Britain's Black Past

400 Pages·2020·4.362 MB·English

by  Gretchen H. Gerzina (editor)

Britain’s Black Past
Edited and with an Introduction by
Gretchen H. Gerzina
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2020 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2020 Liverpool University Press
The right of Gretchen H. Gerzina to be identified as the editor of this book
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-78962-160-0 cased
ISBN 978-1-78962-161-7 limp
eISBN 978-1-78962-744-2
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Gretchen H. Gerzina
1 Before and After the Eighteenth Century:
The John Blanke Project 7
Michael Ohajuru
2 The Slave and the Lawyers: Francis Barber, James Boswell
and John Hawkins 27
Michael Bundock
3 Revisiting Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa 45
Vincent Carretta
4 Britain’s Black Tars 63
Charles R. Foy
5 Black Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Britain 81
Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell and Simon P. Newman
6 The Making of a Liverpool Community:
An Elusive Narrative 99
Raymond Costello
7 Pero’s Afterlife: Remembering an Enslaved African in Bristol 119
Madge Dresser
Contents
8 Within the Same Household: Fanny Coker 141
Christine Eickelmann
9 The Georgian Life and Modern Afterlife of
Dido Elizabeth Belle 161
Gretchen H. Gerzina
10 Ghostly Presences, Servants and Runaways:
Lancaster’s Emerging Black Histories and their
Memorialization 1687–1865 179
Alan Rice
11 Staging Sancho 197
Paterson Joseph
12 Julius Soubise in India 215
Ashley L. Cohen
13 The Gravity of Mary Prince’s History 235
Sue Thomas
14 Nathaniel Wells: The Making of a Black
Country Gentleman 253
Anne Rainsbury
15 Ira Aldridge in the North of England: Provincial Theatre
and the Politics of Abolition 275
Theresa Saxon
16 ‘Fermentation will be universal’: Intersections of Race and
Class in Robert Wedderburn’s Black Atlantic Discourse of
Transatlantic Revolution 295
Raphael Hoermann
17 The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the
Nineteenth Century 315
Caroline Bressey
18 Genealogy and the Black Past 331
Kathleen Chater
Bibliography 343
Index 367
vi
Illustrations
IIlllluussttrraattiioonnss
Illustrations
1.1 Stephen B. Whatley, ‘Tribute to John Blanke’ (2015),
charcoal on paper, A4 11
1.2 Creative Outcomes 22
3.1 Frontispiece to Equiano’s Interesting Narrative 48
4.1 HM Galley Arbuthnot muster, 1783–6 71
5.1 Advertisement placed by Robert Shedden in Edinburgh
Evening Courant, 4 May 1756 95
6.1 Florence and Mora James, c.1870s 105
7.1 Angus Brown as Pero in a reconstruction at the Georgian
House Museum c.2007 136
8.1 Fanny Coker’s family tree 143
9.1 Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Lady Elizabeth
Murray at Kenwood House 162
11.1 The actor Paterson Joseph as Ignatius Sancho 205
12.1 Matthew Darly, ‘A Mungo Macaroni’, 10 September 1772 217
14.1 ‘Piercefield, Seat of Nathaniel Wells Esq.’ 263
15.1 Ira Aldridge as Othello, after James Northcote, c.1826 276
16.1 Frontispiece to Wedderburn’s pamphlet ‘The Horrors
of Slavery’ 311

Contributors
CCoonnttrriibbuuttoorrss
Contributors
Caroline Bressey is Reader in Cultural and Historical Geography in
the Department of Geography at University College London, where she
founded the Equiano Centre, which ran from 2007 to 2017 to support
research into the Black Presence in Britain. In 2009 she was awarded
a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is the author of Empire, Race and
the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), which won
the 2014 Women’s History Network Book Prize and the 2015 Colby
Scholarly Book Prize.
Michael Bundock is the author of The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The
True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir
(Yale University Press, 2015). He is a director of Dr Johnson’s House
Trust and an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of
English Language and Literature at University College London.
Vincent Carretta is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of
Maryland and specializes in transatlantic historical and literary studies
during the long eighteenth century. In addition to more than 100
articles and reviews on a range of eighteenth-century subjects, he has
published two books on verbal and visual Anglophone political satire
between 1660 and 1820 as well as authoritative editions of the works of
Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Philip Quaque, Ignatius
Sancho and other eighteenth-century transatlantic authors of African
descent. He recently edited The Writings of Phillis Wheatley (Oxford
University Press, 2019).
ix
Contributors
Kathleen Chater is an independent scholar. Her doctoral thesis was
published as Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales
During the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1812 (Manchester
University Press, 2009) and she has contributed entries about black
Britons to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. She has
also written numerous books and articles on aspects of genealogical
research and history generally. Her latest work is Henry Box Brown:
From Slavery to Show Business (McFarland, 2020), a biography of the
American fugitive slave turned magician.
Ashley L. Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Southern California. She is the editor of Lady Nugent’s East India
Journal, A Critical Edition (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her articles
and book chapters include ‘Fencing and the Market in Aristocratic
Masculinity’, in Sporting Cultures, 1650–1850 (University of Toronto
Press, 2018), ‘The Global Indies: Historicizing Oceanic Metageogra-
phies’, in Comparative Literature (Winner of the Inaugural Srinivas
Aravamudan Prize, 2017), and ‘The “Aristocratic Imperialists” of Late
Georgian and Regency Britain’, in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2016).
Her first monograph, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture,
1756–1815, Yale University Press, is forthcoming Fall 2020.
Raymond Costello is a former Adviser for Racial Equality for Liverpool
Education Authority Schools Inspection Department. He is an Honorary
Research Fellow of the University of Liverpool School of Sociology,
a Historical Associate for Merseyside Maritime Museum, National
Museums Liverpool (NML) and a board member of the Centre for
the Study of International Slavery (CSIS). He has been involved with
many radio and television programmes and has a number of publica-
tions. His latest book is Black Tommies: Soldiers of African descent in
the First World War (Liverpool University Press, 2015). He received an
award from the Executive Professional Network Northern Chapter in
2002 and the Merseyside Black Police Association Community Award
in 2008.
x