Annotated Bibliography

The Slave Trade and Victorian “Humanity” Richard Huzzey

Victorian Review, Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 43-47 (Article)

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reader to relate to Dicky or to comprehend his actions or his motives—no way, in other words, to make sense of the narrative of Dicky’s life. Dicky, too, needs the affective connection to Canary to enable him to formulate some kind of self-narrative. Dicky may find comfort in Canary’s physical presence, in embracing his “mangy neck,” but actual consolation comes in recasting “the tale of his wrongs” as a “heroic narrative”; Dicky’s “intellectuals [begin] to arrange themselves”(26) when Canary pokes his nose under his jacket. In other words, as Dicky construes Canary’s physical intimacy as emotional intimacy, as sympathy, he is able to forge an interpretation of what has hap- pened to him, which in turn enables him to make sense of the nightmarish world he inhabits. And the reader, too, comes closest to understanding that world only when sitting with Dicky and Canary in the donkey’s squalid pen.

Notes 1 These tropes are catalogued and analyzed by Cunningham and Flegel.

Works Cited Cunningham, Hugh. The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth

Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print. Flegel, Monica. Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature,

Representation, and the nsp cc . Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. 1. New York: Dover, 1968. Print. Morrison, Arthur. A Child of the Jago. Ed. Peter Miles. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

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Making races: victorian racial theories and the category of huManity

The Slave Trade and Victorian “Humanity” r i c h a r d h u z z e y

With “dignified emphasis, and with the slightest possible foreign accent,” Prince Albert addressed the June 1840 meeting to launch the Niger Expedition (“Great Public Meeting” 2). Devised by Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, this enterprise was designed to spread commerce and Christianity in the interior of Africa, undermining the slave trade. The mission’s royal patron explained, “I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exer- tions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings, at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe, have not yet led to any satisfactory conclusion” (2). Buxton’s hopes came to naught, but we can learn a lot from the language that framed the Victorian debate about

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these issues. The “prosecution of a purpose dictated by humanity, approved by sound policy, anxiously desired by the country, and under-taken in the humble hope that the blessing of Almighty God will be vouchsafed in its labours” would elude Victorians for decades to come (2). This forum has prompted me to look at British anxieties about the slave trade and ask who was the “human” in their cries of “humanity.”

Humanitarianism and human rights, as plenty of historians and social scientists have noted, are recent concoctions of older ideas and tradi- tions, mixing diverse and sometimes contradictory components (Hunt 22–28; Barnett 6–8). To tease out what the keyword “humanity” meant to Victorians, I hope to consider the nature of anti-slavery sentiments in the nineteenth century. Victorian Britons exercised broad licence to criti- cize the slave trade and human bondage (abolished by them in 1807 and 1834–38 respectively). While there were varied currents of opinion, it is clear that hierarchy informed many anti-slavery strictures, both conservative and radical (Huzzey, “Minding Civilisation” 819). Debates about how and whether Britons could hasten the end of the transatlantic slave trade offer us a chance to consider several elements here: firstly, we can explore how Britons saw their anti-slavery humanity in historical-civilizational perspec- tive; secondly, we can consider why Britons disagreed over the best ways to share anti-slavery abroad.

Although abolitionist campaigns for emancipation had noted the Biblical claim that “God hath made of one blood all nations” (Acts 17.26), they did not claim equality for enslaved Africans. Abolitionists’ sentiment might therefore best be described as pity, rather than the egalitarianism of empathy, before and after British abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1834–38). Patrick Colm Hogan suggests that we can distinguish between “‘allocentric empathy,’ [or] empathy focusing on the actual responses of the target,” and “‘projective empathy,’ [or] empathy focusing on our own hypotheti- cal responses (some authors refer to this as ‘sympathy’)” (Hogan 277–8). What decides “the difference between compassion and pity” is the extent to which each kind of empathy provokes feelings of “equality, superiority, and inferiority” when measured against “some evaluative standard” of desirable emotions (277–78; see also Wood). Therefore, in reading descriptions—real or fictive—of African suffering, British subjects might feel moved to pity by reports of distress and pain, in which “the horrors of Africa were not to be described or even to be conceived,” as Buxton warned (“Great Public Meeting” 2). However, this allocentric empathy with actual distress was dif- ferent from projective empathy, since most Victorians would imagine their own confinement in the hold of a slave ship as even more degrading and painful than they would conceive it to be for “savage” African others: the distinction lies in British expectations of how Africans felt and how Britons would feel. In seeing British sentiment as superior to the heartlessness of slave traders and to the terror of slaves, Victorian anti-slavery writers reinforced

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a hierarchy of humanity, wherein their excellence lay in pity, not in recog- nizing universal humanity. This hierarchy was not so far from the subjec- tive, normative judgments that permitted eighteenth-century slaveholders to celebrate their own humanity in being kindly owners of grateful, pitiable slaves, whose feelings and freedoms were seen as completely different from their own (see Chaplin; Boulokos).

In dismantling Africans’ status as “others” whose suffering and enslave- ment did not affect (or endanger) European freedom (Eltis 281–84), anti- slavery campaigners did not accept a common standard of humanity, but rather defined their obligations by their superior humanity. Slavery was awful for civilized victims, naturally, but—for different reasons—it came to be seen as cruel for simple barbarians or noble savages to suffer slavery under advanced Christian peoples. Victorians focused their anxieties on how to prevent the European slave trade across the Atlantic (or, later, the Arab slave trade through East Africa); by contrast, British colonizers of Africa at the end of the century found that tolerance for customary forms of forced labour was perfectly compatible with humanitarian zeal (Huzzey, Freedom 186–98). For “uncivilized” societies, slave trading and slave-holding seemed natural. As one person planning to cultivate cotton there in 1858 explained, in West Africa,

the intellectual condition of the slave owner was very little raised above that of the slave. Indeed, there was such an equality between the slave owner and the slaves that they stood on nearly the same footing, and there was none of the degradation associated with the condition which prevailed in America. (Bradford Observer 6)

In 1875, Sir Samuel Baker shared similar insights with the Exeter Literary Society,when he insisted that “a high degree of civilisation rendered a state of slavery impossible” and, therefore, that “freedom of the weak would depend upon the advancement and mental development of the strong of those coun- tries which were now only semi-civilised”1 (Morning Post, 4 Dec. 1875: 2).

The difficulty for men like Baker with pet plans for developing Africa and rejecting invasive slave trades was that Britons continued to disagree over the possibility of hurrying other “civilized” nations to follow them in rejecting slavery. It was difficult for any Victorian Britons to defend slavery as an abstract good, but glacial gradualists, abolitionist ideologues, and crypto-pro-slavers split over the effectiveness of national anti-slavery policies or their wrong- headed effects. These groups differed over whether anti-slavery humanity could be spread overseas, not over their desire to see Christian slavery con- fined to history. For example, those who criticized admitting cheap slave- grown sugar into the British marketplace joked that encouraging Brazilians to import slaves was “a kind of discovery which could never have been made by any other human beings than Whig pretenders to humanity” (Morning Post,

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5 May 1841: 4). Although the Whig-Liberal leaders got their way on sugar in 1846, they faced stiffer opposition to their interpretation of anti-slave- trade humanity: many of their natural supporters, influenced by free-trade radicalism, doubted that the transatlantic slave trade could be dispersed by violence rather than by comity and commerce with slave-trading nations.

By casting doubt on whether Spain and Brazil would have embraced abolitionism more quickly without British meddling, Cobdenites found an unlikely ally in the pages of Dickens’s Household Worlds. There, Henry Morley insisted that “[h]istory proves that commerce is the great means ordained by Providence for the improvement and advancement of the human race” (Morley 407). While Britain “has considered herself pledged to active and unwearied labour for the abolition of all trade in human beings among civi- lized communities,” still, “physical force is but a weak antagonist to moral wrong” (407). Crucially, Morley noted of Africans that

[s]lavery is not in their eyes iniquitous; it is so to few rude nations, it was not so even to the cultivated Greeks, and even in Europe the growth of mind has only latterly brought us to an understanding, and still it is but a faint impression of the dignity and value of a human being. (404)

From this perspective, it seemed difficult to force less humane and civilized nations to meet British standards. In defending the Royal Navy’s campaign of slave-trade suppression from its pacific laissez-faire critics, Lord Palmerston and his allies differed only on the possibility, not the reality, of encouraging other nations to advance closer to Britain’s position on the scale of humanity. In this vein, one supportive journalist noted that the alternatives of “treaties, opinions, enlightenment, and humanity are plants of slow growth unless they are accompanied by other agencies” to check “the most detestable and abominable traffic which has ever disgraced humanity” (Morning Post, 13 July 1858: 4).

The disagreements over anti-slave-trade policies in Victorian Britain are less striking than the terms and assumptions shared by both sides. Claims of “humanity” maintained hierarchies between refined Victorians and the “others” deserving sympathy; slavery was seen as a natural stage of human history that had become corrupted by the unnatural international slave trades of “advanced” nations. As much as Victorian attitudes had developed and individual Britons differed, a civilizational approach to slavery and abolition nevertheless encouraged the tempting superiority of pitying sympathy rather than the egalitarian potential of sensitive empathy. As such, the humane British were the “humans” attuned to humanity. Anti-slavery ideas therefore did not readily incubate anti-racist or anti-imperialist sentiments because the evil of Atlantic slavery lay in the supposed inferiority of Africans to their civilized enslavers. Therefore, suppression of West or East African slave trades was more often seen as the start of African progress towards more useful trade

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with Europe and advancement under Christian tutelage—a set of expecta- tions fertile for colonial expansion and British rule in the final decades of Victoria’s reign. As Baker concluded in his 1875 talk, once freed from slavery in a Muslim nation, “the negro would be most certain to retrograde if left unassisted to his own endeavours” (Morning Post, 4 Dec. 1875: 2).

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Irene J. Middleton for instruction on how the cognitive science of emotion can inform studies of literature and history.

Notes 1 By “semi-civilized” countries, he meant those of the Ottoman Empire.

Works Cited Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011.

Print. Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and

American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Bradford Observer 12 Aug. 1858: 6. 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Web. 18 Jan. 2014 Chaplin, Joyce E. “Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early

Lower South.” Journal of Social History 24.2 (2008): 299–315. Web. 18 Jan. 2014. Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Print. “Great Public Meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave-Trade, and for

the Civilisation of Africa.” The Standard 1 June 1840: 2. 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Web. 18 Jan. 2014.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2008. Web. 18 Jan. 2014.

Huzzey, Richard. “Minding Civilisation and Humanity in 1867: A Case Study in British Imperial Culture and Victorian Anti-Slavery.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40.3 (2012): 807–25. Web. 18 Jan. 2014.

———. Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. Print.

Morley, Henry. “Our Phantom Ship: Negro Land.” Household Words 2 (1851): 400–07. Dickens Journals Online. Web. 18 Jan. 2014.

Morning Post 5 May 1841: 4. 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Web. 18 Jan. 2014. Morning Post 13 July 1858: 4. 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Web. 18 Jan. 2014. Morning Post 4 Dec. 1875: 2. 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Web. 18 Jan. 2014. Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

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