Abstract
This essay focuses on a group of novels set in (and displaying significant local knowledge of) Britain’s West Indian colonies at a moment of tremendous change, the decades leading up to and years immediately following Emancipation: Montgomery; or, the West-Indian Adventurer (1812–13), Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica (1828), Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole (1938), and Creoleana (1842). Given these novels’ sympathetic identification with white creole culture, they pose an interesting conundrum for Caribbean scholars alert to the skewed representations of West Indian life in the period of slavery, but who also may be keen to see them as part, or even as inaugural texts, of a specifically Caribbean literary tradition. By focusing on two particular novels, Hamel and Warner Arundell, the essay explores the implications of the history- and fiction-making capacities of these texts and what they have to say about the textual production of authority during the period of Emancipation in the Caribbean, as well as their influence on such production today.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Edward Said’s germinal essay, “Jane Austen and Empire” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage: 1993), 80–96, and a recent response by David Bartine and Eileen Maguire, “Contrapuntal Critical Readings of Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’: Resolving Edward Said’s Paradox,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 11.1 (2009): 32–56; Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006): 1–29; Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. 51–7; and Eve W. Stoddard, “A Serious Proposal for Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.4 (1995): 379–96.
- 2.
See Candace Ward, Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017). Modern editions of most of the major early creole novels of the first half of the nineteenth century have appeared in recent years. New editions of Marly, Creoleana, and Warner Arundell fall into this category most directly; but we should also draw attention to new editions of novels that are Caribbean-focused, and show some knowledge of the region, even if we cannot be sure that their authors had first-hand experience of the West Indies: William Earle’s Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, and the anonymous Woman of Colour. In a separate category, and still waiting for their modern academic moment of attention, are the massively popular Tom Cringle’s Log (1834), by Michael Scott, and the nautical novels of Frederick Marryat, beginning with The Naval Officer (1829) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836). Scott, in particular, can lay some claim to being a Caribbean author, given that he spent much of his adult life as a merchant in Jamaica. See also Catherine Hall, “Reconfiguring Race: The Stories the Slave-Owners Told.” Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, edited by Catherine Hall, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 163–202.
- 3.
Emmanuel Appadocca was reissued by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1997, edited by Selwyn Cudjoe.
- 4.
Tim Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 20.
- 5.
On “creole realism,” see Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction, 17–65.
- 6.
George Wilson Bridges, A Voice from Jamaica; in Reply to William Wilberforce, Esq. M.P. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, 1823), 8–9.
- 7.
E. L. Joseph, Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, ed. Bridget Brereton, Rhonda Cobham, Mary Rimmer, and Lise Winer (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 31. Further references are to this edition, given parenthetically in the body of the essay.
- 8.
Anonymous, Montgomery, 1.viii-ix, 1.ix.
- 9.
See, for example, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: “A Hot Place, Belonging to Us” (London: Routledge, 2004); Raphael P. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Leah Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Carl Plasa, Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); Tim Watson, “Literature of the British Caribbean,” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History, ed. Trevor Burnard (Oxford University Press, Jan. 2013), http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0117.xml.
- 10.
The most notorious of such reactions is Derek Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance,” New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000, p. 61, a polemical response to Thomas W. Krise’s anthology Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Walcott claims the literature of the early Caribbean is of little value, “provincial,” and “pompous.”
- 11.
Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20.3 (December 1999), 96–105; Brycchan Carey, “Olaudah Equiano: African or American?”, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 17 (2010), 229–46; John Bugg, “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s Public Book Tour,” PMLA 121.5 (2006), 1424–42.
- 12.
Candace Ward and Tim Watson, “Introduction,” Hamel, the Obeah Man, by Cynric R. Williams, ed. Ward and Watson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2010), 9.
- 13.
Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, “Creative Literature of the British West Indies during the Period of Slavery,” Savacou 1 (1970), 46–73.
- 14.
Brathwaite, “Creative Literature,” 72.
- 15.
Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
- 16.
Cynric R. Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man, ed. Candace Ward and Tim Watson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010), 427. Further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
- 17.
Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society, 307.
- 18.
Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction, 74–92.
- 19.
Williams, Hamel, 357.
- 20.
Brathwaite, “Creative Literature,” 71.
- 21.
J[ohn] Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1823). On Stewart’s possible authorship of the novel, see Karina Williamson, “Introduction,” Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2005), xiv.
- 22.
E[dward] L[anzer] Joseph, History of Trinidad (Port of Spain: Henry James Mills, 1838); Cynric R. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823 (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1826).
- 23.
Williams, Tour, 36–7, 88.
- 24.
Williams, Tour, 88.
- 25.
Williams, Tour, 302.
- 26.
Qtd. in Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 136.
- 27.
Hoffer, Cry Liberty, 163.
- 28.
Hoffer, Cry Liberty, 163–64.
- 29.
On this alleged conspiracy, see Appendix C, “Insurrections,” in our edition of Hamel, 459–60, 468–72; and Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002).
- 30.
Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction, 70–74.
- 31.
Sotherby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, Auctioneers, The Hamilton Palace Libraries: Catalogue of the Fourth and Concluding Portion of the Beckford Library, Removed from Hamilton Palace (London: Dryden Press, 1883), 37.
- 32.
Brathwaite, “Creative Literature,” 69, n. 1.
- 33.
Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer (eds.), Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, a Debate with João Pedro Marques (New York: Berghahn, 2010).
- 34.
Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction, 10.
- 35.
Ward, “‘In the Free’: The Work of Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean Historical Novel,” Journal of American Studies 49.2 (2015): 359–81.
- 36.
According to its title page, History of Trinidad was available in Trinidad from the bookseller Henry James Mills, in London through A. K. Newman and Co., and in Glasgow from F. Orr and Sons. It is interesting to note the contemporaneity of the History and Warner Arundell, suggested by the date affixed to prefatory material: the brief preface of the History is dated Port of Spain, December 20, 1837, and the novel’s dedication is dated Port of Spain, August 20, 1837, four months apart.
- 37.
Rev. of Warner Arundell in the Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. for the Year 1838, 71. The Monthly Review conveyed a similar opinion: “[T]he whole [contents], we think, from their verisimilitude, hav[e] facts for a foundation.” Vol. I (January–April, 1838): 460. The advertisements and reviews for other creole novels often remarked on their verisimilitude: see, for example, the Morning Chronicle’s advertisement for Montgomery, which claimed the novel “contains a just picture of the manners and customs of all classes in that Island, and of the present state of the Negroes in slavery” (July 1818); similarly the Atlas review of Hamel opined that, “whatever may be his [Cynric Williams’s] faults, he is thoroughly familiar with the manners he has attempted to describe. It is not from books that he has learned his facts, but from a long and acute observance of the subjects of his story” (April 8, 1827), 218–19.
- 38.
The Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, 71.
- 39.
For recent discussions of mixed-race peoples in the English-speaking Caribbean, see Sara Salih, Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2011) and Kit Candlin, The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. 1–23.
- 40.
For more on Hugues, see H. J. K. Jenkins, “The Colonial Robespierre: Victor Hugues on Guadaloupe, 1794–98, A Dictator and Liberator in the West Indies under the First French Republic,” History Today 27.11 (1977): 734–40 and Laurent Dubois, “‘The Price of Liberty’: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798,” The William and Mary Quarterly 56. 2 (1999), 363–92.
- 41.
Joseph, History of Trinidad, 186n.
- 42.
Bryan Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, 5th edn., 5 vols. (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker et al., 1819), 4: 75.
- 43.
Joseph, History of Trinidad, 186.
- 44.
Joseph, Warner Arundell, 27.
- 45.
Ibid., 130; Marly, ed. Williamson, 160–79. For a discussion of Marly’s depiction of people of color, see Salih, Representing Mixed Race, 43–70.
- 46.
Compare, for example, Fédon’s speech in Warner Arundell with the Declaration reprinted in Gordon Turnbull’s A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection of the French Inhabitants in the Island of Grenada (Edinburgh, 1795): “Without entering into any detail of our rights, we summon you [i.e., the Council], and all the inhabitants, of every denomination, in this colony, to surrender, within the space of two hours, to the republican forces under our command” (35–36). Turnbull’s account was published before the rebellion ended, in June 1796.
- 47.
Joseph, Warner Arundell, 405, 312; Victor Hugues, “Declaration of the Commissioners delegated by the National Convention of France, to the Commanders in Chief of the British forces” (reprinted in Turnbull, Narrative 38–41). A copy of this declaration, which circulated throughout the contested islands of the eastern Caribbean, was delivered to the Grenada Council along with Fédon’s declaration, both on March 4, 1794.
- 48.
Joseph, Warner Arundell, 356–57.
- 49.
Ibid., 314.
- 50.
For a fuller discussion of Fédon’s role in validating Warner’s claims, see Ward, “‘In the Free’: The Work of Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean Historical Novel.” Journal of American Studies 49.2 (2015): 359–81.
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Ward, C., Watson, T. (2018). Early Creole Novels in English Before 1850: Hamel, the Obeah Man and Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole. In: Aljoe, N.N., Carey, B., Krise, T.W. (eds) Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71592-6_8
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