Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 6

Writings in the British Romantic Period

Peter J Kitson, Debbie Lee, Anne K Mellor, James Walvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138757424
• eBook ISBN: 9781000748666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Most writers associated with the first generation of British Romanticism - Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Thelwall, and others - wrote against the slave trade. This edition collects a corpus of work which reflects the issues and theories concerning slavery and the status of the slave.

NOTES

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

p. 3, l. 1: ‘an’: dialectal form of ‘and.’

p. 3, l. 2: ‘the shop’: the sausage-maker’s shop, owned by the Jew’s widow.

p. 3, l. 13: ‘slut’: slattern, in the sense of ‘kitchen-maid or drudge’, rather than with the pejorative meaning of ‘a woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits’ or ‘a woman of low or loose character’ (OED).

p. 3, l. 16–p. 24, l. 1: ‘they shall be told’: the promise of the longer narration is not fulfilled later in the novel.

p. 5, l. 3, ll. 8–9, l. 14. p. 7, l. 2: ‘black wench to be used worse ... no one to stand up for her ... whip into our hands ... the retreating spirits’: suggests, as is often the case with Sterne, a sexual sub-text; see also Mark Loveridge, ‘Liberty and Tristram Shandy’, in Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myers (London: Barnes and Noble, 1984). p. 140.

p. 5, l. 13: ‘the fortune of war’: perhaps an allusion to Locke, that slavery could be interpreted as ‘the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive’: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). p. 302.

Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné

p. 11, l. 1: ‘your last letter’: Beauvaris’s letters to Savillon are to be imagined as they are not featured directly in the novel.++++

p. 11, ll. 9–10: ‘with the Atlantic between’: Savillon is in Martinique and Beauvaris in France.

p. 13, ll. 1–2: ‘the cause of humanity’: the anti-slavery credo.

p. 13, l. 15: ‘management’: ‘indulgence or consideration shown towards a person’ (OED).

p. 14, l. 3: ‘language of my country’: i.e., French.

p. 16, ll. 2–19: ‘same part of the Guinea coast ... their master again’: loosely matches Oroonoko’s situation in Aphra Behn’s novella, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688). Oroonoko is a prince from Coromantien, an area corresponding to the Gold Coast of West Africa.

p. 18, ll. 1–5: ‘deposed sovereign at Paris’: possibly an allusion to the Pretender, although not necessarily a Jacobite one as the sententiousness here counsels acceptance rather than restoration.

p. 19, ll. 14–15: ‘chuse work’: voluntary wage labour, as opposed to coerced slave labour. Savillon’s reform of slavery echoes Adam Smith’s suggestion that ‘a slave.. .who can acquire nothing but his maintenance, consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible over and above that maintenance’: Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols, eds R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. 1. p. 387.

p. 23, ll. 15–17: ‘the willingness of freedom.. .with more than the obligation of slavery’: Savillon’s benevolent system relies on the existence of surrounding slave society as a continuing threat that motivates his workforce.

p. 24, ll. 5–6: ‘the business better and cheaper than the slaves do’: ‘I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves’: Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1. p. 99. Savillon’s solution corresponds to Smith’s description of métayage or bonded farm labour (Wealth of Nations, p. 387): Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). p. 101. p. 122.

p. 25, l. 15: ‘romance’: i.e., romantic effusion.

p. 26, ll. 4–13: ‘from his infancy.. .improve as may be expected’: ironic aside reminiscent of passages in Books 1 and 2 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762).

Dorothy Kilner, The Rotchfords

p. 31, l. 1: ‘they.. .house’: Young Charles Rotchford and his father are on their way to visit a neighbour, Mr. Norris.

p. 31, ll. 18–19: ‘foot-boy to my mistress.. .her best tea-pot’: compare with the second plate of Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress (1732) and also with Quin’s retort to Garrick as Othello, ‘Here’s Pompey, where’s the teakettle’: Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘Petting Oroonoko’, in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999) p. 64.

p. 32, l. 5, l. 21: ‘lazy black dog’: see note below, p. 59, l. 8.

p. 34, l. 27: ‘Mrs. Rotchford’: a misprint; should be ‘Mr. Rotchford’ as Mrs Rotchford is home.

p. 35, ll. 8–9: ‘Pompey, if that is your name’: ‘Pompey’ was a generic sobriquet for black page boys; see also note to p. 59, l. 8.

p. 36, l. 10: ‘has any accident happened?’: Mrs Rotchford’s trepidation is justified as the first volume already featured a bad accident involving Charles’s baby brother George, whose arm was wounded by shattering glass as a result of his making mischief when travelling in a coach with his siblings to meet his grand-parents. Subsequently, the arm had to be amputated.

p. 37, l. 5: ‘Mary’: one of Charles’s sisters, along with ‘Sophia’ (l. 7), ‘Kitty’ (p. 38, l. 20), and Harriot (p. 52, l. 5).

p. 37, ll. 13–14: ‘he had better.. .wash himself’: little George Rotchford wishes to literalise the action of what was glossed in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1741) as, ‘to wash the black-moor white, for a fruitless undertaking’ (n.p., see under ‘Trope’).

p. 37, l. 21: ‘clean notions’: i.e. ‘notions of cleanliness’.

p. 37, l. 29: ‘colour of his flesh is inkey’: in Kilner’s earlier text, The Holiday Present (1780–1), little Charlotte covers herself accidentally with indelible ink and is consequentially subjected to the epithets ‘Sister Tawny’ and ‘Charlotte Blackey’ by her siblings.

p. 38, l. 14: ‘personal deformities’: an indication that the anti-slavery sentiment here exists alongside notions of racial deformity.

p. 40, l. 26: ‘emolument’: profit.

p. 43, l. 13: ‘eat’: ate.

p. 45, ll. 12–13–p. 46, l. 5: ‘me hear him crying in my ears.. .before he die.. .scream out with pain’: compare with the contemporaneous account of the slave in the cage by Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (1784; London: Dent, 1971) pp. 172–3.

p. 50, l. 23–p. 51, l. 1: Mrs Rotchford’s catechism of about eight pages, emphasising the virtues of charity, has been excised in this selection as it does not address slavery directly.

p. 52, l. 2: ‘not the least word of complaint’: Pompey’s stoicism contrasts implicitly with little George Rotchford’s screams of agony in vol. 1 when his arm is hurt and eventually amputated.

p. 53, l. 14: ‘work-bag’: ‘a bag.. .to contain implements, and materials for needlework’ (OED).

p. 55, l. 5: ‘punish’: i.e., in the obsolete sense of ‘to exact (money due) from a person’ (OED).

p. 57, l. 8: ‘soul’: compare with l. 2 of ‘The Little Black Boy’, in William Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789): ‘And I am black, but O! my soul is white’: William Blake’s Writings, 2 vols, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) vol. 1. p. 29.

p. 59, l. 8: ‘little negro dog’: the momentary confusion of Pompey the b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Note on copy texts
• Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760–7)
• Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné (1777)
• Dorothy Kilner, The Rotchfords (1786)
• Anonymous, Adventures of Jonathan Corncob (1787)
• Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton (1789)
• Robert Bage, Man As He Is (1792)
• Elizabeth Helme, The Farmer of Inglewood Forest (1796)
• Cheap Repository Tracts, The Black Prince (1799)
• Hector MacNeill, Memoirs of the Life and Travels of the Late Charles Macpherson (1800)
• William Earle, Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800)
• Maria Edgeworth, ‘The Grateful Negro’ from Popular Tales (1804)
• Mary Sherwood, Dazee, or the Recaptured Slave (1821)
• Notes