Table Of ContentDiscourses of Slavery and
Abolition
Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838
Edited by
Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis and
Sara Salih
Discourses of Slavery and Abolition
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Discourses of Slavery and
Abolition
Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838
Edited by
Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih
Published 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 2004
Chapter 4 © Candace Ward 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-1647-1
All other chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004
All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this
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Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2004 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Discourses 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 for
Advanced Study,University of London.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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 in
literature.6.Slavery in literature.I.Carey,Brycchan,1967– II.Ellis,
Markman.III.Salih,Sara.
HT1162.D57 2004
306.3(cid:2)62(cid:2)0941—dc22 2003069128
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
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
vi Contents
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 TheSlave Ship(1840): Towards a Dialectical
History Painting 209
Leo Costello
Bibliography 223
Index 229
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(cid:3)122.6cm (353/ (cid:3)481/ in.).
4 4
Source:Photograph © 2003 Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. 210
vii
Acknowledgements
Discourses of Slavery and Abolitionoriginated 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. Botkinis 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 Other
Orphans 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 Rhetoric
of Sensibility: Sentiment and Slavery is forthcoming from Palgrave
Macmillan.He is alsoediting, with Karen Lipsedge, a collection of essays
calledOlaudah 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-Century
Studies (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 British
Anti-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
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