[In the following essay, Rice argues that English attitudes toward slavery can be understood by examining how the subject was treated in British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concludes that the transformation of how slaves and slave-owners were depicted during this period is evidence of a cultural revolution in English thought.]

During the century between the Seven Years' War and the American Civil War, a complete revolution in Western attitudes opened the way to the downfall of slavery. Moses Finley has observed that ‘throughout most of human history, labour for others has been performed in large part under conditions of bondage.’¹ Adam Smith would have agreed. When he discussed it with his 1762-3 jurisprudence class, most Europeans still took slavery for granted. He concluded that it was ‘almost impossible that it should ever be totally or generally abolished. In a republican government, it will scarcely ever happen that it should be abolished.’² Yet at the beginning of the American war between the states, the Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was habitually acid about modernity, wrote casually that ‘we are human beings of the nineteenth century and slavery has to go, of course.’³ In the trivial space of a hundred years—perhaps sixty in the British case—slavery had passed from being a given factor on the social landscape, to being incompatible with the beliefs of thinking men and women in the Atlantic community. Disapproval of slavery ultimately became the kind of cultural assumption which requires no evidential support, with something of the reflexive force of the taboo against incest. In this paper I suggest that systematic use of literary sources would help chart the process by which assumptions on slavery were inverted.

We would be closer to understanding this sudden change if Roger Anstey had completed his work. He did not allow the contemporary fascination with social change, with the dynamic, to narrow his focus to the abolitionists who went to the barricades over slavery, or to the sources they left behind them. He was able to think in the wider context of shifting cultural attitudes precisely because his ideal was to draw on the entire written record of the period.⁴ Yet so much remains to be done. Anstey himself had just begun to consider the crisis of ideological authority precipitated by the Bible's failure to solve the problem of slavery, to assess the significance of changing views on redemption and the atonement, and to explore the theological matrix of anti-slavery thought.⁵ Several other approaches are still untried. Even British magazine sources remain unexplored, and we have no full study of incidental newspaper references to slavery and abolition. Except where sermon titles actually mention slavery, the literature of the pulpit, arguably the richest resource of all, is wholly unexploited. No-one has collated direct and indirect references in works in the curricula of British universities; nor has this been done for surviving files of lecture notes on moral philosophy, classics, and law, except in special cases like Smith's. There must also be references to slavery in materials used in primary and secondary schools, and indeed in children's fiction and periodicals, where Americanists have made a useful beginning.⁶ Such sources speak more plausibly about what the culture took for granted concerning slavery at any given time, than reform writing deliberately aimed at the future.

The same is true of literary material. I do not mean by this that we need a more exhaustive analysis of poetry and fiction produced for specifically anti-slavery purposes. Anti-slavery literature in itself reveals nothing more than the standpoint of the pressure group that produced it. It must be clearly distinguished from references to slavery in works written for other purposes. This distinction is ignored in the two works which have examined the British literary response to slavery, and both are flawed in other respects. Eva Beatrice Dykes' The Negro in English Romantic Thought is at worst a compilation, at best an attempt to use the African to illuminate the romantic imagination. Wylie Sypher's Guinea's Captive Kings is concerned less with views on slavery than with the way in which sensibility changed British attitudes to the Negro, to primitivism, and to savagery.⁷ It is worth remembering Wilberforce's dismissal of Sterne's ‘delicate sensibility’ as ‘distinct from plain practical benevolence’, and Coleridge's savage contrast between ‘a false and bastard sensibility’ and the benevolence which ‘impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial’.⁸ However, compassion for the slave would certainly have been articulated more slowly without the cult of humane sensibility, which so dominated polite eighteenth-century letters. No scholar thought this theme more important than Roger Anstey.⁹ The difficulty in assessing its influence accurately is that the texts which speak most expressively to the new frame of mind do not mention slavery. It is a more modest enterprise, though still a daunting one, to set about gathering and identifying the casual references to slavery, brief and less brief, which are scattered through the body of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature—in the novel, in poetry, and in the polite essay.

This material can be most illuminating. Nonetheless, there are serious problems about using it, and indeed about using imaginative literature to explore any historical problem. David Davis' experimental Homicide in American Fiction is in some respects a model of the way in which the assumptions and associations of the novelist enrich our understanding of a changing matrix of values¹⁰—but Davis has the advantage that violence and/or death have intimate imaginative possibilities which have made them central to practically all Western literature. References to slavery are sparser, and usually tangential to the texts in which they are embedded. I have already mentioned the problem of isolating propaganda from references representing assumptions held commonly by the writer and his public. In the eighteenth century, there are also passages on slavery which are really inserted as intellectual set pieces, for instance in Hector McNeill's obscure novel on Guadeloupe, or in Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné, where the hero describes his scheme of slave management by humane incentive.¹¹ However, Edinburgh intellectuals were busily discussing such plans in the abstract at this time, and Mackenzie actually wrote Julia when he was actively co-operating with government attempts to block abolition of the slave trade.¹² The Negro must be the only victim of oppression who does not plead explicitly for sentimental tears in his earlier Man of Feeling. Yet it is usually easy to tell when an author's comment on slavery is nothing more than an intellectual's debating exercise. Twenty year's later, when Mackenzie's friend Sir Walter Scott used forced dancing on slave ships as a metaphor to demonstrate that oppression increases enthusiasm for liberty, there is no mistaking his assumption that readers of goodwill would share his views.¹³

Some of the problems are more apparent than real. It is not always easy to detect the use of anachronistic examples¹⁴—but this hazard is not confined to fiction, and in any case the material is not intended to yield hard factual evidence. Finally, there is the temptation to assume that even famous texts were more influential than they were. For instance, it has often been said that Turner's superb ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On’ was inspired by line 980 (and following) of ‘Summer’ in Thomson's Seasons.¹⁵ There is really no evidence for this view. It is as likely that the painting was a response to the atrocity stories based on the Zong case—more anachronisms—which were circulating in London before and during the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840.

Casual literary references are valuable in spite of their difficulties, and in spite of their incapacity to yield substantive conclusions. Every author, consciously or subconsciously, writes for many audiences. No one has yet developed a satisfactory conceptual apparatus for distinguishing between them. What I am interested in here is the evidence which can be drawn from the writer's relationship with what Peter Rabinowitz has called the ‘authorial audience’. As he puts it, ‘the author of a novel designs his work rhetorically for a specific hypothetical audience. Like a philosopher, historian, a journalist, he cannot write without making certain assumptions about his readers' beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions’.¹⁶ I believe that comment on slavery and abolition presented incidentally and without expectation of a hostile response, should help us plot the stages by which the assumptions of the reading public changed. What follows are some examples of the insights such allusions can provide. I must stress that I present them as methodological illustration rather than as a research contribution, for I have come upon them serendipitously in other reading, mostly in the novel. All the examples are British, most are fairly well known, and none is written about slavery and abolition for its own sake. They vary widely in the class and range of readership they must have reached. Although the period was one of unprecedented advance in literacy, none of my illustrations could have had a mass readership in the modern sense. The first are drawn from Defoe, for whom abolition would have been a piece of windmill-tilting; the last comes from Dickens, upon whom abolitionists had begun to pall. Collectively they suggest that a more systematic survey of such material would make a useful contribution to our understanding of the shift in attitudes to slavery.

Defoe's fiction suggests a reading public which, while it could feel occasional sympathy for the slave, even accept his anxiety to become free, still had no doubts about the morality of slavery itself. It is entirely consistent with his polemical work. The much quoted passage from The Reformation of Manners (1702) is not ‘truly humanitarian’, but exactly what its subtitle says—‘a Satyr’, a non-conformist's satire which construes the total behaviour of its objects as religious declension. Throughout his economic writings, Defoe takes slavery for granted. An Essay on the Trade to Africa (1711) makes a contribution to the African Company controversy without once mentioning blacks or the slave trade. A Plan of English Commerce (1728) argues for the colonization of West Africa to produce tropical staples, by using slaves locally rather than carrying them across the Atlantic.¹⁷ The assumption of the novels is also that there is no question about the morality of slavery as such. However, it can only be moral and therefore profitable if it is used, and if its victims are managed, on the same principles which providentially govern all human economic behaviour.¹⁸ Even in Captain Singleton (1720), the mutineers control the slaves they have taken in war through a system of incentives administered by their Prince. Once they complete the crossing of the African continent, they set him free and reward him with a pound and a half of gold dust drawn from the common stock.¹⁹

Defoe's preconceptions are clearer in the earlier Robinson Crusoe (1719). The whole book is a hymn of praise for the principle of ordered individual accumulation. Every one of Crusoe's misfortunes, including his shipwreck and exile, stems from going beyond conscientious profit-making into speculation. While attempting a second foolish voyage trading in West Africa for gold and slaves, he is captured by Moroccan rovers out of Sallee. He escapes from slavery by sea, with the help of Xury, a Moorish boy, and tries to reach the English settlements on the Senegal. When they go ashore for water, Xury offers to be eaten by the ‘Wild mans’ if this should be necessary for his master's escape. After they are rescued by a Brazilian Guineaman, Crusoe recognises Xury's loyalty by refusing to sell him to the Master as a slave. Instead he binds him over for ten years for sixty pieces of eight.²⁰

When Crusoe is landed in Brazil, Xury's price becomes part of the capital with which he sets up an Ingenio or sugar plantation. He begins to prosper and simultaneously to feel deep discontent. He is ‘coming into the very Middle Station, or upper degree of low life’, the prosaic condition he originally left his home in Yorkshire to escape. Things go even better once he begins to buy slaves, but he cannot resist the gambler's madness which is eventually going to plunge him ‘into the deepest Gulph of human misery that ever Man fell into.’²¹ Hearing of his Guinea experience, his merchant friends persuade him to go off to gather slaves for smuggling into Brazil. He is tempted by being offered a cut of the profits without having to contribute capital. The result is his shipwreck on an island off the coast of Trinidad, where he remains for a period which significantly coincides with the years from the Restoration of 1660 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. When he is rescued and returns to Britain, he finds that his trustees have kept his plantation ticking over steadily. It has expanded according to the benign principles of economic growth, and he can retire as a very rich man in the new community created by the Revolution. The general message is clear: slavery is normative, an acceptable weapon in the process of capitalist accumulation. On the other hand, its relationships may be slightly modified by human bonds, and it is not in any way exempted from the normal dangers of irrational economic behaviour.²²

Defoe makes the same points, though in a modified form, in Colonel Jack (1722). It is the story of a poor outcast from the London slums, and his lifelong search for gentility. It projects Defoe's own desperate anxiety over economic and social insecurity in much the same way as Crusoe. Jack is in turn pickpocket, highwayman, and soldier, but his first successful venture only begins when he is kidnapped and shipped illegally to Virginia as an indentured servant, or, as he and Defoe's readers would have seen it, as a slave. He becomes his owner's overseer, and revolutionizes the management of his plantation by treating the slaves kindly. The owner is sufficiently impressed to free Jack and set him up in a plantation of his own, which also prospers greatly. His story includes a lengthy digression on the incentives needed to use slave labour most profitably.²³ This is not in any sense a criticism of slavery. Defoe's plantations, like Crusoe's kingdom, are ‘islands of ideal social order.’²⁴ Though it has peculiar economic advantages, slave labour must be managed according to normative economic principles.

Like Crusoe, and indeed the real-life Defoe, Jack's fatal weakness is that he cannot resist accelerating the normal course of economic events. He cannot escape the gnawing awareness that he has not become a gentleman—though his failing is not that he is a slaveholder, but that he is a provincial:

I looked upon myself as buried alive in a remote part of the world … and, in a word, the old reproach often came in my way, that even this was not yet the life of a gentleman.

It is true that this was much nearer to it than that of a pickpocket, and still nearer than that of a sold slave; but, in short, this would not do, and I could receive no satisfaction in it.²⁵

Jack leaves when things are going well, is taken by a French privateer, and ransomed to London. He gets married, flees from his wife and her relations, enters an Irish regiment in France, and ultimately joins the Old Pretender's abortive expedition of 1708. He escapes to Virginia, to find in spite of everything that his plantation has continued to expand and prosper under a faithful overseer. After various other reverses, he makes a second fortune in the contraband trade to Spanish Florida. In the end he returns to London to retire on the steady income to which his earlier self-discipline has entitled him.

Defoe and his readers still took the place of slavery in the process of accumulation completely for granted. Jack's and Crusoe's plantations are the one stable force in their mature lives. But the beneficiaries of slavery are not in any sense safe from the dangers of their own irresponsibilities. Moreover, Defoe takes great pains to stress that labour relationships with black slaves should be governed by the same humane principles as those with free and half-free whites. What this amounts to is an attempt to bring slavery into consistency with eighteenth-century assumptions about social justice and the work ethic.

This consistency was too contrived to survive. In the following decades it gradually broke down as sentimental concern for the Negro heightened, as intensified religious anxieties produced a more acute understanding of the plight of the slave, and as growing concern over moral self-control made the passionate world of the slaveholder seem more and more threatening. More fundamentally, the assumptions made by Defoe's generation became less tenable as the humanity of the Negro—which Defoe himself had not denied—came to be accepted all but universally. No passage is so revealing in this respect as the description of the Negro girl in Book IX of Tristram Shandy (1767), sitting in the window of a sausage shop: ‘a poor negro girl, with a bunch of white feathers slightly tied to the end of a long cane, flapping away flies—not killing them—'Tis a pretty picture! said my uncle Toby—she had suffered persecution, Trim, and had learnt mercy—’.²⁶ They conclude that ‘it would be putting one sadly over the head of another’ for God to give a soul to them and not to the Negro. Even in the infatuated world of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, there is no cavil about black humanity, no question about extending the balm of Shandean sentiment to black people. Tristram Shandy is the most important and widely read novel of the century, the most representative of contemporary hopes and anxieties which it both articulated and reinforced. The haunting image of the girl in the window speaks tellingly for polite society's changed image of the Negro. The sentimental revolution against slavery was complete by the 1760s, as indeed was the theoretical argument against it.

These victories raised the problem of what to do about an institution which was generally discountenanced, but which appeared to be immovable. A common response was to take refuge in the assumption that slavery, though undesirable, was an irremediable human affliction analagous to plague, war, disease, and famine. Clearly this was not a response the early abolitionists found acceptable, and we have paid too little attention to it, but is one common at certain stages of most reform movements. It is well expressed in Jonathan Corncob, an extraordinary anonymous novel published in 1788. Although Sypher discusses it briefly, he does not mention that it is a clever parody of Candide, in spite of some conventions drawn from Sterne's Sentimental Journey.²⁷

Jonathan Corncob is an American picaro, whose adventures are set in the revolutionary period. Like Candide, he and all those for whom he cares become the victims of an incomprehensible world which offers nothing constant but its hostility. Jonathan is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, flogged by the British Navy, and put in irons by a US privateer. Even the cartel ship which is to release him is shipwrecked. His legs are scalded in a classically pointless tavern brawl, and he catches syphilis from his landlady's daughter. His Puritan father is practically beaten to death as a loyalist. His Cunégonde, who rejoices in the name of Desire Slawbuck, begins adult life by losing her teeth due to a pathological love of molasses. She is seduced, kidnapped, made a beast of burden by a Hessian, ravished, and imprisoned. She loses her breast to the teeth of a revolutionary's dog. Jonathan and his friends live in a demented and sadistic world, where the only road to sanity is a nihilistic apathy towards evil. The book closes with his resolution that the only worthwhile human activity is the reading of novels. Even Voltaire's ‘We must go and work in the garden’ has become optimistic.

This uncontrollable world reduces slavery to one among the host of agencies which arbitrarily promote human suffering. Jonathan is exposed to it when his adventures carry him to Barbados. An old woman dying in a ditch takes the place of the maimed Negro in Candide. Although Jonathan profits from his host's provision of a mulatto woman for him, he gradually moves from a sadness that so hospitable a society should be subject to hurricanes, to a conviction that its corruption calls for them as a providential judgement. The Barbados sequence closes hilariously and bitterly when the hurricane does strike, but the hurricane itself takes on the same quality of arbitrary destructiveness as the Lisbon earthquake which is its counterpart in Candide. Jonathan records its casualties from local reports as a grim comment on slavery:²⁸

The slaves become victims of the same holocaust as their oppressors.

The revulsion against slavery gathered force too quickly for this kind of nihilism to become intellectually entrenched. By 1816, Jane Austen could assume enough of a consensus against the slave trade to use it to attract attention to the plight of governesses.²⁹ Faulty views on slavery were soon being used as a literary shorthand for being ethically behind the times. In The Last of the Lairds (1826), one of Galt's signals of Malachi Mailings of Auldbiggings' moral opacity is his failure to see that being a slave was worse than being a schoolboy—‘a whip has but ae scourge, our schoolmaister's tawse had seven’, which Dominie Skelp applied not to the insensitive back but to a more tender part ‘that for manners shall be nameless’.³⁰ The same happens in St Ronan's Well (1832), where Scott presents the gulf between barbarism and modernity at its crudest. Captain MacTurk, his down-at-heel highland ruffian, is unable to comprehend that African and American Negroes do not have his own archaic attitude to the code of the duel. Faced with this moral paradox, he fumes at being compared to ‘a parcel of black heathen bodies … that were never in the inner side of a kirk while they lived, but go about worshipping stocks and stones, and swinging themselves upon bamboos, like beasts as they are.’³¹

Another sign of the change was the deteriorating stereotype of the planter. At the end of the eighteenth century, he was appearing on the provincial stage as a comedy villain. In Archibald McLaren's The Negro Slaves and A Wife to be Sold, for instance, Captain Raccoon is the embodiment of spite, ignorance, and cowardice. Even his lovemaking is doltish:

RACCOON
I wou'd die to please you.
LUCY
That's the very favour we were going to ask you. Here's a pistol: kill yourself—You cannot conceive how much it would oblige my mistress.(32)

It is difficult to imagine McLaren's stereotype worsening, but it did become more subtle. One of the rare lapses in Scott's brilliant Bride of Lammermoor came when he cast around for a metaphor to express old Lady Ashton's firmness in refusing the Master of Revensweed's suit for Lucy Ashton. He came up most infelicitously with a boarding school mistress spurning ‘a half-pay Irish officer, beseeching permission to wait upon the heiress of a West Indian planter.’³³ In the 1840s, Tucker's Ralph Rashleigh (not published until eighty years after it was written) describes Australian convict life, often uses trade propaganda imagery to attack the penal system, and has one of the hero's underworld associates pass himself off as a planter. The transition from successful fence to wealthy West Indian would not be a socially difficult one.³⁴ Even as late as Thackeray's Vanity Fair, when old assumptions might have been weakening, Becky Sharp's most pampered schoolfellow is a West Indian heiress.³⁵ To be a planter, or even to have planting wealth, was to be vulgar and flashy, on the fringes of polite society.

When Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, thirty years after Jonathan Corncob, it was no longer pointless to kick against the pricks of slavery. The Haitian revolution had come and gone, and the British slave trade had been abolished. Scott's villain was George Stanton, the seducer of his heroine Effie Deans. He was a West Indian, by then a useful shorthand for depravity. Scott needed no elaborate description to demonstrate that he had been corrupted by his upbringing in slave society. He had grown up ‘in the society of Negro slaves, whose study it was to glorify his every wish … and as the young men of his own rank would not endure the purse proud insolence of the Creole, he fell into that taste for low society’ which led to his ruin.³⁶ Apart from debauching Effie Deans, it transpires that he was the murderer of Captain Porteous in the great Edinburgh riot of 1736.

Even more revealingly, the book closes with a complex salvation/enslavement metaphor which is lost on modern readers, but which Scott clearly assumed his public would pick up at once. Stanton is himself enslaved to sin by his upbringing, and Effie's child is the corrupt fruit of their sinful union. When the baby disappears, she only escapes hanging for infanticide after her sister Jeanie goes to London to intercede with the Duke of Argyll and the Queen. Eventually Effie marries Stanton. Their son reappears in Argyll at the end of the novel. It transpires that he has been sold as a boy to one Dunacha dhu na Dunaigh, whose name incidentally translates as Black Duncan the Naughty, and who is an operator in the trade in white slaves from the Highlands to Virginia. The boy has become a young outlaw nicknamed ‘the Whistler’. The intricacies of the plot allow him to kill his father George Stanton, at which point he is captured by the authorities. He is released by his aunt, Effie's sister Jeanie Deans, who has throughout been the redemptive figure determined to save her sister from enslavement to sin and its consequences. She does save the Whistler from prison, but he is subsequently kidnapped and sent to the colonies as a slave anyway. We are told that he escapes to live among the Indians, ‘with whom his previous habits had well suited him to associate.’³⁷

The paradigm is that the original father is enslaved to sin by his contact with chattel slavery, and subsequently reduces those close to him to his own condition of moral bondage. His son rejects Jeanie Dean's guidance towards salvation and liberty, and is reduced to the same physical slavery which began the cycle. Jeanie Deans fails to redeem either father or son, and her success with her sister is problematic. However, her virtuous, ordered life, and the progressive society she represents, are contrapuntal to the aberrations both of slavery and sinfulness.

After West India emancipation, the British public soon reached the stage where it was no longer necessary to think out or justify an anti-slavery standpoint. Abolition had become the one harmless reform cause, an anodyne commitment which carried no ideological risk. In Disraeli's Sybil, when things are going badly for the prime minister, his agent Tadpole ruminates that he should ‘make some kind of a religious move … if we could get him to speak at Exeter Hall, were it only a slavery meeting, that would do.³⁸ Anti-slavery views seldom had to be articulated, except when writing for American audiences, or to raise support for American abolitionists. However, the slave could still be a useful weapon in argument. For instance, W. E. Aytoun, the compiler of the nostalgic Lays of the Cavaliers, had a substantial American sale, especially in the South. When he found that authors like Dickens and himself could not collect American royalties, he was quick to denounce slaveholders, in the certain knowledge that this would strike a sympathetic chord among his British public. His ‘Apostrophe to Boz’ trotted out the usual catalogue of anti-Americanisms, including the threat that half an hour's conversation with Judge Lynch would make you

… understand more clearly that you ever did before
Why an independent patriot freely spits upon the floor,
Why he sneers at the old country with republican disdain,
And, unheedful of the negro's cry, still tighter draws the chain.(39)

Slavery had become another means of defining what Britons were proud not to be.

By the fifties, every British writer could assume an anti-slavery consensus. When Mrs Craik wanted to dramatize the death of her hero and heroine in John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), an influential work on social mobility, she used one simple expedient. John died after thirty-three years of marriage, followed immediately by his wife Ursula.⁴⁰ This was not an arbitrary number of years. For Mrs Craik's readers, thirty-three had a triple symbolic force. It was the age at which Christ died, as well as the date of the West India Emancipation Act, and thus a number which triggered the three charges of atonement, redemption, and liberation. For mid-Victorians, the anti-slavery position had become a reflexive part of their belief system.

On the other hand, the case of Dickens demonstrates that disapproval of slavery did not necessarily mean enthusiasm for continued abolitionist efforts. We know too little about romantic racism in Britain, and particularly about its relationship to romantic nationalism. However, it is clear that the 1850s saw the image of the Negro become cheapened, and the active abolitionist impulse weaken, in part as a factor of the emotive forms of anti-slavery enthusiasm stirred up by Harriet Beecher Stowe's visits.⁴¹ At the same time, though the consensus of opposition to slavery was left largely undisturbed, Carlyle's Nigger Question (1849) signalized the emergence of a new and particularly ugly form of racism. It is not helpful to dismiss Carlyle and others like him as ‘pigmies, enmeshed helplessly in the prejudiced sloughs of their own bias.’⁴² His thought was the logical product of his Calvinist attitude to work, combined with a particular romantic perception of ethnicity, and a genuine sense of the urgency of domestic social issues. Dickens' famous passage in Bleak House is also symptomatic of a sharp change in British attitudes to helping the Negro, but it is significant that it does not imply the slightest approval of slavery. It is entirely consistent with his lifelong distrust of Exeter Hall philanthropy, and his anxiety that foreign good causes would divert attention from pressing domestic problems. Even in 1853, it did not go without bitter abolitionist criticism.⁴³ However, the significance of the Mrs Jellyby episode is not that it was new for Dickens, but that the changed atmosphere of the decade made it acceptable for a respectable middle-class novelist to deride abolitionists in a way which would have been unthinkable in the 1830s or even the early 1840s.

Dickens had always had mixed feelings about the moral vision of the abolitionists. Even in Pickwick (1836), where his social views are still in flux, there is a well-known comment on the inconsistency between the interest of the Muggletonians in the slave trade and their staunch opposition to all factory reform.⁴⁴ Incidentally, this was precisely the opposite of Coleridge's contempt of forty years before, for reformers who felt able to ignore the slave trade ‘provided the dunghill be not before their parlour window.’⁴⁵ It often seems that reformers cannot win. Dickens also anticipated the Mrs Jellyby passage in 1848, in a review of William Allen's account of the disastrous Niger expedition. It was a persuasive exposure of philanthropic incomprehension of West African realities, and a denunciation of Buxton's fantasy of civilizing Africa while so much remained to be done at home. ‘Such schemes are useless, futile, and we will venture to add—in despite of hats broad-brimmed or shovel-shaped, and coats of drab or black, with collars or without—wicked.’⁴⁶ The animus behind his attack was anti-abolitionist rather than pro-slavery.

The same is true of the ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’ chapter in Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby is obsessed with schemes for the improvement of the natives in Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger. Her squalid household, a pandemonium of unkempt children, slatternly servants, and smoking fires, is a paradigm of the withering evils which have escaped her attention at home. Though Mrs Jellyby believed that the domestic poor could be colonized on the Niger, where it was hoped they would teach the natives to turn pianoforte legs, her fine eyes had ‘a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if … they could see nothing nearer than Africa!’⁴⁷ The chapter is devastating, but it is remarkable less for its content than for what it reveals about Dickens and his British public. Neither had the slightest doubt about the iniquity of slavery. Even Susan Nipper, in Dombey and Son, thought that to be ‘a black slave and a mulotter’ was the lowest and hardest of all lots.⁴⁸ But both were coming to the conclusion that the time had come to call it a day on anti-slavery until more immediate problems were solved.

Literary references of the sort I have mentioned give a wider perspective on attitudes to slavery, a sharper sense of what was changing outside the circle of active commitment. My examples are not much more than throwaway lines. But it is precisely because of their casual quality that they and others like them give a sense of when it was and was not acceptable to write certain things about slavery, and where and when certain standpoints could be taken for granted. What amounts to a cultural revolution cannot be understood without using the evidence, however indirect, which is embedded in that culture's literature.

Notes

1. ‘Slavery’, International Encyclopedia of Social Science, D. L. Sills (ed.), (New York, 1968), xiv, p. 308; ‘A peculiar institution?’, Times Literary Supplement, 2 July 1976, pp. 819-21.

2. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (ed.) R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), p. 181.

3. M. B. Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (ed.) B. A. Williams (Boston, 1949), p. 164.

4. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (1975), pp. 91-153.

5. Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 126-41, 184-99; Anstey, ‘Reflections on the Lordship of Christ in history’, Christian, iii (1975), 69-80.

6. J. C. Crandall, ‘Patriotism and humanitarian reform in children's literature’, American Quarterly, xxi (1969), 3-22.

7. E. B. Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington, 1942); W. Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings, British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1942).

8. W. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society, Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797; reprinted New York, 1856), p. 272n.; S. T. Coleridge, The Watchman (ed. L. Patton), Collected Works, ii (Princeton, 1970), p. 139.

9. Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 145-8.

10. D. B. Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860 (Ithaca, 1957).

11. H. McNeill, Memoirs … of the Late Charles Macpherson (Edinburgh, 1800), pp. 124ff.; H. Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné. A Tale (1797), reprinted in The British Novelists, xxix, 208-14.

12. H. W. Thompson, A Scottish Man of Feeling (1931), pp. 150-1, 262.

13. Old Mortality (ed.) Angus Calder (1816; Penguin edn., 1975), pp. 70-1.

14. H. House, The Dickens World (1941), pp. 29-30.

15. C. B. Tinker, Painter and Poet. Studies in the Literary Relations of English Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 149-52; A. D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson's Seasons (Minneapolis, 1942), p. 165; D. B. Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, p. 353.

16. P. J. Rabinowitz, ‘Truth in fiction: a re-examination of audiences’, Critical Inquiry, iv (1977), 126.

17. Cf. Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings, pp. 158-9; [D. Defoe], An Essay upon the Trade to Africa, in Order to Set the Merits of that Cause in a True Light and Bring the Dispute between the African Company and the Separate Traders into a Narrower Compass (1711); D. Defoe, A Plan of English Commerce, being a Compleat Prospect of the Trade of this Nation, as well the Home Trade as the Foreign (2nd edn., 1730), pp. 333-4.

18. On the economic views expressed in the novels, see M. E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962: reprinted New York, 1976).

19. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720; Everyman edn., 1963), p. 167.

20. Robinson Crusoe (1719; Norton Critical editions, ed. M. Shinagel, New York, 1975), pp. 17, 29.

21. Ibid., pp. 30-2.

22. On Defoe and the problem of respectable mores, see M. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

23. Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jack (1722; Folio Society edn., 1967), pp. 140-61.

24. M. Price, To the Palace of Wisdom, Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Carbondale, Ill., 1964), p. 274.

25. Defoe, Colonel Jack, p. 182.

26. L. Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67; Riverside edition, Boston, 1965), p. 466.

27. Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee (1787), pp. 146-7; Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings, pp. 278-80.

28. Jonathan Corncob, pp. 146-7.

29. Emma (1816; New English Library edn., 1964), p. 238.

30. J. Galt, The Last of the Lairds (1826, Blackwood's edn., 1896), p. 271.

31. W. Scott, St Ronan's Well (1832; A. & C. Black edn., Edinburgh, 1879), ii, p. 277.

32. A. McLaren, The Negro Slaves … being the Original of the Blackman and the Blackbird (1799); A Wife to be Sold, or, Who Bids Most? A Musical Farce. To which is Added the Slaves, A Dramatic Piece (1807), p. 23.

33. (1819; Macmillan edn., 1908), p. 342.

34. J. Tucker, Ralph Rashleigh, ed. C. Roderick (1929; Folio Society edn., 1977), p. 60.

35. (1847-8; Nelson edn., 1901), p. 5.

36. (1816; Collins Classics edn., Glasgow, 1952), pp. 313-14.

37. Ibid., pp. 458-9.

38. Quoted in I. Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (1976), p. 176.

39. W. E. Aytoun, Stories and Verse, (ed.) W. L. Renwick (Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 313-14.

40. D. M. Muloch [Mrs Craik], John Halifax, Gentleman (1856; Panther edn., 1972), pp. 461-2.

41. I have looked at this problem in some detail in my forthcoming The Scots Abolitionists, 1833-61. For a brilliant analysis of the corresponding phenomenon in America, see G. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971), pp. 97-130.

42. I. G. Jones, ‘Trollope, Carlyle and Mill on the Negro: an episode in the history of ideas’, J. N. H., lii (1967), 185-99. Cf. I. Campbell, ‘Carlyle and the Negro question again’, Criticism, viii (1971), 279-90; I. Campbell, Thomas Carlyle (1974), pp. 115-18.

43. Thomas, Lord Denman, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleak House, Slavery and the Slave Trade (1853), p. 5.

44. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836; Penguin edn., 1972), p. 131.

45. Coleridge, The Watchman, p. 139.

46. F. G. Kitton (ed.), To be Read at Dusk and other Stories, Sketches and Essays by Charles Dickens (1898), p. 70. See also House, The Dickens World, pp. 86-91.

47. Bleak House (1852-3; Everyman edn., 1972), p. 34.

48. Dombey and Son (1848; Chapman & Hall edn. with Phiz illustrations, n.d.), p. 48.