Dec 16, 2009

The Passing of Grandison | Setting

A Kentucky plantation in the 1850s provides the main setting for the story, in that the ideologies the story satirizes derive from this site. Reference to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law during that time firmly grounds the historical moment of the story, as do the Underground Railroad and abolitionists, while the use of dialect in the speech of Grandison lends a comical verisimilitude to the picture of plantation life with a wealthy, white colonel running a plantation of “darkies” who know their place.

Dick first travels to New York with Grandison, staying in a...