Abstract
In regency Kensington there once stood an old red-brick mansion. It may have at one point been a spacious townhouse for Georgian nobility in London for the season, but by the 1820s it had changed its function and become instead a fine finishing school for young ladies. At that time London was filled with these little private institutions, some paid for by subscription, others by fees and endowments. They often bordered on fashionable areas dotted around the capital.1 This one was no exception, right in the new West End on the road to Knightsbridge.
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Notes
Before it was demolished in the late nineteenth century, the house was known as Kensington House, not to be confused with Kensington Palace, which was occasionally known by the same name. See Leigh Hunt, Memorials of Kensington: Regal, Critical and Anecdotal in Two Volumes (Hurst and Blackett, London, 1855), vol. 1, p. 119;
see also, more generally, Stuart Maclure, One Hundred Years of London Education (Allen Lane, London, 1970).
R. Sheridan, ‘The Condition of the Slaves on the Sugar Plantations of Sir John Gladstone in the Colony of Demerara, 1812–49’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 76(3/4) (2002), pp. 243–69;
Henry G. Dalton, The History of British Guiana: Comprising a General Description of the Colony: A Narrative of Some of the Principal Events from the Earliest Period of Products and Natural History (Applewood Books, Carlisle, MA, 2009);
Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1994), pp. 55–6.
See also John Gabriel Stedman, Sally Price and Richard Price, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam: Transcribed for the First Time From the Original 1790 Manuscript (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1988); Alexander McDonnell, Considerations on Negro Slavery With Authentic Reports Illustrative of the Actual Condition of the Negroes in Demerara To Which are Added, Suggestions on the Proper Mode of Ameliorating the Condition of the Slaves (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, London, 1824);
B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807–1834 (University of the West Indies Press, Kingston, 1995), p. 311.
Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740 (Clarendon, Oxford, 1989);
C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1965).
Dalton, The History of British Guiana, pp. 193–223 and Chapters VI, VII and VIII. See also Alvin Thompson, ‘Dutch Society in Guyana in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Caribbean History, 20(2) (1985), pp. 169–91.
Sheridan, ‘The Condition of the Slaves’, pp. 243–69; Nick Draper, ‘Possesing Slaves, Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the Time of Emancipation 1834–40’, History Workshop Journal, 64 (Autumn 2007), pp. 74–102, in particular p. 86.
Mark Quintanilla, ‘Mercantile Communities in the Ceded Islands: The Alexander Bartlet & George Campbell Company’, International Social Science Review, 79(1–2) (2004), pp. 14–26;
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1995), pp. 143–71.
For another view of this kind of female biography, see Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Random House, London, 2007). This work comes out of her earlier research on empire.
See Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World (Pantheon, New York, 2002).
David C. Douglas (ed.), English Historical Documents to 1775 (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1964), p. 640.
D.H. Murdoch, ‘Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire: The Sale of Crown Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763–1783’, Historical Journal 27(3) (1984), pp. 549–74.
See T.C. Smout, ‘The Early Scottish Sugar Houses, 1660–1720’, Economic History Review, 2(14) (1961), pp. 240–53;
N.C. Landsman, Scotland and its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton University Press, 1985);
N.E.S. Griffiths and J.G. Reid, ‘New Evidence on New Scotland, 1629’, William and Mary Quarterly, 49(3) (1992), pp. 492–508;
R. Law, ‘The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634–1639’, Scottish Historical Review, 77 (1997), pp. 185–202.
W.W. Marross, The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Library (Clarendon, Oxford, 1965);
David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1994), p. 129.
Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 85.
Mark Quintanilla, ‘The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth-Century Grenadian Planter’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 35(2) (2003), pp. 229–56;
Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1982), p. 140; T.M. Devine, ‘An Eighteenth Century Business Elite: Glasgow Merchants, 1750–1815’, Scottish Historical Review, 57 (1978), pp. 40–67. See also N.A. CO 101/16, Governor Leybourne Outbound, State of the Island of Greneda 10th August 1772.
The literature on this idea and ‘subaltern’ groups in general is extensive; see Stephen Morton, ‘The Subaltern: Genealogy of a Concept’, in Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Polity, Maiden, 2007), pp. 96–7.
For the invasion, see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000), p. 217.
The literature on miscegenation is extensive, less so for incest. An excellent book that covers these areas from a French perspective is Doris Lorraine Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2005).
George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies Written During the Expedition Under the Late Sir Ralph Abercromby: in 3 Volumes (Negro Universities Press, Westport, 1970, original 1806), vol. 3, p. 278.
Edward Cox, Free Coloureds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada 1763–1833 (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1985), Chapter 4, ‘Free Coloureds in the Economy’, pp. 59–75.
R.P. Devas, The History of the Island of Grenada 1650–1950 (Justin James Field, St. Georges, 1964), pp. 152–3.
George Brizan, Grenada Island of Conflict: From Amerindians to People’s Revolution 1498–1979 (Zed Books, London, 1985), pp. 74–5; Cox, Free Coloureds, pp. 89–91; See also Devas, The History of the Island of Grenada.
James Walvin, Black Ivory: Slavery in The British Empire (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), p. 54.
This presence is also the subject of Pedro Welch’s work in Barbados. See Pedro Welch, ‘“Crimps and Captains”: Displays of Self-Expression Among Freed Coloured Women, Barbados 1750–1834’, Journal of Social Sciences, IV(2)(1997), pp. 89–126.
For this aspect in the African-American culture of the USA, see Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Cornell University Press, New York, 1997).
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© 2012 Kit Candlin
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Candlin, K. (2012). The Queen of Demerara. In: The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030818_2
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