Abstract
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.
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Notes
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).
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 Monison (London: Routledge, 1994)
Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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 Eighteenth-Century 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, Slavely, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.
Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 3.
Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 4.
Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, p. 259. See also David Dabydeen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).
Monthly Review, 35 (1766), 43–6; Cuthbert Shaw, Liberty, A Poem (Durham: I. Lane, 1756).
Eve W. Stoddard, ‘A Serious Proposal for Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1995), 379–96, p. 381.
Laura Brown, Fables of Modemity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 254–5.
Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. 13–15.
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.
Keith A. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century 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).
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.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 578–9.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 165–6.
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).
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).
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’.
Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, A Tale, in a Series of Letters, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1777).
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.
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.
In: Maria Edgeworth, Early Lessons (London: J. Johnson, 1801).
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.
Thomas Day, The History of Sand ford and Merton: A Work Intended for the Use of Children (1783–1789), 8th edn, 3 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1798), I, p. 12.
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 191–202.
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© 2005 Brycchan Carey
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Carey, B. (2005). Arguing in Prose: Abolitionist Letters and Novels. In: British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501621_3
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