CALIBAN‟S VICTORIAN CHILDREN: RACIAL NEGOTIATIONS FROM 

EMANCIPATION TO JUBILEE  

 

 

A Dissertation 

Submitted to 

the Temple University Graduate Board 
 

 

In Partial Fulfillment of 

the Requirements for the Degree 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 

 

by 

Tony Paxton Williams 

August 2013 

 

 

 

 

Examining Committee Members: 

Peter Logan, Advisory Chair, English Department 

Joyce Joyce, English Department 

Lewis Gordon, Philosophy Department 

Sally Mitchell, English Department 

Benjamin Talton, External Member, History Department 

  



 

 

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© 

Copyright 

2013 

 

by 

 

 Tony Paxton Williams  

 
  



 

 

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ABSTRACT 

This dissertation examines the various discursive expressions of black agency that 

formed the stereotypical representations of African descendants found in Victorian racial 

discourse. It is, therefore, an analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African 

descent and not of the actual stereotypes frequently associated with Victorian racial 

discourse. I believe that a close reading and analysis of the discursive practices of peoples 

of African descent subject to British influence will offer a more focused and 

contextualized narrative of the fantasies that plagued the British imagination well into the 

twentieth century. This study also suggests that we start looking at Victorian racial 

discourse as an active dialogue and conversation with the Other, rather than a description 

of the psychology of power.  

 

  



 

 

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DEDICATION 

 

For Adrienne, always 

 



 

 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 

It is difficult to fully express the gratitude I feel toward the scholars who served as 

committee members. I will give it a try. I am very grateful for all of the encouragement 

and support I have received from my dissertation chair and advisor, Dr. Peter Logan. His 

insistence on focused contextualization (a process I have yet to master) directed me from 

the moment of conceptualization to the final act of composition. His guidance has been 

invaluable and greatly appreciated. I am also thankful for my committee members at 

Temple University: Professors Joyce Joyce, Sally Mitchell and Lewis Gordon. It was the 

questions they asked, and the diverse insights these amazing scholars expressed, during 

the early stages that actually supplied the building blocks for this dissertation. My outside 

reader, Dr. Ben Talton, was always able to direct me toward the most unexpected 

sources. I have benefitted greatly from our brief in transit conversations. I must also 

acknowledge my most heart-felt appreciation to Sharon Logan and Belinda Wilson. 

Without the help of these two gladiators of the graduate department, my years at Temple 

University would not have been pleasant and very little would have been submitted on 

time. Finally, my warmest appreciation is extended to my wife, Adrienne Paxton. During 

every step of this long and grueling process, she gave me the strength to carry on.  

  



 

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 Page 

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii 

DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iv 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v 

TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... vi 

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ vii 

1 CARLYLE‟S QUASHEE, DICKENS‟S (IG)NOBLE SAVAGE, AND THE 

BIRTH OF CALIBAN‟S VICTORIAN CHILDREN  ........................................................1         

2 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE WONDERFUL 

ADVENTURES OF MRS. SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS...................................................43 

3 ROBERT CAMPBELL AND THE DISCURSIVE ECOLOGY OF AFRICAN 

SPACE ...............................................................................................................................94 

4 EDWARD W. BLYDEN‟S PROVIDENCE AND THE EMPIRE OF THE 

MELANIN IMAGINATION  ..........................................................................................130 

5 BY WAY OF CONCLUSION, J.J. THOMAS AND THE FROUDACITY OF 

THE MYTH OF HAITI  ..................................................................................................173 

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................208 

 
 

 

 

 



 

 

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INTRODUCTION 

 

CALIBAN’S VCITORIAN CHILDREN: RACIAL NEGOTIATIONS FROM 

EMANCIPATION TO JUBILEE 

 

The idea for this project grew out of a slight dissatisfaction with much of the 

literary scholarship done on the racialized representations of peoples of African descent. 

In much of this scholarship, critics have not only overlooked the discursive influence of 

the counter-voice, those who argued against established policy and popular 

representations, but there is hardly any mention of an Africanist reaction to the racial 

discourse of the nineteenth-century. Many critics of Victorian literary production merely 

treat the African as an object on whom fixed and atavistic images and tendencies were 

projected onto. Although great and useful work has come out of the research and 

interpretations of the Victorian gaze vis-à-vis the African, the danger I perceive in these 

approaches is that they may suggest that all of Victorian England spoke with one voice in 

regards to the destiny and condition of contemporary blacks. Furthermore, the present 

state of this branch of Victorian scholarship suggests that black writing and black lives 

had no effect on the transformations of racial representations. Regardless of some of the 

brilliant insights Victorian scholarship has revealed to us, it still seems to reiterate the 

erroneous suspicion that there were no Africans or West Indians present to intellectually, 

artistically and politically challenge contemporary notions of blackness and articulate 

their desire to represent themselves. 

In regards to subjects categorized as members of the African race, most of the 

recent Victorian literary scholarship has been limited and thematic. That is, the concerns 

of the critics have consistently revolved around gothic imagery, race displaced to 



 

 

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highlight feminist cultural desires, slavery and the literary responses to slavery, the 

influences of the natural sciences on racial representations in literature, and the 

ideological imperatives of imperialism and Empire. For example, in Rules of Darkness: 

British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, Patrick Brantlinger chronicles and 

analyzes the ways Victorian anthropology, travel writing and popular fiction formed 

racialized thinking. He even mentions the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) and the 

contemporary responses to conflict in the West Indies but, even in this great work of 

Victorian scholarship, the critical rationale for the rebellion and how it may have 

influenced black discursive practices goes ignored. Nor are the conflicts alluded to in the 

West Indies or India fully analyzed in terms of acts of agency and self-representation. 

H.L. Malchow's Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain takes a loosely 

psychoanalytic approach that non-Europeans were projections of British anxieties and 

used as rationalizations for and instruments of its economic and political power. He goes 

on to show how the language of the gothic appropriated imagined characteristics of the 

Other to construct evil and fictionalized monsters. How these gothic constructions affected 

the Other remains elusive. Susan Myer, in Imperialism at home: Race and Victorian 

Woman's Fiction, employs race as a metaphor for the condition of the Victorian woman. 

Therefore, her study is more about the lived existence of the Victorian woman, thus 

suggesting that race and the lives of non-Westerners were perceived, by the women 

writers in her study, as nothing more than literary devices. Although Jennifer  

Devere Brody, in her Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture, 

brilliantly unpacks the stigma of contamination projected onto the Creole and mulatto 

woman, the details of Mary Seacole's discursive strategy never really takes the stage. Two 



 

 

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other recent studies seem to merely synthesize the seminal work done by the four major 

scholars mentioned in this paragraph. For instance, in Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, 

Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-Victorian Prose, Laura Callanan argues 

that racial encounters caused Victorian writers to turn to the aesthetics in attempts to 

make sense of themselves and the racial Other. And in White Skins/Black Masks: 

Representations and Colonialism, Gail Ching-Liang Low, clearly playing on the title of 

Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks as well as Fanon's assertion that the black man's 

soul is the white man's artifact, addresses the power of imperial myth-making in the works 

of Haggard and Kipling. The object of her study is the psychic investment of colonial 

fantasy. Although these studies, and many others, give some illuminating insights into the 

psychology of racial dominance, our representations of this discourse is clearly limited 

and incomplete. What is lacking, or dismissed, is the voice of the subject of this discourse. 

This voice, I argue, was very active in the debates about race.Moreover, black writing and 

black people, especially in the second half of the nineteenth-century, influenced the 

representations of peoples of African descent. 

The aim of this essay is not merely to place the nineteenth-century African and 

West Indian writers and intellectuals in the racial debates of the times. More specifically, 

it is to position the sundry Africanist responses as forms of literary and cultural criticism 

that individually, collectively and strategically engaged the sources that informed the 

racialized representations found in the Victorian novel and challenged the issues coded in 

Victorian literary products. Standing in the wings, and frequently taking center stage, of 

my analysis of the black presence in Victorian racial discourse is the image of the 

Caliban. I will be arguing that at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s the 



 

 

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image of the Noble Savage was supplanted by a more sinister African figure, and that this 

figure shares all of the qualities invented for it in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. 

Although Victorians, black and white, do not mention Caliban in colonial and racial 

debates (the one exception seems to be Daniel Wilson's Caliban: The Missing Link 

(1873)), the attributes of Caliban were the raw materials of political and scientific 

discussion. These allusions to Caliban in my study are influenced by my reading of 

Paget Henry's Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. In Caliban's 

Reason, Henry argues that the writings of nineteenth-century Afro-British subjects should 

be seen as "attempts at destroying Euro-Caribbean hegemony through the delegitmating 

of their colonial projects" (3). These colonial projects were the constraints imposed by 

colonial rule as well as temporal ramifications of racialized representation. Therefore, the 

literary product of the black Victorian writer consciously sought to undermine traditional 

conceptions of the African which produced what Henry calls "discursive deviations" 

(3). These discursive deviations functioned not only as criticisms of British power, 

but they are also always representations of the self that consciously positioned to 

challenge racial stereotypes and British textual reality and authority. Moreover, these 

writers disrupt contemporary understandings of the Other by presenting to the individual 

consciousness of individual readers capabilities denied and masked in Shakespeare's 

creation: reason, intellect, compassion, humanity, and agency. 

In Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, William Sewell 

reminds us to always be mindful of the fact that documents are produced by agents. He 

emphasized the importance of recognizing the human subject as an agent, rather than an 

inert stock character as we usually do in our critical treatment of the Other. Agents 



 

 

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recognize that they are human beings and, however destitute and oppressed, conceive of 

themselves as "empowered by access to resources of one kind or another" (133). 

According to Sewell, "[t]o be an agent means to be capable of exerting some degree of 

control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the 

ability to transform those social relations to some degree"(143). This suggests that 

"agency arises from the actor's knowledge of schemas, which means the ability to apply 

them to new contexts" (143). Forms of agency not only vary and are culturally and 

historically determined, but an act of agency is always a social and conscious act. In this 

study I will explore and analyze the discursive practices of various black nineteenth 

century cultural actors and communities to Victorian racial discourse. The various 

individual and collective discursive strategies are also addressed.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

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CHAPTER ONE 

CARLYLE’S QUASHEE, DICKENS’S (IG)NOBLE SAVAGE, AND THE BIRTH 

OF CALIBN’S VICTORIAN CHILDREN  

 

INTRODUCING CALIBAN’S VICTORIAN CHILDREN 

 Between 1849 and 1853, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens set into motion  

discursive strategies that contributed to the eventual destruction of one legendary racial  

trope and replaced it with another.  These discursive maneuvers were in response to their  

individual and culturally biased misreadings of the language of agency manifested in the  

movements and behavior patterns in the British West Indies of England‟s ex-slave  

population. Although they were responding to different racial relations, they both were  

able to make problematic the social acceptance of what was loosely regarded as a  

prototypical Noble Savage for a more diabolical and grotesque racialized figuration that 

resembled characteristics attributed to Shakespeare‟s Caliban. Relying on their literary 

and cultural credentials as capital, Carlyle and Dickens created for the Victorian reader a  

template of the African that survived the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is this  

dangerous and "diabolical" African figuration that occupied the British imagination after  

the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834. The characteristics Carlyle and  

Dickens painted onto this African figure functioned as the lens through which the racial  

Other was to remain contained. That is, the racial paradigm both writers participated in  

creating made it imperative for the British to limit the agency of the African, and to have  

African agency directed to fulfill England's material and ideological desires. 

Furthermore, their representations of black agency were rendered as modes of behavior  

and thought that could only do harm to the Victorian community. Although other  

commentators participated in the construction of this new (or rehashed) racial trope, the  

productions of Carlyle and Dickens revealed the broader cultural ramifications implicit in 



 

 

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Victorian racialist thinking. 

The discursive representations of Carlyle, Dickens, and many other observers of  

the West Indian scene were, in fact, responses to a language peculiar to the newly  

evolved black British subjects after emancipation. This particular language manifested by  

the ex-slave took the form of a critique of British character as well as a very loudly heard  

non-verbal statement of black desire. Since all racial discourse is about relationships, the  

non-verbal critique behaviorally articulated through the former British slave not only  

actively opposed the expectations made clear through Victorian racial discourse, but they  

also gave voice to what they themselves expected and anticipated about future  

relationships with the Anglo-West Indian community. The behavior patterns and trends 

that concerned the Victorian observer at mid-century were, in fact, acts of agency that  

challenged traditional relationships of power between whites and blacks initiated during  

the contact zone. These acts of agency, I argue, can be interpreted and should be  

interpreted as a nonverbal language which represents a critique of the dominant race. The  

importance of recognizing post-emancipation black agency as language is central,  

because at this point in black British discourse action was the only and the most  

noticeable equivalent to a discursive strategy they had at their disposal. The vast majority  

of ex-slaves were unable to write. Moreover, it was the manifestation of agency that the  

likes of Carlyle and Dickens translated into the language of innate inferiority and  

essential difference. These acts of black agency, wherever they appeared, challenged and  

questioned the racial hierarchy accepted by many Victorians and problematized what the  

British imagined as the appropriate parameters of interracial interaction. 

This anxiety-inspiring figure of African descent replaced what was loosely  

bantered about early in the nineteenth century as derivative of the Noble Savage. A high  

point in the Victorians‟ discussion of the Noble Savage may have surfaced in 1852-53  



 

 

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with the British reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe‟s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We will,  

however, later discuss the significance of Stowe‟s Uncle Tom through our analysis of  

Dickens‟s place in mid-nineteenth century racial discourse. The disposition and  

characteristics of the Noble Savage as a racial paradigm are important to our  

understanding of the trajectory of the transformations that occurred during this period.  

The idea of the Noble Savage adopted by the Victorians is derivative of Rousseau‟s man  

in a state of nature paradigm. Though Rousseau himself never uses the term Noble  

Savage, his contribution of the primitive and savage is foundational.  According to Hoxie  

Neale Fairchild, who seems to employ an eighteenth century and early nineteenth century  

definition derived from Rousseau‟s man in a state of nature, "a Noble Savage is any free  

and wild being who draws directly from nature virtues which raises doubts as to the value  

of civilization"(2). The Noble Savage, however, is problematic because it was aEuropean  

cultural invention designed to humanize and provide a discursive vehicle in which the  

non-European native was able to enter the fold of humanity. Still, the nature of its  

creation placed it in important ways spiritually above its creator. For here was a creation  

free of the corruption contemporary man had acquired as a result of his advancement up  

the ladder of progress. By the mid-nineteenth century, many Victorians saw that this  

pedestal was unacceptable because it made the dynamics and conditions of domination  

problematic. Placement onto this imaginative pedestal had the potential of modifying  

what may have been perceived as the inhumane treatment of natives and calling into  

question the enslavement of Africans. It also meant that the racial other, the African and  

Indian, were capable of progress similar to that of Europeans. Such positions destabilized  

the assumption that racial superiority was essential. Since the discovery of the New  

World, it was generally argued that native populations had virtuous and noble qualities  

that ought to be nurtured. It was believed that Christianity was to be introduced for the  



 

 

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benefit of non-European populations and for humanity at large. The protection, nurturing  

and development of the Noble Savage were, then, an evangelical‟s dream and the 

putative motive behind England's civilizing mission. In The Myth of the Noble Savage,  

Ter Ellingson identifies three primary and broad characteristics that constituted a Noble  

Savage:  (1) it posited an essentialist vision of the “savage” as  being “noble by nature” 

(2) this nobility, in general, was ascribed to the entire “nation” or “race.” And finally,(3) 

the “Noble Savage" was imagined as being more innocent and morally superior to the  

European (46).  This means that many proponents of the Noble Savage trope argued that  

native peoples could be elevated to the level of Western civilization, if placed under the  

guardianship of Western instructors. Capability and capacity for progress, therefore,  

placed the non-European within the fold of humanity as well as made his welfare a matter  

of Christian responsibility. But because of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) which  

established the first black republic, the outlawing of the Atlantic Slave trade in 1807, the  

abolition of slavery in British territories in 1834, and the end of apprenticeship in 1837,  

the character of the African as Noble Savage came under aggressive scrutiny and, by  

mid-century, discredited and replaced by a racial trope whose humanity and capacity for  

the imperatives of progress were questioned. These historical moments in the Caribbean  

served to loosen European control over a once servant race, threaten racial dynamics  

originally established during the contact zone, and imposed restrictions on the once  

superior group while it contributed to the autonomy and sense of personhood to the once  

socially dead. In other words, the historical anxieties accompanying loss of authority  

contributed to the reification of a racial type to position as the cause of concern. 

 I call the figure that Carlyle and Dickens bring into being the “Victorian Caliban,” 

and he is based on the character created by William Shakespeare in The Tempest. As  

suggested above, at the end of the 1840s and by the middle of the 1850s the Noble  



 

 

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Savage paradigm was supplanted by this much more threatening and less problematic  

African stereotype.  This particular racial figuration possessed all the monstrous qualities  

invented for him by Shakespeare. In the original play, Caliban is all but grateful for what  

his master and self-appointed benefactor Prospero has bestowed. As Caliban says in the  

first act of The Tempest, "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to  

curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!" (1.2.365-67). Obedience  

and servitude are elements of the language Caliban was taught and it was this language  

he cursed. It is the same language Carlyle and Dickens thought desirable to have  

imprinted onto the African's obstinate personality and limited intellect. In the play,  

Caliban's appropriation of Prospero's gifts takes the form of threats and curses. Caliban,  

then, is ungrateful for all that has been done for its benefit and enlightenment.  

Shakespeare's Caliban displays the same kind of imagined ingratitude attributed to the  

newly manumitted slaves after 1834 who refused to work for their betters in the British  

West Indies. In the reality of Shakespeare's play, curses, lewdness, barbarism and  

deception characterize the formless brute.  In varying degrees, even by the professed  

friends of the Negro, similar characterizations filled the pages of Victorian racial  

discourse in regards to peoples of African descent.  

Although neither Carlyle nor Dickens credited The Tempest as the Ur-text of their  

mid-nineteenth century invention, the relationship between Caliban and Prospero in  

Shakespeare's allegory was a mirror of Victorian racial desires and political anxieties.   

The peoples of African descent, like the fictive Caliban, were symbols of a historically  

barbaric world that needed, for the sake of civilization and for the sake of non-European  

native populations, to be tamed and taught the essentials of progress. For Victorians, the  

will to subdue and regulate nature geographically and within man was of moral,  

theological and political importance. In Caliban's Reason, Paget Henry notices that The  



 

 

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Tempest" dramaticized the new vision of existence as the global conquest of nature and  

history. To imperial Prospero, native Caliban (the Carib) was identical with nature -- a  

cannibal, a child, a monster without language, and hence a potential slave to be subdued  

and domesticated along with nature and history" (4).  By mid-century, the Victorian  

practitioners of racial representation took it as a given that people of African descent  

were inferior children of nature and, even after sustained contact with the West, subject to  

lapses into barbarism, laziness and insolence. Many Victorians attributed these moral  

lapses and imagined signs of regression as the result of emancipation. Because these  

particular imaginary qualities generated in the African behaviors constantly at odds with  

British commercial desires, the idea of a Noble Savage was erased almost overnight. In  

chapter four of this study, in which we address Edward Wilmot Blyden, we also see that  

even the attitudes of many English missionaries had generated an image of African  

character that did not resemble the noble type. According to Douglass Lorimer, these  

representational shifts were because “[t]he British rarely found that their schemes for  

black advancement fulfilled their exaggerated expectations and, rather than question their  

own vision, they revived the question of the Negro‟s racial inheritance and often found it  

wanting” (60). The African, according to the narrative attached to this new racial type, 

was constitutionally incapable of progress or participating in ascribed modes of behavior  

agreeable to the maintenance of civilization. Even the most liberal of racialist  

commentators dismissed the Africans' present condition (which for some appeared to be  

frustratingly fixed, natural and eternal) as unsuitable for the exigencies of civilization. In  

short, very few actually argued (or were ready to argue other than as a possibility in the  

remote future) that the African had arrived at the point where he could make use of and  

profit from what he had learned from his former masters and philanthropic benefactors.  

 Paradoxically, the mid-nineteenth century stereotype of the black West Indian  



 

 

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was the result of Emancipation and his appropriation of the strange new condition called  

freedom. That is, emancipation made it theoretically possible for members of the  

historically servant race to not merely engage their former masters as equals but to also  

determine the conditions of their relationship. Therefore, the ex-slave now felt he or she  

had control over their anatomy and autonomy, which in the British West Indies translated  

into deciding on the type of work they would do, the wages they would accept, and (of  

major importance to planters and former masters) the times of year and the conditions in  

which that work could and would get done. Without the fear of corporal punishment, the  

ex-slave was able to exercise what he perceived as autonomy and independence. In other  

words: while Caliban now saw himself as an agent and adopted British subject, the  

British descendants of Prospero imagined a recalcitrant and savage child unwilling and  

incapable of fulfilling a role they perceived as essential for the enrichment of the  

community. This attitude of the former slave, many planters and observers of the West  

Indian scene argued, was not conducive to the material progress that the optimistic  

architects of emancipation had anticipated. Because emancipation did not produce the  

kind of fruits observers had hoped for, attempts to explain what was perceived as the  

failure of the emancipation experiment came in the form of stereotypes about the nature  

and capacities of former slaves. These stereotypes of the black West Indian were created  

to explain current conditions and black behavior patterns. But since investigations were  

restricted to the post-emancipated black subject's failure to improve the material and  

emotional conditions of his former masters, rather than analyzing what blacks were doing  

for themselves in a language conducive to looking for signs of progress rather than  

retrogression, these stereotypes were successful in masking and distorting character traits  

blacks were reported to not have yet acquired. This discursive mask was generated  

through preconceived economic, political and cultural scripts about the nature of what it  



 

 

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meant to be a responsible and independent British subject.  Generally, within these  

cultural scripts was the idea that certain free and independent subjects had a function, and  

(because historically the color of their skin had in the imaginations of the British 

associated blacks with slavery and subservience) the peoples of African descent were  

expected to continue playing the same but (because they were free from force and  

received a salary) modified role. The critics of emancipation saw the ex-slave‟s  

appropriation of freedom as cultural and moral deviations from their script, and therefore  

a danger to the economic well-being of the West Indies.  According to Frederick Cooper,  

it was in "the nonconformity of the former slaves to imperial notions [that] shaped the  

subsequent coding of their behavior in racial terms and the defining of them as outside  

the bounds of 'citizen'" (9-10).  In this period of crisis and change, the Victorians used  

"rhetorical tropes" that "must be understood as more than merely literary and  

philosophical; they are the tropes that come into play with establishment and maintenance  

of colonial authority, or, as sometimes happens, those that register the loss of such  

authority" (3). Through contextualizing these stereotypes, as well as many of the  

humorous and not so flattering anecdotes circulating about the former slave, the nature  

and function of Victorian racial representation is revealed.  We, in short, will see that the  

Quashee's "pumpkin," innate laziness and unwillingness to do the work required for  

generating the wealth of former masters, as reported throughout the post-emancipation  

era by many of Britain's most credible and respectable literary talents, were actually  

strategically masking productive acts of black agency.   

 Therefore, the stereotyping processes that Carlyle and Dickens participated in  

with the fervor of a “moral panic,” however unorchestrated formally, were attempts to  

reassemble historical racial roles. By "moral panic" I mean "[a] condition, episode,  

person or group of persons emerged to become defined as a threat to societal values and  



 

 

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interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media;  

the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking  

people" ( Thompson 7). As a result of this moral panic, the form of stereotyping practiced  

by many mid-century Victorians was, in the words of Stuart Hall, "part of the  

maintenance of social and symbolic order. It sets up a symbolic frontier between the  

'normal' and the 'pathological,' the 'acceptable' and the 'unacceptable', what belongs and  

what does not or is 'Other,' between 'insiders' and 'outsiders', Us and Them. It facilitates  

the 'binding' or bonding together of all of Us who are 'normal' into one 'imagined  

community'; and it sends into symbolic exile all of Them - 'the Others' - who are in some  

way different - 'beyond the pale'" ("The Spectacle" 258). 

 This discursive masking successfully disguised the realization that many former  

slaves had their own concept of self and the desire to cultivate their own vision of social  

space. This new social space, to a great extent a response to the abuses slaves had  

experienced under slavery and apprenticeship, proved itself to be independent of the  

influence of planters, policymakers and, in some cases, missionaries. According to  

Thomas Holt, "there was the quiet reality of the ex-slave's refusal to follow the script  

envisioned by either planters or policymakers. While planters preferred coercion, and  

policymakers voluntary wage labor neither accepted the right of the freed people to  

choose an alternative path" (xxiii). Charles Taylor calls the vision of this space, or what  

Holt calls an "alternate path," the "social Imaginary." By the social imaginary Taylor  

"means something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may  

entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode" (23).  It is "the ways  

people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on  

between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper  

normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (23). 



 

 

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  By consciously pursuing their own social space, and acting on their own social  

imaginary, the emancipated black became a historical agent. "To be an agent," writes  

William Sewell, "means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social  

relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those  

relations to some degree" (143). According to Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische,  

agency is "a temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural  

environments -- the temporal-relational contexts of action -- which, through the interplay  

of habit, imagination and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in  

interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations" (970-71).  

Although no written narrative from the black British subjects during this crucial period  

exists, we can still analyze their actions against what was being written about them to see  

that the conflict between the ex-slave and the ruling classes was that both had contrary  

expectations and visions of what this new relationship entailed.  In other words, two ideas  

of how to use one's freedom, and not freedom per se, were at work and in conflict with  

one another. For one, a vision of autonomy free from the whip, the treadmill, forced  

servitude, insults and the unpredictable whims of another. For the other, however, a  

relationship that required and demanded from his erstwhile "property" servitude and  

submission to traditional work and social relationships. For this latter group, the planter  

class and for their sympathizers in England, a racial hierarchy was expected to remain  

intact for this new mode of existence to function properly and to be considered 

acceptable.    

1 

THOMAS CARLYLE FROM “THE NEGRO QUESTION” (1849) TO “THE 

NIGGER QUESTION” (1853) 

 In “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” which originally appeared in  



 

 

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Fraser's Magazine in December 1849, Thomas Carlyle passionately expressed his  

unpopular positions that 1) blacks should be compelled to work, 2) the emancipation of  

former slaves in the British West Indies was deleterious to blacks, whites, the future of  

the region and 3) that present conditions threatened the natural and traditional racial  

hierarchy. Perhaps in response to his critics, it was later revised and in 1853 was  

reprinted and positioned as the "precursor" to his collection of essays called Latter-Day  

Pamphlets. The revised essay was given an additional twenty-three paragraphs and a 

slightly altered title: "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question."Carlyle, whom  

David Levy calls "the theorist of hierarchical obedience" (45), certainly had enemies on  

Victorian England's discursive battlefield. That is because there was no room in Carlyle's  

cosmos for Liberal reforms, the rhetoric of the rights of man, and he definitely had no  

space in his consciousness for the consideration of the rights of blacks. With religious  

zeal, he believed that civilization was held together because of the Master/Man  

relationship, and that the ending of such a relationship leads to the type of chaotic society  

in which no one knows his place and where man does not respect man. As far as the legal  

rights of blacks in British West Indies were concerned, Carlyle envisioned the murderous  

pandemonium of a new Haiti, with "black Peter exterminating black Paul, and where a  

garden of the Hesperides might be, nothing but a tropical dog-kennel and pestiferous  

jungle" (675). However controversial, Carlyle greatly influenced Victorian thought and,  

even after the circulation of the unpopular comments in “Occasional Discourse,” a far  

from disinterested following. Catherine Hall says that the unpopular and backward- 

looking comments in “Occasional Discourse” were the expression of “words that others  

would not speak” (349). At his most absurd, Carlyle‟s enemies recognized that he was a  

literary force whose influence on the minds of contemporaries at home and abroad 

needed to be taken seriously. John Stuart Mill, in his offensive against the views  



 

 

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expressed in “Occasional Discourse,” sheds light on the weight of Carlyle‟s opinions  

when he writes that “[t]he words of writers of celebrity are words of power on the other  

side of the ocean” (31).  According to Mill, “Circulated as [Carlyle‟s] dissertation will  

probably be, by those whose interest profit by it, from one end of the American Union to  

the other, I hardly know of an act by which one person could have done so much mischief  

as this may possibly do; and I hold that by thus acting, he has made himself an instrument  

of what an able writer of the Inquirer justly calls „a true work of the devil‟” (31). As an  

indication of Carlyle‟s influence on the Victorians, George Eliot writes that “there is  

hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by  

Carlyle‟s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or  

twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived” (213-14).   

 In the 1849 “Occasional Discourse,” Carlyle argued that any talk about the  

“Rights of Negroes,” in light of what impoverished and unemployed Whites in England  

and Ireland were experiencing, was “a jumble of human nonsenses” (671). He 

represented blacks (whom he called “Quashee”) as abnormal and subhuman by arguing  

that blacks in the West Indian Islands have violated three major tenets of human nature:  

the divine law of man's natural instinct to work; that servitude and dependence were the  

natural conditions of the African; and the willingness to trade and exchange were the  

staples of civilization in which blacks refused to participate. In making these claims,  

Carlyle actually decontextualizes the significance of reports that many blacks actually  

sold and profited from products they had grown on their own lands. Black labor as  

represented by Carlyle does not contribute to the community, and therefore does not have  

the exchange value that makes their output any value to civilization and culture. In The  

Body Economic, Catherine Gallagher writes that although early Victorians “extolled work  

as the source of well-being and spiritual grandeur” (64), “almost all other Victorians”  



 

 

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subscribed “to the proposition that value derives from labor, that works make the wealth  

of nations” (78).  If it does not contribute to the wealth and cultural enrichment of the  

community then it fails to meet Carlyle‟s criteria of work and labor. From where Carlyle  

sat, these acts of self-employment expressed by blacks in the West Indies were re-drawn  

into caricatures representing the pumpkin eating ex-slave as happy and content with  

doing very little work. When the black did work, according to Carlyle‟s line of thinking,  

it was only for subsistence or for a short unproductive period of time. Carlyle does  

acknowledge that the black West Indian grew his own food, but what he perceived as  

merely subsistence cultivation does not constitute work or labor. The cultivation of  

pumpkins gets translated by Carlyle as another example of how the lazy, selfishly anti- 

social and happy Negro received everything gratis and at the expense and discomfort of  

his white neighbor. In the words of Carlyle, 

Supply and demand, which, science says, should be brought to bear on 

him, have an uphill task of it with such a man. Strong sun supplies itself 

gratis, rich soil in those unpeopled or half-peopled regions almost gratis; 

these are his 'supply;' and half an hour a-day, directed upon these, will 

produce pumpkin which is his 'demand.' The fortunate Black man, very 

swiftly does he settle his account with supply and demand: - not so swiftly 

the less fortunate White man of these tropical localities. He himself cannot 

work: and his black neighbor, rich in pumpkin, is in no haste to help him.  

(672) 

 Throughout "Occasional Discourse," it was the imagined Calibanistic trope and  

the seemingly diminished sense of racial hierarchy that really occupied Carlyle‟s  

thinking. It was, in fact, the traditional racial hierarchy that Carlyle represented as  

threatened. Registered, as a result of the black's newly granted autonomy and  

emancipation's destabilizing potential, he suggested that the material welfare of whites in  

the West Indies was at the mercy of blacks. "Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing  

saccharine juices, and much at his ease in the Creation, he can listen to the less fortunate  



 

 

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White man's 'demand,' and take his own time in supplying it" (672). What is interesting  

about this passage is that he writes as if he knows that his contemporary reader will detect  

what is unnatural in the relationship he has described. Here, for Carlyle, is the Other‟s  

unnatural denial of white authority. Even if Carlyle and his imagined reader had no  

qualms with a black man "at his ease in the Creation," this "ease" is in conflict with the  

"White man's 'demands.'" Yesterday's servant now decided the conditions in which those  

demands were to be negotiated. Furthermore, Carlyle strategically aligns the white man‟s  

demands to his food supply, which in this caricature of the relationship is now controlled  

totally by the former slave. The dynamics of this relationship flew in the face of  

everything Carlyle and many contemporary middle-class Victorians found acceptable. It  

is also, in microcosm, a fair picture of the post-emancipation problem that the planter  

class and many white observers faced, and of the new sense of agency and autonomy that  

blacks discovered. Black agency, here, then comes across as an ignoble act because it  

undermines the needs and exigencies of the white community.  

Nowhere is it even suggested that individual members of the black population in  

the West Indies engaged in the form of cultivation that leads towards commerce,  

exchange and contribute to the demands of culture and civilization. For Carlyle,  

West India Islands, still full of wasted fertility, produce abundant 

pumpkins; pumpkins, however, you will please to observe, are not the sole 

requisite for human wellbeing.... The Islands are good withal for pepper, 

for sugar, for sago, arrowroot, for coffee, perhaps for cinnamon and 

precious spices; things far nobler than pumpkins; and leading towards 

commerce, arts, polities, and social developments, which alone are the 

noble product, where men (and not pigs with pumpkins) are the parties 

concerned! Well, all this fruit too, fruit spicy and commercial, fruit 

spiritual and celestial, so far beyond the merely pumpkinish and grossly 

terrene, lies in the West India lands: and the ultimate 'proprietorship of 

them,- why, I suppose, it will vest in him who can best educe from them 

whatever of noble produce they were created fit for yielding. He, I 

compute, is the real 'Vicegerent of the Maker' there: in him, better and 



 

 

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better chosen, and not in another, is the 'property' vested by decree of 

Heaven's chancery itself! (674) 

Carlyle, in fact, denied the black any aptitude for cultivation and beyond satisfying the  

desires of their former masters. As Carlyle presented it, blacks nomadically roamed the  

Islands (for they do nothing that leads to “social developments”), filling themselves on  

the productions of nature and the work of others. Blacks consume rather than produce  

and exchange, which places them on the same level as children and animals. The  

suggestion of the black as producer is nowhere rendered. Moreover, the cultivation of  

these desired nobler spices in the West Indian Islands were not possible until the  

appearance of Carlyle's Prospero-like "white Enchanter" (674). Favoring particular  

commodities as “noble,” as Carlyle does, clearly suggest that value is appointed only if it  

contributes to the taste and material needs of a particular class of man. According to  

Carlyle, the Islands' "noble elements of cinnamon, sugar, coffee, pepper black and grey,  

[were] lying all asleep, waiting for the white Enchanter who would say to them, Awake!"  

(674-75). Carlyle believed that "[t]ill the end of human history and the sounding of the  

Trump of Doom, they might have lain so, had Quashee and the like of him been the only  

artists in the game" (675).  

 Since, in Carlyle‟s representation of current events, the blacks refused to work, 

"will not honestly aid in bringing out those sugars, cinnamons, and nobler products of the  

West Indian Islands, for the benefit of all mankind" (675), which is the law of nature,  

then they must be compelled and enslaved. "Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out  

the spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little less ugly than  

his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other methods avail not, will be  

compelled to work" (675). In other words, not only should blacks be discouraged from  

living freely in the Islands "except on terms that are fair toward Britain" (676), but the  



 

 

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Englishman‟s attitude must be that of a stern parent. Thus, for Carlyle, the best possible  

world is one resembling that of parentage.  This racial hierarchy is "the Law of the  

World," one of "Heaven's Laws" (677), trans-historical and unalterable by man.  Nature  

created the Master/Slave relationship for the good of both white and black, and defying  

nature will lead to social catastrophe. "[N]o well-being, and in the end no being at all,  

will be possible for you or us, if the Law of Heaven is not complied with" (677). The  

unregulated and independent black, then, posed a threat to civilization as a whole.  

 In framing black/white relations in such terms, Carlyle naturalized the racial  

hierarchy. In a nutshell, the Carlylean racialized strategy, his mode of discursive 

masking, ran as follows. It is to fix the African condition in nature. As a form of  

discursive masking, it decontextualized the social and economic functions of black labor  

experienced in the evolution of the black community by emphasizing the deteriorated  

racial hierarchy and reduction in wealth of whites. The tropological turn of his racial  

thinking reified and posited as natural a politically and economically motivated  

relationship. For Carlyle, writes Spurr, "nature has already determined a hierarchy of  

humanity which government, in the case of the West Indies, would be wise to act upon.  

In this ideal view of things, power follows reason, history follows nature" (66).The  

Carlylean form of racial discourse, as well as colonial discourse in general, "naturalizes  

the process of domination: it finds a natural justification for the conquest of nature and  

primitive peoples, those 'children of nature'" (Spurr 156). Stuart Hall (1996) writes that  

this form of racist discourse "dehistoricizes - translating historically specific structures  

into a timeless language of nature" (57). In "The Spectacle of the 'Other'," Hall posits that  

"naturalization is thus a representational strategy designed to fix 'difference', and thus  

secure it forever. It is an attempt to halt the inevitable 'slide' of meaning, to secure  

discursive and ideological 'closure' (245).  



 

 

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 Carlyle's is the type of discursive strategy that occurs during social change and  

imagined and real social crisis. For Carlyle, the idea of "rights of Negroes" and the  

rhetoric of equality were contributors to the sense of moral panic registered in  

"Occasional Discourse." He, in short, imagined the defacement of a God-given hierarchy.  

According to Michael Taussig, "[w]hen the human body, a nation's flag, money, or a  

public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from  

within the defaced thing itself. It is now in a state of desecration, the closest many of us  

are going to get to the sacred in this modern world" (1). In Poisoning the Lower Order,  

Don Herzog writes that "[c]ontempt grows angrier not despite visions of equality but  

because of them. If social hierarchy is under attack, it calls for vivid new emotional  

investments that always betray the fear that hierarchy is doomed, or at least it will never  

again be what it used to be" (363). Since this threat to the hierarchy has perceived cultural  

and material ramifications, it had the force of a historical event whose momentum must  

be confronted and curtailed. Because the ideas behind the myth of the Noble Savage open 

the way for racial representations that can destabilize the racial hierarchy (for the Noble  

Savage is perceived as a potential equal), the meaning attached to the Other must be  

altered for a less problematic one. We can see what Hall means when he argues that  

racial meaning floats, which seems to suggest the importance of particular racialized  

representations to remedy social change and social crisis. The racial trope that gets  

privileged is contingent on the demands of the historical moment and it serves political  

agendas and ideological imperatives. Hall writes that "[m]eaning 'floats'. It cannot  

be finally fixed. However, attempting to 'fix' it is the work of a representational practice,  

which intervenes in the many potential meanings of an image in an attempt to privilege  

one" ("Spectacle" 228).  According to Laura Callanan, mid-Victorian racial discourse  

was often "tropological." This means that a series of rhetorical figures developed, with  



 

 

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which writers conveyed shorthand allusions to complex social negotiations taking place  

within the culture. These figures took a variety of forms, including symbols, narrative  

patterns, historical events, and geographical locations (44). Carlyle's Caliban-like figure 

answered the questions that plagued the contemporary British imagination about the  

character of blacks in the British West Indies. The Caliban trope fixed the African in a  

position that availed for many Victorians easy solutions, and more direct and heavy- 

handed approaches to conduct business in the colonies.  

By the time Carlyle reprinted "Occasional Discourse" in his Latter-day Pamphlets 

in 1853, England was in the midst of "Negro-Mania" and "Uncle Tom-Mania," thus  

inspiring him to discard the acceptable "Negro" in the title for the more derogatory and  

demeaning "Nigger." According to Audrey Fisch, “[w]hether to purchase narratives  

written by escaped American slaves in England, to hear speeches, or to see authentic  

scars of slavery on a black man‟s back, Victorians eagerly paid money and queued up”  

(5). Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was perhaps for the majority of  

Victorians the most important and recognized product of American slavery.  For many  

British critics of emancipation, the popularity of the novel may have been the cause of  

anxiety.  Marcus Wood correctly describes "[t]he second publication [of “Occasional  

Discourse” as] a strategic anti-abolition intervention, and the substantial alterations had  

two main aims. First, it was explicitly designed as an assault on the popularity of Stowe's  

Uncle Tom's Cabin. Secondly, it was designed to create an image of Carlyle himself as  

martyr to the pro-slavery cause, a figure 'crucified' by the philanthropists" (376). Wood's  

assessment that Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was a major incentive for the appearance of  

the revised "Occasional Discourse" is only partly accurate. What is really important about  

the "Nigger Question" was its placement as the "precursor" to the volume of essays in  

which it appeared. Whereas "Occasional Discourses" was a topical response to the labor  



 

 

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problems in the West Indies, as well as a corrective against the overturning of the  

traditional racial hierarchy, "Nigger Question" was positioned to remind middle-class  

readers swept up by Negro-- and Uncle Tom-- Mania of the nature of the fiction that 

Stowe, philanthropists, abolitionists, and visiting fugitive American slaves with the  

popularity of Fredrick Douglass and William Wells Brown propagated.  For one, by  

changing from the more polite "Negro" to the derogatory "Nigger" in the title, Carlyle  

announced his intention to comment on an unambiguously degraded presence. He wanted  

his reader to know that he was not writing about the noble-hearted, heroic, virtuous, and  

inhumanly abused Negro slave of sentimental fiction, but of an actual threat to British  

well-being. He wanted to remind his reader that the "Nigger," unlike Stowe's Uncle Tom,  

was not a product of the imagination, but a destructive and dangerous essence within the  

British kingdom.  Secondly, by positioning the "Nigger Question" as a "precursor" (or  

prelude), as an unnumbered chapter in a volume of essays essentially denouncing  

philanthropists and humanitarian principles, Carlyle created the equivalent of a  

cautionary tale. He, in short, positioned his counter-narrative against the romantic,  

popular, and sentimental sideshow visiting from across the Atlantic.  

2 

CHARLES DICKENS AND THE IGNOBLE SAVAGE 

 Charles Dickens‟s “The Noble Savage” appears in Household Words the same  

year that Thomas Carlyle published his Latter-day Pamphlets.  Like Carlyle‟s text, its  

purpose was to re-draw for the British reader an alternate vision of the Other than what  

was generally being displayed and paraded throughout Great Britain at the time.  

Although Bernth Lindfors describes "The Noble Savage" merely as Dickens's "hilarious"  

example "of the ignobility of uncivilized man," and that "there can be no doubt that  

Dickens, with his incomparable flair for comic exaggeration, achieved his aim of  



 

 

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debunking the romantic myth of the 'noble savage'" (69), the function and intention of  

this "hilarious" essay had social ramifications far broader than mere entertainment. It was  

the last of three attempts in non-fiction in which Dickens demonizes the African  

personality. Although Dickens, unlike Carlyle, does not express concern for the labor  

problems in the West Indies, he does posit that white lives are in danger in the tropics and  

ignored at home because of the desired nature of England‟s contact and uncritical and  

romantic obsession with the nobility of African. Although Carlyle specifically limits his  

concerns to the West Indies, Dickens imagines an essential antagonism between white  

and non-white races that cannot be ameliorated through Christianity and well-wishing.  

Dickens, in “The Noble Savage,” goes so far as to position the benighted "native" and  

people of African descent as the source of inattention to the problems of poverty in  

England. In this way, for Dickens, the African becomes the scapegoat whose final  

disappearance will be his only true service to humanity. As a result of the “savages”  

extermination, all talk about his nobility will come to an end and all efforts toward giving  

form and structure to that nobility, at the expense of those starving at home, will cease.  

Moreover, in his writings about the African, the Indian, and non-whites, Dickens's 

representations always showed his contemporary reader that what was at work was a  

relationship which potentially leads to a fatal and material imbalance that does not always  

favor whites. Much of his commentary about relationships between races was of the order  

of keeping groups apart, or of limited contact. This distancing would be, of course,  

beneficial for the physical well-being of whites, which in turn suggested that blacks had a  

diseased quality which could only do harm to the Anglo Saxon's body politic. This  

tendency of Dickens's racialist thinking that favored physical and geographic distancing  

from the African shows up in "The Niger Expedition”, which is a review of Captain  

William Allen's Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her Majesty's Government to the  



 

 

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River Niger in 1841 and "North American Slavery", which is a response to Harriet  

Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Furthermore, though Dickens, unlike Carlyle, never  

takes the overt leap of advocating slavery, he does adopt a wait and see attitude that  

favored the pockets of planters in the American South. However, in “The Noble Savage”  

Dickens does side with Carlyle on the "diabolical" and unstable character of the African  

and non-European races, the detrimental influence of "savages" on Anglo Saxon lives,  

and inthe diseased thinking of philanthropists. “The Noble Savage,” in the end, is  

indirectly an attack on Stowe‟s portrayal of the black as having any of the virtuous  

qualities she endowed them with in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In other words, though  

Dickens's writings may have registered some racial ambiguity early in his career,  

between 1848 and 1853 his views on black humanity were set and in "The Noble Savage"  

his views were carved in stone. 

 While some scholars have commented on what may be racial ambiguity in  

Dickens's published writing, others have pointed to the hold of Carlyle on his racial and  

political thought. For instance, in "Dickens on American Slavery: A Carlylean Slant",  

Arthur Adrian writes that although he "did not go all the way in embracing Carlyle's  

argument for the white man's supremacy," Dickens "did see eye to eye with the essayist  

on certain aspects of the subject" (316). According to Michael Goldberg, "Carlyle  

remained a hero to Dickens throughout his life" (62) and that "[l]ike Carlyle, the tone and  

temper of his social satire acquired a new astringency after 1850, and the subjects he  

chose to satirize gave frequent offense to liberal opinion" (70).  In "Charles Dickens and  

the Zulus," Lindfors argues that Dickens did not advocate genocide in "The Noble  

Savage" essay. Lindfors writes that "he [Dickens] was very much the Victorian  

pragmatist striving to puncture an inflated Romantic conception of the dignity of  

'primitive' peoples. The Zulus were simply a convenient case in point, a group so far  



 

 

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removed from Europe in custom and culture that they could easily be held up as  

examples of an underdeveloped race obviously in need of moral improvement and mental  

refinement. Dickens did not suggest that such peoples be exterminated; rather, he wanted  

them 'civilized off the face of the earth.' He believed in cultural, not literal, genocide"(76- 

7). In Dickens and Empire, Grace Moore rightly recognizes that imperial territories and  

Britain's domestic socioeconomic troubles were "inextricably linked in Dickens's  

imagination" (2).  According to Moore, "[d]espite his humanitarian principles, when  

Dickens was afraid of the slave moving above his station he sought to return him to his  

place through drawing upon what we would consider today a racist discourse" (56). In  

Dark Victorians, Vanessa Dickerson claims that "Dickens's propensity to mock in  

American Notes the victims of the system he would denounce foreshadows the shift in his  

attitude toward blacks that would occur over the next twenty or so years. As Michael  

Goldberg has observed, 'Whereas in 1842 Dickens felt an unequivocal horror for the  

"accursed and detested system" of slavery and was glad to turn his back on the states that  

practiced it, by 1865 he was confessing himself a 'Southern sympathizer to this extent – 

that I more believe in the Northern love of the black man, or in the Northern horror of  

slavery having anything to do' with the beginnings of the Civil War" (30).   

 As far as Dickens's racial attitudes are concerned, many critics of Victorian racial  

discourse seem to have overlooked (or under-emphasized) the importance of "race" as a 

relational concept. Dickens's racialist thinking, and the stereotypes he contributed to 

making, were both implicitly and explicitly couched in relational modes. Therefore, these  

racial representations were the manifestations of a relationship between groups. In 

Difference and Pathology, Sander Gilman writes that "[t]he complexity of the stereotype  

resulted from the social context in which it is to be found" (19).  This was particularly the  

case when it comes to nineteenth century England and the cultures they sought to  



 

 

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dominate.  Neither Carlyle, Dickens, nor any participant in Victorian racial discourse  

engaged the representation of race as if it were in isolation from the cultural self, national  

identity and national desires. The nature of this relation was usually one of power,  

control, temporal and ideological stability. According to Gordon K. Lewis, "the essence  

of ideology is perceived self-image, how any societal group sees it function within the  

general matrix of the social structure, how it sees other groups, and what particular  

arguments it produces as a means of self-justification" (108). Gilman writes that, "[o]ur  

self-image not only reflects our representations of the external world, but, by influencing  

our perceptions of objects and their integration into that mental representation, shapes it  

as well. The objects exist, we interact with them, they respond to (or ignore)our demands  

upon them. But when we relate to them, we relate to them through the filter of our  

internalized representation of the world. This representation centers around our sense of  

control" (19). Therefore, the type of stereotyped representations generated by Victorians  

must be analyzed in terms of the nature of England's material relationship to the Other as  

well as how they imagined the relationship between white and non-white. The questions  

to be asked when engaging Victorian racial discourses are: what material and  

psychological investments are registered in the construction of the Other?  And, what is  

the context of these investments? This means that you cannot thoroughly deal with the  

racial attitudes of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and their contemporaries without  

taking into account the type of racial relationship they had envisioned and imagined and  

the type of relationship they believed would be of benefit to the whites of England.  

 Dickens's questionable sympathies for blacks and the instability he had imagined  

resulting from relations with non-European peoples had been registered before 1853. For  

instance, in "The Niger Expedition," Dickens used Captain Allen's report of the ill-fated  

expedition as a narrative of the dangers and futility of contact with a people as dishonest  



 

 

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and dangerous as the Africans had proven themselves to be. The aim of the expedition  

was the establishment of treaties with various West African nations in an attempt to  

eradicate the slave trade at its source. As a result, England would contribute to civilizing  

indigenous peoples through the introduction of Christianity and increased commerce.  

Commerce was to come in the form exchanging native products for British goods and the  

terms of these treaties were determined by England. Dickens's main point in this review  

was that the African was constitutionally unfit and unprepared for civilization. Dickens  

opens "The Niger Expedition" with a stab, as Carlyle would do a year later in  

"Occasional Discourse," at the philanthropists of Exeter Hall. "It might be laid down as a  

very good general rule of social and political guidance, that whatever Exeter Hall  

champions, is the thing by no means to be done" (117). When considering the  

implications of this statement, it is important to remember that Exeter Hall championed  

the protection of aboriginal cultures. Even in this piece of sarcasm about of small group  

of philanthropists, Dickens has supplied an indication of where Victorians should not  

address attention. He warned his reading public that if they were foolish enough to  

transport civilization to Africa, it must be done "by other means than the exposure of  

inestimable British lives to certain destruction by an enemy against which no gallantry  

can contend" (118). Dickens is never explicit as to why the African was an "enemy," but  

this "enemy... which no gallantry can content" must be of the scope of a monster to  

resists British gallantry. This enemy could be environmental, for he does call the entrance  

to the Niger “The Gate of the Cemetery” (119-120), as well as referring to the  

Englishman‟s “perfect impotency in opposition to their climate, their falsehood, and  

deceit” (118). This "enemy," that the philanthropists of Exeter Hall sought to elevate, was  

for Dickens the source of disease and death. Contact with blacks, then, was fatal for  

whites. He suggests the vast difference between black and white, and the infeasibility of  



 

 

25 

 

them occupying the same space, when he writes that "[t]he air that brings life to the latter  

brings death to the former" (133). Although he suggested the then conventional belief in  

the unhealthiness of the tropical climate on the European body, he was also suggesting  

that both groups are warring ("enemy") and different species. He makes clear his belief  

that a tremendous moral and intellectual gulf exist between the white man and the black  

man. In the words of Dickens, "Between the civilized European and the barbarous  

African there is a great gulf set" (133). His use of "enemy" makes this "gulf" more than a  

mere cultural one. 

 The African, for Dickens, is represented as diabolical and unable to engage in  

honest relations with civilized nations.  Throughout "The Niger Expedition," he described  

the African's dishonesty when it comes to honoring treaties drawn by British  

missionaries. The treaties presented to African leaders stated the terms in which Africans  

were to conduct their external and domestic affairs. Among the concerns in the treaties  

was that the African would cease the selling of slaves to Western nations.  For Dickens,  

the civilizing of the African, and desire to make him Christian, what he called "the  

railroad Christianisation of Africa" (133),were dangerous and self-destructive acts of  

folly. This was the context that Dickens wanted to get across. The energy, material  

resources and the humanitarian enthusiasm expressed by the architects of the Niger  

Expedition should have been redirected toward ameliorating the conditions of the poor at  

home, rather than toward the menacing peoples abroad.  "Believe it," Dickens writes at  

the end of "The Niger Expedition," "African Civilisation, Church of England Missionary,  

and all other Missionary Societies! The work at home must be completed thoroughly, or  

there is no hope abroad" (133-34). Dickens concludes by suggesting that if it was  

possible to elevate the African from his degraded state (for Dickens, blacks were always  

in a degraded state), Christian and European wisdom must be in the form of a black man  



 

 

26 

 

to a black man, as others had also argued. According to Dickens, "there is sound wisdom  

in his idea of approaching the black man through the black man" and that "he can only be  

successfully approached by a studied reference to the current of his own opinions and  

customs instead of ours" (134). Black mediation, then, seems to serve as protection  

against contact with black persons and the African climate.   

 Dickens, in "North American Slavery," which he wrote with Henry Morley 

(1822-1894), uses Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the medium through which his personal  

commentary is made on the moral and intellectual character and constitutions of the  

African. This is a highly problematic essay only because the message, at times, seems  

forced and the reader is able to sense the presence of two hands. Still, he once again  

draws attention to the African's persona and to how well-meaning whites had  

misinterpreted the African psyche.  In the first paragraph, Dickens writes that 

Uncle Tom's Cabin with all its faults (and it is not free from the fault of 

overstrained conclusions and violent extremes) is a noble work; full of 

high power; lofty humanity; the gentlest, sweetest, and yet boldest, 

writing. Its authoress, Harriet Beecher Stowe, is an honour to the time that 

has produced her, and will take her place among the best writers of fiction, 

inspired by the best and noblest purpose. Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe, 

George Harris, and the other negroes with whom Mrs. Stowe has by this 

time made most of us acquainted, are, no doubt, rare specimens of Slaves. 

(1) 

A little further in the article he clarified what was meant by the vague "rare specimens of  

slaves" with "rare specimens of negro character" (3).Therefore, for Dickens, the glowing  

"faults" of the novel are the noble and virtuous qualities Stowe has written into her  

principle black characters. These qualities, which he avoids to elaborate on in "North  

American Slavery," but which readers of the novel were able to perceive, make Uncle  

Tom, Aunt Chloe and George Harris "rare specimens" of what slaves were like as human  

beings.  



 

 

27 

 

 As far as slavery as an institution was concerned, Dickens believed that the  

practice (which he believed should eventually be abolished) in North America was more  

humane than slavery in other countries. However, his solution had a peculiar Carlylean  

ring because it suggested that abolition must come with as little inconvenience to whites  

as possible. Therefore, what was morally right takes back seat to what was materially  

convenient, and racially and ideologically appropriate. Dickens wrote that "A right thing  

may be done in the wrong way; slaves may be made wretched, as well as holders ruined,  

by an act which, being only just and merciful in its own essence, might be so done as to  

become a gain and blessing to all men whose lives are influenced by its effects" (1).  

Other than suggesting that the lives of blacks under slavery at that moment were not  

"wretched," Dickens sounds like a practical observer.  And if slavery was not as wretched  

as abolitionists, fugitive slaves in England, and the annoying self-righteous pundits of  

Exeter Hall had claimed, then North American slaves lived within a certain level of  

protection and contentment. 

 This particular essay has peculiar pro-slavery connotations, for it seems to  

suggests that the material needs of whites must out-weigh the lived conditions of blacks,  

who are strangely better off once their masters started treating them like valuable live- 

stock.   

But while the contraband traffic in slaves is essential to the working of the 

slave system on its present footing in the Spanish Antilles, among the 

Anglo-Americans importation has entirely ceased. The bodily conditions 

of slaves under our cousins in America - we speak only of their bodily 

condition, rating them not as men, but as so much live stock – is good. 

They are, on the whole, fed as amply, and are as well treated as the upper 

class of European horses. They have therefore thriven and their stock is 

multiplied in the land; their inherent power of reproduction more than 

balances the amount of physical decay. (2) 

Dickens's description of the well-fed and productive slave framed for his contemporary  



 

 

28 

 

reader (some of whom were aware that he had visited North American in the early 1840s)  

the image of American blacks as nothing more than animal-like. It was the virtue of the  

American system of slavery to treat their slaves like "the upper class of European horses."  

Thanks to the slaves' powerful sex drive, or "their inherent power of reproduction,"  

American slave holders were able to withdraw from participation in the Atlantic slave  

trade. Moreover, it proved beneficial to the American system that the slaves' animal  

nature and strong sexual appetites have been able to compensate for those slaves worked  

to the level of "physical decay." In short, he has constructed an image of the antithesis of  

the chaste Victorian community. Blacks were rendered as animalistic beings ("live  

stock," "horses")who cannot, as most middle class Victorians can, control his and her  

impulses. According to Dickens's representation of the behavior of slaves, they have no  

sense of restraint and they have a  natural inclination to breed. 

 Dickens goes on to argue that most slaves are content with their position, and look  

forward to being treated like the slave holder's favorite pet. The purpose of this line of  

thought is an attempt to reiterate the older notion of the black as a natural servant to  

white.  

Born to the system, bred to the system, degraded by being set to labour in 

sight of a whip, like the brutes, so working on a motive against which even 

a well-bred brute comes to rebel – thousands of negroes are content to be 

well fed and housed, occasionally patted on the head or played with, and, 

when the master finds it needful to reduce his stock, part with a mere 

transitory brutish pang from a contented wife in Maryland, perhaps, to lie 

down content with a new wife in a new stall in Tennessee. (3) 

And,   

It is pleasanter to think of slaves in Cuba flying before bloodhounds, than 

to know that the slaves of North America learn to identify themselves with 

their masters, and to lie down contented with their place among farm 

animals, because they are well fed; and that in the year 1850, out of three 

million slaves only a thousand fled away in search of liberty: the greater 



 

 

29 

 

part even of that thousand seeking not liberty for its own sake, but as a 

means of escape from the punishment incurred by theft and other crimes. 

(3) 

Dickens, even before "The Noble Savage," does not represent blacks as rational agents.  

The only act of agency he allowed his construction of blacks to have comes in the form  

of flight to "escape from the punishment incurred by theft and other crimes." Dickens's  

representation of what I see as an example of agency seems to correspond to what James  

Scott (1990) means with the observation that "[r]ebels and revolutionaries are labeled  

bandits, criminals , hooligans in a way that diverts attention from their political  

claims"(55).Their acts of agency were decontextualized as crime and theft. Among the  

acts of theft was the willingness to steal "liberty," for legally they were the property of  

others. Nowhere in his interpretations of the African character does Dickens remotely  

suggest that peoples of African descent had a shadow of nobility. As he said in the  

passage above: "even a well-bred brute comes to rebel." They were all described as being  

child-like or devious, questionably worthy of protection. The African, for Dickens, was  

concerned only with satisfying his baser and lower instincts. His ability to seemingly  

praise the American system of slavery and denounce slavery in the abstract was rendered  

through the amplification of what he imagined as the African‟s anti-social and animalistic  

qualities and negation of African humanity.  The racial trope he wanted the middle class  

Victorian to accept as real was, in short, the exact opposite of the myth and romanticized  

noble savage.    

 "The Noble Savage" (1853) can be seen as Charles Dickens's summary on the  

essential nature of Africans and non-white peoples. Moreover, he offered his final  

solution on how to handle this racial trope that had been for him and for other British  

commentators of racial difference, at home and abroad, a "nuisance." "The Noble  

Savage" is far less complex and has none of the nuances that are present in "The Niger  



 

 

30 

 

Expedition" and "North American Slavery." It is a straightforward denunciation of the  

myth of the noble savage and all of the qualities that attached to its referents. The most  

important of these qualities, and the one that had influenced many Europeans for  

centuries, was the belief that natives can be elevated and made equal to (if not better  

than) whites. The idea of a noble savage, therefore, threatened and insulted Dickens's  

perception of himself as an Anglo Saxon member in the racial hierarchy. With the only  

weapons he had at his command, his pen and the credibility attached to his name, he  

sought to create a portrait of a species of man that must be isolated, controlled and, in the  

final scheme of things, exterminated.  

For Dickens, the "noble savage" was a romantic construct, "superstition," and  

“nuisance” that many of his contemporaries had inherited. This construct was a  

“nuisance” because the virtues and essential innocence projected onto the putative Noble  

Savage entitled him to the respect afforded equals, near equals, and it made him worthy  

of attention and valuable resources. As an evolving member of the modern human family,  

this uncorrupted and unspoiled child of nature was the perfect vessel not only of  

Christianity but also of Christian charity. As the adult member of the modern human  

family, many Victorians perceived it as their duty to spiritually and intellectually elevate  

the less capable member. It was perhaps this self-imposed position of protector, teacher,  

guide and benefactor, which fostered the sense of superiority. The obsession with him, as  

well as the obsession with the putative moral obligation in relation to the indigenous non- 

European, however, took attention away from conditions (like the London poor) closer to  

home. The virtuous and malleable nature of the romanticized subject of this stereotype  

distorted the vision of Englishmen and caused many Britons to try to bring savages into  

the folds of civilization. Dickens had no confidence that the characteristics revolving  

around the noble savage myth existed in the nature of the native. Dickens‟s point was that  



 

 

31 

 

neither virtue nor potential for development existed in the moral and mental constitution  

of indigenous peoples. Although this may appear to be somewhat of a turnaround in his  

thoughts about non-whites, it is really an evolution in his racial thinking that was inspired 

by personal forces outside of his control. His friend, Lord Thomas Denman (1779-1854),  

had published a series of articles in which he compared Dickens's treatment of slavery  

and the slave trade in Bleak House with that of Harriet Beecher Stowe‟s Uncle Tom's  

Cabin. According to Denman, Dickens was among “our most popular and influential  

writers” whose literary productions in regard to slavery was “calculated to mislead”(iv).  

Denman, once a close friend of Dickens, identified Mrs. Jellybee in Bleak House and  

“some papers in the „Houeshold Words’” as having been written for the taste of  

slaveholders only” (11).  Therefore, the "nuisance" that he mentioned early in "The Noble  

Savage" can be seen also as a personal one, for it caused him to respond in a less elusive  

and much more defining way. He was now able to give his conclusive thoughts.  

 Dickens introduced the reader of Household Words to what he perceived as the  

true nature of the Caliban-like native by opening "The Noble Savage" with these  

unambiguous words: “To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least  

belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous  

superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fails to reconcile me  

to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage something  

highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth” (337). Although, by referencing  

"pale face" and fire-"water," he appeared to be writing about the Indians in North  

American, his opening includes all non-white races. When he does get to peoples of  

African descent, he warns his reader of the noble savage's warlike and diabolical nature.  

"The noble savage," writes Dickens,  



 

 

32 

 

sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his life and limbs 

without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is passed chin deep in 

a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly, is in his turn killed by 

his relations and friends, the moment a gray hair appears on his head. All 

the noble savage wars are with his fellow-savages (and he takes no 

pleasure in anything else) are wars of extermination - which is the best 

thing I know of him, and the most comfortable to my mind when I look at 

him. He has no moral feelings of any kind, sort, or description; and his 

"mission" may be summed up as simply diabolical. (338) 

Dickens concludes this short character study where he began: 

My position is, that if we have anything to learn from this Noble Savage, it 

is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness a delusion; his 

nobility, nonsense. We have no greater justification for being cruel to the 

miserable object, than for being cruel to a William Shakespeare or an 

Isaac Newton; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and 

higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will 

be all the better when his place knows him no more.  (338)  

Considering the almost universal praise of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which at that moment  

rivaled Dickens‟s very own Bleak House, these words prepared the reader for an alternate  

rendering of Stowe's popular Negro-type.  The noble and sentimentalized Negro of  

Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was recognized as a fiction through Charles Dickens's "The  

Noble Savage." Although Dickens neither directly addresses the pressing situation in the  

British West Indies nor social problems at home in this essay, he participated in the  

Carlylean racial project indirectly by ending that "the world will be all the better when his  

place knows him no more." This is a rewording of the beginning of "The Noble Savage"  

and the conclusion of "The Niger Expedition."  The world, for Dickens, will be a better  

place when the dark "nuisance" is no more. Only then will then English government be  

able to attend to issues at home and aspirations abroad. 

  Dickens was much more concerned that attention gets placed on domestic affairs.  

This was indicated at the end of "The Niger Expedition," and was another reason why  



 

 

33 

 

native peoples were regarded as a nuisance. According to Moore, "he also came to  

conceive of the other worlds of Victorian penury, like London's East End, as areas in  

need of the type of missionary activity that he regarded as misplaced in the distant  

colonies when there was still so much work to be done at home" (2). Dickens‟s attitude  

toward misusing valuable resources aboard is satirized in the character of Mrs. Jellyby in  

Bleak House (1852-53). With her attention overseas, Mrs. Jellybee doesn‟t notice that her  

own children are unfed, uneducated and unhappy.  This, for Dickens, is an allegory of  

what concern for the dark Other has brought England.  According to Grace Moore,  

By the time of Bleak House (1852-3) Dickens's frustration with the policy 

of domestic laissez-faire - in his view a euphemism for downright 

negligence - had become so overwhelming that he could only envisage the 

British nation as Mrs. Jellyby's home, and the dispossessed as analogous 

to her disregarded children. The disorder of the Jellyby household is, of 

course, equivalent to the delapidated state of the nation, and Caddy Jellyby 

identifies its ruin as resulting from her mother's exertions overseas when 

she laments, 'Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole house directly... 

Ma's ruinous to everything'. (36) 

 But Dickens's interpretation did have a much broader function: he, as with  

Carlyle, provided the materials for an alternate interpretation of an entire race that were  

used in analyzing England's problems in the West Indies and later in Africa. Within the  

lens that Dickens and Carlyle had constructed are acts of agency reconfigured as racial  

flaws and dangerous anti-social short-comings.  

3 

IGNOBILITY VERSUS AGENCY: THE LANGUAGE OF THE SILENT NEGRO 

 In this chapter I have been arguing that the interpretations of post-emancipation  

black social and political negotiations in the British West Indies that many midcentury  

Victorians circulated, implicitly and explicitly, unintentionally and by design, masked  

acts of agency. In the process of masking the agency of people of African descent, the  



 

 

34 

 

Victorian commentator of race was able to discursively erase evidence of black  

consciousness and replace it with essentialist notions mapping the limits and nature of  

black progress. By doing this, many Victorian policy makers and officials were able to  

drawthe desired parameters of cross-cultural and interracial relations that favored white  

leadership and dominance. Although Dickens did not directly address the behavior of  

black British subjects, his racial repertory greatly contributed to the templates by which  

the African personality was fixed and measured. By his measurement, the African was  

ill-suited for the exigencies of progress and his innately subhuman constitution placed  

him beneath the consideration showered upon him by England‟s philanthropists and  

humanitarians. For him, the African (as represented in his evaluation of the master/slave  

relationship in the American South) was either contented with his servitude or, as  

evidenced by the reports of the Niger Expedition, he was selfish, morally and  

intellectually stunted, and an untrustworthy liar. Therefore, the functions of the discursive  

strategies expressed in Carlyle and Dickens were designed to limit and contain the  

African within a dependent relationship or a distanced and carefully monitored  

relationship which would serve British interests. Very few observers seem to have  

bothered to seriously analyze the motives of black actions. This omission in itself sheds  

light on whether the ex-slave‟s interpretation and desire held any weight in post- 

emancipation social and political negotiations. Even the paternalistic strategies of British  

missionaries, which we will analyze through the writings of Edward Blyden in chapter  

four, were merely polite arguments for African containment. What their discursive  

practices had achieved in masking was the fact that many of what was presented as flaws  

and forms of lack  in blacks were creative, productive and conscious acts of agency and,  

as we will later see in the West African situation (chapter three), a strong desire for  

autonomy. However, these acts of black agency were responses to new found freedom  



 

 

35 

 

and independence, the history of abuses Africans had experienced under slavery and  

apprenticeship, and they were directed toward a future if not completely free of British  

influence, then at least of a life greater autonomy and independence. The conflict, then, as  

a result of emancipation, can be seen as a power struggle to determine the proper uses of  

freedom. In The Problem of Freedom (1992), Thomas Holt writes that "the struggle to  

define the content of freedom was at bottom a contest for social power, a struggle at once  

intellectual and political, social and economic" (xxi).  Since these acts of agency were  

also relational, they must be interpreted as responses to and critiques of the structures  

peoples of African descent found themselves negotiating.  

 Not all observers of England's emancipation experiment interpreted black modes  

of agency and reactions to independence as regressive movements toward barbarism or  

the "Quashee syndrome." Some of these observers realized, in the words of Cooper, that  

"[w]hat some called savage sloth was in fact an alternative vision of economic life, based  

on small plots and that slaves had been able to use even before emancipation.... Slaves  

did not flee from the plantations but sought to determine the timing and conditions of  

their labor; they marketed produce in local markets, but not necessarily the produce  

officials wanted to see" (21). Although Mill may have thought that the African was still  

among those races unprepared for self-governance, he regarded Carlyle‟s “great ethical  

doctrine” a “damnable” literary performance because it professed “that one kind of  

human being are born servants to another kind” (29). In his response to Carlyle a month  

later in "The Negro Question"(1850), Mill places great value in the performance of West  

Indian blacks as homo economus. Mill wrote that "the negro, whom [Carlyle] despises,  

still do earn by labour the 'pumpkins' they consume and the finery they wear" (27).  The  

black had also made use of his freedom by making his presence tantamount to the  

functioning of the region and the economy. The ex-slave, therefore, through  



 

 

36 

 

emancipation was able to recognize his labor as a valued commodity used according to  

his own inclinations rather than at the beck and call of another. The Blacks, writes Mill,  

“freed from the despotism of their fellow beings, were left to themselves, and to the  

chances which the arrangements of existing society provide for those who have no  

resource but their labour. These chances proved favourable to them, and, for the last ten  

years, they afford the unusual spectacle of a laboring class whose labour bears so high a  

price that they can exist in comfort on the wages of a comparatively small quantity of  

work. This, to the ex-slave-owners, is an inconvenience”(26). Part of the “inconvenience”  

involves the type of resources that the ex-slave is willing to make a profit from. It is not  

the luxury items that Carlyle and the planters held in high regard. What was profitable for  

the ex-slave was not exactly the same products favored by Carlyle and the planters. Mill  

points out that the objects and commodities that Carlyle values are “spices,” “cinnamon,”  

“sugar,” “coffee,” and “peppers” rather than the “pumpkins” grown by the former slaves.  

These objects are considered, mocks Mill, “noble objects” (28). But pumpkins are not  

noble objects. Whatever supports life seems to be less dignified than commodities that  

advance and elevate culture. “Why so?” asks Mill, “Is what supports life, inferior in  

dignity to what merely gratifies the sense of taste?” Spices contribute to “‟commerce,  

arts, polities, and social developments‟. Perhaps so; but of what sort?”(28). When the  

American journalist John Bigelow (1817-1911) visited Jamaica in 1850, he "was  

surprised to find how general the desire among the negroes to become possessed of a  

little land, and upon what sound principles that desire was based" (115). He discovered  

that "[u]pon their little tracts they raised not only what they required for their own  

consumption, but a surplus which they take to market, usually in small pannies upon  

donkies, or upon their heads" (117). In Jamaica in 1850, Bigelow not only contrasted the  

present condition and attitude from that of life under slavery and apprenticeship, but he  



 

 

37 

 

implicitly suggested that these blacks were in essence destabilizing a traditional  

relationship and hierarchy : 

One of the most interesting spectacles to be witnessed about Kingston, is 

presented on the highroad through which the market people, with their 

donkies, in the cool of the morning, pour into the city from the back 

country. They form an almost uninterrupted procession four or five miles 

in length; and what strikes the eye of an American at once, is their perfect 

freedom from care. Neither anxiety, nor poverty, nor desire of gain, has 

written a line upon their faces, and they could not show less concern at the 

result of their trip if they were going to a festival. One may readily 

perceive how strong and universal must be the desire of the poor laborers 

to exchange their servile drudgery, on the lands of others, for this life of 

comparative ease and independence. (117) 

Bigelow's use of "this life," which had once been the property of planters, suggested that  

the former slave was operating within a space of his own making; and "independence"  

indicated the severing of the natural bond Carlyle saw as important. Bigelow further  

suggested how the traditional racial hierarchy had been challenged by the agency of ex- 

slaves: "He is driven by necessity to the purchase and cultivation of land for himself, and  

he finds such labor, so much better rewarded than that bestowed upon the land of others,  

that he very naturally takes care of his own first, and gives his leisure to the properties of  

others, when he feels inclined; in that particular acting very much as if he were a white  

man" (126). As a result of black West Indian agency, in 1852 the British educated  

African American minister Alexander Crummell was able to deliver the following words  

in Bristol on behalf of The Ladies Negro Education Society: "[T]he black population, on  

the whole, is rising,...  in some places, rising on the ruins of the planters, yet it is also a  

sad fact, that, in some places, they are going down to ruin with the proprietors " (315);  

and "the black population, generally, are advancing, to the disadvantage of the planters"  

(n.315).     

 However, black British subjects were measured by their contribution to the  



 

 

38 

 

material needs of the Anglo-British rather than by what they were able to accomplish or  

not accomplish for themselves. The decline in sugar production and other profitable  

species was seen as evidence of laziness and innate deficiencies. According to Curtin,   

Many planters believed that wages would cause no trouble, if only labor 

could be made 'continuous.' The demand for 'continuous labor' came up 

constantly in their discussions and has to be understood in its full 

meaning. It was not a question of the Negroes' refusing to work on 

plantations all year round. They no doubt would have refused, if asked, 

but full time work was not being offered all year round. Sugar and coffee 

being seasonal crops, the problem was to meet the special labor demands 

of the planting and 'crop' seasons. On sugar estates, these periods tended to 

coincide with the planting and harvest seasons on the provision grounds.... 

The planters' demand for continuous labor, therefore, was the desire for 

control, other than wage payments, that would ensure a full working force 

in seasons of special needs. Taken in the Jamaican context, it was a soft 

word for peonage.  (127) 

Therefore, it was imperative that the black laboring population recognized and conducted  

themselves within the constraints of the traditional racial hierarchy. This, however, for  

the ex-slave meant that he did not own his freedom. Abiding to the traditional script  

would only have meant that their freedom was, in essence, still regulated by the needs of  

the white planters. They were expected to fall in line with their ascribed status as an  

inferior and subservient race of man. "When considering the 'Negro race,'" writes  

Lorimer, "commentators lost sight of individual diversity and simply assumed all blacks  

were inferior to all whites. Their assumptions about the characteristics of the Negro race  

made them less willing to recognize the abilities of individual blacks, and some suggested  

that even 'a self-improved Negro' could not rise to the elevated status of a gentleman"  

(15).  According to Catherine Hall, "If the period from the early 1830s to the early 1840s  

was the high moment for abolitionists in Britain, when the universal family of man  

looked as if it might be an achievable reality, the period from the mid-1840s to the mid- 

1860s saw a sharp shift in the discursive terrain: a loss of confidence in the language of  



 

 

39 

 

negro brotherhood and sisterhood, though those values were upheld by the stalwarts, and  

an increasing turn to the language of race to explain and justify the inequalities and  

persistent differences between peoples"(338).  

 When I talk about agency, I am referring to the black British subject's willingness  

to construct his or her own social space and become conscious actors in their own  

destinies. This means that their actions, always self-conscious, were movements towards  

personal and social independence within resistant social structures. Emirbayer and   

Mische writes that "[v]iewed internally, agency entails different ways of experiencing the  

world, although even here, just as consciousness is always conscious of something..., so  

too is agency always agency toward something, by means of which actors enter into  

relationships with surrounding persons, places, meanings, and events” (973). And,  

Emirbayer and Mische argue, “[v]iewed externally, agency entails actual interactions  

with its contexts, in something like an ongoing conversation" (973). This “ongoing  

conversation” constitutive of Emirbayer and Mische‟s conception of agency was, before  

emancipation, absent from the relationship between master and slave. After  

emancipation, the desire and willingness to enter into the conversation directed toward  

the avoidance and remedying of past abuses structured all black/white relations in the  

British West Indies. This is what Harrison White means when he writes that "[a]gency is  

social, not personal, both in its roots and in its main realization. Chickens in the pecking  

order of a flock do have agency even though they do not have personhood. Agency is  

about relations. Agency is the dynamic face of networks"(315). The black actors  

appropriated the legal and philosophical rules of these social structures to avoid the  

nature of past relations and to accommodate their present and future needs.   

Even though they had been granted freedom, there was no indication that they  

would receive the type of respect given to a freeman or woman. The past and present  



 

 

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behavior of the planters assured the black West Indians that many of the abuses, though  

no longer protected by law, were in danger of resurfacing. The spurts of abuse  

experienced at the hands of planters may have contributed to the continued resistance to  

working on the estates after apprenticeship. According to Donald Wood, “[t]he majority  

of those who had left the estates [in Trinidad] after the ending of apprenticeship did so  

not to escape hard work but for fear that the indignities of the slave system would be  

perpetuated in a new guise”(6). Rather than the recalcitrant Quashee of Carlyle, Wood  

assures us that the ex-slave was “quite willing to work on them, but only when they chose  

and on their own terms” (6). In A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August, 1834, the  

apprentice James Williams supplied an example of the feelings toward freed blacks and  

on the treatment some freed blacks had encountered: 

I have been ill treated by Mr. Senior and the magistrates since the new law 

came in. Apprentices get a great deal more punishment now than they did 

when they was slaves; the master take spite, and do all he can to hurt them 

before the free come;- I have heard my master say, 'those English devils 

say we to be free, but if we is to free, he will pretty well weaken we, 

before the six and four years done; we shall be no use to ourselves 

afterwards.' (5)     

In The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition, the Baptist missionary Edward  

Bean Underhill (1813-1901)reports on a conversation he had with a ranger in Jamaica: 

The old ranger then explained how, in his judgment, this state of things 

had been brought about. When the slaves were made free, they were a 

'little obstinate' about wages and their provision grounds, which belonged 

to the estates; the overseers were a 'little obstinate' too, and wished to do 

what they had been accustomed during slavery. So the overseers pulled 

down the people's houses, and discharged them. The people having thus 

become quite free, went to the mountains, obtained land, made themselves 

independent, and now they won't come back; they do better on their own 

land than at estate work. A man with three acres of ground can make £2 a 

week by his provisions, if he is totally industrious. (387)   

And in another parish on the island, Underhill informed a gathering of freed blacks of the  



 

 

41 

 

Carlylean lens through which they were perceived in England: 

As a number of persons gathered around us, we began to ask questions 

about their willingness to work. We told them that we had heard in 

England that they were idle; that they were content to lie all day under the 

shade of the mango tree, and to suck its luscious fruit; that, in fact, only 

the whip would make them work. They became very excited, and for a 

time we could hardly be heard. They loudly complained of the treatment 

they experienced. (278-79) 

 According to Emirbayer and Mische,"[a]lthough ...all experience takes place in  

the present, this present is permeated by the conditioning quality of the past" (975). Since  

black British agency was a response to past and current racial relations as well as their  

hopes for the future, we should look at agency as a conversation and a cultural critique. In  

other words, we need to look at the type of agency being expressed at this point in British  

colonial history as a language, especially since the freemen at this brief period in time  

had not themselves committed their motives and thoughts in print. Walter Benjamin  

advises us that "[e]very expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of  

language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raise new  

questions" (314). According to Benjamin, "There is no event or thing in either animate or  

inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of  

all to communicate their mental meanings" (314).  By looking at black British agency in  

the West Indies as a language that questions the ethics and integrity of the guardians of  

the colonial social structures, we may better be able to interpret the full semiotic value of  

Thomas Carlyle's "pumpkin." That is, what were cast as signs of obstinate ignobility and  

laziness were in fact the ex-slaves‟ nonverbal articulation of agency and protest.          

CONCLUSION 

 In a way, the black British subject's appropriation of freedom was a kind of theft.  

They were granted freedom with the expectation that they would contribute to the  



 

 

42 

 

material wealth of the British government and to that of the planters. However, according  

to Roger Chartier, "[t]he determination to impose cultural modes on the people does not  

guarantee the way in which they are used, adapted, understood" (91). Ex-slaves robbed  

planters of the realization of those expectations and the social conflicts that ensued  

revealed that the free black's conception and utilization of freedom were in conflict with  

envisioned expectations. Therefore, the mechanism on which many Englishmen had put  

their hopes was taken but did not circulate in the agreed form: wealth and progress for the  

dominant class.  This is what Michel de Certeau means when he writes that "users make...  

innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural  

economy in order to adapt it to their own interest and their own rules" (xiii). In this sense  

ex-slaves poached [de Certeau's term] the exigencies of freedom from their former  

masters and used it to create and manipulate evolving and transformed social relations.   

Although their motives were interpreted and misinterpreted through the discursive  

practices of writers and observers of the dominant race, the black British writers  

presented in the following chapters articulated the ramifications of this theft and of the  

trajectory of black British agency.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

43 

 

CHAPTER TWO 

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE WONDERFUL 

ADVENTURES OF MRS. SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS 

INTRODUCTION 

  This essay argues that Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures in Many  

Lands participates in and articulates the political and cultural desires of the colored/ 

brown populations in the nineteenth century British West Indian colonies. The  

articulation of the colored subject's cultural desires presses upon Seacole's discursive  

strategy and thus forms the veiled historical content of her narrative. Through Mrs.  

Seacole, I also argue, we get a picture of a subjectivity that seems to be absent in much  

Victorian scholarship pertaining to nineteenth century racial discourse. Because of how  

Seacole and the colored community racially positioned themselves in the Victorian  

colonial social structure, we need to look at the autobiographical negotiations in 

Wonderful Adventures as what Ross Chambers has called an "oppositional narrative."  

The discursive practices of this community advocated, because of shared self-interest  

with the dominant group, the cultivation of relations rather than a revolution which  

threatens the overthrow of existing political and economic structures.  Oppositional  

narratives and behaviors, as practiced by the nineteenth century colored colonial  

community in the British West Indies, were not radically resistant to structures of  

colonial society as much as they were opposed to the mentality that excluded themfrom  

full participation in that structure. Seacole personifies herself as an exemplar of progress  

and transition in England's age of transition, with the aim of being accepted as a member  

of the British family. This desire is no different from the desires of the rest of the  

educated members of the colored community. The personal experiences rendered in  

Wonderful Adventures, therefore, have very political referential implications. That is,  



 

 

44 

 

Wonderful Adventures is the porthole through which appears the political, social and  

economic desires of a larger community. 

Mary Seacole (1805-1881) was born and raised during a period of contested  

change for the colored population of Jamaica. If people in England, during the first half  

of the nineteenth century, can be said to have experienced a period of transition, many  

members of Mary Seacole's generation in the colored community in the British West  

Indies were also able to make similar claims. She was part of a generation of colored  

British subjects who had gone from positions of limited political agency when she was  

born to that of full legal citizenship by the time she reached twenty-five years of age in  

1830. In Jamaica: Past and Present State, the Baptist Missionary James M. Phillippo  

(1798-1879) described the events and repercussions of the Privilege Act of 1830 (which  

gave free coloreds full civil rights) in terms that may have been useful to Mary Seacole :  

Relieved from these proscriptions by which they had been enthralled and 

bowed down, they as a body immediately began to advance in the scale of 

civilization, intelligence, and virtue, so that at the present time they 

discover a renovation of character and a degree of improvement in 

manners, customs, and knowledge, of which history, in a similar space of 

time, scarcely affords a parallel. In their houses, dress, personal 

appearance (complexion excepted), general deportment, wealth, morals, 

and religion, many of them are on an equality with the most respectable of 

whites. (150)   

And in The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Anthony Trollope (1812-1882), no friend  

of peoples of color or of African descent, begrudgingly conceded that the coloreds'  

conception of self had improved with their legal status and that they "look on themselves  

as the ascendant race. I look upon those of color as being so, or at any rate as about to  

become so" (73). By 1859, Trollope, the lifelong disciple of Thomas Carlyle, was able to  

bear witness that members of the colored community had gained access to places they  

had been denied thirty years ago:  



 

 

45 

 

In Jamaica one does come in contact with coloured men. They are to be 

met at the Governor's table; they sit in the House of Assembly; they 

cannot be refused admittance to state parties, or even to large assemblies; 

they have forced themselves forward, and must be recognized as being in 

the van. Individuals decry them - will not have them within their doors - 

affect to despise them. But in effect the coloured men of Jamaica cannot 

be despised much longer. (74) 

 Perhaps it was the shifts in political status of the coloreds, occurring alongside the self- 

congratulatory and anxiety ridden era of progress and transition written about in the  

mother country, that made it possible in 1857 (the year she composed Wonderful  

Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many  Lands ) for her to appropriate  the narrative and  

rhetoric of the day, look back, reflect, and align herself to what she perceived as progress  

in herself, the colored people of Jamaica, and the British citizens on both sides of the  

Atlantic when she writes "that the century and myself were both young together, and that  

we have grown side by side into age and consequence" (1). In The Victorian Frame of  

Mind, 1830-1870, Walter E. Houghton writes that the British acutely felt that they were  

"living in an age of transition" (1). According to Houghton, "[t]his is the basic and almost  

universal conception of the period. And it is peculiarly Victorian. For although all ages  

are ages of transition, never before had men thought of their own time as an era of change  

from the past to the future. Indeed, in England that idea and the Victorian period began  

together" (1). For Seacole, change and the call for change were all around her. She was  

from a community of people that had publically argued for inclusion and equality with  

the whites of Jamaica. In other words, the colored population of Jamaica not only felt that  

complete civil rights and privileges were their birth right because they had white blood in  

their veins, but that they had mastered and were mastering the requisite credentials for  

equality.  

 Much of the significant recent scholarship on Mary Seacole addresses her  



 

 

46 

 

negotiations of gender and the maintenance of her Creole identity. And while a few  

scholars have rigorously analyzed the significance of "Englishness" in her Wonderful  

Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, others have treated the text as if it was  

written from the vantage point of a of colonial and Diaspora subject  who had considered  

herself "black" or who had shared and expressed a "black" subjectivity. This latter  

approach, however, seems a little anachronistic and shortsighted, for it suggests a  

subjectivity that she (and most of the people like her) may never have embraced. It may  

also suggests that even non-whites, as a whole, perceived mixed-race peoples in the same  

light as they did pure blooded peoples of African descent. What complicates this position  

is the historical fact that throughout nineteenth century England , newspaper articles,  

chapter titles in travelogues of the West Indies, plays on the British stage, diary entries as  

well as works of fiction all expressly represented Mary Seacole's caste as a distinct group  

with access to resources denied "black" colonial subjects. Still, most scholars frequently  

and unavoidably allude to her "Creole," "hybrid," and" liminal" statuses without fully  

unpacking the cultural implications of Seacole's interpretation and construction of her  

discursive world. This tendency suggests that the ramifications of Seacole's narrative  

discourse is limited to gender issues and desires peculiar to her (and, perhaps, other  

woman of color) as a colonial subject. This means that the actual historical forces, which  

most scholars have recognized as being in the margins or entirely dismissed from her  

narrative, are to some extent taken for granted. Even when the social energies or cultural 

discourses beyond the margins are mentioned or alluded to, the full weight of the margins  

does not seem to be given serious critical consideration. What we tend to miss is the  

existence of the nuanced and, at times, self-contradictory network of political and cultural  

discourses with which Seacole skillfully wrestled. Most of this is due, however, to what  

little Seacole leaves today's critics to work with. Most importantly, as we properly praise  



 

 

47 

 

Mary Seacole for her uniqueness, we may fail to see how her narrative strategies mirror  

(and in some ways it is a convex and concave mirror) the political and social desires of  

the particular group (the free coloreds or "browns") of which she was a member.    

 What adds to the complexities of Wonderful Adventures are the culturally  

embedded genre constraints of the autobiography peculiar to a woman of color in mid- 

nineteenth century England. These genre constraints work to bring to the anterior the  

multifarious and interrelated discourses in the margins. That is, the form, the subject's  

representation of self within this cultural form, influences the presentation of the subject's  

performance in the content. As a form of self-representation that follows an author  

through the decisive moments of her or his life, autobiography not only shows the  

contributing forces in the author's development, but it also shows the author as a site of  

progress and development moving through history . The conspicuous absence of those  

forces and historical  moments, as some of the scholars in the following section have  

noticed,  haunts Seacole's autobiographical narrative and begs for attention.  

Autobiographies, more than other literary genres, are implicitly committed to the author  

showing how she or he has developed through a limited period in time. "Autobiography  

is about change," writes Carolyn A. Barros, and "it narrates a series of transformations"  

(1). During the Victorian period, notions of change, transition, and progress, were not  

only essential for the construction of an autobiographical self, but these ideas were  

equally essential for England's sense of itself as a nation. In all autobiographies an  

identity is presented to the reader. This identity is contingent on the autobiographer's  

imagined or interpreted relationship to her/his reader. If Harrison White is correct in his  

belief that "identities are triggered by contingencies" (5), then the constraints on Mary  

Seacole were not the same as those that may have formed a John Stuart Mill or a Harriet  

Martineau. Mrs. Seacole occupied a particular and profoundly complicated space in the  



 

 

48 

 

Victorian imagination.  She was an entirely different sort of historical agent whose  

writing consciously and unconsciously served completely different functions. She was  

not regarded as "white," she did not see herself as "black," nor was she from a respected  

class or caste in the eyes of the black and white communities in the environment that she  

was bred.  Since she was neither a slave nor had she ever experienced the conditions of  

slavery except as an observer, Seacole, as a member of the free colored population, was  

not only writing something new and different from what was by then conventional of the  

popular slave narratives circulating throughout England but her culturally generated  

subjectivity complicates our traditional binary reading of racial and colonial discourses.  

 When considering the history of race relations in the West Indies, Seacole was  

very cognizant that many of her white middle class readers in England would have  

approached her autobiography (if not with suspicion) with certain unflattering  political,  

sexual and racialized assumptions. According to George Landow, "[l]ike all writings  

about the self, Victorian autobiographies embody the question of how the individual  

relates to what is outside himself; and what makes autobiography as a literary mode so  

representative of its time - in a word, so 'Victorian' - is that a concern with this  

problematic relationship lies close to the heart of all literature, all culture, of the age"  

(xiii). The construction of her autobiographical narrative, then, must always have in mind  

the tropes that have been ascribed and imposed on her not only as a member of the  

colored caste but also as a woman of color. She was, as one scholar has said, "doubly  

Othered." As a discursively strategic responses to the prejudices of her time, she  

represented herself as the antithesis of most ascriptions projected onto Creole and African  

peoples. To appeal to her reader, her self-representation was done without explicating 

racial tropes as products of Imperial power, and especially the powers that have limited  

the agency of her and her kind, but as transformable products of nature. She was an  



 

 

49 

 

outsider who wanted access both literally and metaphorically into wholesome Victorian  

homes. Therefore, she needed to present herself as a "non-white" British subject and  

citizen completely different from the "indolent" and static figure that was often read  

about in newspapers and travel books. To gain the access into white middle-class homes,  

and to receive the approval that she so much desired, she had to read her reader as she  

wrote, as well as incorporate what the reader knew about her exploits as "Mother  

Seacole" and a heroine of the Crimean War. In other words, for Seacole, England was  

what Raymond Williams (1973) calls a "knowable community" because she had to assess  

her position vis-à-vis her reader in England to construct her persona. According to  

Williams, it is always important to assess the position of the observer in and towards the  

community, "a position which is part of a community being known" (164). In 

Orientalism, Edward Said proposes a similar methodology, though in a different context  

and having a different trajectory, for analyzing an "author's position in a text" which is  

applicable to the position occupied by Seacole.  Said suggests that we look at the author's  

"strategic location," which is a way to describe the author's relation and position to the  

material she or he writes about (20).  So what we partially get in Wonderful Adventures is  

her interpretation of what the Victorian reader (who not only had knowledge of Seacole's  

celebrity but who may have also held many of the prejudices against peoples of African  

descent) may find acceptable. This is perhaps what Pierre Bourdieu means when he  

writes that "[a] player who is involved and caught up in the game adjusts not to what he  

sees but to what he fore-sees, sees in advance in the directly perceived present" (81). She  

had to construct a persona within a positive rather than a negative relationship to the 

Victorian community. In other words, Seacole's autobiographical negotiations involved  

highlighting and emphasizing those qualities and values that she and the reader shared,  

presenting testimonials and examples of how different she was from what they may have  



 

 

50 

 

expected, as well as giving an account of her life which would make it easier for the  

reader to accept her as a member of the national family. It is also to be remembered that  

this was being done in a period of high patriotism and nationalism, for England had just  

come out of a war. But because of the cultural baggage attached to members of hybrid  

races, she coded her narrative to show that she was among those who had developed and  

progressed beyond those she left behind.   

 To accomplish this, a certain amount of self-censorship was employed by Mrs.  

Seacole. When I say self-censorship I do not mean squashing her inner-most feelings, but  

rather eliding those social forces that contributed to her inner-most feelings and  

subjectivity. In Wonderful  Adventures, she attempted to separate the personal (which she  

believes her reader is interested in) from the political (which may call into question the  

moral integrity of her community of readers). This strategy, of course, is in itself a  

political practice and points to a political awareness of the psychology of power and race  

relations on the part of the non-white nineteenth century writer who is trying to appeal to  

her imagined reader in England. Through this strategy of self-censorship the pressures 

from the margins of Seacole's narrative assume very peculiar discursive shapes and  

becomes  "metacommentary." Fredric Jameson's idea of metacommentary is intricately  

related to Seacole's reading her reader and her autobiographical negotiations. According  

to Jameson, "every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of its own  

existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself: every commentary must be at  

the same time a metacommentary as well" (10). Metacommentary is unavoidable in an  

autobiography by a nineteenth century free woman of color who paradoxically identifies  

and embraces as her own the interests of the dominant community and long-time  

oppressor.  Therefore, in the words of Jameson, metacommentary performed in the  

autobiographical negotiations of Wonderful Adventures finds itself "tracing the logic of  



 

 

51 

 

the censorship itself and of the situation from which it springs: a language that hides what  

it displays beneath its own reality as language, a glance that designates, through the very  

process of avoiding, the object forbidden" (17). This does not mean that Seacole intended  

completely to avoid the political; she only uses the genre restrictions imposed on her by   

the mid-century Victorian autobiography (peculiar to her present social and political  

position at the time) to construct a persona that will contribute to her getting what she  

wants. This is what James Scott means when he writes that "we must above all recognize  

that the creation of disguises depends on agile, firm grasp of the codes of meaning being  

manipulated. It is impossible to overestimate the subtlety of this manipulation" (139).   

We should then see these genre constraints more as the appropriation of genre  

constraints. Therefore, self-censorship as a characteristic of the appropriation of genre  

constraints of the autobiography is a kind of disguise rather than a deceptive mask. For  

Seacole, this discursive disguise is a thin veil: the face of the veiled subject is perceptible  

but not all of the details that make up its features. 

 This appropriation contributes to Wonderful Adventures being looked at in terms  

of what Ross Chambers has called an "oppositional narrative," especially since Mary  

Seacole seems to have no animus toward the mother country.  That is, though she is in  

opposition to the social and cultural relationships that generated her as an image and  

personification of the Other, and because this relationship strongly influenced the mode  

of self-censorship that she employed, she paradoxically presents herself as being at one  

with the members of the society that has excluded her. According to Chambers, “no  

oppositional behavior can be fully acknowledged, in any society, as a challenge to the  

structures of power that are in place" (8). We can, then, see Wonderful Adventures as an  

attempt to ameliorate her sense of personal alienation that is also reflected in the cultural  

agenda of colored population.  In fact, rhetorically, her status as an excluded subject is 



 

 

52 

 

displaced as abnormal through much of her narrative. In turn, her discursive strategy  

involves some form of nation building which includes her as the major actor.  

1 

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PERSONA  

On the surface, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (originally  

published by Blackwood in 1857) can be flatly read as the story of one mixed raced 

woman's voyage from obscurity in her native Jamaica to become what biographer Jane  

Robinson has hailed as "The Most Famous Black Woman of the Victorian Age." She was  

born Mary Jane Grant in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father was a Scottish soldier and  

her mother a woman of African descent.  Seacole attributes her love for adventure and  

camp life to her father's blood and her skills as a doctress to her mother, who, according  

to Seacole, distinguished herself as a healer. However, Seacole was raised by another  

woman and perhaps functioned as the woman's servant and as the companion of that  

woman's children. Mary Grant had visited England on several occasions, and upon her  

return she seems to have evolved into a more enterprising person. She moved back into  

her mother's home after her "patroness" dies and there perfects her skills in Creole  

healing arts. She later marries Edwin Seacole who, within a year, dies. There is no  

mention of children from this union. At the request of her brother Edmund, she goes to  

Panama to start her own business. It is in Panama, a place rendered as the site of chaos  

and lawlessness, that she employs her medical skills and seemingly single-handedly  

battles and defeats a cholera epidemic. She then returns to Jamaica, combats yellow  

fever, and later turns her attentions to the news of war in the Crimea.  Inspired by  

patriotic zeal, she goes through all of the proper channels in which she would be able to  

put her medical knowledge to the service of British soldiers, only to get rejected. She,  

however, is not to be hindered and, with a relative of her dead husband, Thomas Day,  



 

 

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goes to the Crimea as a "sutler" and sets up the "British Hotel." It is during the Crimean  

War that she becomes famously known throughout England as "Mother Seacole" and ,  

along with Florence Nightingale,  as a heroine of the Crimean War. These are the major  

events that make up the content of Mary Seacole's autobiography.  

 What is apparent to any reader of Wonderful Adventures is that Seacole seems to  

have conspicuously left out some important political and cultural background about the  

world that contributed to her life and world view. This is noticeable once we have  

considered that her autobiography radiates with vivid details and commentary pertaining  

to her life beyond Kingston, Jamaica. That is, Seacole seems to have intentionally  

avoided the cultural and colonial forces that inform her subjectivity.  What we, as  

scholars committed to highlighting ethnic identity and multiculturalism, have failed to  

acknowledge is the possibility that Seacole's discursive strategies may be a reflection of  

her appropriation of Creole cultural and political strategies and  desires, however great  

the pains she employs to distance herself from the stereotypes projected onto the Creole  

and colored population. I hesitate to say "unconscious" because I believe that most of the  

self-censorship in Wonderful Adventures is intentional. She is parsimonious, allusive,  

silent and protectively subtle only when the narrative turns toward her inner self and the  

social climate of her British dominated Jamaica. This climate had, during the decades  

preceding the Crimean War, a well-reported and controversial history of which many of  

her readers would have been aware. In contrast to her characteristically un-detailed  

sketch of Jamaica, Seacole does offer to her reader vivid portraits of her travels, and she  

even makes a seemingly strong commentary on North American slavery, but it is  

rendered without indication or reference to the lived conditions that inform her opinions.  

Her tone suggests a common intimacy with the reader. It is this sympathetic tone that  

brings Seacole and her reader closer together. That is, she writes as if there is little  



 

 

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difference between herself and her white middle class English reader because she does  

not seem to perceive of herself as qualitatively Other. When Wonderful Adventures is  

looked at in this light, her attitude towards blacks and slavery, as well as the peculiar  

uniqueness of the persona she creates, will seem less bothersome. And it is this very  

elision that makes Wonderful Adventures such a complicated text. We see who Mary  

Seacole wants us to see, a sympathetic persona, but she skillfully and playfully veils from  

view the larger and, perhaps, disturbing circumstances that makes the persona of "Mother  

Seacole,"  for her, necessary. In short, she is intentionally trying to keep publically  

acknowledged colonial  discourses out of her readers'  living-rooms, and in this way she  

avoids what we seem to have uncritically accepted as "alienating" her reader.  

 The analogy of the "living-room" is a good way to view the personal and political  

implications and trajectory of Mrs. Seacole's narrative.  Traditionally, the living-room is 

the one location in which the family gathers. This location, for Victorians, is the place of  

warmth and it is free of the concerns of the outside world. It is the center of the home, the  

domestic sphere. This place of safely, our scholarship tells us, is heavily protected from  

the intrusion of politics and all other worldly evils and moral impurities that the patriarch  

of the home must face on a daily basis. Standing in the open door, at the threshold, is  

Mary Seacole and all that a Mary Seacole represents. For this middle class Victorian  

family, this liminal figure may have provoked what H.L. Malchow sees as an "intense  

awareness of the 'natural' in human relationships - that is, of sexual perversion and  

'miscegenation,' which often implied the subversion or even reversal of the assumed-to- 

be natural power relationships of class, gender, and race" (127). She faces the living- 

room, and may have on occasion been allowed temporary and conditional entrance. This  

living-room is where she desires to be and she sees that living-room as her birthright. At  

her back, completely out the view of those sitting in the living-room, are pure (or full)  



 

 

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blooded peoples of African descent, former slaves who may have not only contributed to  

the luxury that the occupants of the room value but also to the privileges that have made  

it possible for free coloreds like Mary Seacole to occupy the threshold. The figure at the  

threshold identifies and sympathizes with the desires of those before her. According to  

this figure at the threshold, the interests of those in the room are not dissimilar from her  

interests. But she knows that the only thing that prevents her from having full access and  

movement to this space is her distant affinity to those to whom she shows her back. At  

most, she may consider them, depending on the particular historical moment, with more  

than an anxious anthropological glance over her shoulder. But to completely embrace  

them, and to claim allegiance with them, can be interpreted as a movement backward in  

time, especially during a period which considered African agency as a regressive march  

to barbarism.  Moreover, she is of a caste of people that does not perceive the blacks at  

her back as constitutionally morally or intellectually like her. They are the children of 

nature, while she is the product of progress. In short, these are not her people. In  

character and all that is essential for the maintenance of the living-room, she is like those  

within her gaze.   

 The irony of nineteenth century British West Indian colonial ironies is that the  

figure in the threshold is not exactly the familial and political ally Caliban had anticipated  

in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. In Caliban's vision, the island, now populated by  

the offspring gendered from fantasized sexual union with Miranda, would have honored  

the native and formerly enslaved father rather than dismiss him as a ghost of the past.  

Nor, for Shakespeare's Caliban, would there have been any ambiguity in regards to  

political and racial allegiances. Liminal figures, such as Seacole, desiring entrance into  

the living-room as an accepted and autonomous member of the British family recognize  

themselves as British. For Mary Seacole and many of the colored folks of the British  



 

 

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West Indies, it is the good blood of Prospero's descendants that courses through their  

veins and is the criteria that should be used to define them. However, what makes her still  

a child and spokesperson of Caliban is the desire to break the constraints imposed upon  

peoples of African descent by the dominant culture. In general, for those in the dominant  

culture both the coloreds and the darker former slave are threats on multiple levels.  

Racially, economically, and morally (that is, ideologically and materially) the mixed- 

raced descendents of Caliban are sites of disturbance and discomfort. During the first half  

of the nineteenth century, it was the coloreds, more than the former black slaves, who  

made strong claims that they, rather than the transient whites, were the true native sons of  

the West Indies. 

 The figure at the threshold, the liminal West Indian figure of which Mary Seacole  

was a product, was not altogether radically opposed to the living-room or what it  

represented. Throughout Mary Seacole's childhood and young adult life, the colored  

population petitioned for legal access to what they saw as their birthright. They saw the  

structure as legitimate but not the logic that excluded them from participating in the  

upkeep and profits absorbed by the structure.  As a representative of this liminal caste,  

Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures can broadly be called an "oppositional narrative,"  

because her personal desires and the desires of the group she is a part of and in many  

inadvertent ways resemble, honors the structure she discursively assaults.  Therefore,  

Seacole's personal "oppositional narrative" functions also as a "meta-commentary" on  

Creole-Anglo Saxon colonial relations.  

2 

CULTURAL AND DISCURSIVE BACKGROUND OF MARY SEACOLE’S FREE 

COLOREDS 

 As I have already stated, Mary Seacole participated in a network of historical and  



 

 

57 

 

cultural codes when she composed Wonderful Adventures. That is, the social and  

historical codes that she inherited formed her discursive practices we find embedded in  

her text. This is perhaps what Karl Marx meant when he wrote in The Eighteenth  

Brumaire that men do not make history “under circumstances chosen by themselves, but  

under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past" (595). When  

reading Wonderful Adventures one ought to be cognizant of the social history that formed  

her subjectivity and of how the particular social history of the coloreds in the British  

colonies may have informed the interpretative practices of her audience in England. 

However much Mary Seacole may have painted herself as an independent historical  

agent, her discursive persona and rhetorical strategies were also reflections of the broader  

political and social desires of other colored persons. The colored community‟s political  

and cultural discourses piggybacked the discursive strategies of Seacole's Wonderful  

Adventures. In other words, as a product of a specific kind of racial self-awareness, her  

self-interpretation proves to be a reflection of the concerns of the subgroup from which  

she comes. Thus, embedded in Seacole's discursive negotiations are the cultural desires  

of the free coloreds of her generation in response to the modes of exclusion in the British  

West Indies.  

 The free colored communities in the British West Indies came into being as a  

result of widespread abuses of power and exclusionary practices on the part of the  

colonial government. The members of the colored community (sometimes called  

"brown") were the offspring of white male fathers and freed and enslaved women of  

African descent. Miscegenation in the colonies began as the result of a scarcity of white  

women and the abuse of the master/slave relationship in the British colonies. The  

response to this scarcity ultimately revealed, for the colonial government, an  

embarrassing public misuse of power and a violation of the idea of freedom. For many  



 

 

58 

 

single and married white males who stayed in the colonies there were plenty woman of  

African descent available as outlets for their sexual pleasures. These women were black  

and mix blooded slaves and, as slaves, vulnerable to the whims of white masters and of  

those acting on the behalf of absentee plantation owners. Since slave status passed from  

mother to child, the offspring of black/white sexual relations were also born slaves. Many  

slave women and offspring were, according to historians, given preferential treatment  

and, in many cases, eventually freed long before slavery was abolished in the British  

colonies in 1834. Unlike the general population of slaves, these "Brown slaves," writes  

historian Gad J. Heuman, also "had a greater opportunity to learn skills, and many  

worked as house slaves" (4). The more liberal or generous planters, however, may have  

had bouts of conscience and, unable to bear the thought that their own blood (also  

recognized as such by many members of the white community) was in bondage and  

publicly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, manumitted their illegitimate offspring.  

The failure or unwillingness to free one's illegitimate children and not provide some form  

of education and financial support also opened delinquent white males (married and  

unmarried) to public ridicule. M.K. Bacchus writes that "[w]hile children born to slave  

mothers were also slaves, some social stigma was usually attached to those fathers who  

could afford to purchase their children's freedom and did not do so" (71). Many coloreds,  

mostly the males, who received education at home or in England, later entered various  

professions and were taken on in minor administrative positions. "Women in this  

category," which includes Mary Seacole and her mother, writes Heuman," became  

shopkeepers and sold provisions, millinery, confectionery, and preserves. They usually  

had two or three slaves who traveled into the interior of the island to sell commodities on  

the estates. In addition, freewomen owned and managed lodging houses throughout the  

island" (9). "But," Heuman reminds us, "whatever their parentage, freedmen did  



 

 

59 

 

not become legal equals of whites; for them manumission only meant a release from  

ownership and was not a grant of full civil rights" (4). For the free coloreds, full legal  

civil rights was not to come until the end of the 1820s, when Seacole was in her mid- 

twenties.  

A) THE “FALLEN” WOMAN OF COLOR 

 Because of the pseudo-taboo that impregnated the image of the woman of color,  

Mary Seacole was born into a discourse that shadowed her as being among the “fallen”  

and morally tainted. This representation of mulatto and colored women was altered and  

magnified when more married and marriageable white women established themselves in  

the colonies in the late 1830s. It was, in fact, the increased presence of white European  

women that seemed to have transformed the colonial social scene into a possible place of  

domesticity rather than adventure. Although established modes of impropriety were no  

longer easily shrugged off, respectable white women were still more inclined to indict the  

low moral character of the colored woman as the cause of the illicit encounters. It became  

a conventional practice for observers of the colonial scene to suggestively throw light on  

the stereotyped carnal inclinations of women of like Mary Seacole rather than on uneven  

relationships of power, and abuses of freedom, that shaped colonial social life and the  

sexual interaction between white men and colored women.  Therefore, in terms of race  

relations, the rhetoric of the “fallen woman” as applied to the woman of color was a  

discursive attempt to keep women like Mary Seacole on the margins of respectable  

community or beyond the pale of Victorian domesticity.         

 The writings of this period suggest that the woman of color was a child of her  

erotic and primitive nature. The colored woman's primal psychological and moral  

limitations, unformed by education, Christianity and the tools of proper feminine  

deportment, placed her near or at the level of the Victorian fallen women.  Like the  



 

 

60 

 

nineteenth century discourse of the prostitute analyzed in Anderson's Tainted Souls and  

Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Falleness in Victorian Culture, the woman of color is  

essentially in a fallen condition. Her moral character is always in question and thus  

falleness is inseparable from perceptions of her as a social agent. The forces that caused a  

woman to "fall" were suspected of being peculiar to the non-white female subject, and  

her fate and choices, therefore, cannot fully be attributed to the environment.  

In the fiction and non-fiction of the first half of the nineteenth century, colored  

women were alternately represented as always inclined to gain favor by making  

themselves sexually available to white men and more appealing than white women. In  

other words, the Creole woman of color was often described as willing to employ  

whatever means available to gain access into the broader respectable white community  

and into a white man's heart. These behavioral practices attributed to the woman of color  

were not presented as maneuvers in response to the environment. For instance, in the  

anonymously published The Woman of Colour, the colored female protagonist, Olivia  

Fairfield, is presented as an eligible bride to her white first cousin only because her  

deceased slaveholder father has left a desirable dowry. In this early nineteenth century  

novel, it is Olivia's dowry, and not her exemplary and chase character, that many of the  

secondary characters find appealing. Through the dowry, Olivia may be able to pay for  

entrance into the community. In Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, Matthew “Monk”  

Lewis describes women of African descent, his very own slaves included, as always  

ready vessels of procreation. Colored women, writes Lewis, "lay themselves out to  

captivate some white person, who takes them for mistresses, under the appellation of  

housekeepers" (169). The beautiful mulatto house servant in Hamel, the Obeah Man is  

not merely consumed with lust for the protagonist of the novel, but is presented as  

representative of all mixed race women. The following dialogue from Hamel enacts the  



 

 

61 

 

discourse concerning the sexual nature of the mulatto woman: 

"There is love at the bottom of all this," said the Obeah man in a whisper. 

"These Mulattoes and Mustees think of nothing else, from the hour in 

which they are weaned from their mothers' breast until time has wasted 

away every trace of their beauty; and then they console themselves with 

the recollection of all the transports they have enjoyed." 

"From the mother's breast?" 

"Yes, master, yes; their mothers breathe it into their very souls with every 

kiss which they impart on them, fill their heads with the anticipation of the 

charms they will possess, and the conquest they will make, and the riches 

they will acquire, by their connection with some great buckra planter." 

(193-194) 

 

Characterizations in these texts all seem to reflect the representations of free women of  

 

color that Mrs. Seacole attempted to write against and negotiate.  

 

Very often we rely on and repeat the idea that the mode of sexual interaction  

 

between white men and non-white women was accepted without controversy and contest.  

 

This is because we rely on  sources very similar to the ones I have used above. However,  

 

for Mrs. Seacole and many free colored this issue hit home and some representatives of  

 

the colored community recognized the broader cultural significance of what was going  

 

on.  For instance, John Campbell, the second colored man to sit in the Assembly,  

 

questioned the systems of power that places the free colored woman on the level of the  

 

prostitute. For Campbell and other members of the colored community, without civil  

 

rights and equal protections and privileges, the less favored group is at the mercy of the 

 

more powerful.  For Campbell, full civil rights has the ability of self-empowerment and  

 

thus can contribute to one's self-worth. In his 1816 petition to the Colonial Minister in  

 

which he requests the lifting of disabilities for free coloreds, Campbell also implicates the  

 

delinquent conduct and abuses of freedom in the colonies. Among Campbell's grievances  

 

was a passionate reminder to the Colonial Minister "of the peculiar social conditions  

 

relative to the women of his class in the colony. Colored men had no safeguards  



 

 

62 

 

 

against the seduction of their wives and daughters; 'for however great may be the merits  

 

and deserts of single colored females, they are only looked upon and considered as the  

 

prey and the prostitutes of the white males.' He thought that the repeal of the laws against  

 

them would help these females to develop self respect" (Mavis Campbell 85). Years later,  

 

the political ramifications around the female mulatto's virtue was still being addressed.   

 

Richard Hill, a colored stipendiary magistrate, saw the unstable predicament of many  

 

colored women and illegitimate children as a manifestation of power that seemed to  

 

pervert the ideas of freedom and liberty. In his history of Jamaica called Lights and  

 

Shadows, Hill argued that an emancipated colony‟s total “disregard for social morality”  

 

was antagonistic to the purposes of liberty. The imbalance of power, for Hill, has caused  

 

a particular type of humiliation which has created situations similar to slavery in which  

 

the “family state in which the ordinances of nature is not sanctified as the ordinances of  

 

God.” The politically and economically weaker, Hill is suggesting, is the most  

 

vulnerable. “Freedom,” Hill writes, suffers no violation greater than the frail confidence  

 

by which the weaker sex is drawn into the power of the stronger (63).  Under law, the  

 

stronger member of the arrangement is under no obligation to the weaker. Therefore,  

 

what white colonials reported and what we uncritically have accept as accepted was an  

 

emotionally charged and explicitly political issue for free coloreds. It is also the type of  

 

subject that Mary Seacole, in her attempts to acquire entrance into Victorian homes,  

 

would elide from her narrative.  Falleness questions purity and dignity, and a woman like  

 

Mrs. Seacole did not want to participate in making a topic of this nature an ingredient of  

 

her persona or connected to her name and story. A more thorough analysis of this  

 

particular phenomenon may throw further light on the meaning and psychological  



 

 

63 

 

ramifications of freedom in the British West Indies. Such an investigation may suggest 

 

that, for many women of color, relationships with white males were more than an  

 

accepted financial arrangement. I believe it was the emotional resonance surrounding  

 

interracial sexual interaction in Jamaica that caused Seacole to avoid the issue.  

 

B) ON THE FREE COLORED COMMUNITY 

 

However, even in an unstable political climate, the colored community gradually  

 

presented themselves as willing competitors and actors on the social stage in the colonies.  

 

The restrictions on the colored communities, however, varied from colony to colony. For  

 

much of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, free coloreds, however well-off, were  

 

not allowed to give testimony against whites and could not serve on a jury; they were  

 

forbidden legal action against wrongs perpetuated by whites; they were not allowed to sit  

 

with whites in church; they had no vote, were forbidden from occupying political office,  

 

even though many free coloreds owned slaves and possessed considerable property. The  

 

position they resentfully occupied in the colonial scene was a space between that of the  

 

whites above them and the blacks at the bottom of the social scale. A social buffer is not  

 

an equal.  

 

The cultural agenda of the free coloreds was, as expressed through Mrs. Seacole‟s  

 

text, assimilationist. In the petitions submitted by coloreds were the acknowledgements  

 

of shared interests and ancestry with the white population and they often made strong  

 

patriotic claims in support of the British constitution. According to Duncker,  

 

"fundamental to all free coloreds was a desire to be measured by the same yardstick as  

 

those used for people in similar positions who were white" (Heuman 10). The presence of  

 

European blood coursing through their veins, which Mrs. Seacole emphasizes early in her  

 



 

 

64 

 

narrative as character forming, constituted consideration for legal status equal to that of  

 

whites in the British West Indies. In other words, many free coloreds of Mary Seacole's  

 

generation saw themselves as equal to whites in all that was regarded as essential for full  

 

civil rights. The wealth and social advancements that they had achieved marked them as  

 

different from the darker and “pure blooded” blacks who occupied the bottom of the  

 

colonial social structure. They were not so much antagonistic toward the structure of  

 

colonial and slave society than they were toward being excluded from protections and  

 

participations within that structure which they claimed as their birthright.  

 

We must not assume that Seacole's middle class white British reader was a naive  

 

and uniformed reader. Many members of Britain's reading public were aware of the  

 

stereotypes attached to the mixed race population in the West Indies, and others knew  

 

(through various newspapers, journals, and travel books about the West Indies, personal  

 

experience and from friends and associates who had visited the colonies) of the struggles  

 

which had been going on between the planter class and their colored offspring. Many of  

 

Wonderful Adventures' original readers were able to appreciate and detect that Mrs.  

 

Seacole expressed civility and good taste by keeping the unpleasant details of life in the  

 

British colonies in the margins of her narrative. Therefore, it was not merely her role in  

 

the Crimean War that made her a celebrity; it was also the cultural connotations attached  

 

to her as a woman of color that added to their interests in what she had to say about  

 

herself.  It is doubtful that anyone picking up a copy of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs.  

 

Seacole in Many Lands did not know that the author was a woman of color. When we  

 

read and analyze Seacole's narrative, the various degrees of racial and colonial  

 

knowledge among England's readership must be kept in mind.  

 



 

 

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3 

THE NARRATIVE AND THE TEXT:WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MRS. 

SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS 

 In Wonderful Adventures, Mary Seacole performs what amounts to her  

appropriation of England's narrative of progress. Her narrative of progress is rendered in  

three stages. It is important to remember that Mrs. Seacole, and the educated members of  

the colored population in the British West Indies, felt that they were products and  

participants of progress. This trait and the evidence of their social practices made it  

possible for them to argue that they were no different to their white relatives and  

contemporaries, and far more advanced than the uneducated and degraded blacks. They  

believed that they had proven their value as social agents, even within unfair legal  

constraints. These cultural and personal concerns are the generative forces underlining  

Mary Seacole's autobiographical travel narrative. According to David Parker,  

behind any autobiographical act is a self for whom certain things matter 

and are given priority over others. Some of these things are not merely 

objects of desire or interest, but command the writer's admiration or 

respect. These are the key 'goods' the writer lives by, shaping her acts of 

ethical deliberation and choice. Such goods may include ideals of self-

realization, social justice, equality of respect, or care for certain others. 

We can say that commitment to these goods orients her morally, or,... 

constitute her as a self in moral space. Such goods inevitably shape the 

stories she tells when she projects her future or construes her past or 

present. In short, these goods are at the heart of life narrative, necessary 

constituents of it. (1) 

Thus, being able to prove that they were on the same level of intellectual and moral  

development as their white relatives, and that they shared a common bloodline with their  

white neighbors, they felt that they were in essence the same. The first stage, where  

Seacole's discursive persona and desired relationship to the reader are developed, is the  

less the seemingly simple description of her early life in Jamaica and trip to England.  



 

 

66 

 

This early stage of her narrative establishes a persona who is eager to engage and  

embrace the exigencies of progress. The self-image of the colored community of her  

generation and becomes significant in the later stages. The second stage is the hellish and  

chaotic landscape of Central America, where she shows herself as the embodiment of  

Western culture and Victorian values. And the third stage, where she achieves fame as a  

heroine and the embodiment of Victorian domestic and cultural values, is on the  

battlefields of the Crimean War. It is in this final stage that she shows herself as the  

maternal and patriotic embodiment of good Scotch blood. Throughout these performative  

moments, Seacole's tone suggests sympathy with the reader. I mean sympathy loosely in  

the sense Foucault suggests in The Order of Things as a discursive means of rendering  

sameness.  For Foucault, the "play of sympathies" is a form of "resemblance" (23).  As a  

discursive posture, sympathy is and has a gravitational force that attracts and draws  

objects together. According to Foucault, "[s]ympathy is an instance of the Same so strong  

and so insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it  

has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of  

mingling them, of causing their individuality to disappear – and thus of rendering them  

foreign to what they were before" (23-4). The rendering of sameness, rather than putative  

cultural or racial differences, generates the opening of Seacole's narrative and establishes  

her identity vis-à-vis her white targeted audience.   

A) STAGE ONE 

 The sympathetic tone and Seacole's rhetoric of sameness confronts the reader in  

the first paragraph.  Mary Seacole presents herself as an active and developing subject of  

historical events. She writes that she was born in Kingston, Jamaica, "some time in the  

present century." Her introductory paragraph suggests that she (as well as her reader) is a  

benefactor of progress and its consequences. "But I do not mind confessing that the  



 

 

67 

 

century and myself were both young together, and that we have both grown side by side  

into age and consequence" (1). Within this brief space, she embeds herself ("we have  

both grown")within the dialogue of progress, thus making herself constitutionally no  

different from her reader. Within the following passage, she strategically goes on to blur  

contemporary notions of racial distinctions between coloreds and whites with the power  

she attributes to biology and the ambiguity of her use of the term "Creole."  

I am a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins. My 

father was a soldier, of an old Scotch family: and in him I often trace my 

affection for a camp-life, and my sympathy with what I have heard my 

friends call 'the pomp, pride, and circumstances of glorious war.' Many 

people have traced to my Scotch blood that energy and activity which are 

not always found in the Creole race, and which have carried me to so 

many varied scenes: perhaps they are right. I have often heard the term 

'lazy Creole' applied to my country people; but I am sure I do know what it 

is to be indolent. All my life long I have followed the impulse that led me 

to be up and doing; and so far from resting idle anywhere, I have never 

wanted inclination to rove, nor will powerful enough to find a way to carry 

out my wishes. (1-2) 

In general, both whites and coloreds in the British West Indies were considered Creole.  

Although today we may assume that the term only signified degrees of racial and cultural  

mixture among non-whites,  Creole was used also to designate white subjects who were  

born in the West Indies or who had lived and worked in the colonies for long periods of  

time. Although she later may suggests that by "Creole" she is referring to the free  

coloreds, the ambiguity of the term in the first paragraph is her act of miming the reader  

and infiltrating white consciousness with the language of sameness. As Regenia Gagnier  

has argued, "[d]iscursive production must be understood in terms of the multifarious  

purposes and projects of specific individuals or groups in specific material  

circumstances" (40).  In an attempt to move herself closer to her white reader, she goes  

on to the importance of biology. She writes that she has "good Scotch blood coursing"  



 

 

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through her veins and, by proxy, she is from "an old Scotch family." Through these  

devices Seacole makes claim to a British heritage and psychological constitution. But it is  

not any heritage: the qualifying term is "good," which already suggests, deterministically,  

that she may have inherited those "good" qualities of this "old Scotch family." Thus, her  

initial self-introduction appears to be that of an autobiographical narrative of a white  

woman, whose distinguishing personality trait is that some people have called her a  

"female Ulysses" (2).   

 In the following paragraph there appears to be some tension in Seacole's narrative  

and it involves her mother. The idea of "good Scotch blood," "old Scotch family," and the  

illegitimate circumstances of her birth are indeed incongruous and not easily dismissed. 

To circumvent the vulgar cultural, political and moral significance of the union that  

created her, Seacole begins this paragraph with "It is not my intention to dwell at any  

length upon the recollections of my childhood" (2). Although the mother is mentioned  

more often than her father, Seacole starts this curious paragraph as though it is a small  

matter that may bear no reflection on her own personality. Her mother, she tells us, “kept  

a boarding house in Kingston, and was, like very many of the Creole women, an  

admirable doctress.”  Seacole wants to emphasize for the reader that her mother had a  

position of respectability by “the officers of both services, and their wives” (2) in the city  

of Kingston.  “It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes; and so I had from early  

youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me”(2).  

Mrs. Seacole avoids the obvious suggestion of sexual impropriety by placing her mother  

as the source of purity, respectability, colonial health and distributor medical knowledge.   

Perhaps it is because her mother's relationship to her father is one that her middle class  

British audience certainly did not approve of.  Dwelling on her childhood, the  

background of which was given in the previous section, conjures up images of moral  



 

 

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impropriety, domination and abuses. It also opens the characterization of her mother as  

among the fallen and sexualized women of color, and tarnishes the noble potential of the  

good Scotch heritage that seems to motivate the psyche of her autobiographical persona.  

Seacole's  unwillingness to "dwell"  on the social contexts that formed childhood  

memories functions as  an overt desire to avoid discourses that she, and perhaps her white  

middle-class reader in England, may have found disagreeable and alienating. But though  

marginalized, these unpleasant discourses paradoxically contribute to the writing and  

enjoyment of Seacole's subtle narrative of progress. What gets dismissed from the text  

belongs to an unjust and morally tarnished age, the century still in its youth (a political  

and historical age aligned with childhood development). That is, this period that she will  

not "dwell" upon refers back to a social relationship both she and many of her middle  

class readers have outgrown. Moreover, to evoke a detailed description of her childhood  

would have involved an acknowledgement of the  political and social differences she is  

trying to avoid. 

 Although Seacole seems to not have been raised by her mother, she was put under  

the care of an old lady whom she describes as "my kind patroness" (2). The nature of the  

old woman's patronage is left unuttered, but young Mary was brought "up in her  

household among her own grandchildren, and who could scarcely have shown me more  

kindness had I been one of them" (2). Even here, Seacole refuses to apply to herself a  

concrete employment that may suggests difference and subservience. She paints herself  

as companion rather than as hired help. To add onto these suggestions of sameness is the  

ambiguous fantasy of home.  It is during her contact with the family of her unnamed  

patroness that she starts envisioning England as home and destination. She writes that "I  

was never weary of tracing upon an old map the rout to England; and never followed with  

my gaze the stately ships homeward bound without longing to be in them, and see the  



 

 

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blue hills of Jamaica fade into the distance" (4). While the idea of England seems to have  

a metaphysical attraction, the "blue hills of Jamaica" are rendered as a place from which  

she wishes to escape.  These visions of England seem to become more pronounced as she  

develops into a woman. Her use of "homeward bound" has split connotations: it can  

suggests that the ships are taking its European passengers home as well as mean that  

England is her desired home. But England as destination functions more than a form of  

mere flattery for her reader:  England had always been seen as the center of civilization,  

the site of progress. It is also where many members of the colored community, usually  

the males, went for education. For Seacole, transport from tropical Jamaica to England is  

an indication of her own personal development and of her own progress.  

 Her first visit to England, in the company of "some relatives" (4), is also couched  

subtly in transitional terms which will have relevance later in her narrative. 

I shall never forget my first impressions of London. Of course, I am not 

going to bore the reader with them; but they are as vivid now as though 

the year 18- (I had very nearly let my age slip then) had not been long ago 

numbered with the past. Strangely enough, some of the most vivid of my 

recollections are the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my 

and my companion's complexion. I am only a little brown - a few shades 

duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my 

companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject 

to her rude wit. She was hot-tempered, poor thing! and as there were no 

policemen to awe the boys and turn our servants' head in those days, our 

progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather chequered 

one (4). 

The important phrases in this passage are "numbered with the past" and "Strangely  

enough." The former phrase situates the incident in developmental terms, during "those  

days," while the latter suggests that what follows was not indicative of British character  

even then. This brief episode, an example of what I had said earlier about her ability to  

read the reader, is designed to flatter the sensibility and self-image of Seacole's present- 



 

 

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day audience. However, though she critiques prejudices based on the complexion of skin,  

it is arranged in terms appealing to the imagined reader's sense of self as tolerant and  

educated.  She locates the mentality that generates the incident in the form of  

undeveloped thinkers like little boys (especially "street-boy," whose level of education  

and sophistication are held in doubt). This "Strangely enough" is worded as if her modern  

day reader has evolved from childish modes of thinking and may not sympathize with  

this uneducated and intellectually undeveloped class of people. After all, these are street  

boys. The use of street boys as models of racialized thinkers can be seen as her 

commentary on the intellectual development of prejudiced minds. She distances herself  

from her darker companion by highlighting the other's emotional nature ("rude wit," "hot  

tempered"), which seems to suggests that her companion is subject to violent emotions  

that may be the result of the degree of her race mixture. Her companion, then, is in  

comparison positioned as less emotionally, developmentally, and intellectually suited  

than young Mary to meet the cool and logical thinking required for success in a civilized  

culture. The comparison between Seacole and her companion suggests that Mary, at this  

age and even before setting foot in London, had already evolved emotionally and  

intellectually and that she has tamed violent emotions. She is not like the stereotype of  

the hot tempered and emotional mulatto. That is to say, through this comparison, that the  

volatile companion is subtly made into the Other.  

 Although the reason for her stay in London is unspecified, she, like many colored 

men of her generation, seemed to have received some form of education which may have  

contributed to the apparent elevation in her activities and perception of self. On her first  

visit, which lasted for about a year, she is with relatives. Her exact occupation in England  

is never mentioned: was she there as a servant, which is likely; or was she taken to  

England to learn a trade?  If the latter was the case, then Mrs. Seacole certainly would  



 

 

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have elaborated on this blessing which was not experienced by most colored women. The  

central point is that Mrs. Seacole is very strategic and selective of the information she is  

willing to give to her reader. However, when she returns to Jamaica she seems to now  

have acquired the instincts, aspirations, and talents of a merchant, thus enabling her to  

drape her persona in the garb of an independent merchant. She writes: "Before long I  

started again for London, bringing with me a large stock of West Indian preserves and  

pickles for sale. After remaining two years here, I started for home "(4). She offers no  

insight into what may have caused this elevation from passive companion and dependent  

to business woman.  Moreover, she couches the nature of her later journeys in terms of  

commercial progress and gain. She writes that "Before I had been long in Jamaica I  

started upon other trips, many of them undertaken with a view to gain" (5). These are the  

actions of a young woman with a sense of self and direction originally not indicated in  

her native land. In short, she has presented herself as productive and contributing member  

of Great Britain with signs of independence which may have been much appreciated by  

her middle class reader. Moreover, her budding entrepreneurial spirit is performed as an  

indication of commercial energy not attributed to either the indolent colonial whites or  

the reported lazy and feeble coloreds. This transformation, as Seacole presents it, is the  

result of coming into contact with England and acquired on English soil. 

 After Mrs. Seacole has discursively made inroads placing her as a participant in  

the commercial community, an activity which serves as her bridge between England and 

Jamaica, she sets into motion the elements of caretaker that later in life brought her fame.  

These elements are brought into play through the marriage and death of her husband  

Edmund Seacole.  Even here, the information she offers is strategic and selective and  

arranged to show and emphasize her domestic and saintly virtues. Edmund is presented as  

sickly. The lack of any indication that there was sexual and emotional attraction and  



 

 

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contact (resulting in pregnancy and children) may suggests that she and Edmund was an  

asexual couple. The likelihood that their union was asexual is enigmatic because of the  

way she originally renders their involvement with one another:  "I couldn't find a way to  

say 'no' to a certain arrangement timidly proposed by Mr. Seacole, but married him" (5).  

Although the idea of her having had a pre-matrimonial sexual relation is alluded to, it is  

quickly punctuated by the establishment of marriage, which occurred in the Church of  

England. Mary Seacole was aware of the stigma attached to many women of color. She  

also knew the social stigma attached to mixed marriages, and by not mentioning Mr.  

Seacole's race she avoids receiving the condemnation of some readers in England.  

Edmund, however, may have been white, which accounts for silencing his pedigree.  

According to Seacole's biographer Jane Robinson, Edmund's grandfather served with  

Admiral Nelson and he was from prominent family in the West Indies. Her position as  

caretaker and nurse in this arrangement desexualizes her.  Moreover, by making clear to  

the reader that she has turned away subsequent suitors further removes her from the idea  

of mulatto woman as fallen woman. Throughout this interlude with her Edmund, only her  

desires to nurse and serve are presented.  

Mary Seacole‟s narrative suggests that between the Kingston fire of 1843 and the  

cholera epidemic that swept through Jamaica in 1850, the mature and industrious  

foundation of “Mother Seacole” had developed.  These events prepare her for stage two  

of her adventures. She paints herself further as a woman of action and value, not given to  

despair, even after her home and business, along with much of Kingston, had been burnt  

to the ground. She writes that she had “set to work again in a humbler way, and rebuilt  

my house by degrees.”  Moreover, she says that her “reputation as a skillful nurse and  

doctress, for my house was always full of invalid officers and their wives from  

Newcastle, or the adjacent Up-Park Camp.  Sometimes I had a naval or military surgeon  



 

 

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under my roof, from whom I never failed to glean instruction, given, when they learned  

my love for their profession” (8).Her education in the medical arts is further developed  

when a cholera epidemic swept through Jamaica in 1850. "While the cholera raged," she  

writes," I had but too many opportunities of watching its nature, and from a Dr. B-----,  

who was then lodging in my house, received many hints as to its treatment which I  

afterwards found invaluable" (9). After the Jamaican cholera epidemic, she prepares for  

the second stage of her narrative: the journey to the Isthmus of Panama to assist her 

brother who has established a store and hotel.  

B) STAGE TWO 

 In stage two of her narrative, Mrs. Seacole represents herself as vessel and image  

of British culture. During this stage in her narrative, she sets out to impress onto the mind  

of the reader her desire and ability to transport British values to a world of corruption and  

chaos. Seacole's career in Central America recalls Marlowe's gothic journey through  

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. She attempted to establish businesses there on two  

separate occasions. During both of her journeys, the climate, terrain and most of its  

inhabitants are described in terms of evil and Otherness. What she confronts is the  

antithesis of Western civilization. It is described as a difficult journey in hostile territory  

that is resistant to progress , "as if nature had determined to throw every conceivable  

obstacle in the way of those who would seek to join the two great oceans of the world"  

(10). However, she says that "Not yet...  does civilization rule at Panama. The weak sway  

of the New Granada republic, despised by lawless men, and respected by none, is  

powerless to control the refuse of every nation which meet together upon its soil.  

Whenever they feel inclined now they overpower the law easily"(10). New Granada,  

then, is a lawless and chaotic hell-hole, seemingly impregnated by pirates, with a disease  

infested climate that alters the constitutions of its inhabitants.  



 

 

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  Unlike the gradual transformation that Conrad's hero undergoes as he advanced  

further into the African jungle , and unlike the altered physical and moral states  

undergone by his idol Kurtz, the persona of Mother Seacole is presented to her British  

reader as being strongly determined to uphold the civilized standards and values that have  

bred her. She represents her moral constitution as being impervious to the morally  

corrupting and physically deteriorating effects of the tropics. Only her clothes are stained  

by the effects of the environment but not her sense of self as representative of a civilized  

nation. 

And as with that due regard for personal appearance, which I have always 

deemed a duty as well as a pleasure to study, I had, before leaving Navy 

bay, attired myself in a delicate light blue dress, a white bonnet prettily 

trimmed, and an equally chased shawl, the reader can sympathize with my 

distress. However, I gained the summit, and after an arduous descent, of a 

few minutes duration, reached the river-side; in a most piteous plight, 

however, for my pretty dress, from its contact with Gatun clay, looked as 

red as if, in the pursuit of science, I had passed through a strong solution 

of muriatic acid. (13) 

 As she paints herself as the image and source of British dignity, the prominent  

characters she encounters resembles a gallery of inept and corrupt officials, racist and  

arrogant Americans, and convicts. Among the characters sharing the tropical stage with  

Mother Seacole are "a coarse black priest" and his "stupid worshippers" (33), a "soldier- 

police" force incline to taking bribes (43);  she "found the Spanish Indians treacherous,  

passionate, and indolent, with no higher aim or object but simply to enjoy the present  

after their own torpid, useless fashion" (72). Other than the very pretty and honorable  

white wife of a black judge (clearly a union her nineteenth-century middle class white  

reader would not approve), most of the women she sets her eyes on, especially the young  

American women, are far from candidates for angels in the house. She writes that 



 

 

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Although many of the women on their way to California showed clearly 

enough that the life of license they sought would not be altogether 

unfamiliar to them, they still retained some appearance of decency in their 

attire and manner; but in many cases... the female companions of the 

successful gold-diggers appeared in no hurry to resume the dress or 

obligations of their sex. Many were clothed as the men were, in flannel 

shirt and boots; rode their mules in unfeminine fashion, but with much 

ease and courage; and in their conversation successfully rivalled the 

coarseness of their lords. I think, on the whole, that those French lady 

writers who desire to enjoy the privileges of man, with the irresponsibility 

of the other sex, would have delighted with the disciples who were 

carrying their principles into practice in the streets of Cruces. (20) 

 But they, too, may be victims of the transformative effects of the climate or an indication  

of the lack of moral development found across the Atlantic. What is important is that  

Mrs. Seacole represents herself maintaining Western (at least British) standards of  

manners and appearances. Although her contemporary reader may have empathized with  

Seacole's comic plight, it is important for us today to take into consideration that the  

moral sentiments that she gives expression to are antagonistic and incongruous to the  

popularly imagined personality ascribed to the typical colored woman. The stereotype of  

the period suggests that Seacole should have been at home in such a sexually free,  

promiscuous, and lawless place. By setting herself apart from other women in the tropics  

of Central America, she has also continued the process whereby she desexualizes herself  

before the reader.  The self-characterization we get is that of an intrepid and unprotected  

Victorian widow dropped into the wilds of alien Panama, who carries the torch of virtue  

and righteousness.  Her persona, once again illustrating the development of her moral  

subjectivity, is explicitly sympathetic towards her reader‟s concern for rules of propriety.   

As she takes advantage of these moral concerns, Mrs. Seacole simultaneously challenges  

contemporaneous assumptions pertaining to  the colored women's sexual and moral  

nature.    



 

 

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A landscape as filthy, murky, and damp as the one Seacole has described invites  

her to further showcase her strength of character and knowledge of modern medicine.  In  

this crucial scene, cholera has broken out, and Mrs. Seacole is the only person available  

with the knowledge and courage to do battle against the disease. Without the aid of a  

bona fide medical doctor, she contributed to saving many lives and it appears as if she  

accomplished this feat almost single-handedly. She writes that "[t]here was no doctor in  

Cruces; the nearest approach to one was a little timid dentist, who was there by accident,  

and who refused to prescribe for the sufferer, and I was obliged to do my best" (25).   

Even the "Spanish doctor, who was sent for from Panama, became nervous and  

frightened at the horrors around him," could not relieve the fears of the people of Cruces,  

who "saw that he was not familiar with the terrible disease that he was called upon to do  

battle with, and preferred trusting to the one who was" (27). Thus Mary Seacole became  

known to the people of Cruces as "the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera  

medicine" (27).   

Seacole, however, knows that humility is an important feminine virtue. She is  

very aware that a show of humility (combined with a representation of her sense duty) is  

a quality her Victorian reader will admire. Therefore, to safeguard against charges of  

grandstanding, she writes: 

And here I must pause to set myself right with my kind reader. He or she 

will not, I hope, think that, in narrating these incidences, I am exalting my 

poor part in them unduly. I do not deny (it is the only thing indeed that I 

have to be proud of) that I am pleased and gratified when I look upon my 

past life, and see times now and then, and places here and there, when and 

where I have been enabled to benefit my fellow-creatures suffering from 

ills my skills could often remedy. Nor do I think the kind reader will 

consider this feeling an unworthy one. If it be so, and if, in the following 

pages, the account of what Providence has given me strength to do on 

larger fields of action be considered vain and egotistical, still I cannot help 

narrating them, for my share in them seems to be the one and only claim I 



 

 

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have to interest the public ear…. I am not ashamed to confess - that I love 

to be of service to those who need a woman's help. And where ever the 

need arises - on whatever distant shore - I ask no greater or higher 

privilege than to minister to it.  (25-26) 

 As the embodiment of British manners, morals, feminine sacrifice and Victorian  

liberal thought, she offers her opinions of Americans and the institution of slavery and 

race prejudice that are still practiced in North America. What is important, however,  

about her comments about slavery in North America, is her desire to resist rhetorically  

establishing connections that may suggest the kind of sameness she expresses towards  

whites. 

my experience of travel had not failed to teach me that Americans (even 

from the Northern States) are always uncomfortable in the company of 

coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by 

sour looks and rude words. I think, if I have a little prejudice against our 

cousins across the Atlantic - and I do confess to a little - it is not 

unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which 

shows me related - and I am proud of the relationship- to those poor 

mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still 

owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen 

with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors - 

let others effect to doubt them if they will - is it surprising that I should be 

somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have 

endeavoured to assume over me. (14)  

This relatedness to the blacks and escaped slaves that she observes is rendered in a  

rhetorical mode similar to that of the American "cousin." That is, the cultural distance  

that separates North Americans from the modern day Englishmen perhaps equals the  

distance between Seacole and the blacks she claims a relationship to. The "Atlantic"  

serves as a duel metaphor, for it refers to space and temporality. That is, Americans and  

blacks are situated as inhabiting an underdeveloped mentality in an undeveloped space.  

Both seemingly are in a state of intellectual underdevelopment. The Americans, separated  

by the great Atlantic gulf from the mother-source of liberal thought, are not what the  



 

 

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English have evolved into today. They have not developed and have not progressed  

ethically any further than the juvenile street-boys of London. They still own human  

bodies, while the historical and morally progressive actions of the English suggest that  

slavery is inconsistent with cultural advancement, not to mention good manners.  

 As suggested above, however liberal she wants to appear, to maintain the illusion  

of sameness with her white British reader she must distance herself from blacks. Her  

mode of observation suggests that she perceives them as not of her caste and as a race  

completely distinct from her own.  This perception of distinctions is consistent with the  

racial categorizations followed at that time in her native Jamaica. At times her language  

even assumes an air of disconnected superiority. For instance, near the end of chapter  

three, her critique of American manners involves the appropriation of Yankee racial  

language to describe the demand for "the excited nigger cooks to make haste with the  

slapjacks " (20). Later in her narrative, during a returned excursion to Panama for the  

purposes of gold-mining, she even goes as far as to compare black babies to monkeys:  

"With what pleasure... could one foreign to their [Panama natives] tastes and habits dine  

off a roasted monkey, whose grilled head bore a strong resemblance to a negro baby's?"  

and "it was positively frightful to dip your ladle in unsuspectingly,  and bring up what  

closely resembled a brown baby's limb" (69).  Seacole is clearly writing about blacks and  

not about her own people.  

She is resentful, like many members of her colored community in Jamaica and the  

British West Indies, toward those who conflate the pure black people with the coloreds,  

and who present her liminal status as a social disability. For instance, at a farewell  

gathering in which many Americans were preparing to depart, Seacole responds to a  

racial slur that may have offended many coloreds throughout the British West Indies.  

This incident is famous for many of those who have read and studied Wonderful  



 

 

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Adventures.  

Well, gentleman, I expect you all will support me in a drinking of this 

toast that I du ---- . Aunty Seacole, gentlemen; I give you, Aunty Seacole -

--. We can't du less for her, after what she's done for us ---, when the 

cholera was among us, gentlemen ---, not many months ago ---. So, I say, 

God bless the best yeller woman he ever made, from Jamaica, gentlemen -

--, from the Isle of Springs --- Well, gentlemen, I expect there are only tu 

things we're vexed for ---; and the first is, that she ain't one of us ---, a 

citizen of the great United States ---; and the other thing is, gentlemen ---, 

that Providence made her a yeller women. I calculate, gentlemen, you're 

all as vexed as I am that she's not wholly white ---, but I du reckon on your 

rejoicing with me that she's many shades removed from being entirely 

black ---; and I guess, if we could bleach her by any means we would ---, 

and thus make her as acceptable in any company as she deserves to be ---. 

Gentlemen, I give you Aunty Seacole! (47). 

This toast, for Seacole, goes deeper than emphasizing that it is her African heritage that  

excludes her, even though the services she had rendered were appreciated: it suggests  

that, whatever valuable and noble qualities she may possess, she is forever a slave to an  

inferior status. Although Seacole tries to present her response as distain for intolerance,  

the humor within the toast reiterates the space of exclusion that she and the members of  

her hybrid community were trying to overcome. Since she is "not wholly white," she, for  

these American white men, may not be fully developed and lacks an essential valued  

humanity. Ideologically, such a notion is the antithesis of what the coloreds of her  

generation had argued against and of how she saw herself. Moreover, Seacole is being  

reminded that she is still a member of the black race, which, as we have seen, she and  

many members of the colored community would have denied.  Seacole's response to this  

toast is just as famous, but I believe misinterpreted and not seen in the context of a  

colored woman  formed by the cultural discourses of nineteenth century Jamaica.  

But, I must say, that I don't altogether appreciate your friend's kind wishes 

with respect to my complexion.  If it had been as dark as any nigger's, I 

should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respected by 



 

 

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those whose respect I value; and as to his offer of bleaching me, I should, 

even if it was practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society 

which the process might gain me admission to, all I can say is, that, 

judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don't 

think I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink 

to you and the general reformation of American manners.  (48)  

It is Seacole's sense of self, her integrity as a proud woman of color, rather than an  

African connection which she may not have favored with the label of a heritage, that is  

being defended here. The phrase the she emphasizes, ”as dark as any nigger‟s,” is her  

pronouncement of difference from blacks. The idea of "heritage" may have suggested  

essential qualities passed from one generation to the next, thus making problematic the  

coloreds‟ identification with whites. Seacole need not explain the difference between  

coloreds and blacks to her English reader, because she assumes that they know that there  

are profound qualitative differences between the groups. For Seacole, it may be the  

primitive nature of American thinking which prevents them from distinguishing between  

blacks and coloreds. This "general reformation of American manners" may spark some  

form of moral and intellectual advancement that Seacole had not witnessed in whites on  

the other side of the Atlantic.  

C) STAGE THREE 

 Stages one and two of Mrs. Seacole‟s adventures are suggested by her  

characterization of events as the acquisition of useful and sturdy Victorian tools and  

virtues. The two previous stages on which Mary Seacole performed these acts of sacrifice  

and daring are, when we look closer at her text, inferred in the letters of praise she has  

strategically distributed throughout Wonderful Adventures. The sacrifices she had made  

in the Crimea, however, are widely documented, and there were credible witnesses to  

attest to her bravery and willingness to use her skills for the good of her British "sons."  

The nature of these documents symbolically brought the name and persona of Mother  



 

 

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Seacole into English homes.  England and the English people were, for Mary Seacole,  

what Benedict Anderson calls an "imagined community."  According to Anderson, an  

imagined community exits where "the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal  

comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible... for so many millions  

of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings" (7). This is  

to say that, "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation" Seacole may have  

witnessed in her lifetime in Jamaica and the cases of prejudice that she encountered in  

London, her allegiances (like many members of the colored community) were to the  

mother country and its interests. The motherly persona expressed by Mrs. Seacole about  

her life with British soldiers symbolizes the putative bond of interest that was being  

claimed by the colored community. Her discursive maneuvers during this stage were  

aimed at demolishing the doubts of whites who saw her as an outsider.  

  The third stage of Wonderful Adventures is the longest and most significant stage  

of her narrative and her life. Up to this point, her discursive practices have been  

constructed as performances aimed at eliding alterity and in the representation of herself  

as a medium which had contributed to the advancement of British ideals in the wilds of  

Panama and the ideological battlefields of Jamaica. However, as Paquet has claimed,  

"[t]he public and political event that gives her written life meaning is the Crimean War,  

not the crisis of community that afflicted Jamaica" (62). As she continues these  

discursive practices in stage three, the tropes she makes use of places her firmly as a  

member of the British community. For the English reader, the essentials of "Mother  

Seacole" were an open book. Punch Magazine had immortalized her in print and cartoon  

in 1856 and 1857 respectively. The poem entitled “A Stir for Seacole” appeared on 6  

December, 1856, announcing her bankruptcy, and in the May 30, 1857 issue of Punch is  

a cartoon of Mother Seacole at the bedside of a wounded soldier. William Russell, the  



 

 

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first to bring her to public attention, and others had described her heroic exploits in the  

British press.  In the Preface to Wonderful Adventures, William Russell suggests that she  

had become a household word when he writes that "I should have thought that no preface  

would have been required to introduce Mary Seacole" (vii).  As England had been a part  

of her personal identity, Mary Seacole had become an accepted figure in the British  

imagination. This means that an image and an idea of Mary Seacole were circulating at  

least a year before Wonderful Adventures was written. Moreover, it was known and well  

publicized that she had returned from the war bankrupt. Although profit was one of the  

reasons she had gone to the Crimea, most of her narrative emphasizes patriotic motives.  

News of her bankruptcy, which she does allude to later in her narrative, only served to  

highlight her persona as a woman willing to sacrifice everything for her sons. According  

to Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "[a]ny narrator's behavior will be constrained in part by  

various assumptions he will have made concerning his present or assumed audience's  

motives for listening to him. Although these assumptions will usually be formed on the  

basis of the narrator's prior knowledge of that audience, they may also be re-formed on  

the basis of feedback from the listener during the transaction itself" (234). With Smith‟s  

insight in mind, it is apparent that in her text Seacole is able market “Mother Seacole‟s”  

seemingly innate sense of self- sacrifice to her advantage. Seacole's job, then, was to  

supplya personal touch to the stories that England had already known about her. Most  

importantly, it was imperative for her to address the doubts as to her motives for going to  

the Crimea without offending the post-war sensibilities of her readers. In the words of  

Paquet, "[t]he preexisting public image of Seacole as Crimean heroine shapes her  

autobiographical self-consciousness. Her life story is skewed to public approval and  

public patronage" (67). 

 Seacole‟s discursive currency lies in the continuous tropes of "mother" and "son,"  



 

 

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and allusions to family, that she seductively rendered to demolish "doubts" that may have  

been attached to her racialized personality and motives. Furthermore, allusion to the  

mother/son relationship contributes to Seacole's desire to privilege a biological  

connection and sameness rather than difference. Her written positions vis-à-vis British  

soldiers are familial ones. By favoring these tropes she shows the arbitrary nature of the  

significance attached to her own complexion.  Her eight mouth stay in Jamaica in 1853  

prepares the reader for the last stage of her Wonderful Adventures, for it is a brief account  

of the yellow fever that struck the island and what she claims to be the natural bond  

between Creoles and whites. Her rhetoric suggests something close to a family  

relationship between Jamaican Creoles and Europeans. This sentiment is also a persona  

publically expressed by members of the British colored community for most of the  

nineteenth century. The cause of this affinity, the result of shared bloodlines, is not  

elaborated upon. To explicate on the sexual misconduct and the abuses of power that  

gave birth to the colored community was an uncomfortable subject for coloreds and  

whites. Therefore, the feelings towards white Europeans had to be presented as  

something in nature.  According to Seacole, nature has instilled “in the hearts of the  

Creoles an affection for English people and an anxiety for their welfare, which shows  

itself warmest when they are sick and suffering” (60).The natural bond that coloreds  

supposedly have for Europeans reiterates the argument that they have common interests  

with whites. This statement of affinity, therefore, has historical and political implications.  

It also suggests the natural affection for a family member. What she has done is  

converted a relationship built on power and animosity into one of family affection.   

 In her effort to flatter and seduce her readers‟ sense of themselves as tolerant, she  

describes the rebuffs, discouragements, and obstacles that stood in her way under the  

ambiguous term "doubts." Seacole felt that she was well qualified to serve, for the  



 

 

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prevalent diseases in the Crimean were "cholera, diarrhoea, and dysentery, all of them  

more or less known in tropical climate; and with which, as the reader will remember, my  

Panama experience had made me tolerably familiar" (76). But her requests to serve were  

ignored by all to whom she approached: the War Office, the Quartermaster General's  

Department and then to the Medical Department.  She is also turned down as a recruit by  

one of Florence Nightingale's nurses. She says of an interview with one of Nightingale's  

companions that she "read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not  

have been chosen to fill it" (79). Although she had presented written testimony of her  

expertise and letters of introduction, Mrs. Seacole does not present herself as one to  

complain. The blame seems to be on her foolishness in thinking anyone will take her  

seriously. These nice people may have never met any colored women from Jamaica, and  

may therefore be unfamiliar with their skills in treating tropical diseases, especially the  

three prevalent ones.  She writes that she is "not for a single instant going to blame the  

authorities who would not listen to the offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the  

Crimea and nurse her 'sons' there, suffering from cholera, diarrhoea, and a host of lesser  

ills” (78). This is because “In my country, where people know our use, it would have  

been different; but here it was natural enough - although I had references, and other  

voices spoke for me - that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my offer" (78).  

The following is another one of her ways of letting British prejudices off the hook,  

however disingenuous.  "Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last  

time, thank Heaven,” she writes. “Was it possible that American prejudices against  

colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my  

blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? " (76). Seacole presents the  

ludicrous idea of English racism as a fleeting thought, "the first and last time, thank  

Heaven," with the same dismissive tone of her "Strangely enough"(4) encounter with the  



 

 

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street-boys during her first visit to London. Moreover, she seems grateful to realize that  

her "Doubts and suspicions" were not true. Paravisini-Gebert correctly observes that  

"[t]he rhetorical nature of the question she poses in the English episode only serves as a  

fairly transparent strategy to address the racism she identifies with life in London  

throughout her narrative while evading a direct accusation that would have alienated  

potential readers. ... The performance of the despair occasioned by the doubt allows her  

nonetheless to instill in the minds of the readers the destructive power of racism" (75). 

 Even with letters of introduction, these doubts of others do not have the  

anticipated effect. In most cases, letters of introduction assured entrance into places one  

may never had been allowed. The author of the letter believes that the holder of such a  

letter deserves an audience. According to Robinson, 

Letters of introduction, the remote equivalent of verbal introductions, 

played a significant part in the fabric of nineteenth-century social life. 

They operated, as did everything else, along strictly hierarchal lines and 

their purpose was to open doors which would otherwise remain intractably 

shut. Person A would approach person B for a letter of introduction to 

person C (or be offered one, like Mary). Generally C's social rank was 

equal to or higher than A's, and B was never of lower rank than C. Any 

solecism caused great offence. Failure to produce such a letter when 

seeking to meet someone of higher rank to whom one had not formally or 

formerly been introduced usually resulted in suspicion and 

disappointment. The letters were networking tools, which when properly 

used, like a passport ... smoothed the path of progress. When abused or 

neglected, they could destroy one's social credibility. (98)  

 Mrs. Seacole makes a point of scattering letters of this type throughout her  

narrative and bringing them to the reader‟s attention. For her, these letters have three  

functions. First of all, they are devices employed to market her value to the British  

reading community. This, in other words, is their discursive function. These letters  

contribute to putting the reader in her corner. Within the text, they are testimonials to her  

character and ability to treat tropical diseases and, in the hands of this particular woman  



 

 

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of color, they may also have a flattening effect on the hierarchy Robinson alludes to. This  

flattening may have been what occurred between Seacole and Nightingale. While in  

Malta, a doctor she had known in Kingston had given her a letter of introduction to  

Florence Nightingale. Nightingale, however, was not pleased to see Seacole. The tone of  

this encounter suggests that Seacole seems to have faced Mrs. B. and then Florence  

Nightingale with an air of equality, for at this point there is nothing of value Nightingale  

can give her that she has not decided on doing herself. The significance of the letter  

during this scene would not have escaped many of her readers in Jamaica. Seacole uses  

the letter to subtlely present herself as equal to the great Florence Nightingale. For  

Seacole, Nightingale is now powerless to impede her progress. And Nightingale may  

have feared that to refuse an audience with the colored woman from Jamaica may been  

perceived as an insult by Dr. F,  her superior. Seacole writes that "She has read Dr. F---'s   

letter, which lies on the table by her side, and asks, in her gentle but eminently practical  

and business-like way, 'What do you want, Mrs. Seacole - anything that we can do for  

you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy'" (91). Since Seacole has committed  

herself to continuing her journey to the Crimean without Nightingale, she ask merely for  

place to rest for the night. And she offers "to nurse the sick for the night" (91).  At this  

moment, Mrs. Seacole seems to be modestly requesting a curtsy granted to equals; but in  

presenting her case to the reader in such a way, she is indirectly claiming equal status not  

only with Nightingale but with the reader.  Seacole had asked only to be put up for the  

night, and during her stay she offered her assistance rather than empower her counter-part  

with the request to serve under her. Seacole does not have to explain her credentials, she  

is not sitting across from Nightingale looking for employment, for her expertise has been  

authorized by a white male member of the British community. Sandra Gunning has  

pointed out that "[a]s evidence of the numerous testimonials in Wonderful Adventures 



 

 

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that celebrate her ability to cure the sick, Seacole marshals the approval of the same white  

soldiers whom Nightingale and her nurses vowed to serve, and thus she deauthorizes  

white women as her judges" (972). She does not ask to be taken on as a nurse, for she has  

her own plans to enter the Crimea as a doctress. Nor does Nightingale ask Seacole, with  

her obvious expertise, to join them. Nightingale tells Seacole that the only available bed  

is in the hospital washerwomen's quarters, which she accepts without protest. As she  

done through most of Wonderful Adventures, without overtly charging Florence  

Nightingale with racial prejudice, Seacole has left that verdict up to the British reading  

public and the court of public opinion.       

 For Seacole‟s discursive purposes, patriotism comes in the form of assuming the  

role of the figurative mother to British soldiers. She presents the role and title of "mother"  

as one that was not only given to her by friends and soldiers, but also because it is a role  

suited to her nature. This mother/son relationship is reciprocated between Seacole and the  

British troops, and it is one she wishes to impress on the imaginations of her readers. She  

says that every place she had gone, she was met with cries of "Mother Seacole" from  

soldiers and officers she had known and cared for in Jamaica. For instance, while in  

Gibraltar, she is welcomed by two soldiers who call her "good old Mother Seacole!" (84)  

and, as with most of her references to British troops, she calls these men her "sons." A  

request from one soldier begins: "My Dear Mamma" (127). Her tone is indeed motherly  

and caring, allowing the reader to know that she was there to perform the womanly  

functions that circumstance had precluded for the biological parents in England:  

had you been fortunate enough to have visited the British Hotel upon rice-

pudding day, I warrant you would have ridden back to your hut with kind 

thoughts of Mother Seacole's endeavours to give you a taste of home. If I 

had nothing else to be proud of, I think my rice-puddings, made without 

milk, upon the high road of Sebastopol, would have gained me a 

reputation. What a shout there used to be when I came out of my little 



 

 

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caboose, hot and flurried, and called out, 'Rice-pudding day, my sons.' 

Some of them were baked in large shallow pans, for the men and the sick, 

who always said that it reminded them of home. (140) 

Appealing to the imaginations of her British readers, Mrs. Seacole is very conscious of  

the importance of rendering the British Hotel at Spring Hill as the site of stability with  

manifestations of home life in England. She wants her reader to use their imaginations  

and envision Mother Seacole transporting the comforts and warmth of English  

domesticity to the battlefields of Crimea.  In other words, the British Hotel is represented  

as the domestic sphere where the men, temporarily relieved from combat, came to rest  

and rejuvenate themselves. Seacole writes: 

Of course, I had nothing to do with what occurred in the camp, although I 

could not help hearing a great deal about it. Mismanagement and privation 

there might have been, but my business was to make things right in my 

sphere, and whatever confusion and disorder existed elsewhere, comfort 

and order were always to be found at Spring Hill. When there was no sun 

elsewhere, some few gleams - so its grateful visitors said – always seemed 

to have stayed behind, to cheer the weary soldiers that gathered in the 

British Hotel.  (113) 

Seacole emphasizes that her position at the British Hotel was that of "doctress, nurse, and  

'mother'" (124). The desire to serve and to save lives are represented as coming natural to  

her. 

 Seacole's appropriation of the discourse of domesticity has personal and cultural  

functions. That is, they serve a desired purpose. Seacole is not merely reporting how she  

embraced her role as Mother Seacole in the Crimea, but she also wants the post-war  

reader to see that she has proven herself a willing and valued member of the British  

community, someone the reader may gladly accept into their own homes and as one of  

them. According to Roger Chartier, "The appropriation of discourse is not something that  

happens without rules or limits. Writing deploys strategies that are meant to produce  



 

 

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effects, dictate a posture, and obligate the reader. It lays traps, which the reader falls into  

without really knowing it, because the traps are taylored to the measure of a rebel  

inventiveness he or she is always presumed to possess" (1). Moreover, In emphasizing  

her role as “mother,” she challenges and upstages the current stereotypes of the colored  

woman as sexual being.  According to Poon, "[f]or the most part though, she downplays  

the potential sexual implications of her independent peregrinations and her friendly  

association with British soldiers by glossing over references to her own sexuality.  

Claiming motherhood and deploying the attendant rhetoric of care and domestic confront  

also becomes another way of defusing more problematic questions about sexuality"  

(Poon 51). In other words, the slightest suggestion that her persona is a sexual agent  

would elide her persona a “mother.” 

 However, for Seacole, transporting the idea of "home" to the British soldiers  

whom she appropriates as her "sons" seems less problematic than identifying the location  

of her own home. As a young girl, she envisioned England as her castle in the sky.  

Moreover, the trajectory of her address is England rather than Jamaica. Although I can  

only use this reference for its symbolic value, even the writer of the letter from Jamaica  

seems to light-heartedly scold Mrs. Seacole for not writing to them. "Although you will  

not write to us," says the author," we see your name frequently in the newspapers, from  

which we judge that you are strong and hearty" (185). Still, at the end of the war, Seacole  

alludes to having no home to which to return. According to Poon, this is the point where  

Seacole "seizes on her rootlessness to grant greater legitimacy to her desired identity as  

an English women and mother. Indeed, Seacole is reticent about any feelings she might  

harbor towards her place of origin and it is significant that the reader gets no distinct or  

memorable impression of Jamaica throughout her narrative. She studiously avoids  

providing a serious and viable alternative to England in Jamaica, attempting thus to  



 

 

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facilitate her entry into the land of her 'sons', by diminishing the land of her birth" (72).  

Her allusions to rootlessness and poverty are, of course, appeals to the English reader for  

patronage. She compares her feelings and fate to that of a lone soldier who she  

encounters during the departure from the Crimea: "for he, as well as I, clearly had no  

home to return to" (192). Seacole predicts that the only form of existence she has to look  

forward to may be that of poverty. She writes that "it was pretty sure that I should go to  

England poorer than I left it, and although I am not ashamed of poverty; beginning life  

again in the autumn - I mean late in the summer of life - is hard up-hill work" (192-93).  

The very structure of her published narrative fulfills the desires of her autobiographical  

negotiations: Russell's Preface introduces her to the English community and the list of  

prominent names at the end of her text authorizes her right to patronage. She writes that  

wherever she goes in London, she is met by old friends and kind salutations. Thus she  

describes herself as a familiar member of the community: "for wherever I go I am sure to  

meet some smiling face; every step I take in the crowded London streets may bring me in  

contact with some friend, forgotten by me, perhaps, but who soon reminds me of our old  

life before Sebastopol" (199).   

CONCLUSION 

My main point throughout is that Mary Seacole‟s displays of Englishness, even the  

development and manifestations of her British values, are succeeded through travel and 

transit. Moreover, through the tropes of transit and travel, which by extension suggest  

the exchange of values and ideas, she has discursively fashioned her persona as the  

embodiment of progress. My reading of Wonderful Adventures argues that the English  

values in Mary Seacole's persona were developed in Jamaica and during her visits to  

London, and that her development between Jamaica and London and back are culturally  

significant, for she is marked with the essentials of progress. Therefore, I am arguing that  



 

 

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what are recognized as Seacole's manifestations of "Englishness" were already present  

and that the wilds of Panama and the battlefields of the Crimea were the stages on which  

she was able to test and perform them.  It was important for Seacole not to present herself  

at any moment of her life as what may be considered in any form a "wild child," for such  

a consideration threatened to place her in comparison to the African rather than to the  

Anglo Saxon with whom she and other coloreds identified themselves. White blood was  

central to Seacole's identity and she presents it as the motivating force of her personhood.   

Furthermore, it was the comparison to whites, rather than to blacks, that the nineteenth  

century colored politics emphasized.  However often Seacole mentioned what might have  

been attributed to a "Creole" temperament or mindset, it was never anything more  

inconsequential than manifestations of grief or hot-headedness. Other than that, Seacole  

tries to show "sameness" rather than difference; and those moments in which she turns  

attention to the complexion of her skin are there to emphasize the vanity, stunted  

dispositions, and the possible lack of moral and intellectual development of the individual  

persons who had discouraged her progress and, as a product of her autobiographical  

negotiations, to illustrate how far she, her friends, England as a nation and her English  

reader (the sympathetic person holding the text at that moment) have come. The paradox,  

however, is that history forces itself on her narrative, calling attention to itself through the  

modes of self-censorship that Mrs. Seacole employs. 

 Movement and transit are, of course, important for an understanding of Wonderful  

Adventures. Through travel, she was able to transport and perform what her reader  

perceived as the performance of Englishness and Victorian domesticity. Moreover, this  

discursive performance is synonymous to nation building in a post war era.  Travel and  

transit also connects Seacole to the other writers of African descent in this study. Travel  

and transit causes the circulation of ideas and values, and it contributed to the building of  



 

 

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nations.  The coloreds who had followed reports of Mrs. Seacole's wonderful adventures  

on the Crimean stage, may have detected aspects of how they had envisioned themselves  

as individuals and as a community. Moreover, many members of the Jamaican colored  

community may have recognized in Mary Seacole's discursive maneuvers the cultural  

and political circumstances they had historically and daily found themselves negotiating.  

For many of them, Mrs. Seacole's behavior and discursive practices had on the British  

cultural stage the imagined moral and intellectual constitution of Jamaica's colored  

community. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

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CHAPTER THREE 

ROBERT CAMPBELL AND THE DISCURSIVE ECOLOGY OF AFRICAN 

SPACE 

1 

(RE)INTRODUCING ROBERT CAMPBELL 
  

 Most analyses of nineteenth century racial discourse center on the psychological  

 

and ideological imperatives of the dominant gaze, in which the Other is, simply put,  

 

perceived as what the observer is not. This frequently leaves many readers of Victorian  
 

racial discourse with the impression that representations of race may have had little to do  

 

with the modes of resistance and politically conscious agency on the part of the observed  

 

body. It is this habit of thought, which seems to privilege and inadvertently validate the  

 

racialized imaginations of the dominant group, in scholarly investigation that inspired the  

 

Victorian historian Douglas Lorimer to write that "[o]ur fascination with the stereotype of  

 

the Other runs the risk of denying historical agency to the objects of the racist gaze" 

 

(203). Therefore, while we may acknowledge that nineteenth century racial discourse was  

 

a process that attempted to fix the character of the Other as instinctual, we leave the  

 

political, social and cultural implications of the Other's agency and discursive modes of  

 

response untouched as the generative motive of racial representations. Furthermore, this  

 

habit of thought is carried over in our investigations into counter-discursive practices of  

 

the nineteenth century. When we do encounter the counter-discursive practices produced  

 

by the Other, we often ignore that something is being said about the putative integrity,  

 

motives and objectivity of the nation generating the dominant discourse. Our analysis of  

 

nineteenth century racial discourse, as a result of chiefly focusing on unpacking the  

 

practices and implications of the dominant group, seems to overlook the fact that the  

 

discourse is part of a conversation in response to real discursive and lived actions.   



 

 

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 Robert Campbell's (1829 - 1884) seemingly forgotten text, A Pilgrimage to My  

 

Motherland: An Account of a Journey Among the Egbas and Yorubus of Central Africa,  

 

in 1859-60, and the cultural and racial significance of the motility of his own life, sheds  

 

critical light on what was perceived by peoples of African descent toward the Anglo- 

 

Victorian personality. The topography of Campbell's own motility can be seen as a form  

 

of self-imposed exile and racial and national redefinition. He appeared to have been  

 

constantly in search of a place in which he could exercise autonomy without the  

 

racialized restrictions he had experienced and witnessed in the United States and the  

 

British colony of Jamaica. His movements, therefore, resemble that of the newly freed  

 

West Indian slaves we had discussed in chapter one who had sought to construct lives  

 

independent of the demands and needs of their former white masters. Robert Campbell  

 

was born in Kingston, Jamaica, of mulatto and white ancestry. By his own estimation, he  

 

was three-fourths white. According to Howard Bell, Campbell "received a good  

 

education" and, for five years, worked as a printer‟s apprentice (2). Richard Blackett 

 

writes that Campbell had "entered a normal school for two years" and "then became a  

 

parish teacher in Kingston" (9). He later travelled to Central America, immigrated to the  

 

United States in the 1850s and became a science teacher at the Institute for Colored  

 

Youth in Philadelphia. By 1859, Campbell had joined Martin R. Delany as a member of  

 

the Niger Valley Exploring Party to find a location in what is now southern Nigeria for an  

 

African American farming settlement. At the end of their journey in 1860, both Campbell  

 

and Delany were invited to present their observations and agenda to the African Aid  

 

Society and to the Royal Geographical Society of London. It is through his rocky  

 

relationship with Delany (for they did not agree on principles that the latter regarded as  



 

 

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fundamental to the integrity of a black-led mission) and the Niger Valley Exploring Party  

 

that Robert Campbell makes his brief, but critically ignored, mark on black intellectual  

 

history.  

 

 Very little has been written about Robert Campbell's life and work. He is usually  

 

given a foot-noted status. That is, although Campbell's presence as a participant in the  

 

Pan-Africanist movement has been acknowledged by some contemporary scholars, he is  

 

usually positioned as the other guy (the member of the Party willing to accept money  

 

from whites) who accompanied Delany's exploration of the Niger Valley. Moreover, his  

 

involvement in nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic political thought is usually  

 

overshadowed by the reputations, literary outputs, and contributions of Delany,  

 

Alexander Crummell, and Edward Wilmot Blyden. No extensive discussion of A  

 

Pilgrimage positions Campbell's text as a serious and critical engagement with mid- 

 

Victorian racial discourse and trans-Atlantic political thought. A Pilgrimage is usually  

 

written off as a descriptive travelogue, and its lack of overt militant-separatism (which  

 

resonates unambiguously in Delany's "Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring  

 

Party") may have contributed to its lackluster historical attention.  However, a close  

 

analysis of A Pilgrimage shows that Campbell was much more engaged than Delany and,  

 

with the exception of Edward Wilmot Blyden, many of his contemporaries of African  

 

descent in challenging Victorian representations of the African character. Framed and  

 

embedded in Campbell‟s descriptive narrative are the counter-hegemonic concerns of the  

 

nineteenth century native African and Pan-Africanist communities. Therefore, Campbell  

 

is among the first diasporic writers to participate in what Paul Gilroy calls "a new  

 

discursive economy" (69), for A Pilgrimage refuses "to subordinate the particularity" of  



 

 

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the African's experiences "to the totalizing power of universal reason held exclusively by  

 

white hands, pens, or publishing houses" (69). Moreover, the creation of Campbell's  

 

counter-narrative is not only a discursive intervention but it is also a profoundly symbolic  

 

act of racial self-fashioning. He was very conscious of the story the color of his white  

 

skin told to the native Africans he encountered. Unlike most members of British  

 

Jamaica‟s colored caste, Robert Campbell came to envision Africa as his home. What  

 

completely goes unnoticed about the discursive, personal and historical contexts of A  

 

Pilgrimage to My Motherland is that Campbell moves in the opposite direction from that  

 

of Mary Seacole and many colored members of the British West Indies and identified  

 

with the political and economic desires of his African kindred.  

 

 As a self-consciously non-white participant in Gilroy's "new discursive  

 

economy," Campbell's text is therefore an example of what Deleuze and Guarttari call a  

 

"minor literature" whose expression tends to synthesize the diverse moral and political  

 

concerns of a subordinate group. According to Deleuze and Guarttari, "[t]he three  

 

characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection  

 

of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation"  

 

(18). First, Campbell "deterritorializes" the image of the African by positioning himself  

 

and the conscious demands of the African as authorizing agents. Campbell, in other  

 

words, re-configures the contemporaneous stock character of the instinctive and non- 

 

reflective African into a clear-headed and forward thinking articulator of cultural and  

 

political desires. This is the type of representation that had been denied to the African by  

 

many nineteenth century British writers. His mode of representation is relational and the  

 

characteristics that he applies to Europeans are not fixed in their nature. That is, while  



 

 

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Victorian racial discourse tends to render the Other as a known and knowable object of  

 

investigation, Campbell‟s text comments on the relationship among racial Others,  

 

especially the effects of the alien over the weaker native. Moreover, the derogatory  

 

claims, and figures of speech, which usually accompanied descriptions of African  

 

civilization to aid in structuring the Western reader's interpretation of text, have been  

 

denied a place in Campbell‟s narrative. Terms like "barbarian" and "savage" often aided  

 

the mid-nineteenth century Victorian reader about the essential and innate differences  

 

between themselves and the Other. Although the term "heathen" is often used by  

 

Campbell, it is to indicate non-Christian practices rather than an irredeemably fixed and  

 

innate psyche of the lower order of the species. In other words, the term "heathen" as  

 

employed by Campbell is not interchangeable with "savage" and "barbarian." Moreover,  

 

by referring to Africa as "My Motherland," A Pilgrimage takes on the symbolic  

 

connotation of a return to the source of life and growth. Africa, then, within the context  

 

of the title, is positioned as the spiritual source of development. Symbolically, Campbell's  

 

narrative locates Africa as a beginning, a Trans-Atlantic black rebirth, rather than the  

 

dark continent or the putative "White Man's Grave." Furthermore, throughout A  

 

Pilgrimage, Campbell shows that the social activities of the natives (religious, marital,  

 

commercial) are lived within established communities of laws and customs. Nothing  

 

about the social practices he describes remotely resembles the representations of nomadic  

 

and ungoverned groups made popular in nineteenth century English writings. His  

 

descriptions of African life, free of European interpreted practices, do at times resemble  

 

descriptions pastoral life.  Campbell's African subjects are all involved in traditional and  

 

functional activities that contribute to the strength, well-being and growth of their  



 

 

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communities. Lastly, Campbell's narrative is not "an individuated enunciation" (Deleuze  

 

and Guarttari 17).That is, A Pilgrimage constitutes the common political and cultural  

 

desires of both Westernized and native Africans, and this common desire for unhindered  

 

racialized autonomy of both parties resonates throughout his text. He is writing for the  

 

native and those displaced peoples of African descent, whom Alexander Crummell called  

 

the "now scattered children in distant lands" (244). For Campbell, all blacks have stakes  

 

in Africa's commercial and technological progress, and these common aspirations inform  

 

the world he describes.  

 

 In this chapter I argue that Robert Campbell's A Pilgrimage to My Motherland 

 

was not only an intervention in the Victorian's discourse on the African, but within it he  

 

also suggested that there was something nefarious about the British racial personality (or,  

 

how the British performed their perceived function in relation to the Other) which could  

 

only hinder native progress in Africa. The British, however technologically advanced,  

 

were for Campbell the potential source of political and cultural danger that may  

 

eventually lead to an unhealthy national and geographical space for the native. Campbell  

 

and his Pan-Africanist colleagues argued that the only source of African progress and  

 

regeneration was through the black body and black agency, free of British intervention,  

 

active participation and influence. Although Campbell's model of cultural transformation  

 

was similar to England's "civilizing mission," he, Delany and others were antagonistic to  

 

white influence and active participation. They believed that educated people of African  

 

descent possessed the intellectual and technological tools to materialize “civilization” in  

 

Africa. Although Campbell and Delany radically disagreed over accepting material and  

 

economic aid from whites, both felt that success rested on the active participation of  



 

 

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blacks alone. For Campbell and Delany, whites in the United States and Great Britain had  

 

shown that their active hands-on participation in the lives of peoples of African descent  

 

had limited and limiting results. This ideology in which active white participation is  

 

suggested as the harbinger of cultural disruption and stagnation, I argue, informs the  

 

framing strategy of Campbell's narrative.  In using this ideology of white-exclusion,  

 

Campbell in turn places himself in a position of authority equal to his British  

 

contemporaries while he authorizes the African as the sole and legitimate agent of his  

 

own destiny. That is, in the words of Richard Terdiman, Campbell "competes" with  

 

Anglo-British racial discourse with a "counter-dominant" strain which attempts to  

 

"challenge and subvert the appearance of inevitability" (39). His discursive practice is  

 

resistant to Euro-centric presentations of Africa, which he claims to be distorted and  

 

motivated by circumstances beyond the subject being described. Though Campbell (and  

 

most Pan-Africanists of the nineteenth century) is complicit in holding Western  

 

civilization up as a model to be followed, he is, however, advocating a model of a future  

 

Africa that is built, controlled and ruled by enlightened native Africans with the help of  

 

sympathetic and displaced brethren returning from across the Atlantic. The trajectory of  

 

Campbell's narrative is an attempt to separate both himself and the self-governing  

 

African from British hegemony. In other words, in Robert Campbell's vision of Africa the  

 

only surviving European staples are its capacity for material production, commerce, and  

 

Christianity.  

 

 Campbell's intervention is framed in what I call a discursive ecology of African  

 

space. In this discursive ecology, the distorting effects of the Victorian's racial gaze are 

 

kept in the margins of the narrative. That is, the rhetorical and descriptive framing  



 

 

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strategies of mid-nineteenth century British writers are kept in the borders of A  

 

Pilgrimage but simultaneously alluded to as historical and potential threats. In fact, the  

 

distorting effects of the Eurocentric gaze are strategically referenced in Campbell's book.  

 

When the Western discursive and figurative presence appears, they are positioned as the  

 

sources and manifestations of community distortion, disruption, and ill-health. This  

 

marginalization of the rhetoric of Victorian racialized discursive practices is in itself a  

 

criticism of the British psyche and character. Therefore, British prejudices are not  

 

allowed an influence of the images Campbell evokes. In a Derridaen sense, Campbell's  

 

narrative intervenes on a previous invention of the Other as limited and fixed, a non- 

 

progressive humanity, whose perfectibility as autonomous participants in the global  

 

community is questionable . According to Derrida, "An invention always presupposes  

 

some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a disorder into the peaceful  

 

ordering of things, it disregards the proprieties. Showing apparently none of the patience  

 

of a preface - it is a new preface - it goes and frustrates expectations" (1). Campbell's  

 

invention, if we are to consider that all narrative representations are inventions, is an  

 

intervention. He attempted to marginalize the distorting psyche, or the fetishistic  

 

imagination, of the Victorian commentator. Through these narrative means, that can only  

 

be noticed if compared to other nineteenth-century texts about Africa and the African, we  

 

can see that Campbell cleanses the discursive landscape of what Frantz Fanon  a century  

 

later calls the arbitrary and imposed " existential deviation on the Negro" (14). 

 

2 

HISTORICAL, DISCURSIVE, AND IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF 

CAMPBELL’S INTERVENTION 

 

 The "existential deviations" referred to by Fanon, and the conditions which  



 

 

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generated the representations of the African's cultural and innate limitations, were not  

 

composed in a vacuum. Pro and con representations or "descriptions" of the Other's  

 

behavioral traits are, in the words of Uday Mehta, "seldom neutral. They effect moral and  

 

political sensibilities and therefore carry, even when intended innocently, a normative  

 

valency" (72). These representations were discursive products of desired interactions  

 

between England and Africa peculiar to the 1850s and 1860s. According to Lorimer,  

 

"domestic as well as imperial influences shaped Victorian racial attitudes" (13). This was  

 

a time, according to Kristin Mann, "when the British in general were reluctant to acquire  

 

territory in Africa" (84). Reluctance to expand, however, does not mean that England had  

 

no interest in exerting influence in the region that Delany and Campbell wanted to  

 

establish independent and self-governing settlements. While many British government  

 

officials wavered over the necessity and desire of colonial expansion, there were in fact a  

 

few independent merchants profiting in the region from the newly evolving palm oil  

 

trade. For strategic reasons of commerce, however, many British officials felt it was  

 

necessary to have at least a nominal naval presence in the Niger Valley area. This area  

 

was strategically central to the British as a site in which efforts could be made to end the  

 

movement of African slaves across the Atlantic. Not only had the commerce in human  

 

traffic continued long after the British had outlawed the trade and freed their own slaves,  

 

but slavery was still being practiced in many interior African nations. Since the disastrous  

 

Expedition up the Niger in 1841 attempts had been made to encourage many African  

 

chiefs to honor treaties that called for the ending of domestic slavery and promised the  

 

advancement of commerce between England and Africa. The frustrating continuation of  

 

the trade and its practice on the continent became one of the major topics of debate  



 

 

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among missionaries, humanitarians, and anti-black discourse, and what evolved from this  

 

discourse were representations which naturalized the imagined inherent limits of the  

 

African character. During this period, the British government also debated not only  

 

whether expansion into West and Central Africa were profitable and practical, but  

 

healthy and safe. Although the medical use of quinine had proven beneficial during the  

 

1853 expedition up the Niger (for fewer Europeans had succumbed to the tropical  

 

illnesses that had devastated crews in earlier attempts up the Niger), the idea of Africa as  

 

the "White Man's Grave" remained. Many Victorians still imagined and had appropriated  

 

Charles Dickens's representation of Africa (and the African) as the natural enemy of  

 

white men. The tropical climate alone, argued Dickens, was a danger to the Caucasian  

 

body. Moreover, through Dickens, comes the position that concern for the “savages”  

 

abroad is directly correlated to the lack of funds and attention to the suffering at home.  

 

Throughout this time, humanitarians continued to counter anti-black and non- 

 

expansionist arguments with the belief that British missionaries were necessary for the  

 

spread of Christianity and education to the natives. Although education and the spreading  

 

of the Gospel were major components of the project advocated by Delany and Campbell,  

 

some British missionaries felt that whites were constitutionally better equipped for  

 

achieving this task. Only through spreading the Gospel and adopting the practices of  

 

civilized European societies, they argued, could the African contribute to the end of  

 

slavery and raise themselves out of barbarism and poverty.   

 

 This sense of responsibility was strong in the missionaries who followed David  

 

Livingstone near the end of the 1850s. These missionaries believed that Christianity and  

 

commerce between England and African nations would contribute greatly to elevating  



 

 

104 

 

 

Africa from barbarism, contribute to England's economic and industrial growth, and lead  

 

to the end of the slave trade both in the Americas and within Africa. In Missionary  

 

Travels and Researches in South Africa, Livingstone declared that "[w]e ought to  

 

encourage the Africans to cultivate for our markets, as the most effectual means, next to  

 

the gospel, of their elevation" (675). He hoped "for encouragement in every measure for  

 

either the development of commerce, the elevation of the natives, or abolition of the trade 

 

in slaves" (673). Although, as Patrick Brantlinger says in Rule of Darkness, "blatant  

 

economic motives were not what impelled Livingstone and the horde of missionaries who  

 

imitated him" (181), ideological imperatives caused missionaries to create a particular  

 

image of the African that served their institutional and personal desires. According to  

 

Brantlinger, "missionaries were strongly tempted to exaggerate savagery and darkness to  

 

rationalize their presence in Africa, to explain the frustrations they experienced in making  

 

converts, and to win support from mission societies at home" (182). Although both  

 

Delany and Campbell noticed this tendency in British missionaries, we will see in the  

 

next chapter that this was exactly the mode of engagement between natives and  

 

missionaries that Edward Blyden objects to in his essays to Fraser’s Magazine in the  

 

1870s. The African figure, then, was reduced to the status of humanity's wild-child,  

 

greatly in need of tutorage from and the protection of an advanced adult culture. This is  

 

what Robinson and Gallagher mean when they write that "[e]xpansion was not simply a  

 

necessity without which industrial growth might cease, but a moral duty to the rest of  

 

humanity" (2). 

 

Although they agreed on the importance of independent black colonies, the  

 

partnership of Delany and Campbell was not a smooth one. Both men were fiercely  



 

 

105 

 

 

independent and did not, especially on fund raising methods, see eye-to-eye. As early as  

 

1850, Campbell had denounced Delany to Frederick Douglass for using his name without  

 

his permission. Moreover, he did not believe that Delany‟s plan economically feasible.  

 

“Although he supported the idea of an exploration party to the Niger he made it clear that  

 

he disapproved of Delany‟s operations. He called the plan premature as he saw little hope  

 

of financial support” (Blackett 9). At one point Campbell even “announced the severing  

 

of ties with Delany‟s Niger Party,” but rejoined under the condition that “he was to  

 

maintain an independence of action” (Blackett 9). The most important thing that they did  

 

not agree on was the place of white financial support for the Expedition. As far as their  

 

companionship went, violating this cardinal rule of Delany‟s was the deal-breaker.  

 

Seeing the black community would not unite in support of emigration to Africa (or  

 

anywhere beyond American borders), Campbell was not against accepting financial  

 

support from whites. White support, writes Blackett, “flew in the face of all that Delany  

 

stood for and further strained the relationship between the two members of the  

 

Expedition Party” (10). For Delany and those of his way of thinking, accepting white  

 

support opened the doors to white influence and control. Blackett writes that “Delany was  

 

certain Campbell‟s acceptance of support from both white Americans and Englishmen  

 

had jeopardized the independence of the Expedition” (15). Moreover, and most  

 

importantly, for Delany, white patronage suggested a lack of initiative and dignity on the  

 

part of blacks. Campbell, however, was willing to recruit aid not only from American- 

 

based Colonization Societies suspected of wanting to cleanse the U.S. of the black  

 

population, but he also pursued support from British sources. After his arrival in England,  

 

and while Delany was still in the U.S. unsuccessfully trying to raise funds, Campbell had  



 

 

106 

 

 

released a Circular in which he asked for British support for his expedition. In this  

 

Circular, Campbell writes that the “enterprise is of importance in the Evangelization and  

 

Civilization of Africa, and in affording an asylum in which the oppressed descendants of  

 

that country may find the means of developing their mental and moral faculties  

 

unimpeded by unjust restrictions, it is regarded as of still greater influence in facilitating  

 

the production of those staples, particularly cotton, which are now supplied to the world  

 

chiefly by Slave Labour” (Blackett 13).  By the end of May Campbell had raised £200 for  

 

the Exploration Party (Blackett 14). As an indication of his success in England, Campbell  

 

was given free passage from Liverpool to Lagos.   

 

 By the Fall of 1859, news of the black-formed and led Exploring Party's project  

 

had already been known to concerned individuals and appeared in the British press. Men  

 

of influence in England had known about the black-led project a year earlier. Richard  

 

Blackett cites a letter which has attached to it the names of Delany and two others about  

 

the agenda of the Exploring Party. Considering Delany‟s aversion to white patronage at  

 

that time, it is not exactly clear why he would attach his name to this communication.  

 

This letter, originally sent to Dr. Joseph Hobbins, an English History professor at  

 

Wisconsin State University, was eventually transmitted to a member of the Royal  

 

Geographical Society of London. According to Hobbins, this group of black Americans  

 

intended to “own, equip and to arm its own ships, [and] to man them exclusively with  

 

colored sailors”(4). According to Brackett, “The Geographical Society‟s reply, written by  

 

Dr. Thomas Hodgkins, very diplomatically opposed the establishment of a colony in any  

 

of the areas suggested, but commended the proposal as showing the power of blacks for  

 

independent action” (4). The aims of this mission led by blacks received a polite response  



 

 

107 

 

 

in the Times, especially since the plan was to contribute to facilitating trade between  

 

England and Africa, advance “civilization” on the continent, and undermine the  

 

continuation of the slave trade. In a 22 September article entitled “African Civilization  

 

Society – A Meeting,” The Times reported on a meeting in which black Americans were  

 

praised for their initiative to strike a blow against the slave-trade by encouraging Africans  

 

to grow and supply their own cotton. Thomas Clegg, a wealthy Manchester cotton  

 

manufacturer, who had received a copy of Delany‟s letter to Dr. Hobbins a year earlier, is  

 

mentioned in the article. According to this 1859 article, 

 

A meeting was held yesterday at the Mayor's parlour, Townhall, 

Manchester, of ladies and gentlemen, to hear from the Rev. Mr. Bourne an 

expedition of the origin and object of a society which has sprung up in the 

United States, and it is promoted by the abolitionists and coloured people, 

for civilising Africa by planting colonies in the central and other portions 

of the continent. Mr. Bourne pointed out the immense strength given to 

slavery in America by the growing of cotton for Europe (and this country 

particularly), and dwelt upon the advantages of promoting the growth of 

cotton in Africa, where the plant is indigenous, thereby promoting 

civilisation among the people, while the slave-trade will have to compete 

with free labour. Mr. Bourne gave a number of interesting details 

connected with the society, and its hopes and prospects, and Mr. J. Clegg 

and other gentlemen afterward addressed the meeting, and some 

resolutions approving the movement and pledging support for it were 

adopted. (7) 

 

A few months later, Henry Venn (1796-1873), honorary secretary of the Church  

 

Missionary Society from 1841 to 1873, also acknowledged the wisdom of indigenous- 

 

grown cotton to undermine the slave-trade. Venn, the single most influential force in  

 

making Samuel Crowther the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church, and who  

 

would later play an important role in the life of Liberian scholar Edward Blyden, wrote in  

 

the Times that among the “various social advantages” of free-grown cotton in Africa is  

 

that it will immediately contribute to “stopping the foreign slave trade.” (5).  



 

 

108 

 

 

A few observers, however, suspected that the Delany and Campbell‟s project had  

 

the potential to present problems of influence in the region. As Blackett suggests earlier,  

 

in 1858 Dr. Hodgkins of the Royal Geographical Society was against establishing a  

 

colony in the region. Only after Delany and Campbell had begun to make their rounds  

 

through the region is there any indication of the racially exclusive nature of their project.  

 

In his letter to Henry Venn, dated 24 Feb. 1860, the German missionary Reverent  

 

Gottlieb Frederick Buhler complained that "[t]he Americans Mr. Campbell and Dr.  

 

Delany go ahead without us. They are indeed not the white man's friend though they will  

 

take his money.... They have greatly modified their plans but they don't ask us to assist  

 

them, they manage for themselves" (Ajayi n.191). In response to Delany and Campbell‟s  

 

“Geographical Observations on West Africa” (1860) delivered in London at the invitation  

 

of the Royal Geographical Society in 1860, a Mr. Hanson (described as “a gentleman of  

 

colour”) expresses subtle skepticism over the wisdom of an independent black colony or  

 

settlement. Hanson was doubtful that Delany and Campbell would be able to transport  

 

enough educated and talented blacks from the United States to the continent. Rather than  

 

establish settlements and “separate communities,” he proposed that black Americans  

 

“incorporate themselves into the indigenous race, and seek to elevate them by their  

 

superior information and knowledge of the arts” (Delany and Campbell 221-22).   

 

Although Delany and Campbell‟s humanitarian concerns over the future regeneration of  

 

Africa is addressed in Hanson‟s proposal, following such a suggestion undermines their  

 

desire for an new independent black nation.  At the heart of the project lead by Delany,  

 

and which Campbell emphatically articulates in A Pilgrimage, is that Africa is to be left  

 

to Africans and the peoples of African descent. Delany looked upon the elevation of  



 

 

109 

 

 

Africa with a sense of protective entitlement, and scorned those who treated Africa  

 

merely as a site for profit and the African natives and his descendants as  

 

children. He writes that 

 

Africa is our fatherland and we its legitimate descendants, and we will 

never agree nor consent to see this - the first voluntary step that has ever 

been taken for her regeneration by her own descendants - blasted by a 

disinterested and renegade set, whose only object might be in the one case 

to get rid of a portion of the colored population, and in the other, make 

money, though it be done upon the destruction of every hope entertained 

and measure introduced for the accomplishment of this great and 

prospectively glorious undertaking. We cannot and will not permit or 

agree that the result of years of labor and anxiety shall be blasted at one 

reckless blow, by those who have never spent a day in the cause of our 

race, or know nothing about our wants and requirements.  (111) 

 

According to Delany, in comments that seems to have been pointedly directed to his  

young travelling companion, "the black race should take its affairs in its own hands,  

instead of placing them in the hands of others" (Delany 56). Therefore, self-reliance was  

the foundation of Delany's nationalistic ideology. His adherence to the substance and  

implications of this ideology is what set him apart from Campbell. The world, for  

Delany, had to see that the African was able to form his own destiny without begging for  

help from whites. To gain the respect of other nations, Delany called for the regeneration  

of Africa by Africans and the people of African descent alone: "Africa for the African  

race, and black men to rule them. By black I mean, men of African descent who claim an  

identity with the race" (121). In his "Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring  

Party," Delany writes 

that we desired to be dealt with as men, and not children. That we did not 

desire gratuities as such in the apportioning of their benevolence - nothing 

eleemosynary but means loaned to our people upon their personal 

obligations, to be paid in produce or otherwise. That we did not approve 

of restrictions as to where such persons went (so that it was to some 



 

 

110 

 

country where the population was mainly colored, as that was our policy) 

letting each choose and decide for himself, that which was best for him.  

(124)   

Thus, the emigration movement (as conceived by Delany) wanted no part of active white  

participation or intervention. As Bell succinctly puts it, they wanted to be "unhampered 

by meddling whites" (1). This desire to be free of white American and European  

intervention also addressed the function and influence of missionaries. Although  

Campbell does not mention British missionaries in a negative light, his travelling  

companion is explicit about the cultural, commercial and political limitations caused by  

those who carried the gospel to the Africans. Delany argued that the only good that  

missionaries have achieved concerning the African was the introduction of the Gospel.  

However, these very missionaries, in Delany's view, perceived Africans as limited, thus  

incapable of further progress. This attitude toward the African could have limited and  

limiting effects, especially since the African may suspect that the tools of progress and  

growth, the very tools that many chiefs had asked for, were being intentionally withheld  

by someone who does not physically resemble them. The African native, argues Delany,  

“sees and knows” that the European “is of an entirely different race to himself.” It is also  

recognized by the native that this representative of a different race and foreign land is in  

the position of dispersing knowledge of a much needed secular nature, especially in  

matters “law, government, commerce, military.” But these things of a “temporal and  

secular matter,” which English missionaries tell them are the “things he is not sent to  

teach” (107) are exactly the forms of useful knowledge that Delany, Campbell, and other  

black emigrationists claimed that they were ready to share. Because of the European‟s  

belief in the limitations of black capability, it is, for Delany, imperative that Africans and  

blacks work to uplift themselves. 

What is required to propel the African toward self-reliance and progress, even  



 

 

111 

 

while maintaining the Gospel, was a “new element.” For Delany and Campbell, the  

success of a progressive African civilization must be accomplished by contact with a  

people the native can identify as among their own. This is what Delany calls a "new  

element." This element, which Delany emphasizes, inversely suggests that white  

participation has detrimental and limited influence on African material and technological  

advancement. Delany is suggesting that the nature and practice of British involvement  

can only maintain present conditions of dependence, which do not favor African success.  

To be successful, writes Delany, the elevation of the African “must be carried out by  

proper agencies, and these agencies must have a new element introduced into their midst,  

possessing all the attainments, socially and politically, morally and religiously, adequate  

to so important an end” (110). Delany makes racial homogeneity central, for he believes  

that “natural characteristics, claims, sentiments, and sympathies” shared by members of  

the race (110). Furthermore, the most educated descendants of Africa now living in  

America are prepared to return, facilitate “the establishment of social and historical  

settlements among” the natives, “in order at once to introduce, in an effective manner, all  

the well regulated pursuits of civilized life” (110).Thus, the racialized engine and  

political trajectory of the civilizing mission posed by Delany and Campbell flew in the  

face of England's imperialist imperatives as well as England‟s racial and nationalistic  

paradigm of self as the lone carriers of the light of civilization and progress. Within the  

discourse of Delany and Campbell is the belief that England can do more harm than  

good, which is certainly a challenge to how the British felt about themselves as the proper  

facilitators of progress and their paternalistic interactions with the racial Other. In other  

words, the subtext of Delany's "proper agency" and "new element" is that white  

participation in the regeneration of Africa is suspect and possibly mercenary. The  

inclusion of "proper agency" is, then, a back-handed attack on England's putative  



 

 

112 

 

humanitarian idea of self in relation to the African, and the "new element" only  

supplements the belief that the agents of African transformation has been in the hands of  

a people historically ill-suited for such a project. Although the representation of this point  

is the main aim of A Pilgrimage, Campbell knows that he needs to paint of portrait which  

presents the African as capable and conscious agents of their own destiny.  

3 

A PILGRIMAGE TO MY MOTHERLAND AS ECOLOGICALLY DISCURSIVE 

INTERVENTION 

 In A Pilgrimage to My Motherland, Campbell endeavors to cleanse the discursive  

 

field of African representation of what Abdul JanMohamed calls the "manichean  

 

allegory" and what Peter Logan has identified as the "Victorian fetish." Both habitual  

 

processes of Western thinking toward the African, whether subconsciously or  

 

unconsciously generated, have contributed substantially to the discursive framing of the  

 

policies and attitudes toward the Other. According to JanMohamed, the economy of the  

 

manichean allegory "is based on a transformation of racial difference into moral and even  

 

metaphysical difference (skin color, physical features, and such), [and] its allegorical  

 

extensions come to dominate every facet of the imperialist mentality" (61). The  

 

discursive manifestations of this "mentality" tend to "demonstrate that the barbarism of  

 

the native is irrevocable, or at least very deeply engrained, so that the European's attempt  

 

to civilize him can continue indefinitely, the exploitation of his resources can proceed  

 

without hindrance, and the European can persist in enjoying a position of moral  

 

superiority" (62). Logan sees this allegorical tendency as an unconscious process that  

 

comes into play when the British enters contact with the West African Other. According  

 

to Logan, "[t]he Victorian fetish projects feeling, desire, and belief onto the world, but  

 



 

 

113 

 

does so unawares." These "projections are reflected back in alien form, as though  

 

originating in the external world" (3). But since what gets projected back are  

 

manifestations of a defensive and self-serving imagination, Logan is able to write that  

 

these artificially constructed projections "speak more about the assumptions of  

 

westerners than the practices of Africans" (7). In other words, these assumptions  

 

contribute to painting a portrait of African life based on feelings and desires about the  

 

observer's place in the world in relation to the African Other. It is this allegorical and  

 

fetishistic process that Fanon refers to when he writes "My body was given back to me  

 

and sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that winter day. The Negro is  

 

an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly" (113). For Campbell,  

 

these British feelings and desires (even held by those who purported to be friends of the  

 

African) are responsible for the cultural disruptions and representational distortions of  

 

native life and character. In response to British discursive practices he presents to his  

 

contemporaries a narrative that (though aggressive in intent) seems to be without  

 

aggressive commentary. Although Campbell is not writing a pastoral, A Pilgrimage has  

 

the propensity of the pastoral “to elicit a variety of political and aesthetic adaptations”  

 

(James and Tew 13). The descriptive nature of A Pilgrimage is in itself a form of  

 

cleansing as well as critique of Victorian racial discourse.  

 

 This act of cleansing by the seemingly innocent act of description is a cultural  

 

critique I call the discursive ecology of African space. In this critical space, the usual  

 

tropes and strategies of nineteenth century racial discourse are alluded to as dangerous  

 

specters in the margins. Being in the margins, the historical significance is frequently  

 

alluded to in an effort to inform the reader about the importance of the author‟s project.  

 



 

 

114 

 

In other words, in this discursive ecology the ramifications of cross-cultural contact and  

 

trans-Atlantic history are present both as warning and remembrance. Campbell‟s  

 

narrative suggests that European representations and physical presence are and have  

 

always been sources of disruption and distortion historically and discursively. Embedded  

 

in the representations of many of Campbell's encounters are allusions to the disastrous  

 

consequences of Pratt's "contact zone." These are the consequences that Delany and  

 

Campbell endeavor to reverse and ameliorate through the exclusion of white  

 

participation. Through his seemingly benign narrative strategy, which at times  

 

approaches the faux-innocence of pastoral, Campbell is also able to parade his body as a  

 

result of cultural disruption and erasure (his African heritage and white skin) and present  

 

his eyes as the lens through which the reader gets a portrait of West African life.  

 

Although Campbell knows that he probably will not put an end to the racialized thinking  

 

of his white contemporaries, his narrative does make an attempt to suggest that racial  

 

fantasies are constructions of the mind. 

 

 In his "Preface," Campbell briefly gives a nod to the general tradition of  

 

anthropological and ethnographic writing which had formed contemporaneous thoughts  

 

and attitudes toward the African. This nod initiates his discursive cleansing process. In  

 

response to euro-centric chronicles of the continent, Campbell pits the veracity of his eye- 

 

witness narrative against what he sees as the a priori reasoning drawn from this body of  

 

knowledge. In doing this he is suggesting to his reader that what makes A Pilgrimage  

 

different from present day accounts is that his "narrative is, as far as possible, confined to  

 

personal observations" (151). Although other writers have made similar claims of  

 

objectivity, the function of Campbell's claim is to shed light on and to emphasize the  

 



 

 

115 

 

jaundiced psychology at work in other observers of Africa. His parenthetical phrase, "as  

 

far as possible," suggests an awareness of the influences of unconscious and  

 

subconscious energies in the construction of racial identities. It implies that there is a  

 

danger of undetected fantasy (especially in imaginations molded by Western education)  

 

coming into play. Furthermore, "confined to personal observation" may be an emphasis  

 

on his own conscious struggle to do what other observers of Africa have not done, and  

 

that is to prevent the western fetishistic imagination from materializing what he calls  

  

"details otherwise interesting" (151). In making these preliminary claims, Campbell  

 

seems to be engaged in the same type of language of Realist fiction posited by George  

 

Levine as “a self-conscious effort, usually in the name of some moral effort of truth- 

 

telling and extending the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be  

 

describing not some language but reality itself” (8). Like the Realism that Levine finds  

 

manifested in the Victorian novel, Campbell is essentially defining his narrative against  

 

the excesses he finds in white American and European narratives about Africa.  

  

Because he believes that many mid-nineteenth century Western observers have  

 

given in to this impulse, Campbell is able to state that "Much error, particularly in  

 

reference to Africa, has been propagated in consequence of writers generally not  

 

confining the subject of their books to their own observations" (151). "Propagate," for  

 

Campbell, has multiple functions. On the one hand, propagate refers to communication,  

 

the transmission of ideas from person to person and from one generation to another. To  

 

“propagate,” then, in this sense is the reproduction of euro-centric assumptions and  

 

fantasy. On the other hand, propagate has the connotations of infection and corruption.  

 

The polite "Much error," then, for Campbell (the man of science), may also suggests a  

 



 

 

116 

 

morbific process at work in the Victorian's representations and attitudes towards the  

 

African. This dual discursive function of “propagate,” for Campbell, seems to suggest the  

 

fetishizing tendency of the Victorian imagination (when it encounters the Other), to  

 

create, past down, reiterate and recreate fictitious black legends. These legends or racial  

 

figurations are produced, according to the nineteenth-century Haitian anthropologist  

 

Antenor Firmin, by "certain extrinsic causes which are alien to science but which have  

 

such a stranglehold on the minds of the most intelligent men that they are intellectually  

 

paralyzed" (328). By marginalizing Anglo-Victorian racial discourse, Campbell's  

 

narrative suggests that Firmin's "extrinsic causes" are products of the mind and material  

 

motives of white western observers. The discursive removal, marginalization, and erasure  

 

of extrinsic causes, or the feelings and desires Logan argues as central to the Victorian  

 

fetish, are essential to Campbell‟ progressive narrative, for it reveals the character of a  

 

motivated African subject. 

 

 The first contemporaneous misconception, representational error, or, as Philip  

 

Curtin puts it a century later, persistent "black legend," Campbell subtly engages is the  

 

popular notion of the West African climate as the natural enemy of white European well- 

 

being. Because of this belief, Africa was given the name White Man's Grave. Although it  

 

was true that many Europeans suffered in tropical climates, in many cases fatally, there  

 

was no concrete evidence that the high white mortality rates were solely the results of  

 

race. However, it was commonly believed that European mortality in Africa was racially  

 

based. According to Curtin, this gothic image of Africa as antagonistic to the integrity of  

 

the white body began to take form between 1780 and 1830. By the mid-Victorian era,  

 

"the image of the White Man's Grave was more and more firmly impressed" (104). Curtin  

 



 

 

117 

 

writes that "[b]y the middle of the nineteenth century, the deadliness of the African  

 

climate to white men, while Africans were apparently healthy there, had become  

 

enshrined at the very heart of pseudo-scientific racism" (104). Charles Dickens, as shown  

 

in chapter one, not only believed that "Between the civilized European and barbarous  

 

African there is a great gulf set," but that "The air that brings life to the latter brings death  

 

to the former" (133). In his 1848 review of Captains Trotter and Allen's Narrative of the  

 

Expedition Sent by Her Majesty's Government to the River Niger in 1841, Dickens  

 

appropriates the legend of the White Man's Grave in the following terms: "At last, on the  

 

12th of May 1841, at half-past six in the morning, the line of battleships anchored in  

 

Plymouth Sound gave three cheers to the Expedition as it streamed away, unknowing, for  

 

'the Gate of the Cemetery.' Such was the sailor's name, thereafter, for the entrance to the  

 

fatal river whither they were bound" (119). It was important for Dickens to illustrate  

 

African/English interaction in such terms because he wanted the government to redirect  

 

sympathies and resources to the Condition of England Question at home. Later Victorian  

 

writers, like Richard Burton who referred to the region as a "coffin-squadron" (vii),  

 

would continue to contribute to the legend, even after the benefits of quinine as a  

 

treatment against tropical ailments began to surface after 1841. "Quinine," writes Curtin  

 

in Death By Migration (1989),"contributed to the decline of fever deaths everywhere. It  

 

was the first 'wonder drug' that could attack a specific disease, but its acceptance was  

 

neither universal nor simple" (62). But even after the widespread recognition of the  

 

benefits of quinine were seemingly confirmed, after the successful Pleiad expedition to  

 

the Niger in 1854, which resulted in no white fatalities, the image of Africa as the White  

 

Man's Grave lingered well into the twentieth century. 

 



 

 

118 

 

 Campbell uses, rather than dismiss as white fantasy, the health concerns which  

 

resulted from cross-cultural interaction. As a native of Jamaica as well as a traveler  

 

through Central America, he was cognizant of the impact of the tropics on the physical  

 

constitution of European foreigners. News of whites succumbing to yellow fever even at  

 

that time was a commonplace. Nor would news that a native population had contracted  

 

smallpox been a surprise for the former director of science. However, Campbell seems to  

 

have performed some sort of referential convergence early in chapter one, "Liverpool to  

 

Lagos," which suggests what he perceived as the opportune discursive moment to render  

 

the disruptive consequences of British/African interaction. That is, his presentation may  

 

seem to be an innocent and benign piece of reportage, but in fact the rhetorical  

 

convergence and imagery are critiques of the nature and consequence of this relationship.  

 

Campbell writes that on the twelfth of July, after they had anchored at Freetown, Sierra  

 

Leone, they discovered that  

 

Affairs were in bad condition, the yellow fever, or as some say, a 

malignant form of bilious fever had appeared there, and swept off more 

than a third of the white inhabitants, while small pox was busy among the 

natives. During the two days that the ship continued in the port I had 

frequent opportunities of conversing with several of the natives, men of 

respectability, and in some instances of education; they complained 

bitterly of some of the Europeans, on account of their laxity of morals and 

unblushing disregard of the demands of decency. It is fortunate that the 

number of this class of persons is small compared with the number of 

high-minded, worthy men who are deservedly much esteemed.  (158) 

 

 Rhetorically, Campbell positions both diseases as weapons in a contest resulting  

 

from cross-cultural contact. The yellow fever "appeared" and "swept off" a substantial  

 

number of the "white inhabitants," "while" small pox is "busy" among the natives.  

 

Although Campbell avoids explicating causality, the passage enacts a spontaneous  

 

outbreak which symbolizes the political and meta-political nature of European/African  



 

 

119 

 

 

interaction. What immediately follows is not an explanation of the possible  

 

environmental or biological factors constitutive of both diseases, but a description of  

 

behavioral and attitudinal traits of the foreigners which have disturbed the usual workings  

 

of the native community. That is, Campbell seems to be symbolically linking competing  

 

illnesses as representations of his version of culture clash within the contact zone.  

 

Therefore, at the very beginning of his narrative Campbell is suggesting that a foreign  

 

presence threatens the physical and moral health of the African community. 

 

 In the type of referential convergence Campbell performs, the model of the  

 

putative White Man's Grave has been revised and reinvented. The European brings  

 

disorder with him. Here, the European is not the only victim of the tropical contact zone,  

 

for his very presence (and what he morally and intellectually brings with him) causes the  

 

Other's destruction. In Campbell's post-quinine model, European attitudes toward the  

 

Other can also contribute to the transformation of the region into a cross-cultural  

 

cemetery. The carriers of these disruptive attitudes are among the “[o]ffspring of the  

 

Evangelical Revival and the Industrial revolution” who, according to George Stocking  

 

(1987), “travelled in a period when the differential in sheer physical power between  

 

civilization and savagery was growing rapidly wider” (105). The recognition of the  

 

technological distance (translated into the language of morality and natural intellect)  

 

between the European self and the Other, contributed to the face-to-face interaction  

 

between blacks and whites. “Sustained by that power and those values,” writes Stocking,  

 

“British travelers overseas carried with them a powerful sense of personal self-confidence  

 

and cultural rectitude” (105). In Campbell‟s version of Stocking‟s explanation of the  

 

Victorian hermeneutic space, European hubris (or “self-confidence and cultural  



 

 

120 

 

 

rectitude”) is not only the undertaker of white bodies but it is also the harbinger of  

 

African misery, disruption and discontent. It must also be noted that though the effects of  

 

unpleasant behavioral traits are not represented as epidemic among the majority of  

 

whites, those "high-minded, worthy men," this does not absolve them as carriers of  

 

cultural disturbance.  

 

 It was perhaps the Victorian's fetishistic perception of the African as naturally  

 

servile that gave birth to the paternalistic posture of many travelers. British writers, who  

 

imagined themselves at the peak of civilization, often depicted the African as occupying a  

 

child-like position in nature. In perceiving themselves as occupying the ideal space  

 

beyond the state of nature, Victorians were able to control and frame the Other both  

 

discursively and physically. Firmin and other nineteenth-century writers of African  

 

descent were aware that this mode of cultural and ethnic consciousness "plays a role even  

 

in [the European‟s] assessment of issues, effecting their very reasoning. Even when  

 

nothing is said about it, ethnic consciousness remains a strong, positive, and active force  

 

both in the unfolding of events and in the elaboration of theories" (380).  Carlyle's West  

 

Indian black as natural servant in need of a Prospero-like Englishman, Dickens's North  

 

American slave who needs and desired to be cared for and petted, and Mill's "backward  

 

states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage," were all  

 

derivative of this type of thinking which placed the Englishman, because of technological  

 

advances, as members of the adult of humanity and the Other as child-like and closer to  

 

untamed nature. This way of thinking about the self in the world also functioned as  

 

convenient strategies that dismissed, diminished, or limited the intellectual potential and  

 

the agency of the Other in relation to the group in power. What distinguishes Mill from  



 

 

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many other observers of the Other is that for him, as he suggests in his response to  

 

Carlyle, the African had proven himself in the post-emancipation West Indies and in  

 

Africa as having the capacity for progress. Whereas Mill envisioned a future in which the  

 

African in the West Indies can hold his own, Carlyle imagined a future in which the  

 

people of African descent will always serve whites.  

 

 The trope of the child-like African was very much a part of the discourse of the  

 

period we are discussing. The Africa as child-like and servile, as with most racial tropes,  

 

also functioned to fix interracial relations in a desirable state of nature. In The Lake  

 

Regions of Central Africa, Richard Burton argues that the African's barren cognitive  

 

processes are infantile and, like a spoiled and untamed child, adverse to the call of order  

 

and civilization. According to Burton, in the African "there is no rich nature... for  

 

education to cultivate. He seems to belong to those childish races which, never rising to  

 

man's estate falls like worn-out links from the great chain of animated nature" (489).   

 

Burton further suggests that the African's horror of European architectural structures is  

 

symbolic of an aversion to permanency and the exigencies of civilization. In other words,  

 

the African is, because of his "vagabond instinct," innately averse to permanent  

 

structures. "The African," writes Burton, "has a superstitious horror of stone walls; he is  

 

still semi-nomade, for the effects of the Wandertrieb, or man's vagabond instinct,  

 

uncurbed by the habits of civilization" (79). In the West Indian situation described by  

 

Carlyle and his contemporaries in the late 1840s, this nomadic tendency of the African  

 

was proof of the reported march to barbarism. In the context of the labor problem in the  

 

British West Indies, black behavior suggested the he was ill-fit for the demands of  

 

economic man and that he, according to Carlyle, must be must be made into a worker.  



 

 

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For Burton and observers of Africa in the 1860s, this image suggested that on the  

 

continent existed fertile land awaiting development by the industrious European. 

 

Winwood Reade, in an attempt to lock the African into the place of eternal tutorage,  

 

pursues this trope in Savage Africa.  According to Reade, the African has the attention  

 

capacity similar to that of a child, "riveted by the least thing which is held before it"(28).  

 

Among Reade's concluding statements regarding the African's potential to advance above  

 

the level of savage is that "[t]hey do not merit to be called our brothers, but let us call  

 

them our children. Let us educate them carefully, and in time we may elevate them, not to  

 

our level - that, I fear, can never be – but to the level of those from whom they have  

 

fallen" (430). Tropes of the child-like and servile African are important for purposes of  

 

domination. An infantile people who are incapable of taking care of themselves must be  

 

protected. That is the duty of the mature members of the human community to the rest of  

 

the world.  

 

In response to representations similar to the ones above, Campbell presents a  

 

different type of African community. His, in light of what had been written, is a re- 

 

invention. In Campbell's narrative, the West African native not only welcomes  

 

civilization, but has proven his capacity for progress. He employs recent history to show  

 

the native's capacity and industriousness and also brings to light the type of African  

 

community and nation both Burton and Reade try to keep in the dark. The recent  

 

formation of Abbeokuta, the independent Africa nation that Burton, in Abeokuta and the  

 

Camaroons Mountains, cited as adverse to the exigencies of civilization, is used by  

 

Campbell as an illustration not only of the African's desire for limited contact with  

 

Europeans, but also of their capacity to work, build, and govern themselves. I need to  



 

 

123 

 

 

also note that Campbell‟s description of the history of Abbeokuta seems to be an  

 

illustration of the Exploring Party‟s agenda. 

 

Before 1839 little if anything was known of Abbeokuta. The Yorubas and 

Egbas recaptured and taken to Sierra Leone were sold away before any 

such place existed, and no travelers had before been in the neighborhood, 

but at this time, vague rumors began to be spread along the coast that the 

different tribes of the Egbas had united themselves, and had built a new 

city, powerful from its natural defenses not less than from the brave hearts 

and strong arms of its people. These were joyful tidings indeed to the 

Egbas at Sierra Leone, in the bosom of most of whom was immediately 

kindled the strongest desires, again to be united with their long lost 

relatives and friends. Conquering a thousand difficulties, they eventually 

carried out the object of their desire” (200-201). 

In “the short time between 1839 and 1842,” says Campbell, “no less than 500 of  

them left Sierra Leone for their country” (201).This exodus ("for their country") is a  

conscious movement away from white influence and control (the British colony of Sierra  

Leone) toward a homogenous and developing independent black nation they call their  

own. In other words, they were escaping a location constructed and influenced by white  

rule for a place and a people they could call their own. This exodus was not limited,  

according to Campbell, to recaptured slaves, a mere 500.  "Simultaneously with these  

occurrences," writes Campbell, 

the peoples of the Brazils and of Cuba, Egbas, Yorubas, and other Aku 

tribes who had obtained freedom, began to return. From all sources there 

are scatterd throughout the country, but chiefly at Lagos and Abbeokuta, 

over five thousand of these people, semi-civilized generally, but in some 

instances highly cultivated, being engaged as teachers, catechists, 

clergymen, and merchants. Industrious, enterprising, and carrying with 

them, one here and another there, a knowledge of some of the useful arts, 

they have doubtless been the means of inaugurating a mighty work, which, 

now that it has accomplished its utmost, must be continued in a higher 

form by the more civilized of the same race, who for a thousand reasons, 

are best adapted to its successful prosecution.  (201) 

 

This population, whom Burton described as "artificialized" (Abeokuta 16) because they  



 

 

124 

 

 

have the benefits of a Westernized education, is for Campbell the "means" who have  

 

successfully demonstrated inclination, potential and desire for progress and civilization.  

 

This group is also the native version of the Delany‟s “proper element” that Campbell  

 

wants to introduce into the African community. What Campbell described in this brief  

 

history is, in other words, the “semi-civilized” version of what he and Delany promises to  

 

transport from the U.S.  A similar homogenous exodus, which British writers interpreted  

 

as a march to barbarism, occurred in the British West Indies after emancipation. This was  

 

the phenomenon Carlyle and his contemporaries responded to in the 1840s and 1850s.  

 

For Burton, like the British writers who responded to the West Indian labor crisis after  

 

emancipation and the brief period called "apprenticeship," this movement was evidence  

 

of a deeply engrained resistance to civilization and the tools of progress. Campbell,  

 

however, suggests pragmatic agency at work rather than primal instincts. Many Africans,  

 

of course, for reasons of their own, stayed at Sierra Leone. But he shows that a large  

 

number of skilled Africans, as skilled as the former West Indian slave who sought to  

 

distance himself from Englishman, en bloc and en masses, left the protection of a British  

 

colony for an incipient independent nation, a "new city," built by the "strong arms of its  

 

people." 

 

 Moreover, Campbell takes the essentialist ingredient, which Burton and others  

 

privileged and emphasized, of civilization out of the equation. That is, he argues that  

 

reaching the "higher form" is  dependent on racial sympathies  -the "same race"- rather  

 

than imagined culturally engrained qualities. To become what Campbell sees as  

 

"civilized" is simply the competent acquisition of recognizably advanced intellectual and  

 

technological tools ("knowledge of the useful arts"), which the generality of the “semi- 



 

 

125 

 

 

civilized” has yet to attain. By “semi-civilized” he is referring to the present level of  

 

competence rather than fixed cognitive condition (an essentialist position that Campbell  

 

did not entertain). He reiterates the urgency of the exclusionary ideology of Delany's  

 

"new element" when he writes that advancement and progress "must be continued in a  

 

higher form by the most civilized of the same race, who for a thousand reasons, are best  

 

adapted to its successful prosecution." These most adapted members of the same race are  

 

diasporic persons of African descent who have ironically been "artificialized" and  

 

therefore have incurred from western education an understanding of the mechanics of  

 

western culture. 

 

 In what follows, Campbell performs an unanticipated turn from an assumed  

 

Anglo-European audience to a previously unacknowledged implied native reader. This  

 

very brief address to an implied African reader (the "semi-civilized" above, the chiefs  

 

who had signed treaties with the Exploring Party's, and  the "men of respectability and  

 

[...] education" (158) whom he had encountered throughout his narrative) comes in the  

 

form of warning and plea which encourages the natives to continue to safeguard  

 

themselves against an acknowledged but unmentioned enemy of their progress. "The  

 

hand of God is in the work," writes Campbell, "and although many discouragements and  

 

impediments might intercept the path of you who would labor toward such an end, there  

 

is nothing to fear. Persevere, and the Power, which has already been a safeguard through  

 

so many dangers will aid your efforts in the end" (201). The significance of the  

 

"discouragements," "impediments," and "dangers" which Campbell mentions are directly  

 

referring to the relationships Africa has had with the European world, and of what  

 

Crummell identified as the cause of the "exaggerated barbarism" pouring from western  



 

 

126 

 

 

discourse. In his 1861 lecture, "The Progress and Prospects of the Republic of Liberia,"  

 

Crummell states that  

 

For three hundred years the European has been traversing the coast of 

Africa, engaged in trade and barter. But the history of his presence and 

influence there, is a history of rapine and murder, and wide-spread 

devastation to the families and the homes of its rude and simple 

inhabitants. The whole coast... have been ravished wherever his footsteps 

have fallen; and he has left little behind him but exaggerated barbarism, 

and a deeper depth of moral ruin.  (174) 

 

 In A Pilgrimage the most obvious manifestation of the cross-cultural disruption of  

 

the contact zone, and a sign of the "wide-spread devastation to the families and the  

 

homes" which Crummell mentions above, is inscribed on Campbell's body. By his own  

 

estimation, the author had "twenty-five percent negro blood" (222).Campbell's  

 

discursively strategic reference to his complexion has significance and emotional and  

 

cultural value for different audiences: it is, for his nonwhite reader, an indictment of the  

 

history the white world has had with peoples of African descent (he thus positions  

 

himself as a walking reminder of the abuse of power) ; and it is a sign, for the British  

 

reader, of the potential of whites to stray away from their purported benevolent mission.  

 

Unlike many of his mixed race contemporaries in Jamaica, he does not seem to  present  

 

his hybridity as a badge of honor. Campbell was well aware of the story that  

 

African/Caucasian amalgamation told. Moreover, the political and cultural story that  

 

Campbell's body tells is not lost on the Africans he encounters. Rather than overtly  

 

comment on the cross-cultural phenomenon of miscegenation, he allows the natives to  

 

speak, respond and reiterate the nature of African/ European relations.  

 

 For instance, He writes that while in Abbeokuta, "[t]he natives generally at first  

 

regarded me as a white man, until I informed them of my connection with the Negro.  



 

 

127 

 

 

This announcement always gained me a warmer reception" (171). He was, therefore,  

 

received with less suspicion than the general European. In regards to an interview with  

 

another African chief, he writes that  

  

On the occasion of my first visit to his Highness, as usual he was informed 

of my African origin. 'From what part of Africa,' he asked, 'did your 

grandmother come?' As this was a point on which I possessed no 

information, I could give him no satisfactory answer. He remained silent 

for a short time, and at last said: 'How can I but tell that you are of my 

own kindred, for many of my ancestors were taken and sold away.' From 

that day he called me relative, and of course as every other African had as 

good a claim to kindredship, I soon found myself generally greeted as 

such.  (177) 

 

Campbell records that another African chief "took hold of my hand and shook it heartily;  

 

and drawing me toward him, he threw his arms about my neck, and pressed me with  

 

warmth" (178). And his interview with King Shita is described as "very interesting ," for  

 

the latter "Quite unexpectedly [...] permitted us at this first interview to see his face, a  

 

privilege he never accorded publicly to any one who had before visited the place, at the  

 

same time informing us, that it was because he regarded us as his own people,  

 

descendants of native African" (220).  Campbell thus presents his own body as, what Joel  

 

Williamson says of a different context, "the walking, talking, breathing indictment of the  

 

world the white man made" (95). He, therefore, is the walking, talking, written record  

 

that symbolizes the disruptive and distorting ramifications of the contact zone. Therefore,  

 

Campbell has toured through West Africa a product and in the flesh spectacle of the  

 

"natal alienation" that Orlando Patterson writes about in Slavery and Social Death: he  

 

presents to the African observer a "genealogical isolate" who, because of the slave trade,  

 

is "culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors" (5). Campbell's confessed  

 

ignorance of the full details of his family line can be seen as the ultimate symbolic  



 

 

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warning of the native‟s fate.  

  

CONCLUSION 

 Although contemporary Victorian scholarship rarely analyzes the racial discourse  

 

of the nineteenth-century as a response to African agency, historical knowledge and  

 

cultural desire, a close reading of Campbell's A Pilgrimage reveals that the natives were  

 

not intellectually passive and unthinking observers. The behaviors and descriptions in his  

 

narrative suggest that Africans, by the time he and Delany had arrived, had been actively  

 

engaged in acquiring the tools and knowledge to reach what Western nations called  

 

“civilization.” This conscious and unforced interest of the African in the tools and  

 

manifestations of progress, which Campbell records throughout A Pilgrimage, is lacking  

 

in other ethnographic writings of the times as well as in our present analysis of Victorian  

 

racial discourse. Campbell is not just interested in proving that the African capable of  

 

progress, but he also wants his reader to reevaluate white participation in African affairs,  

 

for it has historically proven to be detrimental to the needs and desires of the native. This  

 

relational component which I have analyzed in Campbell suggests that the counter- 

 

narrative of the Other is not only in the act of commenting on the European psyche, but  

 

that it also is a statement of native desire in relation to the dominant group. In A  

 

Pilgrimage, Robert Campbell seems to say that the only result to be expected from the  

 

European world is cultural disruption rather that a smooth transformation to  

 

“civilization.” In employing this descriptive strategy, he is able to register the counter- 

 

hegemonic desires of a native and diasporic people as well as their attitudes towards their  

 

putative European benefactors. Like all racial discourse, Campbell is giving voice to a  

 

desire relationship. The European, in such a strategy, now becomes the Other, for what he  

 



 

 

129 

 

brings to the political and discursive table does not favor health. Campbell is writing  

 

about relationships. But the major difference between Campbell‟s discursive practice and  

 

those he criticizes is that he bases his representation of the European Other on historical  

 

performance, while the European‟s racial subject is a fetish and a fantasy.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

130 

 

CHAPTER FOUR 

 

EDWARD W. BLYDEN’S PROVIDENCE AND THE EMPIRE OF THE 

MELANIN IMAGINATION 

 

INTRODUCTION 

Although contemporary scholars tend in general to focus on his contribution to  

twentieth-century theories of black nationalism, Edward Wilmot Blyden‟s (1832-1912)  

fame and original effectiveness came in the form of discursive assaults on American and  

Victorian racial discourses. His responses to the nineteenth-century discussion of race  

were not limited to a small group of readers; rather, Blyden‟s ideas were known to  

Victorian thinkers, debated and challenged by his contemporaries, and, to some extent,  

accepted and formed discussions about British/African relations and peoples of African  

descent. From the late 1850s until his death in 1912, Blyden, whom many contemporary  

scholars have credited as the father of Pan-African nationalism and even as among the  

scholars who planted the seeds which contributed to the growth of the early twentieth- 

century Negritude movement, made it his mission to vindicate the image of the African  

race to the English speaking world. “His voluminous writings,” says Teshale Tibebu in a  

recent resent critical biography on Edward Blyden, “laid the ground-work for some of the  

most important ideas of black intellectuals in the twentieth century” (16). Tibebu goes so  

far as to claim that “Whatever variations of nationalist articulations prominent black  

intellectuals may have held since Blyden‟s death, the overarching ideological and  

philosophical underpinnings were Blydenian” (16).   During his lifetime, his untiring and  

ambitious discursive agenda was reported to sympathetic and antagonistic audiences in  

journals and newspapers throughout the English speaking world. In short, Edward Blyden  

was not unknown to the intellectual communities of the United States, Great Britain, and  

West Africa.  



 

 

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Fundamental to the vindication of the African race was the establishment of what  

he perceived as the imperative social, psychological, and ideological requirements  

necessary for African progress. His major themes for the regeneration of African  

civilizations are grounded on his interpretation of Divine Providence and his  

appropriation of Western European theories of progress, culture, and race. In other words,  

a close reading of Blyden reveals that he not only was aware of contemporaneous  

theories of culture and development, but that he appropriated these thoughts into his own  

theory for his own purposes. Moreover, this discursive performance is prominent in the  

five essays he published in London in Fraser’s Magazine between 1875 and 1878.  

Through the essays in Fraser’s Magazine, Blyden incorporated not only his univocal  

critique of Victorian and European racial discourse but he also indicated the modes of  

interaction necessary for his people to strive, progress, and culturally survive.  

The essays which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine brought to Blyden much desired  

literary recognition in England. The controversial trajectory of his subject matter and the  

sophistication in which he presented his arguments circulated his name and concerns  

throughout the British intellectual community. These essays, some in modified form, and  

others which had appeared in various English language journals, were later reprinted in  

London in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1886/87), recognized today as  

Blyden‟s most significant body of work. Although Blyden was prolific, and his writings  

covered many topics, his major themes were how actions generated from the privileged  

representation of whiteness and the derogatory representation of the black person‟s  

personality militated detrimental influences on African progress and contributed to a  

violation of what he perceived as God‟s historical project. It was therefore the semiotics  

of whiteness imposed on the African imagination and social structure, and the effect of  

this imposition on the workings of Providence, which concerned Blyden the most.   



 

 

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Blyden recognized that color and complexion were representations of a cultural  

and nation building language. That is, he was very aware that the color of one‟s skin was  

perceived as having intrinsic meaning and value, and that white-skinned nations self- 

consciously weighed their intellectual and moral status in terms of skin color. This  

conflation of moral and intellectual value with the epidermal fact of racial diversity, for  

Blyden, manifested itself in inter-racial relationships, mannerisms, and attitudes. Blyden  

was concerned that the valorization of whiteness had infiltrated West Africa, thus  

initiating undesirable and unnatural social and political transformations in the region.  

This semiotics of Whiteness, or melanin imagination, was the measuring rod employed to  

not only determine one‟s capacity for progress but also the desired direction of progress.  

The closer one was to whiteness, and by extension to European values and potential for  

perfectibility, the nearer one was to “civilization.” The hierarchal vocabulary of this  

language suggested one‟s place in nature and in the particular cross-cultural relationship.  

The conscious and unconscious force of whiteness and the melanin imagination it  

inspired caused Blyden to adopt (to coin a concept made by Lola Young) his own  

“melanin metanarrative” in which the racial ladder drawn from the traditional chain of  

being model is replaced by “groves” where the races of man (each to his own grove)  

moved in the same direction according to the pace assigned by God, and the color of  

one‟s skin is only an indication of ancestral origins and environmental conditions rather  

than essential inferiority or superiority. 

Rather than adopt a model of racial distribution based on the belief that man had  

degenerated from the exemplary European type, Blyden, through Scripture as his  

authority, argued that the global distribution of man was part of God‟s purposeful design.  

Blyden‟s melanin metanarrative is a theological and scientific explanation of race and  

human progress. The melanin metanarrative is not, however, merely a reading of current  



 

 

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racial theories and an assessment of their cultural and political utility, but it is also,  

according to Lola Young, “constructed in opposition to discourse but displaying similar  

discursive strategies. The two key attributes of racialized science may be identified as,  

first, a belief in a biological definition of „race‟ which posits common phenotypical  

characteristics, and crucially, second, the construction of a hierarchy which places the  

different „races‟ in a relationship of inferiority or superiority (in terms of intellectual,  

moral and physical indicators of achievement) “ (158). Blyden‟s melanin metanarrative is  

therefore the simultaneous appropriation of current racial theories as well as a rewriting  

of those theories into the form of a subtle oppositional narrative. By appropriating well- 

known  European thoughts about culture, race, and progress, Blyden elides the  

conventional socially constructed hierarchal racial ladder for a grove in which all races  

are moving in the same direction. This strategy is effective because he has positioned the  

various racial members of the human family at the same level of existence, with all of  

them employing their peculiar gifts toward the materialization of a common goal.  

Through this strategy of the groves, Blyden recruits the major intellectual currents of  

Western Europe (chiefly ideas derived from Herder, Comte, Taine, and Spencer) to  

authorize his interpretation of Providence.  In other words, he skillfully aligns his  

thinking with accepted systems of thought and respected producers of knowledge. This  

appropriation is crucial, especially for non-European nineteenth-century scholars, writes  

Philip Zachernuk, for “[t]he predicament of the colonial intelligentsia was their need to  

work within the realm of European ideas in order to defeat some of its intentions; they  

had to transform ideas set in a largely inimical framework into something more congenial  

to their own needs” (430). The aim of this study is to show that this melanin  

metanarrative, used by Blyden, was in fact the generative strategy behind his most  

famous essays, those which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. In the Fraser’s essays,  



 

 

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Blyden presented to the British middle-class reader his critique of Western racial  

attitudes, behaviors, and projects that he believed contributed to the abnormal  

development of Africa and the “pure blooded” African. He therefore, in the Fraser’s  

essays, was responsible for keeping under discussion elements of racial discourse and  

engagement that contributed to forming the trajectory of colonial practices. 

1 

BIOGRAPHY IN BRIEF OF A WEST INDIAN LIBERIAN 

Edward Wilmot Blyden was born in 1832 in the Dutch West Indies. During this  

period, most blacks in the Dutch West Indies were still slaves. However, both of his  

parents were free “pure blood” blacks. His mother, who had contributed to most of his  

education, was a teacher and his father a tailor. In 1845, Rev. John P. Knox, a white  

American, became pastor of the Dutch Reform Church in St. Thomas in Virgin Islands.  

According Hollis Lynch, “Knox was impressed with the studious and pious boy of pious  

parents and became his mentor” (4). This close association with Knox may have inspired  

the young Blyden to become a clergyman. To further the young man‟s education,  

Blyden‟s parents allowed him to go with the Knoxs to the United States and enroll into a  

Seminary college. Rutgers‟ Seminary School, Rev. Knox‟s Alma Mater, and other  

American theological institutions of higher learning rejected Blyden because of the color  

of his skin. Because of the passing of the Fugitive Slave Laws in 1850, Blyden realized  

that his movement was very limited and his freedom precarious. That is, the color of his  

skin marked him as potential bounty for slave-catchers. Through connections with the  

American Colonization Society, which led a controversial campaign to return free blacks,  

and escaped and former slaves to Africa, Blyden secured passage to the Republic of  

Liberia.  According to Robert July, in Liberia Blyden “received his formal education” in  

the “mission schools, and was therefore early and often exposed to the doctrine of white  



 

 

135 

 

superiority and the salvation of Africa through the adoption of European values and  

institutions” (74). This experience, the manifestations of white supremacy even from  

putative allies, was to have a formative impact on Blyden‟s future thinking. In 1858  

Blyden was ordained a Presbyterian pastor and appointed principle of Alexander High  

School in Liberia.   

This is the time in which he began to get public recognition as a man of letters  

and spokesman for African American and black West Indian emigration to Liberia. In  

1862 he published his first collection of essays, Liberia’s Offering: Being Addresses,  

Sermons, etc., which includes “Vindication of the African Race; Being a Brief  

Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority.”  “Vindication” was  

originally published in Liberia in 1857 and is clearly Blyden‟s first major discursive  

assault and analysis of nineteen-century racial discourse.  In 1866, Blyden stayed in  

England for two and a half weeks. During that time he sought out old acquaintances,  

Brougham and Gladstone, both of whom he had had correspondence with since the early  

1850s. His friendship with influential public figures made it possible for him to attend a  

session in the House of Commons. Details of this visit were recorded in his travel book,  

From West Africa to Palestine and his letters of the 1850s suggest a close friendship with  

Gladstone, who frequently sent books to the young scholar. As early as the mid-1850s his  

essays had begun to appear in various English language journals. Although Blyden had  

an obsessive distrusted of mulattoes, and was forced to flee Liberia on May 5, 1871,  

owning to derogatory statements against them that appeared in the United States, and  

temporarily settle in Sierra Leone, he had in 1856 married Sarah Yates, a mulatto woman  

and niece of the Vice-President of Liberia. His fame came with the publication of five  

controversial essays that originally appeared in Fraser’s Magazine:  “Mohammedanism  

and the Negro Race” (November 1875), “Christianity and the Negro Race” (May 1876),  



 

 

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“Christian Missions in West Africa” (October 1876), “Islam and Race Distinction”  

(November 1876), “Africa and the Africans” (August 1878). In these essays Blyden  

presents the controversial arguments that Muslim missionaries had been more effective  

than Christian missionaries in the moral, intellectual, and commercial elevation of  

Africans, and that much of what he perceived as European ineptitude is generated from  

their dependence on a tradition of inaccurate and unfair racial representation. 

From 1877 to 1879 he was appointed Liberia‟s first ambassador to the Court of  

St. James. This appointment made it possible for Blyden to maintain and establish  

friendships in influential British circles.  In July of 1878 Blyden was given an audience  

with Queen Victoria and shortly after that he was elected as an Honorary Member of the  

Athenaeum Club. In a letter to his close friend and confidant, William Coppinger  

(Secretary of the American Colonization Society), Blyden enthusiastically writes that  

“On the committee who elected me, are such men as Sir John Lubbock, Lord Carnarvon,  

Herbert Spencer, Viscount Cardwell, Dean Church, the Marquis of Salisbury” and that he  

considered this occasion “one of the chief triumphs of my literary life” (Selected Letters 

275). Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race was published in London in 1886 and, after  

the first edition of five hundred copies “quickly sold out” (Lynch 74), reprinted in 1887.  

The introduction to Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race was written by Sir Samuel  

Lewis, a distinguished Sierra Leonean lawyer and the first black man to ever be given a  

Knighthood.  

2 

BLYDENIAN APPROPRITIONS AND THE EXIGENCIES OF PROVIDENCE IN 

CONTEXT 

Blyden positioned his argument of African continental and racial regeneration  

within the nineteenth-century discourse of progress. A sign of progress was perceived as  



 

 

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one nation‟s ability, through commerce and the exchange of ideas, to advance and  

achieve what was regarded as “civilization.” Blyden‟s own idea of progress is strongly  

based on his Presbyterian convictions about the existence of the laws of Providence.  

Blyden, however, was also an extremely erudite scholar. Many of the ideas that Blyden  

encountered in his various studies contributed to the formation of his philosophy of  

progress, race, and Providence. His adherence to the belief in Divine design is  

responsible for much of what many twentieth-century scholars perceived as Blyden‟s  

political shortcomings, inconsistencies and eccentric opinions. Providence, for Blyden,  

was the Divine movement of man, man‟s performance of God‟s will, and the invisible  

guide and engine of African progress. Man and history work within the limits of God‟s  

plan, within established constraints.  The sufferings of a people, for Blyden, are all part of  

this Divine movement towards the betterment of humanity. This means, as Blyden so  

controversially makes clear in “The Call of Providence to the Descendants of Africa in  

America,” that the many evils and sufferings experienced by the African race had  

spiritual and educational benefits, and that the ramifications of the slave trade, the black  

diaspora, and world events in general were parts of God‟s meaningful design. These  

events, for Blyden, made possible the eventual return of the African to the “fatherland”  

which God had “reserve[d] for them in their absence” (26-27). This is the type of  

thinking Lynch describes as Blyden‟s “theocratic determinism.” For Lynch, Blyden‟s  

way of interpreting events stems “partly from his deeply religious nature and was partly a  

convenient rationale for the unhappy lot of his race. It possessed the supreme advantage  

of being able, theoretically at least, to salve the suffering and humiliation of the race in  

the past and in the present, while holding out to it the promise of a bright future” (79). In  

“The Origin and Purpose of African Colonization,” Blyden gives an example of his mode  

of theocratic determinism or the poetics of Providences when he writes that “There is not  



 

 

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a thinking being, whatever his religious belief, who does not recognize the fact that  

everything in the physical and moral world proceeds according to some plan or order”  

and that “it is the belief of all healthy minds that that law or influence is always tending  

towards the highest and best results”(Christianity 94). Through this statement, Blyden is  

in fact partly referring to religious and secular intellectuals who seem to have constructed  

their own terminology for what he calls Providence. He is therefore situating his way of  

thinking about the laws which govern the limits and trajectory of man within established  

European philosophical, historical, and scientific systems of thought.  

However deterministic, versions of what Blyden called Providence appear in the  

works of intellectuals as highly regarded as Johann Herder, whose Outlines for a  

Philosophy for a History of Man was translated into English in 1803, Auguste Comte‟s  

positive philosophy, Hippolyte Taine‟s theory of culture, and the social evolutionism of  

Herbert Spencer. Therefore, many of the “laws” and theories of race and culture during  

the nineteenth-century, advanced by the century‟s most significant thinkers, had  

deterministic qualities or they posited that the movement of man is determined by  

specific “Laws.” For instance, in History of English Literature, Taine argues that the  

“primitive disposition” and energy of all groups operate the same way and move in the  

same direction (9). Taine believed that however different national and racial personalities  

appear to be, they “all have ploughed over the same ground” (7).  And in The Positive  

Philosophy (which had a major influence on the ideas of many influential Victorian  

thinkers), Comte states that “all phenomena” are “subjected to invariable natural Laws”  

(28). Herder, like Blyden, believed in Providence and man‟s limited conscious agency. In  

Another Philosophy of History, Herder writes that man is “never other than a tool” (71),  

and that human beings “have always been just a small, blind instrument, [used]almost  

against [his] will” (47). Furthermore, Herder writes that “where the human species is  



 

 

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concerned, God might have a greater overall plan than what an individual creature is  

able to comprehend; because nothing ever leads towards anything merely individual 

“(72).  

According to Blyden‟s theory of Providence, God has a unique plan for each  

individual human group. The various races of man have specific functions to perform in  

their struggle to serve humanity. Progress is the eventual fulfillment of these individual  

national and racial functions. The phrase “peculiar work to perform” runs throughout  

most of Blyden‟s writings. In Imagined Communities (2006), Benedict Anderson alludes  

to a nation‟s imagined function when he claims that “[i]t is the magic of nationalism to  

turn chance into destiny” (12). In Our Origin, Dangers, and Duties (1865), Blyden writes  

that “[e]very nation and every people has its peculiar work to perform, and each for itself  

must find out the work to be done and the best methods and instrumentalities of  

persecuting it” (11).  And in “The Origin and Purpose of African Colonization,” which  

was delivered in January 1883 at the anniversary of the American Colonization Society,  

Blyden, very cognizant of European activities which came to be known as the Scramble  

for Africa, says that “Among the conclusions to which study and research are conducting  

philosophers, none is clearer than this – that each of the races of mankind has a specific  

character and a specific work” (Christianity 94). Even racialized geographical locations  

were established by God‟s will. The “Almighty,” Blyden writes, “drove asunder the  

nations and assigned them their boundaries; and ours by physical adaptation” (“The Call”  

29). In regards to the African‟s unique position among nations, Herder, in Outlines for a  

Philosophy of the History of Man (1803), argues that “nature took him in hand, and  

formed of him what was mo[s]t fit for his country, and the happine[s]s of his life. Either  

no African [s]hould have been created, or it was requi[s]te, that negroes [s]hould be made  

to inhabit Africa” (271).  The law of Providence, for Blyden, is forward moving.  



 

 

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Moreover, it evolves from gifts, values, systems of knowledge present in the culture and  

psychology already operating within individual groups. In the terms derived from  

Comte‟s positivism, individual groups are equivalent to being specialists, possessing  

individuated gifts that may in the end serve the common good. The members of a nation  

have shared functional characteristic, and these characteristics suit each race, within its  

own environment, to perform a particular service. 

Like most major Victorian thinkers, Blyden firmly believed that the exchange of  

ideas and knowledge contributed to the moral and intellectual development of a people.  

Although he frequently argued that colonialism was in the service of Providence, he was  

against practices that encouraged the aggressive imposition of one‟s cultural values and  

world view onto that of another national and racial group. This type of relational strategy  

was, for Blyden, an enemy of Providence because it did not recognize the unique gifts  

individual races were given in the service of humanity. Blyden was, in other words,  

opposed to practices that worked to elide (rather than respect) differences. For Blyden,  

once the African had further advanced along the road of progress (as a result of the  

acquisition of Western knowledge), it was imperative that the African hold onto his own  

cultural values and praxis and not imitate the ways of the European or foreign mentor. It  

was just as important, Blyden argued, for the representatives of European nations to  

resists the temptation of transforming indigenous nations into mirror images of  

themselves. This particular component of cross-cultural interaction was not only  

important for Blyden but it seemed also to have been a contested issue of interest in the  

1870s among British missionaries in Africa.  Blyden believed that the aggressive euro- 

centric practices of many British missionaries had a retarding effect on the African‟s  

development.  In his public writings and private correspondences Blyden had emphasized  

his resistance to the nurturing and creation of Europeanized Africans and African  



 

 

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institutions constructed strictly along European models. In a letter to Sir George  

Berkeley, the Governor of Sierra Leone, dated 12 February 1874, Blyden wrote that “[t]o  

mould African institutions after the English model would be to give the people a garment,  

which not having been made for them, and of which they do not feel the necessity, would  

not only not fit them, but hang extremely awkwardly upon them … a sort of caricature  

which, alas, the examples are numerous on the coast” (163). What he says to Berkeley  

seems to echo what was suggested by Herder at the turn of the century: “But look, your  

gown is, in turn, too long for the next person!” (Another Philosophy 14). 

This line of reasoning is resumed a few years later in Blyden‟s inaugural address  

as President of Liberia College, reprinted in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race 

under the title “The Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education for Africans,” in which he  

proposed an African curriculum that would “not to be organized according to foreign  

patterns, but will organize itself according to the nature of the people and the country”  

(71). Later in that same speech he elaborates by saying that “Now in Africa, where the  

colour of the majority is black, the fashion in personal matters is naturally suggested by  

the personal characteristics of the race, and we are free from the necessity of submitting  

to the use of „incongruous feathers awkwardly stuck on‟“(77). Therefore, Blyden is  

insisting that “The African must advance by methods of his own. He must possess a  

power distinct from that of the European” (77). These national characteristics, racial  

peculiarities, are the group‟s distinctive hermeneutics essential for the advancement and  

betterment of humanity.  In the words of Judson Lyon (1994), this strain of Blyden‟s  

writings addressed the “overarching importance of cultural self-expression, and saw it as  

part of a broader movement for human improvement and world harmony” (233). 

Blyden believed that certain modes of homogeneity are required for the harmony  

and progress   of a nation. For Blyden, the nature of a nation‟s homogeneity is of two- 



 

 

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fold: the intellectual developmental and the biological. With the intellectual- 

developmental component, Blyden believed, like Herder and contemporaries like Herbert  

Spencer, nations evolve and advance in accordance to the nature of its contact with other  

nations. Through the acquisition and appropriation of foreign knowledge an indigenous  

community can further develop its own native material and cultural resources, but not all  

forms of cross-cultural dynamics are healthy. In both the original 1878 version and the  

edited version of “African and the Africans” that appears in Christianity, Islam, and the  

Negro Race, Blyden encourages British readers to see and accept that  

The African at home needs to be surrounded by influences from abroad, 

not that he may change his nature, but that he may improve his capacity. 

Hereditary qualities are fundamental, not to be created or replaced by 

human agencies, but to be assisted and improved. Nature determines the 

kind of tree, environments determine the quality and quantity of the fruit. 

We want the eye and ear of the Negro to be trained by culture that he may 

see more clearly what he does see, and hear more distinctly what he does 

hear. We want him to be surrounded by influences from abroad to promote 

the development of his latent powers, and bring the potentiality of his 

being into practical or actual operation. He has capacities and aptitudes 

which the world needs, but which it will never enjoy until he is fairly and 

normally trained  (Christianity 277). 

Theoretically, the new will recognizes itself in the old. The intellect that is  

developed comes from native cultural roots and is therefore different from the culture  

from which a certain body of knowledge originated. Through the acquisition of the useful  

knowledge of the more technologically and scientifically advanced country, the less  

advanced nation is able to develop within the system of understanding (world-view)  

peculiar to the natives. The group‟s ability to manipulate the environment and the  

conditions peculiar to them (and their racial talents) has been enhanced. Homogeneity  

still exists, but in an advanced, complicated, and evolved state.  Spencer, whom Blyden  

had met and conversed with during one of his stays in London, and often referred to and  



 

 

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greatly admired, describes this form of education, which initiates progress, as the  

movement from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or from the simple to the  

complex. For Spencer, foreign knowledge works internally on a culture. In “Progress: Its  

Law and Cause”, Spencer writes that “actual progress consists of those internal  

modifications of which this increased knowledge is the expression” (445). Heterogeneity,  

in the way Spencer here employs the term, is an indication of cultural evolution and  

social metamorphosis rather than biological transformation and institutional renovation.   

As a social group acquires more tools of knowledge, it also becomes culturally, self- 

reflectively, and intellectually more complex than it had been during an earlier stage.  

This form of heterogeneity suggests that social metamorphosis has occurred. Blyden  

envisioned West African cultures going through a social metamorphosis peculiar to itself,  

expanding its cognitive faculties and systems of hermeneutics as a result of the  

acquisition of new knowledge, rather than having this new knowledge transform them  

into a completely different and unrecognizable African community. Therefore, Blyden  

was interested in how the acquisition of new ideas contributed to expanding the  

capability of members of a cultural community.  Blyden is therefore writing about   

building on ideas that the African already possess, and is used for him to negotiate  

conditions peculiar to his own history and his own environment. Like Taine, Blyden  

believed that evolutionary force never confront a blank slate. Dynamic cultural energies,  

already operating within the psyche of the native, influence the momentum and trajectory  

of new knowledge. “When natural character and surrounding circumstances operate,”  

writes Taine, “it is not on a tabula rasa, but on one already bearing imprints. According  

as this tabula is taken at one or at another moment so is the imprint different, and this  

suffices to render the total effect different” (16).This new knowledge gets appropriated  

by the native culture and used in accordance to the demands and needs of its own  



 

 

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traditions. The appropriation of foreign knowledge, therefore, is a result of group‟s  

collective agency. They, in short, not only just take what they need, but consciously make  

known through the act of appropriation what is important for their development.  

Heterogeneity, then, is really another way of indicating a culture‟s advanced intellectual,  

psychological, and cultural complexity. 

But while heterogeneity (in the form of knowledge) has the potential of leading to  

progress, hybridity, for Blyden, hinders stability, progress, social metamorphosis and, by  

extension, muddies Providence. Hybridity, unlike the mode of intellectual heterogeneity 

considered here by Blyden and Spencer, is biological and, according to the logic of the  

time, racial. “Like his European counterparts,” V.Y. Mudimbe accurately observes,  

“Blyden did not doubt that a racial phenomenon must be the basis of nationalism and the  

foundation of the Nation” (116).  “Nothing,” Herder had already written, “appears so  

directly opposite to the end of government as the unnatural enlargement of states, the  

wild mixture of various races and nations under one sceptre. A human sceptre is far too  

weak and slender for such incongruous parts to be engrafted upon it: glued together  

indeed they may be into a fragile machine, termed a machine of state, but destitute of  

internal vivification and sympathy of parts” (R. Young 39).Although Spencer believed  

that the mixture of closely related races may modify social arrangements, these social  

modifications are structural rather than degenerative biological cross-mixtures. This  

particular type of mixture of races goes under the heading of “social constitution,” or the  

types of policies enacted for the sake of order. In The Principles of Sociology Spencer  

refers to this social constitution as “the relative homogeneity or heterogeneity of the units  

constituting the social aggregate” (570-71). This mixed social aggregate is desirable  

because, like England and France, it has “evolved from mixtures of nearly allied varieties  

of man, can assume stable structures, and have an advantageous modifiability”(574).   



 

 

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Spencer, Blyden and most nineteenth century intellectuals held the common place  

assumption that the stability of a nation becomes complicated when blood mixture of  

disparate races enters the body politic. Biologically disparately mixed-race nations, for  

Spencer and most of his contemporaries, was undesirable and a source of social and  

political instability.  

Blyden, therefore, had appropriated the race science and the theories of  

nationalism of the period. He firmly believed that, like Spencer, “hybrid societies are  

imperfectly organizable” and that they “cannot grow into forms completely stable” (574).  

As shown in the following section of this chapter, Blyden had publicly made allusions  

concerning the importance of racial purity and the effects of hybridity on progress,  

Providence and the destiny of the African race. References to unstable loyalties of hybrid  

subjects are present in Blyden‟s “An Address before the Maine State Colonization  

Society” in 1862, where he had accused mulattoes of being in opposition to African  

American emigration to Liberia.  

I am not by any means blaming those who, availing themselves of their 

complexion, can escape the indignities in this land of caste. Nature has 

given them that advantage, and they should use it. And those who are 

„blue-eyed‟ enough and „fair‟ enough with Saxon blood, should go, as 

many have already done, altogether with the whites. They have a right to 

do so. But all we beg of them is, to let us alone. Don‟t divide and distract 

the councils of coloured men. Don‟t keep those whom Providence is 

calling to do a great work in their fatherland, from responding to that call 

(16). 

For the white middle-class British reader of Fraser’s Magazine, Blyden‟s language seems  

a little less direct. Blyden writes in the original 1878 version of “African and the  

Africans” that “It is becoming more and more evident that for the efficient and successful  

work of the race, whatever that  work may be, homogeneity is an indispensable element.  

One of the worst difficulties which can beset a nation, especially in the early periods of  



 

 

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its existence, is a heterogeneous people. Homogeneity is essential to harmony, and both  

are essential not only to effective working, but even to permanent national existence”  

(188).  

3 

ENEMIES OF PROVIDENCE AND THE FRASER’S ESSAYS 

For Blyden, any representational or discursive practice that portray, argues and  

suggests African capability as essentially limited or immutable, and which subsequently  

causes social actors to initiate and encourage projects that limit and control African  

agency, was regarded as a detriment, a hindrance to, and an enemy of Providence. These  

practices, as Blyden saw them, were injurious to African progress and detrimental to the  

workings of Providence because the native was no longer perceived as the active agent of  

his own elevation and not on the same level of humanity as those who are culturally and  

phenotypically different. In terms advanced by Comte, these practices violate positive  

Laws which favored the nurturing of specialties (arts, sciences, knowledge) inherent in  

group differences.  Therefore, behaviors and practices that positioned and fixed  

difference within the inferiority/superiority binary were enemies of Providence. We find  

what Blyden sees as the performances of the enemies of Providence and African progress  

suggested and explicated throughout the Fraser’s essay in the 1870s and in the essays  

reprinted in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race in 1886. Although the controversial  

statements that Muslim missionary‟s conversion  practices were far superior in elevating  

and educating the African than that of European missionaries was the overt aim of the  

Fraser essays, the subtext was that the semiotics of whiteness (which Blyden had  

imagined as essential to European missionaries) had proven a detriment to African  

progress and the African psyche. This semiotics of whiteness, for Blyden, manifested  

itself in behaviors generated from the ethnocentricities of foreign teachers and the  



 

 

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imagined racial and cultural self-hatred formed in the psyches of Western educated native  

instructors and leaders. Because of this semiotics of whiteness, material progress and  

spiritual regeneration are connected to and, in the mind of the practitioner and the  

observer, embodied in whiteness. This human (or nonhuman) intermediary, object of  

mediation (the source from which desired knowledge emanates), then, shapes the destiny  

of the African. This source is in the powerful position of retarding the natural  

development of the African by placing ethnocentric limits on the Other‟s agency. In other  

words, the African subject becomes (based on the internalization of inaccurate and  

prejudiced knowledge)what alien forces have decided he is to become. These actions  

were antithetical, as Blyden saw them, to the purposes of Providence because man‟s ego- 

driven will gets imposed on the natural development of a people. It resulted in an  

artificial cultural community whose development is unsanctioned by what he imaged as  

the will of God. The African becomes what is desired by the mentor, or intermediary,  

rather than organically evolving through what had been engrafted within the African  

constitution by Divine design. 

The road to this cultural retardation starts with the scientific and the artistic  

representation and mis-measurement of a people. This mis-measurement is initiated once  

the character traits and physical characteristics of one group of people become the  

yardstick against which all other groups are measured and evaluated. According to  

Blyden, “[t]he standard of all physical and intellectual excellences in the present  

civilization being the white complexion, whatever deviates from that favoured colour is  

proportionally depreciated, until the black, which is the opposite, becomes not only the  

most unpopular but the most unprofitable colour” (Christianity 77). For Blyden,  

prominent British writers and scholars were chiefly responsible for perpetuating the  

myths of black inferiority. The chief culprits of dishonest representations are partly  



 

 

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drawn from the pens of the members of the Anthropological Society of London in  

particular and the scientific community in general, especially the likes of Richard Burton  

and James Hunt, whom Blyden had on several occasions throughout his life identified as  

the “typical representatives” of “the class of men” who “are untiring in their efforts to  

expel the negro… from the pale of humanity” (From West Africa 62). In Blyden‟s eyes,  

these were the types that formed the parameters of racial and cultural discursive practices  

which fed the British public misrepresentations of weaker races under the disguise of  

science. In a letter to W.E. Gladstone, dated April 16, 1862, Blyden had suggested the  

influence that British intellectuals have around the world, thus giving an indication of the  

dangers of misrepresentation on cross-cultural engagements.  

When I come to this country and see the people who are impressing 

themselves so wonderfully upon the people of all races and climes, 

sending their thoughts to influence the four corners of the earth, I fancy 

that I do not discover any indication in the people generally of a 

consciousness of their power. They do not seem to know the influence 

they are wielding over thousands in America, Asia, Africa and the isles of 

the sea. … This fact imposes serious responsibility upon British writers: 

their words for good or evil are wafted to the ends of the earth. The 

authors of the famous „Essays and Reviews‟ – which are being carried to 

all parts of the world unaccompanied, except by accident, by their 

reputations – certainly did not know the influence of the words they were 

penning (Selected Letters 56). 

Christian images and representations seem to frequently cast blacks in inferior  

roles. As part of the African‟s conversion and Christian indoctrination is the  

internalization of an iconography suggestive of white superiority. These were the models  

newly converted black Christians confronted and were expected to emulate and embrace.  

They were confronted by representations of heroism and transcendence that favored  

white skin, realities and motivations alien to their understanding of themselves and the  

world, thus having a demoralizing psycho-aesthetic effect on African consciousness. In  



 

 

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“Mohammedanism and the Negro Race,” the first of his essays to appear in Fraser’s  

Magazine, Blyden complains that “the painting and sculpture of Europe, as instruments 

of education, have been worse than failures” (15). This use of art, for Blyden, raises  

“barriers” that impede “normal development” because they establish for the black  

Christian “models of imitation” and “canons of taste” which have impaired, “if not  

destroyed, his self-respect, and made him the weakling and creeper which he appears in  

Christian lands” (15). The emphasis on “imitation” and adopting a certain “canon of  

taste” suggest that what is aboriginal to the student is dismissed as unimportant. The  

native‟s entire moral and intellectual foundation, what makes him what he is, are sites of  

erasure; thus, the measure of his conversion is determined by his distance from what is  

seen as barbaric and African. Moreover, writes Blyden, “[t]he Christian Negro, abnormal  

in his development, pictures God and all things remarkable for their moral and  

intellectual qualities with the physical characteristics of the Europeans, and deems it an  

honour if he could approximate – by a mixture of his blood, however irregularly achieved  

– in outward appearance, at least, to the ideal thus forced upon him of the physical  

accompaniments of all excellence” (15). 

These representations favor a man-made racial hierarchy derived from the Great  

Chain of Being, a ladder-like model nineteenth-century European scholars had inherited  

from their predecessors. This model, created by Europeans to make sense of past political  

realities was adopted to explain the contemporary phenomena of human diversity. A  

model more in agreement to the exigencies of Providence, thus sanctioned by Scripture,  

comes in the form of parallel groves. The parallel groves of racial difference, favored by  

Blyden, suggest moral and intellectual equality but highlights differences in the varying  

directions and functions of the races. According to Blyden, Europeans engaged in or even  

“considering questions” of the Civilizing Mission in Africa very often assume that “the  



 

 

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Negro is the European in Embryo” but “in the undeveloped stage,” and only after he has  

progressed up the ladder of civilization will he “become like the European.” The problem  

with this line of thought for Blyden is the assumption “that the Negro is on the same line  

of progress, in the same grove, with the European, but infinitely in the rear” (Christianity  

276). Blyden goes on at length to say that 

This view proceeds from the assumption that the two races are called to 

the same work and are alike in potentiality and ultimate development, the 

Negro only needing the element of time, under certain circumstances, to 

become European. But to our mind it is not a question between the two 

races of superiority or inferiority. There is no absolute or essential 

superiority on the one side, nor absolute or essential inferiority on the 

other side. It is a question of difference of endowment and difference of 

destiny. No amount of training or culture will make the Negro a European; 

on the other hand, no lack of training or deficiency of culture will make 

the European a Negro. The two races are not moving in the same groove, 

with an immeasurable distance between them, but on parallel lines. They 

will never meet in the plane of their activities so as to coincide in capacity 

or performance. They are not identical, as some think, but unequal; they 

are distinct but equal; an idea that is in no way incompatible with the 

Scriptural truth that God has made of one blood all nations of men. 

(Christianity 277) 

The two principle sites that Blyden points to as enemies of Providence are the attitudes  

and practices of missionaries and mulattoes in West Africa. Both the European  

missionary and the mulatto (most of the latter had migrated from the United States),  

internalized and appropriated contemporary racial hermeneutics into their respective  

social practices and interactions with the native communities. Both groups, moreover,  

had considerable power and influence in West Africa over aboriginal populations. In the  

Fraser’s essays, Blyden is suggesting that missionary attitudes toward African cultural  

praxis impede progress. He does this by showing why Islam has been so successful in  

Africa.  Therefore, the successes of Islam are the vehicles he uses to criticize current and  

historical Eurocentric practices and racial prejudices of European missionaries. The  



 

 

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mulattoes, on the other hand, are positioned as bastardized performers of the reiteration  

of Western racial hierarchy which excludes the native from the important materials  

needed for advancement. The behaviors of both groups maintained a language of  

separation that kept the African either excluded or dependent. 

4 

THE MIS-MEASUREMENTS OF THE MISSIONARIES AS ENEMIES OF 

PROVIDENCE 

Blyden‟s ideas, founded on his understanding of Providence, for the intellectual  

and moral development of a Christian African resembled that of Henry Venn (1796- 

1873), the honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S) from 1841 until  

his death in 1873. According to Wilbert R. Shenk, Venn believed in Providence and that  

Christian Missions were established to carry out God‟s plan. He writes that “[i]ntrinsic to  

Venn‟s theological foundation was his belief that God is present and active in history,  

guiding human affairs according to his plan. Christian mission interprets the acts of God  

and calls people to obedience” (27). Moreover, writes Shenk, Venn (similar to Blyden‟s  

uses of Biblical history) believed that “providential design could be discerned in history”  

and that the “missionary should understand that design and align himself with it” (27).  

Venn argued in favor of the creation of self-governing, self-supporting, and self- 

propagating native churches. Under Venn‟s plan, missionaries were to assist in  

establishing Christian communities in Africa, develop a native Christian leadership  

within those communities, encourage native churches to appropriate Christian teachings  

to their aboriginal habits and therefore express their own indigenous characteristics  

within a national church, and then move on and “repeat the process” (Lynch 85). In the  

words of Venn‟s biographer and close friend, William Knight, he encouraged, against  

persistent opposition and resistance from many missionaries, “the formation, wherever  



 

 

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the Gospel was proclaimed, of a Native Church, which should gradually be enfranchised  

from all supervision by a foreign body, and should become… self-supporting, self- 

governing, and self-extending” (277). Venn felt that racial distinctions and peculiarities  

were very important for a developing people and the spread of the Gospel. Under Venn‟s  

policies and influence was it possible for Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806-1891) to become  

the first African Bishop of West Africa in 1864. In 1851, Venn issued to the C.M.S “The  

Native Pastorate and Organization of Native Churches” as a warning that “Care must  

therefore be taken to guard native teachers from contracting habits of life too far removed  

from those of their countrymen” (Knight 306). He, like Blyden, saw the danger of  

dismissing native characteristics and sympathies in misguided attempts to Europeanize  

the native. Both men seemed to have inherited the position suggested by Herder that no  

institution or religion works exactly the same in other parts of the world, even under the  

same name. Venn, then, was insightful enough to perceive the disadvantages of molding  

black Christians into what Blyden interpreted as caricatures detrimental to the evolution  

of African culture. He, in other words, distinguished “between missionary work carried  

on by foreigners” and what he called “Christianity acclimatized” (Knight 276) in an  

attempt to construct an indigenous national church. For Venn: 

The one was the means, the other the end; the one scaffolding, the other 

the building it leave behind when the scaffolding is removed; the other 

subject to constant changes and modifications, as fresh circumstances 

develop themselves, the other growing up to the measure of the stature of 

the perfect man, only changing by gradually putting away childish things 

and reliance on external help and control. (Knight 276-77) 

This insight was the foundation of the guidelines, instructions and suggestions that Venn  

presented to the members and missionaries of the C.M.S. on June 30, 1869 in an essay he  

titled “On Nationality.” Important for our discussion here are Venn‟s suggestions that  

missionaries are to take “into account national distinctions” (Knight 282) and “race  



 

 

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distinctions” and that missionaries should “Study the national character of the people  

among whom you labour, and show the utmost respect for national peculiarities” (Knight  

283). Venn, as with Blyden, felt that “distinctions of race are irrepressible” and that  

resentments and “long cherished but dormant prejudices” will present themselves (Knight  

285). Venn anticipated the culture clashes in West Africa that welcomed Blyden during  

his exile to Sierra Leone when he predicted that “these race distinctions will probably  

rise in intensity with the progress of the mission” (Knight 284). His continuous emphasis  

on the use and study of “national habits” and ”race distinctions” shows that the education  

of Africans should aim beyond the copying stage and more toward a process of  

development that resembles organic growth. In “Africa and the Africans,” the very last of  

his last essays published in Fraser’s, Blyden seems to echo Venn: 

It is owing, in a great measure, to the inadequate theories held by those 

who undertake to deal with the African, whether as friend or foe, that 

while in the colonies along the coast European influence and teaching 

furnish new elements of commercial and religious life, they are helpless to 

raise the people above the „mimetic‟ stage, and endow them with creative 

and reproductive power. What we want is, that the foreign information 

introduced should properly educate the people – that is, should be also 

assimilated as to develop, and be fertilized by, native energy. (281) 

For Blyden, however, the mis-measurement of the African had psycho-historical  

roots which survived in the current attitudes toward the African and the desired  

relationship between white Christian teacher and African student.  In “Mohammedanism  

and the Negro Race,” Blyden writes that unlike Christianity, “Mohammedanism found its  

Negro converts at home in a state of freedom and independence of the teachers who  

brought it to them. When it was offered to them they were at liberty to choose for  

themselves” (Christianity 11). Here he refers to the history and consequences of the slave  

trade. Fear and forced alienation from cultural practices had always accompanied the  

African in the face of Christianity. That is, force and punishment were the initial  



 

 

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components of African conversion. That is to say that Christianity was originally given to  

the African while in a state of captivity. Captivity and Christianity worked in tandem to  

structure the African‟s sense of his own agency, thus fear was always an ingredient of his  

conversion, indoctrination, and acceptance of a foreign creed. “Along with Christian  

teachings,” writes Blyden, “he and his children received lessons of their utter and  

permanent inferiority and subordination to their instructors, to whom they stood in the  

relation of chattels” (Christianity 12).The imagined resulting psychological constitution  

is what makes it possible for Blyden to begin his first essay for Fraser’s Magazine with  

the controversial statement that “[w]herever the Negro is found in Christian lands, his  

leading trait is not docility, as has been often alleged, but servility. He is slow and  

unprogressive. Individuals here and there may be found of extraordinary intelligence,  

enterprise and energy, but there is no Christian community of Negroes anywhere which is 

self-reliant and independent” (Christianity 10). At the start, then, Blyden presents the  

introduction of Christianity as the inauguration of actions not only antithetical to the  

argued purposes of the Civilizing Mission, but also at odds with what he himself sees as  

the will of God. In other words, Blyden blames the commercial and intellectual  

stagnation of the African on the fetishistic imaginations of British missionaries. Although  

attempts during these early stages were not attempts to Europeanize the African per se,  

the African‟s sense of himself as a man was being formed according to the type of  

relationship desired of those who had influence over him. He was being designed to fear,  

serve, and accept his position as servants of men rather than as self-motivating and  

independent agents in the service of God‟s providential design. Historically, then,  

owing to the physical, mental and social pressure under which the 

Africans received these influences of Christianity, their development was 

necessarily partial and one-sided, cramped and abnormal. All tendencies 

to independent individuality were repressed and destroyed. Their ideas and 

aspirations could be expressed only in conformity with the views and taste 



 

 

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of those who held rule over them. All avenues of intellectual improvement 

were closed against them, and they were doomed to perpetual ignorance. 

(Christianity 13) 

These character traits that Blyden imaged as limited intellectual initiative and  

apprehensiveness toward independence, were maintained even after the African was  

emancipated and settled by their British liberators in Sierra Leone. Of the present day  

“Negro Christian” in Sierra Leone, Blyden is of the opinion that “[t]he most enlightened  

native Christians there look forward with serious apprehension – and, perhaps, not  

without good grounds – to the time when, if ever, the instructions and influence from  

London will be withheld” (Christianity 10). Thus, what Blyden had rendered as the  

historical forced dependence during captivity is, through the medium of Christianity,  

transformed into a spiritual and material dependence during freedom. The current  

dynamic between native and foreign missionary participates in erasing the Other‟s  

willingness to build from his own culturally generated cognitive resources, which is in  

violation of what Blyden sees as the exigencies of Providence.  

According to Blyden‟s interpretation of Providence, the conversion strategies of  

Muslim missionaries seem more agreeable to maintaining and developing African minds  

and character. In contrast to the African‟s introduction to Christianity, the native‟s first  

engagement with Islam is during a state of freedom within the wholesome surroundings  

of his own home. Therefore, Blyden argues, African converts generally become Muslims  

through their own actions and by their own choice. According to Blyden, the native‟s  

own desires, and what he saw in the spirituality of this strange new religion, hastened  

conversion. The native, as an active agent in his own spiritual and intellectual  

development, saw that he had something to gain without the shadows of fear and force to  

motivate his choice. Because of this interpretation of native/Muslim dynamics, Blyden is  

able to suggest that Islamic practices are congruent with the imperatives of Providence  



 

 

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because it “strengthened and hastened certain tendencies to independence and self- 

reliance which were already at work. Their local institutions were not destroyed by the  

Arab influence introduced. They only assumed new forms, and adapted themselves to the  

new teachings” (11). Furthermore, writes Blyden, “what really took place, when the Arab  

met the Negro in his own home, was a healthy amalgamation, and not an absorption or  

undue repression” (12). The Muslim convert, for Blyden, because of this “healthy  

amalgamation,” then becomes a producer of knowledge rather than an imitator of  

behavior. Finally, it is also easier for the native to accept the Muslim as teacher because  

of the similarity in skin color. The vehicle to spiritual enlightenment, then, is represented  

through someone who looks like them and who has shown sympathy rather than distance.  

The Christian African convert, according to Blyden and suggested by the urgency  

 

of Venn‟s continuous instructions to the C.M.S, had historically been encouraged to lose  

 

whatever was authentic within himself (his cognitive models of understanding the world)  

 

and uncritically copy and approximate the alien lessons taught him as well as assume for  

 

himself the outward appearances of the culture of his missionary instructor. That is,  

 

according to Blyden, “he is taught from the beginning of his book-training… not to be  

 

himself, but somebody else” (Christianity 37). According to Mary Kingsley‟s testimony,  

 

disregard for native cultural habits were still being practiced by missionaries at the turn of  

 

the century. In her introduction to R.E. Dennett‟s Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort,  

 

Kingsley writes that missionaries “have no interest in native customs and world view”  

 

and they believe that “[w]hat the native African thinks is irrelevant and useless” (v).  

 

Therefore, imitation of a cultural script that requires the erasure and suppression of  

 

behavioral signs perceived as no-European, non-Christian, and, by extension, uncivilized,  

 

were parts of an African convert‟s indoctrination. According to George Stocking,  

 



 

 

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missionary attempts to educate aborigines “were compromised somewhat by an  

 

aggressive ethnocentrism” whenever they confronted “people whose cultural values  

 

seemed at polar variance” from their own. Many of these missionaries apparently did not  

 

weigh the power of the native‟s culture and therefore “they assumed that because they  

 

themselves had risen from ignorance and low estate by their own exertions and by  

 

embracing vital Christianity, the natives to whom they offered education and the word of  

 

God would do likewise” (87-88). This type of education, as imagined by Blyden,  

 

precluded intellectual growth in the native, for it inspired in the native a hesitancy to go  

 

beyond the walls of what he was taught. The intellectual inability to go beyond book  

 

learning, then, makes it impossible to become a producer and a builder. The convert,  

 

then, for Blyden, even with the Gospel, remains stagnant. In “Christianity and the Negro  

 

Race,” the second of his essays published in Fraser’s Magazine, Blyden suggests this  

 

psyche disposition when he writes that  

 

The Mohammedan Negro is a much better Mohammedan than the 

Christian Negro is a Christian, because the Muslim Negro, as a learner, is 

a disciple, not an imitator. A disciple, when freed from leading-strings, 

may become a producer; an imitator never rises above a mere copyist. 

With the disciple progress is from within; the imitator grows by accretion 

from without. The learning acquired by a disciple gives him capacity; that  

gained by an imitator terminates in itself. The one becomes a capable man; 

the other a mere sciolist. (37-38) 

 

This cultural figure, or caricature of a European, evolved, suggests Blyden,  

 

because the missionary himself does not see the native as being very capable. This  

 

attitude is the result of what the European missionary had previously learned about the  

 

African and his own conviction of the Other‟s moral and intellectual limitations. “With  

 

every wish,” writes Blyden, 

 



 

 

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…the European seldom or never gets over the feeling of distance, if not 

repulsion, which he experiences on first seeing the Negro. While he 

joyfully admits the negro to be his brother, having the same nature in all 

its essential attributes, still, owing to the diversity in type and colour, he 

naturally concludes that the inferiority which to him appears on the 

surface must extend deeper than the skin, and effect the soul. Therefore, 

very often in spite of himself, he stands off from his African convert, even 

when, under his training, he has made considerable advance in civilization 

and the arts. (20) 

 

In “Christian Missions in West Africa,” published in Fraser’s in October 1876, Blyden  

 

again directly addresses the European‟s inability to let go of the sense of his superiority. 

 

“The Christian world,” writes Blyden 

 

trained for the last three hundred years to look upon the Negro as made for 

the service of superior races, finds it difficult to shake off the notion of his 

absolute and permanent inferiority…. The influences of representations 

disparaging to his mental and moral character, which, during the days of 

his bondage, were persistently put forward without contradiction, is still 

strong in many minds. (Christianity 46) 

 

Therefore, Blyden seems to suggest that because of the European‟s difficulty and  

 

resistance to conceptualizing the “Negro” beyond a state of bondage, essential difference  

 

and dependence contributes to structuring his humanitarian efforts in ways that reiterates  

 

the master/slave dynamic. Even Christian instruction, within this dynamic, repeats a  

 

relationship that limits African agency and separates (this time intellectually) the native  

 

from his original source of cultural identification. In other words, the natal alienation  

 

under which the African had experienced as a condition and product of the Atlantic slave  

 

trade is replaced by a different sort of cultural erasure. This latter sort is what is desired  

 

by the European missionary for purposes of control. That is, it is easier to facilitate  

 

obedience and conformity after one hermeneutic narrative is eroded, called into doubt,  

 

and erased by a different understanding of the cosmos. The African mind thus becomes  

 

the imagined of a blank slate much touted, according to Blyden, by missionaries. This, in  



 

 

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regards to the African, Blyden seems to suggest to his English reader, is the only  

 

behavioral language the European can speak. Their lack of genuine understanding of  

 

African psychology and desire, which generates their “first and constant effort of the  

 

missionaries to Europeanize them” and to “bring things to this new field as nearly as  

 

possible into conformity with the old” (Christianity 63-64), precludes the manifestation  

 

of the type of communities perceived as being developed by Muslim missionaries in  

 

West Africa. The position that the Europeanization of the African, for Blyden, is in  

 

violation of God‟s will because “neither would the people themselves nor the outside  

 

world be any great gainers by it; for the African would then fail of the ability to perform  

 

his specific part in the world‟s work, as a distinct portion of the human race”  

 

(Christianity 65). In other words, the Europeanization of the African prevents and distorts  

 

the development of the native community‟s natural gifts. 

 

5 

 

THE MELANIN MIS-MEASUREMENTS OF THE MULATTO AS ENEMY OF 

PROVIDENCE 

 

The jaundiced ideological yardstick used to measure racial, cultural, intellectual  

 

and moral superiority, which made it possible for missionaries to encourage and pursue  

 

the suppression of native cultural practices and to form their projects around the  

 

assumption of innate African inferiority, had its most detrimental manifestations in the  

 

behaviors Blyden had witnessed in the mulattoes, or any person of African descent who  

 

overtly glorified in the privilege of having discernible Caucasian blood. Lynch writes that  

 

there existed in Liberia, as in America, “a social stratifications based on colour – the  

 

mulattoes considering themselves superior to the black emigrants, while the colonist,  

 



 

 

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generally speaking, believed the indigenous people inferior to them”(10). During his brief  

 

employment with the C.M.S., Blyden, in a letter to Venn, combined what he perceived as  

 

the active distancing practices established between missionaries and Africans to the  

 

behaviors of the mulattoes he had encountered in and outside of Liberia. In a letter dated  

 

April 17, 1872, Blyden elaborated on a comment he had made to Venn in a previous  

 

correspondence (16 October, 1871) regarding the “sensible refrigeration” (Selected  

 

Letters 97) undergone by European missionaries “as soon as he comes into actual contact  

 

with the Negro” (Selected Letters 97). Blyden‟s later letter to Venn suggests the  

 

importance of enlisting sympathetic and educated black men, of the same color as those  

 

they would teach, as participants in the Christianization and civilizing project. The  

 

importance of teachers being roughly of the same skin complexion as would-be native  

 

disciples partly contributed to the relationship and the advancement of the Gospel in  

 

West Africa, for Blyden believed that phenotypic and epidermal similarities had less  

 

alienating repercussions on the consciousness of the receiver. He would allude to the  

 

necessity of this epidermal dynamic, for both parties, years later in “Mohammedanism  

 

and the Negro Race,” when he suggests that part of Islam‟s success in West Africa is  

 

because the “Arab missionary… often of the same complexion as his hearer, does not  

 

„require any long habit to reconcile the eye to him‟” (Christianity 21). The Arab  

 

missionary, then, according to Blyden, is less incline to recoil in dread at the sight of  

 

black skin. And on the other side of this communication dynamic, the would-be convert  

 

visually imbibes a shared family resemblance to the medium of this foreign religion.  

 

According to Blyden‟s line of thinking, the desired guardian and shepherd of salvation is  

 

one of their own, perceived as being just like them and one of them, as a member of the  

 



 

 

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other‟s genealogy rather than the other‟s negative. Blyden‟s letter to the sympathetic Rev.  

 

Venn suggests that, even with the C.M.S., whiteness as the principle medium through  

 

which technological and spiritual knowledge gets imparted potentially produced an  

 

unstable foundation. “The people here [in Sierra Leone] need a little intercourse with the  

 

Negroes of foreign training and culture – not mulattoes whom they have had several,  

 

who, they inform me, have kept the place in confusion as the few in Liberia are now  

 

doing” (Selected Letters 112).  

 

For Blyden it was the mulattoes‟ imagined intellectual proximity to the white  

 

race, and the meaning attached to whiteness vis-à-vis blackness, that made them  

 

consciously want to distance themselves from the “pure” blooded African while at the  

 

same time exercise power and influence over their darker African American kin in the  

 

United States and Liberia.  According to James Conyers (2009), Blyden had seen in his  

 

own native St. Thomas that mulattoes “were in no way considered black people,” had  

 

“occupied the middle position between the vast social distance that separated white from  

 

black,” and had “tried to maintain as much social distance between themselves and blacks  

 

as whites had maintained from them” (149). It was this dislike for mulattoes that caused  

 

Blyden to find himself fleeing Liberia for Sierra Leone.  Blyden, who had married a  

 

mulatto woman, had early in his public addresses criticized mulatto leadership as  

 

damaging to the cause of emigration from the United States and ineffectual and  

 

exclusionary once they had settled in Liberia. In 1862, in “An Address before the Maine  

 

State Colonization Society,” Blyden pointed out that all of the “bitter and unrelenting  

 

opposition [to black American emigration to Liberia] comes from a few half-white men,  

 

who, glorifying in their honourable pedigree, have set themselves as representatives and  

 



 

 

162 

 

leaders of the coloured people of this country” (Black Spokesman 15-16). These men,  

 

according to Blyden, who “have no faith in Negro ability to stand alone,” also “do all  

 

they can do to identify themselves with white people” (Black Spokesman 15-16). For  

 

Blyden, the members of the mulatto community in the United States, who opposed  

 

emigration, worked against God‟s design because their influence threatened to prevent  

 

the most talented members of the African American community from transporting the  

 

gifts of the diaspora, their Western education (even skills many had acquired during  

 

slavery) across the Atlantic to contribute to the spiritual regeneration and intellectual  

 

restitution of the fatherland. In his speech before the Maine State Colonization Society,  

 

Blyden asked the mulattoes in the audience not to “keep those whom Providence is  

 

calling to do a great work in their fatherland, from responding to that call” (Black  

 

Spokesman 16). Mulattoes, like their white American and European counterparts, were  

 

influenced not merely by the face in the mirror but also through a literature that was  

 

“anti-Negro” and, therefore, seemed to add to their ego-rewarding desire to “cling to the  

 

side of their father” (Black Spokesman 17) in attempts to distance themselves from  

 

charges of moral and intellectual inferiority putatively inherited from the side of their  

 

mothers. “We quite believe that,” wrote Blyden in a description that seems to resemble  

 

what he says about liberal Europeans and Christian missionaries, “under the guise of all  

 

that plausible defense they sometimes make of the Negro, there lurks a secret  

 

acquiescence in the slanders and exaggerations of the Trollopes. We cannot blame them.  

 

Believe what you please and do what you please, only keep from distracting the councils  

 

and deliberations of those who feel the sting of degradation, and have a consciousness of  

 

innate power, under fair opportunity to stand alone” (Black Spokesman 18). By 1865, in  

 



 

 

163 

 

Our Origin, Dangers, and Duties, Blyden seems to have reached the point of arguing for  

 

racial purity in the governance of Liberia. In one of his attempts to recruit African  

 

Americans to Liberia, he writes: “Here is a land adapted to us – given to us by  

 

Providence – peculiarly ours, to the exclusion of alien races” (41). And: 

 

And let us, in giving an impulse to civilization on this continent, take 

warnings from the examples of other nations, and so demean ourselves, 

that Liberia may eventually take her stand among the foremost nations of 

the earth, „free from the blood of all men,‟ with laurals unspotted and pure, 

and with a prosperity untarnished by the tears and anguish and blood of 

weaker races. (42) 

 

In 1870, Blyden‟s most personally damaging statement against mulattoes  

 

appeared in the Smithsonian Institute’s Annual Report under the title “On Mixed Races in  

 

Liberia.” The commentary on Liberia cultural and political affairs printed in the Annual  

 

Report were taken from an 1869 letter he had written to a member in the New York  

 

Colonization Board. It was apparently later sent by Blyden‟s friend to Professor Joseph  

 

Henry, the first President of the Smithsonian Institute, and, for scientific reasons,  

 

published in full without Blyden‟s permission and knowledge. “By the use of statistics,”  

 

writes Lynch (1967), Blyden argued “that although mulattoes had occupied privileged  

 

positions in Liberia, the death rates among them were significantly higher than among  

 

Negro emigrants” (53). “My Dear Sir: I send enclosed a catalogue of all of the students  

 

who have ever been in Liberia College. It will be seen not only that they were not natives  

 

(aborigines), but more than three-fourth the number have been largely mixed with  

 

Caucasian blood, and among these death and disease have made sad ravages” (Black  

 

Spokesman 187). The science of the mulatto question, that is, their legendary inability or  

 

ability to survive in tropical climates, had been a matter of public and scientific  

 

debate for much of the first half of the nineteenth century. By starting his letter with  



 

 

164 

 

 

information concerning mulatto mortality in Liberia, Blyden does seem to make it a  

 

matter of science rather than politics. However, it was the racial and political, rather than  

 

the merely ethnological, that really bothered Blyden about the presence of mulattoes and  

 

their capacity as mediators of African progress. This was during a period in which  

 

Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and other darker members of Liberia College frustratingly  

 

argued for the inclusion of aborigines and the expansion of educational opportunities to  

 

the interior. Much of “Blyden‟s energies” at this time, according to Lynch, “were  

 

consumed in a conflict between educated blacks and the mulatto ruling class” (38). The  

 

basis of this conflict, and the context in which most of what Blyden writes about  

 

mulattoes, is because the problem of the color line “had reproduced itself in Liberia,”  

 

thus providing a “dividing and disrupting influence” (38). “[N]ear-white,” writes Lynch,  

 

“replaced white as the badge of the social elite,” making it possible for mulattoes to take  

 

“for granted that they were to be the rulers” (Lynch 38). Blyden was more concerned that  

 

as leaders mulattoes were ineffective, and that most of the resources promised for the  

 

elevation of the African race and the functioning of the Liberian government, which they  

 

had received from American benefactors, were going to the hybrid classes who were  

 

favored neither by Providence nor the environment that God had reserved specifically for  

 

genuine members of the black family. He thus complained that “the attention of educators  

 

have been principally devoted to persons of feeble constitution” (Black Spokesman 188).  

 

Blyden insisted that “[t]he admixture of the Caucasian and the Negro are not favoured by  

 

Providence in inter-tropical Africa” and urgently requested that board members revisit  

 

the issue of transplanting mulattoes “before wasting any more thousands upon an  

 

impracticable scheme” (Black Spokesman 188-89). The resources, distributed under  



 

 

165 

 

 

inaccurate racial premises, seemingly used solely for the frail and unfit mixed-breed, did  

 

not, for Blyden, contribute to the development of the darker members of the group. In  

 

other words, the regeneration of Africa and the African did not appear to have been a  

 

major component of the mulattoes‟ agenda and the environment (assigned by God as  

 

suggested in Scripture) seemed to have made their assumed position as mediators of  

 

progress problematic. 

 

However, it was not just the mulatto‟s identification with whiteness, the power  

 

they were given over blacks, their separation into racial cliques and misuse of funds, that  

 

Blyden found offensive and having a potentially lasting influence over policies toward  

 

the African race; it was, rather, the overall suggestion that the infusion of Caucasian  

 

blood was the generative medium for black advancement. It was this idea of the  

 

empowering potential of Caucasian blood that seems to have generated the exclusiveness  

 

mulattoes felt and profited from at the expense of aborigines. “The idea was that the  

 

presence of white blood imparted greater aptitude for learning, and such persons were to  

 

be fitted for teachers. Black boys of hale and hearty physique were left to grow up  

 

unnoticed” (Black Spokesman 188). This suggests that both whites and mulattoes, by  

 

virtue of blood, were considered by their benefactors as better fitted to rule and  

 

administer over darker members of the population. This latter element of the mulatto  

 

question, for Blyden, seems to have greater potential in keeping the aborigine alienated  

 

from resources and the darker diasporic members of the black race in subordinate and  

 

dependent positions.     

 

Although Blyden had appropriated and approved of much that was written about  

 

mulatto stock and the progeny of miscegenation (as indicated by his use of “mongrel,”  



 

 

166 

 

 

which parades throughout his private letters in regards mulattoes), he opposed the strain  

 

of magical thinking that argued that one drop of Caucasian blood made African  

 

improvement feasible. In fact, he does adopt the popular and scientific notions that the  

 

mixture of European and African blood produced not only a new race, relatedbut distinct  

 

from both white and black, but also a psychologically unstable and degenerate subject.  

 

The myth of the improving qualities of Caucasian blood also was part of the  

 

reinterpretation of Noah‟s malediction that Edith Sanders and Philip Zachernuk call the  

 

“Hamitic Hypothesis.” Blyden himself had employed the Biblical authority of the  

 

Hamitic tradition as the rationale for human diversity, for his belief that human races  

 

were formed in particular locations to do particular work, and that Africa was the home  

 

chosen for blacks by God. He, however, opposed arguments that denied African  

 

participation in the formation of civilizations. According to Zachernuk, before the 1800s  

 

it was generally believed that Ham was the father of the black races of Africa, “and that  

 

all of his progeny were divinely cursed to a life of servitude” (428). But Europeans began  

 

to rework this tradition around the end of the eighteen-century and early nineteenth- 

 

century. “Theological scholars and ethnographers,” writes Zachernuk of this period, were  

 

now arguing “that Ham and Egypt were white, thus claiming the newly discovered  

 

glories of Egypt for Europe‟s racial forebears” (428). When biblical ethnography was  

 

“superseded” later in the nineteenth-century, “Hamites” (i.e. Egyptians, Phoenicians,  

 

ancient Jews, whiter non-European groups) were still seen as the ones “who possessed  

 

the ability to inspire civilization in darker races” (428). Therefore, according to this view,  

 

black Africans and their descendants “owed whatever progress and improvement they  

 

had known to foreign „Hamites‟ rather than indigenous forces” (428). In general, the  



 

 

167 

 

 

Hamitic theory from the sixteenth century up to the 1800s regarded Africans as savages  

 

and natural slaves. As a result of Napolean‟s expedition to Egypt in 1798, a new  

 

conception of Hamite began to take hold which transformed only Ham‟s youngest son,  

 

Cannan, into a servant of servants. “So it came to pass,” writes Sanders, “that Egyptians 

 

emerged as Hamite, Caucasiod, uncursed and capable of high civilization” (527).  

 

Through the Hamitic Hypothesis, says Sanders, “The Hamites were designated as the  

 

early culture-bearers in Africa owing to the natural superiority of intellect and character  

 

of all Caucasoids. Such a view point had dual merit for European purpose: it maintained  

 

the image of the Negro as an inferior being, and it pointed to the alleged fact that  

 

development could come to him only by mediation of the white race” (528-29). By mid- 

 

century, the influence of Caucasian blood was generally accepted as among the major  

 

mediating forces responsible for examples of talent perceived in peoples of African  

 

descent. 

 

The praise for Blyden‟s own collection of writing, Christianity, Islam, and the  

 

Negro Race, appears to have traces of the logic of the Hamitic Hypothesis, for some  

 

reviewers were astonished that such a work came from the pen of a “pure” African. The  

 

reviewer for the Athenaeum, notes Lynch, wrote that “the most immediately noteworthy  

 

fact about this volume… is that the author is a Negro.” The reviewer of the C.M.S.  

 

Intelligencer seems to divorce Blyden from the general African and says that “if Blyden‟s  

 

formal education stopped at High School, then „the teacher as well as the pupil could  

 

have been no ordinary man‟”; and, “Finally,” writes Lynch, “a correspondent of Notes  

 

and Queries questioned Blyden‟s assertion that he was a „full-blooded Negro‟; the name  

 

Blyden suggested that he had at least „a strain of European blood‟”(Lynch 74-75).  



 

 

168 

 

 

Others, in the United States and Western Europe, also seem to have had drawn  

 

from the logic of this interpretation of Noah‟s malediction, which leads to the belief  

 

about the intellectual improvement generated by the infusion of white blood into the  

 

native. In The West Indies, Anthony Trollope‟s use of the Hamitic Hypothesis indicates  

 

its acceptability. According to Trollope, “Providence has sent white and black men to  

 

these regions in order that from them may spring a race fitted by intellect for civilization;  

 

and fitted by physical organization for tropical labour”(R. Young 142). In other words,  

 

Trollope believed that “when sufficient of our blood shall have been infused into the  

 

veins of the children of the sun; then… we may be ready, without stain to our patriotism, 

 

to take off our hats and bid farewell to the West Indies” (R. Young 142). Monogenesists 

 

employed the Hamitic Hypothesis because it supported the belief that all men evolved  

 

from the same parent. Polygenesists made use of Biblical authority for their arguments  

 

about the innate inferiority of Africans. In The Inequality of Human Races, a work that is  

 

considered among the pillars of nineteenth-century racial discourse, Arthur de Gobineau  

 

makes the claim that “no negro race is seen as the initiator of a civilization. Only when it  

 

is mixed with some other can it even be initiated into one” (212). Gobineau thought it  

 

unrealistic for the European to “hope to civilize the negro”, and that the most he could  

 

manage was the transmission “to the mulatto [of] only a very few of his own  

 

characteristics” (179). With the transmission of these characteristics the mulatto, who  

 

“cannot really understand anything better than a hybrid culture,” will find himself,  

 

especially if he were to marry a white woman, “a little nearer” to the ideas of the white  

 

race. In other words, intellectual capability improves with the addition of white blood.  

 

James Hunt of the Anthropological Society of London, whom Blyden had throughout his  



 

 

169 

 

 

career positioned as the poster-boy of inaccurate and unfair racial representation, argues  

 

against the notion that education alone is responsible for the general improvement of  

 

blacks, and that central source generating African intellectual improvement could only  

 

come about through the infusion of white blood. In The Negro’s Place in Nature, Hunt  

 

writes that  

 

The many assumed cases of civilized Negroes generally are not those of 

pure African blood. In the Southern States of North America, in the West 

Indies and other places, it has frequently observed that the Negroes in 

place of trust have European features, and some writers have supposed 

that these changes have been due to a gradual improvement in the Negro 

race which is taking place under favourable circumstances. It is assumed 

that great improvement has taken place in the intellect of the Negro by 

education, but we believe such not to be the fact. It is simply the European 

blood in their veins which renders them fit for places of power, and they 

often use this power far more cruelly than either of the pure blooded races. 

(28) 

 

According to Armand de Quatrefages, Caucasian blood is the harbinger of civilization.  

 

That is to say that for Quatrefages the amalgamated stock will be more closely allied to  

 

the European than the original indigenous group, thus making them more capable for the  

 

work of progress in tropical climates. In “The Formation of Mixed Human Races”, he  

 

argues that the progeny of European and indigenous parents “will receive at birth an  

 

aptitude for sustaining the operation of the most varied influences; they will become in  

 

advance, as it were, either wholly or partially acclimated” (39). In other words, as a result  

 

of the Europeans‟ inclination to emigrate and populate other countries, it is inevitable that  

 

“the future human races will be largely renovated with an infusion of white blood, that is 

 

to say, with the ethnological elements which thus far have carried to its highest degree the  

 

development of human intelligence” (39).  

 

In his last essay for Fraser’s Magazine, “Africa and the Africans,” Blyden  



 

 

170 

 

 

authorizes African intelligence and right of self-expression over the “hear-say” and the  

 

“preconceived notions” of harbored by many of his middle-class reads with the statement  

 

that “[o]nly the Negro will be able to explain the Negro to the rest of mankind”  

 

(Christianity 263). What he does here is explain to his Victorian reader that the African,  

 

contrary to claims passed down through Western knowledge, is capable of speaking for  

 

himself, especially since what contemporary readers have inherited lacks accuracy and  

 

fairness. In this his final statement to a large British and international audience, Blyden  

 

seems to be calling for recognition of African agency and intelligence.  This assertion  

 

reappears in the version published in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race in 1886 and  

 

in the original article form 1878. What is absent, however, from the 1886 version of  

 

“Africa and the Africans” is any reference to race mixture. This is probably  

 

because Blyden saw it politically expedient at that moment of publication to edit  

 

comments about miscegenation and mulattoes that might harm his already unstable  

 

relationship with the Liberian government. According to Blyden in the original 1878  

 

version of “Africa and the Africans,” among the elements “which seriously affects the  

 

problem and prevents a fair test of Negro ability in Christian lands” (“Africa” 188) are in  

 

fact the ramifications of Caucasian blood. Blyden argues that although the mixture of  

 

white blood artificially, uncritically and arbitrarily designates a person as “Negro,” only  

 

the white element is singled out as contributing to his success and morality. To put it  

 

differently, white blood “is never considered as having any part in the production of the  

 

results deplored, but rather, at times, as imposing a salutary and restraining influence  

 

upon „Negro barbarism‟” (“Africa” 188). Belief in any derivative of the Hamitic Myth is,  

 

for Blyden, contrary to the laws of progress and the exigencies of Providence.  White  



 

 

171 

 

 

blood, for Blyden, was one of the “powerful foreign forces” that interferes “to oppose  

 

primitive forces” referred to by Taine. According to Blyden‟s personal experiences and  

 

studies, miscegenation precluded nation building because it introduced and brought  

 

together what Comte identified as “incoherent materials” (38). Because of these  

 

incoherent materials, “a radical contrariety existed between the materials he was  

 

endeavoring to combine” (38-39). To aid the African in his own improvement is not  

 

white blood, Blyden counters, but the acquisition of knowledge through contact with  

 

other nations. The African, in other words, already has the capability, all that is needed  

 

are the tools. According to Blyden 

 

The African at home needs to be surrounded by influences from abroad, 

not that he may change his nature, but that he may improve his capacity. 

Hereditary qualities are fundamental, not to be created or replaced by 

human agencies, but to be assisted and improved. Nature determines the 

kind of tree, environments determine the quality and quantity of the fruit. 

We want the eye and ear of the Negro to be trained by culture that he may 

see more clearly what he does see, and hear more distinctly what he does 

hear. We want him to be surrounded by influences from abroad to promote 

the development of his latent powers, and bring the potentiality of his 

being into practical or actual operation. He has capacities and aptitudes 

which the world needs, but which it will never enjoy until he is fairly and 

normally trained. (Christianity 277) 

 

V.Y. Mudimbe is accurate when he says that “Blyden uses his literary background  

 

to describe the African as a victim of a European ethnocentrism” (110). To achieve what  

 

Blyden had presented as his vision for Africa and the African race, the African first “must  

 

have a fair opportunity for his development. Misunderstood and often misrepresented  

 

even by his best friends, and persecuted and maligned by his enemies, he is, nevertheless,  

 

coming forward, gradually rising under the influences of agencies seen and unseen”  

 

(Christianity 278). As an act of providence, races are called upon to do particular work at  

 



 

 

172 

 

particular times in the history of humanity. Humanity, for Blyden, has not reached its  

 

final stage, and every race of man, in its individual groove, is moving in God‟s time in  

 

the same direction. “The present practice of the friends of Africa is to frame laws  

 

according to their own notions for the government and improvement of this people,  

 

whereas God has already enacted the laws governing in these affairs, which laws should  

 

be carefully ascertained, interpreted, and applied; for until they are found out and  

 

conformed to, all labour will be ineffective and resultless” (Christianity 281). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

173 

 

CHAPTER FIVE 

 

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION, J.J. THOMAS AND THE FROUDACITY OF THE 

MYTH OF HAITI 

 

1 

 

INTRODUCTION(S): JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE AND JOHN JACOB 

THOMAS 

 

1888, the Jubilee year of the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies,  

 

was ushered in by the publication of a text that participated in problematizing  

 

contemporaneous and future arguments concerning the nature and limits of black agency  

 

in relation to the centrality of British influence. The publication in question was the  

 

January release of James Anthony Froude‟s The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow  

 

of Ulysses. The publication of this text, which may have been the most talked about and  

 

controversial travel narrative on the Caribbean during that jubilee period, brought to the  

 

forefront and seemingly served to reify for many late-century observers of the West  

 

Indian and African scenes an element of imperialist and racial discourse normalized by  

 

Thomas Carlyle and that survives even today in our discussions of globalization. This  

 

particular ingredient of imperialists and racial discourse positions the Western European  

 

(or members of the Caucasian race) as the sole generative source of civilization and  

 

progress, and the non-white subject as the eternal dependent.  

 

The English in the West Indies, in which Froude paints self-government as the  

 

harbinger of black domination which escorts in the destruction of Western institutions  

 

and white lives, is in overall intent and purposes the Caribbean equivalent to Oceana; or  

 

England and her Colonies. In Oceana, Froude argued that self-government was not  

 

merely injurious to the political reputation, military strength, and spiritual wellbeing of an  

 



 

 

174 

 

acknowledged great mother country, but that it was also mortally precarious to the safety  

 

of the newly formed self-governing group. The territories that chiefly concerned Froude,  

 

in Oceana, were Australia and New Zealand. However, in his 1888 text on the West  

 

Indies his argument against self-government is founded on the fear of racial upheaval.  

 

That is, during a period in which the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the 1865 Morant Bay  

 

massacre were still topics of discussion, a closer inspection of The English in the West  

 

Indies reveals Froude‟s conscious manipulation of existing Anglo-Victorian anxieties  

 

toward imagined nationalistic and genocidal tendencies of the darker Other. The  

 

sensational violence of both historical events may not have contributed to the  

 

construction to Froude‟s unwavering stance against self-government, but they certainly  

 

formed his anxiety-ridden fantasies about the essential nature of black British subjects in  

 

the West Indies. The Manichean allegory generating the popular phantom of black  

 

brutality was in fact the trope Froude employed in his attempt to influence opinions in  

 

England against advocating self-government in the West Indies. In the words of C.S.  

 

Salmon (1832-1896), Froude presented a “black man draped out of all recognition as a  

 

warning to Englishmen to avoid that unclean thing, local self-government” (7).  

 

Froude‟s text is clearly an expanded reiteration of Carlyle‟s contention of the  

 

necessity of blacks realizing and accepting the laws of nature which had established the  

 

Englishmen as the wiser of the two races, as well as the natural saviors and masters of the  

 

region. This way of seeing the relationship between white and black British subjects in  

 

the West Indies Carlyle had popularized and set into motion in his famous 1849 essay  

 

which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. Far too often, it seems, discussions of Froude‟s  

 

The English in the West Indies identify him merely as an outdated mouth-piece for the  

 



 

 

175 

 

Anglo-West Indian planter class without seriously considering the fact that he arrived in  

 

the West Indies with a cultural knapsack full of racial and political assumptions that had  

 

already been circulated and embedded as acceptable commonplaces throughout Great  

 

Britain. Furthermore, all of the assumptions he brought with him were employed to  

 

validate responses to racial and nationalistic tensions in recent history, as well as the  

 

template of blackness he had inherited from the author of “Occasional Discourse on the  

 

Negro [Nigger] Question.” John Jacob Thomas knew better than to completely ignore the  

 

influence of what many optimistic Victorian commentators of his day may have  

 

perceived as Froude‟s anachronistic opinions about race. “James Anthony Froude is,”  

 

writes Thomas, beyond any doubt whatever, a very considerable figure in modern  

 

English literature” (27). Outdated or not, traces of the racial thoughts of Carlyle and  

 

Froude still had profound and observable influences on behaviors and colonial policy at  

 

the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth-century. In “John Jacob  

 

Thomas: An Estimate”, Bridget Brereton writes that “[o]ne should not underestimate the  

 

influence and power of these slave-holding types even in the later 19
th

 century. There  

 

were several of them, at the time he wrote, entrenched in the Trinidad Legislative  

 

Council...  That the type was dying out, as Thomas maintained, may have been true,  

 

but they were taking an unconscionable time about it” (33-34). I therefore agree with  

 

Faith Smiththat “It would be absurd to deny the impact of a text such as The English in  

 

the West Indies had on British colonial policy, as well as its contribution to the prevailing  

 

metropolitan image of a Caribbean inhabited by lazy Negroes and well-meaning but  

 

beleaguered plantocracy” (10). Froude followed Carlyle in the belief that self- 

 

government was the unavoidable prelude to the corrupt evils of democracy and  

 



 

 

176 

 

independence, thus leading to the severing all ties and allegiances from the British  

 

Crown. In Oceana, Froude was very straightforward about being “no believer in  

 

Democracy as a form of government which can be of long continuance” (388). Similar to  

 

Carlyle before him, Froude argued that the idea of democracy “proceeds on the  

 

hypothesis that every individual citizen is entitled to an equal voice in the management of  

 

his country; and individuals of infinitely unequal- bad and good, wise and unwise – and  

 

as rights depend on fitness to make use of them, the assumption is untrue, and no  

 

institution can endure which rest upon illusions” (391-92).Although, argued Froude,  

 

public opinion seemingly favored allowing self-government in the colonies, Oceana had  

 

still sold, as an indication that Froude‟s “books commanded an impressive  

 

readership,”75,000 copies in its first edition (Maxwell 379). It is safe to assume, then,  

 

that his thoughts on the West Indian colonies also garnered interest and that a large body  

 

of England‟s middle class readership may have sympathized with the parameters his  

 

racial views (the conditions  and limits of black/white relations), if not in his opinions on  

 

democracy, human rights and universal suffrage.  

 

The phantasmagoria of the African‟s innate emotional dependency and  

 

unconscious desire for savage expression, with a socially constructed image of Haiti as  

 

the power of example, were the center-pieces of The English in the West Indies. Through  

 

Froude, the mid-century “savage” of Carlyle and Dickens is embodied in the in late  

 

nineteenth century re-figuration of the atavistic Haitian. According to Rupert Lewis, “in  

 

the nineteenth century Haiti was held up as a symbol of the threat to white domination  

 

and cited as the prime example of what would happen if blacks were given civil and  

 

political rights” (51). In response to the use of Haiti as the template of African  

 



 

 

177 

 

psychology, Thomas would later that year write in his most famous work,  Froudacity:  

 

West Indian Fables by Anthony Froude, that “[w]ith regard to the perpetual reference to  

 

Hayti, because of our oneness with its inhabitants in origin and complexion, as a criterion  

 

for the exact forecast of our future conduct under given circumstances, this appeared to  

 

us, looking at actual facts, perversity gone wild in the manufacture of analogies” (10).   

 

The projection of what constituted a black Haitian, therefore, became the template in  

 

which African psychology and capability was measured. Froude positioned what was  

 

popularly argued about the black republic as a convex gothic mirror-image of the future  

 

of self-government in the British West Indies.  

 

Also vital to Froude‟s argument against self-government in the British West  

 

Indian colonies is the favoring of white blood and European influence as primary  

 

civilizing elements. This strategy was desired to keep those regarded as pure blooded  

 

blacks (the racial majority in the West Indies) further removed form seats of influence.  

 

For Froude, white blood was a defense against the African‟s predisposition towards the  

 

regressive march to barbarism. Only a few members of the West Indian community were  

 

fortunate enough to be endowed with European DNA. This aspect of his argument  

 

illustrated, for Froude, not only the ups-and-downs of  Haitian politics, but it would also  

 

shed light on why he had selected a modicum of blacks as examples of what members of  

 

the African race may eventually become. However, everything about Thomas‟s life was a  

 

refutation of the deterministic racial ideology advocated by Froude. J.J. Thomas was, first  

 

of all, of pure African descent and the son of former slaves. There was, in other words, no  

 

observable trace of whiteness. Although he was a product of Trinidad‟s school system,  

 

Thomas, who became a teacher and highly regarded scholar, was commonly referred to  

 



 

 

178 

 

by peoples of African descent in the British West Indies as a “self-made” man. This term,  

 

“self-made,” bestowed honor on those persons of African descent to whom it was  

 

applied. It suggested that with minimum assistance from whites, or no assistance from  

 

whites, or formal and institutional resistance from the dominant members of the colonial  

 

social structure, the person regarded as “self-made” rose to recognizable prominence in  

 

his community. This figure was not uncommon in the West Indies. Self-made meant that  

 

he was largely self-educated and respected in Trinidad and London; and, according to  

 

Bridget Brereton and biographer Faith Smith, many Trinidadians followed Thomas‟s  

 

career with pride. Brereton describes him as “[t]he outstanding teacher in this period” and  

 

“in 1867 Thomas topped the list in the first competitive examinations for entry to the  

 

civil service, and came to Port of Spain to fill a minor post” (94). In 1869 Thomas  

 

completed and published The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, “a scholarly  

 

work on the Creole patois spoken by the majority of Trinidadians in the nineteenth  

 

century” (94). The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar received favorable reviews  

 

in England and established Thomas‟s reputation as a scholar.  According to Brereton he  

 

had mastered not only patois, but also taught himself French, Spanish, Latin and Greek,  

 

and was eventually recognized in London as an expert in philology. J.J. Thomas was also,  

 

according to Brereton, “the foremost literary Trinidadian of his day” (94). He had  

 

translated Borde‟s Histoire de la Trinidad and wrote the introduction to a reprinted  

 

edition of J.B. Philip‟s popular and controversial 1830s novel The Free Mulatto. He  

 

started the Trinidadian Athenaeum, which was a literary and debating society whose  

 

membership was almost entirely black and mulatto. And he was also the editor of two  

 

short-lived periodicals, The Trinidadian Monthly and the weekly Review. After reading a  

 



 

 

179 

 

paper entitled “Some Peculiarities of the Creole Language” in London in 1873, Thomas  

 

was elected as a member to the London Philological Society. He became the symbol of  

 

all a “pure black” British subject could become. But “he was in some ways,” writes  

 

Brereton, “a typical representative of the black and coloured middle class which was  

 

emerging in Trinidad and the West Indies in the years after Emancipation. Like most  

 

members of this class, he rose to middle-class status essentially through education and  

 

command of European culture”(22). For this particular caste of people of African descent  

 

that Thomas represented, those who were “pure-blooded” African and those who showed  

 

no visible traces of European ancestry, the suggestion that whiteness was the generating  

 

source of their individual improvement, rather than individual agency and hard work, was  

 

an insult. It was a belief that generated ideas of the pure blooded blacks as having  

 

predetermined limitations on their potential and cognitive capability. The idea, as  

 

advanced by Froude and many others, that the withdrawal of white influence may cause  

 

all that they had acquired to fall away and reveal a “true” savage African character  

 

Thomas also found offensive. This encouraged the belief that white Europeans were  

 

required as guides when, in fact, black social and cultural formations in the British West  

 

Indies were created in spite of the white community. It was this publically observable  

 

characteristic of self-improvement that the rising black middle and educated classes used  

 

to distinguish themselves from their putative white betters. It was Trinidad‟s black and  

 

colored middle class who had considered themselves more cultured and educated than the  

 

crassly materialistic whites on the island. It was, moreover, also this particular class of  

 

people (educated and professional blacks) who may have posed a problem for the current  

 

power structure, especially if Froude‟s unlikely vision of self-government in the Antilles  

 



 

 

180 

 

were to take place. This historical fact of post emancipation, which was the observable  

 

existence of the emerging black middle class, Froude had denied by discursive exclusion  

 

and omission. As suggested before, unlike the mass of blacks in the West Indies, they  

 

were educated and their racial ties to the majority of blacks made them a possible threat  

 

to planter‟s continued domination. This class of blacks, differentiated by skin complexion  

 

even from the coloreds, represented the imagined and feared political heirs of democracy  

 

(for they were the racial majority) if the form of self-government as propagated through  

 

Froude‟s logic should ever materialize. 

 

In response to this vision of the future political reality of the West Indies, Froude  

 

makes the imaginative leap of connecting black leadership and independence to  

 

unmediated and instinctive violence towards white bodies and institutions. Once the  

 

blacks have gained independence, argued Froude, they will sever ties with the creators of  

 

universally acceptable cultural, moral and political forms. They will then take revenge on  

 

their saviors, or on any material form that reminded them of slavery and of their diasporic  

 

condition resulting from the contact zone. In the end, only the skeletal ruins of  

 

civilization will remain in the West Indies, for they will have reverted to the savage  

 

conditions of their ancestors. According to the racialized and deterministic logic of  

 

Froude and some of his contemporaries, once blacks are allowed political participation of  

 

any form, all the rudiments of culture and civilization whites had worked hard to clothe  

 

them with will fall away and reveal the essential African. Froude‟s African, then, is  

 

retrogressive rather than evolutionary, and he instinctively fights against the forward  

 

movement of history.  

 

For Thomas and his black British contemporaries, the Jubilee year of 1888 was  

 



 

 

181 

 

the crucial point of reflection, and the opinions of Froude greatly contributed to opening  

 

the door to discursive expressions of black agency. John Jacob Thomas made use of  

 

Froude‟s Haitian allegory to bring to the British reader his vision of the African as an  

 

active participant in the movement of history. Throughout Froudacity, Thomas‟s main  

 

concern is to show that (during a very short span of time) blacks were the self-generating  

 

embodiment of progress. Thomas placed peoples of African descent not as responders to  

 

history, but as active agents (rather than passive instinctive actors) in the creation of their  

 

own destinies. Furthermore, through Thomas‟s challenge in Froudacity to the nineteenth  

 

century notion of black atavism, we are able to link the broader issue of self-government  

 

in the West Indies to the parochial white anxieties over the emergent black middle class. 

 

2 

THE FROUDACIOUS FABLE: PROCESS AND PURPOSE 

 

James Anthony Froude‟s “fables,” as described by John Jacob Thomas in  

 

Froudacity, are ideological character and nation building constructs that contribute to the  

 

generation of narratives and projects aimed at limiting the agency of the Other. These  

 

“fables” favor the supposed superiority of European identity over that of the non- 

 

European Other. Froude‟s particular “fables,” “myths,” or phantasmagorical  

 

representations reflect England‟s desired relation of domination over the racial and  

 

colonialized Other. Throughout Froudacity Thomas seems to suggest that there is a  

 

strong connection between Froude‟s representations and the economic desires of the  

 

colonial government.  

 

The black West Indian‟s potential to become an atavistic and cannibalistic  

 

Caucasian devouring monster is the very representational strategy of decontextualization  

 



 

 

182 

 

Thomas called an act of froudacity. Through this mode of racial representation that  

 

Thomas calls froudacity, a writer knowingly removes the subject of representation from  

 

history and constructs an abstraction. The amplitude of the abstraction precludes  

 

consideration of the existence of the experienced phenomenon. Through this discursive  

 

act, the writer engaged in froudacity positions as factual what he seems to know is an  

 

invention. Thomas, however, was one among many observers of England‟s colonial  

 

scene aware of the liberties Froude tended to take with truth. In “Mr. Froude‟s  

 

Negrophobia”, for instance, N. Darnell Davis, an Anglo-Granadean, also observed that  

 

Froude‟s misrepresentation of facts was widely known in the West Indian press. Davis  

 

himself was among the contemporary opponents who described The English in the West  

 

Indies as “Froudacious “ (109) and “Froudian” (110). He furthermore condemns the text  

 

for its “Froudian system of making up facts as the Tourist goes on his way” (110). In The  

 

Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (1889), one of the sympathetic reviewers of Thomas‟s  

 

text described The English in the West Indies in these terms: “The Froudacity of the book,  

 

as a substitute for veracity, is faithfully exposed” (957). Davis writes that “It is clear as  

 

the day that Mr. Froude brought out his dread of Haytia, ready made, with him from  

 

England…. At the same time, he seems to have accepted as evidence against the  

 

Haytians, yarns told him by sailors: tales they heard from others, who had, in turn, been  

 

told by somebody else” (117). Although this rhetorical strategy had long been a  

 

commonplace in Victorian racial and political discursive practices, the term “froudacity”  

 

briefly came into popular usage after news of the publication and copies of Oceana had  

 

reached Australia. One nineteenth-century source suggests that the term was first coined  

 

by an irate Australian journalist. The colonist, rather than the reader in the mother  

 



 

 

183 

 

country for whom the text was written, was better positioned to appreciate and to  

 

respond to the invention. Because of the transparent nature of the falsehood, it is highly  

 

doubtful that the white planters in the British West Indies did not happily notice that  

 

Froude had obscured the lived character of the islands in their favor. Whites in Trinidad,  

 

for instance, would have noticed that the actual racial composition of the vanguards of  

 

self-government was downplayed to the point of near invisibility, and that the existence  

 

of a very visible, educated and culturally vibrant black middle class  was entirely erased.  

 

J.J. Thomas was among its most prominent members. It was more important for Froude  

 

to create for his English reader a credible and monstrous nemesis of Western civilization.  

 

Like the prototypical monster Franco Moretti analyzes in Signs Taken for Wonders,  

 

Froude‟s Haitianated (or even Calibanized) Afro-West Indian “is a collective and  

 

artificial creature” (85) as well as a “historical product” (86).  

 

A conscious attempt, then, is made to create (from hearsay and colonial legends)  

 

visions that may inspire fear and trepidation in the minds of the readers in the distant  

 

mother country. The recital of these racial tales are, moreover, composed of elements that  

 

members of the audience might consider as being in the realm of truth, even without the  

 

presentation of concrete data. Therefore, a froudacious fable is the selective accumulation  

 

of unverified information about a particular group or event, the telling of which has a  

 

clearly laid out political agenda. The reader and object of study are separated by  

 

geographic location, thus leaving the writer‟s credibility and cultural credentials as the  

 

only capital contributing to the tale‟s veracity. In this type of text, C.S. Salmon points to  

 

the writers‟ or spokespersons‟ expertise and reputation as of principal importance in  

 

circulating ideas about the West Indies. In The Caribbean Confederation, which was his  

 



 

 

184 

 

own response to Froude‟s text, Salmon writes:  

 

Of brilliant attainments and great administrative ability and business 

experience, these men are appealed to by the home public for their special 

knowledge; and the home public, which knows nothing of the matter or of 

the people in question, is guided by their views; it is told of the 

beneficence of a stringent paternal rule; it has also whispered in its ears 

how these millions of people of other races are backward, or degraded, or 

weaklings, or one otherwise unfitted to possess any of the elementary 

rights of freemen Englishmen so dearly prize. (113) 

 

Intentionality and the positioning of the subject of debate in as nearly as possible to a  

 

cautionary tale and cultural warning are imperative for the creation of a froudacious tale.   

 

In other words, a writer‟s cultural collateral and a nation‟s racial superstitions are  

 

recruited for the creation, however gothic, of a froudacious tale. 

 

According to the black legend that Froude participates in perpetuating, the  

 

institution of slavery had a civilizing and beneficial influence on the displaced African‟s  

 

moral and intellectual development. This line of thinking, of course, was designed to  

 

portray black improvement as occurring only under conditions in which they were  

 

confinement by whites. Froude argued that “the negroes who were taken away out of  

 

Africa, as compared to those who were left at home, were as the „elect to salvation,‟ who  

 

after a brief purgatory are secured an eternity of blessedness. The one condition is the  

 

maintenance of the English crown”(80-81). The tropical climate, which produced an  

 

abundance of fruits, foods and resources, was also a hindrance to the possibility of  

 

African creativity. The richness of Africa undermined initiative and impoverished the  

 

native‟s intellectual capacity. The abundance found in tropical climates gave the African  

 

no incentive for betterment, and no reason to contemplate beyond the satisfactions of the  

 

moment. This line of thinking which informed Froude‟s representation of the black  

 

personality was still being propagated at the turn of the century. In Black Jamaica: A  



 

 

185 

 

 

Study in Evolution, William Pringle Livingstone writes that “the social advancement of  

 

man depends upon temperature. It will be observed that the march of civilization has  

 

taken place within the limits of the temperate zone, the conditions there, and the relations  

 

they bring about, being most favourable to the development of the qualities latent in his  

 

nature” (9).The African environment had itself contributed to what was later perceived in  

 

the west as the original cause of African laziness, his intellectual inertia, child-likeness  

 

and docility. As though it were an acquired trait of evolution, this inactive condition had  

 

become embedded into the African psyche. With the passage of time, and only through  

 

their fortuitously traumatic contact with European cultures through the institution of  

 

slavery (and the imaginary educational structure implicit in the master/slave relationship),  

 

the African had partially adapted to his new condition and acquired some tools of  

 

improvement. In other words, only under a European guide did the African learn how to  

 

work, how to make use of natural resources, and how to negotiate his barbaric nature. 

 

After emancipation, an interaction favoring what we call paternalism was laid  

 

onto the conditions of black/white relations. This interaction took the form of the “duty”  

 

one group had toward another. Goldwin Smith, for instance, was among those eminent  

 

Victorians who argued that it was the duty of the most gifted to pass-on their ingenuity  

 

and knowledge to less educated and gifted individuals and races. “By helping them on  

 

they help us and advance their own character in the highest sense;” writes Smith, “and  

 

that these exertions of benevolence may take place seems to be the reason why  

 

Providence permits such great inequalities in the world” (99). It became generally argued  

 

that most of what the African, once free, seemingly was able to do for himself actually  

 

came as a result of the contact zone and European benevolence.  Any trace of African  



 

 

186 

 

 

ingenuity was perceived as a result of contact with European races. The workings of this  

 

assumption, accepted by many mid-nineteenth century conservatives and liberals, were  

 

summarized through Smith‟s vision of England‟s relation to the world. Although Smith  

 

himself was referring to India, in “Expansion of England” he boasted that England was  

 

the harbinger and the cement of government. No form of civilized government was  

 

possible, many Victorians argued, without the presence and influence of the British. If  

 

England were to withdraw her presence and influence, Smith claims, “Not only would  

 

immense investments and a vast field of action be lost, but the country would be  

 

delivered over to a plundering anarchy. In the British provinces there would be no germ  

 

of government or rallying point of order” (526). Most nineteenth century commentators  

 

on British imperialism started from assumptions similar to the sentiments expressed by  

 

Smith. Smith‟s position also extended his idea of the value of imperialism in his belief  

 

that the West Indian population is better served by British rulers. “No doubt the best  

 

government for the mixed population, and the most likely to hold the balance of justice  

 

even between whites and blacks, is that of a British ruler to home opinion” (529). When  

 

Smith alludes to the centrality of British influence, he is essentially saying that  

 

civilization is made possible and endures only because of the genius of the white race.  

 

Smith and others, therefore, are suggesting that degrees of restraint (monitored by whites  

 

and carefully selected non-whites) are important for growth.  

 

Unlike Smith, who believed that emancipation had contributed to the elevation of  

 

the former slave in the British West Indies, Froude locates the conditions of emancipation  

 

as the principal source of what he perceives as the black‟s intellectual and moral  

 

stagnation. The conditions of freedom, the lack of restraint and the lack of systematic  



 

 

187 

 

 

influence, stifled black progress. According to Froude, “The African blacks have been  

 

free enough for thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, and it has been the  

 

absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming civilized. Generation has  

 

followed generation, and the children are as like their father as the successive generation  

 

of apes” (Froude 125). It was this lack of restraint, even in the mild forms of guidance,  

 

which seemed to have set in motion the atavistic nature of the African in Haiti and  

 

elsewhere.  

 

Froude participated in the discourse that argued that the physical and spiritual  

 

mediation of the European was what separated the African from accessing the savagery  

 

of his deeply embedded tropical nature. The structure of the colonialized African psyche  

 

seems to have been represented as comprising of three parts: 1) the original component  

 

was the dark African component, which almost always sought for violent and  

 

superstitious expression; 2) an unstable wall which represented the African‟s cognitive  

 

perception of the physical presence and teachings of the European, and 3) the  

 

Europeanized behavioral manifestations of civilization. By Europeanized behavioral  

 

manifestations, I mean the acquisition of taste, forms of dress, and other visible modes of  

 

conduct that was recognized as “civilized.” Before the formation of this psyche wall, the  

 

savage and wild inclinations of the African had free undirected expression. The  

 

benevolently traumatic events of the contact zone, slavery and diaspora, made it possible  

 

(though mostly through outside influence) for the African to regulate his urges. These  

 

inclinations remained dormant, though far from extinguished, as long as a wall held firm  

 

and protected the Europeanized elements (habits and inclinations developed as a result of   

 

contact with Europe). As long as that wall held firm, the peoples of African descent who  



 

 

188 

 

 

had been influenced by Europeans had an opportunity to advance onto the road to  

 

civilization. 

 

Moreover, it was the nature of blacks (for Haiti was the historical model) to  

 

corrupt and destroy the very European institutions which had held their barbaric  

 

tendencies in check. Carlyle, who had earlier also referenced Haiti as allegory and  

 

cautionary tale, posited the fate of the West Indies without a European presence. “[L]et  

 

him look across to Haiti,” writes Carlyle,  

 

and face a far sterner prophecy! Let him, by his ugliness, idleness, 

rebellion, banish all white men from the West Indies, and make it all one 

Haiti, - with little or no sugar growing, black Peter exterminating black 

Paul, and where a garden of the Hesperides might be nothing but a tropical 

dog-kennel and pestiferous jungle, - does he think that will for ever 

continue pleasant to gods and men? (675) 

 

In 1859, Anthony Trollope had written in the very popular The West Indies and the  

 

Spanish Main that “To recede from civilization and become again savage – as savage as  

 

the laws of the community will permit – has been to his taste. I believe that he would  

 

altogether retrograde if left to himself” (63). In Sports, Travel, and Adventure in  

 

Newfoundland and the West Indies, Captain Kennedy reiterates Trollope‟s claim about  

 

the strong connection between British institutions and civilized social practices. “I am of  

 

the opinion that the same ceremonies and orgies [cannibalism, infanticide, and Voudoux]  

 

would be practiced in Jamaica as in Haiti, were it not for the str ong arm of the  

 

law”(355). Froude‟s comments of the regressive tendencies of the African was an active  

 

component of colonial and racial discussion. By the 1880s, the idea of black regression  

 

was still circulating in popular journals. In “The Revival of the West Indies” (1883),  

 

Nevile Lubbock wrote that imagined hereditary attributes precluded civilization. “In  

 



 

 

189 

 

considering the effects of freedom upon the negro, the natural character of the race must  

 

be kept in mind,” he councils the readers of The Nineteenth Century. ”The negro has only  

 

for a short time been removed from a condition of the most complete savagery. He has  

 

immense physical strength united with the intellect and disposition of a child…. The very  

 

fact of his great physical strength stands in the way of the negro‟s intellectual progress”  

 

(1073-74). Furthermore, argues Lubbock, freedom without the wise restraint that is  

 

acquired through civilized maturity is detrimental to the moral and intellectual growth of  

 

the black man. “Absolute freedom, unaccompanied by the kind of restraint, is not good  

 

for man, and, in the case of the negro, who, like all other races upon whom civilization  

 

has only recently dawned, is in many ways but a grown-up child, it ought to be no matter  

 

of wonder that it has failed to produce the rapid amelioration which was anticipated by  

 

those who knew him not” (1074). In “The Future of the West Indies,” the writer for the  

 

Westminster Review seems a little more optimistic about the future of blacks in the West  

 

Indies, but this is because of the emphasis he places on the power of England. He writes  

 

that although it is “problematic” that blacks may “fall back into savagery,” Mr. Froude  

 

should remember that “the guardianship of the British Government” is a powerful  

 

preventative” (522). In an 1889 article that appeared in The Saturday Review entitled  

 

“Hayti,” the author argues that Haitians, once liberated and on their own, exhibit a  

 

particular mode of barbarism once European guidance is withdrawn.  

 

Here are a people who have been slaves and who are free, who have 

acquired so much of a European language as enables them to chatter the 

formulas of European speculators to all lengths and breadths. At the end of 

it all they have almost completely reverted to the condition of their naked 

ancestors who were marched on board the slave ships by those other 

ancestors of theirs who were clothed in a flint-lock musket, a cocked hat, 

and a bottle of rum. (233) 

 



 

 

190 

 

In other words, according to this Saturday Review writer “[t]he only use they have made  

 

of their freedom has been to return to their starting-point – and to return a little spoilt”  

 

(233). In the preface to the reprint edition of Hayti, or The Black Republic, Sir Spencer  

 

St. John writes that  

 

[i]n spite of all the civilizing elements around the Haytians, there is a 

distinct tendency to sink into the state of an African tribe. It is naturally 

impossible to foretell the effects of all the influences which are now at 

work in the world, and which seem to foreshadow many important 

changes. We appear standing on the threshold of a period of great 

discoveries, which may modify many things, but not man‟s nature. (ix) 

 

Also structuring the discursive playing-field in which Froude propagated his  

 

atavistic black subject was the belief that white blood was directly correlated to black  

 

intellectual and moral advancement. For many Victorians, white blood not only became  

 

regarded as a source that reversed intellectual and moral limitations and combatted the  

 

volatile nature of blackness, but the transformative power of white blood is seen to have  

 

created another race suited to the work required in tropical climates. Since the African in  

 

the West Indies or anywhere could not progress without the fertilizing influence of  

 

Caucasian biology, Trollope (perhaps in an attempt to excuse or erase white guilt) saw  

 

this occurrence as an act of providence which may eventually save the West Indies from  

 

the slide toward barbarism many Victorians had feared as the consequences of  

 

emancipation. “Providence,” writes Trollope,” has sent white men and black men to these  

 

regions in order that from them may spring a race fitted by intellect civilization; and  

 

fitted also by physical organization for tropical labour. The negro in his primitive state is  

 

not, I think, fitted for the former; and the European white Creole is certainly not fitted for  

 

the latter”(75). Livingstone argued that though it was the white biological energies that  

 

contributed to elevating the intellect of the person of African descent, the African element  



 

 

191 

 

 

in his blood is jealously atavistic and vies for expression. Livingstone writes that in  

 

mixed race persons “the intelligence of the one meets and amalgamates with the animism  

 

of the other, producing a strange nature, the good of which is perpetually forward to  

 

higher thing, and the evil, like an unseen hand, perpetually dragging it back to savagery”  

 

(7). The member of the new race, then, is never completely free of the African imprint in  

 

his psyche, thus reiterating the necessity of a pure white political and cultural presence. 

 

Froude negotiated the significance of white blood through his insistence that  

 

blacks in the British West Indies have two powers of example in which to emulate. These  

 

were Frederick Douglass of the United States and Chief Justice Williams Conrad Reeves  

 

of Barbados, who, in 1889, was appointed Knight of the Realm by Queen Victoria.  

 

Froude positioned these men as examples of what the African man can, perhaps within a  

 

hundred years of education and mentorship, achieve once his “natural tendencies are  

 

superseded by higher instincts” (125). According to Froude, 

 

Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglass of the 

United States, or the Chief Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of 

opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered them. 

But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give the negro as a 

body the political powers that we claim for ourselves, they will use them 

only to their own injury. They will slide back into their old condition, and 

the chance will be gone for lifting them to the level which we have no 

right to say that they are incapable of rising. (125-26) 

 

What Froude does in this passage, with these examples, is reiterates the notion of the  

 

power of white blood to improve the intellectual and moral constitution of the black man.  

 

White blood is the only component that separates Douglass and Reeves from the majority  

 

of blacks (pure-blooded) in the West Indies. Froude treats both men as pure blooded  

 

blacks rather than what was then socially codified as “coloreds,” a racial category distinct  

 



 

 

192 

 

from it parents. Through this strategy, he has subtle suggested that it is the white  

 

biological component that is responsible for the levels of creativity and intelligences  

 

witnessed in Douglass and Reeves. Their blackness, or Africaness, are not the focal  

 

points of Froude‟s address. In response to what was clearly an open secret of the cross- 

 

cultural consequences of colonial life and the ramifications of slavery in the United States  

 

and the West Indies, Thomas also reminds the reader in London that, “[f]irst and  

 

foremost, neither Judge Reeves nor Fred Douglass is a black man. The former is of mixed  

 

blood, to what degree we are not adepts enough to determine; and the latter, if his portrait  

 

and those who have personally seen him misleads us not, is decidedly a fair man” (135).  

 

In other words, Froude was very aware of tri-racial ascriptions (white, African/Negro,  

 

and colored) of the West Indies. Both literally and symbolically, the Douglass/Reeve  

 

example suggests that the un-deluded majority of blacks in the British West Indies are  

 

beyond the pale of full civilization. The only non-white group, however, capable  

 

intellectual elevation, then, was the coloreds. 

 

The African‟s own inescapable nature made it imperative for him to stay under  

 

the control of England. The African‟s happiness, Froude tells the middle class reader in  

 

England as well as those readers with influence in the Colonial Office, “depends on the  

 

continuance of the English rule. The peace and order which they benefit by is not their  

 

own creation. In spite of schools and missionaries, the dark connection still maintains  

 

itself with Satan‟s invisible world, and modern education contends in vain with Obeah  

 

worship. As it has been in Hayti, so it must be in Trinidad if the English leave the blacks  

 

to be their own masters” (98). Without the guidance the Carlylean great white enchanter,  

 

without perceiving the paternalistic hand of European restraints, the African instinctively  

 



 

 

193 

 

turns towards the potent darkness of his natural inclinations which are almost always  

 

barbaric and destructive. All of the unsubstantiated reports about Haiti confirm this  

 

atavistic tendency of the unmonitored African. “[T]heir education, such as it may be,”  

 

Froude says in general about “pure-blooded” blacks,” is skin deep, and “the old African  

 

superstitions lie undisturbed at the bottom of their souls. Give them independence, and in  

 

a few generations they will peel off such civilization as they have learnt as easily and as  

 

willingly as their coats and trousers” (286-87).                                                                                                        

 

3 

 

THE FROUDACIOUS FABLE TOLD THROUGH J.J. THOMAS 

 

At the beginning of this study we saw that Thomas Carlyle had responded to an  

 

observable conscious movement of manumitted slaves away from the influence of their  

 

former masters. In his own perverse way, Carlyle had unintentionally revealed the  

 

freeman‟s desire for autonomy. This desire for autonomy is significant, for acting on this  

 

desire contributed to the existence of the very community of West Indians Froude makes  

 

an effort to erase by omission from his text. “[E]mancipation,” Brereton tells us, removed  

 

“the legal basis of their servitude” and “opened up the possibility of upward mobility”  

 

(89). In response to this desire for upward mobility and autonomy, “numbers of ex-slaves  

 

and their children became petty traders and artisans after 1838”(89). That is to say that  

 

the former commodity and source of another‟s wealth now (through his/her own  

 

initiative) was positioned as competitor for material and cultural resources. Although,  

 

Brereton writes, most of them would not become prosperous, they knew that “they were  

 

better off than estate labourers, they were more mobile, and they were more ambitious for  

 

their children to go to school” (89).  This group “formed a „respectable‟, ambitious,  

 



 

 

194 

 

potentially mobile working class, and their children might well achieve the climb to  

 

middle-class status” (89).This is the group Carlyle brought to the attention of the British  

 

public as the lazy pumpkin eating Quashee. But even during the period in which Carlyle  

 

attacked black agency (which in effect revealed the Anglo-Victorian‟s desired  

 

relationship between the two races), it was argued that the African‟s natural impulses  

 

compelled him to slide backwards if unattended by European mediation. Any movement  

 

on the part of blacks away from the domination and influence of former masters was  

 

interpreted as a backward  march. European commentators were confident that they knew  

 

what the African was; and they all seemed to agree that the African‟s fate was a dark one  

 

without the European‟s physical, observable, legal and institutional presence.  

 

Froude, similarly, dismissed creative and progressive agency but he responded by  

 

also denying the existence and active presence of the particular community and  

 

generation of blacks of which John Jacob Thomas was a recognized and, by virtue of his  

 

education and cultural and scholarly achievements, prominent member. Therefore,  

 

Froude denies that the form of post-emancipation agency black British subjects had  

 

expressed during Carlyle‟s time had begun to evolve, take shape and materialize during  

 

his own time. Froude insisted on black stasis as the rule, thus suggesting that individual  

 

cases of advancement and intelligence were anomalies. According to Froude, “as yet, and  

 

as a body, they have shown no capacity to rise above the condition of their ancestors  

 

except under European laws, European education, and European authority, to keep them  

 

from making war on one another” (286). Absent from Froude‟s text is any indication that  

 

this middle class that he discursively silences was the source of great anxiety among  

 

Anglo-West Indians. In less than fifty years, the white population in the West Indies  

 



 

 

195 

 

watched the conscious evolution of a new cultural and economic entity. Faith Smith  

 

writes: “[a]s Blacks and Colored persons of urban and rural laboring-class origin such as  

 

Thomas began to enter the lower echelons of the middle class beginning in the mid- 

 

nineteenth century, they would participate in, and even be perceived to dominate, what  

 

counted as the intellectual character of the society” (34). The group that Carlyle  

 

bemoaned in 1849 was mostly composed of uneducated former slaves and the children of  

 

former slaves. Thomas was born in 1841, so essentially it was the cultural reality of his  

 

generation that was being denied an existence in Froude‟s representation of West Indian  

 

and Trinidadian society.  Moreover, between emancipation and Froude‟s arrival to the  

 

West Indies, measures had been taken in areas of education that gradually contributed to  

 

a black middle class. For example, the Ward school system was initiated in 1848 and J.J.  

 

Thomas was among the most prominent alumnus of that system. Blacks in the West  

 

Indies, as well as many blacks in Africa, were in agreement about the necessity of  

 

education. Thomas, Blyden, and most serious nineteenth century thinkers of African  

 

descent would have found it difficult to argued against the notion of England as the  

 

harbinger of civilization. However, the idea of England (to employ Goldwin Smith‟s  

 

phrase) as the singular “cement of government” meant that blacks and other non-whites,  

 

by their own ingenuity and unique genius, were incapable of forming and running  

 

nations, was the antithesis of what a self-made man like J.J. Thomas stood for and  

 

experienced.  

 

The open West Indian secret of the black middle class and of the “self-made” black  

 

British subject  complicates the substance and trajectory of Froude‟s ahistorical project.  

 

To admit of their existences would have exploded most of his case. Froude, in response  

 



 

 

196 

 

to a fact that refutes his argument, in effect consciously elides what he does not want his  

 

British reader to perceive by continuing with the circulation of the “ready-made”  

 

Manichean allegory and racial fetish of African savagery in an attempt to initiate the  

 

moral panic N. Darnell Davis calls “Haytia” (117,122). “Throughout Mr. Froude‟s tour in  

 

the British Colonies,” writes Thomas (who makes sure that the range of black life in the  

 

Trinidad is suggested), ”his intercourse was exclusively with „Anglo-West Indians,‟  

 

whose aversion to Blacks he has himself, perhaps they would think indiscreetly, placed  

 

on record. In no instance do we find that he condescended to visit the abode of any  

 

Negro, whether it was the mansion of a gentlemen or the hut of a peasant of that  

 

race”(46). Davis posits that “it is not from personal acquaintance with them [blacks] that  

 

he speaks of them. It has evolved from his inner consciousness, or told him by nameless  

 

slanderers, that they were tending towards Haytia”(Davis 117). In other words, Froude  

 

purposely ignored the emerging black middle class, and treated the entire undiluted  

 

majority (those without noticeable traces of Caucasian blood) of the African community  

 

as though they had not advanced beyond Carlyle‟s “pigs with pumpkins” (674) and  

 

“indolent two-legged cattle” (675) stages. This strategy of Froude‟s, mentioned earlier,  

 

was really directed toward the reader in England, because the Anglo-West Indian had a  

 

different experience of the group Froude ignored. According to Brereton,  

 

The white elite could easily ignore the black masses, for they encountered 

them only in stereotyped class relations. It was less possible to ignore the 

existence of the growing black and colored middle class. Educated black 

and coloured men and women had a claim, through their command of 

British culture and „respectability‟, to consideration as equals. They 

therefore represented a greater threat to the continued white control of the 

society, even though their numbers were relatively few; they held the key 

to the political and social future of Trinidad, and some far-seeing 

Trinidadians realized it.(62-63)  

 



 

 

197 

 

Elsewhere in the West Indies, other black British subjects had attempted to illustrate  

 

African agency and capacity for self-advancement as well as undermine the implications  

 

of the politically crippling myth of white blood. For instance, a group of Jamaican blacks  

 

that Deborah Thomas calls the Jubilee Five published and released in London a collection  

 

of essays that highlighted the achievements of blacks since the end of Apprenticeship in  

 

1838. Deborah Thomas writes that even before J.J. Thomas‟s Froudacity appeared in  

 

London, “The 1888 publication of Jamaica’s Jubilee; or, What We Are and What We  

 

Hope to Be was the first published work by black Jamaicans that codified a critique of  

 

racism” (26). The primary purpose of this publication was to demonstrate before “a  

 

British audience the progress of former slaves in Jamaica during the fifty years since  

 

emancipation and toward assuring them that blacks held no feelings of revenge” (26-27).  

 

Read in the light of what Froude had constructed about Haiti as illustration of African  

 

psychology, it was crucial that black British subjects composed phrases that distanced  

 

them from the consideration of violence. The writers of African descent, during this  

 

period, needed to distance their representations of the race relations from the Caucasian- 

 

hating atavistic constructions of Froude, Carlyle‟s Quashee, Dickens‟s “Noble Savage”  

 

and the Calibanistic “Shambo fellow” (240), Christian King George, of “Perils of Certain  

 

English Prisoners.” In doing so, the black writer assured the white middle class reader of  

 

Great Britain of the illusion that life in the West Indies was harmonious, peaceful, and  

 

that the events at Morant Bay were in no danger of revisiting the region. In regards to the  

 

cultural valorization of European blood, it was critically significant that all of the  

 

contributors to Jamaica’s Jubilee were of pure African stock. According to Deborah  

 

Thomas, the mixed-race members of the community were strategically   

 



 

 

198 

 

not invited to contribute to this volume because of the view that black 

Jamaicans would more forcefully reflect the impact of emancipation and 

missionary activity on the population of former slaves. In the preface the 

authors insisted that they should not be seen as exceptions within the race. 

Rather, they wanted the British public to know that there were many 

others like them who also would have been able to write the book. (n2, 26-

27)  

 

As evidence that black Jamaicans had advanced, and that they had acquired the self- 

 

discipline necessary for civilization, the authors of Jamaica’s Jubilee emphasized several  

 

areas which had seen accomplishments since emancipation. Among them, writes Deborah  

 

Thomas, were “[t]he increase in elementary schools after the abolition of slavery,” which  

 

“was cited as evidence of the former slaves‟ ability and desire to learn” (27). The Jubilee  

 

Five 

 

also placed great emphasis upon the increased number of mutual 

improvement societies, reading clubs, and Christian associations; the 

proliferation of musical and social gatherings during Christmastime; and 

the increase of legal marriages. They felt that this type of progress was due 

to fifty years of „social liberty and equality, of religious privileges, of 

educational advantages, and of intercourse in various ways with civilized 

and Christian men‟. (27) 

 

The members of this emergent group throughout the British West Indies were  

 

aware of the importance attached to the public display of having acquired the  

 

accouterments of the vague terms “culture” and “civilization.” Black and mulattoes  

 

shared and embraced most British values. Ideologically they held, except when the  

 

discussion turned to race, essentially the same views. To a great extent West Indian  

 

blacks measured themselves by European standards and worked to emulate European  

 

taste. Brereton writes that “[f]or the group that we call coloured and black middle class,  

 

command of European culture was the essential qualification for membership, rather than  

 

wealth and lightness of complexion. Few members of this group were even moderately  

 



 

 

199 

 

prosperous; quite a few were black, not coloured. But they all aspired to European  

 

culture” (5). The acquisition, then, of “European culture” produced for the people of  

 

African descent more symbolic capital than material gain. “They elevated „culture‟ into a  

 

supreme value because,” writes Brereton, “in the circumstances of nineteenth-century  

 

Trinidad, this was the only field in which they appeared at an advantage in society” (94).  

 

It was one of the few things blacks were able to hold up as an accomplishment, especially  

 

since education and higher forms of thinking were propagated by whites as being beyond  

 

their reach. As Paget Henry reminds us in Caliban’s Reason, “[i]n the European tradition,  

 

rationality was a white trait that, by their exclusionary racial logic, blacks could not  

 

possess” (12). However blacks were perceived in theory, Brereton also points out that  

 

“most members of this non-white middle class were employed in white-collor jobs; they  

 

were teachers, minor civil servants, journalist and printers, pharmacists, doctors,  

 

solicitors, barristers, and clerks. Education was the key to all these occupations, the  

 

crucial factor in the gradual emergence of a coloured and black middle class”(64).  

 

According to Brereton, “[i]t was in fact their boast that they were more „cultured‟ than  

 

the whites, whom they dismissed as being for the most part crassly materialistic and  

 

commercially minded. Hence the pride when a member of this group [for instance, J.J.  

 

Thomas] was recognized in Britain for his scholarly and literary attainments” (5). This  

 

latter group was very visible and Thomas and others contributed greatly to that visibility.  

 

As far as his confidence in the present-day advancements of blacks in Trinidad was  

 

concerned, Thomas was conclusive, unequivocal, and forthright:  

 

Taking our author‟s „Anglo-West Indians‟ and the people of Ethiopian 

descent respectively, it would not be too much to assert, nor too anywise 

difficult to prove by facts and figures, that for every competent individual 



 

 

200 

 

of the former section in active civilized employments, the coloured section 

can put forward at least twenty thoroughly competent rivals. (187) 

 

Like the members of the Jubilee Five, Thomas did not regard his intellectual  

 

capacity and desire for advancement as unusual. Brereton reports that it was difficult for  

 

observers not to notice the changed demographic character of the islands. He writes that  

 

on the appearance of the first issue of the Trinidad Monthly [which was 

edited and published by Thomas],  a newspaper commented „it is certain 

that the largest group in the community [non-whites] are in advance of 

some others in the matter of intellectual culture and literary endeavour‟. 

Another reviewer pointed out that the articles were nearly all by „self 

made men – to whom the inner walls of college and universities were 

unknown and who have had to battle inch by inch and step by step against 

difficulties and discouragements‟. So the journal indicated that „in the 

humbler walks of life there are men who without the advantages of 

European education… are able to hold their own against the best of them. 

These men could be Carlyle‟s heroes if only they belonged to a different 

race‟. (95) 

 

It was the implications and recognition of this particular social fact (at a moment in  

 

which the merit and wisdom of self-government in the West Indies were under  

 

discussion) that brought the greatest anxiety to the white landowners of Trinidad. The  

 

primary concern is that if the mother country were to acknowledge black advancement,  

 

then existing power relationships in the West Indian colonies were vulnerable and  

 

possibly open to challenge. According to Thomas, who certainly noticed the relationship  

 

between white anxiety and black advancement, “[s]ince emancipation, the enormous  

 

strides made in self-advancement by the ex-slaves have only had the effect of provoking 

 

a resentful uneasiness in the bosoms of the ex-masters” (7). Thomas‟s point is that blacks,  

 

unlike the Froudean Haitian template into which the race was placed, had proven that  

 

they were active participants of history, as well as producers of wealth and culture. In  

 

other words, blacks had responded to the demands of their post-emancipation  

 



 

 

201 

 

environment, and they were fit to participate (even partially) In the workings of  

 

government. This is what Thomas meant when he wrote: “be the incentives what they  

 

may, it would not be amiss on our part to suggest to those impelled by them that the  

 

ignoring of Negro opinion in their calculations, though not only possible but easily  

 

practiced fifty years ago, is a portentous blunder at the present time. Verbum  

 

sapienti”(126-27).  

 

For Thomas, comparisons between Haiti and Trinidad are deceptive and  

 

anachronistic if they fail to present and analyze events within their historical contexts.  

 

Attention to the behaviors of a people within a particular moment, Thomas suggests, can  

 

prevent the observer from generalizations about behaviors in another geographic location.  

 

As far as projecting the imagined behaviors of Haiti as the blue-print of African  

 

character,  Thomas says that “[w]e venture to declare that, unless a common education  

 

from youth has been shared by them, the Hamitic inhabitants of one island have very  

 

little in common with those of another, beyond the dusky skin or wooly hair” (48).  

 

Thomas suggests that there are large historical and phenomenological differences  

 

between the Haitians of the Revolution and the contemporaneous blacks of Trinidad. As  

 

Randal Johnson writes in his introduction to Pierre Bourdieu‟s The Field of Cultural  

 

Production, “Agents do not act in a vacuum, but in concrete social institutions governed  

 

by a set of objective social relation” (6).The blacks of Haiti, during the period of their  

 

self-emancipation, were negotiating the turbulence and inter-racial intrigues of a singular  

 

and unique historical moment. The demands of the moment, and the disposition of the  

 

actors at that point in history, influenced the dynamics of events. Thomas also brings the  

 

reader‟s attention to Froude‟s choice of Haiti as model, when the Republic of Liberia  

 



 

 

202 

 

seemed a more apt example of functioning newly formed African nation. “One would  

 

have thought,” Thomas had written early in Froudacity, 

 

that Liberia would have been a better standard of comparison in respect of 

a colored population starting a national life, really and truly equipped with 

the requisites and essentials of civilized existence. But such a reference 

would have been too fatal to Mr. Froude‟s object: the annals of Liberia 

being a persistent refutation of the old slavery prophecies which our 

author so freely rehearses. (11-12)  

 

Moreover, the revolution caused a symbolic disturbance in the perceptions of a  

 

historical relationship between the African and the European. Anglo-West Indian anxiety  

 

over the presence of the emergent black middle class resembles the symbolic disturbance  

 

caused by Haiti‟s successful revolution. Thomas‟s argument suggests that the  

 

circumstances and implications of that historical moment became the raw material and  

 

blueprint of Froude‟s black West Indian. However, the differences between the Haitian  

 

past and the Trinidadian present were too temporally profound for comparison.  

 

According to Thomas, “[t]he founders of the Black Republic, we had all along  

 

understood, were not in any sense whatever equipped, as Mr. Froude assures us they  

 

were, when starting on their self-governing career, with the civil and intellectual  

 

advantages that had been transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, we had been taught  

 

to regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which they so gloriously  

 

conquered their merited freedom”(10-11). These Haitians, at the point of their incipient  

 

national history, may have been free, but they were also, according to Thomas, “perfectly  

 

illiterate barbarians, impotent to the use of intellectual resources of which their valour  

 

had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit and technical details of a  

 

highly developed national existence” (11). The post-Revolutionary Haitians, in other  

 

words, had not access to the tools of civilization and government that blacks in the British  



 

 

203 

 

 

West Indies had studied and acquired since emancipation. Thomas seems to suggest that  

 

while the blacks of present day Trinidad had met, through schools and study, the  

 

demands of civilization, the abrupt circumstances that gave rise to revolt in Haiti  

 

precluded opportunities for similar forms of development. The historical moment, for  

 

Thomas, did not allow for it. In making his point in this way, which explodes notions of  

 

racial determinism, Thomas also attacks the Oxford historian‟s ahistorical approach to 

 

Afro-West Indian development.  

 

It is important to note that the fate of the mixed race population during and after  

 

the Haitian Revolution was well-known throughout the British West Indies. As part of the  

 

inter-racial intrigue experienced by Haiti, the mixed-race population has historically been  

 

situated as being complicit with either attempting to maintain French hegemony in Haiti,  

 

or with complicating the post-Revolutionary Haitian‟s endeavors toward progress,  

 

advancement, and development as a singular  and independent nation. Furthermore, the  

 

mixed-race/ mulatto population of Haiti has historically been represented as regarding  

 

themselves morally and intellectually superior to blacks, thus reiterating the very  

 

assumptions that caused the impositions of limits on the movement and aspirations of the  

 

majority of peoples of African descent. As a result of the tension between the hybrid and  

 

pure blooded groups, reports of the most gruesome forms of violence against the former  

 

were frequently circulated throughout the West Indies, the United States, and Great  

 

Britain. These stories were more sensational than actual; but the purpose of these tales  

 

was to show the “civilized” and Europeanized world an example of the eternal and  

 

natural animosity between the races and the extent newly freed blacks would go to  

 

express their hatred toward whiteness. Thomas, however, does not avoid contrasting the  



 

 

204 

 

 

historical animosity between blacks and mulattoes throughout the West Indies to his more  

 

liberal and cooperative presentation of modern Trinidad. Thomas writes that “We had  

 

learned also, until this new interpretation of history had contradicted the accepted record,  

 

that the continued failure of Hayti to realize the dreams of Toussaint was due to the fatal  

 

want of confidence subsisting between the fairer and darker sections of the inhabitants,  

 

which had its sinister and disastrous origin in the action of the mulattoes in attempting to  

 

secure freedom for themselves, in conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice of their  

 

darker-hued kinsmen” (11). Thomas exploits this component of the legend of the Black  

 

Republic to call attention to what he wants his reader to believe about the sense of  

 

fellowship currently existing between blacks, mulattoes, and many whites in Trinidad. In  

 

other words, he wants the reader in London to believe that Trinidad of 1888 does not  

 

share the same wide-spread intergroup distrust which had been seen between the  

 

mulattoes and blacks in Haiti. Getting across this sense of interracial cooperation was  

 

important because Thomas believed in reform and, at least, “semi-representative  

 

government in Trinidad” (“An Estimate” 34). According to Brereton, “[a]n essential part  

 

of the Reformer‟s argument was that there was in Trinidad a community of educated,  

 

propertied men, mainly white but also black and brown, who would cooperate with each  

 

other to exercise the franchise responsibly and intelligently. These men were worthy of  

 

the vote because they would work together for common ends regardless of differences of  

 

race and colour” (“An Estimate” 34). To show that this vision of present-day Trinidad  

 

actually existed, “Thomas depicted as a reality what any right-thinking person might have  

 

wished to see: intelligent men who could transcend race and colour in everyone‟s  

 

interests” (“An Estimate” 34). Early in Froudacity, he described Trinidad society as 



 

 

205 

 

 

“free, educated, progressive, and at peace with all men” (11). This sense of a unified  

 

West Indian community is reframed in terms of reforms: “The demands for reform in the  

 

Crown Colonies – a demand which our author deliberately misrepresents – is made  

 

neither by nor for the Negro, Mulatto, Chinese, nor East Indian. It is a petition put  

 

forward by prominent responsible colonists – the majority of whom are white, and mostly  

 

Britons besides” (147).  

 

Thomas recognized that in all aspects of black subjectivity, Froude was  

 

attempting to place the race into a template created by white anxiety and desire, and to do  

 

so Froude masks the existence of an educated class behind the fantasy and garb of  

 

barbarism. The reification of this fantasy may have prevented many Victorians from  

 

gaining knowledge about actual social life in the West Indian colonies. But the  

 

demystification of the black legend, with a portrait of actual lived experiences in the  

 

West Indies, also posed a threat to one‟s perception of self as central to the maintenance  

 

of “civilization.” The realization of the African as historical agent may have been  

 

Froudacity‟s greatest contribution to an understanding of Afro-Victorian racial discourse.  

 

For it is a direct response not only to one text, but to the entire system of thinking that  

 

relentlessly held onto the idea of European centrality and the immanent limitations of the  

 

Other.  

 

CONCLUSION 

 

The language of Afro-Victorian discourse, whether behavioral or literary, is  

 

always a response to the limiting narrative generated by influential segments of a  

 

dominant group. It is a language and an act of agency. What makes it an act of agency is  

 

1), it is self-reflective and 2), it consciously challenges the fidelity of the dominant  



 

 

206 

 

 

narrative‟s attempts at identity formation. In most cases, it is a conscious attempt to bring  

 

to the public stage what peoples of African descent interpret as the motivations of the  

 

group generating the dominant narrative. It‟s behavioral and artistic manifestations are  

 

always attempts to communicate a shared essential humanity with members of the  

 

dominant community. The insistence on this shared essential humanity, and on the  

 

cultural acquisitions that accompany recognition of this shared essential humanity, is, in  

 

the eyes of many practitioners of the dominant discourse, what makes Afro-Victorian  

 

discursive practices dangerously Calibanistic. However parochial, it was their public  

 

representation of themselves as agents that posed the challenge to the Carlylean- 

 

Prosperoic White Enchanters.  

 

J.J. Thomas‟s Froudacity is an example of a black Victorian discursive product  

 

that describes the very phenomena which the dominant narrative attempts to make  

 

invisible. Through Thomas‟s text we see how an emergent and existing black middle  

 

class structures the colonialized monster in Froude‟s The English in the West Indies. In  

 

other words, the complete negation of Thomas‟s historical agent and emergent cultural  

 

elite gives structure, form, and substance to Froude‟s atavistic and Haitianated black  

 

British subject.  

 

In Caliban’s Victorian Children, I have argued that social and discursive practices  

 

expressed by peoples of African descent should be interpreted as acts of agency against  

 

the exclusionary and limited trajectory of Victorian racial discourse. In this study I have  

 

also suggested that we look at Victorian racial discourse as a response to the lived agency  

 

of the other. My intentions are not merely to foreground the discursive practices of  

 

peoples of African descent, but to also encourage us to take a closer look at the dialectical  



 

 

207 

 

 

tensions between actual behavior and the behavior as represented. That is, my intension is  

 

to have us look closer at the behavior being analyzed and silenced, to investigate how the  

 

writings of those whose desires are reformed and silenced, and then show how those  

 

particular behaviors and texts contributed to the construction of the dominant narratives.  

 

The question I have asked myself throughout this study is: what, after placing the literary  

 

and discursive products of the Other besides that of a representative (or group of  

 

representative) dominant text, phenomena is being made invisible or dismissed?  

 

Racialized representations, such as the ones generated midway through the nineteenth  

 

century, were attempts to mask and erase indications of historically responsive agency  

 

with the belief that the racial Other was a prisoner and victim of his own nature.  

 

Consciousness and agency get obscured by the discussion of instinct and primitivism.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

208 

 

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