A Special Relationship?

Abstract

Slavery as a metaphor had a widespread appeal and a long pedigree. Love, as the strongest of emotional bonds, was an obvious subject. In eighteenth-century London, James Boswell, white and pro-slavery, employed it whimsically to describe male subjection to female attraction; in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Sarah Forten, a black contributor to her city’s anti-slavery bazaar was charmed by a local effusion employing the same technique.¹ In Ireland this playful, heterosexual approach was less in evidence but the analogy with religious experience echoed down the ages from St Patrick’s declaration that he was a slave of Christ to the eighteenth-century Presbyterian and nineteenth-century evangelical assertion that Irish Catholics were enslaved by Popery. By this time however the changing political world was producing an array of direct comparisons, as well as the continued use of implicit analogies, between black bondage and Irish conditions.