Abstract
In 1797, Sir Phillip Gibbes published the third edition of his plantation manual, Instructions for the Treatment of Negroes. Within the pages of his work he explained to his readers how an Englishwoman had sent him a number of poems on the subject of slavery and that he had decided to include them in his manual. Several of the poems were supposedly intended for the enslaved laborers to sing while working the plantations to remind them of the benefits of their labor:
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How useful is labour, how healthful and so good!
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It keeps us from mischief, procures wholesome food;
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It saves from much sickness and loathsome disease
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That fall on the idle and pamper’d with ease1
Proslavery arguments could be found in all manner of forms in the era of abolition. The arts were no exception.
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Notes
[Sir Phillip Gibbes], Instructions for the Treatment of Negroes &c. &c. &c., 3rd edn. (London: Shepperson and Reynolds, 1797), 107.
Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2.
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), 450–1.
Ibid., 453.
Ibid., xxvi.
Ibid., 228.
Ibid., 206.
Ibid., 276.
Ibid., 208.
See Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 1–2.
David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey: Dangaroo Press, 1985), 21–7.
Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representation of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 153.
Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 141.
Ibid., 9.
It is interesting to note that the exhibition was held the same month that the abolition campaign was launched. See Jan Marsh, “The Black Presence in British Art 1800–1900: Introduction and Overview,” in Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900, ed. Jan Marsh (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005), 17.
David Bindman, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Portraiture,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 85.
Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 15.
Pascal Dupuy, “Informations et désinformations: Les tentatives d’abolition de l’esclavage en Angleterre à traverse la caricature anglaise, 1760–1810,” Actes de Colloque de 1999, 25 (2001), 182.
Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 7.
Eirwen E. C. Nicholson, “Consumers and Spectators: The Public of the Political Print in Eighteenth-Century England,” History, 81 (1996), 19.
Ibid., 17.
H. T. Dickinson, Caricatures and the Constitution, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyk-Healey Ltd., 1986), 15.
Henrice Altink, “Deviant and Dangerous: Pro-Slavery Representations of Jamaican Slave Women’s Sexuality, c. 1780–1834,” Slavery & Abolition, 26 (2005), 272–5.
Charmaine Nelson, “Venus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness,” in Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900, ed. Jan Marsh (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005), 47.
Miles Taylor, “John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c. 1712–1929,” Past & Present, 134 (1992), 106.
Roy Porter, “Review: Seeing the Past,” Past & Present, 118 (1988), 200.
Anon., Cruelty & Oppression Abroad (London: W. Holland, 1792).
See The New Vocal Enchantress Containing An Elegant Selection of All The Newest Songs Lately Sungat the Theatres Royal Drury Lane, Covent Garden, Haymarket, Royalty Theatre, Vaux Hall, &c. &c. &c. (London: C. Stalker, 1791), 29–30. See also The Muse in Good Humour; or Momus’s Banquet: A Collection of Choice Songs, Including the Modern (London: William Lane, n.d.), 123.
John Whitaker and Gilbert Stuart, “Monthly Catalogue,” The English Review, or An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature 14 (1789), 387.
John Gilmore, “Introduction,” in Creoleana and The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black, ed. John Gilmore (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2002), 15.
Thomas Bellamy, The Benevolent Planters (London: J. Debrett, 1789), 3.
Ibid., 3–4.
George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9–13.
J. W. Orderson, The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black; or, A Cure for the Gout. A Comedy in Three Acts (Liverpool: Ross and Nightingale, 1835), in Creoleana and The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black, ed. John Gilmore (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2002), 158.
Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 3.
David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity During the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 202.
Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6.
George E. Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 23 (1999), 23.
James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xxxiii.
Ibid., xlvii.
Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 2005), 92.
Karen O’Brien, “Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 174–5.
Anon., “The Field Negro, or the Effect of Civilization,” in Poems, on Subjects arising in England, and the West Indies (London: R. Faulder, 1783), 15–16.
James Boswell, No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love (London: R. Faulder, 1791), 8.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 21–2.
Rev. H. E. Holder, Fragments of a Poem, Intended to have been Written in Consequence of Reading Major Majoribanks’s Slavery (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1792), 19.
Ibid., 18.
[Sir Phillip Gibbes], “A Negro’s Address to his Fellows,” in Instructions for the Treatment of Negroes &c. &c. &c., 3rd edn. (London: Shepperson and Reynolds, 1797), 133.
Ibid.
C. F. D., “Bonja Song,” in Contrary Voices: Representations of West Indian Slavery, 1657–1834, ed. Karina Williamson (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008), 491.
Ibid., 492.
M. J. Chapman, Barbadoes, and Other Poems (London: James Fraser, 1833), vii–viii.
Ibid., 41–2.
Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8–9.
Anne H. Stevens, British Historical Fiction before Scott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 53–4.
Ibid., 55.
Janina Nordius, “Racism and Radicalism in Jamaican Gothic: Cynric R. Williams’s Hamel, The Obeah Man,” ELH, 73 (2006), 674–5.
Karina Williamson, “Introduction,” in Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica, Karina Williamson, ed. (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005), xxxiii.
Colonists viewed Obeah as alarming and dangerous. Slaves throughout Britain’s West Indian colonies were banned from practicing it. See Randy M. Browne, “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 68 (2011), 455.
John Gilmore, “Series Editor’s Preface,” in Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica, Karina Williamson, ed. (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005), viii.
[Cynric R. Williams], Hamel, The Obeah Man, 2 vols. (London: Hunt and Clark, 1827), vol. 2, 313.
Anon., Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica (Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Co., 1828); Reprint: Karina Williamson, ed. (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005), 2.
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© 2016 Paula E. Dumas
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Dumas, P.E. (2016). Proslavery Arts and Culture. In: Proslavery Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137558589_4
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