British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery,1760-1807 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807

Brycchan Carey

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck; John Bender, Stanford; Alan Bewell, Toronto; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge; Robert Miles, Stirling; Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton; Saree Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, NYU; Janet Todd, Glasgow Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries—whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity.

Titles include: Brycchan Carey BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 E.J. Clery THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18TH-CENTURY ENGLAND Literature, Commerce and Luxury Adriana Craciun BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Citizens of the World Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors) LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740–1840 Thinking the Republic of Taste Anthony S. Jarrells BRITAIN’S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature Mary Waters BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM, 1789–1832

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Also by the same author DISCOURSES OF SLAVERY AND ABOLITION: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838 (co-editor with Markman Ellis and Sara Salih)

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 Brycchan Carey

© Brycchan Carey 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4626–3 ISBN-10: 1–4039–4626–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carey, Brycchan, 1967– British abolitionism and the rhetoric of sensibility : writing, sentiment, and slavery, 1760–1807 / Brycchan Carey. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism, and the cultures of print) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4626–4 (cloth) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Slavery in literature. 3. Antislavery movements—Great Britain—History— 18th century. 4. Antislavery movements—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 5. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 6. Abolitionists—Great Britain—History—18th century. 7. Abolitionists—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. English language—18th century—Rhetoric. 9. English language— 19th century—Rhetoric. 10. Antislavery movements in literature. 11. Sentimentalism in literature. 12. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. II. Series. PR448.S55C37 2005 820.9′358—dc22 2005045414 10 14

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1 The Rhetoric of Sensibility

18

2 Arguing in Prose: Abolitionist Letters and Novels

46

3 Arguing in Verse: Abolitionist Poetry

73

4 ‘Read This, and Blush’: The Pamphlet War of the 1780s

107

5 Feeling Out Loud: Sentimental Rhetoric in Parliament, the Pulpit, and the Court of Law

144

6 Conclusion: Romanticism, Revolution, and William Wilberforce’s Unregarded Tears

186

Notes

197

Bibliography

219

Index

231

v

Acknowledgements

This book started as a gleam of an idea in an undergraduate class at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, was tentatively explored in an MA dissertation at Queen Mary, University of London, firmed up as a PhD thesis at Queen Mary, and finally extensively re-written as a book at Kingston University. In that time, dozens of friends and colleagues have read, heard, commented on, and disputed with the arguments of the book. Without these conversations, this book would not have been possible. I cannot begin to list all the people whose thoughts and comments over the years have helped my thinking with this book, but I would like to make a small effort by thanking the following for feedback, help, and support, in intellectual matters great and small: Ava Arndt, Jennie Batchelor, Giles Bergel, Kevin Berland, Tom Betteridge, Frances Botkin, Richard Bourke, Vincent Carretta, Warren Chernaik, Norma Clarke, Deirdre Coleman, Angelo Costanzo, Alex Davies, Phil Dehne, Madge Dresser, Jeremy Gregory, Sharon Harrow, Megan Hiatt, Margaret Homberger, Avril Horner, Peter Howell, Carol Joyner, David Killingray, Peter Kitson, Harriet Knight, Andrew Lincoln, Karen Lipsedge, Jack Lynch, Bart Moore-Gilbert, John Mullan, Nora Nachumi, Don Newman, Mary Peace, Lawrence Phillips, Debra Pring, Eric Reed, Chris Reid, Shaun Regan, David Rogers, Sara Salih, Mark Stein, Bob Tennant, and Arthur Torrington. I acknowledge a particular debt to Markman Ellis, who supervised the PhD thesis from which this book grew, and who has since remained both a friend and a mentor. His help and support has always gone well beyond the call of duty, and has always been deeply valued. And I especially thank Megan Hickerson, who minutely engaged with this book over a long period and whose contribution is visible on almost every page. Kingston University has been a very supportive institution, and my colleagues in the School of Humanities have been a wonderful group to work with and to learn from. In addition to those colleagues named above, I would like to thank James Annesley, Martin Corner, Gail Cunningham, Vesna Goldsworthy, John Ibbett, Meg Jensen, Jane Jordan, Erica Longfellow, John Mepham, Anne Rowe, and Sarah Sceats for being such fun to work with. I also thank my students, particularly those on the courses ‘Romantic Vision’ and ‘Satire and Sensibility’, for cheerfully vi

Acknowledgements vii

submitting to be guinea pigs while I tried out my latest theories, and for raising many acute and difficult questions—not all of which have been satisfactorily answered in this book. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy, both for funding the PhD from which this book grew, and for supporting travel to conferences at which much of the book was first aired. Without their support, this book could not have been started, let alone completed. Nor could it have been possible without the help of the librarians and book delivery staff in the Rare Books Room at the British Library, who have been ever helpful despite my increasingly esoteric requests. I also thank the staff at the Queen Mary College Library, the University of London Library, the Institute of Historical Research and the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, the Bodleian library in Oxford, and Kingston University Library. I would like to extend special thanks to all the members of the interdisciplinary e-mailing list, C18-L, who have answered my peculiar and highly specific queries over the years, and who have in discussion raised questions on topics of which I would not otherwise have dreamt. In particular, I thank the list’s Netwallah, Kevin Berland, for making the list possible. I would also like to thank all the members of the Enlightenment and Romanticism Reading Group at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, for many years of wonderful discussion. In particular, I thank the group’s organisers: Elizabeth Eger, Emma Francis, and Annie Janowitz. Some parts of this book have previously been published in variant forms. Part of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘ “The Hellish Means of Killing and Kidnapping”: Ignatius Sancho and the Campaign Against the “Abominable Traffic for Slaves” ’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 81–95. Parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘John Wesley’s “Thoughts Upon Slavery” and the Language of the Heart’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 86, 3 (Autumn 2004), 269–84 and as ‘William Wilberforce’s Sentimental Rhetoric: Parliamentary Reportage and the Abolition Speech of 1789’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 14 (2003), 281–305. I am grateful to the editors; John Dunkley, Jeremy Gregory, and Jack Lynch, respectively, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. I have special thanks of a more personal sort to those close friends and family members who have stood by me intellectually, practically, and emotionally, during the long period in which this book grew. I thank

viii Acknowledgements

Jenny Bassett and Tony Risley for giving me space on the river, and Frank Whately and Naomi Lyons for giving me space in their house while the book was being finished. I thank Colin Roberts and, quite separately, Lee Pope for forgiving my absences. For spectacular dinners and therapeutic trips to the Proms, I thank Tony and Hilary Mason. For the kitchen table at which this book was finally completed, I thank Sarah Sanders. My family have supported me in many ways, and for all their help and encouragement I thank Peter Carey, Anita Carey, Tamsin Carey, Seb Carey, and Seth Cornwall. I particularly thank my mother, Jackie Cornwall, for (amongst much in addition) her encouraging readings of parts of this book, and Piers Carey and George Carey, who provided computer know-how and hardware at crucial stages, without which this book would have been carved on stone tablets. Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan for their careful reading of earlier drafts of this book, and for their invaluable suggestions and comments. In particular, I thank Emily Rosser and Paula Kennedy for their patience and professionalism, and for supporting this book at every stage from proposal to publication.

Introduction

In a letter to Laurence Sterne written in 1766, Ignatius Sancho complained that ‘of all my favorite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren’.1 Sancho, an African, former slave, and at the time of writing, a butler to the Duke of Montagu, has been celebrated for his emulation of the Shandean idiom in his letters, posthumously published in 1782. In this letter, however, he moves beyond Shandyism to combine three important discourses of the late eighteenth century. With his emphasis on tears and misery, he is engaging with the fashionable literary discourse of his day, sensibility, to produce a recognisably sentimental mode of expression. With his demand for some sort of action on behalf of his enslaved fellow Africans, he is also engaging in a form of antislavery, the political movement that was to enter popular consciousness in varying degrees from the 1760s onwards. Finally, his language is the language of persuasion. This is a piece of rhetoric, written at a time when the discipline of rhetoric was being systematically reconceptualised. Sancho’s letter is more than merely imitatively Shandean: it is an important moment in the development of a sentimental rhetoric of antislavery. Sancho’s letter—discussed in detail in Chapter 2—is a fitting emblem for this book, which examines the intersection of the three discourses of sensibility, abolition, and rhetoric. I argue that during the middle to late eighteenth century, many writers and public speakers used a distinct and recognisable sentimental rhetoric, and that participants in the abolition debate used this rhetoric particularly extensively. While points similar to this have been made in passing before, no study to date has demonstrated in detail the operation of sentimental rhetoric. In fact, no study to date has attempted to define sentimental rhetoric at all, although some critics use the phrase loosely to describe writing that seems broadly sentimental and persuasive. My aim is to define sentimental 1

2 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

rhetoric and to chart precisely the way it was deployed in the abolition debate. This rhetoric, I contend, consists of a number of loosely connected rhetorical tropes and arguments, available for the rhetorician to choose from when attempting to persuade an audience that a person or group of people are suffering and that that suffering should be diminished or relieved entirely. Central to the rhetoric is a belief in the power of sympathy to raise awareness of suffering, to change an audience’s view of that suffering, and to direct their opposition to it. As we shall see in Chapter 1, sentimental rhetoric was closely associated with the movement now known as ‘the new rhetoric’, but not entirely dependent on it, operating largely without theory, and depending on its practitioners to take an emotional and often anti-intellectual stance. It is this atheoretical quality to the rhetoric of sensibility which, perhaps, accounts for the difficulty experienced by many modern observers in locating it, defining it precisely, or even recognising its existence. This difficulty is not surprising. Sensibility as a literary phenomenon was itself, until relatively recently, scarcely considered worthy of critical attention. Many critics of the last two centuries, especially those of the modernist period, have used the terms ‘sensibility’ and, more especially, its near-synonym ‘sentiment’, pejoratively, to denote a trite and probably feigned emotionality. To the eighteenth-century writer, however, ‘sentiment’ was not a pejorative term. Rather than worrying about degenerating into sentimentality, many aspired to it, recognising an opportunity to tap directly into the heart of the human condition. If sentimental literature could put people in touch with their emotions, as many in the eighteenth century believed, it was clearly a powerful persuasive tool. Almost all the major political questions of the day were discussed in sentimental terms—and in other terms as well—yet none gave rise to quite as much sentimental rhetoric as the debate over slavery and abolition. British abolitionists in the late eighteenth century demanded a fundamental change to the way Britain did business with the world and at the same time asked searching questions about both the British character and the British constitution. While the physical and emotional suffering caused by the slave trade was high on the list of the abolitionists’ objection to the trade, virtually no aspect of British culture, economy, religion, and society went unexamined, and few people remained untouched by the debate. Indeed, discussion of slavery influenced almost every area of cultural production and, because of this, I have drawn the texts examined in this book from a broad and sometimes eclectic field. Poems

Introduction 3

and novels are considered alongside political essays, tracts, and pamphlets. I read newspaper reports and accounts of political speeches, in addition to journals, and letters. The seeming eclecticism of the texts nevertheless reflects their status as part of a discourse, as does the readily observable fact that, regardless of form or genre, abolitionist writing is determinedly intertextual. Michel Foucault famously argued that ‘the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut [. . .] it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.’2 So too, each text in the discourse of slavery and abolition, whose authors, sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously or pseudonymously, quote, refer, allude to, and plagiarise each others writings, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, with a disregard to the conventions governing intellectual property that might have troubled writers engaged in other discourses. Abolitionist writers naturally had personal motivations in addition to disinterested philanthropy—fame, wealth, or influence—but they saw themselves, and proclaimed themselves, as being part of a cause that transcended personal considerations. The discourse of abolition was thus very much a group effort. The texts studied here have not been chosen primarily for their quality or contemporary popularity, although in many cases the quotations provided, though now largely forgotten, would have been familiar to most well-informed readers of the period. My intention is to analyse the intersection of sentiment, rhetoric, and abolition as it was played out in a broad range of British—and colonial—cultural productions, although the emphasis is on writing. As such, much of the literature examined here belongs to what is now widely understood as ‘colonial discourse’. Colonial discourse is rarely explicit in its objectives. Even when advocating a certain course of action, writers on slavery and colony often seem to be covertly articulating alternatives that are either tangential to or even antagonistic towards their stated intentions. In abolitionist literature, we can readily identify disquiet over the worst excesses of colonialism, yet that same literature often contributed to a discourse about the extraEuropean world that both created and perpetuated ideas that legitimated colonial expansion. Wylie Sypher hinted at this in the 1940s when he noted that the writers of the abolition movement created what he called a ‘pseudo-Africa’ populated by ‘pseudo-Africans’.3 In Sypher’s analysis, this was problematic mostly because literary constructions of ‘pseudo-Africans’ were ‘aesthetically hollow’.4 However, more recent critics, following Edward Said, have argued that European myths about the ‘Orient’ are part of the ‘enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically,

4 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’.5 From Said’s notion of Orientalism derives the related notion of Africanism. The power relationships are not the same, precisely; nevertheless eighteenth-century writers on slavery clearly both ‘manage’ and ‘produce’ an idea of Africa—and a policy towards it—that had ramifications far beyond the question of the abolition of the slave trade.

Sentiment and sensibility That much eighteenth-century Africanist discourse is conducted within the discourse of sensibility has complicated matters as the category of ‘sensibility’ has itself only existed as a meaningful critical concept since, at the earliest, the mid-1950s. Even now, there is no consensus about the meaning of its key words and concepts. The words ‘sensibility’, ‘sentimental’, and ‘sentimentalism’ have always enjoyed a close relationship. Some critics, such as G.J. Barker-Benfield and Chris Jones, insist that they are ‘cognate’ or even more or less ‘interchangeable’. 6 Others, including Janet Todd and Jerome McGann, argue that they are very different, McGann going so far as to say that the habit of considering the terms interchangeable is ‘symptomatic of a wholly inadequate critical procedure’.7 He does not supply a usable alternative critical procedure, however, while continuing to use the words interchangeably throughout his own book. 8 Todd’s teasing apart of the words is more convincing than McGann’s, but she too fails to sustain throughout the body of her Sensibility: An Introduction the careful distinctions made in its introduction. The lack of consensus does not leave us in a very helpful position, but a few clear points do seem to emerge. Eighteenth-century sensibility was a discourse which celebrated the passions over the intellect, which valued the untutored response over the considered reply, and which favoured ‘natural genius’ to learned philosophical and critical procedures. As such, it was—and remains—difficult to define precisely. Samuel Johnson thought that ‘sensibility’ described ‘quickness of sensation’ and ‘quickness of perception’. A person with sensibility would be quick both to understand an event and to experience feelings appropriate to it. ‘Sentiment’ is a more difficult concept. Johnson recognised that it could mean ‘thought; notion; opinion’, but he also considered it ‘the sense considered distinctly from the language or things’: our sensory experience of things rather than the things themselves. Finally, Johnson noted that sentiment was by 1755 already a term of literary criticism. One usage, he stated, was that it was ‘a striking sentence in a composition’.9

Introduction 5

Johnson’s definitions, written during the early period of sensibility, do not fully anticipate the importance the words were to assume in the following forty years. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, ‘sensibility in its C18 uses ranged from a use much like that of modern awareness (not only consciousness but conscience) to a strong form of what the word appears literally to mean, the ability to feel’.10 It was therefore available for use in a wide variety of situations ranging from the intimate to the public and, as Williams suggests, the overtly political. ‘Sentiment’ too became a powerful term, meaning, in Williams’s words, ‘a conscious openness to feelings, and also a conscious consumption of feelings’, the latter use, he argues, leaving ‘sentimental’ vulnerable. Williams’s argument is useful, although it ignores the usage in Johnsonian literary criticism, as well as failing to draw a strong distinction between ‘the ability to feel’ and ‘a conscious openness to feelings’. Bearing these shortcomings in mind, Williams’s definitions guide the usage of these words in this book. A fourth important word, ‘sympathy’, is central to this book. This was a key term in the philosophy of sentimentalism, encapsulating several theories about human sociability. The ability to ‘feel with’ another is itself a possible definition of ‘sensibility’, a point recognised by Johnson who defined ‘sympathy’ as ‘mutual sensibility’. In political terms, recognition of the sympathetic impulse was vital to the formation of campaigns and policies that aimed to relieve the suffering of others. Arising in part from this ‘active sensibility’ was a group of words often used to describe the relationship of the sentimental person with the larger world. These included ‘benevolence’, ‘humanity’, ‘charity’, and ‘philanthropy’. In poetic discourse, they were often personified, and they were always held up as models of behaviour to be emulated by those with sensibility. The task of charting the changing meanings of the words ‘sentiment’ and ‘sensibility’ is allied to the study of the critical reception of the literature of sensibility. Since this book both contributes to this critical reception, and frequently comments upon it, a brief chronology, divided into three distinct phases, is useful. In the first phase, approximately between 1740 and 1790, critics, in many cases practising sentimental poets, dramatists, and novelists, discussed the work of their contemporaries in terms which were themselves often highly sentimentalised. The second long phase involved a reaction against sentimentalism which originated in the late eighteenth century, which was consolidated in the mid-nineteenth century, and which reached an advanced state of precision with the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and George Canning (in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin) are the most famous early critics of sensibility, but, although much discussed,

6 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

their interventions were light skirmishes compared to the later onslaught. Victorian critics typified by George Meredith, argued E.M. Forster, made ‘heavy attacks on sentimentality’. His modernist generation, he continued, pursued ‘the same quarry but with neater instruments’.11 I.A. Richards called a text sentimental when either the feelings it aroused were ‘crude’ rather than ‘refined’, or when the emotional response was ‘inappropriate to the situation that calls it forth’.12 T.S. Eliot maintained that in the seventeenth century ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’ became separated, a phenomenon he calls the ‘dissociation of sensibility’. The problem was that ‘while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude’.13 The problem was solved, he argues, with the advent of the modernist poets of whom he was, of course, a prominent member. The third (and current) phase is revisionist. Post-war critics such as Northrop Frye have sought to rehabilitate ‘the age of sensibility’ into the canon, while historicist and new-historicist critics have argued that the discourse of sensibility should not be judged according to current notions of taste but rather studied as an historically located cultural phenomenon. Frye introduced the term ‘age of sensibility’, which has the useful attribute that it defines sensibility in its own terms rather than in relation to other earlier or later discourses. Equally usefully, Frye saw sentimental authors as ‘process-writers’, arguing that ‘when we turn to Tristram Shandy we not only read the book but watch the author at work writing it’. 14 (Roland Barthes would later call this type of text ‘writerly’. 15) Frye’s essay signalled a major shift in our thinking about late eighteenth-century literature, but it was clearly intended to be indicative rather than definitive. Accordingly, it prompted a debate: critics writing during the 1970s, such as Leo Braudy and R.F. Brissenden, were still working against the received wisdom that saw the midto late eighteenth century as ‘pre-romantic’ and sensibility as an embarrassing aberration.16 Yet Brissenden set an important precedent when he recognised that in eighteenth-century discourse ‘the key word is “sensible”: what we know derives ultimately from what our senses tell us— from our sensibility’.17 In Brissenden’s view, sensibility was an offshoot of empirical philosophy. This strand of thought has produced much of the best recent work on sensibility. John Dwyer’s Virtuous Discourse, although confining its attention to the Scottish Enlightenment, argues that sensibility is always proactive, political, and moralistic. Sympathy is a key sentimental concept, while the novels of Henry Mackenzie and the moral works of Adam Smith are important sentimental texts.18 Likewise, John Mullan, in Sentiment and Sociability, argues that theories of sympathy, especially David Hume’s,

Introduction 7

could be used to explain human society by proposing the ability to sympathise as the essential social attribute of human nature. This emphasis on the social engagement of sensibility has led other scholars to more deeply explore its political dimensions.19 Chris Jones argues in Radical Sensibility that sensibility was never homogenous but rather appeared in a number of varieties. On the one hand, it posited a natural benevolence according to which society was held together by individuals working in mutual sympathy: on the other hand, ‘it was also a social construction which translated prevailing power-based relationships into loyalties upheld by “natural” feelings’.20 In the 1790s, as events in Revolutionary France unfolded, these versions of sensibility, expressed in poetry and novels as well as in tracts and pamphlets, provided a site of conflict between radicalism and conservatism. This conflict was not entirely new in the 1790s, however, as Markman Ellis shows in The Politics of Sensibility. Ellis examines ‘the paradox of sentimentalism’ which arises because sentimental novels are ‘the site of considerable political debate [both] despite and because of the extraordinary texture of the novels’.21 The loose and experimental form of the sentimental novel, he argues, made it an ideal site for the working out of previously unexplored political questions—among which Ellis includes the abolition debate. Not all work on sensibility has followed this path. A distinct strand of thought—also present in the above—considers the discourse of sensibility, in particular the novels, as a site for the working out of changing gender relationships. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, for example, argues that ‘narratives which seemed to be concerned solely with matters of courtship and marriage in fact seized the authority to say what was female’.22 Interpreting the literary construction of the ‘domestic woman’ as a political act, Armstrong maintains that it was in fact a decisive move in the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, although her contention that ‘the formation of the modern political state—in England at least—was accomplished largely through cultural hegemony’ is a large claim indeed, and one which is by no means proved by her study.23 G.J. Barker-Benfield, in The Culture of Sensibility, sees eighteenthcentury sensibility not only as the site and expression of an extensive reworking of female manners, but also as a socially active force that sought to direct male as well as female behaviour. The culture of sensibility, he argues, was that culture by which ‘middle-class women publicized their consciousness of segregation’ from the male world and sought to endow the male, or public, sphere with supposedly feminine characteristics. 24 More recently, however, the alleged division of sensibility between a male public sphere and a female domestic sphere has been

8 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

challenged. Gillian Skinner’s Sensibility and Economics in the Novel starts from the premise that ‘sensibility is linked inescapably to the economic’, especially when distress is relieved by the wealthy disbursing alms. According to Skinner, the economic aspect of the sentimental novel has long been overlooked ‘in large part because the genre has always been seen as essentially feminine’, a mistake that has led critics into the error of thinking that, because feminised, sensibility could not be worldly.25 Anne Mellor has gone further, challenging the notion of gendered ‘separate spheres’ in this period and thus also the work of Jürgen Habermas. ‘Habermas’s conceptual limitation of the public sphere in England between 1780 and 1830 to men of property is historically incorrect’, she argues, noting that: ‘during the Romantic era women participated fully in the public sphere as Habermas defined it’. As evidence, she cites ‘the sheer bulk of their literary production’.26 Other critics—in part taking their lead from Mullan—emphasise the physical and the physiological aspects of sensibility, noting that ‘it is the body which acts out the powers of sentiment’.27 The sentimental moment is often characterised by tears, blushing, fainting, or other physical responses including excessive or inappropriate sexual desire. While these physical symptoms can strike either sex, the physiology of sentiment has been studied more in relation to women than to men. Indeed, as Ann Jessie Van Sant notes, in her discussion of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), although the novel’s title ‘provides the descriptive term widely adopted for male figures of sensibility [. . .] the novel’s central figure, however, hardly has a body’.28 By contrast, women’s bodies are often central to sentimental fiction, usually when they are threatened; a trope early identified by Brissenden as ‘virtue in distress’. Todd contrasts the internal characteristics of female sensibility, ‘intuitive sympathy, susceptibility, emotionalism and passivity’, with their external markers, ‘tears, blushes, palpitations, hysteria and even death’, arguing that this ‘bodily authenticity’ allowed women to ‘glorify themselves and be glorified in fiction’.29 Yet, as Van Sant has shown, ‘gazing on suffering’ was an important part of both rhetorical and scientific discourse, encompassing both male and female bodies, particularly in the arena of philanthropy.30 Felicity Nussbaum has further complicated the picture by reading the discourse of feminine sensibility in the context of postcolonial studies, taking as her ‘central metaphor for the consideration of maternity and sexuality the concept of torrid zones, both the geographical torrid zones [. . .] and the torrid zone mapped onto the human body, especially the female body.’31 In Nussbaum’s analysis of the discourse, female sensibility and sexuality were considered inseparable and innate, clearly and

Introduction 9

disturbingly discernible in women whose origin lay outside of the zone of European civilisation. All these approaches have implications for a study such as this, which reads sentimental literature both by and about men and women, both in a metropolitan and in a colonial context. This book occupies an intermediate position in this critical tradition, recognising that some aspects of sentimental writing, such as its emphasis on the domestic and the personal, offer an agenda for social and political change based on values increasingly asserted by women—in particular, women of the middling sort—during the mid- to late eighteenth century. Yet, I recognise too that much sentimental writing was produced by men, many of whom were articulating new approaches to masculinity. While clearly allied with those studies that see sensibility in the tradition of enlightenment empirical and political philosophies, this book nonetheless argues that, in daily practice, sentimental writing operated without theory and was available for use by women and men, the disenfranchised and undereducated, as well as by the educated and politically active. As such, it tended to cut across boundaries of class and gender, even when it claimed to shore up the very boundaries it transgressed. Indeed, a central paradox of this book is that, although almost every writer in late eighteenth-century Britain used sentimental rhetoric, many, if not most, denied that they did so. Nevertheless, despite this claim for the universality of the rhetoric, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility makes no grandiose claims about the part the rhetoric played in the rise of the novel, the triumph of the bourgeoisie, or even the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. I do not argue that sentimental rhetoric inevitably led to reform but, more narrowly, that reformers, who may well have already made the decision to be reformers, took up and used the already available rhetoric of sensibility, transforming it in subtle and not so subtle ways as they did so. Above all, the rhetoric of sensibility was a practical mode of expression, growing out of the philosophy, literature, and political circumstances of its day, but it was not ultimately or necessarily successful. By 1807, when the British slave trade was finally abolished, most—but not all—abolitionist rhetoric had moved on from sentimentalism.

Abolishing the British slave trade As well as being a work of literary criticism about sensibility, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, as the preceding discussion suggests, tacitly enters into a historiographical debate about the causes

10 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

of British abolition. Broadly speaking, the debate is concerned with why Britain abolished a trade that, on the face of it, was extremely profitable, and historians are divided between those who see abolition as a response to metropolitan cultural changes and those who point to social and, especially, economic factors in the colonies. Of the four main positions, the earliest was put by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1808. Clarkson held that abolition was a triumph of a Christian humanitarian ethos that naturally came to the fore when the true facts about slavery were revealed to the public by campaigners such as himself.32 This selfcongratulatory position was orthodox throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. The Victorian historian W.E.H. Lecky provided a famous example when he described ‘the unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery [as being] among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations’.33 Dismissed as smug by most modern historians, this view nonetheless still has some currency, particularly in popular historiography. Contending directly with it, the second view holds that slavery was abolished purely because it was no longer profitable. This argument, known as the ‘decline theory’, was developed by Eric Williams in his important book Capitalism and Slavery, which appeared in 1945 (although it was not published in Britain until 1964).34 Williams’s economic analysis, never a detailed one, has been closely scrutinised and is now largely superseded. Roger Anstey and Seymour Drescher, in various studies, cast doubts on Williams’s figures, the latter introducing the now familiar term ‘econocide’ to explain the devastating effect which abolition appears to have had on the plantation economy.35 It now seems clear that slavery and its supporting industries were highly profitable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that abolition and emancipation destroyed the considerable profits the plantocracy enjoyed.36 A third position—in fact, encompassing a group of positions—is that the abolition and emancipation campaigns were arenas in which previously disenfranchised groups within Britain, in particular, the middle classes and women, could impose their culture and ideology and flex their developing political muscle. This is explored by David Brion Davis in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. In a celebrated analysis, Davis argues that antislavery ‘reflected the ideological needs of various groups and classes’ and not merely the economic needs, as Williams had argued.37 The class implicated, the commercial (but metropolitan) middle class, embraced antislavery as a way of legitimising a new work ethic that depended on free labour in a free market. Indeed, Adam Smith’s celebrated analysis of slave economy, in which he concluded that ‘the

Introduction 11

work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves’, can be seen as a clear statement of this emerging middle-class ideology.38 Yet, as Davis recognises, antislavery ran deeper than this simple materialist imperative, involving a bifurcation which he sees illustrated ‘by the titles of Adam Smith’s two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations’.39 Davis thus identifies a religious and cultural dimension allied to but not simplistically determined by the emerging economic climate. Bound up with this middle-class culture was a bundle of religious, political, and humanitarian ideas, all dependent on a prevailing openness to new thinking, which allowed hitherto marginal groups to establish themselves in the social and political life of the nation as well as in its economy. Significantly, Davis sees as an important part of this movement ‘the popularization of an ethic of benevolence, personified in the “man of feeling” ’.40 Davis’s argument that antislavery was closely allied with sensibility underpins much of my argument. Yet, as George Boulukos has pointed out, it was not, strictly speaking, new in the work of Davis.41 Boulukos points to Sypher’s important Guinea’s Captive Kings (1942), which assumes a direct link between sentimental literature and antislavery. Sypher’s analysis—discussed at greater length in Chapter 2—is not highly theorised nor could it engage with critical and historical work on ‘the age of sensibility’ that had not yet been written. Nevertheless, it was instrumental in establishing the link between sensibility and antislavery and, as Boulukos reminds us, few scholars have subsequently questioned this link. Several critical works, including those by Moira Ferguson, Markman Ellis, and Felicity Nussbaum, tend to assume that antislavery and sensibility are not just related, but inseparable. Boulukos, however, challenges this by noting that sentimental writers, at least in the 1760s to the 1780s, promoted a form of amelioration, rather than abolition, that if successful would have shored up plantation slavery and made it more profitable. The texts he considers, and the critical response to them, are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, but they form a small part only of the discourse of slavery and abolition. Yet Boulukos, by questioning the automatic assumption that all sentimental writing must be inimical to slavery, articulates a premise that is also explored in British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility. As I show in Chapters 4 and 6, proslavery writers were just as likely to use sentimental arguments as antislavery writers, either as a rearguard action or as a genuine attempt to fit the ideology of slavery into the emerging discourse of sensibility. While Davis and others see antislavery as the expression of a developing middle-class ideology, other writers have argued that women were the

12 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

major metropolitan group whose ideas and ideals were articulated through the abolition movement. Several critics of sensibility, as we have seen, have argued that sentimentalism was a movement that ‘sought to endow the male, or public, sphere with supposedly feminine characteristics’.42 When combined with Davis’s view that opposition to slavery was part of a shift in sensibility, antislavery indeed emerges as a feminine discourse. Several critics and historians have pursued this line. Clare Midgley, in Women against Slavery, argues that women, ‘despite their exclusion from positions of formal power in the national antislavery movement in Britain, were an integral part of that movement and played distinctive and at times leading roles’. 43 Moreover, women’s experiences in the abolition and emancipation campaigns were an important arena for the development of transferable political skills, which could and would be used by women in other political activities—a point reflected in Mellor’s argument that ‘Romantic era women participated fully in the public sphere’.44 The critic Moira Ferguson, discussed in detail in Chapter 2, likewise proposes that women’s antislavery ‘contributed to the development of feminism over a two-hundred-year period’, while Charlotte Sussman has argued that ‘women were accorded an innovative and influential form of political agency by the antislavery movement’.45 Yet none of these critics ultimately succeed in showing that abolition was, in its inception at least, a gendered discourse. Indeed, they are more convincing when arguing that the experience of abolitionism contributed to the development of feminism, rather than the other way round. While all of these approaches posit abolition as a response to metropolitan political and cultural developments, a fourth position holds that it was slaves themselves who brought about abolition and emancipation by acts of resistance and rebellion, and by direct political and cultural engagement. This argument was originally (and perhaps most powerfully) made in 1938 by C.L.R. James in his study of the San Domingo revolution, The Black Jacobins, and was shortly afterwards followed up by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery, when he noted that ‘contrary to popular and even learned belief [. . .] the most dynamic and powerful social force in the colonies was the slave himself’.46 James subsequently extended his analysis to argue that in both Britain and the United States, ‘the slave community itself was at the heart of the abolitionist movement’.47 This has become an increasingly central approach, with books such as Peter Fryer’s Staying Power steering attention away from the ‘Clapham Saints’ and towards those Africans whose acts of resistance made a ‘substantial, though largely forgotten, contribution’ to the abolition campaign. 48 Likewise, Robin Blackburn, in The Overthrow of Colonial

Introduction 13

Slavery, emphasises the part the slaves played in their own emancipation, as well as looking at metropolitan social, cultural, and economic factors, to produce an account of abolition that rejects both monocausal and narrowly Eurocentric explanations for its development.49 Blackburn’s approach has been influential and, increasingly, both histories and critical studies of slavery take a broader view. Accordingly, this book, although it focuses on the rhetoric of the metropolitan debate, pays attention to the voices of slaves and former slaves in that debate by examining the writing of Ignatius Sancho, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano. Despite these efforts, Marcus Wood reminds us that ‘the experience of the slaves is, in a very real sense, lost to the conventional resources of historical reconstruction’.50 This is undeniable. Indeed, it is hard to think of another group in history that has been subject to so much misrepresentation by others while being itself so systematically denied the right to self-representation. Wood’s work on the (mis)representation of slaves has centred on the thesis that much material ‘disseminated ostensibly as anti-slavery propaganda’ was in fact, sado-masochistic pornography, while ‘bondage, body art, sado-masochism, mystical religious cults, the constructions of black male and female sexuality by whites [. . .] evolved, more or less directly, out of the submerged and devious reaction of successive western societies to the inheritances of Atlantic slavery’.51 This is a large claim, or series of claims, by no means established in Wood’s work; yet he does successfully show that in ‘the new cultural history of pornography, focused on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the black body is massively conspicuous by its absence’.52 Wood may not convince all readers that abolitionists were principally motivated by a desire to view sado-masochistic pornography (although, no doubt, some were) but he does remind us very strongly that the discourse of slavery and abolition is thoroughly entwined with other early-modern and modern discourses about the body, the mind, the soul, society, economy, and the fundamental questions asked by every generation about human nature and humanity’s place in the universe. We can no longer approach writing about slavery as somehow separate, or as a special case. Rather, we must see it as central to the development of European, American, and African culture, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, by examining the intersection of the three important discourses of rhetoric, sensibility, and abolitionism, at an important moment in the history of each, intends to contribute to the growing body of work that recognises and proclaims this centrality.

14 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility As a work primarily of literary criticism, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility examines the rhetoric of sensibility in the abolition debate broadly along genre lines. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical groundwork of the book by establishing the existence and principal characteristics of the rhetoric of sensibility. To do so, it examines eighteenthcentury ideas about rhetoric and investigates them as a site of interaction between politics and the sentimental. It locates the rhetoric of sensibility among the ‘new rhetorics’ which contended with traditional (‘neoclassical’ or ‘Ciceronian’) rhetoric. It contrasts the work of these two schools and, in particular, it looks at the rhetorical theory of the philosophers John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, as well as the rhetorical system of Hugh Blair, and considers them in turn as practitioners of the ‘new rhetoric’. It suggests that, with the exception of Locke, what these writers had in common as rhetoricians was an overriding belief in the persuasive power of sympathy, a belief that caused them to advance notions of rhetoric that taught that shared emotions were as or more effective than intellectual arguments in securing the agreement of an audience or readership. This approach, which I call sentimental rhetoric or the rhetoric of sensibility, became available during the mid- to late eighteenth century. It was not entirely new, however, and as well as adding some new strategies, it made use of several pre-existing rhetorical tropes and arguments, particularly those allied with the category of artificial proof known as pathos. Chapter 1 concludes by identifying the main characteristics of the rhetoric of sensibility. It introduces terms for several proofs and tropes of this rhetoric, which are briefly illustrated by examples from a broad range of late eighteenth-century writing. Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters that consider the way ‘literary’ writings used sentimental rhetoric to advance abolitionist ideas. It argues that sentimental novels and letters from as early as the 1760s contributed to the development both of a sentimental rhetoric and of a popular discourse of antislavery. It begins by examining abolitionist or ameliorationist passages in Sarah Scott’s History of Sir George Ellison and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné. In each of these passages, the primary desire seems to be to elicit a sentimental response, using the techniques of sentimental rhetoric described in Chapter 1, but the result is that antislavery narrative becomes locked into the discourse of sensibility. This relationship is confirmed by reading The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African as a variety of epistolary novel and through

Introduction 15

an examination of the sentimental framing of abolitionism in Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton. Chapter 3 is the second of two chapters that consider the way ‘literary’ writings, in this case poetry, used sentimental rhetoric to advance the idea of antislavery. It shows how John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s poem The Dying Negro was developed in response to the celebrated Mansfield decision of 1772, which gave some measure of protection to slaves in England, but which was widely flouted. Closely reading the variant first and third editions, it demonstrates that the authors of this thoroughly sentimental poem progressively hardened its political attitude between 1773 and 1775, and yet continued to maintain an increasingly problematic relationship with the rhetoric of sensibility. In its second section, Chapter 3 considers the boom in abolitionist verse between 1787 and 1792, reading poems by Hannah More and William Roscoe among others, and arguing that this verse paradoxically both used and denounced sentimental rhetoric in a strategy seemingly designed to counter the attacks of proslavery critics. To illustrate this, it shows how both the poetry and its reviews in The Gentleman’s Magazine were the occasion of a tussle for editorial control over the influential journal. The chapter concludes by reading William Cowper’s antislavery poems in the context of popular balladry, demonstrating that Cowper’s fusion of the ballad form with the language and argument of sentimental verse was both popular and innovative, and thoroughly immersed in the rhetoric of sensibility. Chapter 4 examines the adoption of sentimental rhetoric by both proslavery and antislavery pamphlet writers of the 1780s, including James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, James Tobin, Gordon Turnbull, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano. It argues that Ramsay and Clarkson’s influential essays relied on sentimental parables when asserting the common humanity of Africans and Europeans, although the sentimentality of these parables often tended to reinforce primitivist stereotypes of Africans, particularly in Ramsay’s work. Clarkson’s work, it argues, is self-consciously written as rhetoric, with a particular emphasis on the sublime possibilities of pathos: the category of neo-classical rhetoric that dealt with extremes of feeling. It shows that proslavery writers responded to these texts in sentimental terms by diverting attention away from the suffering of slaves and towards the sufferings of the British poor, in particular, miners and child chimney sweeps. The chapter reads the proslavery material in the light of contemporary reviews by Cugoano and Equiano who, as former slaves, had first-hand knowledge of the system they opposed. It concludes with a discussion of the sentimental rhetoric used by these two writers in their own texts, both

16 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

polemical slave narratives and prototypical examples of black British writing. Throughout this chapter, attention is focused on the ways in which ‘political’ writers made use of the ‘literary’ tropes of sentimental rhetoric in a way that, although now familiar, was then highly innovative. Chapter 5 asks how far the most problematic texts of the abolition debate, records of spoken oratory, can be observed to be using sentimental rhetoric. It recognises that these records are far from perfect and that it is not straightforward to establish whether this rhetoric was present in the spoken event or was added by the reporter. Nevertheless, it argues that sentimental rhetoric can clearly be seen at work in a variety of records of written events, especially sermons, parliamentary reports, and legal reports. The chapter is organised into three sections which correspond to the three main areas of classical rhetoric. Under the heading of demonstrative rhetoric, it reads antislavery sermons of the period, including those by John Wesley, Joseph Priestley, and Beilby Porteus, arguing that many made use of the readily sentimentalised parable of the Good Samaritan or invoked Christ as a sentimental hero. Under the heading of deliberative rhetoric, it examines newspaper and periodical reports of William Wilberforce’s abolition speech of 1789, showing its apparent sentimental strategies but arguing that a definitive version of the speech is impossible to reach. The chapter concludes with a discussion of forensic rhetoric. Here, the representation of two well-known eighteenth-century trials in the periodical press is shown to have brought sentimental rhetoric even into law-reporting, perhaps the area of public discourse least amenable to a sentimental interpretation. Chapter 6 is a short conclusion, charting the supposed collapse of sentimental rhetoric in the 1790s. Reading work by pamphleteers of the decade, with a special emphasis on the abolition lecture given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1795, the book concludes by arguing that the rhetoric of sensibility did not disappear with the eighteenth century, but was adapted by subsequent generations for new uses, although it was no longer the dominant mode of the antislavery movement. While British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility cannot claim to be a comprehensive survey of abolitionist literature in the late eighteenth century, it differs from most existing treatments of the subject in the range of categories of writing it considers. My intention throughout has been to chart the relationships between seemingly disparate forms of writing, from poems to law reports, to show that while the most sentimental of poets or novelists were likely to deploy political or legal arguments against slavery, so too were the most dry and plodding of eighteenth-century political or legal writers likely to make use of sentimental rhetoric.

Introduction 17

Likewise, I have not confined my attention to abolitionist writing only: as I show in several places, proslavery writers also engaged with sentimental rhetoric, sometimes to denounce it, but often to make use of it in ways that are as skilful as they are insidious. Not all discussion in the eighteenth-century slavery debate was conducted in sentimental terms, but in this book I hope to have provided sufficient and varied evidence to show that the rhetoric of sensibility was a readily identifiable and widely deployed persuasive tool that was used in a variety of forms by participants on both sides of the argument.

1 The Rhetoric of Sensibility

Sentimental literature was characterised by an interest in feelings and emotional states. Much of this literature is devoted to stories of woe and moments of distress, and the quintessential sentimental moment is when one or more of the characters begin to weep. At these moments, it is often made clear that the reader is supposed to weep too, and sentimental authors put a great deal of effort into bringing this about. The strategies they used are here called sentimental rhetoric, or the rhetoric of sensibility, and it is the purpose of this book to show how that rhetoric worked in the debate over the slave trade. These are loose terms, however, and include a great number of rhetorical procedures that were familiar from antiquity, as well as some that seemed more in tune with the eighteenth century. Yet the theory of rhetoric, as well as its day-to-day practice by writers and orators, was being reappraised in the eighteenth century, to the extent that modern critics have come to recognise a group of approaches to rhetoric that can usefully be considered under the umbrella of the ‘new rhetorics’. I argue that the rhetoric of sensibility is located within this group, and this chapter examines in outline the scope and the philosophical underpinnings of this rhetoric, before concluding by identifying its main characteristics, and introducing terms for several of its proofs and tropes.

The scope of the rhetoric of sensibility In practice, sentimental rhetoric was a collection of distinct and recognisable rhetorical procedures, with an emphasis on the depiction of physical and emotional suffering, some of which were derived from classical rhetoric and some of which were entirely new. Before outlining these procedures in detail, however, we should consider to whom this rhetoric 18

The Rhetoric of Sensibility 19

might have been addressed, and to which arguments or debates it might usefully have been extended. By definition, sentimental rhetoric is in some measure allied to sentimental literature. In addition, those who used it tended to deviate considerably from both the proofs and the tropes of neo-classical rhetoric. It thus seems likely that the rhetoric of sensibility was aimed towards those who enjoyed modern literature more than classical literature. This was clearly a broad church, including not only those who had received a classical education, but also those who had received very little education. Equally broad is the scope of the arguments to which it could be applied. Although, seemingly applicable only to arguments which involve a victim; in fact, most political and judicial questions potentially or actually involve winners and losers. Thus, the sentimental orator or author will normally seek out exceptional instances of suffering and emphasise them in order to gain the reader’s or hearer’s sympathy. In some cases the instances of suffering appear somewhat synthetic, bogus even, but in all cases victims will be found and their sufferings dwelt on. In scope, then, this mode of rhetoric is almost indefinitely extendible. Sentimental rhetoric tended to focus on the emotional or physical response of victims. For this reason, it was often applied to causes that in the eighteenth century would have been described as benevolent or philanthropic. Indeed, the growth of sensibility as a popular literary phenomenon and philanthropy as a social force are seemingly related, if only because they occurred at roughly the same time. This may be a coincidence but, more likely, it reflects a complex brew of social, economic, and cultural conditions peculiar to the eighteenth century. In recent years, historians and cultural critics have attempted to explain sensibility and philanthropy in their historical context. Paul Langford, for example, links active or philanthropic sensibility with rising affluence among the middling sort, calling it the ‘code of manners’ of a ‘polite and commercial people’.1 John Brewer, who sees politeness as the characteristic of the aristocratic class and sees in sensibility a reaction to the excesses of aristocratic material indulgence, does not deny that the middle classes were increasingly the arbiters of ‘high culture’ which ‘ceasing to be the handmaiden of royal politics [. . .] became the partner of commerce’.2 This connection with economic growth is important. No doubt the citizens of an increasingly wealthy and stable society, such as that of late eighteenth-century Britain, have more leisure to reflect on the sufferings of others, a smaller likelihood of encountering those sufferings, and a greater economic capacity to relieve suffering when they encounter it. Accordingly, in the same way that ‘conduct books’

20 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

prescribed correct forms of social behaviour for the middle and upper classes, much philanthropic sentimental literature suggested correct forms of economic behaviour for the wealthy—or for those upwardly mobile enough to imagine that they were wealthy.3 While much sentimental literature deals with economic misfortune, the sufferings of the body are emphasised too. Philanthropy is in one of its forms a reaction against physical violence and it is arguable that, in increasingly peaceful and prosperous eighteenth-century England, a growing proportion of the population became psychologically conditioned to regard any sort of violence with abhorrence.4 If this is true then the realisation that, in the case of slavery, a major branch of the national trade was engaged in systematic torture and violence may well have produced psychologically deep-seated feelings of shame and repugnance. Other forms of violence, such as starvation due to poverty, or even cruelty to animals, were increasingly thought to be no less painful to the victim. That an increasing number of violent ‘crimes’ could have been perceived where previously there had only been misdemeanours, or even usual practice, is a reflection of the increasing sensibility of British people, insofar as sensibility means awareness of the feelings of others. The cult of ‘virtue in distress’ was an expression of this growing awareness. Readers appear to have increasingly lost their desire to cause distress in enemies while at the same time facing less distress themselves. Accordingly, literary representations of distressed victims increased in their power to arouse sympathy, whether the sufferers were victims of male power, of economic misfortune, or of slave traders. As this power to move grew in importance, it became increasingly effective for orators and political writers to seek to manipulate their audiences’ sympathies for the victims of violence and oppression. Indeed, so powerful was the rhetoric of sympathy and sensibility in this period that it became useful for some persuaders to portray aggressors as victims, and to ask audiences to shed a sympathetic tear over the fate of those who had never suffered at all. While cynical applications of the rhetoric of sensibility were common enough in the later eighteenth century, in most cases they existed only because the advocates of philanthropy had already managed to seize the moral high ground. Thus, the target audience for sentimental rhetoric was as broad as the range of issues on which that rhetoric was brought to bear—although in reality those sentimental writers who opposed philanthropic projects usually failed to be convincing. Sentimental rhetoric, therefore, was in most cases an agent of philanthropy. The philanthropic audience was extremely diverse. It ranged from professional politicians such as William Wilberforce to 14-year-old

The Rhetoric of Sensibility 21

schoolgirls like Harriet Falconar who in 1788 produced, with her 17-yearold sister Maria, a book of sentimental poems opposing slavery.5 It was a politically diverse group as well. Evangelical Christians such as Wilberforce tended to be conservative on many social issues while some of the radicals of the late century—Mary Wollstonecraft is a famous example—launched stinging attacks on sentimentalism while themselves making use of the rhetoric of sensibility. The scope of sentimental rhetoric was therefore potentially very broad. It could appeal to political radicals and conservatives, to the young and to the old and, because it could work largely without theory, to the educated and to the ignorant. It was a suitable mode to be employed whenever there was a victim who was in need of sympathy. For these reasons, it quickly became a branch of rhetoric associated with the burgeoning philanthropic movements of the middle to late eighteenth century.

Old and new rhetorics in the eighteenth century Sentimental rhetoric did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. Rather, it was bound up with other movements in literature, in philosophy, and in the teaching of rhetoric itself. This is well illustrated in the work of Adam Smith, best known now for The Wealth of Nations (1776), in which he theorised the workings of an economic system derived from the combined transactions of free individuals, and for The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he theorised the workings of a moral system derived from the combined sensibilities of free individuals. Yet Smith was also a rhetorician, whose lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh would come to be seen as a defining moment in the development of the ‘new rhetoric’, as well as defining moment in the development of English literature as a subject.6 Smith looked back with some contempt on the many textbooks of rhetoric which had appeared in Britain over the previous three centuries. These works, he argued, placed too much emphasis on long lists of categories of rhetoric, and demanded that students commit to memory the names and descriptions of various figures of speech and thought, without sufficient explanation of the context in which they might be used. It was, he argued: From the consideration of these figures and the divisions and subdivisions of them, that so many systems of rhetorick both ancient and modern have been formed. They are generally a very silly set of books and not at all instructive.7

22 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

Smith could well have had John Holmes’s The Art of Rhetoric Made Easy in mind. This popular textbook, published in 1739, devotes more than half its length to listing figures of speech and, in case we are in any doubt as to their usefulness, Holmes is fulsome in their praise in his preface: What Grace and Beauty are to be met with in FIGURES, what Delight and extensive Significancy are contain’d in TROPES, what nervous Force and harmonious Pith we experience in REPETITIONS or Turns, and what Power and Inexpressible Influence of Persuasion in proper PRONUNCIATION and consonant Action.8 Holmes’s textbook is a good eighteenth-century example, but handbooks of rhetoric in English had been popular from the sixteenth century, each adapting classical rhetoric for the English market. This tradition, familiar through the work of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, was understood to be a science comprised of a number of rules which could—and should—be learned.9 These rules were often thought sufficient to provide a complete system of rhetoric for the instruction of any student and, for the elite, proficiency in the art of persuasion was seen as an essential requirement for a career in politics, in the law, or in the pulpit. This system, usually referred to as either Ciceronian or classical rhetoric, was primarily understood as being the study of correct public speaking. The pejorative use of the word ‘rhetoric’, by which it has come to signify hollow words, uttered without conviction, usually for personal political advancement, was certainly known to the eighteenth century, but was not the dominant usage. Samuel Johnson, for example, did not allude to it in his dictionary. For him ‘rhetoric’ had two senses: ‘the act of speaking not merely with propriety, but with art and elegance’ and, more plainly, ‘the power of persuasion; oratory’. Johnson may have been influenced by John Holmes’s compendious definition of 1739: A. RHETORIC is the Art of Speaking or Writing well and ornamentally on any Subject. Its Principal End is to Instruct, Persuade, and Please. Its Chief Office is to seek what may be most conducive to Persuasion. B. The Subject it treats on is any Thing whatever; whether it be Moral, Philosophical, or Divine.10

The Rhetoric of Sensibility 23

Although many equally compendious textbooks of rhetoric appeared during the eighteenth century, the rules remained essentially the same. The student of classical rhetoric could expect to learn that rhetoric was divided into three main areas: those of judicial or forensic rhetoric, which was the rhetoric of the law courts; deliberative rhetoric, which was the rhetoric of political debate; and demonstrative rhetoric, which dealt with praise and ceremony. Within each of these areas the rules for drawing up and presenting a speech or a piece of polemical writing were broadly the same and were discussed under five headings known as the five arts or the five faculties of rhetoric. These, to give them their Latin names, were inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio, which can be translated into English as invention, arrangement, style, memory, and action or delivery. Each of these faculties was further subdivided until every possible aspect of rhetoric was covered. Invention concerned itself with proving an argument, either by ‘inartificial’ means such as the production of hard evidence, or by ‘artificial’ means such as by reason or by appealing to the audience’s feelings about the case. In court, for example, a smoking gun would fit into the first category while the deductions of a Sherlock Holmes or a tearful protestation of innocence would fit into the second. ‘Artificial’ proof had three subdivisions: ethos (ethical proof), logos (logical proof), and pathos (emotional proof). Ethos concerned itself with the speaker or subject’s personality and standing, logos was particularly concerned with deductive reasoning, while pathos was concerned with appeals to the audience’s emotions. The faculty of invention also contained many standard arguments known as topics and commonplaces, long lists of which would appear in textbooks. Arrangement laid down clear rules for structuring an argument, typically with seven steps to be followed from the introduction to the conclusion. The faculty of elocutio, or style (the faculty which most irked Adam Smith) provided rules on how to fit the style to the subject. Students of rhetoric could choose from the grand, the middle, or the low style. Great emphasis was laid on the qualities of style, which students learned were purity, clarity, decorum, and ornament. Under the heading of ornament appeared the long lists of figures of speech and figures of thought, sometimes several hundred in all. Memory, the fourth faculty, was largely concerned with systems of memory training, essential in the eighteenth century and before, as most speakers were expected to perform from memory rather than read from notes. Delivery, the last of the five faculties and in the eighteenth century known as action, laid down rules for the presentation of the argument. Like memory it applied only to spoken rhetoric and concerned

24 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

itself with the tone and amplification of the speaker’s voice as well as with the body language of the speaker.11 Before the middle of the eighteenth century, the majority of textbooks of rhetoric varied little from this pattern other than to emphasise one or another of the faculties or to omit some of these categories altogether. Thomas Farnaby’s Troposchematologia (1648), for example, dealt only with style and gave prominent attention to the figures of speech.12 However, this was not the only possible narrowing of the scope of rhetoric. One group of eighteenth-century rhetoricians saw as most important the fifth faculty of rhetoric, pronuntiatio, the translation of which caused almost as many problems as the argument over how it should be used. While the standard translation in the eighteenth century was ‘action’, amongst one group of rhetoricians the translation adopted was ‘elocution’. Like some pre-Socratic rhetoricians, such as Gorgias, this group had relatively little concern for the content of a speech and stressed that the most important part of rhetoric was the ability to present a speech well using standardised intonation, gesture, and dialect. As several critics have pointed out, dialect was the key. Many of the most prominent elocutionists originated in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and their interest in promoting a standard—typically southern English— dialect was associated with the complex power relationships between England and her Celtic neighbours.13 The elocutionary movement, as it was known, was a departure from the mainstream of rhetorical theory and practice. Nevertheless, its popularity provides evidence that traditional rhetoric was no longer meeting the needs of a rapidly changing society. Elocution was principally concerned with spoken discourse but this was increasingly anachronistic in a society in which the publication and influence of printed texts was expanding at an enormous rate. What was needed was not merely good elocution but a system of rhetoric that would embrace the opportunities offered by this rapid growth in printed material. Since most newly printed texts were modern texts, rather than editions or translations of classical standards, it was no longer appropriate for rhetoric to take solely as its model the rules laid down by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the discipline of rhetoric was overdue for change. Modern critics have come to recognise a movement in eighteenthcentury rhetoric which encompassed different writers and teachers, not all of them in agreement, whose works possess enough similarities to be grouped together under the heading of ‘the new rhetoric’.14 This was not an organised movement, but merely a tendency to reject the more cumbersome and restricting forms of neo-classical rhetoric and to fit

The Rhetoric of Sensibility 25

what remained to the philosophical, political, and social realities of the eighteenth century. Within this loose grouping there was room for dozens of contributors, with as many different slants of opinion and, despite varied attempts to define the new rhetoric, it amounts to little more than a concern over the use of the broad main areas of traditional rhetoric: scope, proof, and style. Although it was an eighteenth-century development, its antecedents can be found in earlier years. An important text in its development was John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). At the end of a chapter entitled ‘Of the Abuse of Words’, Locke attacks both the traditional forms of rhetoric and the practitioners of that rhetoric: If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow, that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheat: and therefore however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform and instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or the person that makes use of them [. . .] ’Tis evident how much men love to deceive, and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation: and, I doubt not, but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality in me to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing Beauties in it, to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And ’tis in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.15 Locke’s language is not entirely original. In the previous decade, Samuel Butler had observed in Hudibras (1662–1668) that: Doubtless the pleasure is as great Of being cheated as to cheat; As lookers-on feel most delight, That least perceive a jugler’s slight.16 Moreover, Locke’s argument comes out of a long tradition of suspicion of rhetoric, in particular pathos, going back to ancient Greece. More

26 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

recently, the inadequacy of neo-classical rhetoric for communicating philosophical (scientific) ideas had been articulated by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605). This book was both important and influential: according to Brian Vickers, its programme for ‘the reformation of science [. . .] swept through virtually all social, political, or religious groups in the seventeenth century’.17 Yet it was not a finished new rhetoric: in Howell’s words, ‘although it cannot be said to have proposed a complete new rhetoric [. . .] it did indicate that rhetoric had obligations to learned as well as to popular discourse’.18 This new understanding of the place and purpose of rhetoric may not have been eagerly taken up by seventeenth-century schoolmasters, but it was certainly adopted by members of the Royal Society who advocated a plainer style of rhetoric for scientific discourse. Locke’s criticisms of rhetoric should certainly be read in this context. Yet, bedded in wider seventeenth-century discussion of rhetoric though they may have been, Locke’s comments are significant in that they bring together and pay close attention to two of the three main concerns of the new rhetoric: scope and style. His criticisms of ornate rhetorical style, ‘all the artificial and figurative application of words’, are straightforward enough. Being ‘perfect cheat’, eloquence is unsuitable for the dissemination of knowledge, although he is prepared to tolerate these ‘arts of deceiving’ where they lead to pleasure. Locke clearly has no problem with literary eloquence, nor does he see the use of rhetoric as inappropriate in the context of ‘harangues and popular addresses’. Nevertheless, his assertion that rhetoric is inappropriate in ‘all discourses that pretend to inform and instruct’ suggests that he is not merely discussing the scope of rhetoric but is also questioning the underlying philosophical basis for the traditionally dominant system of rhetorical proof. Aristotle had recognised that proof could be reasoned both inductively and deductively, but induction (which in rhetoric he called ‘paradigm’ or ‘example’) was subordinated to deduction with the syllogism, and the syllogism’s near relation the enthymeme, given preference over paradigm.19 For this reason (and at some risk of being simplistic) we can say that traditional rhetoric, with its dependence on deductive reasoning and the enthymeme, provided an imperfect medium for the dissemination of the new scientific knowledge which was founded on experimentation and observation and which relied more on inductive than deductive reasoning. This problem goes to the core of traditional systems of rhetorical proof. Textbooks of rhetoric, as we have seen, provided long lists of topics and commonplaces among which the approved syllogisms and enthymemes could be found. Many of these originated with Aristotle. All were derived from classical philosophy.

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The logical proofs provided by the traditional rhetoric therefore constituted a closed system in which the orator could do nothing but enumerate old themes. The problem for Locke and for all empirical scientists was that very often these themes could not support new advances in learning. Locke argued that traditional rhetoric was ‘perfect cheat’ because he understood that it was premised on a closed and thus flawed system of philosophical proof. The implications of Locke’s views are that, since the patterns of traditional rhetorical proof within the faculty of invention are no longer to be trusted, the topics and commonplaces become an irrelevance, used by woolly and unoriginal thinkers only. The only acceptable proof to the scientist was inartificial proof. The artificial proofs of ethos, pathos, and logos, which had come to dominate this faculty of rhetoric, were of little use to the scientific thinker who inferred from actual observation and wished to pass on his findings without ornament. Classical rhetoric, which had never been much concerned with inartificial proof, was clearly defective in this respect. In this way, Locke established a fundamental schism within rhetoric in which the art of persuading was divided between the arts, opinion, amusement, and the emotions on one side, and teaching, the sciences, fact, instruction, and intellect on the other. Unlike Locke, David Hume appeared not to criticise eloquence but rather to lament its demise. ‘In ancient times’, he tells us in his essay ‘Of Eloquence’ (1742), ‘no work of genius was thought to require so great parts and capacity, as the speaking in public’. Not so with modern times: Of all the polite and learned nations, ENGLAND alone possesses a popular government, or admits into the legislature such numerous assemblies as can be supposed to lie under the domain of eloquence. But what has ENGLAND to boast of in this particular? Hume’s argument is that, since rhetoric is associated with popular government, or democracy, and since the democratic element in the British constitution was comparatively strong, then for these reasons eloquence should be thriving. Unfortunately, it was not; a situation which Hume lays at the door of the politicians who have bored their audience by either following the rules of rhetoric too doggedly, thus appearing wooden and studied, or by not following them at all. Hume concludes by advocating a middle way. He argues that: Their great affectation of extemporary discourses has made them reject all order and method, which seems so requisite to argument,

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and without which it is scarcely possible to produce an entire conviction on the mind. It is not, that one would recommend many divisions in a public discourse, unless the subject very evidently offer them: But it is easy, without this formality, to observe a method, and make that method conspicuous to the hearers, who will be infinitely pleased to see the arguments rise naturally from one another, and will retain a more thorough persuasion, than can arise from the strongest reasons, which are thrown together in confusion.20 Hume’s essay has prompted debate among critics keen to pigeonhole Hume as either in favour of or opposed to classical rhetoric. Wilber Howell, on the one hand, asserts that the essay is ‘an endorsement of the values of the old and a denial of the leading tenets of the new rhetoric’.21 By contrast, Adam Potkay has argued that the paradoxes inherent in Hume’s essay reflect a far larger debate about the role of eloquence in eighteenth-century society. Briefly stated, Potkay maintains that ‘eloquence [. . .] becomes a vivid illustration—if not the literary origin—of the doctrine of sympathy at the heart of Hume’s moral philosophy’. He argues that ‘in “Of Eloquence,” sympathy explains how the audience “accompanies” the orator in his “bold and excessive” passions’, and that ‘the orator is ultimately represented less as an artist manipulating his audience’s sympathy than as a man feeling with men’. Moreover, there are significant political consequences of this theory. ‘The politics of eloquence’, Potkay argues, ‘like the ethics of sympathy on which it relies, is fundamentally arational. Hume’s ideal democracy relies upon an intercourse of hearts.’ He concludes by observing that ‘for philosophers less sanguine about the justness of our untutored responses, the passionate appeal of oratory provides a perennial source of anxiety’.22 Although centred on oratory, this observation accords with many of the contemporary criticisms levelled against sentimental writing. Eighteenth-century critics (who in many cases were very far from being philosophers) frequently voiced their disquiet at the way in which the ‘arational’ discourse of sensibility appealed to the undereducated, in particular to the young, to women, and to people whose social position denied them a formal education. It could thus be argued that a theory of sensibility based on Hume’s works actively threatened both cultural and social hierarchies in the eighteenth century. There are objections to this: not least that Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature was largely an unread book in the eighteenth century and that the initially conservative appearance of his essay on eloquence was almost certainly the reading favoured by most who took up the book. But this is not to say that the

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link between sentiment and rhetoric was insignificant, or that Hume’s widely read essay was without influence. While Hume has relatively little to say on the scope of rhetoric, other than to argue that it should regain some of the territory it had anciently held, and little new to say on rhetorical style, he makes important additions to the theory of rhetorical proof. In effect, Hume is calling for a resurgence in the use of that part of ‘artificial proof’ known as pathos. Rather than seeing pathos as a thing in itself, beyond philosophical explanation, he provides it with a mechanism, the theory of sympathy. For Hume, a good orator was a man who could touch the hearts of his audience: ‘the principles of every passion’, he tells us, ‘and of every sentiment, is in every man; and when touched properly, they rise to life, and warm the heart’.23 In ‘Of Eloquence’ Hume is not promoting, as Howell suggests, a simple endorsement of the old and a denial of the new. Rather, he is calling for a reconfiguration of the old to bring rhetoric in line with the growing movement to bring emotions to the fore. Fourteen years later, in A Philosophical Enquiry (1756), Edmund Burke set out to explore the terms ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’. In the process, he articulated an approach to sympathy and to the passions that has a direct bearing on the development of the rhetoric of sensibility. In particular, his belief in the affective power of rhetoric, combined with his interest in the reasons why we appear to enjoy representations of pain or suffering, creates an approach to rhetoric, if not an actual system of rhetoric, which is distinctly sentimental. Burke identifies ‘three principal links’ in the ‘great chain of society’ which are ‘sympathy, imitation, and ambition’, and it is: By the first of these passions that we enter into the concerns of others; that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost any thing which men can do or suffer [. . .] It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself.24 Burke’s analysis is voyeuristic, imagining that the ‘delight’ we feel when sympathising with the distresses of others, particularly when those distresses are conveyed to us via the ‘affecting arts’, is little more than a species of relief at not being the person who suffers. Burke tackles this problem by introducing a social and religious dimension. ‘Our Creator’, he tells us (without any scriptural evidence), ‘has designed we should be united by the bond of sympathy.’ Moreover, society is not

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held together merely by this sympathetic bond. The ‘delight’ we feel at viewing a scene of misery is also mixed with some positive pain. Thus, society is held together by a fusion of the two principles which many Enlightenment thinkers considered mutually exclusive: altruism and selfishness. The ‘delight’ that we experience in witnessing the distresses of others (a necessary result of the God-given ‘bond of sympathy’) ‘hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer’. Finally, Burke insists that this entire process is ‘antecedent to any reasoning’, that is, entirely emotional or irrational.25 Burke’s argument is not essentially original and, in particular, it draws on the work of Locke and Hume. It was, however, a timely and to some extent an influential addition to the growing body of philosophical literature which dealt with the concept of sympathy. But Burke was also opening a discussion of the use of sympathy in the art of rhetoric. His thoughts follow on directly from Hume’s, with the difference that Burke asserts more firmly that rhetoric is essentially emotional. In the final pages of the Philosophical Enquiry he turns his attention to ‘words’ as a source of the sublime. Earlier, he had made it clear that the sublime is ‘productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’.26 Here, his argument turns upon the power of language to raise this strong emotion. Burke argues that words produce ‘three effects in the mind of the hearer’. Of these, ‘the first, is the sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the thing signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing’.27 The latter is the most important for his theory of language. The sublime, or any of the emotions which tend towards producing the sublime, are not found in simple sounds or pictures. Rather, there is an interaction between those simple representations of external realities and ‘the soul’, that is, the irrational, emotional part that makes up the self. The implication is that the sublime in literature (which he calls ‘poetry and rhetoric’) is a purely internal phenomenon suggested by the sounds and pictures of words, and that we feel the sublime regardless of whether there is any actual sublime object or event brought before our view. The mechanism by which we do this is sympathy, with language the agent of the sympathetic impulse: Poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.28

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In Burke’s view, that entire category of writing or speaking which came under the rhetoricians’ headings of ‘artificial’ or ‘artistic’ existed to ‘affect’, that is, to appeal to the emotions; the medium through which these emotions could be transmitted was words, and the mechanism was sympathy. Almost at the conclusion of the Enquiry, he brings together all his thoughts on words, feelings, and sympathy to argue why exactly words are such a powerful persuasive tool: We take an extraordinary part in the passions of others, and [. . .] we are easily affected and brought into sympathy by any tokens which are shewn of them; and there are no tokens which can express all the circumstances of most passions so fully as words; so that if a person speaks upon any subject, he can not only convey the subject to you, but likewise the manner in which he is himself affected by it.29 This is a highly sentimentalised account of communication between feeling individuals whose opinions are formed according to their passions (feelings) and modified according to the passions of others. In Burke’s rhetorical world, communication—and particularly persuasion—do not merely employ the emotions as one set of tools amongst many. Rather, the emotions are the main thing which words are used to convey. The implications for the discipline of rhetoric are clear: to persuade, one must pay more attention to the emotional state of the audience than to the logical proof of the argument. If your argument involves the suffering of others, that means one must go straight for the heart. One of the most celebrated examples of sentimental philosophy is Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments which first appeared in 1759, two years after Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Smith, largely following Hume, argues that ‘mutual sympathy’ is the fundamental human attribute that allows people to live together in societies. It is our ability to sympathise both with other peoples’ joys and with their misfortunes that allows us to behave with propriety towards them. Knowing how we would feel under a particular set of circumstances causes us to respond appropriately when we find another in those circumstances. Knowing what would bring ourselves pain or joy allows us to behave in a way which promotes happiness and prevents distress in others. From these simple, if eminently contestable, premises, Smith’s work blossoms out into a detailed analysis of society, an analysis which is both a work of moral philosophy and a sustained piece of rhetorical writing in itself. John Rae, Smith’s biographer, tells us that ‘during the winter of 1748–49 he made a most successful beginning as a public lecturer by delivering

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a course on the then comparatively untried subject of English literature’.30 Rae laments that the text of these lectures were burnt shortly before Smith’s death, on Smith’s orders, but a copy, made by students in 1762–1763, appeared in an Aberdeenshire library sale in 1958. These lectures, subsequently hailed as a defining moment in the development of the new rhetoric, went unpublished in the eighteenth century, but this does not necessarily mean that they were not influential. As we shall see, much of Smith’s thinking was reflected in the published works of Hugh Blair. More to the point, a generation of Scottish students were exposed to Smith’s ideas while his thoughts on rhetoric were circulated in manuscript among the intelligentsia of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Smith’s Lectures include twenty-nine of thirty lectures (the first is missing) which present us with a complete system of rhetoric, albeit one which is markedly different from the neo-classical systems of Holmes and Farnaby. Turning away from the ‘silly’ sets of tropes and figures, Smith instead develops a whole theory of communication rather than a mere system of persuasion. Central to this theory is the idea of sympathy, an idea which is developed from the Theory of Moral Sentiments to provide a mechanism for communication.31 This grounding in sympathy is often more implicit than explicit, although if its philosophical basis is less fully developed here than in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, this must surely have been because he could have pointed his students towards the Theory. Nonetheless, sympathy is discussed in several places in the lectures, particularly in the sixth lecture, shortly before Smith’s comments on the silliness of tropes and figures: When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is poss〈ess〉ed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and clevery hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it. It matters not the least whether the figures of speech are introduced or not.32 The incorrect spelling of ‘cleverly’ reflects the student’s transcription of the lecture. So too does the student’s emphasis of the phrase ‘by sympathy’, one of only a very few phrases emphasised in the lectures. We can only guess at Smith’s gestures or intonation as he spoke these words. It is telling, however, that the student thought them to be significant. Smith is rejecting most of the baggage of the neo-classical movement in rhetoric. What matters only is that the speaker communicates effectively with his audience and to do this he must express his sentiments in such

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a way that the audience instantly understands and shares in them. Figures of speech work against this sympathetic exchange as their artificiality may suggest dishonesty or, at the very least, place barriers between the speaker and the audience. But there is more to sympathy than plain language. Establishing an audience’s sympathy calls for plenty of artistry. It may even call for a certain sort of orator: a man of feeling. Traditional rhetoric included character under the heading of ethos, which was a form of artificial proof. If the audience knew that the speaker, or the person the speaker defended, was an honest man, they would be inclined to accept the speaker’s statements as being true. Smith attacks the simplicity of this position by noting that Cicero’s Oration in defence of Milo, though fine rhetoric, is unsustainable. Cicero’s dependence on ethos leads him to declare that Milo could not have killed Clodius because ‘he had no motive, tho they had been squabling and fighting every day and 〈he〉 had even declared his intention to kill him; That it was unsuitable to his character altho he had killed 20 men before; and that he had no opportunity altho we know he did kill him’.33 Clearly, the simple assertion of good character was nonsense when all the facts pointed against it. Just as clearly, we should not automatically assume that a speaker or writer is telling the truth on any occasion merely because they have a reputation for honesty. But curiously, given this position, Smith is at some pains to point out the importance of character in a rhetorician. More interestingly, his notions of those characteristics that make for a good rhetorician show a marked similarity to the sentimental model of the man of feeling. In his seventh lecture, Smith draws a portrait of two hypothetical characters: the plain man and the simple man. The plain man is an irritable fellow who ‘gives his opinion bluntly and affirms without condescending to give any reason for his doing so’. Worse still, ‘he never gives way either to joy or grief’ and ‘compassion finds little room in his breast’. He is contrasted with the simple man who: Appears always willing to please, when this desire does not lead him to act dissingenously. At other times the modesty and affability of his behaviour, his being always willing to comply with customs that do’nt look affected, plainly shew the goodness of his heart [. ..] Contempt never enters into his mind, he is more ready to think well than meanly both of the parts and the conduct of others. His own goodness of heart makes him never suspect others of dissengenuity [. . .] He is more given to admiration and pity, joy g〈r〉ief and compassion than the contrary affections, they suit well with the softness of his temper.34

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This simple man seems remarkably close to the mid-eighteenth-century ideal of the sentimental hero. He is kind, generous, in touch with his feelings and, like many sentimental heroes, he comes with a dash of the natural state in him. Yet, although he is ‘given to admiration and pity, joy g〈r〉ief and compassion’, he is not entirely a weeping man of feeling. Nevertheless, sentimental fiction focuses on suffering and invites our sympathy for the suffering of others. In a later lecture, the sixteenth, Smith explains why suffering will always form the best subject for rhetoric and belles lettres and, in effect, for literature in general: It is an undoubted fact that those actions affect us in the most sensible manner, and make the deepest impression, which give us a considerable degree of Pain and uneasiness. This is the case not only with regard to our own private actions, but with those of others. Not only in our own case, missfortunate affairs chiefly affect us; but it is with the misfortunes of others that we most commonly as well as most deeply sympathise.35 He concludes the lecture with an overtly sentimentalist statement. ‘It is not surprising’, he says, ‘that a man of an excellent heart might incline to dwell most on the dismal side of the story.’ In sentimental fiction, this is indeed what happens. In Smith’s lectures we have, almost fully developed, a sentimental rhetoric with a central man of feeling who is capable of strongly sympathising with the grief of others and of passing on, also by means of sympathy, that grief to an audience of sympathising and sympathetic listeners. While the essence of Smith’s theory of communication is sympathy, the essence of a good orator appears to be the ability to sympathise. Smith wants us to have no doubts about this. In his thirtieth lecture he discusses Cicero, the man who had long been held up as the greatest rhetorician of all time. Smith agrees that Cicero is a great figure in the history of rhetoric despite having grave doubts about the usefulness of his system. More to the point, Smith declares that Cicero’s greatness as an orator stemmed from his innate sensibility: in a reading firmly located in the middle to late eighteenth century, Cicero, he tells us, seems: To have been possessed of a very high degree of Sensibility and to have been very easily depressed or elated by the missfortunes or prosperity of his friends [. . .] We may reasonably suppose that one of this temper would be very susceptible of all the different passions but of none more than of pity and compassion, which accordingly appears to have been that which chiefly affected him.36

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Smith’s works on rhetoric were not published during his lifetime, or even during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, they were certainly influential. One reason for this is that many of Smith’s arguments were reproduced in the work of Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were published in 1783. Blair is vague on his debt to Smith. At one point, he admits to having borrowed a few ideas on simplicity in style from him, telling us that ‘several ideas have been taken from a manuscript treatise on rhetoric, part of which was shown to me many years ago by the learned and ingenious author, Dr. Adam Smith’.37 As Rae put it in 1895, ‘many of Smith’s friends considered this acknowledgement far from adequate’.38 With the publication of Smith’s lectures in 1963, we can now see that they were right. Blair’s lectures, although containing additional material, are based almost entirely on Smith’s original plan, although Blair does innovate in two important ways. First, he broadens the scope of rhetoric quite considerably and, second, he makes Smith’s arguments more sentimental. Blair intends rhetoric and the belles lettres not merely to represent spoken oratory, nor even all forms of persuasive discourse, but to encompass all forms of literature. He follows Smith closely in arguing that a good orator or persuasive writer must be a man of feeling. ‘Without possessing the virtuous affections in a strong degree,’ Blair asserts, ‘no man can attain eminence in the sublime parts of eloquence. He must feel what a good man feels, if he expects greatly to move or to interest mankind.’39 In this, Blair says no more than Smith had done, although to many of his readers this may have appeared as a novel as well as a fashionably sentimental view of the role of the orator. Blair goes further in his next lecture. Here, it is not merely the author who must ‘feel what a good man feels’. A good reader must also share this attribute. Blair’s analysis owes something to David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757), but where Hume saw reason as the most important prerequisite for the development of good taste, Blair adds emotion and a feeling heart to the equation. Blair writes: I must be allowed to add, that as a sound head, so likewise a good heart, is a very material requisite to just Taste. [. . .] He whose heart is indelicate or hard, he who has no admiration of what is truly noble or praiseworthy, nor the proper sympathetic sense of what is soft and tender, must have a very imperfect relish of the highest beauties of eloquence and poetry.40

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Blair returns to his discussion of taste, based on Hume, for a further ten pages before concluding: Just reasonings on the subject will correct the caprice of unenlightened Taste, and establish principles for judging of what deserves praise. But, at the same time, these reasonings appeal always, in the last resort, to feeling [. . .] It is from consulting our own imagination and heart and from attending to the feelings of others, that any principles are formed which acquire authority in matters of Taste.41 Blair argues that all critical judgements must fundamentally be based on our emotional engagement with a text while the text itself must be driven by its author’s emotions. In the sympathetic exchange Blair envisions, the point of contact between text and reader, or orator and audience, must be a highly charged emotional experience. While reason is always present, it is always in danger of being overridden entirely by emotion. Indeed, the implication is that a good writer or orator operates by doing exactly that while a good reader seeks to have his or her reason overthrown by emotion. The emotions described are not the harsher variety. Blair is not arguing that texts should be approached with anger or even particularly with passion. The feelings specified (and it is significant that Blair uses the word ‘feeling’ rather than ‘passion’ or ‘emotion’) are ‘admiration of what is truly noble or praiseworthy’ combined with a ‘proper sympathetic sense of what is soft and tender’. These, above all, are the sentimental virtues extolled in numerous novels and poems of the later eighteenth century. Blair demands that both producers and consumers of literature approach their task with proper sensibility. The emotionally charged moment when the text is heard or read becomes, in Blair’s system of rhetoric and literary appreciation, a supremely sentimental moment.

Sentimental proof Classical rhetoricians divided proof into two categories, artificial and inartificial. Inartificial proofs arose naturally and could not easily be disputed. If in support of his argument that Caesar was dead an orator produced the lifeless body of Caesar, his argument had been won by the production of inartificial proof. The use of inartificial proof in rhetoric was clear and so it was not under dispute in the eighteenth century. What were under discussion were artificial proofs, sometimes known as artistic proofs, in which the orator constructed an argument according

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to the rules of logic, ethics, or pathos. Over the years, students of rhetoric have largely agreed that logic is the most important of these and for philosophers and forensic rhetoricians (lawyers) this is probably the case. By contrast, logic was of less importance to those who used feeling to persuade in the political or social arena. The sorts of proofs advanced in sentimental rhetoric were less likely to be logical and more likely to belong to the categories of pathos and ethos, particularly the former. Originally, pathos applied to all forms of feeling. Aristotle’s famous discussion of pathos in On Rhetoric, sometimes hailed as the earliest systematic discussion of human psychology, is not merely a discussion of how to influence the emotions of an audience but is also a general theory of human emotion.42 In the late seventeenth century, a narrower definition of pathos emerged in which the word came to represent ‘that quality in speech, writing, music, or artistic representation [. . .] which excites a feeling of pity or sadness; power of stirring tender or melancholy emotion’ (OED). This usage became dominant in the eighteenth century. Although concerned with all of the emotions, pathos in classical rhetoric nonetheless dealt with pity and suffering under that broad heading, and classical rhetoricians were clear that if an audience could be brought to sympathise with suffering then this was a powerful persuasive tool. ‘The hearer suffers along with the pathetic speaker,’ Aristotle tells us, ‘even if what he says amounts to nothing.’43 Cicero takes a similar line when he notes that ‘compassion is awakened if the hearer can be brought to apply to his own adversities, whether endured or only apprehended, the lamentations uttered over someone else’.44 In this respect, the rhetoric of sensibility could be viewed as merely an eighteenthcentury habit of according pathos, in particular the sympathetic part of pathos, a privileged position over other forms of rhetorical proof. But this is not quite sufficient, as there were many arguments from ethos which were as sentimental as those from pathos. Moreover, there were also a number of rhetorical strategies, mostly forms of proof, which were either new or unique to sentimental persuasion or which were used with particular success by sentimental writers and orators. Six such techniques I suggest could be named as: Sentimental Argument, The Rejection of False Sensibility, The Sentimental Parable, The Establishment of a Sentimental Hero, Sentimental Diversion, and The Emotional Subversion of the Intellect. Here, I shall briefly consider each of these in turn. Sentimental argument Sentimental arguments would appear to belong to logos rather than pathos, although they are not necessarily logical arguments, derived

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from deductive rather than inductive reasoning. Indeed, sentimental arguments sometimes entirely replace reason with emotion and substitute evidence with intuition. In the main, however, sentimental arguments are those that depend on ideas of common feeling and mutual sympathy, such as those propounded by Hume and Smith. Often these arguments are sentimental in tone, but this is not necessarily the case. The overriding characteristic is an earnest desire to find the ability to sympathise everywhere. In the drive to prove that a sympathetic heart is common to all human beings, robbers and the robbed, slaves and slavedrivers, can all be shown to possess the sympathetic instinct. In the final analysis, however, the good act on their sympathies while the bad suppress them. A related and widespread sentimental argument maintains as a basic tenet that all human beings experience pain and misery in the same way. Sentimental and philanthropic writers and orators (and in later periods, radicals and socialists) used this axiom to develop the argument that equality of feeling proves the equal status of all human beings, although this argument was not new in the eighteenth century. Indeed, it was familiar, then as now, through its expression in The Merchant of Venice where Shylock argues that ‘if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’45 The association of this argument with race was an early one and, in the eighteenth century, it was particularly useful to antislavery campaigners who faced a proslavery lobby who increasingly denied the humanity of Africans. The eighteenth century, however, saw a distinct pushing forwards of the bounds of benevolence and a renegotiation of what constituted humanity. As a result, this argument also began to be deployed by those concerned with children, the poor, and even animals. William Cowper, who wrote poems opposing slavery, was also a prolific writer of anthropomorphic verse concerned with the feelings of animals (and even plants). Thomas Day, co-author of the important antislavery poem The Dying Negro, was also a pioneering children’s writer and a campaigner for the better treatment of horses. These, and other sentimental writers, maintained that since all people felt in the same way they should all be treated in the same way. The rejection of false sensibility This strategy was widespread, both in material about slavery and elsewhere. Often mistaken for rejection of sentimentalism itself, writers who reject false sensibility typically criticise those whose tears are prompted by trivial events or misfortunes, particularly those that affect only themselves,

The Rhetoric of Sensibility 39

and those whose tears are prompted too readily by fictional suffering rather than, in Hannah More’s phrase, ‘living anguish and substantial woe’. 46 Indeed, More’s poem Sensibility (1780) offers us a particularly clear discussion of the distinction between true and false sensibility. More’s compendious definition of true sensibility is followed by a long passage outlining the self-serving, and self-deluding nature of false sensibility, personified in her portrait of a novel-reading, play-going woman who neglects both her social and her domestic duties while boasting of her superior sensibility: She does not feel thy pow’r who boasts thy flame, And rounds her every period with thy name; Nor she who vents her disproportion’d sighs With pining Lesbia, when her sparrow dies; Nor she who melts when hapless Shore expires, While real mis’ry unreliev’d retires! Who thinks feign’d sorrows all her tears deserve, And weeps o’er WERTER, while her children starve.47 For More, as for many other writers, sincerity was important: true sensibility was natural and unfeigned. False sensibility was affected and rehearsed. While such attacks on false sensibility do sometimes blend into attacks on sensibility more generally, often, as here, they are accompanied by the argument that real sensibility leads to action. For example, Coleridge argued in 1795 that ‘true Benevolence is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare.’48 Although sometimes taken as an attack on sensibility, Coleridge’s argument is consistent with attacks on merely false sensibility that had been made many times in the preceding three decades in that it makes the case that true sensibility is active rather than passive. The sentimental parable This, like the biblical parable on which it is based, is a short story with a moral, usually interpolated into a larger narrative. As such, it is closely related to the classical rhetorical notion of paradigm, or example. Aristotle argued that ‘if one does not have a supply of enthymemes, one should use paradigms as demonstration’.49 He noted that there were two forms of paradigm: historical paradigms and fables, the former factual and the latter fictional.50 A paradigm can illustrate any kind of situation but the parable is more concerned, as is most sentimental rhetoric, with ethical or moral situations. The sentimental parable invariably draws attention

40 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

to some form of suffering and always draws a benevolent or philanthropic moral from the story it tells. The biblical parable, by contrast, is more concerned with matters of faith. The sentimental parable often works by drawing attention to a tale of suffering in which the fate of a single individual is recounted in moving language as an example of the suffering which afflicts a multitude. In many cases this individual is named. Very often, however, and especially in the case of Africans, they are not named—there were limits to the empathy of most eighteenth-century European writers. Yet the power of the sentimental parable is undoubted: statistics can confuse while a broad canvas might overpower the reader’s sensibilities. A human story on a human scale is more likely to move, and more likely to persuade those who are moved. In this way, a ‘personal’ connection, a sympathetic identification, is established between the reader and the sufferer, which can be exploited by the narrator without the need to discuss complex social, economic, or political questions. Many sentimental parables are either explicitly or implicitly based on the familiar biblical parable of the Good Samaritan.51 Perhaps for that reason, the text was immensely popular in the mid- to late eighteenth century, and can be found in many different collections of sermons, as well as being imitated in novels, for example in the famous chapter in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews where Joseph is robbed and left for dead. 52 Its utility as a sentimental parable is clear. It dwells on the sufferings of another. It allows the humane to be shocked at the inhumanity of the Levite and the priest: ‘Merciful GOD!’ exclaims Laurence Sterne in his sermon on the text, ‘that a teacher of thy religion should ever want humanity’.53 Finally, it invites the reader or listener to place themselves in the role of the Samaritan by invoking an emotional response and then providing only one character with whom the emotionally involved reader can possibly identify. The sentimental hero In classical rhetoric, ethos involved proofs that established either the character of the person under question or the character of the person making the oration. The former was of use in forensic and epideictic rhetoric (respectively, legal rhetoric and the rhetoric of praise or blame). The latter was applicable to all orations as it was important that the audience viewed the orator as a man of good character. In sentimental rhetoric, as in most sentimental fiction, the narrator usually seeks to establish his or her credentials as a sincere man or woman of feeling, and this in itself is a form of ethos. But, in sentimental rhetoric, we also find a distinct form of ethical argument in which a person under discussion

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is portrayed, and often praised, as a sentimental hero or, less frequently in political debate, as a sentimental heroine. That person is likely to be either a victim of someone else’s actions, or a benefactor who alleviates the sufferings of others. These two types clearly promote two sorts of behaviour. The first suffers from a wrong which the reader or listener is urged to condemn while the second follows a course of action which the reader is invited to emulate. In either case, their superior sensibility is highlighted, their suffering—or their joy at relieving suffering—is dwelt upon, and the audience is asked, directly or indirectly, to share in their feelings. The sentimental hero or heroine is a figure directly culled from the pages of the sentimental novel. Numerous celebrated examples could be named: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, Frances Sheridan’s Mrs Sidney Bidulph, and Oliver Goldsmith’s Dr Primrose on the one side, Lawrence Sterne’s Uncle Toby, Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison, and Henry Mackenzie’s Mr Harley on the other. Sentimental diversion Sentimental diversion occurs when the sufferings of one person or group of people are invoked in order to divert attention away from the sufferings of another. While the effort to engage the sympathies of the audience was apparent on both sides of an argument, the diversionary technique was almost exclusively used by conservative writers hoping to divert attention away from the issue at hand by inviting listeners or readers to sympathise with another evil supposedly closer to home. Although calling for a transfer of sympathies, it was not a new method of persuasion in the eighteenth century, nor was it necessarily sentimental. Indeed, ‘charity begins at home’ had been proverbial for centuries, probably as a misquotation of the Biblical text ‘learn first to shew piety at home’.54 The diversionary technique becomes sentimentalised when it is combined with one of the other forms of sentimental persuasion, for example, when the group to act as the diversion are described in particularly sentimental language, or are presented in a sentimental parable. An interesting point is that, since ‘home’ was as likely to refer to Britain as the ‘home country’ as much as it referred to one’s domestic arrangements, this argument was particularly useful for proslavery writers seeking to undermine the sentimental arguments of abolitionists. It was also useful to antifeminists who were able to apply a much narrower definition of ‘home’ and were therefore able to undermine philanthropic work done by women.55 Diversionary tactics, red herrings, and tubs thrown to whales dogged philanthropic writers and are frequently examined, criticised, and refuted. A good example of the irritation this technique

42 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

produced occurred during William Wilberforce’s speech on the abolition of the slave trade in February 1807. Wilberforce is reported to have argued that antislavery campaigners searched out every recess of misery and vice in their own country, they looked around them every where for evils, and hugged them all to their bosoms. They then said, if you can make these evils and the Slave Trade pair off together we have no objection; but unless you can do this, we will retain them all.56 Wilberforce neatly exposes the flaw in the diversionary arguments by ridiculing the idea that ‘evils’ can only be abolished en masse. He also hints at the sentimental approach taken by his opponents. As well as ‘evils’, his opponents search out ‘misery’, the domain of sentimentalists, and hug this misery ‘to their bosoms’. This physical engrossment of misery is a rather sinister mirror image of the physical symptoms, especially weeping, displayed by sincere sentimentalists. But, while the physical movement involved in weeping is outwards from the body, the physical movement displayed by these false sentimentalists is inwards. In Wilberforce’s analysis, even the monopolisation of misery can be a selfish act. The emotional subversion of the intellect The emotional subversion of the intellect is a method by which the impact of a logical, or even merely a reasonable, argument is altered by an appeal to the emotions. Classical rhetoric, under the heading of pathos, had always provided for a degree of emotional subversion of the intellect, but in the main it was felt that these sorts of arguments were rather below the dignity of a competent and well-bred orator. Indeed, they were frequently brought together under the heading of ad populam arguments, reflecting the belief that rational debate was the province of the upper classes while passionate appeals were of more use in persuading the lower classes. Sentimental emotional subversion of the intellect is markedly different, however, in that while most classical ad populam discourse appealed to the lowest feelings of the crowd, proponents of sentimental emotional subversion maintained that it was part of a refined, ‘civilised’, discourse. In this respect, the rhetoric of sensibility differed markedly from classical rhetoric. The emotional appeal, far from being something of a cheat or a vulgar argument at best, was now an integral part of the rhetoric. There are two main varieties of sentimental emotional subversion. The first, and simplest, occurs when rational proofs are dismissed in

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favour of emotional ones. Perhaps the most famous example of this is when Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), discusses Marie-Antoinette and asks ‘What a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!’ His lament that ‘the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded’, dismisses the rational evidence of ‘calculators’ and makes our emotional engagement with the French monarchy the most compelling reason why we should support it.57 This is not rhetorically complex, but does attempt to subvert our intellects. The second variety of emotional subversion of the intellect occurs when emotional arguments are used to alter the mood in which a reader or listener receives a reasoned argument. In particular, this is seen where sentimental arguments come before ‘scientific’ proofs, often statistics, with the hope that the reader will be more likely to accept these proofs at face value after his or her ‘resistance’ has been lowered by prior exposure to the emotional argument. This sort of argument is rarely seen in novels or other imaginative forms of literature where hard evidence is seldom required. Instead, it is found in letters to newspapers and magazines, in speeches made before Parliament and in public, and in political tracts and pamphlets. In some cases, a short sentimental passage immediately precedes a rational argument. In many other cases, the sentiment and the argument have a more distant relationship. The latter group is more typical. Amongst these are texts in which the political arguments are embedded within a generally sentimental narrative, texts in which the ‘pathetic’ and the ‘argumentative’ parts are in separate long passages or chapters, and texts in which the sentimental material is kept entirely separate from the argument. All of these forms were employed in the debate of abolition of the slave trade, and numerous examples will be discussed in later chapters of this book. Yet the technique, although extremely popular in persuasive writing, was not without its limitations. For it to work, the person addressed must have sensibility to be engaged. In political writing and oratory, where the audience is much larger, the tactic might work well with many, but it also leaves itself open to ready detection, criticism, and even ridicule by those who absolutely oppose the argument, or whose feelings are less susceptible of manipulation.

Style and arrangement Arrangement is concerned with the form and structure of an argument, which was very closely regulated in classical rhetoric, while style concerns itself with the tone, diction, and figures of speech used by the writer or

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orator. The use of these, in both speech and writing, was being reappraised by eighteenth-century rhetoricians, although the purest sixpart Ciceronian pattern of exordium, narration, proposition, and so on was never commonly found in its pure form in written arguments. It was the orator in Parliament, or in a court of law, who was most likely to adhere to the Ciceronian rules. As we saw earlier, however, even in Parliament the classical structure appears to have been increasingly ignored in the early eighteenth century to the point where David Hume could plead with parliamentarians to resist slavish adherence to Ciceronian arrangement, but still: ‘to observe a method, and make that method conspicuous to the hearers’.58 Just a few years later, Adam Smith was arguing that ‘it matters not the least whether the figures of speech are introduced or not’ into a speech or piece of persuasive writing.59 Their views on style were significant and, in part because of those views, late eighteenth-century rhetoric became progressively freer of ornate language in the grand style, of precise though arbitrary divisions, and of figures and tropes merely for the sake of them. Although sentimental rhetoric was unencumbered with the more rigid forms of classical rhetoric, that is not to say that it was entirely free of such things, nor that it developed entirely new forms of arrangement. All the techniques of classical rhetoric were available to sentimental persuaders. Similarly, all the techniques of sentimental rhetoric were available to those who preferred, in the main, to use a classical model. If anything, the rhetoric of sensibility was characterised by the fact that it did not present a unified front, either in its ideology or in its methodology. It was at all times local, tactical, and opportunistic rather than general, strategic, or systematic. It was as possible for long and unsentimental polemics to contain a sentimental set-piece as it was for a generally sentimental narrative to contain, even briefly, a clear and unsentimental political message addressed to those who might not be convinced by the language of sensibility. Likewise, the question of whether sentimental persuaders favoured the grand, middle, or low style is not entirely straightforward. Much sentimental writing addresses domestic or familiar themes while many of the characters featured are the weak or the politically disenfranchised. For these settings, and for these characters, the low style was traditionally considered appropriate. This presents a problem: much of the rhetoric of sensibility is concerned with suffering or pain and, in Burke’s famous formulation, ‘whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger [. . .] is a source of the sublime’.60 Rhetorical descriptions of the sublime are perhaps more appropriately conducted in the grand

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style: indeed, the grand style could itself be a source of the sublime. Novelists such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, who combined sentimental, sublime, and Gothic modes, were well aware of the possible overlaps. So too were many persuaders who saw that in the looseness of style encouraged by the new rhetorics there were opportunities to use sentimental rhetoric to rouse feelings of pity, while there were also opportunities to inspire terror by using a rhetoric allied to the Gothic, or confidence by invoking a scientific rhetoric. In the late eighteenth century, and in particular in philanthropic debates, the rhetoric of sensibility was the most widely used of these rhetorics, but it was not the only one available. Finally, we must note that sentimental persuaders adopted and adapted a uniquely sentimental tone. In part, this tone is based on a direct and personal approach in which the audience or reader is brought into the confidence of the speaker or writer and asked to share in his or her deepest feelings. It can often be recognised by its diction. Words such as ‘tears’, ‘weeping’, and ‘sighs’ are found in close proximity to more complex notions such as ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, and ‘sympathy’ as well as those slippery terms ‘sentiment’ and ‘sensibility’. The Finnish etymologist Eric Erämetsä has identified 147 such terms—although they are a very broad selection and most need to be put into context to realise their supposed sentimentalism. Likewise, Erämetsä identifies several ‘sentimental’ tropes, including hyperbole, intensification, and enumeration, none of which are unique to sentimental fiction but which Erämetsä shows to be characteristic.61 However, it is difficult to be prescriptive about tone. All we can say with confidence is that the sentimental tone is an integral part of the rhetoric of sensibility, both part of the production of that rhetoric, and one of its symptoms. It may be difficult to pin down precisely, but it remains one of the most recognisable characteristics of the rhetoric of sensibility. This rhetoric, grounded in philosophical ideas about sympathy, but emerging from contemporary debates and disputes about the use of and nature of rhetoric, was widely available, in whole or in part, for use by anyone who wanted to persuade others to alleviate suffering. In the following chapters of this book, I shall examine precisely how it was used in the debate over the abolition of the British slave trade.

2 Arguing in Prose: Abolitionist Letters and Novels

Sentimental rhetoric operated in two spheres: the literary and the political. Both were interested in persuasion, both made use of sentimental heroes, diversion, argument, and parables, both denounced false sensibility, and both made use of the emotional subversion of the intellect. Where they differed was in their details: literary sentimental rhetoric was predominantly fictional while political rhetoric at least purported to be factual. They agreed, however, in the reception that they demanded. Both aimed at alerting their audiences to suffering, and both were written in the hope that their readers would be spurred into action to relieve the suffering which the author had highlighted. In the late eighteenth century, slavery was increasingly recognised as a source of widespread human suffering and this view was expounded in numerous political writings and many imaginative writings including some plays, a considerable number of novels, and a very large number of poems. In this and the following chapter, I examine a small selection of these literary texts, starting here with novels and letters, to consider how these imaginative writings used sentimental rhetoric to promote the idea of antislavery, and to examine how abolitionist literature itself contributed to the development of a rhetoric of sensibility. This relationship, I argue, is central both to the development of antislavery and to the development of sentimental rhetoric. Poetry and novels were in the vanguard of the abolition movement, frequently presenting in literary discourse ideas and arguments that were later to be expressed in the mainstream of political discourse. Few critical studies attempt to examine a broad range of literary antislavery material of the eighteenth century, although the numbers have grown in recent years.1 In many of these, the discussion of eighteenthcentury texts comes at the start of a study more interested in Romanticism 46

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or nineteenth-century abolitionism, particularly in the United States.2 Other texts, though more relevant to this study, cannot be said to be comprehensive in their treatment as they include discussion of antislavery material as part of a wider debate about eighteenth-century literature or culture—or, in some cases, as part of a narrower or more specific debate.3 To date, two critical works have aimed to survey a wide range of literary writing about slavery in the eighteenth century. The most recent is Moira Ferguson’s Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834, which appeared in 1992. As the title suggests, this is largely confined to an examination of works by women writers and, while it is useful in many ways, it cannot be said to be comprehensive. Ferguson argues that ‘antislavery protest in prose and poetry by Anglo-Saxon female authors contributed to the development of feminism over a two hundred year period’.4 However, the ‘Anglo-Saxon female authors’ she reads are a far more heterogeneous group than she portrays them, ranging from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, including Scottish and Irish as well as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ women, encompassing Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and Quakers, and differing in wealth and social status from the Countess of Hertford to Ann Yearsley, the so-called ‘poetical milkmaid of Bristol’. Ferguson never seems to doubt that these very different women had exactly the same motivation— conscious or unconscious inferiority—for opposing slavery. Nor does she consider the extent to which this group could be described as uniformly ‘middle-class’. Indeed, while her historical generalisations tend to confuse her argument, her contention that ‘the condition of white middle-class women’s lives [. . .] set the terms of the antislavery debate’ is paradoxically undermined by the narrowness of her reading. By focusing on women’s texts, most of which are ‘literary’ forms (poems, novels and plays) rather than polemical texts such as pamphlets and speeches, she has overlooked the influence the avowedly political text bore on the emerging discourse of antislavery (although, as Anne Mellor has pointed out, the ‘sheer bulk’ of women’s literary production in the period demonstrates that literature was a recognised entry into the public sphere for women).5 Moreover, by almost entirely ignoring the part played by male literary writers such as Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and Thomas Day, she deduces a far stronger link between women’s experience and the emergence of antislavery discourse than could possibly have been the case. For all the failings of her central arguments, Ferguson’s readings of individual texts are often revealing, and her contention that most antislavery texts by women ‘misrepresented the very African-Caribbean slaves

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whose freedom they advocated’ is undeniable.6 However, this argument is not new, having been forcibly expressed by Wylie Sypher in Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1942), a book with a better claim to comprehensiveness than Ferguson’s— although depth of treatment is often sacrificed to ensure inclusivity, and Sypher consistently underplays the contribution made to abolitionist literature by women. The great trunk from which Sypher’s thesis grows is that the ‘antislavery literature of eighteenth-century England wilfully ignores facts’.7 He argues that while proslavery writers were only interested in portraying Africans as ignoble, antislavery writers conversely represented all Africans as being noble at all times. From this he posits the existence of two literary models: the ‘noble Negro’ and ‘pseudo Africa’. ‘The African appears’, he tells us, ‘as a thoroughly noble figure, idealized out of all semblance of reality, and living in a pastoral Africa— a pseudo-African in a pseudo-Africa.’8 Indeed, literary Africans are almost always of noble birth and display the sort of behaviour which eighteenthcentury readers would have recognised as noble, albeit in a primitivist mode. Likewise, African literary landscapes are rarely convincing. Some have been cribbed from contemporary travel narratives, but most are drawn straight from classical literature or the writer’s ill-informed imagination. The ‘noble Negro’ and ‘pseudo-Africa’ are readily observable in eighteenth-century antislavery literature. Nevertheless, Sypher misunderstood the rhetoric of sensibility, arguing that antislavery poets ‘addressed not the humanity of the reader but his sentiment. Thus, antislavery poetry was often ethically as well as aesthetically hollow.’9 The anonymous blurb-writer who added his (or her) words to the dust jacket of the first edition summarised Sypher’s views even more succinctly. The ‘humanitarian impact’ of the abolitionist movement, the blurb-writer tells us, ‘was largely smothered by a muck of sentimentality’. These are perhaps stronger words than Sypher might have used and yet the blurb-writer has put his or her finger on the central fact of Sypher’s text, namely, that he does not like the material about which he has chosen to write, partly because it betrays real life with its ‘pseudo-Africa’ and ‘pseudo-Africans’, but mostly because it wears its heart on its sleeve. In part, Sypher’s views reflect the prevailing anti-sentimental mood of the mid-twentieth century. In common with many other critics of the period, Sypher is both judging eighteenth-century literature and thought by emotional standards current in the first half of the twentieth century, and fundamentally underestimating the power of the sentimental genre to move and to influence the late eighteenth-century reader. Antislavery writers addressed an audience that was experienced in

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sensibility; an audience which not only found itself capable of being moved by sentimental writing, but which demanded to be so moved. When Sypher argues that antislavery poets ‘addressed not the humanity of the reader but his sentiment’, he fails to recognise the important point that the poets of antislavery did not address their reader’s sentiment instead of their humanity. They addressed their readers’ humanity through their sentiment. The question, therefore, for eighteenth-century poets and novelists eager to contribute to the abolition movement was the practical one of how best to stimulate and harness their readers’ sensibility. In large measure, the available tropes of sentimental rhetoric answered that practical question. This assertion admittedly flies in the face of much recent critical work on sensibility and slavery, as well as challenging the, by now, more distant work of Sypher. Marcus Wood, for example, in a discussion of Laurence Sterne, warns ‘that the dangers of playing sentimentally with the suffering of the slave are immense and uncontrollable’.10 For Wood, the danger is that the sentimental imagination becomes a type of appropriation, akin to the process of enslavement itself, and an agent in the process of colonisation. This is not readily disputed: it is easy to demonstrate, as many have done, that eighteenth-century abolitionist discourse emerged from and contributed to a legitimising colonial discourse. Nevertheless, understanding this should not prevent us from asking whether, and if so why and how, it was a component of the popular campaign to abolish the slave trade. Several critics, on this point, have questioned the utility of the rhetoric. Markman Ellis, for example, argues that many sentimental arguments against slavery run aground ‘on the shoals of the pathetic and the little—that category of the sentimentally apotropaic which voyeuristically focuses on the powerless resigned to powerlessness’.11 In other words, although perhaps intended to challenge the evil of slavery, much sentimental antislavery rhetoric does the reverse, leading the reader away from an understanding of the extent of the horror, and into a safe, confined, and ultimately impotent consideration of the sorrow of a ‘pathetic and little’ individual. While some, perhaps many, readers may have responded in this way, I argue instead that the focus on the ‘pathetic and little’ typical of what I call the ‘sentimental parable’ offered the eighteenth-century reader a space to imagine the unimaginable, to consider themselves in a situation which they could not possibly have experienced first hand. As Sypher, Ferguson, Wood, and others have pointed out, this imaginative engagement was unlikely to have accorded with the reality of slave experience, and may ultimately have added a dangerously legitimising strand to colonial discourse. And yet,

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on a practical level, to mobilise political action to the single end of abolishing the slave trade, it was not required that a reader fully empathised with the experience of slavery nor that they became alive to the dangers of colonisation. Instead, all that was required was that they were moved enough to write a letter, pay a subscription, sign a petition. As I argued in Chapter 1, the main tropes and arguments of sentimental rhetoric were available some years before the abolition movement became important. Writers of literary antislavery texts therefore drew upon the same background of writing as did the authors of the many pamphlets, newspapers, and speeches which denounced the slave trade. This close relationship was to prove both a blessing and a liability for the cause. On the one hand, polemical literature benefited from its ability to borrow from a popular literary discourse by being able to extend itself to wide audiences. On the other hand, its association with a literature popular amongst diverse groups and social classes left it open to accusations of populism, insincerity, and even effeminacy. In a similar vein, literary antislavery gained credibility by its borrowings from ‘serious’ political discourse, although it could be and was argued that the poems, plays, and novels became worthy, dull, and dry as a result. Yet, whatever the quality of the texts, they were certainly popular and hundreds, perhaps thousands, appeared. In a book of this length it is not possible either to catalogue or to survey this extensive literature. Instead, I have chosen important examples, concentrating on prose writing in this chapter and poetry in the following. Drama has been excluded, not because antislavery plays were insignificant, but because the study of dramatic texts calls for a type of analysis that is beyond the scope of this book.

A sentimental hero at work For almost as long as the British had been systematically involved in the slave trade, Africans and slaves had appeared in English novels.12 In these novels, with the exception of very early works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (1688), the rhetoric of sensibility is clearly detectable. In works that predate an organised abolition movement by twenty years or more, authors make sentimental arguments and tell sentimental parables. These parables are either told by or are told about a sentimental hero. Serious points about cruelty on the plantations, the status of Africans within the human family, and the economics of slavery are made immediately after or before emotional moments designed to subvert the intellect and force the reader to accept contentious arguments on emotional grounds.

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An important example is Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), a fictional biography of a virtuous ‘man of feeling’, Sir George Ellison, who is something of a superman amongst sentimental heroes. It concerns itself with a multitude of social problems, including the relief of debt, the treatment of mental illness, the education of children, and the position of unmarried women. Slavery is just one of its concerns, considered for the most part in two chapters early in the novel. Choosing to go to Jamaica to make his fortune, the young Mr Ellison, though declining to own any slaves himself, amasses a fortune by trading in slave-produced goods. Through marriage, he acquires a plantation with a number of slaves and, horrified by the cruel treatment of the slaves, he sets about improving their lot, much to the horror of his wife who recognises sharp distinctions on racial grounds. Mrs Ellison notwithstanding, he manages to institute a ‘humane’ system of slave management before his scheming wife dies, allowing Ellison to return to England, there to disburse extensive charity to the inhabitants of Dorset. Contemporary reviews of the novel were largely positive, although they tended to see the character of Sir George Ellison as rather improbably benevolent. The poet Cuthbert Shaw, himself the author of Liberty, A Poem (1756), praised the book in The Monthly Review as ‘a sober rational feast’.13 By contrast, the anonymous reviewer in The Critical Review thought that ‘the author has indulged his fancy, more than consulted his judgement, in drawing the Picture of Sir George Ellison’. Although The Critical Review was mistaken in assuming the novel’s author to be male, they were more accurate in noting the essentially redistributive nature of Ellison’s philanthropy and they approved of the book on this count. ‘We may venture to recommend it to every man of fortune’, they concluded, ‘who has more money than he can rationally employ.’ What most caught the attention of both reviewers, however, was the attention the novel paid to slavery. In The Monthly Review, Shaw quoted a long discussion between Mr and Mrs Ellison about the treatment of slaves, excluding quotation from any other part of the book. The Critical Review also quoted from the same passage, arguing that Mr Ellison’s ‘sentiments upon this occasion are noble, generous, humane, and ought to be engraven in the heart of every West Indian Planter’. For both magazines, the slavery passages were both the most affecting and the most illustrative of Mr Ellison’s humanity.14 More recently, there has been critical debate as to whether Scott’s novel counts either as an antislavery novel or as a sentimental novel. Sypher believes that it is both, arguing that it: ‘is a mature novel of antislavery, except that the pity for slaves is a mere throb in the pulse

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of the hero’s benignity’. To emphasise the point the work is discussed under the heading of the ‘delectable antislavery tear’.15 Scott’s sentimentality is barely addressed by Moira Ferguson, but she is clear that ‘Sypher’s characterisation of The History of Sir George Ellison as a mature novel of antislavery more than misses the mark’ and that Scott provides a ‘seemingly categorical endorsement of the status quo, provided slave owners act benignly’.16 Markman Ellis, though clear that the novel is sentimental, agrees with Ferguson to an extent, arguing that the book is a novel of amelioration in that it ‘argued for the mitigation of the conditions of slavery, but not its abolition’.17 Opposed to both Ferguson and Ellis is Eve W. Stoddard who suggests that Ellison’s humane plantation reforms anticipate the strategy of abolitionists such as James Ramsay who saw amelioration as a first step leading inevitably towards emancipation. Likewise, she argues, aping Sypher’s rather narrow definition of the sentimental novel, that ‘if the purpose of a sentimental novel is to evoke delectable tears in the reader’s eyes, Sir George Ellison will not qualify’, largely because ‘Scott believes in teaching not by emotional appeals but by precept, in textual modelling of desirable behavior’.18 Finally, Laura Brown argues that the lap dog incident in the novel (discussed below) evokes an ‘effusion’ of sentiment in which ‘Mrs Ellison occupies the place of Yorick, the man of feeling’.19 That such divergent views can exist in such a small body of critical literature suggests that the novel holds complexities which are not immediately apparent. The two chapters that deal with slavery appear initially to agree, but closer reading shows that they take a markedly different approach to the slavery question. The first of the two chapters is, as Sypher, Ellis, and Brown agree, sentimental in tone and content. The second, as Stoddard argues, teaches humanity largely by precept rather than by emotional appeal. The question of whether the novel promotes antislavery is more difficult to answer. It was written in 1766, twenty years before an organised antislavery movement came into being, and five years before the Sommersett case brought the question of slavery into the open for what was, as far as most British people were concerned, the first time. It is unlikely, therefore, to represent the views of anyone other than the author and perhaps a few in her circle of acquaintance. For this reason, and because of the repeated distaste for slavery expressed by Ellison, I argue that the novel promotes an antislavery view which confines itself to what, in 1766, might have been possible to achieve. Again, there are complexities. The second chapter, which deals with slavery in a style that is predominantly non-sentimental, contains the

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details of Ellison’s plan for a ‘humane’ plantation. This chapter, however, shows Ellison ‘mitigating the suffering of his slaves’ rather than displaying his hatred of the institution.20 By so doing it promotes a rational and achievable approach to plantation life which planters could be encouraged to follow. The first chapter is rather different. Here the argument is sentimental and the antislavery more explicit. We learn of Ellison that ‘slavery was so abhorrent to his nature, and in his opinion so unjustly inflicted, that he had hitherto avoided the keeping any negroes’. Later he tells his wife that ‘when you and I are laid in the grave, our lowest black slave will be as great as we are; in the next world perhaps much greater’.21 The call for the abolition of slavery may not be unequivocally stated, but Ellison’s politics and theology tend directly towards that end. The History of Sir George Ellison is, paradoxically, both a sentimental and a non-sentimental novel, as well as being both an antislavery novel and one that merely argues for amelioration. It is able to keep its options open simply by taking a different and seemingly contradictory tack in each of the two chapters principally concerned with slavery. This strategy, Ellis argues, ‘is opportunistic and shifting, rather than rational and “scholarly”. Scott’s interest is in hitting as many sentimental notes as she can, rather than conducting an internally coherent political argument.’22 Stoddard’s view is somewhat different. She maintains that Scott’s argument is coherent, but her evidence for this is largely external. She points out that Ellison’s scheme in the novel bears considerable similarities to proposals later put forward by Edmund Burke, James Ramsay, and others, writers who ‘saw reform as the beginning of a gradual movement toward emancipation’.23 While this argument is debatable it is not implausible, especially when a close reading of the two slavery chapters in The History of Sir George Ellison suggests that Scott’s political rhetoric is a good deal less ‘opportunistic and shifting’ than Ellis suggests. Indeed, what Scott offers is a thoroughly worked-out example of sentimental rhetoric in which an emotionally subversive sentimental parable is told, starring a sentimental hero, in preparation for the reception of a ‘rational’ political scheme to at least mitigate the worst excesses of slavery and, arguably, to set the ball rolling towards emancipation. We can examine the first of these two chapters in detail. Here, Ellison meets and weds a widow and, through the marriage, inherits ‘a considerable plantation with a numerous race of slaves’. Although his wife is hardened to it, Ellison recoils from the treatment of the slaves. Indeed, ‘they had not been married above a week, before Mr. Ellison gave great offence to her and her steward, by putting a stop to a most severe punishment just beginning to be inflicted on a number of them’,

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a punishment handed down for being drunk on a holiday. The steward laments that ‘all order was now abolished’ while Mrs Ellison, pitying her husband’s ‘failings’, attempts to explain to him the great ‘impropriety’ he has committed in setting plantation society upside down. The reforming Ellison replies by recounting the ‘extacy’ he felt when his slaves showed him their gratitude: Had you, my dear, been present when they threw themselves at my feet, embraced my knees, and lifting up their streaming eyes to heaven, prayed with inexpressible fervency to their supposed Gods to shower down their choicest blessings on me, you would have wept with me; and have owned a delight which nothing in this world can afford, but the relieving our fellow creatures from misery. Using a sentimental argument, Ellison justifies his strategy towards the slaves by describing the emotions it raised, both in himself and in the slaves. Tears, the ubiquitous indicator of sentiment, are shed by all—with the notable exception of the hard-hearted Mrs Ellison. Benevolence is finally posited as the most delightful possible human activity. The passage, as Ellis has pointed out, is a ‘sophisticated and articulate set-piece of sentimental rhetoric’. Ellis does not call this ‘sentimental argument’, but he notes that ‘Ellison appeals to the sentimental as a kind of proof (an argument by emotion) whose discursive force the text suggests is or ought to be irresistible.’24 Yet Scott shows that it is possible to resist this sort of argument: Mrs Ellison remains unconvinced, her cynical response being that the slaves ‘rejoiced to find their punishment remitted, as they look upon it as a permission to take the same liberty every holy-day’.25 A short passage follows in which Ellison signals his intention to ‘find a means of rendering our slaves obedient, without violating the laws of justice and humanity’. His scheme is outlined in the following chapter. Before this is reached, however, Scott inserts a sentimental parable which illustrates Mrs Ellison’s character more clearly than before, but which also sends a message to the reader to examine his or her own conscience.26 Mrs Ellison is walking home: When a favourite lap-dog, seeing her approach the house, in its eagerness to meet her jumped out of the window where it was standing; the height was too great to permit the poor cur to give this mark of affection with impunity; they soon perceived that it had broken its leg, and was in a good deal of pain; this drew a shower of tears from

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Mrs. Ellison’s eyes, who, turning to her husband, said, ‘You will laugh at me for my weakness; but I cannot help it.’ Ellison does not laugh, of course, at this sudden show of sensibility but is surprised, he tells her, ‘to see such marks of sensibility in a heart that I feared was hardened against the sufferings even of her fellow creatures’. This remark hardly seems likely to do much for Ellison’s connubial felicity and, indeed, prompts Mrs Ellison’s indignant reply: ‘sure, Mr. Ellison, you do not call negroes my fellow creatures?’ Ellison does, and defies his wife to prove to him: That the distinguishing marks of humanity lie in the complexion or turn of features. When you and I are laid in the grave, our lowest black slave will be as great as we are; in the next world perhaps much greater; the present difference is merely adventitious, not natural. Before Mrs Ellison can engage in this debate, however, Ellison changes the subject and attends to the broken leg of the unfortunate lap-dog. Mrs Ellison, somewhat mollified by this action, ends the chapter viewing her husband’s treatment of the slaves as an ‘amiable weakness’.27 Mrs Ellison’s hypocrisy and inconsistency are highlighted in this sentimental parable while Mr Ellison’s reason and sensibility are both brought to the fore. Mrs Ellison proves that she can bring forth tears of sympathy, and thus act with sensibility, although the occasion of her display of sensibility—an injury to a favourite lap-dog—is inappropriate for the amount of emotion she shows. In this sense, Scott’s strategy here amounts to a rejection of false sensibility. The dog contrasts strongly with the slaves towards whom such emotional shows of sympathy, it is implied, might be appropriate. On the other hand, Ellison emerges as a man both of feeling and of reason. While he is capable of expressing his disagreement with his wife in reasonably robust terms, he is also capable of phrasing that disagreement in a balanced and scientific manner. He attacks the view, not yet widespread but current among some eighteenth-century thinkers, that Africans were in some way a different human species to Europeans. He is also able to introduce a theological argument about the equality of all people before God. Finally, he reaffirms his sensibility by halting a conversation that he knows to be disagreeable, and by turning to undertake his duty of care towards both the lap-dog’s broken leg, and his wife’s hurt feelings. Ellis argues that the lap-dog incident ‘leads nowhere: it is a closing-off device, diffusing enquiry into an amiable and placid equanimity

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approaching quietism’.28 This is indeed the short-term effect it has upon Mr and Mrs Ellison’s marriage. The effect on the reader may be somewhat different. Throughout the parable of the lap-dog, readers are implicitly invited to examine their own consciences to explore whether they too may be guilty of the same sort of hypocrisy. For many readers the result may have been disturbing. Others may have felt rather smug. In any case, it is unlikely that many could read this parable without experiencing some sort of potentially destabilising emotion. At the same time the passage, rather than ending in ‘equanimity’, concludes with a very uneasy equilibrium which seems likely to topple over with the recovery of the lap-dog or the next appearance of a slave. The conflict within the Ellisons’ marriage has not been resolved, leaving the reader expecting to be a witness to further marital strife. This combination of emotional effects, playing on readers’ ideas of themselves, providing models of good and bad sensibility, and holding out the possibility of conflict to come, is an excellent example of the emotional subversion of the intellect. This technique normally exists to prepare the reader for a rational (or merely unemotional) argument which is immediately to follow. With the intellect subverted by the emotions, the reader, it is hoped, will quickly accept the argument before enquiring too minutely into the feasibility of the scheme suggested. This is exactly the case in The History of Sir George Ellison. Immediately after the lap-dog incident, Scott outlines Ellison’s programme to improve conditions for the slaves on his plantation in language which is clear, practical, and very far from being sentimental. This plan includes providing the slaves with cottages and plentiful kitchen gardens, allowing the slaves leisure to cultivate their plots and indulge in ‘innocent amusements’ (that is, those which do not involve ‘strong liquor’), and includes the complete abolition of corporal punishment. This programme, Stoddard argues, was a radical one in 1766. ‘Scott’s specific proposals for the reform of slavery’, she suggests, ‘are among the earliest and the most progressive in the eighteenth century.’29 In fact, these were not necessarily the earliest reform proposals, but they would still have been unusual. As such, they may have seemed far-fetched to many readers. Scott’s rhetorical strategy, then, is both clever and typical of sentimental rhetoric. First, she creates a sentimental hero (Ellison) who is opposed to slavery and, to stand against him, she provides a character (his wife) whose false sensibility is exposed and rejected. She then illustrates these opposing character traits in a sentimental parable (of the lap-dog), a parable which challenges the reader to examine his or her own sensibility. Then, having entirely subverted the reader’s

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intellect, she presents a radical programme of humanitarian reform which the reader is unable to reject except by identifying themselves with the hypocritical and unsentimental Mrs Ellison.

Laurence Sterne and Ignatius Sancho One contemporary reader whose heart was warmed by Scott’s writing was Ignatius Sancho, a keen novel reader, a butler to the powerful Montagu family (into a branch of which Sarah Scott’s sister, Elizabeth, had married), and an African and former slave.30 A few months after the publication of The History of Sir George Ellison, Sancho wrote to his literary hero Laurence Sterne (also related by marriage to the Montagus) to praise his and Scott’s contribution to an emerging literature of antislavery. The ensuing correspondence became one of the most celebrated in the mid-eighteenth-century world of letters, although it did not actually come into public view until the posthumous publication of Sterne’s letters in 1775. The exchange has been celebrated by modern critics as well, although they have been divided as to whether Sancho’s letter was simply imitative of Sterne’s style or whether it was involved in a more complex relationship with Sterne. Earlier critics such as Paul Edwards, James Walvin, and Keith Sandiford saw Sancho’s letter as derivative, the latter noting Sancho’s ‘flair for imitation’,31 but an emerging consensus now suggests that Sancho’s intervention was both an original and a radical gesture that strongly influenced Sterne and positioned Sancho as an outspoken opponent of slavery.32 Sancho, enthused by the few words Sterne had produced on slavery in one of his sermons,33 wrote to Sterne to say: Of all my favorite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren—excepting yourself, and the humane author of Sir George Ellison.—I think you will forgive me;—I am sure you will applaud me for beseeching you to give one half hour’s attention to slavery, as it is at this day practised in our West Indies.— That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many—but if only of one—Gracious God!—what a feast to a benevolent heart!34 Sancho’s reluctance to ask Sterne to condemn slavery outright is significant. Sterne and Scott are praised for bringing forth tears on behalf of slaves, not for demanding its abolition. Sterne is asked to contribute further to this nascent literature of antislavery in the hope that his

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words might ‘ease the yoke’ of slavery rather than abolish it outright. Even Sancho, who experienced slavery as a child, seems unwilling to ask for emancipation. Yet Sancho, like Scott, deals with what is possible and his sentimental argument is clear. Sterne is exhorted to ‘give one half hour’s attention to slavery’, not merely because slavery is abhorrent, but because any easing of the yoke which follows Sterne’s intervention will be ‘a feast to a benevolent heart’. The emotional effect on the writer’s sympathetic affinity with the slave whose yoke is eased, Sancho argues, is of as much importance as the actual easing of that yoke. This may seem a self-indulgent argument, but it was effective in its context. Sterne replied to Sancho to tell him that, as his letter arrived, ‘I had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl.’35 Whether or not Sancho’s entreaties had anything to do with the matter, the passage appeared in the final instalment of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It is a sentimental parable of the sort at which Sterne was particularly adept. Uncle Toby and corporal Trim enter a shop wherein they find ‘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’. Uncle Toby considers this ‘a pretty picture’ because ‘she had suffered persecution [. . .] and had learnt mercy’. Trim wonders ‘if a negro has a soul’. Toby is sure that ‘God would not leave him without one’. Finally, Toby remarks that it is ‘the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now—where it may be hereafter, heaven knows!—but be it where it will, the brave, Trim! will not use it unkindly’.36 This episode is an excellent example of a sentimental parable. The story of an individual—the otherwise unnamed ‘Negro girl’—synecdochically represents the story of a multitude—the slaves. The girl is early on established as a sentimental heroine since, although ‘she had suffered persecution [she] had learnt mercy’, refusing even to scourge the flies with her feathery version of the overseer’s whip. This ‘pretty picture’ works by emotionally subverting the intellect, by altering the emotional state in which we will receive the second part of the parable in which Trim and Toby explore the theological and political implications of the image of the Negro girl. Here, the two soldiers recreate the discussion held between Mr and Mrs Ellison. First, it is established that ‘the negro has a soul’ just as Mr Ellison seeks to prove to his wife that ‘negroes [are] my fellow creatures’. Next, it is proved that Africans and Europeans are equal before God. If Africans are without souls, Trim suggests, ‘it would be putting one sadly over the head of another’ while Ellison argues that ‘when you and I are laid in the grave, our lowest black slave will be as great as we are’. Finally, Sterne enters into the political dimension: it is

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‘the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now’, says Toby, while Ellison remarks that ‘the present difference is merely adventitious, not natural’. Whether or not Sterne intentionally borrowed from Scott, the two authors are taking a nearly identical approach. Sterne’s sentimental parable may appear, ultimately, to collapse inwards on itself while Scott’s leads onwards to a rational and achievable plan for slavery reform, yet both chose to insert a sentimental parable into a longer narrative to make serious and difficult points about the theology and politics of slavery. In 1782, seven years after the Sterne–Sancho correspondence became public, and two years after his death, Sancho’s letters were collected and published to considerable critical acclaim. These letters are seemingly eclectic, and Sancho’s style is certainly not consistent. Although he adopts different voices to fit the topic at hand, among these voices the sentimental is nevertheless predominant. Sancho’s sensibility is rarely lachrymose. Instead, the predominant tone is playfulness expressed through light satire, gentle humour, and a pervading delight in verbal and typographical witticisms. The tone, as many have pointed out, is distinctly Shandean but, where Sterne frequently sheds a tear over the ill, the mad, the poor, and the dying, Sancho is more likely to find a joke at the expense of human vanity. What makes Sancho sentimental is not excessive dolefulness or delight in misery, but rather his ability to universalise from the seemingly trivial and his constant ability to draw a surprising and often challenging message from the most domestic of incidents. Sancho’s arguments are occasionally sentimental, and he sometimes makes a determined effort to emotionally subvert the intellect of his readers before presenting them with his considered views but, for the most part, the Letters is a collection of sentimental parables which taken together posit Sancho as an exemplar of the sentimental hero. Many of Sancho’s sentimental parables are in letters of thanks in which the happiness of the Sancho family is shown as arising from a gift from the correspondent. These letters are rarely intentionally persuasive and so cannot be described as being more than loosely rhetorical. On the other hand, several of the more public letters are clearly intended to persuade. These include letters to Julius Soubise urging him to reform his moral outlook, a letter to a Mr Charles Browne asking him to employ a servant of Sancho’s acquaintance, and a number of letters to newspapers on public themes. In these, Sancho makes frequent use of the sentimental parable, drawing large messages from trivial examples. In a letter to The General Advertiser written in April 1778, for instance, he contributes to the debate taking place in London over the entry of

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France into the war with the American colonies. He notes the ‘scarcity of men’ for military service and argues that there exists: A resource which would greatly benefit the people at large (by being more usefully employed), and which are happily half-trained already for the service of their country—by being—powder proof—light, active young fellows:—I dare say you have anticipated my scheme, which is to form ten companies at least, out of the very numerous body of hair-dressers.37 The incongruity of gunpowder and hair-powder drives the humour of the piece, which Sancho emphasises by suggesting that his plan would save the nation time as ‘people of the ton of both sexes’ often lose ‘between two or three hours daily on this important business’. In addition, Sancho claims that his scheme would ‘cleanse, settle, and emancipate from the cruel bondage of French, as well as native frizeurs, the heads of my fellow subjects’. Sancho scores points against several perennial targets including a vain and effeminate fashionable world and, of course, the French. Indeed, Sancho’s rhetoric of bondage and emancipation, though perhaps informed by his personal childhood experience as a slave, is a familiar trope of Anglo-French rivalry in the eighteenth century. The letter is successful, however, because it adopts many of the conventions of sentimental comedy. It focuses on the domestic arrangements of ‘people of the ton’ and contrasts these arrangements with the needs of the state—it thus starts in the domestic sphere and moves into the public sphere. It allows the reader to extrapolate beyond the details given to form their own conclusions about the importance (or otherwise) of many of the domestic arrangements of the upper classes. This may not be ‘weeping sensibility’, but it certainly is a variety of the sentimental parable used in a light and satirical manner to make a serious point about British society. It is possible, too, that Sancho might be hinting at the employment conditions of many of his ‘brother moors’. Dressing hair was one of the occupations of personal servants, and many black Londoners were indeed personal servants. Olaudah Equiano, for example, worked as a hairdresser in 1767–1768.38 While Sancho specifically mentions ‘French’ and ‘native’ (British) hairdressers, one is tempted to speculate whether Sancho is also raising the question of the national status—and national utility—of the many African servants in London. Few of Sancho’s letters are public rhetoric, and yet The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho taken as a whole is a strong intervention in the emerging discourse of antislavery, and a clear example of public

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sentimental rhetoric. The rhetorical purpose of the collection is made explicit in an editorial note at the start of the book. The editor, Frances Crew, writes that one of her main motives for publishing the letters is ‘the desire of shewing that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European’.39 There were few precedents for such a venture. The narratives of the lives of Briton Hammon and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw had been taken down by amanuenses, and published in 1760 and 1772 respectively, but there is no evidence that either Sancho or Crew had read these.40 The poems of Phillis Wheatley, a young Boston slave, famously demonstrated the abilities of ‘an untutored African’ when they appeared in both Boston and London in 1773.41 Sancho himself recognised them as the work of ‘genius in bondage’, and they have subsequently been seen by many critics as a pivotal text in the development of an African American literary tradition.42 Nevertheless, Wheatley’s poems were not on the scale of Sancho’s Letters, nor did they reflect a similar range of personal experience. If Sancho’s letters were to appear, it was clear they would take a very different form. Whether or not Sancho’s letters were ‘written with a view to publication’, an idea Crew strenuously repudiates in her editorial note, is hard to say.43 We know, however, that he was not averse to publication. In the first place, he had already published four books of music in his own lifetime.44 In addition, we know that he wrote to the newspapers since much of this public correspondence appears in the Letters and two further letters have recently been located.45 As Ellis has shown, several of his letters were anthologized in 1778 and, had Sancho lived longer, this may have been the start of a more extensive literary career.46 In April 1779, Sancho received a letter from Edmund Rack, an editor of anthologies, asking if Sancho would be prepared to allow some of his letters to appear in a forthcoming anthology (which apparently never appeared) with the suitably sentimental title Letters of Friendship. Rack’s letter anticipates Crew’s editorial note in that it asserts a specifically polemical purpose to publication. Rack, ‘fully persuaded’ that God ‘regards the natives of Africa with equal complacence as those of this or any other country’, hopes that the letters, ‘if published, may convince some proud Europeans, that the noblest gifts of God, those of the mind, are not confined to any nation or people’. Sancho replied that if Rack believed: The simple effusions of a poor Negro’s heart are worth mixing with better things—you have my free consent to do as you please with them—though in truth there wants no increase of books in the

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epistolary way, nor indeed in any way—except we could add to the truly valuable names of Robertson—Beattie—and Mickle—new Youngs—Richardsons—and Sternes.47 The modesty is strategic, of course. Sancho is plainly both willing to see his letters in print and willing that they be used to make the same anti-racist point that Crew asserts as her motivation for editing the Letters. He also appears to have a very good notion of where they belong in the literary marketplace. His list of his reading, like his letters, is eclectic but sentimental. He concludes with his favourite, Laurence Sterne, so it is plausible that Samuel Richardson is a close second. Significantly, Sancho is positioning his own letters as—potentially at least—part of a sentimental epistolary tradition. Indeed, in many ways the Letters does belong to this tradition. Whether or not the original idea to publish had come from Sancho, the book itself was completed by Crew, who compiled it from a collection of carefully ‘discovered’ manuscripts. This device is commonly found in the eighteenth-century novel, and Crew’s editorial note resembles both those prefixed to novels comprised of supposedly discovered manuscripts and those attached to epistolary novels (although, of course, so-called editorial notes to fictional works themselves mimic those in bona fide collections). In this note, Crew assures the reader that Sancho’s letters are private, that he kept no duplicates, and that the letters which appear in the Letters have all ‘been collected from the various friends to whom they were addressed’. She thus effaces any hint of Sancho’s editorial contribution, while also attempting to disguise the extent of her own intervention. The letters, like those ‘presented’ by the purportive editors of epistolary novels, are not described as being ‘ordered’, ‘arranged’, or ‘selected’. Rather, Crew speaks only of ‘laying them before the publick’ as if they were a complete and unified body of work that she had passively discovered. Despite this, however, Crew’s editorial role was clearly not entirely passive. Several of the letters have footnotes, and the collection as a whole is prefixed with a biography specially commissioned for the occasion. Crew was clearly selective, a point now established by Vincent Carretta’s discovery of two unpublished letters and by John Ralph Willis’s publication of a number of letters likely to have been written by Sancho.48 The letters may either have been collected from friends or collected as a complete bundle from the dying Sancho but, in either case, Crew had the opportunity to edit and arrange them according to any system she chose (and even if Sancho did have a hand in the project, she could still have overridden his wishes). While the chronological arrangement she adopted might seem obvious and logical, it was not necessarily so. She

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could have chosen other arrangements with both precedent and justification, and there is no reason why she should not have ordered the letters by subject matter or by recipient. Significantly, however, the decision to place the letters in chronological order gives the Letters a narrative structure rather than a structure based on argument, style, or relationship. Although the Letters records many friendships, it is not the anthologized Letters of Friendship that Edmund Rack had planned but, instead, letters recording the life, friendships, and decline of a particular individual. These letters tell the story of a middle-aged man at the centre of a domestic and commercial network operated through the literary device of letters in which are disseminated breaking news, political opinions, homely wisdom, poignant if light satire, and opinions on the advantages of benevolence, Christian piety, and responsible commerce. The subject matter is thus as sentimental as the style, and Sancho himself is cast in a role strongly reminiscent of the sentimental hero of a sentimental novel, a role that might not have been apparent had his letters not been given the chronological structure common to sentimental epistolary novels. Moreover, this is the tradition in which he himself, in his letter to Rack, positions his work. In this reading, the Letters is more closely integrated with the mainstream of early antislavery writing. Sancho becomes a sentimental hero who would be recognisable as such to the readers of Scott and Mackenzie as well as to the readers of Sterne and Richardson. His heroism is demonstrated through a series of sentimental parables that finally add up to overarching narrative ‘shewing’, in Crew’s words, ‘that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European’. The Letters can thus been seen as a sustained work of sentimental rhetoric emerging from the literary tradition of antislavery that Sancho clearly knew well, and available as a further and persuasive text in that tradition. Moreover, despite those who lament Sancho’s seeming unwillingness to engage with antislavery sentiment, the collection offers many personal and political arguments against slavery, and shows some evidence of having been constructed with those arguments in mind. As such, the Letters can be ranked among the best and the most successful examples of abolitionist rhetoric produced in the years leading up to the establishment of a formal abolition movement.

The man of feeling on his plantation By the time that Sancho’s Letters appeared in 1782, slavery had become a more familiar topic to readers of English literature, although most

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works of sentimental fiction containing an antislavery message tended to crowd the antislavery sentiment into a few pages interpolated into the main narrative. Among these, Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné, which appeared in 1777, was no exception.49 Mackenzie was already celebrated as the author of The Man of Feeling (1771), one of the most lachrymose of all novels of sentiment. Julia de Roubigné is paradoxically a darker but less tearful novel than Mackenzie’s earlier works, although like those it is introduced through the device of the discovered manuscript. It continues as an epistolary novel, and it is through the correspondence of Julia de Roubigné and her friend Maria de Roncille that we learn about Julia’s hopeless love for Savillon, who has gone to the French plantation colony of Martinique to make his fortune, and her marriage to the wealthy Count Louis de Montauban, seemingly a true man of feeling, later revealed as a villain. In Volume 2, the correspondence is primarily between Savillon and his friend Beauvarais. Savillon becomes involved in the sugar trade, despite being shocked at the treatment of the slaves. In a long and digressive letter, an extended sentimental parable, we learn how he institutes reforms broadly similar to those suggested in The History of Sir George Ellison. His reforming zeal is not enough to keep him in Martinique, however, and he returns to France wealthy and still unmarried. A secret meeting with Julia comes to the attention of Montauban who succumbs to a fit of jealousy, poisons Julia, and then himself. The novel, which was not widely reviewed, in some ways resembles Othello and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Its comments on slavery are somewhat anomalous since, though positioned almost exactly at the centre of a markedly sentimental novel, they are considerably less sentimental than they might have been. Indeed, while Sypher maintains that Savillon ‘founds a sentimental economy’ with his reforms, Ellis notes that the book’s ‘discussion of slavery is played out within the larger conceptual field of commerce and sentimentalism’.50 Both are correct. The sentimental effect of the slavery passage comes not from over-written accounts of the slaves’ tears or moving exhortations to the reader to find a heart and follow the hero’s example. Instead, a ‘sentimental economy’ is founded in which Savillon promotes efficiency and maintains order on his plantation by creating personal ties of kindness, loyalty, and obligation.51 Regardless of the benefits for the slaves, the system appears to work well for Savillon. He notes that: I have had the satisfaction of observing those men, under the feeling of good treatment, and the idea of liberty, do more than almost

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double their number subject to the whip of an overseer. I am under no apprehension of desertion or mutiny; they work with the willingness of freedom, yet are mine with more than the obligation of slavery.52 Savillon’s psychological control over the slaves seems chilling, while his reaffirmation of plantation property rights (‘are mine’) in fact strengthens rather than ameliorates the slaves’ position as chattel.53 It remains to be seen how far Mackenzie was actually promoting, rather than merely describing, an alternative sentimentalist economy for the colonies (or anywhere else). Indeed, Mackenzie was less than fully committed to the antislavery cause. According to Sypher he ‘solemnly repudiates’ the antislavery of Julia de Roubigné in a political text, the Review of the Principal Proceedings of the Parliament of 1784, which was written in 1791–1792 as a document of support for the Pitt ministry.54 Ellis takes issue with Sypher, arguing that in Julia de Roubigné, Mackenzie’s ‘argument about slavery is perhaps not as radical as Sypher proposes’.55 Mackenzie’s position in the novel is merely ameliorationist, says Ellis, while in the Review he rehearses both sides of the argument before eventually deciding that Britain’s commercial advantage should take precedence. This position is not far removed from that in Julia de Roubigné where the humane treatment of the slaves is advocated because it turns to Savillon’s commercial advantage. Mackenzie, in Ellis’s view, does not ‘repudiate’ his earlier antislavery because he was never entirely opposed to slavery. Ellis, however, does not examine the passage in which Savillon expresses his doubts about the entire project of slavery, a passage which contains many rhetorical complexities: I have often been tempted to doubt whether there is not an error in the whole plan of negro servitude, and whether whites, or creoles born in the West-Indies, or perhaps cattle, after the manner of European husbandry, would not do the business better and cheaper than the slaves do. The money which the latter cost at first, the sickness (often owing to despondency of mind) to which they are liable after their arrival, and the proportion that die in consequence of it, make the machine, if it may be so called, of a plantation extremely expensive in its operations. In the list of slaves belonging to a wealthy planter, it would astonish you to see the number unfit for service, pining under disease, a burden on their master.56 In the ameliorationist context of the novel, the opening line, and the argument that flows from it, is powerful. Although a temptation to

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doubt would hardly count as full-blooded antislavery in any other context, Savillon argues that there may be ‘an error’ in the system of slavery. At this stage, his reasoning appears not so much tempered by humanitarian concerns as by economic ones. The slaves get sick and die and this all adds to their masters’ costs.57 The plantation, he suggests, could be worked as efficiently by cattle as by human beings. Mackenzie’s mechanistic rhetoric, in which plantation society is likened to a ‘machine’, seems to be a strong expression of this economic interpretation of plantation life. Yet, although Savillon’s doubts about slavery initially seem to derive directly from his own commercial self-interest, and he appears to view the slaves as economic ‘units’ rather than as human beings, the hard-nosed attitude of this passage seems unsustainable. Midway through the paragraph, he abruptly switches from the language of commerce to the language of sentiment: —I am talking only as a merchant:—but as a man—good Heavens! when I think of the many thousands of my fellow-creatures groaning under servitude and misery!—Great God! hast thou peopled those regions of thy world for the purpose of casting out their inhabitants to chains and torture?—No; thou gavest them a land teeming with good things, and lighted’st up thy sun to bring forth spontaneous plenty; but the refinements of man, ever at war with thy works, have changed this scene of profusion and luxuriance, into a theatre of rapine, of slavery, and of murder! This sudden change in the narrative position is marked by an equally sudden change in subject, tone, and even punctuation—the dashes are reminiscent of those used so frequently by Sterne—even more frequently by Sancho—and which were derided by Ralph Griffiths, in his review of Sancho’s Letters in The Monthly Review, as ‘an abomination to all accurate writers, and friends to sober punctuation’.58 The passage itself recalls the sermon by Sterne which prompted Sancho to write his letter, quoting Sterne’s words as ‘Consider slavery—what it is—how bitter a draught— and how many millions are made to drink it’.59 Savillon may have reduced the number of slaves from millions to thousands, but he very strongly repudiates his earlier analysis of the slaves as part of a ‘machine’ by referring to them here as ‘my fellow-creatures’. This is a direct quotation from that part of The History of Sir George Ellison where Mr and Mrs Ellison have the disagreement about slavery which is punctured by the sudden precipitation of a lap-dog. Mackenzie’s co-optive strategy is clear. He

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has brought on side Sterne, Scott, and Sancho, the three sentimentalists of 1766, to key the reader directly into a familiar and sentimentalised reading of slavery. As well as this intertextual rhetoric, the passage contains its own emotional language which is sentimental in that it emphasises the body (groans, chains, and torture) and argues for the existence of an unpleasant dichotomy between human beings in their feeling and unfeeling roles (man and merchant). In what becomes an excellent example of the emotional subversion of the intellect, the sentimental argument is allowed, paradoxically, to both refute and underscore the intellectual approach. In the earlier part of the paragraph, intellectual arguments were made about the economic advantages to possibly accrue from an abolition of slavery. These are apparently addressed to merchants: men in their unfeeling mode. The sentimental section abruptly alters both the tone and the argument, suggesting that common humanity (‘as a man’) dictates that slavery is unacceptable regardless of the economic arguments. And yet the economic arguments have been made and the sentimental section does not specifically refute them. Rather, Savillon argues that feeling and commerce go hand in hand, and that the inferior motives of the merchant can be augmented by the superior motives of the sentimentalist. While his argument suggests that commerce without humanity is morally repugnant, it still permits commercial arguments to stand without humanity. It offers intellectual reasons against slavery and then solidly shores them up with emotional appeals which seem intended to subvert the intellect and topple even the most unfeeling merchant into an antislavery position. The passage continues by taking a third and familiar tack: the theologically primitivist one. Africa is posited as a part of the world closer to Eden than to the modern and European world: it is ‘a land teeming with good things’ given, in this version, even before God created light. This paradise is destroyed, inevitably, by ‘the refinements of man’, but it is not made clear whether Savillon means ‘man’ or ‘Europeans’, a confusion which tends to undermine the ‘fellowcreatures’ rhetoric a few lines earlier. In either case, this is a powerfully emotional, though not a sentimental, conclusion to a complex paragraph in which Mackenzie constructs Savillon as a man of feeling and as an early campaigner, not just for amelioration, but for emancipation as well. Whether Mackenzie himself shared the views that his character Savillon expounds is unclear. What is certain is that Mackenzie presents the clearest example of antislavery rhetoric to be found in a novel of the 1770s.

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Sandford and Merton While many novels followed the lead set by Scott and Mackenzie in inserting a short antislavery (or ameliorationist) passage within a longer narrative, this strategy was not universal. Thomas Day’s important novel The History of Sandford and Merton, A Work Intended for the Use of Children (1783–1789) does exactly the opposite, framing a loose collection of stories within a sentimentalised critique of slavery. The suggestion for this novel, one of the first substantial works for older children, had come from Day’s friends Richard and Honora Edgeworth, who had complained of a lack of literature for children. They had started on a book (eventually published by Richard’s daughter Maria Edgeworth in 1801 as Harry and Lucy60) to which Day had intended to contribute a short story. The short story expanded, and was published in 1783 as the first volume of The History of Sandford and Merton.61 This novel does not have a strong narrative structure. Instead, Day presents the reader with a collection of what are effectively short stories, usually containing a strong moral message, which are framed by an explicitly abolitionist account of a particular child’s faulty upbringing and subsequent moral salvation. Young Tommy Merton is the son of a rich Jamaica planter who is ‘naturally a very good-natured boy, but unfortunately had been spoiled by too much indulgence’. Day ascribes this to the slave economy in which Tommy had been excused any form of labour: He had several black servants to wait upon him, who were forbidden upon any account to contradict him. If he walked, there always went two negroes with him, one of whom carried a large umbrella to keep the sun from him, and the other was to carry him in his arms, whenever he was tired [. . .] His mother was so excessively fond of him, that she gave him every thing he cried for, and would never let him learn to read, because he complained that it made his head ach.62 Tommy thus develops an unnecessary sensitivity towards his environment—which might otherwise be described as an excess of false sensibility. As a cure, he is sent to England for education, where he is rescued from a poisonous snake by Harry Sandford, the virtuous and sturdy son of a ‘plain, honest farmer’ who lives close by. Despite their obvious differences, the two become friends, and Tommy is introduced to Mr Barlow, the local clergyman. Under his directions, Tommy learns the virtue of patience, self-reliance, and respect for others, as well how to read and write. The episodic narrative allows Day to explore many situations and

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contemporary problems, both moral and practical. In response to these situations, Tommy’s character steadily improves, and he ultimately becomes the hardy, responsible, but feeling child advocated in Day’s philosophy, a philosophy heavily influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or, on Education (1762). In the concluding story, Tommy is made to face his racial prejudices. Slightly more than half way through the novel, Tommy and Harry are taken to a bull-baiting, a ‘barbarous sport’ in which a ‘noble animal’ is ‘wantonly tormented’. Here, ‘a poor half-naked black came up, and humbly implored their charity’.63 Day, himself both an abolitionist and a campaigner for the rights of animals, clearly intends parallels to be drawn between these abused figures. This former slave, it transpires, fought for the British against the American revolutionaries but is now destitute. The situation Day describes was not merely hypothetical, but reflected the everyday reality of many hundreds of former slaves who had fought for the British in the recent war, and who had come to London to enjoy the fruits of their freedom, but who were forced into destitution after being denied compensation and, often, even their wartime wages. This scandal was partly responsible first for the formation of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and, later, for the disastrous Sierra Leone Resettlement project of 1788, in which many black Londoners were resettled, not all willingly, in West Africa where most perished within a few years.64 However, in typically sentimental style, Day does not advocate grandiose public solutions along the lines of the Sierra Leone project. Instead, he proposes a charitable solution. Tommy, as yet not entirely reformed, has wasted ‘in cards, in play-things, in trifles, all his stock of money; and now he found himself unable to relieve that distress which he pitied’. It falls to Harry to relieve this man’s poverty, which he does by handing over his last sixpence. This is a good investment since, almost immediately, the enraged bull breaks free. The sentimental moment is punctured by the irruption of the sublime, taking the form of the bull who ‘roared with pain and fury; flashes of fire seemed to come from his angry eyes, and his mouth was covered with foam and blood’. Just as disaster seems inevitable, ‘the grateful black’, transformed from an object of sentimental pity into a figure of sublime nobility, engages with and subdues the bull.65 In the final volume of the novel, first published in 1789 when the abolition campaign was at its height, the ‘honest negro’ becomes a more central character, albeit one without a name. Now in residence with the Sandford family, he is able to tell the boys stories about his life as ‘a slave among the Spaniards at Buenos Ayres’, and about his former

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life in the Gambia.66 In both cases these are tales of high adventure, strongly influenced by Rousseau’s ideas about the ‘Noble Savage’. Yet these stories also serve a more directly polemical purpose—and a more sentimental purpose as well. In the first place, Day explicitly opposes prejudice based on race. ‘In this country’ says the African, ‘people are astonished at my colour, and start at the sight of a black man, as if he did not belong to their species.’ With its talk of ‘species’, this speech goes some way beyond a rebuttal of simple colour prejudice. It continues to discuss race as a biological phenomenon by drawing close analogies between human races and breeds of animals: In some parts of the world I have seen men of a yellow hue, in others of a copper colour, and all have the foolish vanity to despise their fellow-creatures as infinitely inferior to themselves. There indeed they entertain these conceits from ignorance; but in this country, where the natives pretend to superior reason, I have often wondered they could be influenced by such a prejudice. Is a black horse thought to be inferior to a white one, in speed, or strength, or courage? Is a white cow thought to give more milk, or a white dog to have an acuter scent in pursuing the game? On the contrary, I have generally found, in almost every country, that a pale colour in animals is considered as a mark of weakness and inferiority. Why then should a certain race of men imagine themselves superior to the rest, for the very circumstance they despise in other animals?67 The African follows up this argument with an anthropological account of life in an African village, and a tale of high adventure involving a fight to the death with a lion. These stories are not merely told to assert the nobility of the African character, but also to refute specific notions of European racial superiority. As such, Day is referring to very current debates, since in the 1780s it was still relatively unusual to see racial difference asserted along scientific or pseudo-scientific lines in a way that would become familiar in the nineteenth century.68 Yet this is apparently not sentimental, despite sentiment being the key tone of the rest of the novel. In fact, it exists as part of a more general sentimental argument about the education of a sentimental hero. Throughout the African’s accounts of Gambia and Argentina, and throughout the accounts of his part at the bull-baiting and in the Sandfords’ home, the focus is on Tommy’s emotional response, both to the African’s narrative and to

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his mere presence, and it is this emotional response which finally completes Tommy’s education. After listening to the stories of the former slave, Tommy found that: His heart expanded in the same proportion that his knowledge improved. He reflected, with shame and contempt, upon the ridiculous prejudices he had once entertained; he learned to consider all men as his brethren and equals; and the foolish distinctions which pride had formerly suggested were gradually obliterated from his mind. Such a change in his sentiments rendered him more mild, more obliging, more engaging than ever; he became the delight of all the family; and Harry, although he had always loved him, now knew no limits to his affection.69 At this important moment, the previously spoiled son of the plantation owner is recalled to his own family by the entrance of his father. The reunion is tearful, and the separation of Tommy and Harry that follows is equally lachrymose. The book thus returns to the sentimental style, with Tommy by now a sentimental hero with an expanded heart, fully capable of shedding ‘a tear of real virtue and gratitude’ instead of displaying the false sentiment that gave him a headache when he tried to learn to read. More problematic is the economic reckoning. Farmer Sandford, though declining a gift of one hundred pounds because it might lead him to idleness and luxury, is prevailed upon to accept a team of ‘true Suffolk sorrels, the first breed of working horses in the kingdom’.70 Both the cash and the horses, of course, are underwritten by Mr Merton’s plantations in Jamaica. It remains to be seen whether Tommy will work either to abolish or to ameliorate slavery on his father’s estate. Yet this oversight should not be taken to imply a lack of commitment on Day’s part. While the ending shies away from the more radical solutions that would satisfy a modern reader, it is clear that opposition to racial prejudice—and to slavery—is a central theme of this extended parable about the education of a sentimental hero. Day, like the other writers examined in this chapter, uses the techniques of sentimental rhetoric tactically to emotionally subvert the reader’s intellect at key points in the argument. As a children’s writer, it might be argued that his task was less challenging in this respect. Nevertheless, Scott, Sterne, Sancho, and Mackenzie do not use sentimental rhetoric that is any more complex, in its essentials, than that used by Day. All

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make use of the key sentimental tropes: sentimental argument, sentimental parables, and the rejection of false sensibility, to prepare the reader to be emotionally receptive to difficult or contentious ideas. In this respect, their writing is as rhetorically complex and as politically engaged as any writing, fictional or otherwise, to have appeared during the abolition debate.

3 Arguing in Verse: Abolitionist Poetry

The earliest unambiguously abolitionist poem, John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro (1773–1775), unmistakably, if problematically, deploys the rhetoric of sensibility. Yet the sentimental strategies of The Dying Negro were not always emulated. Later abolitionist verse was often keen to reject false sensibility in a strategy seemingly designed to counter the attacks of proslavery apologists. There were other differences, of course, from the sentimental rhetoric that appeared in prose writing. Sentimental arguments in poetry are usually, but not always, presented more simplistically and with more confidence. Sentimental heroes have to be established more quickly and with greater economy of language. For this reason tears, sighs, and other indicators of sensibility appear more frequently. The poetic form has a natural tendency to simplify narrative and focus on single events and individuals. Accordingly, sentimental parables are less likely to be vignettes inserted into the narrative and more likely to form the whole subject of the poem. But where there are serious political points to be made in verse the technique of emotional subversion of the intellect comes rapidly into play. In the poetry of antislavery, emotions are quickly raised and the reader is encouraged to adopt political positions on the strength of those emotions. This tactic was not lost upon the doctor James Currie who, in the preface to his friend William Roscoe’s The Wrongs of Africa (1787)— a poem commissioned by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade—outlined a pattern that was widely adopted by the poets of antislavery. He argued that ‘it is this trade, which setting justice and humanity at defiance, crowds the unhappy Africans in the foul and pestilential holds of ships, where twenty-five thousand perish annually of disease and broken hearts’.1 In Currie’s view, the slave trade was offensive first because it was unjust (despite being legal) and secondly because it 73

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was inhumane. By appealing first to the head and then to the heart, he provides the emotionally subversive model that was followed by almost all the poets of antislavery. Sandwiched between the medical terms ‘pestilential’ and ‘disease’ we are offered the paradigm of the scientific method, a statistic, before Currie’s focus shifts abruptly. These twenty-five thousand ‘unhappy Africans’ who ‘perish annually’ are not merely dying from causes, such as disease, that are amenable to rational explanation. They are also dying of ‘broken hearts’. The reader, having already swallowed some harsh truths, couched in the language of reason, is now forced into making an emotional response. In sympathy with the ‘unhappy Africans’, he or she might now feel it churlish to take issue with the statistics. ‘Broken hearts’ are at the centre of antislavery poetry, but the hearts that were meant to be broken were not those of the slaves but those of the middle- and upper-class readers of poetry in Britain. Roscoe may attack ‘Sensibility, with wat’ry eye, / Dropping oe’r fancied woes her useless tear’, yet when giving reasons against the slave trade in the preface to Roscoe’s poem, Currie still maintains it to be impossible ‘that representations such as these should fail in a country where men have heads to reason and hearts to feel’.2 Roscoe and Currie’s ostensibly anti-sentimental position is, in reality, an attack only on false sensibility and, throughout Roscoe’s poem, the tear and the appeal to the heart are given immense privilege. The same is true of many other antislavery poets. Hannah More’s poem Slavery may begin with an invocation to liberty but before long we find that the worst sin the slave trader perpetrates is the refusal to allow the captive slaves ‘to weep together’.3 William Cowper’s slave in ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ asks ‘What are England’s rights?’ Moments later he complains that ‘tears must water’ the plantation soil which the slave works.4 Throughout the poetry, slaves are portrayed as sentimental heroes: men and women of feeling whose tearful emotional response to their predicament overwhelms the purely physical tortures of the whip and the chain, and who are endowed with all the outward signs of a highly developed sensibility: weeping, sighing, and the almost superhuman ability to attend to the needs of others. Throughout the period of the abolition and emancipation campaigns, antislavery poetry appeared with regularity. Many hundreds of poems were published singly, in collections, in newspapers and journals, in chapbooks, and as broadsheet ballads. In this chapter, I examine a small number of these poems, and I read them in the context of contemporary critical debates about both their political and their aesthetic value. As with the discussion of prose writing in Chapter 2, rather than attempting to be comprehensive, I have selected poems that use sentimental rhetoric

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particularly clearly, or which were influential or celebrated contributions to the poetic campaign. Inevitably much has been omitted, but the poems and debates considered here offer us, I believe, considerable insights into the way that sentimental rhetoric was both deployed and criticised in the poetry of antislavery.

The Dying Negro Much antislavery poetry was directly inspired by The Dying Negro, a poem written between 1773 and 1775 by Thomas Day in collaboration with his ‘very ingenious friend and school-fellow’, the lawyer John Bicknell.5 Although poems about slaves had appeared before, this one arguably opened the poetic campaign against slavery—Wylie Sypher goes so far as to call it a ‘manifesto’.6 The poem appeared in 1773, was revised and expanded in 1774, and again in 1775.7 It appears that Bicknell supplied the original poem which was worked on by Day, and an edition of 1793 identifies exactly who did what.8 In 1774, Day added a long dedicatory introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau which considerably strengthens the antislavery credentials of the publication. The plot of the poem, such as it is, is more or less the same in all editions, although the third edition is considerably longer. The title of the first and second editions is The Dying Negro, a Poetical Epistle, supposed to be written by a black, (who lately shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames;) to his intended WIFE. In the third and subsequent editions the title was shortened to The Dying Negro, a Poem. All the editions contain an ‘Advertisement’ (although the wording changes) which describes the factual inspiration for the poem. According to this, the poem was completed on 5 June 1773 and was inspired by ‘an article of news which appeared last week in the London papers’.9 This short report appeared in several, but by no means all, of the London papers during the last week of May 1773. It stated that: Tuesday a Black, Servant to Capt. Ordington, who a few days before ran away from his Master and got himself christened, with the intent to marry his fellow-servant, a White woman, being taken and sent on board the Captain’s ship in the Thames, took an opportunity of shooting himself through the head.10 This brief paragraph constituted the whole report, which tells the story of a slave committing suicide after being forcibly carried aboard his master’s ship, thereafter to be returned to plantation slavery. The irony is that this practice had been ruled illegal in June 1772, and the report

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clearly demonstrates that, almost two years after Lord Mansfield’s celebrated ruling in the Sommersett case, slaves were still being carried out of the country against their will and, by now, against the law. Lord Mansfield’s ruling had not meant the end of slavery in England, as many erroneously believed, but he had ruled that no slave could be forcibly returned to slavery outside of England. As the report suggests, the law could be flouted. Day and Bicknell’s poem, written we should note by two young lawyers, must therefore be seen first as a commentary on the ineffectiveness of the law. The Dying Negro is no dry legal document. Rather, it is an overtly sentimental work with a serious political message. It establishes and promotes the idea of a suffering sentimental hero, while also aiming to emotionally subvert the reader’s intellect. Thomas Day, the author of the ‘Advertisement’, signals this strategy immediately after quoting the newspaper report. ‘The Author trusts,’ he tells us: That in an age and country, in which we boast of philanthropy, and generous sentiments, few persons, (except West-Indians) can read the above paragraph, without emotions similar to those, which inspired the following lines. They who are not more inclined to sympathise with the master, than the servant, upon the occasion,—will perhaps not be displeased at an attempt to delineate the feelings of the latter, in the situation above described.11 Indeed, feelings are very much to the fore. The poem is a suicide note in verse in which the slave gives vent to his feelings at being torn from the woman with whom he has fallen in love, as well as being torn from the country in which he now wishes to stay. The Dying Negro, self-consciously ‘become a thing without a name’ (his name is not given, either by Day and Bicknell or in the newspaper accounts), recounts his own suicidal depression in the poem, as well as describing the noble spirit of his fellow Africans, the treachery of the European mariners who took him into slavery, the slaves’ feelings about their daily routine in the plantations, and the manner in which he won the love of his intended wife. The slave, whose ‘dying eyes o’erflow’ at the thought of plantation slavery, is presented as a sentimental hero both for undergoing suffering and for expressing his misery through the medium of tears.12 His status as such is reinforced when, although distant from them, he addresses his ‘lost companions in despair’ (the slaves remaining on the plantations) ‘whose suff’rings still my latest tears shall share’. The sufferings of many are here contrasted with the tearful misery of an individual, as we would

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expect in a sentimental parable, and there is an implicit invitation to the reader to share in this suffering and to be themselves ‘rouz’d’ to action to stamp out the abomination. This is a clear example of the emotional subversion of the intellect. Not only are atrocities depicted in terms that seem intended to appeal to the reader’s sensibility as well as to his or her sense of moral outrage, but also this emotional passage is immediately followed by one that appeals more to the head than to the heart. In this passage, the slave owner is apostrophised and dismissed. His power cannot reach ‘beyond the grave’, despite the fact that he withheld from the Dying Negro both the ‘rights of man’ and the knowledge of Christ. Avarice is attacked, Africa is described, and the notion of geographical determinism is dismissed. In a footnote, it is suggested that ‘with proper instruments, and a good will’ Africans would become ‘excellent Astronomers’. The scientific rationalism of this passage cannot be sustained, however, and at the end Day returns to a description of the African character that combines a primitivist account of the ‘noble savage’ with a more sentimental representation of Africans: In their veins the tide of honour rolls; And valour kindles there the hero’s flame, Contempt of death, and thirst of martial fame: And pity melts the sympathising breast. In an important passage some 85 lines later, the Dying Negro tells the story of how he met and fell in love with the women he intended to marry. The location of the poem alters too, from the deck of the slave ship to a domestic setting, one consistent with the domestic interiors of the sentimental novel. Here, both the Dying Negro’s seeming nobility and his lover’s natural superiority are highlighted by their ability to communicate in the mode of sensibility: Still as I told the story of my woes, With heaving sighs thy lovely bosom rose; The trick’ling drops of liquid chrystal stole Down thy fair cheek, and mark’d thy pitying soul; Dear drops! upon my bleeding heart, like balm They fell, and so on my wounded soul grew calm. Then my lov’d country, parents, friends forgot; Heaven I absolv’d, nor murmur’d at my lot, Thy sacred smiles could every pang remove, And liberty became less dear than love.13

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The Dying Negro’s sentimental heroism, rather than his mere physical valour, awakens first the compassion and next the love of this young woman, and appropriately this scene takes place in a private, domestic setting. At this point, we might contrast the Dying Negro with Othello, who won the heart of Desdemona by telling her in private the story of his life. Having heard fragments of that tale, she asks him to tell the full story. ‘I did consent’, Othello publicly explains to the Venetian Senate: And often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffer’d.14 The Dying Negro does the same thing, using his eloquence to create a sympathetic response in his audience of one. Othello’s ‘distressful strokes’ are incidental to his main narrative, and he is quite clear that he is telling ‘the story of my life’, but the Dying Negro, as a sentimental hero, tells ‘the story of my woes’. These woes introduce a complex interaction of tears, bodies, and souls. Real tears fall from the woman’s eyes indicating that she has a ‘pitying soul’. The ‘dear drops’ fall metaphorically upon the Dying Negro’s ‘bleeding heart’ with the effect that his ‘wounded soul grew calm’. This sentimental interplay seems intended to move the reader, if possible even to tears, while at the same time introducing a charming domestic vignette of two lovers soothing one another’s troubles, a vignette which concludes with the firm, though pleasant, anchor of ‘love’. This heart-warming scene does not last long. In a new paragraph, the slave abruptly remembers his current situation, and reminds us of the hopelessness of believing, as he previously had done, that love could be sustained without liberty: ‘—Ah! where is now that voice which lull’d my woes’, he asks, before reminding himself that: My hopes, my joys, are vanish’d into air, And now of all that once engag’d my care, These chains alone remain, this weapon and despair!15 The emotional transition, from domestic sentiment to suicidal despair, is powerful, calculated to rouse indignation and guide the reader into the final scene of the poem, where the slave’s despair moves him inexorably towards the madness of suicide. While this scene may engage the reader’s sensibility, the language is too uncompromising to be sentimental. The soft distress of the preceding scene may have brought forth tears in the reader but, before those tears can be dried, horror replaces sentiment.

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The poem has moved from sentimental despair, through rational arguments about rights and religion, to domestic sentiment and finally to horrific despair. The reader is kept in a state of emotional awareness throughout the poem so that the complex notions discussed in the rational section will be accepted uncritically by their emotionally subverted intellect. The horrors of a life in slavery, and the resulting suicide and despair, invoke emotions alien to most educated readers of the late eighteenth century. To augment the emotion found here, these horrors are juxtaposed with the more familiar distresses of the English, domestic, sentimental scene. The combined effect is highly emotional, forcing the reader to recoil strongly from the horrors portrayed, but also to accept the arguments made against the slave trade. The poem concludes with an angry passage in which the slave prays despairingly to the God to whom, with his baptism, he had recently turned. Like Christ himself, the slave asks God why he appears to have forsaken him: ‘when crimes like these thy injur’d pow’r prophane, / O God of Nature! art thou called in vain?’ The closing lines of the poem contain a call for revenge and, with his dying breath, the poem’s narrator asks God to arrange that the slave ship on which he has committed suicide will sink, and all its crew will drown. In that moment, he hopes, the slavers’ prayers will also go unanswered, that ‘while they spread their sinking arms to thee, / Then let their fainting souls remember me!’16 The vengeful tone of this concluding passage alarmed several of the anonymous reviewers of the day. The Gentleman’s Magazine was critical of the ‘rather impious expostulation with which the poem concludes’. The Critical Review attempted a more balanced, if patronising, assessment, arguing that: This bold expostulation with the supreme Being, and the imprecations denounced, might fill us with horror if uttered by any native of Europe; but when considered as the effusions of a negro, who had but lately been initiated in the doctrines of the Christian religion, they seem entirely natural, and strongly express the sentiments which may be supposed to agitate the human mind in the situation described.17 All the reviewers were moved by the poem. The Monthly Review argued that: [Day] expresses the highest sense of human liberty, and vigorously asserts the natural and universal rights of mankind; in vindicating which, he, of course, condemns and execrates our West-Indian planters, &c. whose tyranny over their unhappy slaves will, we are afraid, in many instances, but too amply justify the severity of his muse.18

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Yet, while the poem is unmistakably opposed both to slavery and to the slave trade, nowhere in the first edition is there a direct appeal, either to Parliament or to the public, to bring a halt to the trade. In addition, the poem often seems content merely to wallow in the misfortunes of the suffering victim. This was clearly to contemporary tastes: with a largely favourable critical reception, the poem sold well, and the substantially rewritten second and third editions appeared over the following two years. In these, extensive changes show a clear hardening of the authors’ position but also a tacit admission that sentimental rhetoric was not necessarily the best medium for expressing a horror of slavery. In the first place, there is the new introduction, entirely Day’s work, which appeared in 1774. This essay, eight pages of densely printed text, takes the form of a dedication to Day’s hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but digresses into a discussion of the context of the poem and, indeed, into a more general discussion of the lamentable state of British society as a whole. Although wide-ranging, there are three aspects to this introduction that clearly take it into the realm of the antislavery manifesto in a way that the first edition of the poem had failed to do. First, Day briefly articulates a number of pressing philosophical and economic arguments against slavery, noting that ‘the fury of African tyrants is stimulated by pernicious gold; the rights of nature are invaded; and European faith becomes infamous throughout the globe’.19 As we shall see in Chapter 4, these arguments had been made before 1774, but there is not much evidence that they had reached a wide audience. Day’s ‘Dedication’ was probably the first time many people had come across such ideas. Second, Day becomes one of the first British writers to discuss the paradox of American liberty by noting that it is for the benefit of the American colonists that ‘the Negro is dragged from his cottage, and his plantane shade’ and that thus ‘the rights of nature are invaded’. ‘Such is the inconsistency of mankind’, he argues, that ‘these are the men whose clamours for liberty and independence are heard across the Atlantic Ocean’. This argument was made famous by Samuel Johnson in April 1775, when he asked ‘why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from among the drivers of Negroes?’20 Nevertheless, a year before Johnson, and two years before the Declaration of Independence, Day is already making a case that was to be restated by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic right up until the thirteenth amendment was passed in 1865. Finally, the dedication ends with a wish that ‘the generous minds of my countrymen [. . .] extend an ampler protection to the most innocent and miserable of their own species’. This statement refers directly to the Mansfield decision, which provided some protection for slaves in

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England. As we have seen, the poem itself highlights the shortcomings of that decision, the fact that it could be, and clearly was, ignored from time to time. The ‘ampler protection’ for which Day calls could be new legislation to put Lord Mansfield’s decision into statute law, or it could be a call for resources to police and enforce the decision. But it could also be a call for a far more radical solution: an end to slavery, and an end to the slave trade. Day leaves it up to the reader to decide just how ‘ample’ that protection should be, but clearly the ‘Dedication’ calls for further action on the part of the reader, and this significantly alters the way the poem is read in the later editions. Significantly, this approach is developed in Day’s Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes. This pamphlet takes the form of a letter addressed to a slave owner in America—and might genuinely have been such a document. It was written and sent in 1776 after the recipient had written to Day asking him for his ‘sentiments relative to the Slavery of the Negroes’.21 In 1776, given that Day’s only real claim to fame was The Dying Negro, this was clearly a request for a polemical treatment of the subject already addressed in the poem. Day was forthcoming, although the Fragment was not published until 1784. Its central argument is that African slaves are men and that all men have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ‘If there be certain natural and universal rights, as the declaration of your congress so repeatedly affirm, I wonder how the unfortunate Africans have incurred their forfeiture.’22 This repeats the argument Day had made in 1774, in the preface to the second edition of The Dying Negro, but, with a sentimentalist’s regard for feelings, Day focuses on the happiness part of the equation more than the others. There are passages in which the life of slaves, ‘a loathsome existence in misery and chains’, is described at length: ‘how they are brought to the market, naked, weeping, and in chains [. ..] how all the most sacred duties, affections, and feelings of the human heart, are violated and insulted’.23 This is the language of sentimental rhetoric, calculated to be moving, but there are also sentimental arguments, based in the philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith that saw sympathy as the glue of human society. ‘There is a method of pursuing our own happiness in such a manner’ Day argues, ‘that we may promote the general good at the same time’, because our basic nature causes us to ‘love, and esteem, and sympathize’ with people who do not ‘interfere’ with others. Likewise, we feel ‘hatred and indignation’ towards ‘aggressors’.24 This basic nature pleads against slavery, Day argues in this letter to a slave owner: ‘Have [these principles] not, a thousand times, animated you to acts of virtue and humanity [. . .] Have they not often pleaded the

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cause of the wretch that lay trembling and defenceless at your feet?’25 In Day’s reading, the American Congress’s Declaration of Independence is a sentimental document, concerned as it is with the happiness— the feelings—of its ostensible citizens, and it is the same appeal to the feelings that guides his demand for equal rights for those who at that time were slaves. The argument thus fits in neatly with that of The Dying Negro, which asks us to attempt to understand the feelings of a slave and form judgements about the institution accordingly. Indeed, the Fragment was later reprinted alongside the poem, in both English editions and, curiously, a German translation. Clearly, the later editors and the translators saw the projects of poem and pamphlet as being closely related. Readers of the later editions of The Dying Negro would have turned to the opening lines of the poem with the Dedication’s call to action in mind. Yet, even without reading this polemical material, we can see how the poem has moved sharply from a depiction of passive suffering to one of active resistance. In 1773, the poem opened: Blest with thy last sad gift—the power to dye, At last, thy shafts, stern fortune, I defy; Welcome, kind pass-port to an unknown shore!— The world and I are enemies no more. By 1775 it had become: Arm’d with thy sad last gift—the pow’r to die, Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy; Thy dreadful mercy points at length the shore, Where all is peace, and men are slaves no more There is a crucial shift from presenting the power of suicide as a blessing to presenting it as a weapon. In the first edition, death comes as a final release from the generalised suffering of the world, and we have to wait to find out what the specific problems are. In the third edition, although the metaphor of the ‘shore’ becomes less clear, thus arguably diminishing the force of the opening, the worldly problem—slavery—is emphasised early on, and the suicide becomes more an act of resistance than an act of despair. The reader discovers more quickly that the poem is not merely a tragedy in the familiar sense (although, the opening clearly echoes Hamlet’s musings on suicide) but is also a polemical tract. The tragedy, which seems essentially personal for much of the first edition, is political from the start in the third edition.

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Similar changes are made throughout the poem. None, however, show as marked a contrast as do the closing lines. In 1773, as we have seen, the poem finished with the expostulation which worried so many of its critics. In 1774, Day added 44 lines to the end and, in 1775, Bicknell contributed a further ten. These 54 lines significantly alter the tone of the poem. The sentimental language which characterises so much of the original version is still there, of course, but the new ending changes the balance of the poem from largely sentimental, with an ‘impious expostulation’ at the end, to a largely impassioned and vengeful poem, with sentimental tableaux at the start and middle. In this new ending, there are indications that the Dying Negro’s ‘impious’ request that the slavers will drown may yet be answered. The new section starts: —Thanks, righteous God!—Revenge shall yet be mine; Yon flashing lightning gave the dreadful sign. I see the flames of heav’nly anger hurl’d, I hear your thunders shake a guilty world.26 The lines that follow are apocalyptic, as the slave, now close to his final moments, sees ‘prophetic visions flash before [his] sight’. These visions show a future in which the spirit of Africa, personified as a warrior, arises to ‘pour / The plagues of Hell’ on the European ‘shore’. Bicknell’s ten-line interpolation, even heavier on personification, rather strains the poetry as, silhouetted against the ‘lurid’ sky, Discord, War, and Commerce do battle with Pity, Mercy, and, finally, Nature herself. In the end: One common ruin, one promiscuous grave, O’erwhelms the dastard, and receives the brave— For Afric triumphs!—his avenging rage No tears can soften, and no blood assuage.27 Africa’s victory comes at the cost both of European manners, represented by the sentimental signifier, tears, and European lives. The poem’s narrator, with his last words, anticipates the ‘glorious morn’ when this warrior, the ‘great avenger of thy race be born’. In what would seem a rejection of his recent conversion to Christianity, the Dying Negro offers himself as a sacrifice to unspecified, but clearly unchristian, deities: —And now, ye pow’rs! To whom the brave are dear, Receive me falling, and your suppliant hear. To you this unpolluted blood I pour, To you that spirit which ye gave restore!28

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Perhaps mindful of the accusations of impiety the first edition received, Day has added the dark pun on ‘falling’. But, if the Dying Negro is indeed falling towards damnation, it is a voluntary and calculated fall. No longer desiring the favours of a Christian God, the slave asks for ‘no long eternity of happiness’. Instead, he wants freedom. In lines that would seem, structurally at least, to be a marked improvement on the first edition, the poem ends with the same metaphor that appeared in the opening passage. The final couplet of the poem, in which the slave cries, ‘O lead me to that spot, that sacred shore,/ Where souls are free, and men oppress no more’, directly refer to the third and fourth lines where the slave notices that; ‘dreadful mercy points at length the shore,/Where all is peace, and men are slaves no more’. The 1775 edition has a completeness missing from the earlier edition. It also projects a more public vision than the earlier version, which dwelt on the Dying Negro’s personal feelings and the domestic situation that prompted his suicide. In the third edition, the domestic and the personal— often couched in sentimental terms—are still present, but the ending dramatically expands the scope of the poem. The first edition had ended with private prayers, private sorrow, and private acts of revenge. The second and third conclude with an apocalyptic vision of war between Africa and Europe, a war from which no one can escape, and in which natural justice, so long perverted by Europeans, is finally asserted. By translating the slaves’ ‘impious expostulation’ from the realm of personal prayer to that of intercontinental warfare, it demands that the reader respond in a manner which is less private and more public. In short, the poem ends by asking the reader to do something: to take action to end slavery and the slave trade. Day and Bicknell do not replace the sensibility of the first edition, but they clearly felt that sentimental rhetoric was only one of several possible rhetorical strategies available to them, and not necessarily the best one, for them, to instil horror and promote political action. Yet the sentimentalism remains a prominent part of the poem even if relegated to the status of parable rather than being the dominant mode. And although the poem may not be a manifesto, in the strictest sense of the word, it is a call to arms. Just as the poem’s hero himself moves from being ‘blest’ to being ‘arm’d’ with the power to die, the reader too is being asked to take sides in the conflict between Europe and Africa, a conflict in which Africa will ultimately triumph, because Africa has ‘natural justice’ on her side.

Hannah More’s Slavery, A Poem Almost all the antislavery poems that appeared in the 1780s and 1790s make some use of sentimental rhetoric, although often that

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rhetoric is buried in verse that is inspired by other traditions. For example, the anonymous Wrongs of Almoona (1788) portrays Africans as unsentimental, noble warriors. The poem is written as an epic, with scenes of hand-to-hand combat, comradeship in arms, and rousing martial speeches.29 Nevertheless, the poet does have recourse to sentiment at crucial points in the narrative, in particular, immediately before the deaths of the principal characters. The poet recognised that he or she needed to generate an emotional response at these moments but, clearly finding it difficult to do so within the confines of the epic genre, he or she switches from the heroic to the sentimental mode at short notice. Other poets did the reverse, writing predominantly in a sentimental manner but inserting an occasional image of Africans as noble savages, or discussing the happiness of life in the state of nature. Hannah More’s important Slavery, A Poem (1788) is a good example. At one point she draws contrasts between Africans and the heroes of antiquity, noting the perversity of prejudice in that ‘that very pride / In Afric scourg’d, in Rome was deify’d.’30 She can, for just a few lines, invoke that most respectable form of eighteenth-century primitivism and draw attention to the martial glory of the classical golden age, but it is a clumsy interpolation and she quickly returns to a more sentimental mode. More’s Slavery is in many respects typical of antislavery poetry, which is not surprising considering the extent to which it was imitated. It is structured as a series of themed tableaux and, in fewer than three hundred lines, it discusses almost every aspect of the slave trade debate; an impressive list that, succinctly itemised by Moira Ferguson, includes ‘human bondage, split families, atrocities, unchristian traders, the demeaning of Britain’s “name”, tributes to parliamentarians and appeals to philanthropy’.31 This is fertile ground for the deployment of sentimental rhetoric and, although More chooses not to establish sentimental heroes (or, indeed, any sort of character) or to use sentimental parables, a familiar sentimental argument runs throughout the poem, contending that all people are equal because all feel the same emotions and bodily sensations. This argument is clearly expressed towards the middle of the poem when More asks the reader to: Plead not, in reason’s palpable abuse, Their sense of *feeling callous and obtuse: From heads to hearts lies Nature’s plain appeal, Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel.32 * Nothing is more frequent than this cruel and stupid argument, that they [Africans] do not feel the miseries inflicted on them as Europeans would do.

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The footnote strengthens the argument. This argument is echoed several times, both earlier and later in the poem, and is structurally important as it provides one of a small number of repeated themes bringing some semblance of unity to an otherwise eclectic poem. The notion of the ability to feel as an indicator of common humanity is also an important argument within the wider discourse of sensibility. Its deployment here allows More to identify herself (and the antislavery movement) with that discourse while at the same time gaining strength from it. Her assumption is that her readers are already familiar with the philosophical arguments about the importance of feeling. Her job is to remind her readers that feeling is universal, and not merely the preserve of the ‘reasoning’ classes. This approach flatters the reader, who would certainly have seen himself or herself as amongst that part of humanity which could both reason and feel, but it also contains an implied rebuke. That minority who, in More’s view, are lucky enough to be able to reason should not abuse the privilege with bad reasoning—and to the sentimentalist the worst reasoning of all is that suffering is the preserve only of a minority. This approach is consistent with the strategy of rejecting false sentiment, a strategy which is explicit in the poem from the start. Early in the poem, More writes: For no fictitious ills these numbers flow, But living anguish and substantial woe; No individual griefs my bosom melt, For millions feel what Oronoko felt.33 In the third and fourth lines, More signals her familiarity with what I call the sentimental parable. Indeed, she makes considerable use of this technique in much of her writing. For example, the Cheap Repository Tracts, which were largely written by More over a period of years starting in 1794, are little more than a collection of sentimental parables. There are, however, no sentimental parables in Slavery, and these lines offer an explanation. More clearly has a very keen sense of the magnitude of slavery, a sense no doubt enhanced by her direct involvement in the Abolition Committee.34 She also has a strong point to make about the relationship between fictional and non-fictional representations of Africans and slaves. As we have seen, Wylie Sypher argued that representations of Africa and Africans, and slaves and slavery, in most cases had little to do with reality. More rejects these representations, typified in the familiar stage figure of Oroonoko, as superficial, and asserts a difference between her poem and other literary works on slavery which had come before. Her poem, she is

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saying, is a contribution to an actual political debate and not merely an aesthetic production: it refers to real Africans suffering ‘living anguish and substantial woe’. Critical opinion has been divided in its view of the realism of Slavery. Sypher believes that More is ‘fully aware of the conditions within the slave-trade, and relies on the information undoubtedly gleaned from Wilberforce and his friends’.35 Ferguson is less convinced and argues that the poem ‘casts slaves into a mode of radical alterity’, 36 while Patricia Demers notes, with rather ungainly language, that More informs ‘her appeal to parliamentarians with the received bourgeois and hegemonic view of the black’.37 These views are not necessarily antithetical. There is no doubt that More had access to the best information available to any late eighteenth-century person without direct experience of the slave trade. Equally, there is no doubt that the vast majority of eighteenthcentury Britons, including abolition campaigners, had at best a very hazy understanding of Africa and African culture. As Demers puts it, while More’s ‘characterization of the black may indeed have contributed to a theory of radical otherness, her intention—despite the inadequate methodology—was reformative’.38 More central to the relationship between the discourses of sensibility and abolition is More’s seeming unease with the sentimentalism with which readers could weep over the ‘fictitious ills’ of an Oroonoko while doing nothing to bring about an end to slavery in the real world. In part, More’s difficulty with sensibility reflects an extended theme, and a notable paradox, in her work as a whole. Although clearly writing in a sentimental style throughout most of her work in the eighteenth century, More nonetheless expresses concern over the excesses of this literary fashion in a number of places, most notably in Sensibility, A Poem, which first appeared in 1782.39 This concern is reiterated in Slavery, but More’s ostensible anti-sentimentalism in this poem does not seek to attack sensibility, but merely false sensibility. This common sentimental argument prompts an emotional response in the reader by insisting that if they are prepared to weep over ‘fictitious ills’ they must also weep over real suffering. The message is reinforced by an implied warning against hypocrisy. There is also a politically defensive strategy at work, involving a seemingly anti-sentimental message being couched in sentimental terms. The strategy is to catch the opposition off their guard and to pre-empt their criticisms of the sentimental manner—while also co-opting them into the sentimental and abolitionist projects. This proactive approach was not merely precautionary. As the slavery debate intensified, the forces of reaction increasingly deployed their arguments in the popular press.

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In the arsenal of anti-abolitionism, a strong critique of the sentimentalist nature of abolitionist discourse became one of the main weapons of the proslavery camp.

Abolitionist verse and The Gentleman’s Magazine The way this argument was played out is illustrated by The Gentleman’s Magazine, the most widely read periodical publication of the period, in which antislavery poetry vied for attention with largely proslavery letters and essays. Throughout the eighteenth century, the magazine had taken sides in various political disputes and, once the Abolition Committee had initiated its campaign, it appears to have become clear to both sides that the magazine would be a battleground. After a short tussle, the conservatives won control of the review section. Throughout 1787, and until February 1788, antislavery texts were warmly received. Abruptly, in March 1788, the reviewer’s position shifted. From this point onward, every abolitionist tract or poem is harshly reviewed while proslavery texts are portrayed in glowing terms. The last antislavery publication to be reviewed positively is James Ramsay’s Letter to James Tobin in January 1788. In this article, the reviewer praises Ramsay as ‘the Vicar of Teston in Kent, who first undertook to display [the slave trade’s] horrors and expose its guilt’. On the same page, there is a review of A Letter to the Treasurer of the Society Instituted for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, from the Rev. Robert Boucher Nickolls, Dean of Middleham. The reviewer plainly states that Nickolls ‘expresses an ardent wish for the success of the cause: in which we heartily concur with him’.40 No slavery publications are reviewed in February, but in March the reviewer takes offence at Joseph Priestley’s Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade which allegedly ‘contains some of the most specious arguments against the slave trade’. The reviewer manages to combine an attack on abolitionism with a swipe at Priestley’s nonconformism: ‘turn all mankind loose, and release them from every restraint but what their own consciences will suggest, and see what will be the consequence’.41 Worse is to come. In April, the reviewer’s exasperation becomes evident when he complains, in a review of The Prince of Angola, that ‘this is the third time Southerne’s Oroonoko has been altered’. This becomes the occasion for the more pointed political statement that: ‘great care must be taken, that, under the specious name of Humanity, as already of Liberty, too great sacrifices of national polity and interest be not made’.42 Thereafter, reviews of slavery publications follow a similar pattern.

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The reasons for the sudden change are not immediately clear. Although we know the authors of many of the articles in The Gentleman’s Magazine from this period, including the authors of a substantial proportion of the reviews, attributions for the articles quoted here, and many others dealing with slavery, cannot safely be established.43 However, we can attempt a reconstruction. The chief reviewer at this time was Richard Gough, a close friend of the editor, John Nichols, and a political conservative, as he made clear in the obituary that he wrote for himself: On the death of his Fellow Collegian, Mr. Duncombe, in 1786, he occasionally communicated Reviews of Literary Publications to that valuable Miscellany. If he criticised with warmth and severity certain innovations attempted in Church or State, he wrote his sentiments with sincerity and impartiality—in the fullness of a heart deeply impressed with a sense of the excellence and happiness of the English Constitution both in Church or State.44 Gough was being modest about the extent of his contribution to the magazine. The obituary was reprinted twice by Nichols and in both cases the first sentence was altered to read: ‘in 1786, the department of the review in that valuable Miscellany was, for the most part, committed to him’.45 The dating shows that the change in attitude towards the slave trade had nothing to do with Gough’s appointment, which had taken place two years earlier, but the two variants agree that Gough was not the sole reviewer. The timing of the change is an important clue to what was going on behind the scenes. In early 1788, the trickle of abolitionist literature became a flood as the Abolition Committee began its campaign in earnest. It seems likely that the conservative Richard Gough decided the review section at least should be following the proslavery line. Either Gough took over himself when slavery-related texts were discussed or he appointed another similarly reactionary reviewer for that topic. From this point onwards, the abolitionist literature reviewed was routinely subjected to far harsher criticism than it merited on purely aesthetic grounds. Not all discussion of slavery in The Gentleman’s Magazine was in the reviews: there were also letters, essays, and poems dealing with the topic. In these, at least until early in 1792, when reports of the French Revolution and the slave uprising in San Domingo filtered through and were seized upon by reactionaries, abolitionists had a monopoly on the powerful imagery of abuse and suffering with which to denounce ‘this man-stealing, man-buying and man-murdering system’.46 On the other hand, proslavery

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writers prided themselves on their ‘dispassionate’ language (with, in many cases, little justification, as I show in Chapter 4). They sought to project the image that they had reached a rational position based on facts rather than having been governed by their emotions. They tended to be openly sceptical both of sentimental literature and of sentimental attitudes in general. Moreover, the essayists in the magazine objected strongly to poets interfering in matters of politics, as the pseudonymous contributor ‘No Planter’ makes clear in his now widely quoted contribution of 1789: The vulgar are influenced by names and titles. Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave trade by pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians.47 The attempted light-hearted satire of this passage masks bitter criticism of the abolitionists. They are accused first of being vulgar (socially inferior), secondly of paying attention to superficialities like titles rather than to hard facts, thirdly of being violent and plural—a mob—and, finally, of being in various ways weak and hypocritical. The inclusion of ‘poetesses’ alongside representatives of church and state is interesting. The writer is attacking antislavery sentiment articulated in the public sphere, and it is clear that he sees poetry, or antislavery poetry at least, as a predominantly feminine discourse. In this he was not correct—more antislavery verse was written by men than by women—but his argument does show that he recognised that publishing poetry was a method by which women could, and did, enter the public sphere. His attack is thus on public pronouncements made for private reasons. The divine has become ‘pious’, in this case meaning sanctimonious rather than devout, while the politician has become ‘short-sighted’—often a synonym for ‘self-interested’. Both of these professionals have switched their attention from the outside world of realities to an interior world of false religion and false attention to the state. Between these lies the most self-concerned figure of them all; the ‘tender-hearted’ poetess, whose sentimental judgements are formed emotionally rather than rationally, and whose concerns lie merely with the order of words rather than with the real world of trade. Viewed from this reactionary position, it is the poetess who is the genuinely subversive figure and who must therefore be most closely guarded against. ‘No Planter’s’ attack is simultaneously an attack on abolitionism, supposed self-interest, and false sentiment. ‘Polinus Alter’ attacked poetesses

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under an even broader head, arguing that all abolitionism is mere sentimental affectation, and identifying two of the most popular authors of the previous decade as being both hypocritical and licentious: Poetic fiction is sadly misapplied. Our poetesses, who can oppress and abuse one another when opportunity offers, unite in opposition to oppression with as ill a grace as Hawkesworth (whose wife kept a boarding-house for young ladies) prostituted his pen to describe the Cytherean pleasures of the South Seas, or the admirers of the English Bramin celebrated his base attachment to another man’s wife, and erected a monument in Bristol Cathedral to the worthless Eliza.48 Here, the hypocrisy of poetesses is compared with the sexual hypocrisy that the writer, like many others, believed John Hawkesworth and Laurence Sterne displayed, respectively, in The Voyages (1773) and in A Sentimental Journey (1768).49 Not only is the application of poetry to political discussion questioned, but it is also insinuated that the morality of the poetesses themselves is questionable. There are further complications. Both Hawkesworth and Sterne had applied themselves to the topic of slavery, the former in his 1759 adaptation of Oroonoko, and the latter in a number of passages in Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey and his much publicised correspondence with Ignatius Sancho. Moreover, the salient fact of Hawkesworth’s Voyages is a cultural encounter in which, it was argued by some, Hawkesworth had neglected to take a sufficiently Christian line and had dwelled too lovingly on the sexual practices of the inhabitants of Tahiti. The essayist can therefore dismiss Hawkesworth’s sympathy for people of other cultures as a sexual proclivity. By placing Sterne and Hawkesworth together in this way, ‘Polinus Alter’ invokes an image of sexual, religious, and racial hypocrisy that undermines both the authors themselves and their views on slavery. Furthermore, the ‘tender-hearted poetesses’ are propelled into a steamy underworld of sex and immorality merely by their having chosen to write on a question—slavery—which also engaged the attentions of Sterne and Hawkesworth. ‘No Planter’ and ‘Polinus Alter’ were not the only contributors to the Gentleman’s Magazine to lambaste the ‘poetesses’ who challenged the slave trade. It is significant, however, that only female poets came in for this treatment; male poets were left alone by the essayists (although not by the reviewers). This would be understandable if the majority of the poets of antislavery in this period were indeed women, yet, even if we assume that women wrote all of the anonymous poems on slavery published in

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this period, male authors still outnumber female authors. The essayists who attacked the antislavery movement by attacking its poets were clearly taking a simple, though fallacious, line. They were attempting to show that antislavery was a feminine, domestic, private, and emotion-centred discourse whereas the arguments in favour of the continuance of slavery were based on real facts understood in the male and public world of commerce. It may have been acceptable, laudable even, for poets to have feelings of sympathy for slaves in private, but when these ‘poetic effusions’ went hand in hand with a political movement which offered to relieve suffering by attacking vested interests, they had to be challenged. This goes some way towards explaining why for a few years antislavery reigned supreme in the poetry section of The Gentleman’s Magazine, while the reviews and most of the essays were strongly opposed to abolition. Clearly the proslavery editors viewed the ‘select poetry’, the section of the magazine which published readers’ poetry, as the magazine’s drawingroom: a polite place for the ladies to pour out their hearts but not really connected with the ‘real world’ of male political discourse. Of course, this argument is not without its problems, as most of the contributors to the poetry section were male. It has long been argued, however, that although men participated fully in the discourse of sensibility, it was one that women could, and did, take a large part in formulating. Proslavery campaigners clearly saw antislavery poetry both as a sentimental and predominantly feminine discourse and for that reason were disinclined to attack abolitionism and its poets in verse, and happy to criticise antislavery by criticising the poetic form in which much antislavery sentiment could be found. This may well explain why so few proslavery poems can be found. James Boswell, who in 1791 published a poem called No Abolition of Slavery: or, the Universal Empire of Love, notorious for its misogyny as much as for its proslavery, was the exception rather than the rule.50

The Wrongs of Africa In the context of the attacks on ‘tender-hearted poetesses’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, we can better understand Hannah More’s diffidence about sensibility in Slavery and her insistence on demonstrating that her poem draws attention to ‘living anguish and substantial woe’. In this context too, we can read William Roscoe’s The Wrongs of Africa, which was published in 1787 to raise funds for the Abolition Committee. The poem is long, in blank verse, and in the jaundiced view of Wylie Sypher ‘justifies Roscoe’s confession that “At my birth . . . the muses

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smiled not.” ’ 51 Contemporary reviewers were rather kinder, with William Enfield arguing in The Monthly Review that the poet had completed his task with ‘judgment, taste, and genius’.52 On the whole, the reviewers were pleased with the poem’s heroic form in blank verse, a form (and tone) clearly modelled on Paradise Lost. The poem is primitivist, with representations of an impossibly idyllic Africa, and stories of slave suicide. It also has a complex relationship with the discourse of sensibility, a relationship explored in the opening lines of the poem: Offspring of love divine, Humanity! To who, his eldest born, th’Eternal gave Dominion o’er the heart; and taught to touch Its varied stops in sweetest unison; And strike the string that from a kindred breast Responsive vibrates! from the noisy haunts Of mercantile confusion, where thy voice Is heard not; from the meretricious glare Of crowded theatres, where in thy place Sits Sensibility, with wat’ry eye, Dropping o’er fancied woes her useless tear; Come thou, and weep with me substantial ills; Torn from their natal shore, and doom’d to bear The yoke of servitude in Western climes.53 Like More, Roscoe is keen to point out that he is addressing a real and not an imagined problem and he makes the point in remarkably similar language. ‘Come thou, and weep with me substantial ills’, implores Roscoe, while More argues that ‘for no fictitious ill these numbers flow, / But living anguish and substantial woe’. Roscoe’s poem came first, and More would certainly have been familiar with it. The likelihood is that More’s echoes of Roscoe are a deliberate attempt to promote a unified abolitionist voice which denounces false sensibility in verse while simultaneously demanding a strongly emotional response to the horrors of slavery. Roscoe attacks sensibility in a way that was becoming increasingly familiar in the 1780s: he accuses it of being insincere and ‘useless’. He compares a personified Humanity which, by being able to ‘strike the string that from a kindred breast / Responsive vibrates’, is posited as a real principle based on mutual sympathy, and a Sensibility that is inward looking and self-indulgent, concerned only with ‘fancied woes’. It is interesting, however, that Roscoe does not implore the reader, at this point in the poem at least, to

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take political or direct action. His appeal that the reader should ‘weep with me substantial ills’ is oblique rather than direct. As a lawyer in Liverpool, Roscoe numbered many people who benefited from the slave trade among his clients and, according to one biographer, he thus ‘always avoided open and unnecessary provocation’.54 Rather than calling directly for abolition in the first book of The Wrongs of Africa, he instead rejects false sentiment and argues for sympathy, a key technique of sentimental rhetoric. Later in the poem, he portrays an idealised African village which is attacked by African slave traders. As well as the young men of the village being enslaved, women, children, and elderly people are ruthlessly targeted by the traders. There is much weeping and Roscoe flags the inhumanity of the traders by their failure to respond to these tears, with a sharp rebuke to any reader who may also be failing to respond: The tear Of supplicating age was pour’d in vain: —Fond tears, and vain attempts! Shall mercy rest In savage bosoms, when the cultur’d mind Disclaims her influence?55 This attack on false sentiment is followed by further scenes of brutality in which the weeping slaves are marched through the interior of the continent until they reach the coast. Here Roscoe addresses the reader directly, calling for a strong emotional response: ‘let the cheek with burning blushes glow’, he demands, ‘and pity pour her tears’. By now the reader has experienced several pages of the most unimaginable cruelties being perpetrated on people who have been consistently represented as men and women of feeling, that is, as sentimental heroes. If the readers are men and women of feeling themselves, it is implied, they should already be weeping. If not, this is the moment where emotional involvement is demanded as an unconditional requirement of reading the poem. Having reached this climax, and having emotionally subverted the reader’s intellect, Roscoe immediately turns to the political question of a possible consumer boycott of sugar, exposing the hypocrisy of those who know about the barbarities of slavery ‘yet partake / The luxuries it supplies’. He concludes with a rallying call to those who are aware of the inhumanity of the slave trade, yet do nothing to oppose it: Shall these not feel The keen emotions of remorse and shame?

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And learn this truth severe, that whilst they shun The glorious conflict, nor assist the cause Of suffering nature, THEY PARTAKE THE GUILT?56 Roscoe has moved from several pages of sentimentalised narration, through an appeal to the reader’s own sentiments, to a demand that they become politically involved in a sugar boycott (which, of course, was an abolitionist strategy, even if Roscoe declines to call openly for abolition). This demand comes at a point in the narrative when the reader is least able to resist it because their ‘tender emotions’ have been addressed by stories of sentimental heroes represented in sentimental parables. The reader’s emotions have been clearly manipulated and their intellect subverted. This is the rhetoric of sensibility being used directly and unequivocally for political ends. Roscoe clearly knew that the proslavery camp was attacking the abolitionist cause through its poetry and that one of the chief complaints they made was that the poems were the sentimentalised productions of ‘tender-hearted poetesses’. By beginning his poem with a critique of sentimentality he set out on the offensive. Roscoe sought to distance himself from sentimental poets but, for all his denials, his poem, like almost all the poems of the antislavery movement, makes considerable use of the rhetoric of sensibility. The reviewers were clear that this poem would have a strong effect on the feelings of its readers and, in the main, were supportive both of Roscoe’s views and the manner in which they were expressed. Enfield, in The Monthly Review, thought that ‘the poet, in order to produce the strongest impressions on the imagination and feelings of his readers, has only to follow the track of the historian, and clothe plain facts in the dress of simple and easy verse’.57 As we have seen, he was clear in his praise for Roscoe’s ability to perform this task. The Critical Review, however, had a more strongly sentimental approach to the poem. In a long review they argued that the poem ‘demands the applause of every candid and philanthropic mind’, but they continued with an appeal to a self-interested sensibility which is highly revealing: To our West-India planters, in whom the spark of humanity is not absolutely extinguished, we recommend the following lines. They carry conviction with them, and will, we trust, be read by no feeling mind without a wish at least of alleviating the miseries of these unhappy fellow-creatures. Exclusive of higher obligations, there must surely result from acts of benevolence towards them an internal satisfaction, which their oppressor can never experience.58

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This passage is followed by a long quotation from the poem. The quotation includes three lines which compare the slaves’ capacity to feel with the unfeeling response of Europeans involved in the slave trade: Form’d with the same capacity of pain, The same desire of pleasure and of ease, Why feels not man for man?59 These lines advance the well-established sentimental argument that equality of feeling proves the equality of all mankind. The response to these lines in The Critical Review is another sort of argument altogether, an argument which harks back to that made by Sir George Ellison in Sarah Scott’s novel of the same name, discussed in Chapter 2. There, Sir George, to justify to his wife his kind treatment of his slaves, ‘owned a delight which nothing in this world can afford, but the relieving our fellow creatures from misery’. This ‘delight’ (though merely an ‘internal satisfaction’ according to The Critical Review) was one of the rewards for benevolence promised by many sentimental writers. It is a self-interested argument, which is why it is one of the characteristics of the discourse of sensibility to come under increasing criticism as the century progressed. Paradoxically, Roscoe, who tried so hard in his poem to guard against accusations of false or merely self-serving sensibility, has his poem promoted by The Critical Review in the very terms that he sought hard to avoid.

William Cowper and the antislavery canon By the time that the emancipation campaign had got under way in the late 1820s, a canon of antislavery poets had emerged. As the title of the 1828 Antislavery Album: Selections in Verse from Cowper, Hannah More, Montgomery, Pringle, and Others makes clear, this canon included poets from both periods of antislavery agitation: William Cowper and Hannah More had written antislavery verse in the eighteenth century, while James Montgomery and Thomas Pringle were active in the early to midnineteenth century. Few of these poets are widely read now and so, in the last years of the twentieth century, another antislavery canon emerged, comprised of works by the then most valued poets from that period: William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Robert Burns.60 That some of the best-known poets of the Romantic era took a stand against slavery is hardly surprising. Even without strong

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political conviction, it would have been difficult for any British adult not to have had an opinion on a subject that was repeatedly aired in public between 1785 and 1840. Indeed, William Wordsworth, looking back in 1805 on the antislavery agitation of the early 1790s, remembered ‘a whole Nation crying with one voice’.61 Although hyperbole, Wordsworth’s comment reminds us both of the scale of the protest, and the impossibility Wordsworth found in avoiding it. With its emphasis on ‘crying’ it perhaps also tells us something about the sentimental quality of that protest, at least in Wordsworth’s eyes. Yet, despite Wordsworth’s opposition to the slave trade, and his poetic admiration for some of the most prominent individuals of the abolition movement such as Thomas Clarkson and Toussaint L’Ouverture, Wordsworth’s abolitionism was never more than lukewarm. 62 As he made clear in The Prelude (1805), he initially saw slavery as only one of many problems of human rights which would be solved by a more universal political revolution. Wordsworth confesses: For me that strife had ne’er Fastened on my affections; nor did now Its unsuccessful issue much excite My sorrow, having laid this faith to heart, That if France prospered good Men would not long Pay fruitless worship to humanity, And this most rotten branch of human shame, Object, as seemed, of a superfluous pains, Would fall together with its parent tree.63 Significantly, Wordsworth ascribes his failure to become involved in antislavery as an emotional rather than an intellectual problem: the cause had never ‘fastened’ on his ‘affections’. Other Romantic poets were less relaxed about slavery than Wordsworth. Coleridge wrote a Greek ‘Ode Against the Slave Trade’ in 1792.64 Rather more accessibly, he lectured against the trade in Bristol in 1795, an activity fraught with danger in a town that relied on slavery for its prosperity. (I discuss this lecture in Chapter 6.) Robert Burns’s ‘The Slave’s Lament’ (1792), with its melancholic refrain of ‘alas! I am weary, weary, O!’, is a short ballad, and Burns took the trouble to publish the music as well, clearly hoping that it would be taken up and sung across the nation.65 Blake’s commitment to abolitionism seems undoubted, but his influence was no doubt marginal. His most famous contribution to antislavery was ‘The Little Black Boy’ from Songs of Innocence (1789), a poem that asserts the familiar

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abolitionist argument that black and white skins are physical attributes only and that souls are equal before God. In Blake’s hands this argument takes on both a mystical and an egalitarian quality, although the poem’s best known line, in which the little black boy cries out ‘I am black, but O my soul is white!’, still values whiteness more highly than blackness. The poem concludes with an attempt to reverse this value judgement, arguing that, in Heaven, the black boy’s former proximity to the sun (and to God’s love, which the sun symbolises) will give the black boy an advantage in heaven. The poem thus draws on the logic of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ argues that roles will be reversed in Heaven, and yet this reasoning is antithetical to much abolitionist theology which demands spiritual equality, not role-reversal. Blake’s abolitionism is thus somewhat out of line with the mainstream of abolitionist thought. Likewise, his celebrated illustrations for John Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition; Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) were more hard-hitting and yet also very unlike images produced elsewhere in the abolition campaign.66 Whether or not they were pornographic, as Marcus Wood has repeatedly argued, they were certainly disturbing.67 Yet, for all their activity, no major poet of the late eighteenth century was as central to the abolition campaign as William Cowper. Admittedly, claims about Cowper’s centrality to the movement originate with Cowper himself. In a letter to Lady Hesketh in February 1788, he is quick to point out that ‘I was one of the earliest, if not the first of those who have in the present day, expressed their detestation of the diabolical traffic.’68 Cowper is referring to two works. In his poem Charity, he had written lines clearly opposed to the slave trade as early as 1782.69 More famously, he argued against slavery in book two of The Task, published in 1785.70 This early foray into abolitionism was matched by Cowper’s output of antislavery verse during the campaign of 1787–1792. There is, however, justice to Sypher’s argument that ‘Cowper’s boast that he was among the first in his generation to champion the slave may be too assertive.’ John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro precedes Cowper’s antislavery verse by almost a decade and, even if he had missed that poem, it is inconceivable that Cowper was not aware of Granville Sharp and John Wesley’s work against slavery. Yet Cowper was not, as Sypher argues, an unwilling supporter of abolition who ‘was swept into the campaign almost against his will’, an assertion that Sypher rests on the slender evidence that ‘Cowper was no propagandist’ and that ‘the poems are flat’.71 Clearly, Cowper’s later antislavery poems are of a different sort

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to Charity and The Task, where he was interpolating antislavery material into longer discussions presented in the formal modes of heroic couplets and blank verse. The later poems have an explicitly polemical purpose, a purpose that could easily be at odds with the demands of polished verse. Indeed, Cowper understood that effective political poetry must do more than merely transmit a message. This is articulated in an extract from his 1781 poem ‘The Flatting Mill. An Illustration’, which takes as its central metaphor a tool used by gold and silver smiths to produce thin and often delicate ribbons of metal for a variety of purposes from minting coins to beating out gold leaf: Alas for the poet, who dares undertake To urge reformation of national ill! His head and his heart are both likely to ache With the double employment of mallet and mill! If he wish to instruct, he must learn to delight, Smooth, ductile, and even his fancy must flow, Must tinkle and glitter like gold to the sight, And catch in its progress a sensible glow. After all, he must beat it as thin and as fine As the leaf that enfolds what an invalid swallows, For truth is unwelcome, however divine, And unless you adorn it, a nausea follows. In the final stanza, Cowper refers to the eighteenth-century medical practice of coating pills with gold leaf to facilitate ingestion. Ungilded tablets (we might today talk of unsugared pills) were likely to induce vomiting. Yet the metaphor oversimplifies the process of writing political poetry. Just as different patients will expect different coatings on their pills, so too any efforts to stave off poetic nausea will vary with the audience to whom the poem is addressed. Accordingly, in the later antislavery poems, Cowper puts aside the forms of polite literature, and seeks a more explicitly populist voice. To do so, he pays attention to simple sentimentalism, in particular to some well-known sentimental arguments, and he combines this with a poetic form borrowed from the ballad; the popular song of the eighteenth century. This was sound practice for a propagandist. A ballad, reproduced on broadsheets, could reach the ears of millions once it entered into the repository of orally transmitted

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popular songs and, if it was in a well-established form with a well-known tune, it could spread over the country in a matter of weeks.72 ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ is the best known of these overtly propagandist ballads, and it is notable for its particularly concentrated deployment of several sentimental arguments, culminating in a pointed attack on false sentiment. Like many of Cowper’s poems, it was first printed in a London newspaper, in this case Stuart’s Star and Evening Advertiser, where it appeared on 2 April 1789. It was not written specifically for publication in the newspapers but, rather, at the request of the Abolition Society who approached Cowper during March 1789 asking for ‘some good ballads to be sung about the streets’.73 The broadsheets soon appeared, not all entirely faithful to the original, nor all sold for the profit of the Abolition Society.74 While not following the traditional ballad meter of alternating lines of four and three stresses, the poem does suggest this with alternating lines of eight and seven syllables. In fact, as some early printed versions make plain, it is set ‘to the tune of “Hosier’s Ghost” or As near Porto Bello lying’ (the first line of the song). This song relates the fate of vice-admiral Francis Hosier (1673–1727) who, along with 4000 crewmen under his command, died of fever while conducting a blockade of the Spanish West Indies. The ballad, written by Richard Glover (1712–1785) in 1739, misrepresents Hosier’s demise as the fault of Walpole’s government for ordering him and his fleet to avoid engaging the enemy at Porto Bello. In the words of Hosier’s restless spirit, encountered off the coast of Porto Bello by a passing British warship; ‘nothing then its wealth defended, / But my Orders not to fight’.75 The ballad concludes with the ghost’s demand that the passing tars ‘Think on vengeance for my ruin, / And for England, sham’d in me’. The tune is thus already associated with colonial mismanagement and England’s shame even before Cowper adds his abolitionist sentiments. Indeed, Cowper wrote to John Newton to say that ‘the Song is an admirable one, for the purpose for which it was made, and, though political, nearly, if not quite as serious, as mine’.76 The tune itself has an air of melancholy, yet seems both surprisingly upbeat and excessively ornamented for a supposed street ballad about a suffering slave. Cowper’s choice of familiar music clearly serves to gild the pill for the singing public, a diverse group that may have included fashionable middle- and upper-class drawing room groups as well as ballad singers in public houses and the streets. Indeed, the poem was probably aimed more at the former group than the latter. Glover’s ‘Hosier’s Ghost’ was a respectable ballad, published on quality paper and arranged, in one edition at least, ‘with Variations for the Harpsicord, or Piano Forte’. These were expensive instruments, so much so that this edition also

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adds a note informing the less affluent musician that ‘these Variations make an agreable Lesson for a German Flute, or Violin, and Violoncello’. The respectability of the tune, as well as its subject, no doubt contributed to the poem being included in a collection of antislavery hymns for the Methodist church.77 The text of the poem also advertises itself as being above the lowest street literature by its engagement with arguments that, although popular, are based in the sentimental philosophy of sympathy. The argument of the poem is the familiar one that equality of feeling proves the equality of the subject: Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot forfeit Nature’s claim; Skins may differ, but Affection Dwells in White and Black the same. This argument is immediately followed by emotionally subversive lines that equate, in typically sentimental fashion, the sufferings of the body with the suffering of the mind. In these, as in so many sentimental poems, bodily effusions represent emotional affliction, as the slaves ask why ‘all-creating Nature’ could produce such a labour-intensive plant as the sugar cane: ‘Sighs must fan it, tears must water, / Sweat of ours must dress the soil.’ As the poem progresses, the imagery becomes more violent, with the human tortures of ‘knotted scourges’ and ‘bloodextorting screws’ emphasised by the God-sent sublimity of ‘wild tornadoes’ that blast the landscape; ‘Strewing yonder flood with wrecks, / Wasting Towns, Plantations, Meadows’. Yet neither the divine anger nor the human barbarity that mark the central stanzas of the poem are sustained to the end. In the penultimate stanza, the sublime gives way to sentiment. The scene returns to the middle passage, described at the start of the poem. Whereas the first stanza proclaimed the intellectual defiance of the slave, who asserts that ‘minds are never to be sold’, the penultimate stanza concludes with emotional resignation where the middle passage is ‘sustain’d with patience taught us / Only by a broken heart—’. The ‘negro’ of the title has developed from being a champion of the mind into being a champion of the heart—a sentimental hero. The poem concludes with a double attack on racist theory and on false sentiment: Deem our nation Brutes no longer ’Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard and stronger

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Than the Colour of our Kind. Slaves of Gold! Whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted pow’rs Prove that You have Human Feelings ’Ere ye proudly question Ours. The ending turns the reader inwards and thus away from voyeuristic contemplation of the slave’s suffering. It also demands action, urging the reader to turn away from false sensibility and embrace the political action that comes with true feeling. It therefore articulates in a particularly potent form the sentimental argument about equality of feeling, an argument presented in this poem by a sentimental hero. Moreover, with its direct challenge to the reader it is emotionally subversive, seeking to frame its political arguments in language which could only be denied by the coldest of cold hearts. In ‘The Negro’s Complaint’, Cowper has expertly balanced the needs of the ballad form with the arguments and methods of sentimental rhetoric, a mixture calculated to make use of both head and heart in the attempt ‘to urge reformation of national ill’. Cowper’s other celebrated antislavery poem, ‘The Morning Dream’, is equally sophisticated. Set to the familiar if complex ballad tune ‘Tweedside’, it too draws on traditional forms such as the ‘dream vision’ device much used by medieval poets, as well as on an apocalyptic tradition of religious poetry. Somewhat incongruously, there are also mild sexual undertones that tie it in with the aubade tradition. It is hardly sentimental, but it was given wide publication, including an appearance in the ‘select poetry’ section of The Gentleman’s Magazine.78 Yet Cowper’s gilded pill was not always successful. The nauseous taste, masked by beaten gold in ‘The Flatting Mill’, spoils the sweet-tasting food in the poem ‘Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce; or, the Slave-Trader in the Dumps’. This ballad, although written at the height of the abolition campaign, went unpublished until 1836, first appearing in the second volume of Robert Southey’s Life and Works of William Cowper.79 The reasons why the Abolition Society rejected it seemed clear to Cowper himself. On 27 March 1789, he had written to his cousin, General Spencer Cowper, to say that, of the three songs he had sent to the Society, ‘Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce’, a poem ‘of which the Slave Trader is himself the Subject, is somewhat ludicrous’.80 This seems self-evident on reading the poem, which commences: A Trader I am to the African Shore But since that my trading is like to be o’er, I’ll sing you a song that you ne’er heard before,

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Which nobody can deny, deny, Which nobody can deny. Each of the song’s ten stanzas concludes with the identical refrain: ‘Which nobody can deny’, inviting the audience to agree with the slave trader’s increasingly problematic assertions. There is clash of registers, however, as the unpleasant subject matter is carried along by a jaunty rhythm: Here’s padlocks and bolts, and screws for the thumbs, That squeeze them so lovingly till the blood comes, They sweeten the temper like comfits or plums, Which nobody, &c. By the end, the poem veers unsettlingly between the slave trader’s cynical and patently false sensibility, and the situational irony by which he invites the audience to sing up for the demise of his profession: But ah! If in vain I have studied an art So gainful to me, all boasting apart, I think it will break my compassionate heart, Which nobody, &c. For oh! How it enters my soul like an awl! This pity, which some people self-pity call, Is sure the most heart-piercing pity of all, Which nobody, &c. So this is my song, as I told you before; Come, buy off my stock, for I must no more Carry Cæsars and Pompeys to Sugar-cane shore, Which nobody can deny, deny, Which nobody can deny. Despite the somewhat ‘ludicrous’ tone, the poem is following a wellknown folk-ballad pattern with a familiar chorus. James King and Charles Ryskamp conjecture that Cowper ‘probably wrote the words to “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce” in a ballad-like form without having any particular tune in mind’, and they conclude that it went unpublished ‘perhaps because the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade found it too jocular for its purpose’.81 Both of these speculations are erroneous. Cowper clearly wrote the song to the familiar tune ‘Which Nobody Can Deny’. This tune had been popular in a variety of forms from the late sixteenth

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century, at which time it was known as ‘Greensleeves’, the name by which it remains familiar to this day. It had been used by political poets and balladeers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was well known by both names well into the nineteenth. As late as the 1850s, William Chappell could write that ‘Green Sleeves, or Which nobody can deny, has been a favorite tune, from the time of Elizabeth to the present day; and is still frequently to be heard in the streets of London to songs with the old burden, “Which nobody can deny.” ’82 Chappell follows the history of the song, showing how it became politicised during the Civil War when it ‘became one of the party tunes of the Cavaliers’. He cites dozens of published songs to the tune, and finally prints a score with the ‘which nobody can deny’ refrain, to contrast it with the Elizabethan version. This score, in common with many Victorian representations of popular music, is somewhat romanticised and, being arranged for the piano, offers a range and complexity unlikely to be found in a simple street ballad. More likely to resemble the melody Cowper had in mind is the 1754 political song: For Lord Mayor’s Day 1754. A Congratulatory Ballad to the Citizens of London on their Electing Mr. Alderman Janssen, Lord Mayor. To the Tune of Which no Body can deny, which, uniquely for an eighteenth-century ‘Which Nobody Can Deny’ broadsheet, preserves both the words and the music. While this resembles ‘Greensleeves’ in some respects, it is clearly a distinct tune, probably one that has evolved from the more famous tune through the process of oral transmission. The structure is undeniably the same as

Figure 1 For Lord Mayor’s Day 1754. A Congratulatory Ballad to the Citizens of London on their Electing Mr. Alderman Janssen, Lord Mayor. To the Tune of Which no Body can deny (1754). Reproduced by permission of the British Library

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Cowper’s poem, however, and there can be little doubt that this tune, or one closely resembling it, was the one Cowper had in mind for his ballad. This fact tends to undermine the view that the ‘jocularity’ of the poem led to its rejection by the Abolition Society, since the tune is reflective—melancholic even—rather than jocular.83 Moreover, the inappropriately jaunty rhythm vanishes when the ballad is set to this melody. In fact, the ballad may have gone unpublished because it ironised the ‘Which Nobody can Deny’ tradition in a way that might have made it too complex for use as a political ballad. In its early versions, ‘The Blacksmith’ and ‘The Brewer’, the ‘Which Nobody can Deny’ ballads took the form of long allegories on Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, respectively.84 By the eighteenth century, the allegory had been lost, and most versions offered unsubtle assertion of political evils that, in the terms offered by the ballad, certainly could not be denied. In Cowper’s poem, by contrast, the narrator is a slave trader, contemplating the loss of his livelihood and suggesting that nobody can deny that he has a ‘compassionate heart’, that he and his colleagues ‘kindly prepare’ the slaves for market, or that thumbscrews ‘sweeten the temper like comfits or plums’. The irony is biting, and works because the reader, or the participating audience, in contention with the refrain, strenuously denies that the trader has a right to continue his trade, especially under the brutal conditions outlined in the poem. Moreover, as we have seen, Cowper continues his double strategy of using sentimental arguments—here represented by the blatant false sensibility of the slaver—in conjunction with placing the poem in the context of a tradition of political balladry. By so doing, Cowper pre-empts two key strategies of the proslavery lobbyists. First, he parodies the argument that slaves were well treated and that abolition would only lead to suffering among all those in Britain who directly or indirectly benefited from the trade. Having in this way undermined attempts at what I call sentimental diversion, he then places the poem in a robust tradition of street literature, a literature that imagined itself as manly, commonsensical, and above the sordid factionalism of party-politics. By so doing, he denies his opponents the opportunity of equating him with ‘pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians’. The ballad is a serious attempt at engaging with the problems of political poetry in an age of sentiment. As such, it draws attention to the stresses inherent in bringing together two discourses, sentiment and politics, which on the surface are not natural allies. As we have seen in this chapter, Cowper was not alone in confronting these stresses. Thomas Day, Hannah More, and William Roscoe all faced

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similar challenges when trying to write poetry that was emotionally engaged but immune to criticisms of excessive or inappropriate sentimentality. While all the poets I discuss made use, in varying degrees, of sentimental parables, sentimental arguments, and the emotional subversion of the intellect, the characteristic technique of sentimental rhetoric in poetry was the rejection of false sensibility, and the assertion of an active sensibility that had political action as its end.

4 ‘Read This, and Blush’: The Pamphlet War of the 1780s

This chapter argues that the use of sentimental rhetoric was widespread in abolitionist pamphlets and essays of the 1780s, as well as in some pamphlets written by proslavery apologists. Throughout the decade, the number of publications addressing slavery grew annually, from just a handful of titles in the first three years of the decade to a peak of well over 100 titles in 1788.1 This relatively sudden growth in publications concerning slavery might be taken for the historical moment when ‘antislavery’ originated as an identifiable political position. Nevertheless, as Hugh Thomas has shown, outright opposition to slavery had been articulated almost from the start of the European slave trade, with sixteenth-century Spanish clerics and lawyers leading the way.2 Many of their arguments were specific to their historical and geographical location but, as David Brion Davis has pointed out, by the early eighteenth century the substance of the Anglophone antislavery debate had largely been worked out, even if few people were aware of it. In his analysis of two pamphlets published by the American Quaker John Hepburn in 1715, he notes that ‘taken together, these remarkable essays answered virtually every pro-slavery argument that would appear during the next century and a half’.3 They went largely unread, even in the colony in which they were written. Indeed, throughout the seventeenth and for most of the eighteenth centuries, lone voices expressed disquiet about slavery. Most, such as the seventeenth-century Quaker George Fox, failed to criticise the institution itself but merely its more pernicious aspects. Fox urged more humane treatment for slaves, even advising manumission ‘after a considerable Term of Years, if they have served [. . .] faithfully’.4 Nowhere does Fox explicitly condemn the institution of chattel slavery and in this he was not alone. When slaves were treated well, which was uncommon but certainly not unheard of, this low-key 107

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and largely private benevolent response was characteristic, and became the position advocated by ameliorationists in the mid-eighteenth century. As British involvement in slavery grew, greater numbers of British people came into contact with both slaves and the products of slave labour, and the number of those expressing disquiet grew in proportion. In England, while literary discussions of slavery became increasingly common in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, political tracts on the subject emerged only in the late 1760s, and appeared only at infrequent intervals until the mid-1780s. In 1764, John Newton, who more than twenty years later would attack ‘that unhappy and disgraceful branch of commerce’,5 published his account of his life as a slave trader. Although he accepted that the trade ‘is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment’, yet ‘I considered myself as a sort of Goaler [sic] or Turnkey; and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles.’6 Newton’s doubts did not amount to a full-scale attack on the trade. The first of these to become influential was written by Anthony Benezet, a Quaker schoolmaster from Philadelphia, whose Caution and Warning to Great Britain appeared in England in 1767, the year after it had been first published in Pennsylvania.7 Granville Sharp’s Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery (1769) quickly followed.8 Sharp’s book resulted from research he had conducted while trying to force a legal judgement on the status of slaves in England, research that, combined with Sharp’s vigorous activism, was to culminate in the James Sommersett case of 1771–1772. This case, discussed at length in Chapter 5, can be described as the start of the abolition campaign in Britain, although it failed to inspire an organised movement of the sort that would appear fifteen years later. Nevertheless, public interest and indignation was roused and, as a result, slavery-related pamphlets started to become more widely available. Most, indeed, were written either by Sharp or Benezet themselves, often in concert, but the two were joined in 1774 by John Wesley, who wrote Thoughts on Slavery after reading Benezet’s work.9 These were important works, and yet none appear to have sold in large numbers. Benezet’s books were certainly published and read on both sides of the Atlantic, and were used by later abolitionists such as James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but in the 1770s they probably circulated most freely within Quaker circles. Sharp was better known for his activities in the courts than for his publications. Even Wesley’s contribution does not seem to have been read widely beyond Methodist circles. Indeed, Benezet’s many letters on the subject suggest that he, at least, gave away as many of the books as he sold.10

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In this early phase, the rhetoric is rarely sentimental. Newton’s pronouncements against the trade are too slight to be considered. Benezet, perhaps because of his personal background as a Quaker and a Philadelphian— far from the fashionable currents of sentimental London—writes in a relatively plain and unadorned style, as befits a Quaker and an historian. Although Ignatius Sancho thought that Sharp’s work was ‘of consequence to every one of humane feelings’, his writing is often concerned with legal debate and, in any case, his inclinations are too academic for him to be comfortable with sentimentality.11 The important exception to the rule in the early period is provided by John Wesley who, in Thoughts Upon Slavery, rewrites and adds to Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea in a style that both reflects and promotes his ‘religion of the heart’. Wesley’s contribution is discussed in detail in Chapter 5, but his style is not typical of antislavery writing in the 1770s. In the following decade, however, sentimental rhetoric becomes much more common, and few writers—on both sides of the slavery debate—fail to include at least one sentimental passage or argument. At the same time, there is a substantial increase in the number of texts being produced. Accordingly, this chapter concentrates on a small group of important texts that, taken together, illustrate the most significant uses of sentimental rhetoric in both abolitionist and proslavery writings of the 1780s.

Rant and rhapsodical effusion: James Ramsay’s Essay With the appearance of James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies in 1784, the British reading public were, for the first time, presented with an antislavery work by a mainstream Anglican writer who had personally witnessed slavery in the British Caribbean plantations. Ramsay had been an Anglican priest on the Caribbean island of St Christopher (now usually known as St Kitts), credentials that ensured that plantation owners felt sufficiently threatened by his book to line up behind several vitriolic and often highly personal refutations.12 Despite the ferocity of the attacks made on it, there was little in Ramsay’s Essay that had not already been said by Sharp, Benezet, and Wesley, but the essential difference was that Ramsay could count on social and ecclesiastical support for his work. Not only was Ramsay’s neighbour and patron, Sir Charles Middleton, at that time a Member of Parliament and Comptroller of the Navy, keen to promote the work, but so too was Beilby Porteus, the evangelical Bishop of Chester (later Bishop of London) who advertised Ramsay’s work in his antislavery sermons.13 Ramsay’s connections, as much as the content of

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his work, ensured that he would become the focus of public attention and, accordingly, a substantial portion of the slavery debate in the 1780s centred on his writing. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ramsay’s rhetorical strategy, and his use of sentimental rhetoric, was widely imitated. Ramsay’s style is neither overtly evangelical, nor overtly sentimental. Rather, he sets out to discuss slavery under various headings and in various styles, which initially gives the Essay a somewhat eclectic appearance. He writes about the history of slavery in the style of an historian, about the economics of slavery in the style of the new political economists, about the theology of slavery in the style of an Anglican clergyman, and about the humanity of slavery in the style of a sentimental novelist. Long before he chooses to deploy his sentimental rhetoric, Ramsay shows that he intends to be rigorous and scholarly. His descriptions of the daily routine of plantation slaves are meticulous on the one hand, while on the other hand he shows that he is prepared to take on some of the most celebrated thinkers of his age. In particular, he launches an attack on David Hume when, in the style of a philosopher, he attacks Hume’s notorious footnote to his essay ‘Of National Characters’. Hume had said: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites [. . .] In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.14 In Ramsay’s view, this statement was ‘made without any competent knowledge of the subject’ and appeared ‘to have no foundation, either in reason or nature’. Moreover, Ramsay argued that Hume, another Scot, was in a position to dispense his philosophy purely by an act of good fortune (or divine will). Ramsay suggests that had Hume ‘lived in the days of Augustus, or even but a thousand years ago, his northern pride, perhaps, would have been less aspiring, and satisfied to have been admitted even on a footing of equality with the sable Africans’.15 Alluding to English prejudice against the Scots, Ramsay is able to deliver a short sermon on pride combined with a stiff reminder that all nations and races are equal before God and equally likely to rise and fall through the course of history. Ramsay’s discussion of Hume is a good example of the tenor of much of the Essay. Much of what remains is concerned with a detailed description of a day in the life of plantation slaves.16 This, though likely to attract the attentions of philanthropists, is not written in particularly

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sentimental or even emotional language: the strategy is that the facts will speak for themselves. Slavery, Ramsay says, ‘needs only to be laid open or exposed in its native colours, to command the abhorrence and opposition of every man of feeling and sentiment’; a view shared by most abolitionists.17 Later, this position, considerably refined by Thomas Clarkson, was to become the orthodox explanation for the upsurge in antislavery feeling in the 1780s, with early abolitionists such as Ramsay and Sharp being celebrated as ‘those who brought the subject more or less into view’.18 We should note, however, that Ramsay is quite clear that bringing slavery to public attention is likely to mobilise the opposition not of the general public in any abstract sense but, more specifically, ‘of every man of feeling and sentiment’. For this reason, he applies himself to rousing the sensibility of these men of feeling. After forty pages of minute detail of the slaves’ daily sufferings, he switches style, aggressively rejecting false sentiment in passage which is designed, not only to bring forth the reader’s indignation, but to shame any reader who has not yet brought forth a tear of his or her own. The passage is long: this extract starts about half way through: Let us imagine (and would Heaven it were only imagination!) masters and overseers, with up-lifted whips, clanking chains, and pressing hunger, forcing their forlorn slaves to commit every horrid crime that virtue shrinks at, and with the same weapons punishing the perpetration, not to the extremity indeed that nature can bear, but till the whole man shrinks under them. But to make the representation complete, we must also draw humanity, bleeding over the horrid scene, and longing, eagerly longing, to be able to vindicate her own rights. Still, whatever she may urge, it will have little weight, if avarice or luxury oppose her claim. We are exceedingly ready, it is the turn of the age, to express ourselves sorrowfully, when any act of oppression, or unjust suffering, is related before us; the generous sentiment flows glibly off our tongues, charity seems to dictate every sympathizing phrase, and vanity comes cheerfully forward to make her offering. But whom shall we find willing to sacrifice his amusement or his pleasure, to obey the call of humanity? Who to relieve the sufferings of the wretched slave, will boldly encounter the oppressor’s rage, or offer up selfish interest at the altar of mercy? Why, then, hath the active zeal of the benevolent Mr. Granville Sharp, and a few others, in the business which we now agitate, hitherto made the unfeeling indifference of our age, and nation, but the more conspicuous?19

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This is a sustained piece of sentimental rhetoric aiming at the emotional subversion of the intellect, rejecting false sensibility, and concluding with the introduction of a sentimental hero. The first sentence seizes on a few fleeting, though powerful, images of cruelty; although at first the reader is asked only to imagine the abuse of the body, dreadful enough though that might be. The second sentence presents a sentimental abstraction, a personified Humanity ‘bleeding over the horrid scene’. This is a paradigmatically sentimental effusion, an outpouring of emotion, which here is represented by blood—analogous to the outpouring of tears in many sentimental novels. The figure of Humanity, however, is unable to take action but merely to mourn: she is ‘longing, eagerly longing, to be able to vindicate her own rights’, but is opposed by ‘avarice’ and ‘luxury’. This is where Ramsay turns the argument on his readers, implied as men and women of professed sensibility. ‘It is the turn of the age, to express ourselves sorrowfully’, he argues, asking the reader to examine his or her own sensibility, at the very point at which he has illustrated the impotence of ‘Humanity’. Demanding an emotional response to the suffering that he has described, both in the long chapters before and in the few immediately preceding short lines, Ramsay’s language becomes both inclusive and emotionally subversive. He argues that we may have suffered, in our imaginations, with the suffering slaves and that ‘the generous sentiment flows glibly off our tongues’, but in a direct challenge to the reader, he asks: ‘whom shall we find willing to sacrifice his amusement or his pleasure, to obey the call of humanity?’ In this surprisingly strong rejection of false sensibility, the reader is accused of inaction and hypocrisy, accusations that might produce another emotion: guilt. To assuage the guilty feelings, the reader must overcome his or her ‘vanity’ and take action in the manner of Granville Sharp. Ramsay’s appeal to the reader is no ‘mere rant and rhapsodical effusion’, as one of his anonymous critics suggested.20 Rather, it is a measure of the passage’s complexity that Ramsay combines sentimental imagery and arguments with an attack on false sentiment, and a call for political action. In this, however, Ramsay must tread carefully. He is likely to alienate his readers if he pays too much attention to their false sensibility. Conversely, if he blames only unidentified slave traders for the cruelty of slavery, his readers will not feel any of the guilt necessary to spur them into action. Ramsay does not solve this problem by attacking slave traders or by taking either himself or the reader as a model. Instead, the series of rhetorical questions that conclude the passage refer to Granville Sharp and hold him up as a sentimental hero, a model of active philanthropy, whose benevolence should be generally

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imitated. Having pricked his readers’ consciences, finally he tells them whom to emulate. Later in the book, in a long chapter sub-section, Ramsay tells a number of sentimental parables. This sub-section, ‘African Capacity Vindicated from Experience’, is the fifth in a series debunking popular racial myths and stereotypes (although it often manages to substitute one myth for another). The first of his sentimental parables is designed to show that ‘nothing in the turn or degree of [Africans’] mental faculties, distinguishes them from Europeans’, and that ‘in spite of the disadvantages under which they labour, individuals, on particular occasions, have shewn an elevation of sentiment that would have done honour to a Spartan’. The story concerns a slave named Quashi who ‘was brought up in the family with his master’ on the island of St Christopher. In later life Quashi ‘retained for his master the tenderness that he had felt in childhood for his play-mate’. This tenderness seems to have been rather one-sided. The master was ‘inexorable when a fault was committed’ and ‘too apt to let prejudice usurp the place of proof’. Quashi, unable to ‘exculpate himself to his satisfaction, for something done contrary to the discipline of the plantation, [. . .] was threatened with the ignominious punishment of the cart-whip’. He ran away, hoping to find another slave to approach the master and mediate for him. Unfortunately, Quashi was discovered before this could begin and, while running from his master, he tripped, fell, then wrestled with him. Finally, having gained the upper hand, Quashi ‘firmly seated on his master’s breast’ pulled out a knife and addressed his master thus: ‘Master, I was bred up with you from a child; I was your play-mate when a boy; I have loved you as myself; your interest has been my study; I am innocent of the cause of your suspicion; had I been guilty, my attachment to you might have pleaded for me. Yet you have condemned me to a punishment, of which I must ever have borne the disgraceful marks; thus only can I avoid them.’ With these words, he drew the knife with all his strength across his own throat, and fell down dead without a groan, on his master, bathing him in his blood. Had this man been properly educated; had he been taught his importance as a member of society; had he been accustomed to weigh his claim to, and enjoy the possession of the unalienable rights of humanity; can any man suppose him incapable of making a progress in the knowledge of religion, in the researches of reason, or the works of art?21

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The story and, more especially, the moral Ramsay draws from it are familiar. Ramsay himself notes the parallels with the tale related by Addison in The Spectator, No. 215. In Addison’s story, also set on the island of St Christopher, two male slaves who are the best of friends fall in love with the same woman, another slave. Realising ‘how impossible it was for either of them ever to be happy’ they stab the women and then themselves. Addison sees a lesson in this: We see, in this amazing Instance of Barbarity, what strange Disorders are bred in the Minds of those Men whose Passions are not regulated by Vertue, and disciplined by Reason. Though the Action which I have recited is in it self full of Guilt and Horror, it proceeded from a Temper of Mind which might have produced very noble Fruits, had it been informed and guided by a suitable Education.22 Addison’s moral has clearly influenced Ramsay. Both are agreed that Africans have a ‘natural nobility’ which would be improved by a European style of education. Wylie Sypher notes similarities between the facts of the two stories as well, placing both within what he calls the ‘noble Negro’ tradition. The Addisonian story he calls ‘The Legend of the Two Lovers’, while ‘The Legend of Quashy’ he calls ‘of less consequence but none the less contributory to the tradition of the noble Negro’.23 However, Sypher has missed an important point about the dating of the two stories. He gives as a source the Abbé Raynal’s History of the Two Indies, which had first appeared in 1774, and argues that the story ‘becomes a set-piece in antislavery literature, and reappears in James Ramsay, Hannah More, Samuel Jackson Pratt, and Herder’s third Negro-Idyl’. To prove how easily legends become recycled as facts, Sypher ends his discussion by quoting Ramsay’s explanation and profession of the story’s veracity. In fact, Ramsay’s Essay was the source for Raynal and all the other authors he mentions. Sypher’s edition of Raynal was an English translation from 1788 which boasts in its introduction that ‘the last edition of this work, published by the Abbé Raynal in ten volumes, being entirely new-modelled, the translation is in consequence almost totally a new work’. In the earlier editions, which Sypher was clearly unable to consult, the Quashi story simply does not appear.24 It seems likely, therefore, that Ramsay was recounting a story that he had heard first hand and which he believed to be essentially true. His moral, however, is taken straight from the pages of The Spectator. Quashi’s story is a sentimental parable: a parable because it hints at a ‘great truth’ by showing a relatively small action, and sentimental

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because it specifically invites the reader to share emotionally in the suffering of another. This is an important example of sentimental rhetoric in political writing. As we saw above, Ramsay was aware that at least part of his readership would profess themselves men and women of sensibility. Moreover, he adopted different voices to fit the argument that he was conducting at the time. In this chapter sub-section, he deliberately targets the feeling reader and does so by painting vignettes of individual Africans who are noteworthy for some heroic or exemplary action. In Quashi’s story, one injustice is heaped upon another as the narrative moves inexorably towards the tragic finale. The twist in the tale—that Quashi turns the knife on himself rather than on his master—elevates Quashi to a higher moral sphere and belittles the master whose petty vindictiveness is exposed. The story closes, as many sentimental stories do, with the symbolic outflow of bodily fluids. The master is left weltering in Quashi’s blood but the reader versed in sentimental literature would be well aware that the alternative is for both to be bathed in tears of reconciliation. Although Quashi’s action is ‘a refinement of sentiment, to which language cannot give a name’, the linguistic blockage arises not because the action is sentimental but because it is terrifying: because it is sublime. Nevertheless, Ramsay insists on seeing this sublime moment as one caused by an excess of unrestrained sensibility. He invites us to understand Quashi’s actions as an example of an innate ability which, ‘had this man been properly educated’, could have been turned towards ‘progress in the knowledge of religion, the researches of reason, or the works of art’.25 Quashi is held up as a model of the ideal eighteenth-century man of sensibility—a sentimental hero—who has merely missed out on a polite education. The ‘other’ of Ramsay’s tale is not the African slave but the unsentimental and unsympathetic master who, unlike any man of sentiment, had acted brutally towards a man who had been ‘his playfellow, from his childhood’. Orphans, or those who have for one reason or another been rejected by their families, appear frequently in eighteenthcentury fiction and, in particular, in the sentimental novel. In almost every case, an evil brother or stepbrother is at hand to torment the hero or heroine. Quashi is clearly an orphan, so the master’s behaviour towards him typecasts the master as a stock villain. Taken together, the various elements of Ramsay’s Quashi story add up to a powerful sentimental parable designed to present the slave as more akin to the reader of sensibility than the brutal and unfeeling slave driver. Ramsay’s next tale in this chapter sub-section ‘is of a less awful nature, but will shew, that all the nobler qualities of the heart are not monopolized by the white race’. 26 Ramsay discusses Joseph Rachel,

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‘a black trader in Barbadoes’, with whom Ramsay claims he had often done business and whom he found ‘remarkably honest and obliging’. Rachel’s honesty is contrasted with other traders as well as with other Africans: ‘his character was so fair, his manners so generous’, Ramsay tells us, ‘that the best people shewed him a regard, which they often deny men of their own colour, because not blessed with like goodness of heart’.27 By proving Rachel’s ‘goodness of heart’, Ramsay is establishing Rachel as the sentimental hero of a sentimental parable and this strategy enables him to establish the civility and common humanity of Africans. The core of the parable centres on Rachel’s response to a personal tragedy. Ramsay explains that in 1756 a fire destroyed much of Bridgetown, although Rachel’s area was spared. One man, in debt to Rachel, was not so lucky and lost everything, a circumstance that ‘excited Joseph’s compassion’. Taking this man’s documents in hand: Joseph held his bond for sixty pounds sterling. ‘Unfortunate man,’ says he, ‘this shall never come against thee. Would heaven thou could settle all thy other matters as easily! But how am I sure that I shall keep in this mind: may not the love of gain, especially, when, by length of time, thy misfortune has become familiar to me, return with too strong a current, and bear down my fellow-feeling before it? But for this I have a remedy. Never shalt thou apply for the assistance of any friend against my avarice.’ He got up, ordered a current account that the man had with him, to a considerable amount, to be drawn out, and in a whim that might have called up a smile on the face of charity, filled his pipe, sat down again, twisted the bond, and lighted his pipe with it. While the account was drawing out, he continued smoking, in a state of mind that a monarch might envy. Rachel then went in search of his friend and presented him with the ‘mutilated bond’. ‘One may easily guess’, says Ramsay, ‘at the man’s feelings, on being thus generously treated’. A paragraph later he asks ‘will any man pretend to look down with contempt on one capable of such generosity, because the colour of his skin is black?’28 Rachel’s soliloquy follows dramatic rather than naturalistic conventions. The business with the pipe, allowing Ramsay to indulge in a quaint pun on the phrase ‘drawing out’, is too fortuitous to be convincing. Yet Rachel did exist, and was well known as a prosperous businessman in Bridgetown. He died around 1758, two years after the date of Ramsay’s story.29 There was indeed a serious fire in Bridgetown, on 8 February 1756, that, according to a report in The Gentleman’s Magazine, destroyed about 160

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houses.30 However, while the story is likely to be substantially true, Ramsay has turned it into a sentimental parable, and Rachel into a sentimental hero, for a direct polemical purpose. He has celebrated Rachel’s immediate act of benevolence while moving beyond the physical action of the charitable deed to a description of Rachel’s internal emotional state, characterised as ‘a state of mind that a monarch might envy’. Rachel is capable of a greatness of action which gives him a serenity of mind above that available to a monarch. Implicit in this passage is an invitation to the reader to compare himself or herself with Rachel and to imagine that he or she might do likewise in similar circumstances. Rachel is a sentimental and a benevolent hero, an ideal towards which, it is implied, everyone should aspire. In this clever inversion of the prevailing eighteenth-century image of the suffering African, Rachel is more likely to feel sympathy for the reader than the reader is for Rachel. Although they could have stepped out of the pages of a sentimental novel, Rachel and Quashi are presented as real rather than fictional characters. These are avowedly true stories, retold by Ramsay in an attempt to show the African character, as he perceives it, in more than one light; to attempt to break the stereotype of Africans as lazy, unfeeling, brutish or, indeed, as indistinguishable from one another. Both Quashi and Rachel are hard working but, whereas Quashi is in servitude, Rachel is a successful businessman. Both Quashi and Rachel are feeling people. Quashi takes his own life both to avoid the shame of being whipped and to avoid showing ingratitude to a master who had been his childhood play-mate. Rachel is closely in touch with the feelings and sufferings of others at the economic level. Yet whether these stories are essentially true or not, they have both been given the sentimental treatment, and both their protagonists have become sentimental heroes. Earlier, I noted that Ramsay’s Essay is not entirely sentimental but that Ramsay instead tries out a number of different styles, each adapted to the subject in hand. It is significant, therefore, that the only section which attempts to portray slavery on the human scale and to introduce named African characters is also the section written entirely in the sentimental style. For Ramsay, as for many others, sentiment and humanity were two sides of the same coin. It is one thing to write about suffering and injustice in general terms, and Ramsay could be passionate enough when doing just that, yet while fiery language might rouse the reader’s indignation, it does little to engage his or her sympathy. It is the suffering of one rather than the many which brings a tear to the eye just as it is the benevolent actions of one that speak for the rest and allow the reader to see that humanity, benevolence, and ‘all the nobler

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qualities of the heart are not monopolized by the white race’. Admittedly, Ramsay’s strategy is fragmented. He does not always manage to inspire both sympathy and indignation simultaneously. But he does recognise that both ingredients are needed to spur the reader to action. The response to Ramsay’s Essay was rapid and the book was warmly received in the periodical press. It moved William Seward, who assessed the book for The Monthly Review, to denounce slavery in exceptionally strong terms: Read this, and blush, ye Creoles, who live at ease in our land; who spend in riot and dissipation the profits of your plantations; thus earned by extreme labour, oppression, blood! Read this, ye African traders, who tear from their native country, to be thus inhumanly treated, poor, quiet, harmless beings, who, without our love of gain, and desire of aggrandizement, would happily recline under the shade of their plantains, and enjoy the beauties of nature and of climate which kind Providence has allowed them.31 Seward’s only criticism of the Essay was that it was too cautious. Ramsay had suggested that a limited and voluntary form of the slave trade could be retained in which only Africans who wished to go to the plantations would have to. Thus, Ramsay argued: The slave trade, in its present form the reproach of Britain, and threatening to hasten its downfal [sic], might be made to take a new shape, and become ultimately a blessing to thousands of wretches, who, left in their native country, would have dragged out a life of miserable ignorance.32 This was clearly an attempt at moderation on Ramsay’s part. He did, after all, have first hand knowledge of the extreme resistance of many planters to any form of amelioration, let alone abolition. It may also have been an ironic suggestion poking fun at those who said that Africans were happier as slaves. If they were happier as such, no doubt a voluntary scheme would work just as well as enforced slavery. In any case, Ramsay was clearly not convinced himself that such a scheme could work. In a footnote to this passage, he comments that ‘this is on supposition that the slave trade could be conducted without that violence and injustice to individuals, and enormous loss of lives [. . .] that now accompanies it’. If it was irony, Seward missed it: ‘why our author should wish such success to the slave trade we cannot see’ he wrote.33

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The Gentleman’s Magazine’s response to Ramsay’s Essay was more ambiguous. They include the following quotation from the last page of the Essay before adding a comment of their own: ‘May GOD, in his prudence, in his goodness, esteem us a people worthy of a blessing, so valuable and extensive as the social improvement and conversion to Christianity of our slaves would indisputably be!’ In this prayer every pious, humane, and considerate reader will join with the author.34 Social improvement and conversion may have been acceptable to the reviewer at The Gentleman’s Magazine but abolition is not mentioned, far less advocated. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, The Gentleman’s Magazine moved abruptly to a proslavery position in 1788, probably because its conservative chief reviewer, Richard Gough, decided to impose his views as the trickle of abolitionist literature became a flood. The Monthly Review underwent a conversion somewhat sooner although its enthusiasm for the proslavery line was as short lived as its initial support for Ramsay’s Essay. The Monthly Review, despite priding itself on its impartiality, had allowed itself to be drawn into a debate between Ramsay and his most vociferous critic, James Tobin, whose book, Cursory Remarks on the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay, appeared early the following year. The outbreak of a debate on slavery, in the opinion of Thomas Clarkson, was one of the most important developments in the early history of abolitionism as it was this which ‘brought Mr. Ramsay into the first controversy ever entered into on this subject, during which, as is the case in most controversies, the cause of truth was spread’.35 By 1788, when the Ramsay–Tobin exchange had reached its bitter and personal denouement, The Monthly Review was calling Ramsay’s work ‘all personal abuse and scandal’ and asserting that ‘with respect to the present subject [. . .] we are so heartily tired, that we wish never to hear any more of you’.36 Nevertheless, Clarkson was not wrong in his judgement that public disagreement, rather than merely the polite assertion of humane principles, was what attracted a popular audience.

Proslavery reaction to Ramsay’s Essay As we saw in Chapter 3 with the episode of the ‘tender-hearted poetesses’, proslavery writers were often scathing of what they saw as the sentimental treatment of their livelihood. Yet, at other times, they too could deploy sentimental rhetoric, sometimes when describing the suffering which

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they believed they or their families would inevitably undergo as a result of the economic hardships caused by abolition, but in particular when trying to divert attention away from slavery and the slave trade. This technique, a species of red herring, I call ‘sentimental diversion’, and in this section I examine a small selection of proslavery writing to show how it worked. Inevitably, this gives this section a rather different feel to the rest of the chapter. Nevertheless, it is important to show that sentimental rhetoric was not confined only to abolitionist writing, as well as to demonstrate some of the strategies adopted by apologists for slavery in response to the sentimental rhetoric of writers opposed to the slave trade. James Ramsay was the first abolitionist writer both to use sentimental rhetoric to any extent and to provoke a proslavery response. It is to his opponents and, in particular, to James Tobin that we can therefore look first for evidence of a proslavery form of sentimental rhetoric. Tobin, a former Nevis planter, after 1782 resident at Bristol, was one of many apologists for slavery who replied to Ramsay’s Essay but he was one of only a few to whom Ramsay publicly addressed a counter-reply.37 His first book, Cursory Remarks upon the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay (1785), is not often sentimental. Most of the book takes on Ramsay’s work chapter by chapter, often page by page, and counters Ramsay’s arguments in much the same language that Ramsay used. Where Ramsay uses the language of the political economist or the historian, Tobin adopts those styles. Tobin is highly critical, scornful even, of many of Ramsay’s assertions. He accuses Ramsay of getting his facts wrong, of knowing little of the actual operation of a slave plantation, and of generalising from what Tobin felt were unusual instances of cruelty to suggest that the entire plantation system was inherently cruel. All these were the standard arguments of the proslavery lobby and, in his later work, A Reply to the Personal Invectives and Objections (1785), Ramsay took considerable pains to point out that his facts were accurate and based on careful personal observation as well as the best statistical information he could find. Yet, although Cursory Remarks is not often sentimental, Tobin makes a curious side step at the outset of his book to ingratiate himself with the sentimental reader. Slavery, he argues, is indeed an evil but a necessary one. Despite having taken the time and effort to write a lengthy book attacking Ramsay’s antislavery arguments, Tobin appears not to want the reader to think he is so hard-hearted as to actually be arguing in favour of slavery: I shall freely venture to deliver my sentiments [. . .] in firm reliance, that [. . .] I shall not be so far misunderstood by the candid, and

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judicious part of mankind, as to be ranked among the advocates for slavery; as I most sincerely join Mr. Ramsay, and every other man of sensibility, in hoping, the blessings of freedom will in due time, be equally diffused over the face of the whole globe.38 In the opinion of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, the African and former slave whose 1787 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery included a long critique of Cursory Remarks, this passage showed that Tobin’s ‘understanding [had] got the better of his avarice’ and that ‘it would seem that he was a little ashamed of his craftsmen, and would not like to be ranked or appear amongst them’.39 Cugoano ironically overplays Tobin’s shame. A key phrase in Tobin’s passage is ‘in due time’. Tobin plainly believes in the institution of chattel slavery or else he would not have written his book. The ‘necessary evil’ argument that Tobin adopts is a standard one in the conservative arsenal. Rather than abolish a practice that benefits some while harming others, it is argued that the good done to one group outweighs the bad done to another. The most interesting thing about this passage, however, is the way in which Tobin characterises Ramsay as a ‘man of sensibility’. Since Tobin seems to want to join Ramsay, he must therefore also see himself as a man of sensibility, or at least want others to see him as such. More interesting still is his unquestioned assumption that every man of sensibility would wish for freedom to be ‘diffused over the face of the whole globe’. If this is true, and sensibility and antislavery really are as indivisible as he would appear to be arguing, then Tobin has a difficult problem: as long as he wishes to advertise himself as a man of feeling, he must argue for the continued existence of an institution which is incompatible with the persona he hopes to project. He attempts to solve this problem in two ways. First, he soft-peddles on any criticism of Ramsay’s sentimental passages and, second, he promotes a sentimentalised political agenda of his own in order to distract attention away from the injustices committed by slave owners and slave traders. In an attempt to get (quite literally perhaps) into the good books of the sentimental reader, Tobin is anxious not to offend those whose sensibilities were moved by reading Ramsay’s Essay. Every chapter of the Essay is directly challenged in Cursory Remarks with the important omission of the chapter sub-section ‘African Capacity Vindicated from Experience’, the section in which Ramsay introduces Quashi and Joseph Rachel. Tobin may have omitted criticism of this section for practical reasons. It may simply have been that he had no information with which to challenge the veracity of these stories, or that he knew the

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stories to be essentially true. This, however, seems overly simplistic. Had Tobin wished to criticise this section he could easily have done so by making fun of the sentimental style, or by mocking Ramsay’s position as a clergyman—tactics increasingly used by proslavery writers. As we saw in Chapter 3, a contributor to The Gentleman’s Magazine was scathing in his attack on the ‘pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and shortsighted politicians’ whom he claimed led the abolition movement.40 Tobin, however, well aware of the power and popularity of the sentimental genre, avoids criticism of Ramsay’s sentimentality and professes the very greatest respect for the Reverend Mr Ramsay’s profession. Tobin also realised that he could not merely be on the defensive when trying to affect his readers’ sensibilities. He thus directly engages his readers with a sentimental passage of his own. In a central section of Cursory Remarks, Tobin creates a massive diversion from the suffering of the slaves and focuses instead on the suffering of the rural poor in England. The passage is lengthy, and considers in turn the horrors of a povertystricken childhood, adulthood, and old age. This extract, from the end, gives the flavour of it: A much more affecting picture of English human misery still remains to be exhibited, and that is, when the poor, exhausted, worn-out victims of labour, are become aged, infirm, and helpless, and are forced, under the complicated pressure of cold, hunger, and decrepitude, to rely, for the mere support of feeble nature on the little pittance which can be badly spared them from the calls of the younger part of their families; or, which is more dreadful, to depend entirely for such scanty relief as will barely keep souls and body together, on the humanity of the petty tyrants of their village, whose interest it is, that the languid remnant of their, now useless, lives should find a speedy period.—That these things are so, is not to be denied.41 Tobin proceeds to ‘turn from this mortifying view of nominal liberty, and carry [his] readers across the Atlantic, to take a prospect of those regions of slavery, which, according to the representations of Mr Ramsay, are the favourite abodes of tyranny, distress, and despondence’.42 In the following pages he describes an idyllic plantation that is, of course, entirely misleading, although it does bear some resemblance to the ‘model’ plantations advocated in the ameliorationist passages of Sarah Scott’s History of Sir George Ellison and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (both discussed in Chapter 2). Nevertheless, in his portrayal of the hardships of rural life in England, Tobin had a point. Life for an

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agricultural labourer in the 1780s was hard and could be desperate. Applications for poor relief often were in the hands of petty village tyrants while landlords quite frequently did not live up to the ideal of the benevolent patriarch idealised and promoted in countless sentimental novels. If charity began at home, there was indeed plenty for the late eighteenth-century humanitarian to worry about on his or her own doorstep, and this is what gives Tobin’s diversionary tactic its power. Moreover, Tobin’s diversion is sentimental. The ‘affecting picture’ which he draws aims to emotionally subvert the intellect. He hopes thereby to enlist the sympathy of the reader for the ‘victims of labour’, now ‘aged, infirm, and helpless’. Several people found Tobin’s sentimental diversion offensive. Cugoano was clear that ‘the poorest in England would not change their situation for that of slaves’ and with good reason: ‘slaves, like animals are bought and sold, and dealt with as their capricious owners may think fit, even in torturing and tearing them to pieces’.43 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, referring to the argument ‘that the Slaves are as well off as the Peasantry in England’ without mentioning Tobin by name, nevertheless proclaimed that ‘were I the attorney General, I should certainly have prosecuted the author for sedition & treasonable Writings’.44 In a short parody, Ramsay dismissed Tobin’s argument as nonsense, arguing that this part of Tobin’s book: Is taken up with an elaborate description of the worse than wretched situation of English peasants, who wear shoes fortified with iron, and are not suffered to labour on Sundays; and if he describes it fairly, it would be a good Christian act in him to propose a bill to be pushed through with all the West Indian interest in Parliament, to reduce them all to the happy state of West Indian slavery.45 Ramsay’s jibe exposes the fundamental lie in Tobin’s argument. Although his ironic strategy in this passage is not particularly complicated, it is effective. ‘This’, replies Tobin, ‘is another curious specimen of Mr. R.’s wit, but it is by no means keen enough to supply the place of argument.’ Some may have considered it equally curious that Tobin felt unable to counter with any further argument himself.46 Tobin’s use of sentimental rhetoric is, therefore, twofold. He attempts to use sentimental arguments, couched in sentimental language, to associate himself (albeit opportunistically) with the genre. Later, he creates a long sentimental diversion, which he hopes will remind his reader that ‘charity begins at home’. These tactics did little to convince his

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critics either of the strength of his arguments or of the sincerity of his feelings. Olaudah Equiano, in particular, launched a scathing personal attack on Tobin in a letter to The Public Advertiser on 28 January 1788, in which he argued that one who attempted ‘to justify the cruelties inflicted on the negroes in the West Indies’ could not ‘be susceptible of human pity’. Equiano emphasises Tobin’s lack of feeling, and his lack of recognition of the equality of human feeling, asking ‘who could but the Author of the Cursory Remarks so debase his nature, as not to feel his keenest pangs of heart on reading [the slaves’] deplorable story?’ Later he asks Tobin ‘why treat [the Negro] as if he was not of like feeling?’ To Tobin’s unconvincing foray into sentimental rhetoric, Equiano counters with questions that probe at the heart of theories of sympathy, natural right, and universal feeling. Equiano’s attack, fully experienced in the rhetoric and theory of sensibility, demonstrates a thorough understanding of those sentimental arguments that Tobin, as an opportunist, grasps only imperfectly.47

Sweeps and miners Tobin chose agricultural labourers as his sentimental diversion from slavery but there were plenty of other candidates in late eighteenthcentury Britain, including the poor, the disabled, war veterans, ‘fallen’ women, children, and animals. Two groups in particular were singled out for comparison with slaves: miners, particularly coal miners, and chimney sweeps. There are several reasons for this. All industries involved child labour, in harsh conditions, and had extremely high rates of mortality. More significantly, at least to eighteenth-century observers, slaves, sweeps, and miners also have black faces in common. This point of comparison seemed obvious to the author of a 1788 poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine who talked of ‘Sweeps! Negroes in this land of Freedom’. 48 Child chimney sweeps were increasingly considered a national disgrace in the 1780s and, while the majority of people who wrote to highlight the appalling conditions they endured were opponents of slavery as well, some proslavery apologists attempted to divert attention from slaves to sweeps. The first person to seriously raise the issue of child sweeps was Jonas Hanway, who campaigned on several humanitarian issues and who produced a number of works on sweeps including, in 1785, A Sentimental History of the Chimney Sweepers. Hanway died in 1786, just as the slavery debate was growing in public importance, but he was aware of slavery and opposed to it. Moreover, he took a broad view which clearly rejected the ‘charity begins at home’ argument: ‘if

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charity extends to the relief of every kind of suffering of body and mind,’ he argued, ‘it takes in the chimney-sweeping sooty boy and the miserable negroe-slave, the ignorant poor child,—and the sinner of every class!’49 More ambivalent is the reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine who seems to oppose slavery, but is keener to mobilise support for the anti-child sweep cause. In a review of a book by Hanway’s friend James Pettit Andrews, which appeared in 1788 and which is little more than a condensation of Hanway’s Sentimental History, the reviewer brings together the slavery issue with the theme of child sweeps: Surely, if the management of our plantations and our chimnies would allow us, it were to be wished that we should have nothing to do with blacks in either case. We are now thinking of the poor Africans; let us also think of those English men, those English Children, who only resemble the Africans in colour.50 The reviewer sees a wide gulf between the natural state of the chimney sweeps and that of Africans. These two groups, he suggests, have nothing in common but their colour. If the institution of child sweeps were to be abolished, these poor black children could, quite literally, scrub their skins white and take their place in society as Englishmen—an option not available to African children. While this passage is very far from being a call to retain the institution of slavery, it is plain that the reviewer views Africans as innately inferior to Europeans. In this he was not alone. While some sought to promote interest in outlawing child sweeps at the expense of the campaign to abolish the slave trade, others saw the origins of juvenile sweeping in a debased nature common to Africans and the poorest in society. ‘From its nature’, argued David Porter in 1792, climbing chimneys ‘was probably the desperate expedient of a criminal, or the last resource of some poor Negro to prolong a miserable life’.51 The Scottish natural scientist John Rotheram, writing in The Monthly Review, was certain of the importance of the issue: ‘it is, in some respects, worse than the African slave trade’, he announced, ‘stop, for goodness sake! stop the practise!’52 Another, calling herself ‘Rachel’, was keener to expose the misery close to home. The child chimney sweepers, she argued, ‘undergo harder labour, and, at the same time, more painful than slaves who work in mines’. These white children differ from the actual slaves in one important respect: ‘under all that sable hue they would, if washed, and cleaned, and fed, be as attractive as the babes of wealth and family’.53 More powerful, perhaps, than the review articles is

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the news story which ran on the front page of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal on 22 March 1788: In the West Indies the more children a negroe brings into the world her situation is so much more advantageous; but, in England, the utmost industry in the parents is frequently unable to supply the wants of a numerous progeny; distress steels the finer feelings, and renders our fellow creatures scarcely human.—A mother lately sold her child of five years old, to a chimney-sweeper for half a guinea!!!— You, whose minds are replete with philanthropy, think of this—The circumstance is well known.54 Bristol was one of Britain’s two main slave-trading ports and, as one might expect, the abolition debate received a great deal of attention in the local press. Surprisingly, the Bristol Journal was prepared to publish letters and articles advocating abolition, but these often seem to have been deliberately inserted as Aunt Sallies, allowing the outraged readers, most of whom directly or indirectly made their living from slave trading, an opportunity to reply with forcible polemics and invectives directed at the abolitionists. The issue in which this story appeared also contained a long article dismissing abolition as a ‘popular phrenzy’, and a shorter piece which asserts that: ‘The sentimental furor which rages at present, unless it meets with an effectual check, will destroy all the good sense in the kingdom.’ These are significant since they characterise abolition as a madness seemingly brought about by an excess of sensibility. Yet, in a distinct rhetorical strategy, the sweep story recounts a desperate act caused by a failure of sensibility, itself brought on by poverty. The story concludes with an appeal, not to men of sense, but to men of feeling: ‘you, whose minds are replete with philanthropy’. Yet, the writer’s attempt to divert emotional energy away from slavery and towards chimney sweeps is beset with a savage irony. Mothers in the West Indies cannot call their children their own. Slaves themselves, they do not even have the ability to bring their own children to market in the way a poor English mother can, albeit illegally. The ‘advantageous’ lifestyle productive West Indian mothers allegedly enjoy in the plantations exists, if it does at all, solely to allow slave traders—many of them readers of this newspaper—to enslave and sell the slave-mothers’ children. The editors of The Bristol Journal apparently saw no irony in this. Nor did they see any further irony when, the following week, the newspaper followed up its sudden enthusiasm for the plight of child labourers by reporting a meeting of the ‘executors and friends of the late

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Mr. Hanway, to consider what measures might most successfully be pursued, in order to correct the abuses, respecting some of the most pitiable of our fellow creatures [. . .] it being a sad truth, that they are in too many instances not treated like rational beings.’55 The campaign to provide ‘relief’ for the climbing boys was, of course, laudable, largely supported by abolitionists, and was ultimately to lead to considerable child labour legislation in the nineteenth century and beyond. It is significant, however, that the publications most opposed to abolition also tended to be those most keen to promote the campaign against child chimney sweeps. Those whose interest or opinion led them to support the institution of slavery could use the example of sweeps to argue that philanthropists should confine their attentions to their own doorsteps. The position of the Bristol Journal is glaringly clear in this respect. In the case of The Gentleman’s Magazine, however, it would appear that a sentimental diversion, the ‘charity begins at home’ argument, with child chimney sweeps being closest to home, may have been among the factors to influence and finally move the mind of the reviewer towards a more staunchly proslavery position. When Jonas Hanway wanted to find an occupation that was worse than sweeping chimneys, his example was the ‘quick-silver mines of the Austrian dominions’.56 Mining—even now a dangerous and difficult job—was a far more arduous and hazardous occupation in the eighteenth century and, clearly, miners were as deserving of sympathy as anyone else. The proslavery apologist Gordon Turnbull took this view in his 1786 book An Apology for Negro Slavery. Turnbull was a Grenada planter who had already written a guide to good plantation management.57 The Apology employs many of the then standard economic and theological arguments in favour of slavery as well as launching a sustained personal attack on James Ramsay, an attack that prompted Equiano to leap to Ramsay’s defence in a letter to The Public Advertiser on 5 February 1788. Equiano tells us that ‘I have known [Ramsay] well both here and in the West Indies for many years’. Accordingly, in Equiano’s view, Turnbull’s attack on Ramsay was an ‘attempt to wound the reputation of the reverend Essayist by false calumnies, gross contradictions of several well known facts, and insidious suppression of others’.58 In this, Equiano’s analysis of Turnbull’s work remains accurate. What interested Equiano less, however, was Turnbull’s use of sentimental rhetoric, important here, since the Apology concludes on a solidly sentimental note. Turnbull initially follows the same diversionary route taken by Tobin and compares the drudgery of English peasants with the allegedly far pleasanter conditions experienced by plantation slaves. He then quotes generously

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from James Grainger’s georgic poem, The Sugar Cane (1764), which, as well as offering much in the way of instruction to slave owners, also makes the connection between miners and slaves. The italics in the final line are Turnbull’s, although the point need hardly have been emphasised any further: Nor, Negroe, at thy destiny repine, Tho’ doom’d to toil from dawn to setting sun. How far more pleasant is thy rural task, Than theirs who sweat, sequester’d from the day, In dark tartarean caves, sunk far beneath The earth’s dark surface; where sulphureaous flames, Oft from their vap’ry prisons bursting wild, To dire explosion give the cavern deep, And in dread ruin all its inmates whelm?— Nor fateful only in the bursting flame; The exhalations of the deep-dug mine, Tho’ slow, shake from their wings as sure a death. With what intense severity of pain Hath the afflicted muse, in Scotia, seen The miners rack’d, who toil for fatal lead? What cramps, what palsies shake their feeble limbs, Who, on the margin of the rocky Drave Trace silver’s fluent ore? Yet white men these!59 The proslavery context in which this poem is quoted substantially alters the sense of Grainger’s verse. He is made to appear ironic when he says that the slaves are ‘doom’d to toil from dawn to setting sun’. The extract is so clearly a diversionary tactic to show that many people, especially miners, are in a far worse position than slaves that the reader may take the author’s view to be that the slaves are not doomed at all, but instead somewhat privileged. This tactic may not have been entirely successful in practice: many of Turnbull’s readers would have been familiar with the poem, and would have been aware that the previous passage, which Turnbull does not quote, provides advice to slave owners on ‘inuring’ slaves to labour, a process known as ‘seasoning’. This advice is offered in lines that are distinctly pastoral in tone, setting up the contrast between slaves and miners that is to come in the quoted lines. Grainger, Turnbull wants us to believe, is making a clear argument in favour of slavery as the lesser of many evils. And yet The Sugar Cane is an altogether more complex and wide-ranging poem than Turnbull

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would have us think. Shortly after the passage quoted by Turnbull, for example, Grainger makes it clear that he is not an unthinking advocate for slavery: Oh, did the tender muse possess the power, Which Monarchs have, and monarchs oft abuse ’Twould be the fond ambition of her soul, To quell tyrannic sway; knock off the chains Of heart-debasing slavery, give to man, Of every colour and of every clime, Freedom, which stamps him image of his God.60 Later, Grainger makes a plea for the common humanity of Africans and Europeans by invoking a common sentimental argument, the belief in the equality of feeling; ‘the Ethiop feels’, he argues, ‘when treated like a man’. These lines contradict the monolithic proslavery slant that Turnbull discovers and, to an extent, manufactures in Grainger’s poem by italicising the final line of the quotation which he has taken out of context. Grainger’s poem may not be an abolitionist work, but it does argue for amelioration. Moreover, it is a georgic poem, a form that traditionally both extolled rural life and provided instruction about good husbandry. Amongst its many characteristics is an eclecticism of content and argument that allows for opposing points of view to be expressed in the name of providing a balanced education. Turnbull’s quotation from the poem militates against this tradition and imposes a fixed meaning on what is actually a complex and subtle argument. Then, before we have had time to consider our response to the quotation, Turnbull attempts to emotionally subvert the intellect by launching into a high-flown piece of sentimental rhetoric which is extraordinary as it is present only as an attempt to persuade the reader against alleviating suffering. Turnbull concludes his Apology by arguing that: Humanity has no need to visit distant regions, or to explore other climates, to search for objects of distress in another race of men! Here, at her very door, there are enough—here let sensibility drop her tear of generous pity—here let charity stretch forth her liberal hand—and here let benevolence, whom heaven has blessed with the means, exert her noblest power, indulge her sweetest gratification, and enjoy her highest and most delicious luxury! Ye, whom warm philanthropy hath inspired with the wish, to diffuse the blessings of liberty to all your fellow-creatures!—begin at

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home [. . .] and your souls shall be filled with that delight, which is virtue’s own reward in this world, and the anticipation of supreme bliss in the world to come.61 This is among the clearest examples of sentimental diversion to be found in the proslavery literature of the 1780s. It is also the most overtly sentimental passage to be found there as well. All the keywords and key phrases are there: ‘objects of distress’, ‘tear of generous pity’, ‘warm philanthropy’. Sentimental arguments stress the need to alleviate suffering, to show concern for the condition of others, to act always as the Good Samaritan would. While this is the natural ground of the antislavery campaigner, by the time Turnbull’s intervention was written sentimental rhetoric was no longer merely the preserve of tender-hearted poetesses. It had become a mainstream discourse to which everyone must apply to catch the public imagination. Proslavery writers had very little in common with sentimental readers, but they realised that in order to win the minds—and hearts—of their audience they must invoke sympathy for suffering. A key strategy was to create a hierarchy of suffering and to try to persuade their readers that slavery was low down on that list, far behind coal miners, chimney sweeps, and underemployed agricultural labourers. By the 1780s, it was no longer sufficient for a proslavery writer to appeal merely to logic, economics, or scriptural authority: he had to be a man of feeling as well as a man of common sense.

A shriek unusually loud: Clarkson’s sentimental rhetoric In 1786, Thomas Clarkson published what was probably the best-known book on slavery to appear during the eighteenth century. His Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species not only replaced James Ramsay’s Essay as the handbook of the emerging abolition movement but also far surpassed it in the directness of its style. The arguments themselves differed little from those that Ramsay and others before him had made, a fact that Clarkson was at pains to make clear in his introduction. Here he praised Ramsay’s Essay and noted that the extensive criticism which had been levelled at it by proslavery propagandists, especially Tobin, had only served to recommend it the more highly. Ramsay’s Essay, he argued, was ‘a work which is now firmly established; and I may add, in a very extraordinary manner, in consequence of the controversy which this gentleman has sustained with the Cursory Remarker’.62

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Over the years to come, Clarkson’s Essay was extensively printed and reprinted, widely quoted and reviewed, and subjected to a barrage of praise and criticism from all parties. It remains one of the most widely discussed of eighteenth-century antislavery publications although, as is frequently the case, it has interested historians of the movement rather more than literary critics. This is surprising since it has an interesting history as a piece of rhetoric; having been originally written in Latin as an entry in a Cambridge University prize competition, which it won. The person who set the question was the vice-chancellor, Peter Peckard, who later wrote two abolitionist pamphlets himself.63 The question— and there was only one—was ‘Is it Lawful to make Slaves of Others against their Will?’64 Although Clarkson knew nothing about this subject, it engaged his curiosity and he soon discovered the works of Anthony Benezet. He also found both students and others with personal experience of slavery and the slave trade. His research paid off and, after having written the essay and collected the prize, he translated the essay into English, rather hurriedly, he apologetically informs us, so that it could gain a wider audience. Clarkson’s apology is significant. He wants us to be aware that this is a translation of a piece written by a student as an exercise in rhetoric, and by making his apology he hopes we will forgive any youthful grandiloquence or impropriety of style. This apology is itself a rhetorical trope, the captatio benevolentiae, one of the many ploys by which the classical rhetorician could ensure the good will and attentive ears of the audience, in this case by asserting a fitting modesty. In fact, most of Clarkson’s Essay is translated into a clear idiomatic English that, though persuasive, is rarely grandiloquent or even merely grand. It is striking that when Clarkson does choose to appeal to the emotions he does so not by using the formal language of the grand style of classical rhetoric, but by using the familiar language of the sentimental novelist and the familiar arguments of the sentimental philosopher. For example, near the start of the book, he argues:

Alas! when we reflect that the people, thus reduced to a state of servitude, have had the same feelings with ourselves; when we reflect that they have had the same propensities to pleasure, and the same aversions from pain; another argument seems immediately to arise in opposition to the former, [that slavery is justified by long custom] deduced from our own feelings and that sympathy, which nature has implanted in our breasts, for the most useful and generous of purposes.65

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Clarkson articulates two fundamental sentimental arguments. The first is that equality of feeling proves the equal status of all human beings— we all feel the same, therefore we all are the same. The second argument is that sympathy is a key motivating factor in human decision-making: there is a reference to one of Adam Smith’s best known metaphors for the human sympathetic conscience: ‘the man within the breast, the supposed impartial spectator, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct’.66 Clarkson accepts that this sympathy is a natural and universal condition and is convinced that by merely examining our own feelings we can construct an a priori argument against the continuation of slavery. This is the sort of reasoning on which much sentimental literature is based, and, indeed, on which much sentimental rhetoric is based. Deliberately or not, Clarkson commences his work with a direct appeal to the mainstream of sentimental thought and, throughout, he returns to this idea whenever he wants us to react emotionally to the condition of slaves, to imagine ourselves in their position, and to find and demonstrate our sympathy with their predicament. Like Ramsay, Clarkson does not use his sensibility in isolation. He too is prepared to use the tone and argument of law, the church, or of philosophy. Unlike Ramsay, Clarkson also makes use of the sublime, albeit in the sympathetic mode that Edmund Burke described in his Philosophical Enquiry. In Clarkson’s Essay, we have many terrible, painful, images of slaves suffering, and we are repeatedly asked to sympathise, not with the dismal and melancholy images beloved of sentimentalists, but with more horrific images of violence and abuse. Clarkson articulates these strategies in a long central section of the Essay, informing the reader that: To place this in the clearest, and most conspicuous point of view, we shall throw a considerable part of our information on this head into the form of a narrative: we shall suppose ourselves, in short, on the continent of Africa, and relate a scene, which, from its agreement with unquestionable facts, might not unreasonably be presumed to have been presented to our view, had we been really there.67 The reader is asked to imagine that he or she has travelled to an African village and is watching a long stream of manacled slaves pass by while an unnamed ‘melancholy African’ explains who they are, where they come from, what their families are like, and what misfortunes befell them that they should find themselves enslaved. Clarkson had never been to Africa, and this entire section is thus an imaginative exercise, a piece

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of Africanist discourse, not merely describing Africa, but inventing an imagined Africa which sets the terms by which we are to understand the African experience when reading the Essay. So influential was Clarkson’s work that his vision of Africa in this section came very much to dominate representations of Africa and the slave experience in the poetry, novels, and political literature which appeared in the later 1780s, the 1790s, and even beyond. Indeed, Clarkson clearly recognised the power of his vision to mould other people’s perceptions of Africa and, in the second edition, many of his assertions were substantially altered, not least because he had undertaken a fact-finding mission for the Abolition Society, and was thus better informed. For example, in the first edition, Clarkson has his African narrator describe a group of slaves arriving at the coast on foot, where they are immediately: Branded upon the breast with an hot iron; and when they had undergone the whole of the treatment which is customary on these occasions, and which I am informed that you Englishmen at home use to the cattle which you buy, they were returned to their prison.68 This description was not strictly accurate. Slaves, when branded, were subjected to this treatment by their owners in the plantations. In the second edition, Clarkson appears to have realised this and the incident is omitted. In its place is a description of slaves arriving not on foot, but by canoe—something that did take place in slave-trading areas on river systems. Although Clarkson has revised his imaginative vision of Africa to make it agree more fully with the facts, the facts he chooses are still the ones he thinks are significant, and the narrative structure is unchanged. Ironically, his writing thus becomes entrenched more deeply as a European idea of Africa, and not the reverse. As rhetoric, however, both versions retain their power. In addition, both versions self-consciously instruct the reader in how to approach the text. As well as writing a piece of rhetoric, Clarkson seems compelled to offer a lesson in reading rhetoric. This is significant since it is not neo-classical rhetoric he wants the reader to learn, despite the essay’s Latin origins, but, more specifically, a pathos-centred rhetoric influenced by the new ideas on sympathy, sentiment, and the sublime. This appears strongly in the last few pages of the chapter, which conclude the imaginary conversation between the English traveller and the free African. The two characters stand or sit by the side of the road while the enslaved masses walk past them. The African at times appears to have intimate knowledge of the slaves’ lives and is able to describe the manner

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in which they became slaves. By and by, they are passed by ‘a numerous body of kidnapped people’, and: Here we indulged our imagination. We thought we beheld in one of them a father, in another an husband, and in another a son, each of whom was forced from his various and tender connections, and without even the opportunity of bidding them adieu. While we were engaged in these and other melancholy reflections, the whole body of slaves had entirely passed. We turned almost insensibly to look at them again.69 Clarkson offers a sentimental model for reading his narrative. The traveller and the African become very much like the author in that they indulge their imagination, and hypothesise about the people they see. The conclusions they come to are domestic ones, as they imagine the family relationships of the slaves being broken apart. The tone is melancholic and tends to introspection—so much so that they lose sight, quite literally, of the people whose suffering prompted their sentimental reverie, and when they refocus on reality they find, again literally, that the problem has passed them by. Clarkson is describing both the imaginative potentialities, and the shortcomings, of the pathetic in its sentimental mode. It is through our imagination, he seems to be arguing, that we can place ourselves in the situation of these enslaved people, or in other words, that we can come to sympathise with them. Nevertheless, our imagination alone, if it leads us into melancholy and introspection, is ultimately useless. The problem that needs to be addressed, like the body of slaves, will pass by us and out of view while we are lost in contemplation. The passage continues with another technique of pathos in its sentimental mode when a lame and ‘unhappy’ man passes by. Clarkson, like all who use a sentimental rhetoric, knows that it is far easier to prove an argument by outlining the suffering of an individual than of a group. Surprisingly, however, this unhappy man does not turn out to have a simple sentimental parable to tell. It emerges that he has been separated from his family, so a domestic tragedy is outlined, but this man is more vehement than sentimental, and his loss becomes focused in a strong attack on Christians and the Christian religion that he holds responsible. From this point onward, Clarkson’s narrative becomes increasingly unstable, swinging backwards and forwards between different pathetic extremes, to reach a strong, indeed, a sublime climax. The African, who until now has related the tales of distress in an apparently objective

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manner, turns on his audience, both the traveller and the reader, goading them with the accusation that their professed Christianity is mere sham: What is Christianity, but a system of murder and oppression? The cries and yells of the unfortunate people, who are now soon to embark for the regions of servitude, have already pierced my heart. Have you not heard me sigh, while we have been talking? Do you not see the tears that now trickle down my cheeks? and yet these hardened Christians are unable to be moved at all. The language switches abruptly between the scathing and the sentimental. Accusations of murder and oppression give way suddenly to the language of the heart, the language of tears and sighs. The melancholy African narrator tells the traveller that his heart has been ‘pierced’ and to demonstrate this inward condition he points to the external signs of his sighs and the ‘tears that now trickle down my cheeks’. Despite this narration, the African is essentially a passive sufferer. His ‘act’ is one of communication that, although vital in Clarkson’s scheme of things, is not in itself enough to overthrow slavery and the slave trade. Indeed, the European traveller, not surprisingly perhaps, goes on the defensive, arguing that the African is ‘totally mistaken: Christianity is the most perfect and lovely of moral systems’. Moreover, says the traveller, Christians ‘are, in short, of all nations, the most remarkable for humanity and justice’. Somehow, this fails to convince: ‘ “But why then,” replies the honest African, “do they suffer this? [. . .] Why are these dismal cries in vain?” ’ The European traveller has the last speech, if not the final utterance: ‘Can the cries and groans, with which the air now trembles, be heard across this extensive continent? Can the southern winds convey them to the ear of Britain? If they could reach the generous Englishman at home, they would pierce his heart, as they have already pierced your own. He would sympathise with you in your distress. He would be enraged at the conduct of his countrymen, and resist their tyranny.’— But here a shriek unusually loud, accompanied with a dreadful rattling of chains, interrupted the discourse.70 The passage dramatises the argument that slavery continued to exist only because the British public were unaware of the suffering that it caused. This belief motivated Clarkson, and finally became the orthodox

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historical explanation for the success of the abolition movement after the publication, in 1807, of his history of the abolition movement. Although the process of public enlightenment is very clearly presented here as the key to success, the passage is more interesting for its rhetorical effect since the traveller makes a direct appeal to the reader to advertise the suffering that the ‘melancholy African’ has shown him in the earlier parts of the chapter. Unlike the earlier extract, where introspection led to inaction, action must follow words, and it is the traveller, not the African, who shows exactly how words will lead to action. He adopts the sentimental language of the African narrator and, in a short speech, explains how the ‘cries and groans’, which he hears all around him, will lead directly to political action. First, they must ‘reach the generous Englishman at home’. As this is not literally possible, these groans will have to be represented by the next best thing: the language of feeling. Once these feelings reach England, they will undoubtedly pierce the heart of the ‘generous Englishman at home’. This aesthetic ‘delight in misery’, as Burke put it, will rapidly give way to the sympathy that Adam Smith saw as a basic ordering principle of human nature.71 From feeling sympathy, the Englishman will progress towards feeling anger and, ‘enraged at the conduct of his countrymen’, will take the final step into political action. So powerful is this political response likely to be that Clarkson describes it as a resistance against tyranny. Indeed, once these words have reached England, there is no knowing how far they might provoke Englishmen into action. The full range of pathos is unleashed here, as the emotions available escalate from tender feelings, through sympathy, to rage, and finally resistance. The traveller’s peroration is left unfinished, interrupted by ‘a shriek unusually loud’. The shriek is a reminder of the reality of the suffering around the traveller, but it also hints at the disorder lurking just beneath the surface of eighteenth-century English society. Clarkson seems to be hinting that once the tyranny of slavery is generally known, the English public will stop at nothing to see justice done. It is a dangerous hint, but also a very powerful one. This speech, when viewed as the dénouement of the long dramatic conversation between the African and the traveller, is both an example of sublime and sentimental rhetoric, and a model of how the rhetoric of sensibility should act on the reader. In classical terms, it works by using pathos rather than logos—emotion rather than reason—as proof, before throwing out some very direct hints about how the reader should react to their new-found knowledge that Africans are suffering because of the slave trade: they should react with sympathy, rage, and resistance.

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It also suggests that this progression is the method by which a political writer should go about inspiring his readers to action. The method is powerful, but the essential ingredient that starts us on this progression towards political action is sympathy. Like Hume, Smith, and Burke before him, Clarkson maintains that it is our ability to suffer in our imagination, alongside those who are really suffering, which holds the key to our future actions. To alleviate our own imagined, sympathetic, suffering, and to be a benevolent or even merely a sympathetic reader of this text, it is necessary to take action to hasten the abolition of the slave trade. This movement takes the reader away from a sentimental contemplation of misery, and towards an engagement with the political world that is genuinely sublime.

Grief is eloquent: Cugoano and Equiano As we have seen, among the most vociferous critics of sentimental proslavery writing were two Africans and former slaves: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. In addition to their criticism, both of these authors produced substantial works of antislavery in the late 1780s. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (1787) is impassioned, persuasive, and clearly intended to rouse the emotions in the hope of inspiring the reader to take action against slavery. It is only rarely sentimental, but these few moments of sentiment come at key moments in the text. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) is notable for its clarity of style and the directness of its rhetoric. Although often a moving work it is rarely sentimental, yet Equiano does introduce some sentimental set-pieces in places while, in some respects, the Interesting Narrative can be viewed as an extended sentimental parable and Equiano himself as a selfconstructed sentimental hero. This chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the use of sentiment in these important texts. Cugoano’s book is fiercely argued and consists, for the most part, of scriptural arguments against slavery. These make difficult reading for most modern readers but, as Vincent Carretta has pointed out, this does not necessarily mean that the work is badly constructed. Thoughts and Sentiments, Carretta argues, is an example of the jeremiad, or political sermon, and many of its formal qualities ‘that might strike readers as ungrammatical, repetitive, imitative, and lacking in narrative force may be explained by approaching the text from the African oral and Christian homiletic traditions’. Moreover, he argues, despite early critics such as the Abbé Gregoire focusing on Cugoano’s ‘use of rhetorical pathos’, this approach ‘underestimates his reliance on logic and his use of authority’.72

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The political sermon is examined in more detail in Chapter 5, below, but it is worth noting that, despite Gregoire’s argument that in the Thoughts and Sentiments ‘grief is eloquent’, a rhetorical use of pathos did not imply to the eighteenth-century reader, schooled in neo-classical oratory, that the argument was either illogical or lacking in authority. Yet neither does it imply that the argument is sentimental.73 Cugoano’s use of pathos is in the neo-classical tradition, which embraced all of the emotions. The predominant tone is anger, and Cugoano rarely makes use of what the eighteenth-century reader would have understood by ‘sentiment’. This is surprising since, in the opening pages of the Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano is at some pains to associate himself with the benevolent strand of sentimental thinking, while one of his first Biblical allusions is explicitly tearful: ‘did not I weep for him that was in trouble; was not my soul grieved for the poor?’ The ability to weep for others, that is, to show sympathy towards the distress of others, is one of the key building blocks of a sentimental argument. Cugoano immediately follows this up with praise for the ‘many benevolent and humane gentlemen’ who campaign against the slave trade, before declaring that slavery can only be justified by those ‘who must eventually resign their own claim to any degree of sensibility and humanity’.74 This is Cugoano’s way of saying that he intends to appeal to the reader’s sensibility, as well as to their Christian beliefs and their powers of reasoning. These brief flashes of sentimental rhetoric in the first few pages of his book are, however, followed up in only one later section; the short passage in which he describes his abduction and his experiences in the middle passage and the plantations. That this terrible sequence of events made the child Cugoano ‘cry bitterly’ can hardly be counted as sentimental, but the late-eighteenth-century reader might have recognised sentiment in Cugoano’s memory of his lost family: Let it suffice to say, that I was thus lost to my dear indulgent parents and relations, and they to me. All my help was cries and tears, and these could not avail; nor suffered long, till one succeeding woe, and dread, swelled up another. Brought from a state of innocence and freedom, and, in a barbarous and cruel manner, conveyed to a state of horror and slavery.75 That Cugoano should describe these clearly traumatic episodes in feeling language is understandable, but we should not, as some have done, underestimate his rhetorical strategy. Keith Sandiford, for example, argues that Cugoano ‘chose an unvarnished sentimental naïveté in

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relating the details of his early life and in recounting the circumstances of his enslavement’. While Sandiford concedes that this ‘was no doubt calculated to enlist the sympathies of readers inclined to sentimentalism’, there is also no missing his sceptical attitude to the discourse favoured by Cugoano on this occasion.76 Cugoano’s repeated description of his ‘cries and tears’ almost certainly reflects his actual childhood response to his abduction, but he immediately follows up this feeling passage with an analysis of how his childhood experience has directed his adult emotional state. ‘The grievous thoughts which I then felt’, he tells us, ‘still pant in my heart; though my fears and tears have long since subsided.’77 This is a subtle sentimental argument that works by providing the reader with a model for his or her own response to Cugoano’s text. While the descriptions of the abuse he received as a child, partially written in sentimental language, might draw tears from sentimental readers, what is important is what remains with them afterwards. This veiled attack on false sensibility emotionally subverts and provokes the reader to themselves take action to oppose slavery, even after the ‘fears and tears’ invoked by reading this passage have subsided. In his opening pages, and particularly in the autobiographical passages, Cugoano shows himself to be adept at using a tactical sentimental rhetoric, but in the main he chooses to target readers who might have attended Evangelical and Methodist meetings rather than those in the sentimental drawing rooms of the wealthy and aspiring middling classes. Cugoano was clearly familiar with the works of James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson, and may have known Ignatius Sancho, yet unlike them he chose to model no more than a few short passages on the writings of literary sentimentalists. He is prepared to engage his reader by hinting at the fashionable idiom, but he does not sustain his use of the technique. His autobiography briefly returns to the rhetoric of sensibility, but here he seems not to be addressing his preferred reader. While Cugoano’s text is the earlier, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative is by far the better known of the two. It was a phenomenal best-seller in the eighteenth century, going through nine editions, and in recent years has become one of the most frequently assigned eighteenthcentury texts in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Accordingly, a large and ever-growing body of critical literature has attached itself to the text, examining the work’s role as a proto-typical slave narrative, its position in the literature of empire, and its relationship with the burgeoning eighteenth-century market for travel literature. Its role as political rhetoric has not been ignored either, but few critics have examined its relationship with the discourse of sensibility. Such a relationship exists

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since, like Cugoano before him, Equiano adopts a number of voices and makes use of sentimental rhetoric at intervals—although without committing himself to it throughout his work. Like Cugoano, Equiano reaches his most sentimental moments while describing his childhood abduction. The focus of much of the opening chapters is on domestic scenes of village life in Africa, and while the style owes little to sentimental literature, the passages serve to normalise African society for the English reader and to create a strong contrast with the shock of Equiano’s abduction. Equiano thus inverts a key strategy of sentimental rhetoric, the emotional subversion of the intellect, by preparing the reader for an emotional sequence with a passage notable for its dispassionate tone. This gambit emphasises the suffering of the child Equiano, and by so doing casts him into the role of a sentimental hero. While the later part of the book demonstrates Equiano overcoming his misfortunes through a combination of prayer and hard work, in the earlier part, the child is an innocent and suffering victim, friendless and often bewildered by the events of his life. Although he rarely writes in a sentimental register, Equiano’s narrative of his childhood invites a sympathetic response. At times, however, Equiano’s rhetoric becomes more recognisably sentimental and perhaps the best example of this is his description of his relationship with his sister, who was abducted at the same time. Recounting the experience of their first night in captivity, he writes that ‘the only comfort we had was in being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears. But, alas! we were soon deprived of even the smallest comfort of weeping together’.78 This emphasis on the mutuality and communicative function of tears is repeated a few pages later when Equiano is temporarily re-united with his sister: As soon as she saw me she gave a loud shriek, and ran into my arms.—I was quite overpowered; neither of us could speak, but, for a considerable time, clung to each other in mutual embraces, unable to do anything but weep. Our meeting affected all who saw us.79 The re-telling of this story is intended to ‘affect’ the reader as well and the passage acts as a model on which the reader is invited to base his or her own response. The emphasis on tears is one sign that the passage is concerned with sensibility, but the story is also a sentimental parable with Equiano and his sister appearing in the roles of sentimental hero and heroine. Equiano proceeds from here into a textbook example of emotional subversion of the intellect. He describes how his sister was

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finally ‘torn from me for ever’ and how the separation left him in a state of depression. These emotionally charged scenes give way to progressively harder-nosed forms of rhetoric. The description of his emotional state after their separation leads into a heartfelt apostrophe to his absent sister: ‘thou dear partner of all my childish sports! thou sharer of my joys and sorrows!’ He returns to his emotional state, lamenting that ‘the thoughts of your sufferings have damped my prosperity’, before ending with a prayer and a hard-hitting declamation: To that heaven which protects the weak from the strong, I commit the care of your innocence and virtues, if they have not already received their full reward; and if your youth and delicacy have not long since fallen victims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer.80 This seemingly violent outburst is, in fact, carefully controlled. It moves from the tearful domestic scenes at its opening to a reasoned and structured closing attack on the whole system of Atlantic slavery. In telling the history of his separation from his sister, Equiano has already provided a sentimental parable for the reader to weep over and, by this point, he or she should be responding emotionally rather than intellectually. In the final sentence of this passage, he begins with a prayer reminiscent of the Anglican ‘Order For the Burial of the Dead’. Here he commits his sister’s soul to heaven while actually raising questions about the terrestrial status of her body. Reminding the reader of her ‘innocence and virtues’, he proceeds to describe what Carretta calls ‘the four stages of the African slave trade’: capture, the middle passage, seasoning and enslavement.81 This movement is the key to Equiano’s use of sentimental subversion of the intellect. The stages of the slave trade he describes were well known by the time The Interesting Narrative appeared. Here they are referred to in proximity to the image of a tearful young girl, a girl who is portrayed as having the same feeling response to adversity as any young woman in an eighteenth-century middle- or upper-class home. In the reader’s emotionally subverted state, he or she might be expected to link the emotional image of the abused child with their pre-existing intellectual understanding of the nature of the slave trade. The result should be a strong and, perhaps more importantly, a lasting abhorrence of slavery and the slave trade. But, in case the reader has still not quite grasped the horror of the situation, Equiano finishes with the most disturbing image of all: the ‘lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer’.

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Here the circle is completed, with the journey from the childhood innocence of the young girl, via the workings of the global slavery industry, ending up once more in a recognisable image of a recognisable individual. The passage ends with the brutality and sexual sadism of the overseer encapsulating the horror of plantation slavery, as much as the tearful images of the young Equiano and his sister encapsulated the innocence and emotional honesty of the aggrieved citizens of Africa. This is powerful rhetoric, and rhetoric that has long been argued came from both experience and the heart. There is no consensus on this matter, however, and some critics—notably S.E. Ogude and Vincent Carretta—have cast doubt on the veracity of parts of Equiano’s narrative. Indeed, Carretta’s discovery of documents giving Equiano’s place of birth as South Carolina suggests that Equiano was born there—or at least told people in his youth that he was born there—and not in Africa. While this evidence is not conclusive, there is a strong possibility that Equiano’s account of his early life in Africa, his and his sister’s abduction, and the middle passage must be considered, in Ogude’s words, as ‘an imaginative reorganization of a wide variety of tales about Africa from an equally wide range of sources’.82 Equally, Carretta notes that Equiano’s ‘account of Africa may have been based on oral history and reading, rather than on personal experience’.83 This is important research, and has far-reaching implications for Equiano studies. It does not, however, in any sense alter the fact that The Interesting Narrative is work of rhetoric, written with the distinct purpose of convincing the reader of the importance of abolishing the Atlantic slave trade. While determining Equiano’s unstated or unconscious motivations might prove more challenging in the light of Ogude’s blunt assertion that ‘Equiano’s narrative is to a large extent fictional’, the persuasive parts of The Interesting Narrative remain persuasive. Whether or not Equiano had a sister—in Africa or America—and what became of his sister if he did, is in any case unknowable. What remains of this passage is a powerful piece of writing, reflecting the lived experience of thousands of Africans. In addition, although one of only a few such examples in Equiano’s work, this is sentimental rhetoric at its most characteristic. Equiano and Cugoano’s forays into sentimental rhetoric are consistent with the use of the rhetoric throughout pamphlets and essays on the slave trade. In almost all cases, from James Ramsay’s work onwards, abolitionists as well as apologists for slavery needed to communicate a variety of arguments including those drawn from philosophy, theology, political economy, military strategy and party politics. In the main, essayists and pamphleteers composed their arguments in a register

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appropriate to the immediate subject matter. Almost without exception, these writers concluded that the sentimental register was the appropriate one for discussing slavery in human terms, and in human proportions. In these chapters and passages, abolitionists emotionally subverted intellects with sentimental parables featuring sentimental heroes and admonitions against false sensibility. In return, proslavery writers diverted attention away from slavery by telling their own affecting tales about the deserving poor. While not the only mode of persuasion available to participants in the debate, the rhetoric of sensibility was clearly a valuable weapon in the armoury of both abolitionist and apologist.

5 Feeling Out Loud: Sentimental Rhetoric in Parliament, the Pulpit, and the Court of Law

Spoken rhetoric was as important to the campaign against the slave trade as it was to any other political activity. At the local level, scenes of oratory included meetings, debates, readings, and hustings. At another level, priests and judges pronounced on the spiritual and legal reasons why slavery and the trade should, or should not, be tolerated. Finally, at the point when the campaign came nearest to realising its goals, Parliament took up the question, debating for long hours in committee rooms and, at last, in the chamber of the House of Commons itself. For the most part, these many speeches and conversations are utterly lost to us. Minutes of abolition meetings tend to record resolutions, not the debates that led up to them. Most of the many sermons preached each week were neither published nor preserved. Court records, with forensic pedantry, record many forms of evidence including personal testimony, but remain legally blind to tone, nuance, and innuendo. Even Parliamentary debate itself is represented to us, not through the verbatim reports that would later appear in The Official Record, otherwise known as Hansard, but through competing and contradictory reports in newspapers and magazines. Quite clearly, scholars face a difficult task in the attempt to reconstruct or analyse the role of spoken rhetoric in the abolition debate. Such was the importance of spoken rhetoric, however, that it is important to examine those records that survive. In certain areas, these are considerably better than might be hoped. The pulpit, the courtroom, and Parliament, all scenes of formal rhetoric, have bequeathed huge quantities of written records of spoken events. These records are not perfect, of course, nor do we know how, exactly, many of them are imperfect. All have been subjected to revision, omission, expansion, and, in some cases, total misrepresentation. Nevertheless, we are still able to 144

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hear in the written reports an echo of the spoken event, an echo that allows us tentatively to assess the ways in which sentimental rhetoric was used in the spoken abolition debate. Accordingly, this chapter considers three arenas of public oratory in turn, each of which corresponds to one of the three main divisions of classical rhetoric. First, it looks at a branch of what classical rhetoricians called ‘demonstrative rhetoric’: the rhetoric of praise and ceremony. Focusing on the religious aspect of demonstrative rhetoric, it examines a group of popular printed sermons. These include examples by Laurence Sterne, John Wesley, Beilby Porteus, and Joseph Priestley. The central part of the chapter considers ‘deliberative rhetoric’, and is largely concerned with a detailed examination of William Wilberforce’s abolition speech to Parliament in May 1789. Finally, it pays attention to ‘forensic rhetoric’, looking at two celebrated legal cases: the 1773 case of James Sommersett, and the 1793 trial for murder of Captain John Kimber, a slave trader.

Demonstrative: Sermons and slavery Although arguments against slavery were frequently issued from the pulpit in the late eighteenth century, this area has been neglected, both by historians and by literary scholars. Substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the British political sermon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sermons preached during the period of the great international movements of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as well as the more domestic trauma of Civil War partly based in religious ‘enthusiasm’, have long been understood to play a part in those events. Indeed, the seventeenth-century sermon has been widely subjected to praise and analysis: hardly surprising for a century that, with its range of styles from the ‘metaphysical’ John Donne to the ‘neoclassical’ John Tillotson, and with its intensity of thought and feeling engendered by revolution and war, is often referred to as the ‘golden age’ of the British sermon.1 By contrast, the latitudinarian sermon of the eighteenth century, often portrayed as a limp shadow of its former glory, has rarely been seen as an important part of eighteenth-century literary or political culture.2 Even the enthusiastic oratory of Methodism and late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism are rarely examined for their literary content. Although theological treatments by practising Christians abound, most secular scholars, following historians like Elie Halévy and E.P. Thompson, prefer to examine these movements as social phenomena.3 But whether neo-classical or Methodist, eighteenth-century sermons remain part of the literary culture of their time. Just as literature and rhetoric could increasingly be

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described as sentimental, so too were sermon writers moving in that direction. This is a point made by James Downey, when he argues that Laurence Sterne’s theology in The Sermons of Mr. Yorick was ‘as much a religion of the heart as was Wesley’s’. Wesley argued that true Christians needed an emotional commitment to God, a commitment that was often missing in those who obeyed only the form of Christian worship. Sterne too saw his work, as Downey reminds us, as ‘a theological flap upon the heart’.4 Although clearly—some would say notoriously—sentimental, Sterne’s sermons are neither theological exegeses, nor political sermons in any immediately recognisable sense, yet they do develop a sustained argument about the social benefits of philanthropy, derived from a Sterne’s supposedly untutored theology of the heart, in tandem with his understanding of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 2, Sterne explicitly discusses slavery in his sermon ‘Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, Considered’. The passage is short but significant. It asks us to: Consider how great a part of our species in all ages down to this, have been trod under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither hear their cries, nor pity their distress.—Consider slavery—what it is,—how bitter a draught, and how many millions have been made to drink of it;—which if it can poison all earthly happiness when exercised barely upon our bodies, what must it be, when it comprehends both the slavery of body and mind?—To conceive this, look into the history of the Romish church and her tyrants, (or rather executioners) who seem to have taken pleasure in the pangs and convulsions of their fellow-creatures.5 Ignatius Sancho saw in this a condemnation of chattel slavery ‘as it is at this day practised in our West Indies’, but the evidence for this is purely external.6 The slavery mentioned here is surely that variety perennially feared by Whigs and Anglicans, the combination of political tyranny with Papal dominion that was banished from England with the revolution of 1688. Sterne’s reply to Sancho that he was at that moment ‘writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl’ indicates only that Sterne was prepared to see this passage as relevant to Atlantic slavery once Sancho had pointed it out. As Sancho’s response shows, however, the passage offers a sentimental reading of slavery. Sterne’s invitation to the reader or congregation to ‘consider slavery’ is quickly followed by a request that the physical reality of slavery—the pain—is uppermost on the mind. The relationship between body and mind is discussed

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and the inappropriate response is described. The ‘cruel and capricious tyrants’ responsible for slavery demonstrate their failure as sentimentalists. Far worse than their refusal to hear the cries of their victims is their inability to ‘pity their distress’. For Sterne, slavery is caused as much by a failure of sensibility as by errors of political or theological understanding. In contrast to Sterne’s, Wesley’s ‘religion of the heart’ may not be unequivocally sentimental but, with its emphasis on the emotions, it was in accord with most sentimental literature.7 This is despite Wesley’s avowed objection to sentimental literature. As Markman Ellis has noted, Wesley, although a keen reader of Henry Brooke’s sentimental novel The Fool of Quality, articulated strong reservations about the word ‘sentimental’ itself, as well as passing an unfavourable verdict on Sterne.8 In August 1772, he wrote in his journal: Tues. 11.—I casually took a volume of what is called A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! what is that? It is not English; he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea; yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one! However, the book agrees full well with the title, for one is as queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose, the writer is without a rival.9 Sterne becomes an uncouth imitator of Brooke (‘one fool makes many’) whose patriotism can be called into question. We do not know what Sterne made of Wesley, but in one point they would have agreed. Wesley called for a form of continual worship and love of God ‘as engrosses the whole heart, as takes up all the affections, as fills the entire capacity of the soul, and employs the utmost extent of all its faculties’.10 While the enthusiasm might have repelled Sterne, the emphasis on the affections would not have. But while there was little room for discussion of slavery in Sterne’s ‘religion of the heart’, the same could not be said of Wesley’s creed. His opposition to slavery and the slave trade, commencing with his experience in colonial Georgia in 1736–1737, began long before the issue had received widespread attention, and was sustained throughout his life—he was reading Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative on his deathbed.11 Wesley’s biographers, using the evidence of his journal and correspondence, have traditionally dated his interest in slavery from August 1772, but there is evidence to show that he was already corresponding on the subject earlier in the year, if not the previous year. On 14 May 1772, The Philadelphian Quaker Anthony Benezet wrote to

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Granville Sharp, sending him copies of Some Historical Account of Guinea, which Sharp arranged to be published in an English edition.12 In this letter, Benezet tells Sharp that: ‘My friend John Westly promises he will consult with thee about the expediency of some weekly publication, in the newspapers, on the origin, nature, and dreadful effects of the slave trade.’13 It does not appear that this planned newspaper column ever materialised, yet on this evidence it seems likely that Wesley and Benezet had been communicating from a relatively early date. Wesley’s antislavery activity before August 1772, and his relationship with both Benezet and Sharp, is confirmed by another letter, dated 30 July 1772, written by Granville Sharp to Robert Hay Drummond, Archbishop of York. In this, Sharp sends the Archbishop a copy of ‘one of Mr. Benezet’s books’ (he doesn’t say which one) and surveys the attitudes of various Christian sects towards slavery. He notes that ‘The Methodists are also highly offended at the scandalous toleration of slavery in our colonies, if I may judge by the sentiments of one of their principal teachers, Mr. Wesley—though, indeed, I have never had any communication with that gentleman but on this particular point.’14 Although the earliest surviving letters between Wesley and Sharp date from 1787, clearly, they are already in touch by the summer of 1772. In any case, we are certain that Wesley later read Sharp’s edition of Benezet since, on 12 August 1772, the day after his unfortunate encounter with sentimental literature, he wrote the following in his journal: Wed. 12.—In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade. I read of nothing like it in the heathen world, whether ancient or modern; and it infinitely exceeds, in every instance of barbarity, whatever Christian slaves suffer in Mahometan countries.15 No doubt, in addition to his personal contacts with Benezet and Sharp, Wesley was reading the book because slavery had been in the news recently following the landmark legal decision in the case of James Sommersett. In his journal entry, Wesley constructs slavery as a problem of ‘real’ as opposed to ‘nominal’ Christianity, a construction that was to be used frequently by antislavery writers in the coming campaign. Moreover, Wesley explicitly contrasts the ‘Christian’ transatlantic slave trade with the slavery of Europeans in North Africa. As Linda Colley has shown, in popular discourse inspired by captivity narratives ‘North African Islamic society stood for tyranny, brutality, poverty and loss of freedom’.16 In a pointed inversion of this popular

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view, Wesley portrays the slave trade as the shame of Christendom, not of Islam. Clearly Benezet’s work, and Lord Mansfield’s deliberations in the Sommersett case, gave Wesley some disquiet for two years later, in 1774, he issued a short pamphlet called Thoughts Upon Slavery. Later, in 1788, when the abolition campaign was at its height, he preached a sermon in Bristol, one of the foremost slave trading ports. In such a location, at such a time, an antislavery sermon could not have been preached without considerable personal risk to the preacher. Indeed, during the sermon a disturbance took place, which Wesley recorded in his journal: About the middle of the discourse, while there was on every side attention still as night, a vehement noise arose, none could tell why, and shot like lightening through the whole congregation. The terror and confusion were inexpressible. You might have imagined it was a city taken by storm. The people rushed upon each other with the utmost violence; the benches were broke in pieces, and nine-tenths of the congregation appeared to be struck with the same panic.17 Wesley ascribed the confusion to ‘some preternatural influence. Satan fought, lest his kingdom should be delivered up.’ While it is possible that a sudden thunderstorm or other natural phenomenon was the cause of the panic, a more likely cause, perhaps, was a plot by slave traders, anxious to disrupt a piece of abolitionist rhetoric being sounded deep in their territory. How strong this rhetoric was is impossible to tell, as the 1788 sermon has not survived. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that it was based in some measure on his pamphlet Thoughts Upon Slavery. This had first been published in 1774, and went into four editions in two years. In August 1787, Wesley wrote to the Abolition Committee to express his support, and he pledged to reprint the tract in ‘a new large edition’.18 For some reason this fifth edition did not appear until 1792, a year after Wesley’s death, but clearly the pamphlet was in Wesley’s mind at the time. The pamphlet follows a similar pattern to Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea. Indeed, as George Brookes, Benezet’s biographer has put it, ‘in a century of free plagiarism, the opening chapter of Wesley’s treatise required little exercise of thought’.19 This may be somewhat unfair, but the first part of the book at least is heavily dependent on Benezet. It commences with a discussion of topology and society, drawing an Edenic image of West Africa populated with reasonable and reasoning people—if ‘Heathens’. Wesley’s Africans

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are neither unusually noble nor sentimental but, rather, ‘remarkably sensible, considering the few advantages they have for improving their understanding’.20 Next, Wesley outlines the method of procuring and transporting slaves. He holds white people directly responsible for the slave trade, a trade which he ascribes not only to avarice, but also to a failure of sensibility: ‘Whites, not Blacks, are without natural affection!’21 The brutality of plantation life is then discussed before Wesley advances legal and moral arguments against both slavery and the slave trade in which it is shown ‘that all slavery is as irreconcileable to Justice as to Mercy’.22 Wesley then answers the defence that slavery is justified by necessity, before concluding, as befits a preacher, with an appeal to religious morality, distinct from the plea of common humanity which he made earlier. The pamphlet concludes first with a direct address to the slave trader and slave owner and finally with a prayer. In these concluding eight pages, the political tract mutates into both a sermon and a piece of sentimental writing. There is textual evidence that the Thoughts Upon Slavery formed the basis of the 1788 sermon: both the pamphlet and Wesley’s journal entry describing the sermon conclude with the hope that God will free the slaves and burst ‘their chains in sunder’.23 This phrasing is rather unusual, even for the eighteenth century. In either case, there is a dramatic shift in tone as Wesley moves away from the geographical and legal evidence he has assembled, and towards a rhetoric of the heart to match his feeling religion. The language is passionate but, with its insistence on the personal emotional response, and its focus on such effusive signifiers as weeping, sighing, and bleeding, it is also sentimental. Wesley fires questions at the slave trader, asking: Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as Compassion there? Do you never feel another’s pain? Have you no Sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the Great GOD deal with You, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands.24

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If this is a sample of the language Wesley used in his 1788 sermon at Bristol, we can readily see why a disturbance might have broken out in a congregation formed largely from those who made their living, directly or indirectly, from slavery. It accuses the guilty, and holds out threats of eternal justice. The passage is well within the tradition of the political sermon, but, inflammatory though it undoubtedly is, it also makes use of many of the conventions of sentimental rhetoric. It constructs a sentimental argument founded in the idea of sympathy, and posits a sentimental hero— here conspicuous by his absence. The implied reader (or listener) of this passage is simultaneously a slave trader and a man of no sensibility. To render the identification of this passage with sentimental literature complete, the passage is also marked by its use of sentimental signifiers such as tears, groans, and hearts, by its determination to bring private feelings into the public sphere, and by its overheated and excessively woeful tone. As sentimental writing, it ranks with the best Sterne had to offer. Wesley’s impact on popular religion was never doubted, but his influence within the hierarchy of the Church of England was always less certain. By contrast, Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester (after 1787, Bishop of London), managed to combine his evangelical ministry with a successful ecclesiastical career. During his lifetime, he published several volumes of sermons as well as tracts on both political and spiritual topics. Among these was a sermon, preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on 23 February 1783, which had as its title: ‘The civilization, improvement, and conversion of the Negro slaves in the British West-India islands recommended.’ The sermon did not explicitly call for the abolition either of slavery or the slave trade, but instead put the case for the ‘benevolent purpose of communicating to our Negroes the benefits and blessings of religion’. By ‘our Negroes’, Porteus was referring, not just to slaves held in British colonies, but more specially to the slaves owned by the Anglican Church on their trust estates in Barbados. Their conversion, he told the society, required that their situation first be improved. ‘If we ever hope to make any considerable progress in our benevolent purpose’, he argued: We must first give them some of the benefits and the blessings of society and of civil government. We must, as far as is possible, attach them and their families inseparably to the soil: must give them a little interest in it; must indulge them with a few rights and privileges to be anxious for; must secure them by fixed laws from injury and insult; must inform their minds, correct their morals, accustom them to the restraints of legal marriage, to the care of a family and the comforts

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of domestic life; must improve and advance their condition gradually, as they are able to bear it; and even allow a certain number of the most deserving to work out their freedom by degrees [. . .] as a reward of superior merit and industry and of an uncommon progress in the knowledge and practice of Christianity. 25 With its insistence on maintaining control, moral as well as physical, and its emphasis on freedom being a gift for the deserving, this passage agrees with much of the ameliorationist sentimental literature of the 1760s and 1770s, although, for the most part, Porteus refrains from the sort of tear-jerking sentimentalism in which the novelists often indulged. He does, however, allow himself space for sentimental argument. Early in the sermon, he argues that, because of the influence of Christ’s personal benevolence, slavery withered away in the ancient world. His ministry, Porteus suggests, ‘diffused throughout the earth such a spirit of mildness, gentleness, mercy, and humanity, that the heavy chains of personal slavery were gradually broken in most parts of the Christian world’.26 This argument was to reappear in one form or another in sermons preached throughout the abolition and emancipation campaigns. According to Bob Tennant, ‘such an appeal to the authority of Christ’s human personality is new. It is the language of “sentiment”. Not the sentimentality of Sterne’s novels and sermons, with its tendency towards self-absorbtion, but the ethical sentimentality of Goldsmith, with its socially reformist implications.’27 Not only is this the ‘language’ of sentiment, as Tennant suggests, but it is also a particular type of sentimental argument: the invocation of a sentimental hero. Christ has become the sentimental hero and, as the duty of a Christian is to follow Christ, it means that the correct Christian course of action is sentimental as well. Nevertheless, this, by itself, does not seem quite sufficient. Christianity, by its nature, has always had a tendency towards hero worship—or hagiography. As Tennant has shown, it is the emphasis on the essentially benevolent nature of Christ’s personality that makes this argument sentimental. Porteus, though, had a room full of senior church figures to convince. To present a persuasive and aesthetically pleasing piece of rhetoric, he needed to balance his early sentimental argument with a later piece of sentimental rhetoric. To do so he moves the sentimental part of his argument on from first principles (Christ’s personality) to outcomes. The reward of his scheme is both spiritual and political, but the language in which the reward is presented is sentimental. At the end of an increasingly breathless passage invoking imagery of ‘improved’ plantation slaves, Porteus calls for a crusade to:

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‘Make their yoke easy, and their burden light,’ to civilize their manners, to enlarge their understandings, to reform their hearts, and to open to them a prospect into a better and a happier country, where all tears shall be wiped from their eyes, and where sorrow and slavery shall be no more.28 The tears and hearts are familiar enough as sentimental signifiers, while the tone explicitly seeks an emotional response. The conclusion, that ‘slavery shall be no more’, appears to present abolition as a worthy goal on earth, while in fact only suggesting that slavery cannot exist in the afterlife. This is a fine example of emotional subversion. The intellectual argument asks only for some measure of amelioration for the slaves held on the Anglican trust estates in Barbados. The emotional argument is far more radical, not only calling for spiritual edification, but also hinting at temporal emancipation. Porteus’s emphasis on the word ‘slavery’ explicitly alters the balance in favour of this reading and, in his words, holds out ‘a prospect’ for the end of slavery on earth. Yet Porteus, though inspiring such sentiments, never actually calls for such radical measure, as such would have been thought in 1783. Porteus’s sermon had a wide readership, not only among Anglicans but among dissenting ministers as well. As the abolition movement gathered momentum in 1787 and 1788, many preachers took it up and incorporated its ideas into their own homilies. One of these was Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian preacher and pioneer of chemistry, who referred to Porteus’s ‘excellent sermon’ in several notes to the printed version of his own abolitionist Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade, both preached and published in Birmingham in 1788.29 For Priestley, the campaign against the slave trade was ‘not the cause of unitarianism, or arianism, or of trinitarianism, but simply that of humanity, and our common christianity’.30 His sermon thus avoids sectarian dispute (swipes against Papists excluded) and focuses instead on the politics and economics of the trade. Indeed, at the outset, Priestley is not sure whether to address his congregation as a preacher or a politician. Taking as his text the parable of the Good Samaritan, he signals the political tenor of his sermon from the start by claiming that: I do not know whether it be more in the character of men, or in that of Christians, that I shall now take the liberty to address you. But if you feel as becomes either, you cannot but sympathize with the miserable and oppressed of the human race, how remote soever they be from yourselves in every other respect. [. . .] And as we ought to

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feel for our fellow men, we ought, to the utmost extent of our influence, to exert ourselves to relieve their distresses.31 Priestley thus commences his sermon by combining a reading from a sentimental parable with an archetypal sentimental argument; the argument that society coheres because of philanthropic acts inspired by mutual sympathy. In addition, Priestley alludes to the most frequently asserted sentimental argument of the abolition campaign: the argument that the common ability to feel proves the common humanity of all members of ‘the human race’. While the language is not sentimental (The Critical Review praised it for its ‘great coolness’) the arguments are.32 In this sermon, secular ideas about sympathy and common humanity vie from the outset with scriptural authority to produce a compelling case against slavery. Priestley was not the only preacher to use this strategy. Sentimental rhetoric was deployed in pulpits across the country during the campaigning year of 1788, but rarely was it successfully harmonised with theological thought or the teachings of the Bible. James Dore, speaking on 30 November, devotes the first half of his sermon to scriptural exegesis. The second half, explicitly marked as a new section, takes the secular track, commencing with the exhortation: ‘consult your feelings and let them speak’.33 Dore’s primary source of secular information is John Newton’s Thoughts on the African Slave Trade, a book from which he extracts a terrible story and transforms it into a sentimental parable. Newton’s story involved a slave captain throwing an infant into the sea because he could not bear its crying.34 Dore highlights the weeping, now transferred to the mother, and notes that the captain was now ‘obliged to bear the sound of her lamentations’. Until now, Dore has added little to Newton’s story, but a further transfer of tears is implied, demanded even, when Dore explicitly addresses a certain section of his congregation. ‘Ye affectionate mothers’, says Dore, ‘when you feast your eyes on your little infants in your arms, think of this story: and if you CAN, justify the practice of trading the persons of men.’35 Newton’s story, now unmistakably become a sentimental parable, is also emotionally subversive. Having reduced the mothers present to tears, Dore then embarks on political and economic objections to slavery. The sermon ends with an attempt to bring together its secular and spiritual arguments. Dore holds up as an example of virtue and benevolence the recently formed Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Commending their work, he exhorts his congregation, ‘in the language of my divine Master, GO, AND DO THOU LIKEWISE’.36 Christ’s injunction, from

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Luke 10:37, is, of course, the denouement of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Three years later, the same arguments, founded in the same texts, were still being advanced in churches across Britain. John Liddon, preaching in Hemel Hempstead, just north of London, argued that ‘Christianity is a system of compassion’, and that ‘no man is to be an indifferent spectator of the sufferings of his fellow men’. His evidence, predictably, is ‘that beautiful history or parable of the good Samaritan’. Like Porteus before him, he sees Christ as a sentimental hero ‘who was full of compassion, and went about doing good’. Presumably referring to Colossians 3:11, he argues that some slaves ‘exited the compassion of the Apostle. He exhorts Christians to sympathize with them; to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. But can there be sympathy in stealing men?’37 Liddon’s sentimental argument, founded in eighteenth-century theories of mutual sympathy, is thus thoroughly modern, modish even. The word ‘sympathy’ rarely appears in pre-twentieth-century translations of the Bible, nor had theologians or philosophers before the eighteenth century seen sympathy as the mechanism by which compassion was engendered. Liddon’s insistence on the power of the emotional response grows and, before the sermon concludes, he cites not a Biblical authority, but a protosentimental poet, Edward Young: The more a christian compares [the slave trade] with his religion, the greater his abhorence, the more does he feel the want of a language formed by the union and under the influence of indignation and honour to convey his feelings in proper terms. ‘On such a theme, ’tis impious to be calm; ‘Passion is reason; transport, temper here.’38 Liddon’s inability to articulate his intense feelings leads not to blockage, however, but to a persuasive exegesis. Combining sentimental theory and literature allows him to bring his scripture reading into the modern age. Again, he invokes the Good Samaritan, like Dore before him, asking the congregation to ‘go thou and do likewise’. Unlike Dore, however, Liddon’s exhortation to his congregation is sentimental, not practical. Liddon’s parishioners are asked not merely to emulate the Good Samaritan by working to end the trade or free the slaves, but more specifically, to ‘exert all your talents and all your influence to dry up the tears of the Africans’.39 Having now both emotionally subverted his audience’s intellect, and presented compelling scriptural evidence for action, Liddon keeps the

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emotions on the boil. The remaining pages of the sermon combine political and economic argument with a language of feeling that is sometimes sentimental, sometimes indignant, but always moving. Indeed, Liddon sees abolition as simultaneously a Christian imperative, a rhetorical manoeuvre, and an act of the imagination: ‘Let the christian orator then, in every department in life, display the horrors of the trade. He may give full scope to the imagination. He may ransack earth and hell for frightful images, and be assured he does not exceed the truth.’40

Deliberative: Wilberforce and the speech of 178941 Since it was clear to the Abolition Society that the existence of the British slave trade depended on the support of the British Parliament, the focus of the campaign was on persuading Parliament to declare the trade illegal. In one of the most significant moments in this campaign, on Tuesday 12 May 1789, the Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce rose before the House of Commons and delivered a speech calling for abolition of the trade. Wilberforce, who as a close friend of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and as Member of Parliament for England’s largest county, had plenty of political influence, was nonetheless considered too inexperienced to join Pitt’s cabinet. He was well known for his idealism, however, and for this reason was courted by the fledgling abolition committee and finally urged by the prime minister to steer abolition through the Commons. He began the task late in 1787, and by May 1789 had amassed enough evidence to present the long trailed and eagerly awaited speech examined here. No definitive reports of Wilberforce’s speeches exist. Indeed, no reliable versions exist for any parliamentary speeches of the eighteenth century. Rather, we have a number of conflicting accounts, which in many cases tell us more about the reporter than the reported. Eighteenth-century political reporters deliberately changed things. Indeed, many saw themselves as literary figures who rendered into fine style the unpolished debates which they heard, a practice which has obscured the language of parliamentary debate for the modern historian or critic. For this reason, we must consider the conditions of publication of parliamentary speeches in the late eighteenth century. Another problem for my argument is that it is not clear whether Wilberforce was a critic of sentimentalism or, quite the reverse, a fully developed sentimental writer. Reports of his speeches do little to confirm what his personal views on the subject were, so briefly considered here is a religious tract, written during the 1790s, from which we can glean much about Wilberforce’s relationship with

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the discourse of sensibility. The main part of this section, however, considers Wilberforce’s speech of 1789 as it appeared in contemporary periodicals and newspapers. It contrasts the accounts provided in these publications to show both the impossibility of recreating the exact words spoken in Parliament and, paradoxically, the possibility of establishing the tone of the speech without regard to its content. Bearing in mind throughout that the newspaper reader of the 1780s was almost certainly thoroughly experienced in the discourse of sensibility, this article argues that Wilberforce’s sentimental rhetoric, although discernible in reports of his original speech, was enhanced and manipulated by the newspapers for rhetorical purposes often far removed from those of the speech which they purported to report. The journalist Michael MacDonagh, writing in the early years of the twentieth century, was both proud of the achievements his era had made in turning parliamentary reporting into a reliable science, and contemptuous of the shortcomings of another age. ‘Would the reports of the proceedings in Parliament furnished by Hansard today be of any value’, he asks, ‘if the speeches were supplied, not by a corps of trained shorthand-writers, but by a staff of imaginative romancers?’42 Those ‘romancers’ were the early reporters of parliamentary debates during the eighteenth century, writing at first in defiance of the law and, after 1771, with Parliament’s permission, although not under Parliament’s control. Indeed, until late in the eighteenth century, the standing orders of both houses of the British Parliament made it a breach of privilege to publish reports of their proceedings. This law was flouted on a number of occasions, most famously during the 1730s and 1740s by Samuel Johnson in The Gentleman’s Magazine, but in the main, detailed accounts of parliamentary debates were rarely available to the public. The Middlesex elections of 1768–1769, in which John Wilkes was repeatedly elected to Parliament and then expelled, led to a considerable upsurge in public interest in Parliament. While the Wilkes camp held the view that the ‘liberty’ for which they stood demanded freedom of the press, newspaper proprietors were not slow to notice that there was commercial advantage in feeding a public appetite for parliamentary reports. Accordingly, from 1768 onwards, a number of newspapers started to print sketches of parliamentary debates. By the autumn of that year, many of the daily, weekly, and tri-weekly newspapers were publishing full reports as well. What followed was the celebrated ‘Printers Case’ of 1771 in which the newspapers, by refusing en masse to obey the standing orders, secured the right to publish accounts of the debates in the Commons and, later, in the Lords.43

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These newly legitimised reporters worked in conditions which were far from ideal. The gallery was frequently packed, sometimes noisy, and, when a particularly interesting debate was taking place, could verge on the riotous. Visibility was limited as the eighteenth-century House of Commons had no specially constructed press gallery, while the public gallery, which reporters used, overhung the Members’ benches, often leaving it unclear which Member of Parliament was speaking. Neither was it always clear what was being said: eighteenth-century newspapers frequently found it necessary to apologise for a gap in their coverage due to the Members’ inaudibility. To make matters worse, notes were taken longhand and it was not until the second decade of the nineteenth century that shorthand was adopted. Finally, the report a journalist brought back to his newspaper was likely to suffer further mangling at the hand of the editor, not least because of the severe constraints on space in eighteenth-century newspapers. In short, a large number of factors conspired to make it unlikely indeed that a report of a debate would bear much resemblance to the debate that had actually taken place.44 Reports of debates were unreliable, but equally unreliable is the attempt to assess the exact tastes, social position, and political orientation of the readership of any particular eighteenth-century newspaper. Editorial comment was usually non-existent, and so any information about readers has to be inferred from the advertisements, and from editorial choices of what was considered newsworthy. A preponderance of advertisements for luxury goods may suggest an upmarket readership, for example, but might also indicate an aspirational readership of petty merchants. A great deal of interest in farming news might suggest a lower-status yeoman readership—or indicate that the paper was read by the land-owning aristocracy. Likewise, political affiliation is not always clear. Many newspapers were funded by the government, or the opposition, but many more managed an independent existence. Of the newspapers considered here only two, The World and The Whitehall Evening Post, received government money, paid from the secret service fund.45 Even this fact tells us little about the readership, who could not have known about (even if they guessed at) the government’s support. Despite these difficulties, we can assume that accounts of debates were intended to be read by all who took an interest in politics, including MPs themselves. Since debates were often very badly attended, editors of newspapers and periodicals in the late eighteenth century could assume that their accounts would be read and used by both lawmakers and the public at large. Yet despite this broad readership, politicians were frequently exasperated by what they perceived as misrepresentations of the words they had spoken in

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Parliament, a problem rendered all the more acute since there was no ‘official’ record to which they could turn. Wilberforce complained on a number of occasions that his speeches had been badly reported. His first biographers, his sons, recount that in December 1798 he raised the matter in Parliament and, five years later, he made his frustration clear in an exchange on the subject he had with Hannah More: ‘We hear a great deal of a famous speech of yours and Sheridan’s,’ writes Mrs. Hannah More, ‘so much that we regret that our economy had cut off the expense of a London paper.’ ‘You talk of my speech,’ he answers; ‘whatever it was, the newspapers would have given you no idea of it. Never was any one made to talk such arrant nonsense.’46 Modern historians have also had problems getting an accurate idea of parliamentary debates, a point explored by Dror Wahrman in his important 1992 essay ‘Virtual Representation’. Rather than sticking close to reports offered by a single newspaper or periodical, as most historians have done, Wahrman draws attention to the number of different sources for late eighteenth-century parliamentary debates. He notes that, in many cases, newspapers and periodicals offer contradictory reports of speeches given by the same Member of Parliament. Arguing that ‘representations of the proceedings of the British Parliament in the press were in fact distinct reconstructions’, arising from political and rhetorical habits peculiar to each newspaper, he notes that there was therefore no unified—or authorised—image of parliamentary debates available for each reader.47 This is important since historians and critics have come to accept Cobbett’s Parliamentary History as a reliable text—or even, as Wahrman puts it, as a ‘semi-official’ account.48 This approach might be good enough for simple enquiries, he suggests, but it is not sufficient for studying ‘charged and contested notions’, where both the facts and the rhetoric can change dramatically in different accounts of the same speech.49 Issuing a call to historians to change their methodology, he also makes a far more interesting observation, from the point of view of the literary critic. It is not often that we get the opportunity to see the same rhetorical event from so many different angles. Rather than merely using this to attempt a reconstruction of what was actually said, a useful, if rather dull enterprise, Wahrman argues that we are offered a unique insight into the working of rhetoric in the period and that ‘we can gain insights into the active interaction of ideas and language, as it was played out in the daily practice of politics’.50 The broadness, and the variety, of the competing reports makes it difficult, if not impossible, to pin down Wilberforce’s precise language

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in his speech of May 1789. While some versions depict him in the full flow of sentimental rhetoric, others suggest that he took a more detached approach. It is impossible to definitively state if sentimental rhetoric formed part of this speech, but examination of his other writings, especially those produced under conditions of full authorial control, offers a promising way of revealing Wilberforce’s views on sentimentalism. From this, we can at least establish whether reports of his speech are in character. Wilberforce published four books during his lifetime. Of these, only A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (1797) is close enough, chronologically, to the speech examined here for us to make any meaningful comparisons.51 Wilberforce had started the work in 1793 as ‘a little tract to give to his friends’, many of whom were puzzled about the nature of his conversion to evangelical Christianity.52 Over the following four years the tract blossomed into a book which was more a series of personal observations on Wilberforce’s notion of ‘true’ religion than a reasoned or closely argued theological work. For our purposes, the Practical View demonstrates two things. First, that Wilberforce had a sustained, if troubled, relationship with the discourse of sensibility. Second, that he recognised the power of sympathy and the ‘feeling heart’, viewing them as requirements of the true Christian. Wilberforce’s difficulty with sensibility is illustrated by a section of his book attacking ‘Exquisite Sensibility—the school of Rousseau and Sterne’. Rousseau is hardly discussed, but Sterne, who displays ‘a morbid sensibility in the perception of indecency’, comes in for fierce criticism. The followers of Sterne and Rousseau, Wilberforce claims, are ‘apt to be puffed up with a proud though secret consciousness of their own superior acuteness and sensibility’. Exquisite sensibilities, ‘though shewy and apt to catch the eye [. . .] are of a flimsy and perishable fabric’.53 These criticisms of sensibility were all too familiar in the late 1790s, and Wilberforce adds little to the debate. A few pages earlier, however, he had combined an attack on sentiment with a restatement of the Protestant doctrine of faith above works: ‘it seems to be an opinion pretty generally prevalent,’ he argued, ‘that kindness and sweetness of temper, sympathising, and benevolent, and generous affections [. . .] may well be allowed in our imperfect state, to make up for the defect of what in strict propriety of speech is termed Religion’.54 In these, Wilberforce attacks sentiment, especially false sentiment, by deeming it self-centred, self-serving, and irreligious. Yet while Wilberforce clearly opposes ‘flimsy and perishable’ sentiment, the same does not appear to be true of more deep-seated sensibility. In an eighteen-page section in

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the book called On the Admission of the Passions into Religion, Wilberforce argues that: We can scarcely indeed look into any part of the sacred volume without meeting abundant proofs, that it is the religion of the Affections which God particularly requires [. . .] As the lively exercise of passions towards their legitimate object, is always spoken of with praise, so a cold, hard, unfeeling heart, is represented as highly criminal. Lukewarmness is stated to be the object of God’s disgust and aversion; zeal and love, of his favour and delight; and the taking away of the heart of stone and the implanting of a warmer and more tender nature in its stead, is specifically promised as the effect of his returning favour, and the work of his renewing grace.55 This is a sentimental reading of the Bible, in part because it discusses the role of feelings in religion and also in that it imposes a rather domesticated language not present in the Authorised Version. Where Ezekiel represents God as saying ‘I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh’, Wilberforce’s paraphrase employs the euphemistic ‘warmer and more tender nature’ to avoid the more explicit ‘flesh’. Similarly, Wilberforce introduces the phrase ‘disgust and aversion’ to describe God’s reaction to ‘lukewarmness’. The text, from Revelations, could itself hardly be more disgusting. Here God tells the lukewarm: ‘I will spue thee out of my mouth’. With these respectable circumlocutions, the Biblical texts have been domesticated and sentimentalised. At the same time, the readings and their interpretations deal with God’s requirement that people feel and feel passionately. Earlier in the book, Wilberforce considers the idea of sympathy and postulates that it is an essential tool of Christian forgiveness—a rather present-minded exercise, as the word is not mentioned once in the Authorised Version of the Bible. Wilberforce’s theology of sympathy starts from the orthodox premise that all men are sinners. It is because we are all sinners, he argues, that we are able to obey the divine injunction to forgive the sins of others, and we can do this because of our mutual sympathy. He suggests that we: Accustom ourselves to refer to our natural depravity, as to their primary cause, the sad instances of vice and folly of which we read, or which we see around us, or to which we feel the propensities in our own bosoms; ever vigilant and distrustful of ourselves, and looking with an eye of kindness and pity on the faults and infirmities of others,

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whom we should learn to regard with the same tender concern as that with which the sick are used to sympathize with those who are suffering under the same distemper as themselves.56 Wilberforce’s language is again softening and domesticating. Rather than the fulmination so often associated with the evangelical preacher, we have keywords of sentimental humanitarianism: ‘kindness’, ‘pity’, and ‘tender concern’. Most interesting, however, is Wilberforce’s ability to bring in a very eighteenth-century interest in sympathy and bend it to serve the needs of his religion. Rather than cast out sinfulness as an abomination, we are encouraged to view it as a disease, and a universal one at that. It is clear that Wilberforce, despite making jibes against David Hume and Adam Smith, was strongly influenced by the eighteenth-century philosophical school that saw sympathy as the paramount force in human relationships.57 It is not inconceivable, therefore, that The Parliamentary History quotes him accurately when it reports that he told Parliament that ‘it is sympathy, and nothing else than sympathy, which, according to the best writers and judges of the subject, is the true spring of humanity’.58 This observation was reportedly made during Wilberforce’s speech of 12 May 1789, which called for the abolition of the slave trade. His strategy, it would seem, was to appeal both to the heads and the hearts of the assembled parliamentarians. As we do not have access to the speech itself, it is hard to judge if he was successful in this. We can, however, glean much from the newspapers. One, The General Evening Post, supplemented its coverage of the debate with a back-page description of the delivery of the speech, one of the few contemporary descriptions we have. According to the newspaper: Mr Wilberforce was four hours in delivering his speech against the Slave-Trade, and so eager were the public to hear this important matter discussed, that the gallery of the House was nearly filled by eleven o’clock, and there were near 350 Members present. In the pathetic parts, this gentleman shone with peculiar eloquence;—in the argumentative, he was nervous and powerful;—but in the part of calculations he was several times at a loss. Upon the whole, however, it was allowed by both sides of the House, that it was one of the best speeches ever delivered in Parliament.59 Despite this upbeat account of its delivery, the newspaper’s version of the actual speech is frustrating, carefully omitting all of the ‘pathetic’, and most of the ‘argumentative’, sections in favour of a rather harsh

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representation emphasising the offending ‘calculations’ (by which the newspaper means statistical evidence). This account does Wilberforce and his cause no favours. It leaves the reader unmoved by the (absent) emotional parts and unimpressed by what remains; intellectual arguments that are not always watertight even when they are broadly persuasive. Several newspapers employed this strategy, which allowed them to be superficially respectful to Wilberforce while remaining opposed to abolition. Of those that took this path, only The General Evening Post could make any sort of a claim to impartiality, as it was the only newspaper to supplement its report with a statement claiming that the pathetic and eloquent parts contributed to making this ‘one of the best speeches ever delivered in Parliament’. It is not a claim supported by its synopsis of his speech. Beilby Porteus would certainly have agreed with the last part of the editorial view of The General Evening Post. Writing almost fifty years after the event, the Wilberforce sons, in the biography of their father, quote Porteus as saying that Wilberforce’s effort was ‘one if the ablest and most eloquent speeches that was ever heard in that or any other place’.60 Their view of their father’s 1789 speech is understandably sympathetic and, interestingly, the sections they choose to discuss and to partially reproduce are among the most sentimental. They note that his ‘arguments were invested throughout with the glow of genuine humanity, and enforced by the power of a singular eloquence’. Lamenting the ‘barrenness of an extract from “a most inaccurate Report” ’ (a report which they do not identify), they nonetheless argue that Wilberforce’s arguments ‘retain much of their original beauty’. They conclude that: Knowing ‘that mankind are governed by their sympathies,’ he addressed himself to the feelings as well as the reason of the House; and we can even yet perceive the vigour of description which records the sufferings of the middle passage, ‘so much misery crowded into so little room where the aggregate of suffering must be multiplied by every individual tale of woe;’ and the force of that appeal which, after disproving the alleged comforts of the miserable victims, summoned Death as his ‘last witness, whose infallible testimony to their unutterable wrongs can neither be purchased nor repelled.’61 Despite the ‘barrenness’ of the account, the Wilberforces, at a distance of fifty years, have been especially moved by one short passage which, in emotional terms, discusses sympathy, suffering, and death. This section, in which Wilberforce discusses ‘the sufferings of the middle passage’, appears to have been a highly ornate piece of oratory, displaying

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complex rhetorical figures and arguments. In particular, it seems to have been a sustained piece of pathos designed to catch at the hearts of the listener. Accordingly, the rest of this section will be an analysis of this part of the speech as it was reported in two very different publications. These, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History and the daily newspaper The Morning Star were selected as representing the main types of parliamentary reporting of the period.62 The Parliamentary History was included because it has traditionally been seen as reliable. Historians frequently quote from it uncritically, as if it were the best or even the only source for eighteenthcentury parliamentary speeches. While this is not true, Cobbett’s accounts are nonetheless useful because they were collated by reference from a number of different sources and because he attempted objectivity. ‘In a Work of this nature’, he informed his readers, ‘the utmost impartiality is justly expected; and it is with confidence presumed, that a careful perusal of the following pages will convince the reader, that that impartiality has been strictly and invariably adhered to.’63 So, while Cobbett’s accounts are far from perfect, they can usefully be employed as a starting point against which to measure other interpretations of the same speech. In this instance, the extract does double work. Cobbett very largely based his account on that in John Almon’s Parliamentary Register, one of the parliamentary periodicals that published polished versions of speeches weeks or months after they had been delivered.64 The second version of the speech was published in the daily newspaper The Morning Star. This appeared just a few hours after Wilberforce had finished speaking, and in places the text is clearly hurried. It is in many ways typical of a contemporary parliamentary report, but has been included in preference to other newspaper reports since it sustains the sentimental approach more fully than most. About one third of the way in to The Parliamentary History’s account of the speech [col. 45], Wilberforce begins to discuss the middle passage. In Cobbett’s version, Wilberforce starts by contrasting his own feelings with the ‘blunted’ feelings of the slave traders, thus setting up a dichotomy between the man of sensibility and the man of no sensibility. In this context, Cobbett shows Wilberforce examining the evidence given by Robert Norris, who was one of the Liverpool slave traders who had given evidence in favour of continuing the trade. The examination commences with a seemingly impartial review of Norris’s evidence, but this is given only to allow Norris to incriminate himself. In Cobbett’s account, Wilberforce then turns on Norris: The song and the dance, says Mr. Norris, are promoted. It had been more fair, perhaps, if he had explained that word promoted. The

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truth is, that for the sake of exercise, these miserable wretches, loaded with chains, oppressed with disease and wretchedness, are forced to dance by the terror of the lash, and sometimes by the actual use of it. ‘I,’ says one of the other evidences, ‘was employed to dance the men, while another person danced the women.’ Such, then is the meaning of the word promoted; and it may be observed too, with respect to food, that an instrument is sometimes carried out, in order to force them to eat which is the same sort of proof how much they enjoy themselves in that instance also.65 The case hinges on the word ‘promoted’. Norris, in this account, had said that ‘the song and dance are promoted’. Wilberforce is represented as exposing the true meaning of the word ‘promoted’. In this version of the speech, Wilberforce’s approach is sensationalist, but he mixes sensation with irony. We find out that Norris’s use of the word ‘promoted’ is euphemistic. While promotion usually implies some sort of freedom of choice, Norris’s slaves are violently coerced. A strong contrast is drawn between the image favoured by the slave traders, and the reality of the middle passage. Norris’s alleged depiction of the slaves singing and dancing on board ship seems intended to bring to mind the pastoral pleasures of village swains dancing around the maypole. Reality, its antithesis, is quite dreadful. The slaves, ‘loaded with chains, oppressed with disease and wretchedness’ are ordered to dance under the threat of severe violence. This exercise removes all agency from the slaves, who no longer even dance for themselves, but are ‘danced’ by another, bringing to mind macabre imagery of puppeteers pulling the strings of their helpless captives. Here, though, the strings are the cords of the cat o’nine tails. ‘Such’, indeed, ‘is the meaning of the word promoted.’ The reader may want to pause here, to digest the full horror of the words just passed, but instead is hurried on to a further horrifying thought: the slaves must sometimes be force-fed. Earlier in Cobbett’s account, Wilberforce had been depicted as quoting Norris as saying that the slaves ‘have several meals a day; some of their own country provisions, with the best sauces of African cookery; and by way of variety, another meal of pulse, &c. according to European taste’. Hyperbole such as ‘the best sauces’ is clearly such nonsense that it is not necessary to refute it directly. Yet whether this ironic strategy can be attributed to Wilberforce or to the reporter, this horrific and darkly ironic passage is not sentimental. What follows certainly is: As to their singing, what shall we say when we are told that their songs are songs of lamentation upon their departure which, while

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they sing, are always in tears insomuch, that one captain (more humane as I should conceive him, therefore, than the rest) threatened one of the women with a flogging, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful for his feelings.66 The passage alludes to Psalm 137, ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ where ‘they that carried us away captive required of us a song’. Its relationship with the psalm is complex, inverting the role of song in the Biblical text, but the story retains the form of Biblical story-telling while adding a specifically eighteenth-century concern with the role of feeling. We can describe the passage as a sentimental parable: the ‘parable of the captain’. In this, we are invited to examine the relationship between fine feeling and actual benevolence in a tale which pointedly attacks the false sensibility exhibited by a slave-ship captain, while contrasting this with the very real tears and lamentations of the slaves whose sensibility, unlike the captain’s, is shown to be real. The rhetorical strategy of this bitterly ironic story engages the readers’ sensibilities and enables them to distance themselves from the patently false sensibility of the slave-ship captain. This rhetorical ploy at once exposes the villainy of the captain while simultaneously flattering the reader, who might congratulate himself or herself on having interpreted the ironic jibe at the captain’s humanity, and on having finer and more honest feelings than the captain. The reader, then, is both alerted to suffering and, through flattery, made more receptive to the argument. In addition, this is a story about an emotional response to cruelty. The captain, perhaps tormented by his own guilt, hits out violently (or threatens to do so) to suppress the outward manifestation of suffering, the lamentation. At the start of this version of the speech, Wilberforce had made it clear that he believed the guilt for the cruelties of the slave trade was shared by all members of the British legislature.67 The suggestion is that there are two types of members: those who admit this guilt and those who do not. In this ‘Parable of the Captain’, these two groups are implicitly characterised as the feeling and the unfeeling, and here a simple parallel can be drawn between Parliament and the captain. Parliament can either act like the captain, with false sensibility, and ignore the slave trade, or allow it to grow perhaps more iniquitous. Alternatively, it can act with real sensibility and decide to abolish the trade. With this thought fresh in the mind of the reader, the passage moves on to evidence. The rhetorical progression, from ridicule, through horror, sentiment, and irony, abruptly reaches ‘Death’, a word which, coming at the start of a sentence, is structurally highlighted in Cobbett’s account,

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quite possibly reflecting the emphasis Wilberforce gave it during the delivery of his speech. The introduction of death marks a turning point, a moment when the rhetoric switches from anecdotal to statistical evidence, and only now, after a long section in which the statements of Norris and others are held up for examination, is new evidence introduced. There is a 12½ per cent mortality rate on slave ships. Then we get the statistic that 4½ per cent of slaves die waiting to be sold. Worse is to come: another one-third of the slaves die during the seasoning period. Although these are truly appalling statistics which by themselves should have been enough to convince any parliamentarian to vote to abolish the slave trade, they were not enough. Parliament took another eighteen years to abolish the trade and, on the evidence of Cobbett’s account, it would appear that Wilberforce was aware of the limitations of hard evidence in the parliamentary forum. This is why his statistics come where they do; after a long period in which feelings are to the fore and sentiments are examined. In this, Wilberforce seems to contradict himself. Almost at the start of Cobbett’s account of his speech, we read that Wilberforce had given his audience an undertaking not to enter into the subject ‘with any sort of passion’ and ‘not to take them by surprise’.68 Whether or not this account represents Wilberforce’s actual words, the version Cobbett gives us is not marked for its use of ‘cool and impartial reason’. Nor does it refrain from taking its audience by surprise. Indeed, the preamble to the mortality statistics is particularly full of emotional language, both impassioned and sentimental, horrific imagery, and surprising revelations and figures of speech. Rather than present the statistics in a reasoned and impartial manner, which allows for a detached response, this passage sows confusion and distress (refers to forced dancing and forced feeding) in a rhetorically challenging manner (uses irony). Having gained entrance, so to speak, to the listeners’ hearts, it makes use of fashionable sentimental language (‘tears’ and ‘lamentation’) to present a sentimental parable on the difference between true and false sensibility. By now having forced the reader to examine his or her own sensibility, the passage abruptly apostrophises Death, thus taking the reader by surprise. In the hope of having emotionally subverted the reader’s intellect by these methods, the passage now forces the reader to accept the empirical part of its argument on emotional terms. Either they have true sensibility and will thus accept the outrage of the slave trade as a moral problem, or they have false sensibility, will quibble about the numbers, and fail thereby to live up to the sentimental ideals of the day. The passage, couched in the language of sensibility, thus demands introspection. If it in any way reflects

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the reality of Wilberforce’s delivery, one imagines that even the most hardened supporters of slavery then present in the House of Commons remained suspiciously quiet through this part of Wilberforce’s speech. Indeed, The Star may not have been far wrong when it noted that ‘the gallery of the House of Commons on Tuesday was crowded with Liverpool Merchants; who hung their heads in sorrow—for the African occupation of bolts and chains is no more’.69 The newspaper may have been premature in sounding the death knell of the slave trade, but it is surely accurate in noting that Wilberforce demanded and got a powerful emotional response to his speech. How, then, are we to assess the view of The General Evening Post when it reported that ‘in the pathetic parts, this gentleman shone with peculiar eloquence;—in the argumentative, he was nervous and powerful;—but in the part of calculations he was several times at a loss’. The last part of this analysis seems unfair, at least on the evidence of the report in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History. But this was not the only report. As we have already noted, The General Evening Post’s account of the speech displayed Wilberforce’s weaker moments in preference to his stronger ones. Other newspapers had their own emphases and styles of reportage, and the section of the speech explored above was reported in many forms. One account, differing markedly from that in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, appeared in The Morning Star on the morning after the speech was delivered. It is shorter than Cobbett’s account, appropriately for a newspaper article (newspapers in the late eighteenth century were normally four pages long, and parliamentary debates rarely occupied more than one entire page) and commences with Wilberforce magnanimously declaring that ‘he came not to accuse the merchants, but to appeal to their feelings and humanity’. He then declares that the slave trade ‘must make every man of feeling shudder’. This appeal to that quintessentially sentimental figure, the man of feeling, precedes what is probably the most sentimental account of the speech we have. The account differs from Cobbett’s in many ways. A short introduction aside, the Cobbett account is in the first person, no doubt one of the reasons why historians have found it so plausible. The Morning Star’s version is less direct, starting in the descriptive third person, and the voice of the reporter obtrudes into it more clearly with locutions such as ‘Mr. Wilberforce then noticed’. In places, such as when we hear that Wilberforce ‘resolved to be regulated by temper and coolness’, we can see how the reporter is merely giving the flavour of the speech without revealing its ingredients. Yet the structure of the speech is broadly similar

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in both accounts, and there are many phrases common to both. Interestingly, however, in the passage which I call ‘the parable of the captain’, the two accounts manage to disagree sharply about the subject of the speech while agreeing completely about its tone. To examine these points of difference and agreement more closely the two extracts are placed side by side: Cobbett’s Parliamentary History

The Morning Star

As to their singing, what shall we say when we are told that their songs are songs of lamentation upon their departure which, while they sing, are always in tears,

To hear a recital of these facts would make people shudder; and the tear of sympathy would communicate from one man to another with congenial celerity.

insomuch that one captain (more humane as I should conceive him, therefore, than the rest) threatened one of the women with a flogging, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful for his feelings

There was one Captain who declared that his feelings revolted at such measures. He applauded highly the sensations of this man, who had made such a concession in defiance of the barbarous practises already described.

In both cases the first part is marked by the use of sentimental language and, in particular, by the use of that key sentimental signifier: tears. Were we simply interested in arriving at the best reconstruction of the speech it would be safe to assume that Wilberforce drew attention to tears at this point. What is not clear is who, in Wilberforce’s original speech, was doing the weeping. According to Cobbett it is the slaves who ‘are always in tears’ while they sing ‘songs of lamentation upon their departure’. The tears portrayed in The Morning Star are rather different. First, they are conditional on the ‘facts’ which Wilberforce relates becoming publicly known. Secondly, they are shed by English men and women becoming aware of those facts. The Morning Star lays it on a bit thick at this point, almost as if (which is not unlikely) the reporter sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons had jotted down the single word ‘tears’ at this point and had (re)constructed this part of the speech later on by a process of extrapolation from what he already knew of the discourse of tears. Tears are the outward sign of true sensibility and, because external, are a form of communication, a point made by the reporter, who notes that these tears ‘would communicate from one man

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to another with congenial celerity’. In its primary eighteenth-century usage, the word ‘congenial’ is synonymous with ‘sympathetic’, but the now more familiar usage in which it is synonymous with ‘agreeable’ was far from unusual in 1789. This account of Wilberforce’s speech provides an excellent example of sentimental political discourse in that it privileges the response to the suffering of others over the response of the person who is actually undergoing the suffering. Moreover, it characterises the sentimental response to others’ suffering as agreeable, and it provides a mechanism—sympathy—by which the agreeable sentiments are communicated. At this point, The Morning Star’s report resembles Cobbett’s only insofar as they both mention tears and are conducted in a sentimental register. The second section sees the newspaper report the ‘parable of the captain’. Here, though, the story is entirely different in that we are told that the captain’s ‘feelings revolted’ at the practice of whipping the slaves ‘into a compliance’. Moreover, the story is completely free of the irony characterising Cobbett’s version. In The Morning Star, the captain is genuinely humane, a real man of feeling, and Wilberforce celebrates this. In another sentimental touch, Wilberforce is portrayed as applauding the man not for his actions, but for his ‘sensations’. To this reporter, the captain’s feelings appear to be more important than his actions, an inversion of the Cobbett variant in which Wilberforce attacks the captain for intensifying his actions to palliate his own feelings. Indeed, the reporter appears to have been carried away with the emotion of the speech, or at least his own interpretation of it, since at the end of the ‘parable of the captain’ the third person narration abruptly gives way to a first person account. The reporter’s voice merges with Wilberforce’s in the phrase ‘when first I heard, Sir, of these iniquities’, a phrase that seeks to mask the mediating influence of the reporter and present the reconstructed report as the actual words of Wilberforce. It is, of course, significant that this rhetorical trick comes at the end of the most moving part of the report, the ‘parable of the captain’, and immediately after the surprising and emotionally charged passage which concludes with the heavily emphasised reference to ‘DEATH’—the word is capitalised by The Morning Star. Despite this, the main difference between the two reports lies in The Morning Star’s lack of an ironic strategy to attack the captain. It is possible that the reporter merely failed to catch the irony which Cobbett’s reporter recognised, but it is equally possible that no such ironic strategy was used. Most of the daily and weekly newspapers agree (where they mention the story at all) with The Morning Star on this point. The World, for

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example, tells the ‘parable of the captain’ from the same angle and in particularly sentimental tones: The Song, [Wilberforce] allowed, was often recommended, and by one Captain in particular; but so plaintively impressive were the tones, or so affecting the subject, that seeing the sympathetic tear rising in the eye of each African, the Captain ordered them to desist; which [Wilberforce] loved the fellow for doing, as it shewed that his feelings had not been thoroughly subdued, even by the inhumanity of his barbarous occupation.70 The captain in this account is a true man of sensibility, responding sensitively to the ‘sympathetic tear’ of each of his captives. The slaves, in turn, are sentimentalised. They are treated, not as feeling human subjects, suffering as the reader would suffer, but rather as sentimental objects, blank canvasses with tears, responding to their own aesthetic productions as much as to the dreadful situation into which they had been forced. This aesthetic sensibility was an aspect of the scene The Whitehall Evening Post found especially attractive: It was customary, in order to lull [the slaves’] cares, to amuse them with the music of their native land, which never failed to draw tears down their cheeks. One of the Captains seeing this, desired that the musician should desist, for which the honourable Member commended his humanity.71 These portraits of a humane and feeling slave captain are not very convincing, and one wonders what rhetorical benefit Wilberforce thought he might derive from looking for instances of humanity in a trade which he otherwise roundly condemned as thoroughly inhumane. On the other hand, these images were fashionable and served to attract the interest of the many readers of sentimental novels, plays and poetry, a constituency which the newspapers—and the government of the day—could only have benefited from attracting. The latter point may explain both the sentimental tone of these passages, and the rather inconsistent approach to the slavery debate taken by The World and The Whitehall Evening Post. The two titles tended to maintain a neutral or mildly abolitionist position. At the same time, they both showed a distinct predilection for a sentimental tone of reportage, coupled with a fondness for publishing sentimental poetry. In The Whitehall Evening Post, these tendencies come together with the

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publication of a number of sentimental antislavery poems, most notably those by William Cowper.72 Both newspapers, however, published strongly proslavery letters in the days leading up to Wilberforce’s speech.73 The reason for this sudden intervention seems, circumstantially at least, to be clear. Both newspapers were in the pay of the government. While the prime minister supported abolition, at least in private, the same was not true of all of his cabinet. Although the government was split on the abolition question, its Chief Secretary to the Treasury, George Rose, appears to have had firmer opinions on the question. Not only was he a slave owner who derived almost all his income from his estates in Antigua, but he was also the man who paid the newspapers and, to some extent, told them what to publish. Rose almost certainly either wrote, commissioned, or encouraged the proslavery letters.74 By contrast, on May 6, the day when The World published its proslavery letter, the normally abolitionist Morning Star published a strong attack on George Rose. The sentimental tone was arguably a populist one. It is a moot point how many Members of Parliament would have avowed themselves avid consumers of sentimental literature. Indeed, many would have considered such productions, especially sentimental novels, beneath their dignity. The same was not necessarily true of ordinary readers of daily and weekly newspapers. These publications competed in a marketplace that included not only other newspapers and monthly magazines, but also works of fiction, sentimental, and otherwise. It is tempting to speculate that, as part of his propagandist policy, Rose urged the papers to put his preferred case in language that would attract a broad audience. Whether or not this was the case, it remains significant that the two most sentimental accounts of the Wilberforce speech considered here appeared in newspapers which were funded by the government. Although a consistent government line on the slavery question is hard to pin down, it is nonetheless relevant that the popular sentimental tone is adopted most clearly (or perhaps most clumsily) in those newspapers with a positive, if covert, propagandist purpose. By contrast, Cobbett largely based his account on that provided by The Parliamentary Register, a periodical ostensibly dedicated to providing the most accurate account possible of parliamentary proceedings. For this reason, as well as the opportunities its editors had of revising and checking their text before going to print, the periodical may well have been able to present an account more alert to the ironies and ambiguities in the speech and less dependent on finding a popular audience. This does not necessarily make it more accurate (although it is arguable that it does) but it does mean that a more authoritative and less populist

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tone could be achieved. For this reason it is possible that the sentiment, the ‘pathetic parts’ noted as particularly fine by the editor of The General Evening Post, have been edited out of Cobbett’s account and, indeed, out of most of the accounts of parliamentary speeches used by historians of the late eighteenth century. Wilberforce’s actual words are not recoverable, but The Morning Star had no doubt about the message. Its account of Wilberforce’s speech contains a section overlooked by all other newspapers and reported only in a very different form by Cobbett. According to the newspaper, Wilberforce told Members of Parliament that ‘we unite with the person of sensibility, that [abolition] is necessary, as founded in rectitude and universal benevolence’. This argument, combining both the language of rights with the language of feeling, sounds more like the newspaper’s editorial than the words of the person whom they were ostensibly trying to report. Nonetheless, the section concludes with words similar to those reported by Cobbett, who had noted Wilberforce, with more than a nod to the sentimental philosophers, saying that ‘it is sympathy, and nothing else than sympathy, which, according to the best writers and judges of the subject, is the true spring of humanity’. The Morning Star found it necessary to stress with italics that Wilberforce had said ‘that sympathy is the great source of humanity’. In this short, but crucial, phrase is encapsulated the philosophical justification for both the rhetoric and the politics of sensibility and a core argument in Wilberforce’s call to abolish the slave trade. It is the imperative of the man of feeling, in this analysis, to oppose the slave trade because the man of feeling sympathetically feels the pain which the slaves actually suffer. Those who do not feel the pain are both callous brutes and thoroughly unfashionable. This argument, sentimental and modish, though firmly based in moral sense philosophy, significantly appears in only two publications: one which purports to be unbiased and one which makes its abolitionist sympathies plain. By contrast, Wilberforce’s sentimental arguments, although not his sentimental tone, are played down or ignored entirely in publications that advertised a belief in the continuation of the trade in slaves.

Forensic: James Sommersett and Captain Kimber As Peter Fryer has shown, the legal status of slaves had been disputed in the courts from the middle of the sixteenth century. Not until the 1830s, with the passing of the Emancipation Act, would slavery be outlawed by statute. In between, in what Fryer calls ‘the legal pendulum’, lawyers

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made differing and often conflicting judgements on the status of slaves and former slaves.75 Accordingly, as the abolition campaign gathered speed, the courts were increasingly used as a medium of protest. Although thousands of slaves died annually in the trade, in the 1780s and 1790s, prosecutions for murder were for the first time brought against those responsible. The resulting trials, though largely unsuccessful, focused attention on practices in the slave trade and, through further publication and discussion, attracted widespread public interest and indignation. This chapter concludes by looking at two of the more celebrated slavery trials, to show how even the dry rhetoric of the courtroom could become, in the hands of journalists and pamphleteers, a form of sentimental oratory. In the eighteenth century, reports and transcripts of trials, debating both the evidence and the outcomes, appeared in newspapers, journals, and pamphlets. As Beth Swan has shown, ‘sensational accounts of trials, particularly those concerning adultery, bigamy, homosexuality and murder, were popular reading and trials of all kinds attracted spectators from a wide social spectrum’.76 Although popular, these accounts are often no more reliable than those of parliamentary debates. Indeed, the interpretative challenges identified by Dror Wahrman in respect of parliamentary reports are also applicable to law reporting. Often, this is for the same practical reasons such as editorial deadlines and difficulty in hearing or writing down the proceedings. Just as with parliamentary reports, versions of trial proceedings differ significantly, sometimes because the reporter or editor supported one party to a suit or action.77 To overcome this problem, historians turned once again to Cobbett, and to the monumental State Trials, which appeared under his name but which were actually edited by Thomas Howell and, later, his son between 1809 and 1826. These seemingly offer a reliable text for the most historically significant trials (although they include few details of ‘everyday’ criminal cases). As with the Parliamentary History, however, there is no guarantee that the State Trials are accurate or complete but, for much the same reasons as with the History, historians have tended to rely on their account, assuming that, for most purposes, they are accurate enough. In reality, as with parliamentary reports, rhetorical effect seems to have been a primary consideration. Most of the reports of trials are reconstructions: polished versions of otherwise vanished acts of verbal rhetoric. This is necessarily so for a work that opens with accounts of twelfth-century trials, but even with more recent cases a particular rhetorical stance is adopted, and sometimes adapted. As Swan notes, in her discussion of the 1760 trial and execution for murder of Lord

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Ferrars, ‘Howell provides horrific detail coldly, as one might expect in a factual account.’ She argues that, after the ‘cold’ discussion of the execution, Howell’s rhetoric shifts so that ‘we are not simply given an account of the facts, but an indication as to the atmosphere and the mood of the crowd [Howell] seemingly directing his readers’ emotions, which may seem strange for an editor of a collection of trials’.78 Swan’s reading, in which she parallels Ferrars with present-day ‘media stars’, suggests that Howell is conscious of his text’s role as entertainment, and this is a plausible analysis. Nevertheless, the rhetoric she identifies is more than a mere crowd-pleaser. A public execution involves not just the principle of retribution, but also that of deterrence. Howell’s emphasis on the feelings of the crowd in this case serves the ‘political’ function of emphasising the terror of execution, thereby reinforcing public order. Just as newspaper reporters manipulated Wilberforce’s language for political ends, so too Howell reconstructs the language—and the atmosphere— of trial and execution to inculcate obedience to the law. In the instance Swan discusses, the facts of the case may not have gone far adrift. This is not always so, either in Howell or, more particularly, in the many reports of lesser trials in fugitive publications. Nevertheless, reading the printed reports presents us with, to paraphrase Wahrman, the opportunity to gain insights into the active interaction of ideas and language, as it was played out in the daily practice of law. The most important and celebrated eighteenth-century legal deliberation on slavery is that made by Lord Mansfield in June 1772. The facts of the case can be briefly outlined. From the late 1760s, Granville Sharp had been pursuing slave owners through the courts with the intention of forcing a final and binding legal judgement showing slavery to be illegal in England. Although he had been successful in securing the release of a number of slaves who were being forced to leave the country, he had not been able to prompt a final judgement on the matter. In 1771, he intervened in the capture of the slave of a Bostonian customs official called Charles Stewart. The slave, James Sommersett, had escaped in 1769 and, now recaptured, was being forcibly shipped to Jamaica. Sharp, acting quickly, obtained a writ of habeas corpus forcing the ship’s captain to produce Sommersett before the lord chief justice, Lord Mansfield. Seven months of legal deliberation and delay followed, as generously funded lawyers for both sides made their arguments. Finally, Mansfield ruled that there was no authority under English law for anyone to take a slave out of the country by force and accordingly ordered that Sommersett be discharged. The ruling appeared to be a victory, but it was not resoundingly so. Mansfield had effectively empowered any

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slave in England to emancipate himself or herself by running away, but he had not actually ruled that slavery was illegal—although to many contemporaries and, indeed, to many later commentators, Mansfield’s decision was erroneously interpreted to mean that ‘the moment a slave steps foot in England he is free’.79 The case prompted considerable public interest, and gave rise to several publications as well as to generous coverage in the newspapers. As Peter Fryer has shown, however, not all contemporary accounts of the case agree. The wording of the judgement itself, as given in State Trials, differs significantly from accounts found in newspapers—and from that recorded by Granville Sharp’s own hired shorthand writer.80 Clearly, the judgement was misunderstood from the start. Both the case and the judgement were dry stuff, important enough to warrant extensive media coverage, but not calculated to make light reading. ‘A long series of reasoning in points of law’, argued The Gentleman’s Magazine, in a review of one of the ensuing publications, ‘can entertain but few readers’.81 The book they refer to, An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett (1772) by Francis Hargrave, one of the lawyers representing Sommersett, is rather more readable than the review suggests, but certainly contains little amusement. It depends entirely on reasoned argument and does not, as it might have done, make use of the rhetorical proofs of ethos or pathos. Whether these were present in the original speech is unclear, as the author is at pains to inform the reader that the argument ‘is not to be considered as a speech actually delivered’. Rather, what we have ‘is entirely a written composition’.82 That such studied and polished writing should appear is a measure of the importance of the case, but it does not explain why the Gentleman’s Magazine should expect that the report might offer ‘entertainment’ and be disappointed when it did not. For that, we should look at popular accounts of the case, as they appeared in the newspapers. The editors of most newspapers considered the case important enough to warrant coverage, but that coverage is sporadic, varying not only between newspapers but also from month to month in individual publications. Many of the ‘advertisers’ and other newspapers concerned more with trade than news, reported it in a cursory manner with little commentary. Others, such as The Morning Chronicle and The London Evening Post, gave it considerable attention and published both commentary and letters from readers. In the main, reports are confined to descriptions of the evidence given rather than outlines of the argument. In some instances, the rhetorical quality of the speeches is given although their content is largely omitted. ‘Mr Hargrave’s speech’, according to The

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Morning Chronicle, was ‘one of the most learned and elaborate we have ever heard’. ‘Mr Allen’, they noted, ‘shone in an equal manner, but on very different principles; his speech was a graceful eloquent oration, delivered with perfect ease, and replete with elegant language, classical expression, and pertinent observation.’83 Only the account of William Davy’s speech shows a hint of sentimental material. In the report in The London Evening Post, Davy is represented as saying that slaves were ‘torn from their nearest and dearest connections’ and that this was ‘shocking to ideas of honour or humanity’.84 Nothing approaching this is found either in the account given in State Trials or in reports in rival newspapers. Regardless of the unpromising material, several of the newspapers looked for opportunities to entertain their readers. A few attempted humour. The General Evening Post, for example, presented a comic account of Serjeant Davy’s comparison between the case and that of Joseph and his brethren, as reported by Moses.85 The Westminster Journal used satirical exaggeration to make a serious point. ‘If negroes are to be slaves on account of colour’, they argued: The next step will be to enslave every mulatto in the kingdom; then all the Portuguese; next the French; the brown-complexioned English; and so on till there be only one free man left, which will be the man of the palest complexion in the three kingdoms!86 Others, against the odds, managed to find in the case an opportunity for sentiment. In the main, they did this not by manipulating the words actually spoken in court, as newspapers were later to do with Wilberforce’s parliamentary speech, but by introducing related material. One method was to publish readers’ letters. One such, ascribed to ‘Vindex’, calls slavery based on colour distinctions ‘bigotted prejudice’. Worse still, the introduction of slavery in the British Isles would be a positive danger to national sensibility. ‘Were the toleration of slavery that is now contended for, to take place among us, we should insensibly become callous to every humane feeling.’87 Quite possibly, the author of this letter had been in court. The State Trials would later record that the barrister Alleyne (or Allen) had invoked the image of ‘a wretch bound for some trivial offence to a tree, torn and agonizing beneath the scourge’. Alleyne was concerned that such sights might ‘become familiar, become unheeded by this nation; exercised, as they are now, to far different sentiments, may those sentiments never be extinct! the feelings of humanity!’88 In contrast to such dreadful scenes, so threatening to sensibility, The Morning Chronicle showed how Lord Mansfield’s decision, when it came on

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June 22, had its own sentimental rewards. The newspaper described how ‘several Negroes’ who were present: Shaking each other by the hand, congratulated themselves upon their recovery of the rights of human nature, and their happy lot that permitted them to breathe the free air of England.—No sight upon earth could be more pleasingly affecting to the feeling mind, than the joy which shone at that instant in these poor mens sable countenances. 89 Just as sentimental novels reduced social and political questions to individual tales of distress or pleasure, so here the newspaper resolves the outcome of the Sommersett case into the pleasing tale of the joy of those representatives of the London black community who were present. This strategy turns attention from the political implications of the ruling towards the personal. Moreover, it takes as its centre not the people who are presently shining with joy but, rather, the ‘feeling mind’ that witnesses the joy. In the same way that a theatre-goer might be expected to shed a little tear of happiness at such a moment, so too the witness to the ‘affecting’ scene at Westminster Hall is expected to be moved by this display of personal happiness. The dry oratory of the legal arena is recast as a sentimental drama, a drama that is explicitly being staged for the benefit of the feeling minds in the audience. The Morning Chronicle’s coverage of the Sommersett case was consistently fuller than that in other newspapers. Accordingly, discussion of the case appears on more than one page of their 23 June edition. At one point, they recount another comic tale, not in itself sentimental, but one that paraphrases a then well-known song from a sentimental comedy, Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Padlock. In this play, which was at the height of its considerable popularity in 1772, an African named Mungo laments that he is always being ordered about: What e’er’s to be done, Poor Black must run; Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo every where.90 The newspaper tells the story of ‘two Blacks’ discussing the Mansfield decision. ‘Ah ah’, they say, ‘we be no mungo here, mungo dere, mungo every where, we be made white by de gentleman in de black gown, and we go here, and dere, and every where, dat is, if we like it.’91 The joke

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again diminishes the response of the Africans and relegates them to the position of actors in a sentimental comedy. Curiously, however, it is immediately followed by an ‘extract of a letter from a person in Maryland’ which seriously addresses the plight of the ‘poor unhappy slaves’ in North America. The author writes that both of the slaves he ever bought were manumitted, the second because ‘he decayed or pined so much, and expressed so sensible a sorrow at his cruel separation from his aged parents, relations, and countrymen’. The letter was reproduced in greater length in The London Evening Post and with it was printed a letter from the second slave, now revealed to be Diagola Dha, a Prince of Foota.92 This letter claims to have been translated by Dr Desaguiller, who died in 1744, so it was certainly not new in 1772. In fact, the letter is a reworking of the famous message sent in Arabic by Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also known as Job Ben Solomon, to his father in 1734. Diallo was a West African Islamic scholar and slave trader who was himself enslaved and taken to Maryland in 1731. The letter and Diallo himself were celebrated in the 1730s and beyond and the letter was frequently reprinted. Both the letter and the narrative of Diallo’s life have, in the words of Philip Curtin, ‘the classic elements of many later works on the theme of the noble savage’.93 The letter turns, however, not on noble rage and resistance to oppression in the manner of Oroonoko but, rather, on the sickness and recovery of the former slave. While the language and narrative are in the primitivist mode (ships are ‘flying houses’, for example), the subject matter, domestic and personal, is more appropriate to the sentimental mode: ultimately this tale, as much as the tale of the courtroom, is designed to be ‘pleasingly affecting to the feeling mind’. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Mansfield decision indirectly prompted the most influential poem of antislavery, John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro, a poem which combined both sentiment and primitivism in a similar—if more sophisticated—way to this letter. Both the poem, and the earlier material in the newspapers, showed that even the driest legal language and the most technical of legal decisions need be no bar to a writer or editor seeking an emotional story with which to move their readers. Nevertheless, making a distinction between emotional language and sentimental language can be fraught with difficulty. As we have already seen, making this distinction was also a challenge—or an opportunity—to the newspaper and periodical writers. In 1792, as in 1772 and 1789, slavery was again a topic of general interest, and William Wilberforce once again addressed the House of Commons with a long and important speech. As before, reports of the speech varied sharply from one publication to another but, so powerful was it on this

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occasion, that one of his stories was reproduced by almost every publication which covered proceedings in Parliament. This tale, which invoked in a particularly horrific form the scenario of ‘virtue in distress’, familiar from countless sentimental novels, illustrated ‘the cruelty of those who dealt in this abominable traffic’. It concerned: The case of a young girl, fifteen years of age, of extreme modesty, who finding herself in a situation incident to her sex, was extremely anxious to conceal it. The captain of the vessel, instead of encouraging so laudable a disposition, tied her by the wrist, and placed her in a position so as to afford a spectacle to the whole crew. In this situation he beat her; but not thinking the exhibition he had made sufficiently conspicuous, he tied her up by the legs, and then also beat her. But his cruel ingenuity was not yet exhausted, for he next tied her up by one leg, after which she lost all sensation, and in the course of three days she expired. This was beyond dispute a fact. [Name! Name! Name! resounded from all parts of the House.] Captain Kimber was the man.94 This allegation was too dreadful to go unnoticed by the newspapers and, in the story that appeared before Parliament, the attack, first on a woman’s modesty and second on her life, contains all the ingredients necessary for a sentimental parable. In Cobbett’s account, the event is represented as being emotionally charged, although clearly not a moment for sentiment. Few changes were required, however, to ensure that the story became sentimental in the press and these changes were made—or possibly Wilberforce’s actual words were represented—by The Star. In their account of the murder on Kimber’s ship, the Recovery, given after Wilberforce had spoken in Parliament, but before Kimber had come to trial, they relate that ‘the innocent simplicity and modesty of this poor creature, reflecting upon the inhuman indecency with which she had been exposed, affected her so much, that she fell into convulsions, and in three days she died’.95 In this version, the partly legalistic and partly medical register of the Cobbett account is replaced by more emotionally suggestive language. Where the first extract has ‘young girl’, The Star has ‘poor creature’. More importantly, where the first extract gives physical reasons for the woman’s death, telling us that Kimber ‘tied her up by one leg, after which she lost all sensation, and in the course of three days she expired’, The Star ascribes her death to her emotional state as a result of her treatment. In this version, the convulsions kill her because of her affective response to ‘the inhuman indecency with which she had been exposed’. According to The Star, it was not the beating

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that killed her, but rather her shame at having the ‘situation incident to her sex’ (or the exposure incident to her punishment) made general knowledge. This is a sentimental version of the story, a version in which the inner emotional state is shown to have a greater effect on the body than the external beatings it receives. In addition, The Star’s version seems particularly calculated to rouse the indignation of its female readers who are implicitly invited to imaginatively place themselves in the situation of the murdered slave girl. It is this sympathetic identification which makes The Star’s account sentimental, unlike that in The Parliamentary History. Moreover, in this version we have a tale that urges the reader to respond with appropriate sensibility. Wilberforce clearly saw the value of outraging public feeling with stories such as this. Indeed, according to one account, he saw these occurrences as providential: The recent enormities appeared to have been permitted by Heaven for the purpose of rendering it impossible that any one should have the presumption to justify the continuation of a traffic that was necessarily productive of crimes that admitted of no excuse or palliation whatever.96 Whether providential or not, Wilberforce’s political instincts were accurate enough. The enormity of the events on the Recovery gave rise to more than just a few sentimental passages in newspapers. In addition to the parliamentary reports and, later, the reports of the trial, the event was portrayed in a now widely republished cartoon by Isaac Cruikshank called The Abolition of Slavery: Or the Inhumanity of Dealers in Human Flesh Exemplified in Captn Kimber’s Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virgen Modesty.97 Here the event is portrayed in highly sexualised imagery. The girl is suspended from her foot, naked except for a red rag around her waist—possibly symbolic of menstruation; surely the ‘situation incident to her sex’. The dialogue of the two sailors is loaded with double entendre. The one holding up the girl cries ‘dam me if I like it—I have a good mind to let go’. While perhaps an expression of genuine distaste, this is just as likely to be a euphemism for a desire to reach orgasm. Another remarks that ‘our gurles at Wapping are never flogged for their modesty.’ Wapping was an area notorious for prostitution. While modest girls are clearly unlikely to be flogged for any reason, this probably alludes to the Wapping prostitutes’ involvement in sadomasochistic practises. Cruikshank’s sailors, then, can be argued to be deriving a sexual charge from their sadistic act of torture, an act of sadism which costs them less money to enjoy here than at Wapping.

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The cartoon reflects the considerable public interest taken in Wilberforce’s parliamentary accusations against Captain Kimber. It also suggests that more passions than revulsion were aroused by Wilberforce’s description of the event. According to Mary A. Favret, an element of Wilberforce’s abolitionist strategy was a form of emotional rhetoric ‘aimed to arouse the strong passions of the gentlemen of the House’ through a form of sado-masochistic pornography in which ‘scenes of flogging served as the crucial means of arousal’.98 Given his outspoken views on public morality, it seems extremely unlikely that Wilberforce was deliberately trying to arouse the erotic passions of his audience, even if Cruikshank was. This point is recognised by Marcus Wood who notes that the ‘sexual elements’ in the cartoon were ‘introduced by Cruikshank’.99 Wood’s reading of the cartoon is, however, as problematic as Favret’s account of Wilberforce’s parliamentary rhetoric. Wood argues that the ‘while the young black woman hangs mute and inverted she is flanked by grinning, fully clothed, white males’. However, only one of the white males—Kimber—is grinning. It is also an oversimplification to say, as he does, that ‘the viewer’s sympathies are invited to be with the white men’. While the viewer indeed appears to be asked to sympathise with some of the men, no sympathy is invited for the grinning figure of Kimber himself. Nor is it fair to say that no sympathy is invoked for the central figure, the tortured young woman. Instead, Cruikshank is illustrating a commonplace of the abolition movement: the idea that the trade was damaging both to Africans and to Europeans. Both were threatened by the disease that ravaged slave ships and proved the common humanity of all by infecting and killing regardless of race. But equally, the trade threatened both by removing the restraints of ‘civilised’ society, restraints which prevented men like Kimber from committing torture and murder. Favret is right to note that the Kimber story, as related by Wilberforce, is a form of emotional rhetoric, if not sentimental rhetoric, which ‘proved rhetorically effective in prompting the men of England to recognize their power—and desire—to act’.100 Whether that desire was specifically erotic remains to be seen, but it is certainly true that Wilberforce, by emphasising the young woman’s ‘extreme modesty’ casts her into the sentimental role of ‘virtue in distress’, a strategy that would not have been possible had Kimber’s victim been male. In this case, the sentimental argument is strongly gendered, but it might be more true to suggest that Wilberforce appeals to Members of Parliament not only in their public role as protectors of the nation, but also in their domestic role as protectors of wives and daughters. The masculine

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response he seems to be calling for is not arousal, but anger at the ill-treatment of an undefended woman. On Thursday, 7 June 1792, as a result of the accusations levelled against him in Parliament, John Kimber was tried for murder. Accounts appeared in the newspapers and in a pamphlet that was published separately, attesting to the strength of public interest.101 According to The London Chronicle, ‘this trial lasted from noon to six o’ clock. The curiosity to hear it was such, as to fill the court in a few minutes after the doors were open.’102 The prosecution called a number of witnesses, of whom the most important were the ship’s doctor, Thomas Dowling, and the mate, Stephen Devereux. The counsel for the defence likewise called a number of witnesses, including two with the unlikely names of Thomas Laughter and William Riddle, who prepared to testify, not against the evidence of Dowling and Devereux, but against their characters. Dowling was ‘determined to be REVENGED’ against Kimber, while Devereux could be shown to be mutinous and a liar. Kimber, on the other hand, though knowing Devereux to be of bad character, ‘took him on board merely out of humanity’. A third witness told the court that ‘I have known Captain Kimber for twenty-five years; he has borne the character of a humane good tempered man.’103 The case for the defence thus rested on that most fundamental principle of classical forensic rhetoric: ethos—sworn testimony about a defendant’s character. In this instance, the method paid dividends. The jury was convinced of Kimber’s good character and that the evidence of Dowling and Devereux was malicious. They were obviously prepared to accept the sworn testimony of the implausibly named witnesses Laughter and Riddle, and thus to acquit Captain Kimber of a capital crime. The jury may also have been intimidated. Wilberforce’s first biographers, his sons, argued in 1836 that Kimber escaped ‘in the judgement of Mr. Wilberforce, “through the shameful remissness of the Crown lawyers, and the indecent behaviour of a high personage who from the bench identified himself with the prisoner’s cause” ’.104 The ‘high personage’ was the Duke of Clarence who had experience as a naval commander, was considered the Royal Navy’s representative within the royal family, and was in favour of retaining the slave trade— indeed, his maiden speech in the House of Lords, made just four weeks earlier, had been a call to reject Wilberforce’s Abolition Bill which had passed the Commons in a watered-down form. The Wilberforce children’s reluctance to name him is understandable. At the time they were writing he was, as William IV, the king. The

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Wilberforces did not comment on Laughter and Riddle, and perhaps they were genuine witnesses, but it does seem likely that a more rigorous trial would have convicted Captain Kimber. Kimber’s guilt or innocence notwithstanding, the story is powerful. Not only does it depict murder, but also an outrage upon the virtue and modesty of a young woman anxious to conceal the fact, it would appear, that she is menstruating: the ‘situation incident to her sex’. Eighteenth-century notions of modesty were not forgiving, and any evidence of sexual activity in a woman would tend to diminish claims about her modesty. Cruikshank clearly interprets Wilberforce’s word ‘modesty’ as ‘virgin modesty’. In the newspaper accounts of the trial of John Kimber, most newspapers drop comments about the young woman’s modesty and instead report that she was suffering from ‘a certain complaint’. The Morning Herald alone reports that she was suffering from a ‘gonorrhea and lethurgy’. Moreover, the published account of the trial shows that Thomas Dowling testified in court that it was he who had communicated the story to Wilberforce in the first place, actually the night before Wilberforce made his speech, and second that the girl was, in his words, ‘affected with a gonorrhœa, or clap’. We do not learn how she contracted the disease—she may well have been a victim of rape just as she was most certainly a victim of abduction. In either case, she was eventually a victim of murder. But in the late eighteenth century, since any evidence of sexual activity— even as a victim of rape—would tend to undermine declarations in Parliament about the girl’s ‘modesty’, it is tempting to speculate on whether or not Wilberforce knew and suppressed her medical diagnosis before making his speech in Parliament. Certainly, either Dowling or Wilberforce was concealing the truth. We may now be horrified at the outcome of the trial since the women was ill and clearly a victim of many crimes but, in 1792, details such as this compromised the credibility of Wilberforce’s evidence to Parliament—and ultimately contributed to the conviction for perjury of Thomas Dowling and Stephen Devereux. Wilberforce’s attempt to use sentimental rhetoric to expose Kimber may ultimately have backfired, but it was extremely effective in bringing him to trial in the first place. In this instance, we can clearly see how spoken sentimental rhetoric could lead directly to action. As I have argued throughout this chapter, however, the effect of most spoken sentimental rhetoric cannot be so clearly assessed. Accounts of trials, parliamentary debates, and sermons, come to us mediated through reporters and editors, or polished by their original authors.

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Yet despite the imperfect nature of these written records of spoken events, we can nevertheless deduce that spoken abolitionist rhetoric made as much use of the rhetoric of sensibility as did novels, poems, and pamphlets written specifically for publication. Whether its use in speeches, sermons, and debates was always as effective in rousing the passions of its audience as Wilberforce had been in generating outrage against Kimber is, sadly, something that we can probably never know.

6 Conclusion: Romanticism, Revolution, and William Wilberforce’s Unregarded Tears

The first efforts of William Wilberforce and others to abolish the slave trade were unsuccessful. The Abolition Committee had set out in 1787 to see the trade abolished at the earliest possible opportunity. By 1792 that opportunity looked as if it might be a long time in coming. After Wilberforce’s speech naming Captain Kimber, Henry Dundas suggested an amendment to the Abolition Bill: the introduction of the word ‘gradual’. The bill passed as amended, by 230 votes to 85, and gradual abolition became law, the final date for slave trading to remain legal being later fixed at 1796. This gave the West India Interest room to manoeuvre. Parliamentary delaying tactics came into play, further evidence was demanded, and it became clear that gradual abolition was to mean no abolition. Much had taken place in the intervening time to focus the minds of British politicians and the British public on other issues. Of these, the French Revolution was the most significant, rapidly became the defining event of the 1790s, over-shadowing the abolition movement, and bringing out the conservative instincts of many who had previously supported change. After the outbreak of war with France in 1793, few of the middle or upper ranks of society had any inclination to rock the boat. While the slavery debate continued into the 1790s and beyond, by the middle of the decade, abolition of slavery had become associated in the public mind with radicals and English Jacobins. Opponents of abolition vigorously promoted this association. One anonymous pamphleteer announced that his aim was: To relinquish then at once the JACOBINS of ENGLAND, the Wilberforces, the Coopers, the Paines, and the Clarksons, the dupes who are flattered into mischief, and those of a far different description, who direct their motions. [. . .] It may be asked, By what motives the promoters 186

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of the Abolition have been actuated? the answer is plain, Fanaticism and False Philosophy had exalted their imagination, and obscured their reason; and in what they affected to call a Reform in the Constitution, they saw the means of establishing such a Government as best suited their wild ephemeral theory.1 Both Wilberforce and Paine, one imagines, would have been surprised to have found themselves placed in such proximity, but the pamphleteer’s wild assertions illustrate how far the tone of the abolition debate was altered by events in France. Instead of the abolitionists threatening British commercial and imperial interests, the standard argument of the West India interest in the 1780s, abolition now takes on a more sinister aspect. Wilberforce can be accused of attempting to tamper with the constitution or even of plotting to overthrow it entirely. By association, abolition can be dubbed a treasonable activity. The French Revolution was not the only civil commotion to alter the course of the antislavery movement. Slave rebellions were not uncommon in Britain’s colonies nor in the colonies of other European powers, and a number of risings had taken place throughout the eighteenth century. A few, like Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, were serious affairs which threatened to undermine the ability of the British to maintain a colony on the island. Most were more localised and were put down with comparative ease (though with no less brutality) by the colonial authorities. The regularity and inevitability of these uprisings is indicated by a famous toast made by Samuel Johnson ‘when in company with some very grave men at Oxford’. According to a disapproving James Boswell, Johnson raised his glass ‘to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West-Indies’.2 Johnson, a lifelong opponent of slavery, clearly recognised that slave uprisings were both a form of protest against slavery and a method of self-emancipation: hundreds of slaves, known as maroons, had freed themselves and were living beyond British control in the highlands and inaccessible regions of many Caribbean islands, especially Jamaica. Thousands more wished to join them, such that the planters lived in constant fear of these regular acts of defiance. The early 1790s was marked by two such uprisings of importance to the British. The first was a major, if abortive, rebellion which took place on the Windward Island of Dominica in January 1791. The island alternated periods of French and British rule during the eighteenth century and an Anglo-French Creole population managed to peacefully co-exist, even through a period of French rule between 1778 and 1783. News of the revolution in France changed opinions on the island and, in 1791,

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French supporters of the revolution in tandem, if not in concert, with a substantial Maroon population raised a rebellion against the British plantation owners. The attempt failed and the leaders of the revolt were hanged, drawn, and quartered, a punishment not seen in Britain since the early seventeenth century. Peace was restored, but news of the rebellion reached Britain in March 1791 and considerably embarrassed Wilberforce and other abolitionists who were trying to prove that Africans were peaceable people.3 More serious, and more far-reaching in its implications, was the revolution that took place on the island of Hispaniola during the 1790s. Here, the French colony of San Domingo came under the influence of French revolutionary thinking. The mixed-race population, then referred to as mulattos, demanded the equal treatment which appeared to be promised them in the new French constitution. Denied this equality the mulattos raised a rebellion in autumn 1790 under the leadership of Ogé and Chavannes—who were both executed when the rebellion failed. The attempt, and the continuing influx of revolutionary sentiment from France, sowed the seed for a more serious uprising. In August 1791, the slaves in the central and northern part of the colony rose up and ‘armed with pruning hooks, machetes, and torches, surrounded the houses, slaughtered the men, drank the rum, raped the women, and fired the estates and canefields’.4 A few months later, the western part of the colony joined the rebellion, plunging it into a twelve-year period of revolution which culminated in the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1803. The San Domingo revolution was marked by appalling violence from all sections of the population, reports of which were quick to reach British newspapers. When they appeared, official French publications were seized upon, translated, and sold in large numbers. Many people learned about the revolution from translations of speeches made at the French National Assembly, speeches which, though dealing with pain and suffering, are far from sentimental. Almost half of one such speech consists of detailed accounts of the horrific deaths met by many of the French victims of the rebellious slaves. We hear of ‘M. Robert, a carpenter’ who was ‘seized by the negroes, who bind him between two planks, and saw him deliberately in two’.5 Another story recounts how ‘a colonist, father of two young ladies, whites, is bound down by a savage, ring-leader of a band, who ravishes the eldest in his presence, delivers the younger over to one of his satellites; their passion satisfied, they slaughter both the father and the daughters’.6 The stories conclude with a description of a desolated colony: ‘mean time the flames gained ground on all sides.

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La Petite Anse, la plaine du Nord, the district of Morin, Limonade, presented only heaps of ashes and dead bodies.’ The narrator is then quick to turn upon the French abolitionists, crying ‘what a lesson for The Amis des Noirs!’7 Accounts such as these played havoc with British abolitionists’ attempts to portray the slaves as harmless, downtrodden victims. In the public imagination, the slaves themselves now became the aggressors and slavery, with its concomitant brutal discipline, once more became a necessary evil in the minds of many who had previously opposed it. The nature of the rhetoric changed too: rather than seeing the tears of the slaves, we hear the screams of their victims. Nevertheless, for those who wished to indulge their sensibilities there were still plenty of victims to sympathise with—including a large number of Europeans—the same people who had been castigated a few months earlier for being cruel, heartless, and greedy. This new state of affairs allowed sentimentally inclined proslavery campaigners to tip the balance of sympathy away from the slaves, who could now be represented as barbaric, and towards the planters. The old arguments about Africans being unfit for freedom resurfaced with new vigour, and it was suggested that true humanity lay in the suppression of ‘Negroe barbarity’. Furthermore, the compassion of sentimentally inclined abolitionists for the slaves could be ‘exposed’ as a cynical and politically motivated pretence. In a pamphlet of 1792, Henry Redhead made this point with clarity when he argued that: If the outrages committed in the fertile and unhappy colony of St. Domingo; if rage, insolence, ingratitude, barbarity on the one side; meekness, suffering, sorrow, innocence, on the other, can excite no indignation in the breasts of the abolitionists; if no compassion arise from a complication of forfeits and persecutions, then they have no humanity; and their demands must cloak some evil and latent passion, which will have something more than the mere abolition of the slave trade.8 Again, abolitionists are accused of revolutionary tendencies and antislavery is conflated with radicalism. Redhead creates an opposition in which the slaves, characterised by ‘rage, insolence, ingratitude, [and] barbarity’, are placed against the planters who display ‘meekness, suffering, sorrow, [and] innocence’. The slaves are associated with uncontrolled anger and destruction, while the planters are noteworthy for their sentimental virtues. In short, the planters are identified as sentimental heroes and it becomes the duty of the benevolent to sympathise with, relieve, and

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where possible to emulate them. By contrast, the abolitionists are guilty of displaying false sensibility and of harbouring ‘some evil and latent passion’. No doubt, the reader is supposed to infer that the ulterior motive is regicide and republicanism. Revolution and rebellion abroad distracted attention away from the abolitionists and provided reasons to revert to a proslavery line for many whose opposition to slavery was never very strong. The changing political climate also affected those whose commitment to abolitionism was never in doubt. Clarkson dropped out of the movement entirely while Wilberforce became a laughing-stock to many. ‘We understand, from very authentic information’, joked The Star in 1792, ‘that a large body of free Negroes, from St. Domingo, are daily expected at Hull, in order to offer themselves to the protection and service of MR. WILBERFORCE.’9 A satirical print by James Gillray showed Wilberforce seated on a sofa in a luxurious apartment, sharing a pipe with a bare-breasted African woman while a book lying on the floor and painting over the doorway allude to the ‘innocence’ of Captain Kimber.10 Both ridiculing Wilberforce, and questioning the purity of his motivations, these attacks typify the many satirical productions to appear at the end of the first phase of popular antislavery. In January 1793, the king of France was executed. Within a few days, Britain and France were at war. Clearly, a government fighting a counter-revolutionary war could not consider a far-reaching measure such as abolition. Not for another twelve years, until after Britain had secured victory over the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805, would anyone in a position of authority seriously consider changing any aspect of the regulation of the sea service or the colonies. Once British naval supremacy had been achieved, however, the battle to outlaw the slave trade was back on and was won within two years. The second wave of antislavery agitation, post-Trafalgar, was markedly different from the first wave. As well as abolition being seen as a necessary development of the humanitarian impulse, it was also seen as an international duty in which a newly empowered Britain could impose its will on other nations. Abolition and, later, emancipation became part of a mythology of empire according to which Britain ruled the world because she was morally best equipped to do so. Whether any other than the most blindly idealistic really believed this is a moot point: few people, in the nineteenth as much as the eighteenth century, had ever been in much doubt about the real commercial nature of British involvement overseas. Commerce, however, is a poor subject for a national mythology and so British antislavery,

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conducted in the face of foreign inhumanity, provided a convenient rallying cry for the advocates of an expanding empire. The language of antislavery rhetoric, post-Trafalgar, changed too. Just how far is illustrated by an event which took place on 23 February 1807, almost fifteen years after Dundas had effectively wrecked abolition with his gradualist amendment. On that day, Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of abolition of the slave trade. During the debate the SolicitorGeneral, Sir Samuel Romilly, spoke against the trade. His speech concluded with a long and emotional tribute to Wilberforce in which he contrasted the peaceful happiness of Wilberforce in his bed with the tortured sleeplessness of the guilty Bonaparte. In the words of Romilly’s biographer: Wilberforce was overcome by the power of Romilly’s concluding passages, and sat with his head on his hands, tears streaming down his face. As Romilly reached his final sentences the House broke into one of those scenes that it reserves for great occasions. Members stood and cheered him tumultuously.11 According to the Morning Chronicle, Wilberforce received ‘three distinct and universal cheers’.12 Scenes such as this are rare in the House of Commons where applause is forbidden, but this report, or one like it, must have reached William Hey, the Yorkshire surgeon, evangelical, and former Mayor of Leeds, for on February 28 he wrote to Wilberforce to ask if it was true. ‘If so,’ he continues, ‘was not this an unprecedented effusion of approbation?’ Wilberforce replied that ‘I was myself so completely overpowered by my feelings [. . .] that I was insensible to all that was passing around me.’13 In this exchange, and in his response to the cheers he received in Parliament, Wilberforce’s emotion is understandable but, while the event is clearly susceptible to being portrayed in a sentimental manner, it is recorded neither in the newspaper accounts of the debate, nor in Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. There may be several reasons for the absence of newspaper reports, not least that all of the daily newspapers gave over much of their space to reporting a mass panic which had gripped a crowd during a public execution in London. In the ensuing stampede, 30 people were trampled to death and many others injured. This news may have been of lesser historical significance than the abolition of the slave trade but, clearly, it impinged more nearly on the lives of most Londoners. To accommodate full reports of the tragedy, accounts of parliamentary debates were kept to a minimum. The story might not have pushed Wilberforce’s tears out

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of the papers twenty years previously but, by 1807, tears, even the tears of famous parliamentarians, were not quite so fashionable. Yet equally significant is Thomas Clarkson’s account, in his History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), in which he alludes to the high emotion of the event without mentioning Wilberforce specifically. ‘I must observe’, he writes: That there was such an enthusiasm among the members at this time, that there appeared to be the same kind and degree of feeling, as manifested itself within the same walls in the year 1788, when the question was first started. This enthusiasm too, which was of a moral nature, was so powerful, that it seemed even to extend to a conversion of the heart: for several of the old opponents of this righteous cause went away, unable to vote against it.14 While in part this is no more than the old campaigner indulging in nostalgia for the heady days of his youth, it is still significant that his submerged description of the sentimental moment calls up that period of the campaign which made most use of sentimental rhetoric. Indeed, Clarkson describes the ‘enthusiasm’ as having ‘a moral nature’ and leading to ‘a conversion of the heart’. But this is not sentimental writing. The feelings are still there, but they are being recorded differently. This extract, no less than the absent newspaper reports, testifies to the fact that while pathos, sentiment, and other moving emotions remained available to writers, by now they appeared to be for the most part confined to the pens of minor poets and novelists. Literary critics have tended to agree both that the 1790s saw the demise of sentimentalism and that this demise occurred broadly because of the new political climate resulting from the revolution in France. The central text of this transformation has traditionally been seen as the Anti-Jacobin, published in 1797 and 1798, while the dramatis personae—Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Canning, Wordsworth—alert the reader to the shift from the ‘age of sensibility’ to that of the ‘Romantic era’.15 However, recent criticism has tended to reject simplistic explanations for the supposed decline of sensibility, and in some cases to question whether it disappeared at all. Janet Todd’s account of ‘the attack on sensibility’ shows how sensibility became unacceptable to the guardians of ‘high culture’, whether they were political conservatives or radicals, but she reminds us that ‘the sentimental strain did not die in 1800 but continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the popular genres of drama and fiction’.16 Chris Jones sees sensibility not

Conclusion 193

just as popular discourse in the 1790s and beyond but also as one which influenced Wordsworth profoundly and which is a central preoccupation of The Prelude. Indeed, we might argue, although Jones does not, that Wordsworth’s argument in the ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, that poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, has more in common with the sensibility of the 1780s and before than the Romanticism to which it was later made to belong.17 (Jerome McGann makes exactly this point in The Poetics of Sensibility when he asserts that ‘sensibility is the language of spontaneous overflow’.18) Markman Ellis has also commented on critical agreement that the 1790s marked the end of sentimentalism. He argues that ‘this consensus may be unjustified’ as ‘debate was always central to the hybrid power of sentimentalism’.19 The criticism which sentimental writings faced in the 1790s and after may well have altered the terms of the debate but did not mean that sentimentalism was an entirely spent force. Rather, he concludes, this criticism tended to ‘testify to the continued force of sentimentalism, providing the channel for its transmutation (survival and renaissance) into powerful forms of political argument and literary production in the nineteenth century and beyond’.20 We can point to several examples of sentimental antislavery rhetoric appearing in the years after the initial antislavery movement collapsed. Of these, the most celebrated is Coleridge’s ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’, delivered in Bristol on 16 June 1795, published in a revised form in The Watchman the following year, and recovered by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann in its unrevised form from the original manuscript.21 As Deirdre Coleman has shown, this lecture relies heavily on existing texts, not all unambiguously opposed to slavery.22 However, although the evidence is borrowed from elsewhere, the style and arrangement are Coleridge’s. The lecture starts by denouncing luxury and ‘artificial wants’ (including, somewhat ironically for a lecture given at the Assembly Coffee House, coffee) but soon moves from philosophical and economic musing to a description of the middle passage that must have been familiar to many in his audience. With an eye to the local, Coleridge denigrates the crimps who force unwary Bristol sailors into the slave trade but, soon after, reproduces many of the standard arguments about Africa and the middle passage made by Benezet, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others. These are sometimes horrific and sometimes sentimental; of the latter category, three aspects in particular are significant. First, he alludes to Wilberforce’s sentimental ‘parable of the captain’, which I discussed in Chapter 5, when he describes the captive slaves’ songs as ‘songs of lamentation’.23 Second, in what Coleman calls a ‘sentimental

194 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

vignette’, heavily borrowed from Carl Wadström’s Essay on Colonization (1794), he represents Africans as ‘innocent and happy—the peaceful inhabitants of a fertile soil’.24 This ‘vignette’, in which Coleridge compares African families to ‘the peasants in some parts of Europe’, seeks both to explain African society in European terms and also to sentimentalise Africa. Coleman notes the Pantisocratic nature of African society in Coleridge’s analysis—the Africans ‘cultivate their fields in common and reap the crop as the common property of all’—yet Coleridge seems also keen to emphasise the essentially domestic nature of African production in which ‘each family [. . .] spins weaves, sews, hunts, fishes and makes basket fishing tackle & the implements of agriculture’. It is this emphasis on domesticity that makes the vignette sentimental and which ties it to many other sentimental representations of idealised family life. Yet, perhaps the most important part of Coleridge’s sentimental rhetoric comes when he seems to be explicitly rejecting sensibility. As was briefly noted in Chapter 1, Coleridge’s rejection of ‘sensibility’ in favour of ‘benevolence’ is itself a sentimental argument denouncing false sensibility. Coleridge’s attack is particularly strong: Had all the people who petitioned for the abolition of this execrable Commerce instead of bustling about and shewing off with all the vanity of pretended Sensibility, simply left off the use of Sugar and Rum, it is demonstrable that the Slave-merchants and Planters must either have applied to Parliament for the abolition of the Slave Trade or have suffered the West India Trade altogether to perish.25 Clearly, Coleridge’s attack is on ‘pretended sensibility’. Paradoxically, Coleridge denounces false sensibility as active (‘bustling about’) while true sensibility in this case is inactive, requiring only that people leave off the use of sugar and rum. The clever paradox in fact serves to highlight the essential distinction between true and false sensibility in which the former is generally inactive, or inappropriately active, while the later is characterised by action of a sort that Coleridge later calls benevolence: ‘true Benevolence’, he argues, ‘is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare—what novel-reading Lady does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family.’ Moreover, Coleridge makes the specific point (albeit in the printed version of the lecture that appeared in The Watchman) that ‘there is one criterion by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere sensibility—Benevolence impels to action’.26

Conclusion 195

Coleridge attacks sensibility by name, but his criticisms are levelled at false sensibility in much the same way as the many similar criticisms, made many times before, which have been discussed throughout this book. Indeed, a large proportion of such attacks on sensibility in the 1790s and 1800s followed the same pattern and did little more than rearticulate arguments familiar from the 1760s and before. Yet despite this seeming chorus of condemnation for sensibility, at least in name, sentimental heroes, parables, and arguments continued to make appearances in nineteenth-century antislavery literature, though less frequently, perhaps, in political tracts and pamphlets. Instead they made their home in publications such as The Antislavery Album, which in 1828 reprinted many of the poems of the 1780s and 1790s alongside a number of more recent contributions.27 Few of these poems showed any great signs of being influenced by the ideas of the Romantic movement. Instead, tears abound. In the same year, an Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women appeared in which a number of sentimental arguments are developed. Women, it is argued, should be particularly involved in the emancipation campaign because ‘the peculiar texture of her mind, her strong feelings and quick sensibilities, especially qualify her, not only to sympathise with suffering, but also to plead for the oppressed’.28 The consequences of women not doing so, the pamphlet argues, is that these feminine sensibilities come under threat. The story of Donna Sophia is told in which a slave trader’s wife moves from a position of complete abhorrence to a position of voyeuristic enjoyment of the brutality of slavery. ‘When we first settled here she was continually interceding for the slaves’, relates Señor d’Almeydra, her husband. ‘She constantly wept while I punished them, and now she is among them from morning till night, and stands by and sees them punished!!’ As well as making a clear abolitionist statement, this sentimental parable illustrates the danger of allowing one’s sensibilities to become hardened to cruelty, and articulates a set of anxieties about female sexuality and the threat of miscegenation. Donna Sophia’s sadistic voyeurism threatens both the home and the heart. In this analysis, slavery is both a failure of sensibility, and a cause of that failure. Sentimental rhetoric never completely disappeared from the discourse of antislavery. Indeed, sentimental strategies are still widely used by humanitarian agencies hoping to raise awareness of present day slavery, poverty, and famine. Slavery, in fact if not in name, is still a reality for many people around the world. To counter it, newspapers and magazines now frequently carry advertisements which use very similar sentimental rhetoric to that developed by the abolitionists of the eighteenth century.

196 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

In recent years, their effectiveness has often been enhanced by the inclusion of moving and often harrowing imagery. Nevertheless, the late eighteenth century, and in particular the years 1787–1793, saw the relationship between sensibility and the discourse of antislavery at its height. Indeed, one can think of few other occasions in history at which a literary discourse was so closely allied with a popular political movement. Hundreds of sentimental poets, playwrights, and novelists embraced the cause, but no less important were the dozens of political writers, on either side of the argument, who felt compelled to make at least part of their case in the language of sensibility. Although drawing on developments in sentimental rhetoric which had been long in the making, these polemicists were the first to engage in an extensive public debate which saw the widespread use of sentimental persuasive techniques. With the temporary demise of the abolition movement in the mid-1790s, these techniques were retained for the uses to which they had originally been put as well as being adapted to new polemical purposes. But never again would sentimental argument be so closely identified with a single political movement. Indeed, never again would the discourse of sensibility be thought of as the obvious site in which to conduct a political campaign. From being the political wing of the dominant literary discourse of the late eighteenth century, the rhetoric of sensibility, though never quite losing its appeal, would be relegated to the status of just one in an increasingly large arsenal of nineteenthcentury political rhetorics.

Notes

Introduction 1. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782), ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 74. 2. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 23. 3. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), pp. 29–37. 4. Ibid., p. 157. 5. Edward Said, Orientalism, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 3. 6. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. xvii; Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 5. 7. Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 96n; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 6–9. 8. His unusable distinction is that ‘sensibility emphasizes the mind in the body, sentimentality the body in the mind’, McGann, Poetics of Sensibility, p. 7. 9. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan et al., 1755). 10. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 236–7. 11. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 89. 12. I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1929), p. 255. 13. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), pp. 241–50, p. 247. 14. Northrop Frye, ‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’, ELH, 23, 2 (June 1956), 144–52, p. 145. 15. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 4. 16. Leo Braudy, ‘The Form of the Sentimental Novel’, Novel, 7 (1973), 5–13. 17. R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 22. 18. John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late EighteenthCentury Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987). 19. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 20. Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 7. 21. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4. 197

198 Notes 22. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 5. 23. Ibid., p. 9. 24. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, p. 37. 25. Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1, 2. 26. Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 2, 3. 27. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, p. 201. 28. Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110. 29. Todd, Sensibility, p. 110. 30. Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, p. 46. 31. Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in EighteenthCentury English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 7. 32. Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808). 33. W.E.H. Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1869), I, p. 169. 34. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: André Deutsch, 1964). 35. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 38–57; Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) and Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (London: Macmillan, 1999). 36. The subsequent debate has been anthologised in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Oxford: University of California Press, 1992). 37. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 42. 38. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I, p. 99. 39. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p. 46. 40. Ibid., p. 45. 41. George Boulukos, ‘The Grateful Slave: A History of Slave Plantation Reform in the British Novel, 1750–1780’, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1 (2001), 161–79, p. 161n. 42. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 37. 43. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–4. 44. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, p. 2. 45. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3; Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 129. 46. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), 3rd edn (London: Allison & Busby, 1980); Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 201.

Notes 199 47. C.L.R. James, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of Their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World’, Amistad 1, ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 119–64, p. 147. 48. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 207. 49. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988). See pp. 24–9 for his methodology in this regard. 50. Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9. 51. Ibid., pp. 12, 89. See also Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 52. Ibid., p. 90.

1 The rhetoric of sensibility 1. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 461. 2. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 3 and (for a discussion of sensibility), pp. 113–22. 3. For a clear discussion, see Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (London: Macmillan, 1999). 4. An argument made by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). Elias’s argument covers the whole of Europe in the early modern and modern periods and thus tends to generalise about complex social and psychological developments in communities with very different histories. 5. Poems on Slavery: By Maria Falconar, aged 17, and Harriet Falconar, aged 14 (London: Egertons, Murray, and Johnson, 1788). 6. Adam Smith’s contribution to ‘the invention of English literature’ is explored in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment by Robert Crawford in Devolving English Literature, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 27–36. 7. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce and A.S. Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 26. 8. John Holmes, The Art of Rhetoric Made Easy; or, the Elements of Oratory Briefly Stated, and Fitted for the Practise of the Studious Youth of Great-Britain and Ireland (London: A. Parker, A. Bettesworth, and C. Hitch, 1739), ‘The Preface’. 9. Useful introductions to classical rhetoric can be found in: George Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Peter Dixon, Rhetoric (London: Methuen, 1971), Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988) and Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 10. Holmes, Art of Rhetoric, p. 1. 11. Dixon, Rhetoric, and Robert Cockcroft and Susan M. Cockcroft, Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric (London: Macmillan, 1992), provide short but clear introductions to the rules of rhetoric for the modern reader.

200 Notes 12. Thomas Farnaby, Troposchematologia: Maximam Partem ex Indice Rhetorico, FARNABII Deprompta, Additus Insuper Anglicanis Exemplis. In usem Scholæ Regiæ Grammaticalis apud St. Edmundi Burgum (London: Ri. Royston, 1648). 13. See Crawford, pp. 29–30, and Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 152–9. 14. My discussion of the new rhetoric owes much to two works: Howell’s, EighteenthCentury British Logic and Rhetoric; and Michael G. Moran, ed., Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). 15. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 452. 16. Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1662–1678), part 2, canto 3, ll. 1–4. 17. Brian Vickers, ‘The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment’, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth, Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), pp. 3–76, p. 3. 18. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), p. 366. See pp. 364–83 for an extended discussion. 19. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 40. 20. David Hume, ‘Of Eloquence’, Essays, 2nd edn (1742), reprinted in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 97–110. 21. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic, pp. 615–16. 22. Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 46–51. 23. Hume, ‘Of Eloquence’, p. 107. 24. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 41. 25. Ibid., pp. 42–3. 26. Ibid., p. 36. 27. Ibid., p. 152. 28. Ibid., p. 157. 29. Ibid., p. 158. 30. John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. 30. 31. For discussion, see Vivienne Brown, Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 14; H. Lewis Ulman, ‘Adam Smith’, in Moran, p. 213. 32. Adam Smith, Lectures, pp. 25–6. 33. Ibid., p. 182. 34. Ibid., pp. 36–8. 35. Ibid., pp. 85–6. 36. Ibid., p. 192. 37. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan & Thomas Cadell, 1783), I, p. 381. 38. Rae, Life of Adam Smith, p. 33. 39. Blair, Lectures, I, p. 13. 40. Ibid., p. 23.

Notes 201 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Ibid., pp. 31–2. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, p. 121. Ibid., p. 235. Cicero, De Oratore, with an English translation by E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1942) II, lii, p. 211. William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, III, i. Hannah More, Slavery, A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), p. 54. Hannah More, Sacred Dramas; Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible. To Which is Added, Sensibility, a Poem, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell, 1782). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 231–51, p. 249. Aristotle, Of Rhetoric, p. 181. The sentimental parable could be seen as an example of Laura Brown’s notion of the ‘cultural fable’ which ‘can be said to tell a story whose protagonist is an emanation of contemporary experience and whose action reflects an imaginative negotiation with that experience’. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 3. Luke, 10:25–37. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742), Ch. 12, ed. R.F. Brissenden (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 67–73. Laurence Sterne, ‘Philanthropy Recommended’, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760), 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), I, pp. 25–36, p. 28. 1 Timothy 5:4. For a recent discussion of the relationship between slavery, colonisation, and ideas of the ‘domestic’ in both the national and personal senses, see Sharon Harrow, Adventures in Domesticity: Gender and Colonial Adulteration in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (New York: AMS Press, 2004). Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, VIII, 993–4; The Morning Herald (Tuesday 24 February 1807). Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 168–70. Hume, ‘Of Eloquence’, pp. 97–110, p. 110. Smith, Lectures, p. 26. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 36. Eric Erämetsä, A Study of the Word ‘Sentimental’ and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of the Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Series 13, 74 (Helsinki: Helsingen Liike Kinjapaino Oy, 1951).

2 Arguing in prose: Abolitionist letters and novels 1. In addition to critical works, two important anthologies have appeared: Peter Kitson et al., eds, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999) and James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002).

202 Notes 2. Examples in this category include: Joan Baum, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1994); Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-slavery, 1770–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1942); Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, eds, The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (London: Routledge, 1994); Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. Examples in this category include: Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in EighteenthCentury English Narratives (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) and The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3. 5. Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 4. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. Ibid., pp. 156–7. 10. Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, p. 18. 11. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 128. 12. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 259. See also David Dabydeen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 13. Monthly Review, 35 (1766), 43–6; Cuthbert Shaw, Liberty, A Poem (Durham: I. Lane, 1756). 14. Critical Review, 21 (1766), 281–8. 15. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 266. 16. Ferguson, Subject to Others, p. 104. 17. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 87. 18. Eve W. Stoddard, ‘A Serious Proposal for Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1995), 379–96, p. 381. 19. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 254–5.

Notes 203 20. Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. 13–15. 21. Ibid., pp. 10, 13. 22. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, pp. 104–5. 23. Stoddard, ‘A Serious Proposal’, p. 392. 24. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 93. 25. Scott, Sir George Ellison, p. 11. 26. Laura Brown argues that the lap dog incident is a ‘cultural fable’, in this case, ‘the fable of the non human being’. See Brown, Fables of Modernity, pp. 254–6. 27. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 28. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 98. 29. Stoddard, ‘A Serious Proposal’, p. 383. 30. Much of Ignatius Sancho’s biography comes to us through Joseph Jekyll’s problematic Life of Ignatius Sancho (1782). See Brycchan Carey, ‘ “The Extraordinary Negro”: Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26, 2 (Spring 2003), 1–13. 31. Keith A. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in EighteenthCentury Afro-English Writing (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), p. 79. For other examples of the earlier view see James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1973) and Paul Edwards’s introductions to The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life by Joseph Jekyll, Esq., M.P. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968) and The Letters of Ignatius Sancho (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). 32. See Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne’, Research in African Literature, 29, 4 (Winter 1998), 88–105 and Markman Ellis ‘Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form’, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 199–217. 33. ‘Sermon X: Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, Considered’, Sermons of Mr Yorick, 2 vols (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1760), II, pp. 73–105. 34. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782), ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 74. 35. Sterne’s correspondence with Sancho is reproduced by Carretta, pp. 331–6. The versions from which I quote are those which were published in the eighteenth-century, rather than the manuscript versions which Carretta also gives. 36. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 578–9. 37. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, p. 214. 38. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 165–6. 39. Ibid., p. 4. 40. A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (Boston: Green & Russell, 1760) and A Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, Related by Himself. The first edition given in the ESTC is Newport, Rhode Island: S. Southwick, 1774, although this was apparently printed in Bath.

204 Notes 41. Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. By Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England (London: A. Bell, 1773). 42. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, p. 112. 43. The following discussion of Sancho’s Letters is extracted from: Brycchan Carey ‘ “The Hellish Means of Killing and Kidnapping”: Ignatius Sancho and the Campaign Against the “Abominable Traffic for Slaves” ’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 81–95. 44. These appeared between 1767 and 1779. They have more recently appeared together in facsimile. See Josephine R.B. Wright, Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780): An Early African Composer in England – the Collected Editions of his Music in Facsimile (London and New York: Garland, 1981). 45. Letters, pp. 81–2; 113–15; 214–15. Another newspaper letter, on pp. 119–20, was ‘inserted unknown to Mr. Sancho’. See also Vincent Carretta, ‘Three West Indian Writers of the 1780s Revisited and Revised’, Research in African Literature, 29, 4 (1998), 73–86, in which Carretta reproduces two further letters, both to the Morning Post. 46. Ellis, ‘Ignatius Sancho’s Letters’, pp. 205–6. 47. Letters, pp. 151–2. Carretta points out that, although dated as January 1779 in the first edition, later editions confirm that these letters were in fact written in April. See Letters, pp. 300–1. 48. J.R. Willis, ‘New Light on the Life of Ignatius Sancho: Some Unpublished Letters’, Slavery and Abolition, 1 (1980), 345–58; Carretta, ‘Three West Indian Writers’. 49. Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, A Tale, in a Series of Letters, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1777). 50. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 270; Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 118. 51. The most important of these personal ties is established in the sentimentalised figure of Yambu, an ‘African prince’ whom Savillon sets free in order that he might encourage the other slaves to work willingly. For discussion of Yambu as ‘cultural fable’, see Brown, Fables of Modernity, pp. 212–14. 52. Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, II, p. 40. 53. Susan Manning points out that control is a major theme in the novel, not confined to discussion of slavery: ‘Savillon’s enlightened treatment of the slave Yambu’, she argues, ‘is in striking contrast to both Roubigné’s and Montauban’s proprietorial attitudes to the disposal of Julia’s affections, her future, and her body’. Susan Manning, ‘Julia de Roubigné: Last Gasp, or First Fruits?’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24, 2 (Autumn 2001), 161–74, p. 166. 54. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 270. 55. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, p. 127. 56. Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, II, p. 41. 57. Mackenzie’s depiction of slavery seems to owe much to the famous analysis offered the previous year by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I, pp. 98–9. 58. Monthly Review, 69 (1783), 493.

Notes 205 59. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, p. 74. 60. In: Maria Edgeworth, Early Lessons (London: J. Johnson, 1801). 61. Peter Rowland, ‘The Life and Times of Thomas Day, 1748–1789: English Philanthropist and Author: Virtue Almost Personified’, Studies in British History, vol. 39 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), p. 207. 62. Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton: A Work Intended for the Use of Children (1783–1789), 8th edn, 3 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1798), I, p. 12. 63. Ibid., II, pp. 300–2. 64. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 191–202. 65. Day, Sandford and Merton, II, pp. 303–7. 66. Ibid., III, p. 264. 67. Ibid., III, pp. 279–80. 68. For a useful survey, see: Peter Kitson, ‘ “Candid Reflections”: The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 11–25. 69. Day, Sandford and Merton, III, pp. 297–8. 70. Ibid., III, p. 308.

3 Arguing in verse: Abolitionist poetry 1. James Currie, ‘Preface’ to William Roscoe, The Wrongs of Africa (London: R. Faulder, 1787–1788). 2. Ibid., p. 1; ‘Preface’. 3. Hannah More, Slavery, A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), p. 106. A substantial extract is also available in James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 335–41, although Basker erroneously calls the poem ‘The Slave Trade’ after the 1843 American edition of The Works of Hannah More which is his source. The full text of the poem is available online at . 4. All Cowper poems are quoted from The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995). 5. James Keir, An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day, Esq. (London: John Stockdale, 1791), p. 39. 6. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 177. 7. The whole of the 1773 edition (although without the ‘Advertisement’ and ascribed to Day alone) is reprinted in Basker, pp. 203–11. The full text of the 1775 edition is available online at . 8. John Bicknell and Thomas Day, The Dying Negro, A Poem. By the Late Thomas Day and John Bicknell, [...] To Which is Added, a Fragment of a Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes (London: John Stockdale, 1793). 9. [John Bicknell and] Thomas Day, The Dying Negro A Poetical Epistle, Supposed to be Written by a Black (Who lately shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames;) to His Intended Wife (London: W. Flexney, 1773), ‘Advertisement’.

206 Notes 10. This report appeared in at least three newspapers: The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 253 (28 May 1773), The General Evening Post, 6181 (25–27 May 1773), and Lloyd’s Evening Post (26–28 May 1773). 11. Bicknell and Day, Dying Negro (1773), ‘Advertisement’. 12. Ibid., p. 4. 13. Ibid., p. 15. 14. William Shakespeare, Othello, I, iii. 15. Bicknell and Day, Dying Negro (1773), p. 16. 16. Ibid., p. 19. 17. Critical Review, 36 (1773), 71. 18. Monthly Review, 49 (1773), 63. 19. John Bicknell and Thomas Day, The Dying Negro, A Poem, 3rd edn (London: W. Flexney, 1775), p. ix. 20. Samuel Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny (1775), in Samuel Johnson: Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 401–55, p. 454. 21. Thomas Day, Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes; Written in the Year 1776 (London: John Stockdale, 1784), p. 11. 22. Ibid., p. 34. 23. Ibid., pp. 38, 32. 24. Ibid., pp. 15, 16. 25. Ibid., p. 16. 26. Bicknell and Day, Dying Negro, 3rd edn (1775), p. 22. 27. Ibid., p. 23. 28. Ibid., p. 24. 29. Ibid., p. 193. 30. More, Slavery, A Poem, pp. 81–2. 31. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 150. 32. More, Slavery, A Poem, pp. 147–50. 33. Ibid., pp. 53–6. 34. For a biography of More, see Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 35. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 195. 36. Ferguson, Subject to Others, p. 150. 37. Patricia Demers, The World of Hannah More (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 58. 38. Ibid., p. 60. 39. Hannah More, Sacred Dramas; Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible. To Which is Added, Sensibility, a Poem, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell, 1782). 40. Gentleman’s Magazine, 58, I (1788), 54. 41. Ibid., p. 239. 42. Ibid., pp. 342–3. 43. James M. Kuist, The Nichols File of the Gentleman’s Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 44. Ibid., p. 79, I (1809), 190–5.

Notes 207 45. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols (London: Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1812), VI, p. 272, and ‘The Rise and Progress of the Magazine’, General Index to the Gentleman’s Magazine (London: John Nichols, 1821), p. lxvi. 46. ‘The Isle of Wight Petition on the Slave Trade’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 58, I (1788), 311. 47. ‘On Slavery’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 59, I (1789), 334. 48. ‘Reflections on the Slave Trade’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 58, II (1788), 599. 49. John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by Order of His Present Majesty, for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere . . . , 3 vols (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1773); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance (1768), ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 50. James Boswell, No Abolition of Slavery: Or, the Universal Empire of Love (London: n.p., 1791). There is an extract in Basker, pp. 238–41. 51. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 182. 52. Monthly Review, 78 (1788), 137–40. 53. Roscoe, Wrongs of Africa, pp. 1–2. There is an extract in Basker, pp. 196–200. 54. Donald A. Macnaughton, Roscoe of Liverpool: His Life, Writings and Treasures, 1753–1831 (Birkinhead: Countyvise, 1996), p. 28. 55. Ibid., p. 20. 56. Ibid., p. 22. 57. Monthly Review, 78 (1788), 137–40. 58. Critical Review, 64 (1787), 149–50. 59. Roscoe, Wrongs of Africa, p. 2. 60. See: Joan Baum, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1994); Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001); Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 61. The Prelude (1805) in William Wordsworth [selected poems], ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), X, p. 212. 62. See Wordsworth’s sonnets ‘To Toussaint l’Ouverture’ (1802) and ‘To Thomas Clarkson, on the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. March 1807’ (1807). 63. The Prelude (1805), X, pp. 218–26. 64. An English translation by Stephen Marsh is now available in Basker, pp. 446–9. 65. Words and music are reproduced in Burns: Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 515. 66. John Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition; Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America; from the Year 1772 to 1777 (London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796). 67. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 230–9 and Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 87–140.

208 Notes 68. James King and Charles Ryskamp, eds, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–1986), III, p. 103. 69. William Cowper, Charity, pp. 123–243. 70. William Cowper, The Task, II, pp. 1–47. 71. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, pp. 186–9, passim. 72. For a good general introduction, see Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and Other Ephemera (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973). 73. King and Ryskamp, eds, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, III, p. 130. 74. For example, several versions were printed and sold by the well-known printer of broadside ballads and chapbooks, John Pitts, from his shop in Covent Garden. For more information on Pitts, see Leslie Shepard, John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials, London, 1765–1844, with a Short Account of His Predecessors in the Ballad and Chapbook Trade (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969). 75. This ballad, and many of the ballads quoted in the following pages, exist as slip songs or broadsheets in collections at the British Library and elsewhere. 76. King and Ryskamp, eds, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, III, p. 127. 77. ‘A Selection of Hymns, Odes, and Anthems as Sung at the Methodist Chapels’ (Norwich: Lane & Walker, n.d. [c.1820]), cit. Norma Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper to 1837 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1963), p. 151. 78. Gentleman’s Magazine, 58, II (July–December 1788), 1008–9. 79. Robert Southey, The Life and Works of William Cowper, 15 vols (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1835–1837), II, p. 369. 80. King and Ryskamp, eds, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, III, p. 137. 81. Ibid., p. 131n. Ryskamp again argues that no tune for the poem can be established in the commentary to his now standard edition of the poems. See III, pp. 285–6. 82. William Chappell, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time: A History of the Ancient Songs, Ballads, and of the Dance Tunes of England, with Numerous Anecdotes and Entire Ballads, 2 vols (London: Chappell & Co., 1859), I, p. 227. 83. The word ‘ludicrous’ could mean ‘witty’ in a non-pejorative sense in the late eighteenth century. The OED cites a letter by Cowper as an example of this usage. 84. These versions are preserved in Wit and Mirth. An Antidote against Melancholy. Compounded of Ingenious and Witty Ballads, Songs, and Catches, and Other Pleasant and Merry Poems, 3rd edn (London: Henry Playford, 1682), pp. 21–7. The book is better known by its running title Pills to Purge Melancholy.

4 ‘Read This, and Blush’: The pamphlet war of the 1780s 1. English Short Title Catalogue On-line. 2. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 146–9. 3. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 317.

Notes 209 4. George Fox, Gospel Family-Order, Being a Short Discourse Concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks and Indians (London, n.p., 1676), p. 16. 5. John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (London: J. Buckland & J. Johnson, 1788), p. 1. 6. [John Newton] An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of ********, Communicated in a Series of Letters to the Reverend Mr Haweis (London: J. Johnson, 1764), p. 192. 7. Anthony Benezet, A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions (Philadelphia: Henry Miller, 1766), published the following year in London, and Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of its Inhabitants. With An Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its Nature, and Lamentable Effects (Philadelphia, 1771), published the following year in England (London: W. Owen and E. & C. Dilly, 1772). 8. Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men in England (London: Benjamin White & Robert Horsfield, 1769). 9. John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (London: R. Hawes, 1774). 10. See George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937) for biography and for reprints of many of the letters. 11. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782), ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 164. 12. For biography, see Folarin Shyllon, James Ramsay: The Unknown Abolitionist (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1977). 13. Bob Tennant, ‘Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus’s Antislavery Sermon’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 158–74, p. 162. 14. David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 208n. 15. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London: J. Phillips, 1784), pp. 198–201. 16. Ibid., pp. 64–101. 17. Ibid., p. 19. 18. Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), II, p. 32. 19. Ramsay, Essay, pp. 104–5. 20. An Answer to the Reverend James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves, in the British Sugar Colonies. By Some Gentlemen of St. Christopher (Basseterre, St. Christopher: Edward L. Low, 1784), p. ii. 21. Ramsay, Essay, pp. 246–53. 22. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), II, pp. 338–41. For a more detailed analysis of Addison’s story and its subsequent appropriation by abolitionists, see Brycchan Carey, ‘ “Accounts of Savage Nations”: The Spectator and the Americas’, in Uncommon Reflections: Emerging Discourses in ‘The Spectator’, ed. Don Newman (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 129–49.

210 Notes 23. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 143. 24. The first edition was: Guillaume Raynal, Histoire Philosophique et Politique Des établissemens et du Commerce des Européans dans les deux Indes, 8 vols (La Haye: n.p., 1774). The ‘two lovers’ section is at V, pp. 274–5. The first English edition was A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. Translated from the French of the Abbé Raynal, trans. J. Justamond, 4 vols (London: Thomas Cadell, 1776). The edition Sypher uses is ‘revised, augmented, and published in ten volumes’ (London: A. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1788). The ‘two lovers’ and the ‘Quashi’ stories appear at VI, pp. 308–11. 25. Ramsay, Essay, p. 253. 26. Ibid., pp. 253–4. 27. Ibid., p. 254. 28. Ibid., pp. 255–7. 29. Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 131. 30. Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 (1756), 205. 31. Monthly Review, 70 ( June 1784), 413. 32. Ramsay, Essay, pp. 292–3. 33. Monthly Review, 70, p. 418. 34. Gentleman’s Magazine, 54, II (1784), 597. 35. Clarkson, History, I, p. 103. 36. Monthly Review, 78, p. 160. 37. Obituary of James Tobin in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 87, II (1817), 562. 38. James Tobin, Cursory Remarks upon the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay (London: G. & T. Wilkie, 1785), pp. 4–5. 39. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 18. 40. Gentleman’s Magazine, 59, I (1789), 334. 41. Tobin, Cursory Remarks, pp. 90–1. 42. Ibid., p. 92. 43. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, pp. 19–20. 44. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann (Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 235–51, pp. 250–1. 45. James Ramsay, A Reply to the Personal Invectives and Objections Contained in Two Answers, Published by Certain Anonymous Persons, to an Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies (London: J. Phillips, 1785), p. 92. 46. James Tobin, A Short Rejoinder to the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Reply: With a Word or Two on Some Other Publications of the Same Tendency (London: E. Easton, 1787), p. 66. 47. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 330–2. 48. Oxoniensis, ‘A Poor Sweep’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 58, I (1788), 155. 49. Jonas Hanway, A Sentimental History of the Chimney Sweepers, in London and Westminster (London: Dodsley & Sewell, 1785), pp. xxvi–xxvii.

Notes 211 50. ‘Review of An Appeal to the Humane, on Behalf of the Most Deplorable Class of Society, the Climbing Boys Employed by the Chimney Sweepers. By J.P. Andrews’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 58, I (1788), 151. The book itself was published by John Stockdale in 1788. 51. David Porter, Considerations on the Present State of Chimney Sweepers, with Some Observations on the Act of Parliament Intended for their Regulation and Relief; with Proposals for their Further Relief (London: T. Burton, 1792), pp. 12–13. 52. John Rotheram, ‘Review of Andrews, An Appeal to the Humane’, Monthly Review, 78 (1788), 260–1. 53. ‘Rachel Weeping for her Children’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 56 (1786), 724–5. 54. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 22 March 1788. 55. Ibid., 29 March 1788. 56. Hanway, Sentimental History, p. 43. 57. Gordon Turnbull, Letters to a Young Planter; or, Observations on the Management of a Sugar-plantation (London: Stuart & Stevenson, 1785). 58. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, p. 333. 59. James Grainger, The Sugar Cane (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1764), IV, pp. 159–76, here as quoted in Gordon Turnbull, An Apology for Negro Slavery (London: Stuart & Stevenson, 1786), pp. 61–2. 60. Ibid., IV, pp. 232–8. 61. Turnbull, Apology, pp. 63–4. 62. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, Translated from a Latin Dissertation, Which was Honoured with the First Prize in the University of Cambridge, for the Year 1785 (London: T. Cadell & J. Phillips, 1786), p. xxv. 63. Peter Peckard, Am I not a Man? and a Brother? With all Humility Addressed To The British Legislature (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1788) and Justice and Mercy Recommended, Particularly with Reference to the SLAVE TRADE. A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1788). 64. Anne Liceat Invitos in Servitutem Dare? Apart from the question itself, the original Latin essay has been lost. 65. Clarkson, Essay, p. 2. 66. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 226–7. 67. Clarkson, Essay, pp. 117–18. 68. Ibid., pp. 118–19. 69. Ibid., p. 124. 70. Ibid., pp. 125–7. 71. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 41. 72. Vincent Carretta, ‘Introduction’ to Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, p. xxii. 73. Henri Baptiste Grégoire (Abbé Grégoire), An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes; Followed with an Account of the Life and Works of Fifteen Negroes and Mulattoes Distinguished in Science, Literature and the Arts, trans. D.B. Warden (Brooklyn: Thomas Kirk, 1810), p. 342. 74. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, pp. 9–10. The biblical text is Job 30:25. 75. Ibid., p. 15.

212 Notes 76. Keith A. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in EighteenthCentury Afro-English Writing (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), p. 97. 77. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, p. 15. 78. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, pp. 47–8. 79. Ibid., p. 51. 80. Ibid., p. 52. 81. Ibid., p. 52n. 82. S.E. Ogude, ‘Facts into Fiction: Equiano’s Narrative Reconsidered’, Research in African Literatures, 13 (Spring 1982), 31–43, p. 32. 83. Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity’, Slavery and Abolition, 20 (December 1999), 96–105, p. 103.

5 Feeling out loud: Sentimental rhetoric in Parliament, the pulpit, and the court of law 1. For a survey of the critical literature, see Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, ‘Revising the Study of the English Sermon’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 2–21. 2. The most important book examining sermons along literary lines is James Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit: A Study of the Sermons of Butler, Berkeley, Secker, Sterne, Whitefield and Wesley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Most historical work on the eighteenth-century political sermon is contained in short articles. See: Henry P. Ippel, ‘British Sermons and the American Revolution’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1982), 191–205; Gerd Mischler, ‘English Political Sermons 1714–1742: A Case Study in the Theory of the “Divine Right of Governors” and the Ideology of Order’, British Journal for Eighteenthcentury Studies, 24, 1 (2001), 33–61; Bob Tennant, ‘Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus’s Antislavery Sermon’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 158–74. 3. Elie Halévy, England in 1815 (1912), trans. E.I. Watkin and D.A. Barker, 5 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd, 1924) especially I, pp. 371–4, argues that ‘Methodist conservatism’ prevented Britain from experiencing political revolution. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963) shows the centrality of Methodist and other dissenting churches to the development of working-class political culture. 4. Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit, p. 133. 5. ‘Sermon X: Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, Considered’, Sermons of Mr Yorick, 2 vols (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1760), II, pp. 73–105. 6. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782), ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 74. 7. The following discussion is a revised and abridged version of my article, ‘John Wesley’s “Thoughts Upon Slavery” and the Language of the Heart’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 86, 3 (Autumn 2004), 269–84. 8. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 36.

Notes 213 9. Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., Bicentenary Issue, 8 vols, ed. Nehemiah Curnock (London: Epworth Press, 1938), V, p. 445. 10. John Wesley, ‘Sermon II: The Almost Christian. Preached at St Mary’s, Oxford, Before the University on July 25, 1741’, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, 2 vols, ed. Edward H. Sugden (London: Epworth Press, 1921), I, pp. 53–67, p. 62. 11. References to slavery occur throughout Wesley’s journals. For a synthesis, see V.H.H. Green, John Wesley (London and New York: University Press of America, 1987), p. 156 and John Pollock, Wesley the Preacher (Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 2000), pp. 240–3. 12. Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of its Inhabitants. With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its Nature and Lamentable Effects. Also a Republication of the Sentiments of Several Authors of Note on this Interesting Subject: Particularly an Extract of a Treatise Written by Granville Sharp (London: W. Owen and E. & C. Dilly, 1772). 13. George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), p. 291. 14. Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq. Composed from His Own Manuscripts, and Other Authentic Documents (London: Henry Colburn, 1820), p. 185. 15. Wesley, Journal, V, p. 446. 16. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 101. 17. Ibid., VII, pp. 359–60. 18. Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 8 vols, ed. John Telford (London: Epworth Press, 1931), VIII, p. 7. 19. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet, p. 84. 20. John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (London: R. Hawes, 1774), p. 16. 21. Ibid., p. 20. 22. Ibid., p. 33. 23. Ibid., p. 53, and Wesley, Journal, VII, pp. 359–60. 24. Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery, pp. 46–7. 25. Beilby Porteus, ‘Sermon XVII. The civilization, improvement, and conversion of the Negro slaves in the British West-India islands recommended. Preached before the incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, February 23. 1783’, The Works of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D. Late Bishop of London: With His Life, by the Rev. Robert Hodgson, A.M. F.R.S. Rector of St. George’s Hanover-Square, and One of the Chaplains in Ordinary to His Majesty. A New Edition, in Six Volumes (London: T. Cadell, 1823), II, pp. 391–428, pp. 398–9. 26. Ibid., p. 384. 27. Tennant, ‘Sentiment, Politics, and Empire’, p. 167. 28. Porteus, ‘Sermon’, pp. 404–5. 29. Joseph Priestley, A Sermon on the Subject of the Slave Trade; Delivered to a Society of Protestant Dissenters, at the New Meeting in Birmingham; and Published at their Request (Birmingham: printed for the author, 1788), pp. 12n, 16n–17n. 30. Ibid., p. 33. 31. Ibid., p. 1. 32. Critical Review, 65 (1788), 228.

214 Notes 33. James Dore, A Sermon on the African Slave Trade, Preached at Maze-Pond, Southwark, Lord’s Day Afternoon, Nov. 30, 1788 (London: L. Wayland, 1788), p. 12. 34. John Newton, Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (London: J. Buckland & J. Johnson, 1788), p. 18. 35. Dore, Sermon, p. 16. 36. Ibid., p. 24. 37. John Liddon, Cruelty the Natural and Inseparable Consequence of Slavery, and Both Diametrically Opposite to the Doctrine and Spirit of the Christian Religion: Represented in a Sermon, Preached on Sunday, March 11th, 1792, at Hemel-Hempstead, Herts (London: C. Dilly, 1792), pp. 11–13. 38. Ibid., p. 20. The quotation is from Edward Young’s poem The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742), ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Night IV, ll. 639–40. 39. Liddon, Cruelty the Natural and Inseparable Consequence of Slavery, p. 21. 40. Ibid. 41. This section reprints, in a revised form, my article ‘William Wilberforce’s Sentimental Rhetoric: Parliamentary Reportage and the Abolition Speech of 1789’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 14 (2003), 281–305. 42. Michael MacDonagh, The Reporters’ Gallery (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), pp. 163–4. 43. For detailed discussion of the start of reporting of the House of Commons see Peter D.G. Thomas, ‘The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting in the Newspapers, 1768–1774’, English Historical Review, 74 (1959), 623–36. For the House of Lords see William C. Lowe, ‘Peers and Printers: The Beginnings of Sustained Press Coverage of the House of Lords in the 1770s’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 240–56. 44. Two useful studies are: A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press c. 1780–1850 (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd, 1949), and A. Aspinall, ‘The Reporting and Publishing of the House of Commons Debates 1771–1834’, in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, ed. A.J.P. Taylor and Richard Pares (London: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 227–57. See also: R.R. Rea, The English Press in Politics, 1760–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate, Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978); Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 45. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p. 68. 46. R.I. Wilberforce and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, II, pp. 323–4; III, p. 75. 47. Dror Wahrman, ‘Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and the Languages of Class in the 1790s’, Past and Present, 136 (August 1992), 83–113, p. 85. 48. William Cobbett produced The Parliamentary History of England. From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the Year 1803, 36 vols (London: T. Curson Hansard, 1806–1820) as an independent commercial enterprise, compiling the debates from a variety of sources. The misconception that it is an official account is widespread although, in fact, it was not until 1908 that Hansard became the official, verbatim, record. 49. Ibid., pp. 90–1. 50. Ibid., pp. 108–9.

Notes 215 51. William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (London: T. Cadell, jun. & W. Davies, 1797). It went through 18 English editions between 1797 and 1830. 52. Pollock, p. 145. 53. Wilberforce, Practical View, pp. 282–4. 54. Ibid., p. 247. 55. Ibid., pp. 84–5. The biblical texts are: ‘I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh’ Ezekiel 11:19, repeated at Ezekiel 36:26. ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth’. Revelations 3:16. 56. Wilberforce, Practical View, pp. 51–2. 57. Ibid., pp. 387–8. 58. Parliamentary History, 28 (1789–1791), col. 49. 59. General Evening Post (Tuesday 12 to Thursday 14 May 1789). 60. R.I. Wilberforce & S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, I, p. 220. 61. Ibid., I, pp. 218–19. 62. Substantial extracts from the articles discussed here are available in Carey, ‘William Wilberforce’s Sentimental Rhetoric’, pp. 298–303 and also on-line at . 63. Parliamentary History, 1, ‘Preface’. 64. The Parliamentary Register: or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons: Containing an Account of the Most Interesting Speeches and Motions; Accurate Copies of the Most Remarkable Letters and Papers; of the Most Material Evidence, Petitions, &c. Laid before and Offered to the House, 45 vols (London: J. Almon & J. Debrett, 1781–1796), 26 (1789), 130–54. 65. Parliamentary History, 28, col. 47. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., col. 42. 68. Ibid. 69. Star, 323 (Thursday 14 May 1789). 70. The World, 738 (Wednesday 13 May 1789). 71. Whitehall Evening Post, 6551 (Tuesday 12 May to Thursday 14 May 1789). 72. ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ appeared in issue 6564 (Thursday 11 June–Saturday 13 June 1789); ‘The Morning Dream’ in issue 6569 (Tuesday 23 June to Thursday 25 June 1789). 73. World, 732 (Wednesday 6 May 1789); Whitehall Evening Post, 6546 (Thursday 30 April–Saturday 2 May 1789). 74. Aspinall, pp. 72–3; Dictionary of National Biography. 75. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984). In particular, Chapter 6, ‘Slavery and the Law’, pp. 113–32. 76. Beth Swan, Fictions of Law: An Investigation of the Law in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 11. 77. James Oldham has shown ‘how poor quality reports have created entrenched misinterpretations that have taken decades—indeed, centuries—to undo’. Like Wahrman, Oldham debunks the idea that the records we have are reliable. Unlike Wahrman, Oldham’s main concern is reaching the truth and for this he recommends using manuscript notes of trials taken by judges,

216 Notes

78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

barristers, and others. He concludes that this might ‘present us with a new array of interpretative challenges’. See James Oldham, ‘Detecting Non-Fiction: Sleuthing Among Manuscript Case Reports for What was Really Said’, in Law Reporting in Britain, ed. Chantal Stebbings (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), pp. 133–64, pp. 135, 155. Swan, Fictions of Law, pp. 15–16. The Ferrars trial is reported in Thomas Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 26 vols (London: T.C. Hansard, 1814), XIX, cols 885–980. A considerable historiography has grown up around this case. The most important contributions are: Jerome Nadelhaft, ‘The Somersett Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions’, Journal of Negro History, LI (1966), 193–208; Folarin Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1974), passim, but particularly pp. 77–176; Fryer, pp. 115–26; James Oldham, ‘New light on Mansfield and Slavery’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 45–68; James Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), II, pp. 1221–44. In addition, an account of the case is included in almost every history of the abolition movement. Fryer, Staying Power, p. 125n. ‘Review of Hargrave’s Argument in the Case of James Sommersett’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 43 (1773), 34. Francis Hargrave, An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett a Negro, Lately Determined by the Court of King’s Bench (London: F. Hargrave, 1772), p. 9. The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 15 May 1772. The London Evening Post, 21–23 May 1772. The General Evening Post, 14–16 May 1772. The Westminster Journal and London Political Miscellany, 16–23 May 1772. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 20 May 1772. Howell, State Trials, XX, p. 69. Morning Chronicle, 23–25 June 1772. Isaac Bickerstaffe, The Padlock: A Comic Opera; As it is Perform’d by His Majesty’s Servants, at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, 2nd edn (London: W. Griffin, 1768), p. 11. Mungo was played by Samuel Dibdin, who performed in blackface. Morning Chronicle, 23–25 June 1772. The London Evening Post, 20–23 June 1772. The modern Futa Jalon are a people largely based in central Guinea. Philip D. Curtin, ‘Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu’, in Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 17–59, p. 17. Ibid., cols 1070–1. Cobbett’s version is a slightly altered version of that in the Parliamentary Register, 32 (1792), 154–75. Senator, IV, p. 510, notes that Wilberforce ‘enumerated several instances of cruelty, of which we shall select one’. Their account is nearly identical to that in The Parliamentary History. Star, 1227, Tuesday 3 April 1792. Parliamentary Register, 32, p. 174.

Notes 217 97. The cartoon is reprinted in Mary A. Favret, ‘Flogging: The Antislavery Movement Writes Pornography’, Essays and Studies 1998: Romanticism and Gender, ed. Anne Janowitz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 19–43, p. 20, and in Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 160. It is also widely available on the Internet. 98. Favret, ‘Flogging’, pp. 24–5. 99. Wood, Blind Memory, pp. 160–1. 100. Favret, ‘Flogging’, p. 39. 101. The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Supposed Murder of an African Girl, at the Admiralty Sessions, before the Hon. Sir James Marriot KNT. (Judge Advocate) and Sir William Ashurst, KNT. &c. on Thursday June 7, 1792. Of Which He was Most Honorably Acquitted, and the Two Evidences for the Prosecution Committed to Newgate to Take their Trials for Wilful and Corrupt Perjury (London: William Lane, 1792), p. 15. Another account, supposedly of ‘the whole of the proceedings’, published by Rivington and taken down shorthand by E. Hodgson, was advertised in The Public Advertiser on 14 June 1792, but no copies appear to have survived (ESTC). 102. The London Chronicle, Friday 8 June 1792. 103. The Trial of Captain John Kimber, pp. 40–2. 104. R.I. Wilberforce & S. Wilberforce, Life, I, p. 357.

6 Conclusion: Romanticism, revolution, and William Wilberforce’s unregarded tears 1. A Very New Pamphlet Indeed! Being the Truth: Addressed to the People at Large. Containing Some Strictures on the English Jacobins, and the Evidence of Lord M’Cartney, and Others, Before the House of Lords, Respecting the Slave Trade (London: n.p., 1792), pp. 3–4. Thomas Cooper (1759–1839) was a lawyer who went as a democratic envoy to Paris in 1792 for which he was attacked by Burke and others (DNB). 2. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), ed. George Birkbeck Hill, revised L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), III, p. 200. 3. Lennox Honychurch, The Dominica Story: A History of the Island, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995). See especially pp. 49–103. 4. Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1492–1995, rev. edn (New York: University Press of America, 1996), p. 43. The classic account remains; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), 3rd edn (London: Allison & Busby, 1980). See also Thomas Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1973). 5. A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo, which began in August, 1791; being a Translation of the Speech made to the National Assembly, the 3rd November, 1791, by the Deputies from the General Assembly on the French part of St. Domingo (London: T. Boosey, 1792), p. 7. 6. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 7. Ibid., p. 11.

218 Notes 8. Henry Redhead, A Letter to Bache Heathcote, Esq. on the Fatal Consequences of Abolishing the Slave Trade, both to England, and her American Colonies (London: John Stockdale, 1792), p. 77. 9. Star, Monday 2 April 1792. 10. James Gillray, Philanthropic Consolations After the Loss of the Slave-Bill. 4 April 1796, in Draper Hill, Fashionable Contrasts: Caricatures by James Gillray (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), plate 17. 11. Patrick Medd, Romilly: A Life of Sir Samuel Romilly, Lawyer and Reformer (London: Collins, 1968), p. 165. 12. Morning Chronicle, 11, 786, 24 February 1807. 13. Robert Isaac and Samuel Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols (London: John Murray, 1838), III, p. 297. 14. Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), pp. 574–5. 15. A excellent introduction to the Anti-Jacobin, but one that clearly displays the critical disjuncture between ‘sentimentalists’ and ‘Romanticists’, is Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?’ Romanticism on the Net, 15 (1999), accessed 31 May 2004, . 16. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 147. 17. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ (1802), in William Wordsworth [selected poems], ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 595–615, p. 598. 18. Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 43. 19. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 190–1. 20. Ibid., p. 221. 21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’, in Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann (Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 235–51. 22. Dierdre Coleman, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s’, ELH, 61 (1994), 341–62. 23. Coleridge, ‘Lecture’, p. 242. 24. Coleman, ‘Conspicuous Consumption’, p. 345; Coleridge, ‘Lecture’, p. 240. Carl Wadström, An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa, with Some Free Thoughts on Cultivation and Commerce; also Brief Descriptions of the Colonies already Formed, or Attempted [. . .] in Africa, Including those of Sierra Leone and Bulama (London: Darton & Harvey, 1794). See, in particular, Ch. 2. 25. Coleridge, ‘Lecture’, p. 246. 26. Ibid., p. 249. 27. The Antislavery Album: Selections in Verse from Cowper, Hannah More, Montgomery, Pringle, and Others (London: Howlett & Brimmer, 1828). 28. [Elizabeth Coltman], Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women (Leicester: A. Cockshaw, 1828), p. 3.

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Bibliography 229 Tennant, Bob, ‘Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus’s Antislavery Sermon’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 158–74. Thomas, Helen, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London: Picador, 1997). Thomas, Peter D.G., ‘The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting in the Newspapers, 1768–1774’, English Historical Review, 74 (1959), 623–36. Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963). Tobin, James, Cursory Remarks upon the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay (London: G. & T. Wilkie, 1785). ——, A Short Rejoinder to the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Reply: With a Word or Two on Some Other Publications of the Same Tendency (London: E. Easton, 1787). Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986). The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Supposed Murder of an African Girl, at the Admiralty Sessions, before the Hon. Sir James Marriot KNT. (Judge Advocate) and Sir William Ashurst, KNT. &c. on Thursday June 7, 1792. Of Which He was Most Honorably Acquitted, and the Two Evidences for the Prosecution Committed to Newgate to take their Trials for Wilful and Corrupt Perjury (London: William Lane, 1792). Turnbull, Gordon, Letters to a Young Planter; or, Observations on the Management of a Sugar-Plantation (London: Stuart & Stevenson, 1785). ——, An Apology for Negro Slavery (London: Stuart & Stevenson, 1786). Van Sant, Ann Jessie, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Vickers, Brian, ‘The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment’, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth, Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985). ——, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Wadström, Carl, An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa, with Some Free Thoughts on Cultivation and Commerce; also Brief Descriptions of the Colonies already Formed, or Attempted [. . .] in Africa, Including those of Sierra Leone and Bulama (London: Darton & Harvey, 1794). Wahrman, Dror, ‘Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and the Languages of Class in the 1790s’, Past and Present, 136 (August 1992). Walvin, James, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1973). Wesley, John, Thoughts Upon Slavery (London: R. Hawes, 1774). ——, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, ed. Edward H. Sugden, 2 vols (London: Epworth Press, 1921). ——, Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 8 vols, ed. John Telford (London: Epworth Press, 1931). ——, Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., Bicentenary Issue, 8 vols, ed. Nehemiah Curnock (London: Epworth Press, 1938). The Westminster Journal and London Political Miscellany.

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Index Aberdeenshire, 32 Abolition Society, 73, 86, 88, 89, 92, 100, 102, 103, 105, 133, 149, 154, 156, 186 abolitionism after 1805, 190–2 and gender, 12, 41, 47–8 historical explanations for success of, 9–13, 111, 135–6 and literary criticism, 11–13, 46–50 origins, 9–13, 107–9 and sensibility, 1–2, 9, 11, 46, 90–1, 195–6 see also Abolition Society; amelioration; emancipation; slavery; slave trade, history of ad populam arguments, 42 Addison, Joseph, 114 Africa, 4, 48, 67, 69, 70, 77, 83–4, 93, 132–3, 140, 148, 149–50 see also individual countries by name Africanism, 4, 133 Africans in Great Britain, 12, 60, 69, 75–6, 178–9 literary representations of, 69–71, 73–4, 77, 85, 86–7, 113, 117, 125, 129, 133–6, 149–50, 171, 178–9, 194 self representation, 137, 139, 142 Almon, John, 164 altruism, 30 amelioration, 11, 53, 65–6, 67, 107–8, 118, 122, 129, 152–3 America, 60, 69, 80, 81–2, 179 see also individual states by name; United States Amis des Noirs, lesson, 89 Andrews, James Pettit, 125 Anglicanism, 47, 109, 110, 141, 146, 151–3 animal welfare, 69 Anti-Jacobin, The, 5, 192

Anstey, Roger, 10 Antigua, 172 antislavery, see abolitionism Antislavery Album, The, 96, 195 Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women, 195 Argentina, 69, 70 argument, sentimental, see rhetoric of sensibility Aristotle, 22, 24, 26, 37, 39 Armstrong, Nancy, 7 arrangement, 43–4 Austen, Jane, 5 Austria, 127 Bacon, Francis, 26 balladry, 99–105 Barbados, 116–17, 151, 153 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 4, 7 Barthes, Roland, 6 Basker, James, 205n3, n7 Beattie, James, 62 Behn, Aphra, 50 see also Oroonoko benevolence, see philanthropy Benezet, Anthony, 108, 109, 131, 147–8, 149, 193 Bickerstaff, Isaac, The Padlock, 178 Bicknell, John, 15, 73, 75–80, 83, 98, 179 see also Day, Thomas Birmingham, 153 Blackburn, Robin, 12–13 ‘Blacksmith, The’, 105 Blair, Hugh, 14, 32, 35–6 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 35–6 Blake, William, 96, 97–8 blushes, 8, 94, 118 Boston (Massachusetts), 61, 175 Boswell, James, 92, 187 Boulukos, George, 11 Braudy, Leo, 6 231

232 Index Brewer, John, 19 ‘Brewer, The’, 105 Bridgetown, 116–17 Brissenden, R.F., 6, 8 Bristol, 47, 91, 97, 120, 126–7, 149, 151, 193 Brooke, Henry, 147 Brookes, George, 149 Brown, Laura, 52, 201n50, 203n26, 204n51 Browne, Charles, 59 Brudenell, George, see Montagu, George, 1st Duke of the Second Creation Buenos Aires, 69 Burke, Edmund, 14, 29–31, 43, 44, 53, 132, 136, 137, 217n1 A Philosophical Enquiry, 29–31, 43, 44, 132 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 43 Burns, Robert, 96, 97 Butler, Samuel, 25 ‘By the rivers of Babylon’, 166 Cambridge, 131 Canning, George, 5, 192 captatio benevolentiae, 131 Carey, Brycchan, 203n30, 209n22 Carretta, Vincent, 62, 137, 142, 204n45, n47 Chappell, William, 104 charity, see philanthropy Charles I, 105 Chavannes, Jean-Baptiste, 188 children, 68, 124–7, 138, 140–1, 154 chimney sweeps, 124–7 Christ, see Jesus Christ Christianity, 10, 21, 79, 83–4, 91, 119, 134–5, 137, 138, 145–56, 160–2 see also individual denominations by name Church of England, see Anglicanism Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 22, 24, 33–4, 37, 44 Civil War (English), 104, 145 Clapham, 12 Clarence, William, Duke of, 183

Clarkson, Thomas, 10, 15, 97, 108, 111, 119, 130–7, 139, 186, 190, 192, 193 Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, 130–7; and the sublime, 132, 136–7; and sympathy, 131–2; as neoclassical rhetoric, 131, 136; as sentimental rhetoric, 133–7; representation of Africa, 133 coal miners, see miners Cobbett, William, 159, 164, 166, 169, 172, 173, 174, 180, 214n48 coffee, 193 Coleman, Deirdre, 193–4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16, 39, 96, 97, 108, 123, 192, 193–5 ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’, 16, 39, 123, 193–5 Colley, Linda, 148 colonial discourse, 3–4, 49 colonialism, 3–4, 49, 190–1 Coltman, Elizabeth, 218n28 An Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women, 195 commerce, 19–20, 67, 190 see also economics Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, see Abolition Society Committee for the Relief of Black Poor, 69 conduct literature, 19–20 Cooper, Thomas, 186, 217n1 Covent Garden, 208n74 Cowper, Spencer, 102 Cowper, William, 15, 38, 74, 98–106, 172 Charity, 98–9 ‘Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce’, 102–5 ‘The Flatting Mill’, 99, 102 ‘The Morning Dream’, 102, 215n72 ‘The Negro’s Complaint’, 74, 100–2, 215n72 The Task, 98–9 Crew, Frances, 61–3 Critical Review, The, 51, 79, 95–6, 154 Cromwell, Oliver, 105

Index 233 Cruikshank, Isaac, The Abolition of Slavery, 181–3, 184 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, 13, 15, 121, 123, 137–9, 140 Currie, James, 73 Curtin, Philip, 179 Davis, David Brion, 10–11, 12, 107 Davy, William, 177 Day, Thomas, 15, 38, 47, 68–71, 73, 75–84, 98, 105, 179 Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes, 81–2 Sandford and Merton, 68–71; sentimental rhetoric in, 69–71; structure and composition, 68–9 The Dying Negro, 73, 75–84, 179; authorship, 75, 83; editions, 75, 80, 82–4; reviews, 79; sentimental rhetoric in, 76–9, 84 decline theory, 10 deliberative rhetoric, 23, 145, 156 Demers, Patricia, 87 demonstrative rhetoric, 23, 145 Desagulier, John Theophilus, 179 Devereux, Stephen, 183, 184 Dha, Diagola, see Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman dialect, 24 Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman, 179 Dibdin, Samuel, 216n90 discovered manuscripts, 62, 64 diversion, sentimental, see rhetoric of sensibility Dominica, 187–8 Donne, John, 145 Dore, James, A Sermon on the African Slave Trade, 154–5 Dorset, 51 Dowling, Thomas, 183, 184 Downey, James, 146 drama, 46, 50, 86, 178–9, 192 Drescher, Seymour, 10 Drummond, Robert Hay, 148 Dundas, Henry, 186, 191 Dwyer, John, 6

economics, 8, 10–11, 64–6, 80 see also commerce Edgeworth, Honora, 68 Edgeworth, Maria, 68 Edgeworth, Richard, 68 Edinburgh, 21, 32 Edwards, Paul, 57 Elias, Norbert, 199n4 Eliot, T.S., 6 Ellis, Markman, 7, 11, 49, 52, 53, 55, 61, 64, 65, 147, 192 elocution, 24 emancipation, 58, 173, 176 emotional subversion of the intellect, see rhetoric of sensibility emotions, 31, 36, 37, 40, 55–7 see also blushes; pathos; rhetoric of sensibility; sensibility; sympathy; tears empathy, 40, 50 see also sympathy empire, see colonialism Enfield, William, 93, 95 England, 24, 27, 76 English literature (as an academic discipline), 21 enthymemes, 26, 39 epideictic rhetoric, 40 Equiano, Olaudah, 13, 15, 60, 124, 127, 137, 139–42, 147 identity and birthplace, 142 Interesting Narrative, 139–42 Erämetsä, Eric, 45 ethos, see rhetoric; rhetoric of sensibility evangelicalism, 21, 139, 145, 160 faculties of rhetoric, 23–4 Falconar, Harriet, 21 Falconar, Maria, 21 Farnaby, Thomas, 24, 32 Favret, Mary, 182 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 126–7 Ferguson, Moira, 11, 12, 47–8, 49, 52, 85, 87 Ferrars, Lawrence Shirley, 4th Earl, 175 Fielding, Henry, 40 figures of speech (tropes), see rhetoric Foota, 179

234 Index forensic rhetoric, see rhetoric For Lord Mayor’s Day 1754, 104–5 Forster, E.M., 6 Foucault, Michel, 3 Fox, George, 107 France, 7, 43, 60, 97, 186–7, 188, 190 French Revolution, 7, 43, 89, 97, 186–8 Frye, Northrop, 6 Fryer, Peter, 12, 173 Futa Jalon, 216n92 Gambia, 70 General Advertiser, The, 59 General Evening Post, The, 162–3, 168, 173, 177 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 15, 79, 88–92, 102, 116, 119, 122, 124, 125, 127, 157, 176 changes position on slavery, 88–9, 127 proslavery essays in, 90–1, 122 Georgia, 147 georgic, 129 Gillray, James, 190 Glasgow, 32 Glover, Richard, 100 Goldsmith, Oliver, 41, 152 Good Samaritan, see parables Gorgias, 24 Gothic literature, 45 Gough, Richard, 89, 119 see also Gentleman’s Magazine, The government, see Great Britain Grainger, James, The Sugar Cane, 128–9 Great Britain, 12 Africans in, 12, 60, 69 government, 27, 100, 158, 171, 172 slaves in, 12, 75–6, 173–4, 175–6 see also England; Parliament; Scotland; Wales ‘Greensleeves’, 104 Gregoire, Henri Baptiste, Abbé, 137–8 Grenada, 127 Griffiths, Ralph, 66 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw, 61 Guinea, 216n92

Habermas, Jurgen, 8 Haiti, Republic of, 188 see also San Domingo Halévy, Elie, 145 Hammon, Briton, 61 Hansard, 144, 157, 214n48 Hanway, Jonas, A Sentimental History of the Chimney Sweepers, 124–5, 127 Hargrave, Francis, 176–7 Harrow, Sharon, 201n55 Hawkesworth, John, 91 Hemel Hempstead, 155 Hepburn, John, 107 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 114 heroes, sentimental, see rhetoric of sensibility Hertford, Frances Seymour, Countess of, 47 Hesketh, Lady Halliot, 98 Hey, William, 191 Holmes, John, 22, 32 Holmes, Sherlock, 23 Hosier, Francis, 100 ‘Hosier’s Ghost’, 100 Howell, Thomas, 174, 175 Howell, Wilbur, 26, 28, 29 Hull, 190 Hume, David, 6, 14, 27–9, 30, 31, 35, 44, 81, 110, 137, 162 ‘Of Eloquence’, 27–9, 44 ‘Of National Characters’, 110 ‘On the Standard of Taste’, 35 Ireland, 24, 47 Islam, 148–9, 179 Jacobins, 186–7 Jamaica, 51, 68, 110, 175, 187 James, C.L.R., 12 Jekyll, Joseph, 203n30 jeremiad, 137 Jesus Christ, 19, 77, 79, 98, 152, 154, 155 Johnson, Samuel, 4–5, 22, 80, 157, 187 Dictionary of the English Language, 4–5, 22 Johnston, Kenneth, 218n15 Jones, Chris, 4, 7, 192–3

Index 235 Kent, 88 Kimber, John, 145, 180–5, 186, 190 in Cruikshank’s cartoon, 181–3 named in Parliament, 180, 186 trial for murder, 183–5 King, James, 103 Langford, Paul, 19 lap dogs, 52, 54–6 latitudinarianism, 145 Laughter, Thomas, 183, 184 law, 75–6, 80–1, 108, 144, 148–9, 157, 173–84 see also legal cases Lecky, W.E.H., 10 Leeds, 191 legal cases difficulty reconstructing, 174–5, 215n77 Kimber case, 145, 183–5 and sentiment, 177–9 Sommersett case, 15, 52, 76, 80–1, 108, 145, 148–9, 175–9, 215n79 State Trials, 174, 177 see also law Lewis, Matthew, 45 Liddon, John, Cruelty the natural and inseparable consequence of slavery, 155–6 Liverpool, 94, 164 Locke, John, 14, 25–7, 30 Essay concerning Human Understanding, 25–7 logos, see rhetoric London, 61, 69, 109, 155, 191 London Chronicle, The, 183 London Evening Post, The, 176, 179 Louis XVI, 190 MacDonagh, Michael, 157 McGann, Jerome, 4, 192, 197n8 Mackenzie, Henry, 6, 8, 14, 41, 47, 63, 64–7, 71, 122 Julia de Roubigné, 64–7; as abolitionist text, 64–6; critical studies, 64–5; sentimental rhetoric in, 66–7

Review of the Principal Proceedings of... 1784, 65 The Man of Feeling, 8, 41, 64 man of feeling, 11, 33, 34, 40–1, 51, 67, 110, 130, 168, 173 see also heroes, sentimental Mann, Peter, 193 Manning, Susan, 204n53 Mansfield, William Murray, first Earl of, 15, 76, 80–1, 149, 175–6, 177, 179 see also law; Sharp, Granville; Sommersett, James Marie-Antoinette, 43 Maroons, 187, 188 Martinique, 64 Maryland, 179 Mellor, Anne, 8, 12, 47 Meredith, George, 6 Methodism, 47, 101, 108, 139, 145, 148, 212n3 see also Wesley, John Mickle, William Julius, 62 middle passage, 101, 141, 164–6 Middlesex, 157 Middleton, Sir Charles, 109 Midgley, Clare, 12 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 93 miners, 124, 125, 127–8 Montagu, George, 1st Duke of the Second Creation, 1 Montgomery, James, 96 Monthly Review, The, 51, 66, 79, 93, 95, 118–19, 125 More, Hannah, 15, 39, 74, 84–8, 92, 93, 96, 105, 114, 159 Cheap Repository Tracts, 86 Sensibility, a poem, 39, 87 Slavery, a poem, 39, 74, 84–8, 93; critical studies, 87; sentimental rhetoric in, 85–8 Morning Chronicle, The, 176, 177–9, 191 Morning Herald, The, 184 Morning Star, The, 164, 168–70, 172, 173 Mullan, John, 6, 8 Murray, William, first Earl of Mansfield, see Mansfield, William Murray, first Earl of music, 99–101

236 Index neoclassical rhetoric, see rhetoric Nevis, 120 new rhetoric, 18, 24–5 newspapers, 59–60, 61, 74, 75–6, 100, 126–7, 157–9, 162–4, 168–72, 174, 176–9, 191 see also individual titles Newton, John, 100, 108, 109, 154 Nichols, John, 89 see also Gentleman’s Magazine, The Nickolls, Robert Boucher, 88 noble savage, see primitivism Norris, Robert, 164–5 Nussbaum, Felicity, 8, 11 Official Record, The, see Hansard Ogé, Vincent, 188 Ogude, S.E., 142 Oldham, James, 215n77 orientalism, 3–4 Oroonoko, 50, 86, 88, 91, 179 Oxford, 187 Paine, Thomas, 186 parables parable of the captain, 166, 169–71, 193 parable of the Good Samaritan, 40, 130, 153, 155 sentimental, see rhetoric of sensibility paradigm, 26, 39 Parliament, 42, 43, 44, 65, 144, 157–8, 162, 166, 180, 186, 191 parliamentary debates, 42, 144, 156–73, 179–81, 191 conditions under which they were reported, 156, 158 difficulty in reconstructing, 144, 156, 158–9, 164 legality of reporting, 157 see also Hansard; individual members of parliament; individual titles of journals and newspapers Parliamentary History, The, 162, 164, 168, 174, 181, 191 Parliamentary Register, The, 164 pathos, see rhetoric; rhetoric of sensibility

Patton, Lewis, 193 Peckard, Peter, 131 Pennsylvania, 108 Philadelphia, 109 philanthropy, 5, 19–21, 38, 41, 51, 69, 95–6, 112, 116–18, 123, 125–7, 129–30, 138, 152, 154, 166, 173, 194 see also altruism Pills to Purge Melancholy, 208n84 Pitt, William, the younger, 65, 156, 172 Pitts, John, 208n74 pornography, 13, 98, 181–3 Porteus, Beilby, 16, 109, 151–3, 163 Porto Bello, 100 Potkay, Adam, 28 Pratt, Samuel Jackson, 114 Priestley, Joseph, 16, 88, 153–4 primitivism, 48, 67, 70, 77, 85, 93, 179 Prince of Angola, The, 88 Pringle, Thomas, 96 proofs, rhetorical, see rhetoric; rhetoric of sensibility proslavery, 11, 38, 88–92, 107, 119–30, 186–7 Public Advertiser, The, 124, 127, 217n101 Quakers, 47, 107, 108, 147–8 Quashi, 113–15, 121 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 22, 24 race, 38, 55, 70, 71 see also racial ideology Rachel, Joseph, 115–17, 121 racial ideology, 55, 71, 101, 125, 129, 177 see also race Rack, Edmund, 61–2, 63 Radcliffe, Ann, 45 Rae, John, 31, 35 Ramsay, James, 15, 52, 53, 88, 108, 109–19, 120–3, 127, 130, 132, 139, 142 Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves, 109–19, 120–3; attacked by James Tobin, 120–3; rejects false sentiment, 111–12; reviews of, 118–19, 130;

Index 237 sentimental parables in, 113–17; style and structure, 110 Reply to the Personal Invectives and Objections, 120, 123 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, Abbé, 114 Recovery, The, 180, 181 red herrings, see diversion, sentimental Redhead, Henry, 189–90 rejection of false sensibility, see rhetoric of sensibility; sensibility rhetoric ad populam arguments, 42 captatio benevolentiae, 131 definitions, 22 deliberative, 23, 145, 156 demonstrative, 23, 145 elocution, 24 epideictic, 40 faculties of, 23–4 figures of speech (tropes), 21–2, 23, 32–3, 43–4, 45 forensic, 23, 37, 40, 145, 173 neoclassical, 22–4, 28, 32, 36–7, 42, 43–4, 131, 138, 145 new, 18, 24–5 proofs, 23, 25, 26–7, 29, 31, 33, 36–7, 39, 40–1; enthymemes, 26, 39; ethos, 23, 33, 37, 40–1, 176, 183; logos, 23, 26–7, 37, 136, 137; paradigm, 26, 39; pathos, 23, 25, 29, 37, 42, 133, 134, 136, 137–8, 164, 176, 192; syllogism, 26 rules of, 23–4 and science, 26–7, 43, 45 scope, 26 style, 25, 26, 131 textbooks of, 21–4, 26 and the sublime, 44–5 see also rhetoric of sensibility rhetoric of sensibility Adam Smith and, 33–4 arrangement, 43–4 contrasted with neoclassical rhetoric, 44, 131, 138 definitions, 1–2, 18–19 Edmund Burke and, 29–31

emotional subversion of the intellect, 37, 42–3, 56–7, 67, 73–4, 77, 79, 94–5, 102, 112, 123, 139, 140–1, 153, 155, 167–8 Hugh Blair and, 35–6 proofs, 29, 36–7, 40–1, 42, 43, 136; ethos, 40–1; pathos, 29, 37, 42, 43, 136, 164, 192 rejection of false sensibility, 37, 38–9, 55, 56, 73, 74, 86–8, 90–1, 93, 106, 111–12, 139, 160, 166, 167, 194 relationship with abolitionism, 1–2, 9, 46, 48–9, 50, 90–1, 195–6 scope, 9, 18–21 sentimental argument, 37–8, 50, 54, 66–7, 73, 81–2, 85–7, 101–2, 105, 123, 130, 132, 138–9, 151, 152, 154, 195 sentimental diversion, 37, 41–2, 105, 119–20, 121–30, 190 sentimental heroes, 34, 37, 40–1, 50–1, 53, 56, 63, 70–1, 73, 76, 78, 94, 101–2, 111, 116–17, 137, 140, 151, 152, 154, 189–90, 195; see also man of feeling sentimental parables, 37, 39–40, 49, 50, 53, 54–6, 58–60, 69–71, 73, 77, 84, 86, 113–17, 130, 134, 137, 140–1, 154–5, 166, 167, 169–71, 178, 195 style, 43–5 tone, 45, 169, 173 see also rhetoric; sensibility; sympathy Richards, I.A., 6 Richardson, Samuel, 41, 62, 63 Riddle, William, 183, 184 Roman Catholicism, 47, 146 Romanticism, 96–8, 192–3, 195 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 191 Roscoe, William, The Wrongs of Africa, 15, 73, 74, 92–6, 105 rejects false sentiment, 93–4 reviews, 93, 95–6 sentimental rhetoric in, 93–6 Rose, George, 172 Rotheram, John, 125

238 Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 64, 69, 70, 75, 80, 160 Royal Navy, 109, 183, 190 Royal Society, 26 Ryskamp, Charles, 103 Said, Edward, 3–4 St Christopher, see St Kitts St Kitts, 109, 113, 114 Samaritan, see parables San Domingo, 12, 89, 188–90 Sancho, Ignatius, 1, 13, 14, 57–63, 66–7, 71, 91, 139, 146 correspondence with Laurence Sterne, 1, 57–9, 91, 146 Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, 57, 59–63; as parable, 59–61; circumstances of publication, 61–3; critical studies, 57; structure, 63; tone, 59 Sandiford, Keith, 57, 138–9 Satan, 149 science, 26–7, 43, 45, 74, 77 scope, see rhetoric; rhetoric of sensibility Scotland, 24, 47, 110 Scott, Elizabeth, 57 Scott, Sarah, 14, 41, 51–7, 58, 59, 63, 64, 66–7, 71, 96, 122 The History of Sir George Ellison, 51–7, 64, 66–7; argument of, 52–3; critical studies, 51–2; use of sentimental rhetoric, 53–7 selfishness, 30 Senator, The, 216n94 sensibility and abolitionism, 1–2, 9, 11, 89–92, 172, 195–6 active, 5, 19, 39, 106, 194 contemporary attacks on, 28, 39, 89–92, 189–90, 194–5 definitions, 4–5 and economics, 8, 19, 64–6 failure of, 94, 126, 147, 150, 195 false, 38–9, 68, 71, 86–8, 90–1, 93, 103, 105–6, 111–12, 139, 160, 166, 190, 194 and gender, 7–9, 41, 90, 92, 182, 184, 195

and literary criticism, 5–9, 28, 192–3 and philanthropy, 19–20 supposed demise of, 191–3, 195–6 and the body, 8, 20, 42, 67, 180–2, 184 see also blushes; rhetoric of sensibility; suffering; sympathy; tears sentimental rhetoric, see rhetoric of sensibility sentimentalism, see sensibility sermons, 40, 57, 138, 144, 145–56 Seward, William, 118 Seymour, Frances, Countess of Hertford, see Hertford, Frances Seymour, Countess of Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 82 Othello, 64, 78 The Merchant of Venice, 38 Sharp, Granville, 98, 108, 109, 111, 112, 148, 175, 176 Shaw, Cuthbert, 51 Sheridan, Frances, 41 Shirley, Lawrence, 4th Earl Ferrars, see Ferrars, Lawrence Shirley, 4th Earl Sierra Leone, 69 Skinner, Gillian, 8 slave trade, history of, 9–13, 141 see also abolitionism; slavery slavery and abolition, 9–13, 107–9 legality in England, 75–6, 80–1, 108, 173–4, 175–6 see also abolitionism; amelioration; emancipation; slave trade, history of slaves, 12–13 and acts of resistance, 12–13, 187–90 in Great Britain, 12, 75–6, 80–1, 173–4 in the United States, 12, 80 see also Africans Smith, Adam, 6, 10–11, 14, 21–2, 23, 31–5, 44, 81, 132, 136, 137, 146, 162, 199n6, 204n57 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 21, 31–5, 44

Index 239 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 11, 21, 31, 32, 132, 146, 204n57 Wealth of Nations, 11, 21 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, see Abolition Society Socrates, 24 Solomon, Job Ben, see Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman Sommersett, James, see Sommersett, James Sommersett, James, 52, 76, 108, 145, 148–9, 175–6 see also Mansfield, William Murray, first Earl of Soubise, Julius, 59 South Carolina, 142 Southerne, Thomas, 88 see also Oroonoko Southey, Robert, 102 Star, The, 168, 180–1, 190 State Trials, 174, 177 Stedman, John, 98 Sterne, Laurence, 1, 6, 40, 41, 47, 49, 57–9, 60, 62, 63, 66–7, 71, 91, 146–7, 151, 152, 160 A Sentimental Journey, 91, 147 correspondence with Ignatius Sancho, 1, 57–8, 60, 91, 146 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 1, 6, 58–9 Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 40, 57, 146–7 Stewart, Charles, 175 Stoddard, Eve, 52, 53 Stuart’s Star and Evening Advertiser, 100 style, see rhetoric; rhetoric of sensibility sublime, 30, 44–5, 69, 101, 115, 132, 136–7 suffering, 2, 5, 8, 18–20, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 46, 82, 101, 111–12, 117, 129–30, 132, 134, 135–6, 166 sugar, 94–5, 194 Sussman, Charlotte, 12 Swan, Beth, 174–5 sweeps, 124–7

syllogism, 26 sympathy, 5, 6–7, 20, 28–36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 55, 81, 92, 93, 101, 117–18, 124, 130, 131–2, 136–7, 138, 140, 150–1, 153–4, 155, 160, 161–2, 163, 170, 173, 182, 189, 195 Adam Smith and, 31–4, 38, 132 David Hume and, 28–9, 38 Edmund Burke and, 29–31, 132 Hugh Blair and, 35–6 Thomas Clarkson and, 131–2 William Wilberforce and, 160, 161–2, 163, 170, 173 Sypher, Wylie, 3, 11, 48–9, 51, 64, 65, 75, 86–7, 92–3, 98, 114 Tacky’s Revolt, 187 Tahiti, 91 tears, 8, 18, 20, 38–9, 42, 45, 52, 54–5, 71, 74, 78, 93, 94, 101, 111, 112, 115, 117, 130, 135, 138, 140, 150, 151, 153, 154, 166, 169–70, 191–2, 195 Tennant, Bob, 152 Teston, 88 textbooks, 21–4, 26 Thomas, Hugh, 107 Thompson, E.P., 145 Tillotson, John, 145 Tobin, James, 15, 119–24, 130 Cursory Remarks upon the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay, 120–4; reviews of, 121, 123–4, 130; sentimental diversion in, 122–4 Short rejoinder to the Revd. Mr. Ramsay’s reply, 123 Todd, Janet, 4, 8, 192 tone, 45, 169, 173 Toussaint L’Overture, François Dominique, 97 Trafalgar, battle of, 190 tropes, see rhetoric Turnbull, Gordon, An Apology for Negro Slavery, 15, 127–30 and Grainger’s Sugar Cane, 128–9 reviews of, 127 ‘Tweedside’, 102

240 Index Unitarianism, 153 United States, 12, 47, 80 see also America; individual states by name Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 8 Vassa, Gustavus, see Equiano, Olaudah Vickers, Brian, 26 violence, 20 Wadström, Carl, 194 Wahrman, Dror, 159, 174, 175, 215n77 Wales, 24 Walpole, Robert, 100 Walvin, James, 57 Wapping, 181 Watchman, The, 193, 194 weeping, see tears Wesley, John, 16, 98, 108, 109, 146, 147–51 Journal, 147, 148, 149 Letters, 147 participation in abolition movement, 147–8 preternatural event at Bristol, 149 Thoughts Upon Slavery, 108, 109, 149–51 West India Interest, see proslavery Westminster Journal, The, 177 Wheatley, Phillis, 61 ‘Which Nobody can Deny’, 103–5 Whigs, 146 Whitehall Evening Post, The, 158, 171–2 Wilberforce, Robert Isaac and Samuel, Life of William Wilberforce, 163, 183–4

Wilberforce, William, 16, 20, 21, 42, 145, 156–73, 175, 179–85, 186–7, 188, 190, 193 A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, 160–2 satirical attacks on, 186–7, 190 speech against the slave trade, April 1792, 179–81, 182 speech against the slave trade, February 1807, 42 speech against the slave trade, May 1789, 145, 156–7, 162–73; delivery, 162–3, 168; examines evidence of Robert Norris, 164–6; parable of the captain, 166, 169; reported in newspapers, 168–72; sentimental rhetoric in, 166–71; statistical evidence in, 167 weeps in Parliament, 191–2 see also newspapers; parliamentary debates Wilkes, John, 157 William IV, 183 Williams, Eric, 10, 12 Williams, Raymond, 5 Willis, John Ralph, 62 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 21, 192 Wood, Marcus, 13, 49, 98 Wordsworth, William, 96, 97, 192, 193 World, The, 158, 170–1, 172 Wrongs of Almoona, The, 85 Yearsley, Ann, 47 York, 148 Yorkshire, 156, 191 Young, Edward, 62, 155