Abstract
A slave waterman gave Matthew Lewis this advice during Lewis’s first inspection of two recently inherited Jamaican plantations, Cornwall and Hordley, which financially supported the entire Lewis family. The waterman’s advice, expertly blending threat and submission, distills in one speech the most salient issues Lewis explores about slavery in his Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834): economic and moral survival. Lewis had previously engaged with the abolition debate in his 1797 play The Castle Spectre by including an African slave character whose arguments for slaves’ humanity address themes similar to those of the non-fictional waterman. After becoming a slave owner in 1812, Lewis gave up the fulltime writing career that had supported him as a young adult, and in 1815 he traveled to Jamaica to reform working conditions on his plantations and to document those reforms in the Journal.2 That the waterman must remind Lewis that slaves can “think, and hear, and see, as well as white people” reveals how Lewis’s opinion about the mental and moral capacity of African slaves had changed between the production of Spectre and the drafting of the Journal. He endorses the slave’s opinion: “I thought this fellow himself was a good proof of his assertion,” but Lewis’s continued magisterial presence in Jamaica becomes incompatible with sustaining a belief in the fundamental injustice of slavery.
He said that kindness was the only way to make good negroes, and that, if that failed, flogging would never succeed; and he advised me, when I found my negro worthless, “to sell him at once, and not stay to flog him, and so, by spoiling his appearance, make him sell for less; for blacks must not be treated now, massa, as they used to be; they can think, and hear, and see, as well as white people: blacks are wiser, massa, than they were, and will soon be wiser.” I thought this fellow himself was a good proof of his assertion.1
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Notes
Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 102.
See Michael Gamer, “Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 114 (1999): 1043–54.
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Wordsworth, January 23, 1798, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 1
H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 17.
Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25.
Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 64.
Jeffrey Cox, In the Shadow of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 113
Jerrold Hogle, “Introduction: Gothic Studies Past, Present, and Future.” Gothic Studies 1 (1999): 4.
Michael Gamer, “Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama.” English Literary History 66:4 (1999): 844–5.
Margaret Baron-Wilson, The Life and Correspondence of M.G. Lewis (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 1
Matthew Lewis, The Castle Spectre. In Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825, ed. Jeffrey Cox (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 161.
See Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 122–6.
Early examples include Thomas Middleton’s masque Triumph of Truth (1613) and Webster’s The White Devil (1611). See Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings (New York: Octagon, 1969), 64–76.
Elizabeth Inchbald, Such Things Are. In The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York: Garland, 1980), 1
See John Kenrick, The Horrors of Slavery: In Two Parts (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1817), 308–12.
Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 164.
Bryan Edwards, History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies (London: John Stockdale, 1807), 3:79.
See James Allard, “Spectres, Spectators, Spectacles: Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre.” Gothic Studies 3:3 (December 2001): 246–61.
Robert Reno, “James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis’ The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage.” Eighteenth-Century Life 9:1 (1984): 95–106.
See Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain 1780–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 200.
See Marcus Wood, “Slavery and Romantic Poetry.” In Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 181–254
Helen Thomas, “Romanticism and Abolitionism: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.” In Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82–124.
Charles Greville, The Greville Memoirs, ed. Henry Reeve (London: Longman, 1896), 2:384.
Harry Harmer, The Longman Companion to Slavery, Emancipation, and Civil Rights (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 75–8.
Judith Terry, Introduction to Journal of a West India Proprietor by Matthew Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), x.
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 71.
See Steven Kagle, Early Nineteenth-Century American Diary Literature (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 5.
See Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), x–xi.
See Ileana Rodriguez, “Apprenticeship as Citizenship and Governability.” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodriquez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 341–66
Donna Heiland, “The Unheimlich and the Making of Home.” In Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self and Other in the Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 174.
See “note on the text” in Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxxv.
See Heiland, “The Unheimlich” and D.L. MacDonald, “The Isle of Devils: The Jamaican Journal of M.G. Lewis.” In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–4.
Marcus Wood, “Abolition Poetry: A Literary Introduction.” In The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology 1764–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi.
See Maureen Harkin, “Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor: Surveillance and Space on the Plantation.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24:2 (2002): 139–50.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 206
See Jennifer Morgan, “The Breeding Shall Goe with Their Mothers: Gender and Evolving Practices of Slave Ownership in the English American Colonies.” In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 69–106.
Michael Kelly, The Reminiscences of Michael Kelly (New York: De Capo Press, 1968), 127–8.
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© 2013 Ellen Malenas Ledoux
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Ledoux, E.M. (2013). Reforming Genres. In: Social Reform in Gothic Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302687_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302687_6
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