Abstract
James Grainger’s poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) relates the history of that plant and the manner of its cultivation in the colonies in the Caribbean, especially St Kitts where the author was resident between 1759 and his death in 1766.1 The poem extends over 2,500 lines of verse, in four books, with extensive prose footnotes. The topic of the sugar cane is considered as a subject of natural history, of agricultural practice, and aesthetic description. As an account of slavery, The Sugar-Cane is both evocative and detailed, but the poem is in no sense abolitionist. Indeed, much of its fame, or rather notoriety, in the last century has been as an ‘apology and rationalisation’ of slavery.2 Evidence for this view is not hard to find in the poem. In Book III, the poet describes how the bands of slave labourers approach their work with eager anticipation:
The Negroe-train, with placid looks, survey Thy fields, which full perfection have attain’d, And pant to wield the bill: (no surly watch Dare now deprive them of the luscious Cane:) Nor thou, my friend, their willing ardour check; Encourage rather; cheerful toil is light. (III. 96–101)
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Notes
James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764). The edition preferred here is John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane’ (London: Athlone Press, 2000). All references to the poem incorporated in the text, are to Gilmore’s edition.
Arthur D. Drayton, ‘West Indian Consciousness in West India Verse: A Historical Perspective’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9 (1970), 66–88 (p. 80).
Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid IIV, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, No. 63 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
John Chalker, The English Georgic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 4–8.
John Dryden, The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics and lEneis Translated into English Verse (1697), in Poetical Works, ed. G. R. Noyes, rev. edn. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 202.
Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), I, p. 3.
John Entick, The Present State of the British Empire, 4 vols (London: B. Law, E. and C. Dilly, Faden and Jeffrey, and R. Goadby, 1774), p. 2.
Karen O’Brien, ‘Imperial Georgic’, in The Country and the City Revisited, ed. Donna Landry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 160–79; Markman Ellis, ‘Islands of Empire: Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry and the West Indies’, Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmund and Vanessa Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 43–62.
Joseph Addison, ‘An Essay on the Georgics’, in Dryden, Virgil (1697), repr. in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols (London: G. Bell, 1914), pp. 3–11.
Grainger to Percy, 10 Jan. 1759, in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (London: J. B. Nichols, 1848), VII, p. 268; James Grainger, A Letter to Tobias Smollett, M.D. (London: T. Kinnersly, 1759), in John Gilmore, ‘Tibullus and the British Empire: Grainger, Smollett and the Politics of Translation in the Mid-18th Century’, The Translator, 5, 1 (April 1999), 1–26.
Thomas Percy, Reliques of Antient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), I, pp. 313–16. 17. James Grainger, An Essay on the more common West-India Diseases (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1764).
H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1930).
After publication, Johnson helped Percy write a favourable notice for The London Chronicle (5 July 1764), but also wrote a much more equivocal review for The Critical Review, XVII, 10 (October 1764), 270–7. Further reviews were provided in The Scots Magazine, July 1764; and in the Gazette Litteraire de l’Europe of Paris (Nichols, Illustrations, VII, p. 291). For an account of Grainger’s reception see Grainger, ed. Gilmore, pp. 36–53.
James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), II, pp. 453–5, 532–5.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Creative Literature of the British West Indies during the Period of Slavery (1970)’, in Roots: Essay (Havana, Cuba: Premio Casa de las Americas, 1986), pp. 127–70.
In addition to those already noticed, see David Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Keith Sandiford, ‘Grainger: Creolizing the Muse’, in The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 67–88.
Recent anthologies include Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777, ed. Thomas W. Krise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); The White Man’s Burden: An Anthology ofBritish Poetry of the Empire, ed. Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996); and Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810, ed. James G. Basker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002).
Alexander Pope, ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ (1704), The Poems ofAlexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 119.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; repr. London: Hogarth, 1993); Richard Feingold, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978); John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 91–102.
Hugh Prince, ‘Art and Agrarian Change, 1710–1815’, in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 98–118; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).
Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. i; The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Volume V: 1640–1750, 2 vols ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
On sugar planters as agricultural improvers see J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 94–105, and J. R. Ward, ‘New Husbandry’, in British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 61–119 (on St Kitts see pp. 74–9).
Selwyn Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002), p. 136.
Compare Gilmore: ‘Often when Grainger talks about his muse, it is simply a periphrasis for himself’ (Grainger, Sugar-Cane, p. 216). For evidence of the female muse see the opening 22 lines of Book II (and numerous other places).
Samuel Johnson, Critical Review, XVIII (October 1764), 270–7.
Chris Whatley, Serfdom: A Species of Slave: Serfdom in Scottish Coal Mines, c. 1606–1799 (Newtongrange, Midlothian: Scottish Mining Museum, 1989), p. [2]; Baron F. Duckham, ‘Serfdom in Eighteenth Century Scotland’, History, 54, 181 (June 1969), pp. 178–97; T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969), pp. 167–70, 403–12.
Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery (London: Benjamin White and Robert Horsfield, 1769), p. 4 n.
[Mr Johnson], Considerations on the Present Scarcity and High Price of Coals in Scotland; and on the means of procuring greater quantities at a cheaper rate (Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1793), pp. 23, 24.
Archibald Cochrane, Description of the Estate and Abbey of Culross. Particularly of the Mineral and Coal Property (Edinburgh: [n.p.1, 1793), pp. 72–4.
W. E. K. Anderson, ‘Life of Grainger’, in Anderson, ed., A Complete Edition of the Poets ofGreatBritain, 14 vols (London: J. and A. Arch; Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1792–5), X, pp. 891–4. See also Grainger, ed. Gilmore, p. 3.
Nathaniel Appleton, Considerations of Slavery in a Letter to a Friend (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1767), pp. 4, 15–16.
Jamaica, a Poem, in Three Parts. Written in that Island, in the Year MDCCLXXVI (London: William Nicoll, 1777), p. v.
Douglas V. Armstrong, The Old Village and Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 25–30.
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Ellis, M. (2004). ‘Incessant Labour’: Georgic Poetry and the Problem of Slavery. In: Carey, B., Ellis, M., Salih, S. (eds) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522602_4
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