This e-lecture is mainly meant to fill in some details in the historical record.  It’ll take you up through the end of the nineteenth century or thereabouts. You can read on your own about the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century in the chapter by Scobie in next week’s recommended reading. 

As I mentioned in class: the reason we’re fast-forwarding through the nineteenth century is that, literarily speaking, there ain’t much to tell. Throughout the 1800s, there was a small number of black celebrities in Britain (mainly athletes and entertainers—boxers, actors and musicians) and an even smaller number of black scholars and intellectuals, a handful of whom published works of non-fiction—memoir, travel writing, essays and political tracts, etc. Apart from Mary Prince’s narrative, the most notable of these are probably Robert Wedderburn’s radical polemic The Horrors of Slavery and Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, her account of serving as a nurse in the Crimean War.  But beyond that small number of notables, we’re once again talking about faceless masses, about whom we don’t have much information. 

S.I. Martin’s Equiano and Cugoano, you’ll remember,discuss late eighteenth-century efforts to rid London of the “black poor,” and it wasn’t long after that fictional episode that the historical Equiano, against his better judgment, got mixed up in the Sierra Leone Settlement Scheme that I told you about.  (It was a horrific failure and a public relations disaster:  after one year, only seventy of the nearly 400 people who’d shipped off to Sierra Leone were still alive—although miraculously, the colony did ultimately recover and thrive.)  Just the same, thousands of people of color continued to live in England, many if not most of them abjectly poor.  Prominent members of that population—Equiano and (a few decades later) Wedderburn and Prince—were highly visible and highly vocal in the abolitionist movement throughout its major triumphs, but the rest of these early Black Britons lived and toiled in relative anonymity.  The black “darlings”—those fashion-accessory pageboys and faithful valets that had been all the rage in Elizabeth times—had largely disappeared by 1800.  So had English-born slaves: the Somerset decision of 1772 (which ruled that no person could be transported out of Britain against their will) made it easier for slaves to take the law into their own hands, and from that point forward, slaves on English soil mainly liberated themselves, in the same way that Mary Prince did. 

You may already have gotten a hint or two that the attitudes of the general public in England towards free blacks had begun to grow less tolerant by 1800.  There was a great deal of sympathy expressed, in the abstract, at least, for mistreated slaves.  But as the popular image of “black” people (a category which by the early 1800s included British-born blacks, American-born blacks, freed West Indian slaves, and a handful of Africans, Chinese, and East Indian “Lascars,” as well as people of mixed race) began to focus less on extraordinary individuals or victims of slavery and more on the masses of urban poor and destitute—vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, peddlars and thieves—the popular attitude shifted gradually from sympathy to pity to condescension to outright hostility.  In addition to various relocation and “repatriation” schemes, there were, for instance, some fairly brutal government-sponsored programs for the “suppression of mendacity,” which targeted the poor and homeless of all races.  Many of the most destitute black people died in misery.  Some clambered their way into the working class and eventually assimilated, both economically and racially, over a period of several decades.  (Equiano, in fact, had once proposed to solve the problem of anti-black racism through mass interracial marriage.)  But however in happened, by 1850 black beggars had effectively disappeared from the streets of London, and by 1900 the “black” population of England had dwindled from a high of as many as 40,000 at the beginning of the 1800s to about half that at the end. 

Now having said this, I should note that there was still a small but steady trickle of immigrants of color entering Britain all throughout the nineteenth century.  The majority of them were sailors (usually from America or the West Indies)—a career with which black men, both foreign and domestic, increasingly came to be associated throughout the nineteenth century.  (They were popularly known as “Black Jacks.”)  Relatively large numbers of these seamen settled in the dockside neighborhoods of major seaport towns:  Liverpool, Bristol, London, Cardiff.  For a good long while, anyway, they seem to have been fairly well tolerated and to have lived amicably with their neighbors—probably because times were relatively good and their numbers were relatively small; i.e., they confined themselves to fairly well delimited geographical areas and to fairly limited spheres of public life, and they didn’t threaten anyone else’s economic or social well-being. 

(It’s also the case, as Edward Said and Michelle Cliff point out, that people of color increasingly show up peripherally or obliquely, and occasionally centrally, as characters in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction—and in one ambiguous instance, at least, as an author of such fiction: the anonymous romance The Woman of Colour: A Tale.)

So what we see as the nineteenth century wears on is a strange sort of tension:  in the early decades of the century, the anti-slavery campaign received a huge amount of attention in British public life: until 1833, at least, slavery was “topic A” on everyone’s agenda, the subject of fierce public debate and widespread public interest.  On the other hand, once the anti-slavery victory was won, Britons seemed eager to forget the degree to which their nation had been built upon a foundation of slavery.  Of course, throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, British life—its culture, its economic prosperity, its sense of national identity—would be increasingly shaped not by slavery but by imperialism.  And while Britons proudly, ritually, acknowledged the fact of Empire, they were nevertheless determined to see their Empire as a benevolent, almost divinely ordained, enterprise—not one which, in practice, was every bit as cruel and exploitative as slavery had been, and possibly even moreso.  (But that’s the subject of another course!)  At any rate, Empire would also shape the character of Black Britain, as we will see in the coming weeks. . . .