Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 1

Writings in the British Romantic Period

Peter J Kitson, Debbie Lee, Anne K Mellor, James Walvin, David Dabydeen, Sukhdev Sandhu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000748611
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

INTRODUCTION

The 10,000 blacks in eighteenth-century England had a visibility completely out of proportion to their tiny numbers. By 1800 the country’s population had expanded rapidly to over nine million. Yet even in London, where swarthy men and women were most commonly found, they made up less than one per cent of the metropolis’ citizenry.

Seemingly ubiquitous, blacks entered the country as a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade. Tea, sugar, cotton, spices, coffee, tobacco and oil were just some of the products ferried into slave ports such as London, Liverpool and Bristol from Africa and the Americas. Nearly all of these goods depended on slave labour. Not for nothing did a coin – the guinea – derive its etymology from the West African region of that name, the area from which hundreds of thousands of natives were seized in order to work on plantations across the Atlantic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African – literally – became a unit of currency.

Those involved in the slave trade – planters, Government officials, military and naval officers – were often accompanied back to England by their black servants to whose reassuring company they had become attached during their long and melancholic homeward voyages. A minority of Africans disembarked at their own leisure as freemen or as wealthy and respectable members of royal families. More commonly black arrivants were led to dockside auctions where they were sold off by the ships’ surgeons to whom they had been originally been allocated as cargo perks.

Many black people worked in aristocratic households where they served as butlers, valets, cooks and footmen. Their duties were rarely onerous and their chief function seems to have been decorative. Not only did they symbolise the wealth of their owners, but they also served as ornamental human equivalents to the porcelain, textiles, wall papers, and lacquered pieces that the nobility were increasingly buying from the East. In the family portraits of such artists as John Wootton, Peter Lely and Bartholomew Dandridge, they were situated on the edges or at the rears of the canvasses from where they gazed supplicatorily at their masters and mistresses who bestrode the centre stage. Blacks often stood next to dogs, horses and other domestic animals with whom they shared more or less the same social status. Mesmerisingly mute as they may strike the contemporary viewer, they originally functioned as aesthetic foils to their owners’ economic fortunes.

Black servants may have been patronised – it was common to saddle them with mock-heroic names such as Pompey, Zeno or Socrates which implicitly ridiculed any aspirations towards social or intellectual escalation they may have held – but, on the whole, they were well-treated and often deeply loved. Gossip abounded about noble ladies who seemed rather too affectionate towards their dusky attendants. A number of owners taught their charges to read and write, and encouraged them to convert to Christianity. Nor did such concern necessarily wane over time: Dr Johnson famously left Francis Barber a £70 annuity and, much to the disgust of Sir John Hawkins, made him his residuary legatee.

Good treatment was no substitute for liberty. Blacks were often regarded as little more than clever pets. Many wore metal collars inscribed with the owner’s name and coat of arms riveted round their necks. Numerous ‘lost-and-found’ advertisements in London newspapers during this period indicate the high incidence of runaway slaves: many fled to St Dunstan’s, Ratcliff and St George’s-in-the-East, areas characterised by poverty and comparatively large black populations. Here, amongst overcrowded and unhygienic dens located in stenchy, ill-paved alleys full of brothels and lodging houses haunted by thieves, sailors and the dregs of society, they eked out illicit, subterranean livings.

The African and English underclasses maintained a degree of fraternity and solidarity that commentators found alarming. Sir John Fielding, a magistrate and brother of the novelist Henry, complained that when black domestic servants ran away they often found ‘the Mob on their side [which] makes it not only difficult but dangerous to the Proprietor of these Slaves to recover the Possession of them, when once they are sported away’. ¹

The black and white poor lived together – they also thieved in tandem. The black Elizabeth Mandeville was prosecuted at the Old Bailey for working as ‘one of a pair with Ann Grace (a white woman) to steal three half guineas and six shillings from John Pidduck. Grace extracted the money while Mandeville pinned the victims down.’ ² In June 1780 two black American servants, Benjamin Bowsey and John Glover, helped organise the delivery of Newgate gaol during the Gordon Riots.

Africans and English sang and danced together at mixed-race hops. Inevitably they also slept with each other. Women comprised only twenty per cent of the black population making intermarriage practically compulsory – much to the disgust of the literate middle-classes who vilified miscegenation. The narrator of Defoe’s Serious Reflections (1720) spots a mulatto-looking man in a London public house who is speaking both eloquently and intelligently. During their conversation, the mulatto, whose colour has precluded him from entering the kind of respectable profession his education merits, curses, to the obvious approval of the narrator, his father who ‘has twice ruin’d me; first with getting me a frightful Face, and rhen [sic] going to paint a Gentleman upon me.’ ³ Over half a century later in 1788, Philip Thicknesse claimed that ‘in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkies and infinitely more dangerous’. ⁴

Such invective echoes the rhetoric of swarming that accompanied much eighteenth-century debate about England’s black population, and, indeed, anticipates the panics about swamping, flooding and deluging stoked by canny politicians since World War Two. In 1723 the Daily Journal wrote ‘’tis said there is a great number of Blacks come daily into this city, so that ’tis thought in a short time, if they be not suppress’d the city will swarm with them’. ⁵ And in 1731, long before the build up of a sizeable African presence in the metropolis, the Lord Mayor of London issued a proclamation decreeing that blacks could no longer hold company apprenticeships.

Images of Africans cropped up everywhere and helped to fuel the perception that they were pouring into the country. Blacks often featured in the prints of Hogarth, Cruikshank, Gillray and Rowlandson, as well as on countless tradesmen’s cards – particularly those of tobacconists. They were used to advertise products such as razors: ‘Ah Massa, if I am continued in your service, dat will be ample reward for Scipio bring good news to you of Packwood’s new invention that will move tings with a touch’. ⁶ Huge pictures of negro heads or black boys were ostentatiously displayed on the signs outside taverns, shops and coffee-houses. Attractively painted and gilded, these extruded onto the streets, cutting out daylight on account of their size and, occasionally, falling and killing those people unfortunate enough to be passing below.

Africans were represented rhetorically as well as visually. Despite being cherished by their aristocratic owners and blending almost seamlessly into underclass society, a cluster of negative clichés about black people developed and calcified over the course of the century: they were portrayed as stupid, indolent and libidinous. Violent and untrustworthy, they were said to lack ratiocination. They were wild and emotional. Often compared to orang-outangs, their simian propensities encouraged the view that enslaving them in no way contradicted the laws of humanity. Such tropes peppered cartoons, stage plays, private journals, plantocratic tracts, coffee-house pontification, parliamentary invective, and the thick-skulled, blue-blooded pomposities bandied about over the clink and gleam of crystal decanters in noble dining rooms. These views were also confirmed by text books – the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1810 described the Negro thus: ‘Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race; idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an aweful example of the corruption of man left to himself.’ ⁷

While critics and philosophers busied themselves drawing up convoluted racial taxonomies, black Britons still led dismal hand-to- mouth lives. Runaway slaves had few skills to brandish before potential employers. Many turned to music: black bandsmen – particularly trumpeters, drummers and horn players – served with army regiments across the nation; others mustered meagre livings by fiddling on street corners and around taverns. Non-melodians begged, swept crossings, or turned to prostitution. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, even recorded the existence of a black brothel in London in 1774. A large proportion of Africans who had turned their backs on domestic service became seamen and spent violent and unremunerative stretches rigging, cooking and hairdressing on board ships.

Not all Africans were reduced to penury. After the death of his celebrated father, William Sancho worked not only as a librarian for Joseph Banks, but as a bookseller, before, in 1803, becoming the first black publisher in Europe or North America. Another wealthy African was Cesar Picton who inherited a legacy of £100 from a former employer. He added this to his own savings and, in 1788, became a coal merchant in Kingston-upon-Thames. When he died in 1836 he left behind a house with a wharf and shops attached, as well as another house with a garden, stables, coach house and two acres of land.

Then, as now, black people commonly excelled in the entertainment industry. Africans became circus performers: Macomo was a famed lion-tamer; Pablo Fanque (also known as William Darby) was an acrobat and North of England circus proprietor; a black contortionist and fire-eater performed at Charing Cross in 1751–2. Boxing was another route to glory: American-born Bill Richmond was one of many black pugilists to attain huge fame in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. He later became a publican at the Horse and Dolphin pub near Leicester Square in London, and also ran a boxing academy where he gave lessons to, amongst others, the essayist William Hazlitt.

Such successful Africans were clearly exceptional. Most blacks in the eighteenth century led short, penny-pinched and centrifugal lives. Yet this fact should not encourage casual references to ‘the black community’. Naturally they conjoined and convivialised whenever possible. When two of them were imprisoned in Bridewell for begging they were visited by more than 300 fellow blacks. In 1764 a newspaper reported that ‘no less than 57 of them, men and women, supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No Whites were allowed to be present for all the performers were Black.’ ⁸

Nonetheless, the black population, even in big cities such as Liverpool and London, was simply too small to have practised cultural exclusion. Its members were by no means racially uniform and hailed from different tribes and regions of Africa. Some had spent long stretches in the Caribbean or in North America, whilst others had spent most of their lives in the United Kingdom. Class determined their day-to-day vicissitudes at least as much as race. Blacks could be quite as pompous and internecine as white people: in 1780 Lloyd’s Evening Post lamented that ‘The absurd custom of duelling is become so prevalent that two Negroe Servants in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, in consequence of a trifling dispute, went into the Long-Fields, behind Montagu-house, on Thursday morning, attended by two party-coloured Gentlemen, as their seconds, when on the discharge of the first case of pistols, one of the combatants received a shot in the cheek, which b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Introduction
• Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to volume 1
• Bibliography
• Note on copy texts
• Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As Related by Himself (1772)
• Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
• Phillis Wheatley, Selected Letters from The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988)
• Julius Soubise, ‘Letter’ in Anon, Nocturnal Revels: Or, The History of King’s-Place, and Other Modem Nunneries (1779)
• Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: an African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life (1782)
• Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787)
• James Harris, Letter to James Rogers (1787)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)
• Letters from Sierra Leonian Settlers (1792–8)
• John Jea, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher (1815)
• Robert Wedderburn, The Axe Laid to the Root, Or a Fatal Blow to an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica (1817)
• Robert Wedderburn, Letter to Francis Place (1831)
• Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831)
• Notes