, John, 142, 143, 146

Foucault, Michel, 3, 125

Fowler, Alastair, 46

France, 154, 186, 195

French Revolution, 154, 195

Fryer, Peter, 102

Fuller, Jack, 219

Gage, John, 213

Gainsborough, Thomas, 3

Gates, Henry Louis, 98, 126, 127, 134

Gentleman, Francis, Oroonoko, or theRoyal Slave, a Tragedy, 37–8

geographies, 175, 176–9

see also travel books

Geography for Children, 176

Geography made familiar and easy toYoung Gentlemen and Ladies, 177

George III, 49

georgic, 4, 6, 45–8, 49, 50–2, 53,

144–5

Gibbon, Edward, 149, 150, 153

Gilbert, Sandra, 208n46

Gilmore, John, 50

Gilroy, Paul, 106n26, 125, 126, 129

Glasgow, 114

Glasgow Courier, 132

Gliddon, George, 12

Goldberg, David Theo, 12, 22

Gold Coast, 162

Goldsmith, Oliver, 48, 148, 153, 167

Grainger, James

biographical sketch, 48–50

‘Bryan and Pereene’, 49

Essay on the more common West-IndiaDiseases, 49

The Sugar Cane, 4, 45–59: attitude

towards slavery, 52–9;

composition, 49; on mining,

55–6; on plantation

management, 51–2; proposes

abolition, 57; publication history,

50; reception, 49–50, 57–9

Grégoire, Henri-Baptiste, 103–4

Grenada, 142

Griffiths, Ralph, 85

Guatemala, 113

Gubar, Susan, 208n46

Guinea, see Africa

Habermas, Jürgen, 177

see also public sphere

Haiti, see Santo Domingo

Hale, Matthew, 27

Hall, Stuart, 125, 129

Hanway, Jonas, 143

Hawkesworth, John, 31, 38

historicism, 3–4, 50, 51, 124–5, 220

Holmes, John, 177

Horneman, Frederick, 186

Hottentots, 177, 185, 187

Houston, James, 1

Hulme, Peter, 97, 100

Hume, David, 20

Hungary, 55

Hunter, John, 15

Hutner, Heidi, 202

Ibo, see Igbo

Igbo, 18, 102, 199–200

Inchbald, Elizabeth, A Simple Story, 71,

74

India, 88, 159

insects, 6, 64, 142, 143–54

ants, 143, 149, 153–4

bees, 144–5, 149

232 Index

insects – continuedbutterflies, 146

mosquitoes, 64

study of (entomology), 6, 146, 150

termites (white ants), 143–5, 147–8,

149–54

Ireland, 195, 202

Islam, 184

Jacobs, Harriet, 127

Jamaica, 18, 70, 108, 110

Jamaica, a Poem, 58–9

James, C. L. R., 127

James, Henry, 110, 118

James, William, 142

Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia, 85, 187–8

Jekyll, Joseph, 90

Jesus Christ, 165–8, 175

jettison, see pursuit and jettison

Jews, 206

Johnson, Mr, ‘Citizen of Edinburgh’, 55

Johnson, Samuel, 48, 49

Johnson, Walter, 118

Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 16, 49

Kaul, Suvir, 26

Kemeys, John, 14

Free and Candid Reflections, 14

Keppel, Frederic, 160

Kiple, Kenneth F., 66

Koromantyn, 43n15, 199–200, 201

Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand

von, The Negro Slaves (DieNegersklaven), 200

Kristeva, Julie, 204

labour, 50–2, 54–7, 141–2, 144, 148–9,

162, 182, 196

Ladies’ Society of Birmingham for the

Relief of British Negro Slaves, 2,

132

La Peyrère, Isaac, 13

Lavater, Johan Casper, 15

law, 2, 26, 133–4, 165

Lawrence, Amelia, 118

Lawrence, William, 16–17

Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, andthe Natural History of Man, 17

Leslie, Charles, 65

Lettsom, John Coakley, 142, 146

Ligon, Richard, History of the Island of Barbados, 17–18

Lind, James, 65, 67–8

An Essay on Diseases Incidental toEuropeans in Hot Climates, 65

Linneaus, 146, 147

Little Truths, 181

Liverpool, 142, 146

Locke, John, 161

London, 48, 56, 102, 110, 131, 216

Long, Edward, 19, 20, 24n8

Candid Reflections, 14

History of Jamaica, 2, 13–14, 199

Lowth, Robert, 159, 166

Luttrell, Temple, 141

Macartney, George, first Earl, 185

McCoubrey, John, 211–13, 214

McKay, Claude, 127

Mackenzie, Henry, 90

MacKenzie, James, The History ofHealth and the Art of Preserving It, 65

McQueen, James, 132, 134

Mandeville, Bernard, Fable of the Bees, 149

Mansfield, William Murray, first Earl

of, 2, 82, 197, 201

Marais, Eugene, 148

Marsh, Jan, 213

Martin, S. I., 102, 105

Marx, Karl, 220

Mellor, Anne, 195

Memmi, Albert, 22

Menchú, Rigoberta, 113

Methodism, 166

Milligan, Hugh, ‘The Lovers, an

African Eclogue’, 215

Milton, John, 149

mining, 55–6

monogenist hypothesis, 13, 15–17, 20

Monthly Review, 47, 85

Moravian Society, 133, 159, 185

More, Hannah, 21

Morice, William, 162

Morocco, 183

Morton, Samuel, 12

Index 233

Mosse, George, 11

Murray, William, first Earl of

Mansfield, 2, 82, 197, 201

Native Americans, 28, 43n16, 159,

160

Nelson, Horatio, Lord, 220

Newbery, John, 177

new historicism, see historicism

New Holland, 151

New-Jerusalem Magazine, 143, 148

New Moral System of Geography,

177

North America, see America

Nott, Josiah, 12

novel (as literary form), 4, 26, 90

Nugent, Sir George, 18

Nugent, Maria, 18

Nussbaum, Felicity, 3

Obeah, 203–6

Olney, James, 123, 130–1

Ornelas, Kriemheld Coneè, 66

Palestine, 113

Palmer, Archibald, 109, 116

Park, Mungo, 175, 183, 186

Parliament, 2, 70, 131, 158–9, 172,

183, 219

Pascal, Michael Henry, 100

pastoral, 50, 51

Peckard, Peter, 85

Penshurst, 109

Percy, Thomas, 48, 49

Perera, Suvendrini, 197–8, 203

Peters, Thomas, 155n5

Philadelphia, 181

Phillips, Caryl, 105

Phillips, Joseph, 113, 131–2

‘Philo-Xylon’, 19

Piersen, William, 99

Pinckard, George, 67

Piozzi, Hester, 153, 154

Observations and Reflections,153–4

piracy, 183

Pocock, J. G. A., 154

polygenist hypothesis, 13, 17, 20

Pope, Alexander, Discourse on PastoralPoetry, 50

Porteus, Beilby, 6, 158–72

anti-slavery sermon (1782), 163–71:

ameliorative programme,

169–70; anti-slavery arguments,

167, 171; delivery of, 164, 166;

and the Glorious Revolution,

170; personality of Jesus Christ,

167; précis, 165–6; scriptural

text, 164–5


The character of our Lord, as delineated in the Gospel, 167

‘The civilization, improvement,

and conversion of the

Negroe-slaves’, 158, 171–2

Letter to the Governors … in the British West India Islands, 159,

171

Portugal, 211

Pouchet Paquet, Sandra, 126, 127,

128–9, 131, 133, 134

Pratt, Mary Louise, 101–2, 184

Price, Thomas, 110, 111, 113–14

Prince, Hugh, 51

Prince, Mary, 3, 5, 113, 114–15, 117,

123–35

The History of Mary Prince, 113,

114–15: anthologized, 126–7,

135; authorship, 118, 124;

language, 114–15, 117; Penguin

edition, 133–4; publication

history, 130; structure, 130; and

testimony, 113, 130, 132;

theoretical approaches to, 125–9

Prince Regent (George, Prince of

Wales), 183

Pringle, Martha, 130

Pringle, Thomas, 113, 114, 115–16,

128, 130–1, 133

public sphere, 177–8, 189

pursuit and jettison, 211–13, 215

Quakers, 82, 86, 141, 142, 178, 217

race, 4, 11–22, 40, 63

see also racial ideology; colour

racial ideology, 4, 11–22, 129

in abolitionist writing, 4, 11–12, 20–2

in children’s literature, 177,

199–200

234 Index

racial ideology – continueddevelopment of, 12–17

and disease, 68

in pro-slavery writing, 17–20,

199–200

racialism

definition, 13

see also racial ideology

racism

definition, 13

see also racial ideology

Rack, Edmund, 91

Ramsay, James, 12, 19, 162

Essay on the Treatment and andConversion of African Slaves, 20

rape, 27, 29–30, 38, 42nn4–6

Raphael, 214

Rauwerda, A. M., 133

Reynolds, Joshua, 21, 48

Rice, Alan, 99

Richardson, Samuel, 91

Clarissa, 65

Robinson, George, 108

Rodney, Walter, 68

Romaine, William, 166

Roman Catholicism, 159, 195, 202

romance (as literary form), 26, 31,

43n14

Romanticism, 46, 167

Rome, 151, 153, 214

Royal Academy, 209, 210, 219

Royal Adventurers into Africa, 1

Royal Africa Company, 1

Royal Navy, 68, 170, 211, 213

Royal Society, 144

Ruskin, John, 216

sacerdotalism, 166

Said, Edward, 3, 113, 124

St Ann, 109

St Kitts, 45, 48

St Mary-le-Bow, 158

Salmon, Thomas, 176

New Geographical and HistoricalGrammar, 176

Sancho, Ignatius, 3, 5, 81–93, 102,

126, 187–9

Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, anAfrican, 81–93, 187–9: and

abolitionism, 86, 188;

composition, 88–93; and

race, 87–8, 187–8; reception,

83–5

Sandhu, Sukhdev, 84

Sandiford, Keith, 83, 85

Santo Domingo, 18, 19, 195, 197

Scarborough, 142

Scotland, 55

Scott, Sarah, The History of Sir GeorgeEllison, 63, 71–4, 90

Seacole, Mary, 127–8, 135

seasoning, 70, 76n28

Secker, Thomas, 167

Sekora, John, 112

Senior, Gilbert, 115

sensibility, 4, 63–75

and abolitionism, 64–9, 90

and disease, 64–9

and the novel, 63, 70–4, 90

see also sentimentalism

sentimentalism, 18, 56–7, 59, 90, 158,

167, 181, 201

see also sensibility

sermons (as literary form), 162–3

Seven Years War, 46–7, 170

Seward, Anna, 196

The Sexes Mis-match’d; or a New Way toget a Husband, 39–40

Shakespeare, William, Othello, 37

Shanes, Eric, 213

Sharp, Granville, 82, 86, 143, 160

Representation of the Injustice andDangerous Tendency of ToleratingSlavery, 55

Sharpe, Jenny, 134

Shenstone, William, 48

Sheridan, Frances, 71, 77n29

Sheridan, Richard B., 68

Shields, Rob, 175

Sierra Leone, 6, 142, 155n5, 186–7

slave narrative (as literary form), 90,

123–4, 130–1

Slavery Abolition Act (1833), 110

Smart, Christopher, 170

Smeathman, Henry, 6, 141–54


Plan of a Settlement to be made nearSierra Leona, 142

‘Some Account of the Termites’,

143–4, 149–50, 151–3

Index 235

Smith, Adam, 182, 196

Smith, Charlotte, The Wanderings ofWarwick, 3

Smith, Olivia, 3

Smith, Samuel Stanhope, Essay on theCauses of the variety of Complexionand Figure in the Human Species,16, 21

Smith, Sir W. Sidney, 183

Smollett, Tobias, 48, 72

Snelgrave, William, 1–2

Society for the Conversion and

Religious Instruction of the

Negroes in the West Indies, 159

Society for Effecting the Abolition of

the African Slave Trade, 2, 82

Society for the Propogation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts, 158–72

adopts abolitionist agenda, 172

annual report for 1782, 162, 169

slave ownership, 160, 169–70

see also Church of England

Solander, Dr, 151–2

Somerset, James, 2, 82, 160

von Sömmering, Samuel Thomas, 15

Sommersett, James, see Somerset,

James

Soubise, Julius, 88, 188

South Africa, 184–6, 187

Southerne, Thomas, Oroonoko, aTragedy, 4, 31–6, 202: altered by

later playwrights, 37–41; Behn’s

text altered, 31, 35, 202; attitude

to slavery, 31; rape in, 31, 33–6

Southey, Robert, 143

Spain, 211

Spencer, Jane, 37

Spink, John, 89

Spivak, Gayatri, 189

Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth Earl

of Chesterfield, 167

Starr, A. G., 202

Stedman, John, Narrative of a FiveYears Expedition Against theRevolted Negroes of Surinam, 3

Sterne, Lawrence, 84, 86, 91, 167, 188

Sermons of Mr Yorick, 90

Stewart, John, 18

Account of Jamaica, 18–19

Strickland, Susanna, 128, 130,

132–3

Sturge, Joseph, 110, 113, 114

sublime, 218–19

sugar, 4, 141, 179

Surinam, 28

Sussex, 219

Swift, Jonathan, 106n20

Symond’s Inn, 153

Sypher, Wylie, 84, 85, 86

testimony, 113–15, 132

Thomas, George, 49

Thompson, Dr, 115

Thomson, James, The Seasons, 150–1,

214–16, 218

Tillotson, John, 162–3

The Times, 133

tobacco, 28, 141, 182

Tobin, James, 14, 19, 20

Tompkins, Jane, 102

tour books, see travel books

Toussaint L’Ouverture, François

Dominique, 18, 19

Trafalgar, 220

travel books, 175, 179–87

see also geographies

Trimmer, Sarah, 178, 184

Family Magazine, 178

Tucker, Josiah, 162

Turks Islands, 129

Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 6,

209, 219–20

The Deluge, 219

The Fighting Temeraire being Tuggedto its Last Berth, 219

Rome, From the Vatican, 214

Slavers throwing overboard the Deadand Dying—Typhon coming on(The Slave Ship), 3, 6, 209–20:

and abolition, 216–17;

dialectical method, 216–17,

220; historical progression,

209–10, 211–14, 219–20;

historical sources, 210–13; and

the sublime, 218–19; and James

Thomson, 214–16

‘Typhon’, 215

Tyson, Edward, 15

236 Index

United States, 12, 42n2, 112, 126–7,

130, 172, 180

see also America

Vassa, Gustavus, see Equiano,

Olaudah

Vatican, 214

Virgil

The Aeneid, 149

Georgics, 6, 46, 47, 144–5

Virginia, 149, 159

Voltaire, 15

Voodoo, see Obeah

Wakefield, Priscilla, 175, 178–87,

189

Excursions in North America, 180–2,

184, 187

The Juvenile Travellers, 178

Mental Improvement, 178–9

Reflections on the Present Condition ofthe Female Sex, 182

The Traveller in Africa, 180, 182–7

Walvin, James, 83, 84, 85, 216

Warburton, William, 167, 168

Wardlaw, Ralph, 216

Wesley, John, 82, 162

West, Cornel, 128, 129

West India Interest, 49

whales, 151

Wheatley, Phillis, 86, 126

Wheeler, Roxann, 11, 22

White, Charles, 14, 17

Account of the Regular Gradation inMan, 14–15

Whitlock, Gillian, 118, 125, 126, 130,

133, 134

Wilberforce, William, 12, 14, 159,

179, 183, 219

Williams, James, 3, 5, 109–10

A Narrative of Events since the First ofAugust, 1834, 3, 5, 108–19:

authorship, 118; context, 111;

publication history, 108;

reception, 112–13; recorded by

amanuensis, 109, 116, 118;

structure, 110–11; and

testimony, 113–15; use of

Creole, 114–17

Williams, James (‘American Slave’), 112

Williams, Raymond, 51

Willis, John Ralph, 92

Wilson, Kathleen, 148–9

Wingrave, Jack, 86

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 204, 205

Wood, John, 131, 133

Wordsworth, William, 167

Wright, William, 67–8, 70

York, 159

Young, Sir William, 186

Zafar, Rafia, 109, 120n5

Zong, 210–13, 215

Index 237

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Writing in Britain and its Colonies 1660-1832, ed. Brycchan...

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