Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 4

Writings in the British Romantic Period

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

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138757400
• eBook ISBN: 9781000748642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Mary Birkett, A Poem on the African Slave Trade [Part I] (London, 1792)

Mary Birkett (1774–1817) was only seventeen when she published her rousing and ambitious anti-slavery poem ‘addressed to her own sex’. The daughter of a Quaker tallow chandler, Birkett spent her early years in Liverpool, but moved with her family to Dublin by the age of ten. Nothing is known of her education, though she may have attended a Quaker boarding school as did her two cousins. She was obviously well-read, however, and was something of a radical thinker in her youth, later recanting and adopting more orthodox Quaker views. She remained in Ireland and in 1801 married her cousin Nathaniel Card, helping him to run his merchant concern. They had eight children, four surviving to adulthood. One son, Nathaniel, copied and bound Birkett’s writings – a spiritual journal, letters, poems, and miscellaneous pieces – which have remained in the family and are being edited by a descendant. Birkett warmly supported philanthropic causes like schooling for children of the poor and was active in the local Friends community, serving as clerk to the Dublin Women’s Monthly Meeting from 1813–16. She died at forty- two, probably from a liver ailment.

Aside from the two parts of the Poem on the African Slave Trade, issued some months apart in Dublin in 1792, Birkett’s only known publication is her 1807 Lines to the memory of our late endeared and justly valued Friend Joseph Williams (a prominent Quaker elder). An 1806 anti-slavery poem addressed to Birkett’s Member of Parliament, urging him to vote for the Abolition Bill, remained in manuscript. Part I of Birkett’s major anti-slavery poem, written in fluent heroic couplets, features the contradictory idealisation of Africa and wish for its Christianisation and civilisation typical of the genre. Birkett’s unqualified belief in human equality under the skin and her particular address to fellow women of Ireland (the ‘Hibernian fair’) stand out, however, especially her call for a female boycott of sugar, the ‘blood-stain’d luxury’. Part II is notable for its appeal to the ‘rights of Men’ and its contrast between English domination and Irish avoidance of the slave trade.

A
POEM
ON THEON THE
AFRICAN
SLAVE TRADE.

ADDRESSED TO HER OWN SEX

By M. BIRKET .

_____________________

“DISGUISE THYSELF AS THOU WILT, STILL, SLAVERY, STILL THOU ART A BITTER CUP.”

STERNE.

_____________________

DUBLIN:

PRINTED BY W. CORBET,

FOR J. JONES, NO. III, CRAFTON-STREET.

_________

N, DCC,XCII.

---

PREFACE.

_________

IN presenting this juvenile attempt to the eyes of the public, I am sensible how much I lay myself open to the censure of those, whose superior discernment shall point out all its errors in their full magnitude.—I can only hope that the merits of the cause will in part plead my excuse; for the rest, I submit to their candor.

It is with the greatest diffidence that I presume to offer, to indiscriminate inspection, a production of so little labour, which never experienced the correcting hand of judgment, and which, overwhelmed with confusion, would shrink from the piercing eye of criticism—as the owl from the face of day.

M.B.

A
POEM
ON THE
AFRICAN
SLAVE TRADE.

OPPRESSION! thou, whose hard and cruel chain,

Entails on all thy victims woe and pain;

Who gives with tyrant force and scorpion whip,

The cup of mis’ry to a Negro’s lip;

Marks with stern frown thy wide, unhallow’d reign,

And broods with gloomy wing o’er Afric’s injur’d plain!

Thy voice which spreads pale desolation round,

While trembling myriads groan beneath the sound,

Thy voice more rude than Boreas’ chilling breath,

Calls thousands forth to feel a living death!

Which in hoarse thunders bids injustice rise!

While oft beneath the strokes the suff’rer dies:

Yes! thy infernal voice impels my song,

And o’er my soul its crude ideas throng;

A forrowing sympathy surrounds my heart,

And mild compassion bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Editors
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Note on copy texts
• Thomas Chatterton, ‘Heccar and Gaira an African Ecologue’ (1770)
• Thomas Day and John Bicknell, The Dying Negro, a Poetical Epistle (1773)
• Bryan Edwards, The Negro’s Dying Speech on his Being Executed for Rebellion in the Island of Jamaica’ (1777)
• Hugh Mulligan, The Lovers, an African Ecologue’ (1784)
• Edward Rushton, West-Indian Ecologues (1787)
• Eliza Knipe, ‘Atomboka and Omaza; an African Story’ (1787)
• William Cowper, The Negro’s Complaint’, ‘Pity for Poor Africans’, The Morning Dream’, and ‘Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce’ (1788)
• Helen Maria Williams, A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave-Trade (1788)
• William Roscoe and James Currie, The African’ (1788)
• Robert Merry, The Slaves. An Elegy’ (1789)
• Hannah More, Slavery, A Poem (1788)
• Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade (1788)
• William Blake, The Little Black Boy’ (1789)
• Anna Letitia Barbauld, Epistle To William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (1791)
• James Boswell, No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love: A Poem (1791)
• William Lisle Bowles, The African’ (1791)
• Mary Birkett, A Poem on the African Slave Trade [Part I] (1792)
• Robert Burns, The Slave’s Lament’ (1792)
• [Anonymous], The African’s Complaint On-Board a Slave Ship’ (1793)
• John Wolcot [‘Peter Pindar’], ‘Azid; or, The Song of the Captive Negro’ (1795)
• Hannah More and Eaglesfield Smith (?), The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman’s Lamentation (1795)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, translated from ‘Greek Prize Ode on the Slave-Trade’ in Joan of Arc (1796)
• William Shepherd, The Negro Incantation’ (1797)
• [Anonymous], ‘Ode. The Insurrection of the Slaves at St. Domingo’ (1797)
• Robert Southey, ‘Poems Concerning the Slave Trade’ (1797-1810)
• Mary Robinson, The Negro Girl’ (1800)
• William Wordsworth, ‘We Had a Fellow-Passenger’, To Toussaint L’Ouverture’, and To Thomas Clarkson, on the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ (1803-1807)
• James Grahame, To England, on the Slave Trade’ (1806)
• John Thelwall, The Negro’s Prayer’ (1807)
• James Montgomery, The West Indies’ (1809)
• Charles and Mary Lamb, ‘Conquest of Prejudice’ (1809)
• George Dyer, ‘On Considering the Unsettled State of Europe, and the Opposition Which Had Been Made to Attempts for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade’ (1812)
• Thomas Pringle, ‘Slavery’ (1823)
• Amelia Opie, The Black Man’s Lament; or, How to Make Sugar (1826)
• Letitia E. Landon [‘L.E.L.’], The African’ (1831)
• William Stanley Roscoe, The Ethiop’ (1834)
• Josiah Conder, The Last Night of Slavery’ (1837)
• Notes