Still, Adam Lively’s point is well taken. Against such an ignoble system as slavery and the imperialism that followed African exploration, how are we to address the literature of early-nineteenth-century white middle-class Britons with all we now know about the effects of this history? How can we do anything but submit to a rhetoric of blame or, at the very least, a cautious examination of the possible ruptures in these necessarily complicit British texts? There is, after all, ample evidence in Romantic texts to characterize the writers as being complicit with empire or anxious about its effects on others, and even more to suggest they sought to question the workings of empire, including slavery and the racial prejudices that have lingered long after its demise. Blake is a prime example. In “A Song of Liberty” that concludes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake dramatically declares: “Empire is no more!” Yet this same “Song of Liberty” contains some shockingly racist stereotypes that Blake must have known were crucial to the extension of empire: a call to the Jew to “leave counting gold!” and to the African to alter his facial characteristics: “O African! black African (go. winged thought widen his forehead).”18
Though such discrepancies sear nearly every poem, this is not surprising, at least according to Toni Morrison, in her stunning explanation of the African presence in the American literary imagination. In Playing in the Dark (1992), Morrison argues that blackness permeates the literary imagination in America, even in works where we least expect to find it. A writer’s response to African presence may be “encoded, or explicit,” she says, but in any case it “complicate[s] texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely.” The African presence “serve[s] the text by further problematizing its matter with resonances and luminations.” Linguistic responses, most intriguingly, “provide paradox, ambiguity; they strategize omissions, repetitions, disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence. In other words, they give the text a deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly present to us.”19 The African presence, likewise, shaped the British Romantic imagination. Because slavery was such an intimate part of the imagination, writers produced works so distinct that an entire literary period formed around them.
In the broadest sense, this book asks: what is the relationship between the artist and the most hideous crimes of his or her era? In dealing with the Romantic period, the question has to be: what is the relationship between the nation’s greatest artists and the epic violence of slavery, described so astutely by Coleridge in 1808 as “the wildest physical sufferings” combined with “the most atrocious moral depravity” (SWF, 1:218). The answer is varied, at best, but one of the things Romantic works chronicle is the death of Romantic illusions in the face of slavery. In fact, many of these writers suggest that the enormous violations of their era can only be met with absurdly small acts of recompense, such as the blessing of water snakes in “The Ancient Mariner.” Yet key Romantic works like “The Ancient Mariner,” Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Lamia, “The Witch of Atlas,” Frankenstein, and Lyrical Ballads, which seem impossible to lay aside even after we have finished reading them, also deliver something larger: an inquiry into the nature of empathy.
PART I
History and Imagination
1
British Slavery and African Exploration
The Written Legacy
I
In 1816, the British government began pressuring colonial legislatures in the Caribbean to be more accountable for their African populations.1 At this time, the colony at Berbice started keeping a “book of minutes” recording the complaints of slaves, which were then published by Parliament and distributed throughout Britain. These records are unique. For in the midst of a turbulent controversy on slavery by virtually all classes of British citizens, the voices of slaves were now to be found within official government discourse. Though the words of slaves were written down by British officials and were often in the third person, the fact that they appear at all says something about the significant shift taking place during this period between African slaves and British masters.
Among these complaints, the case of “Tommy” stands out.2 On 9 February 1819, Tommy appeared before the fiscal (judge) of the colony to state his case. Tommy, a carpenter by trade, belonged to a man named Fraser of the Gladstone Hall plantation. Fraser used Tommy to repair sugar casks. On the day in question, Tommy had gone to the boiling house to fetch some nails for his day’s work, where he met another slave who was “heading up sugars.” Tommy and the other slave apparently spoke casually for a few minutes. Before he left, Tommy walked over to one of the casks and “took a lump of sugar for the purpose of sweetening three gallons of water” for his personal use. He put the sugar in his apron, along with some rusty nails. While employed repairing sugar casks, Tommy explained to the fiscal, he was in the habit of keeping old nails that he would later use to repair his hut. But as he was coming out of the boiling house, Tommy met Fraser, his “owner.”
For his part, Fraser reported that he had bumped into Tommy and immediately noticed “a big bulge” in his apron. Fraser demanded closer inspection. Tommy opened his apron revealing, in Fraser’s words, “a great quantity of sugar and nails mixed together.” Fraser accused Tommy of theft, a crime that most plantation owners considered an insidious form of resistance. Fraser then proceeded to have Tommy tied to the ground and flogged one hundred times, sixty-one more than the legal limit.
In his complaint, Tommy did not deny taking the sugar and rusty nails. If anything, he adamantly affirmed his “theft.” What he objected to was the flogging. Yet when the fiscal asked Tommy to expose his back and posterior to the court, Tommy’s body showed only a few faded marks. The fiscal questioned Tommy on this inconsistency, and he explained that “he had been favoured by the drivers, who threw the whips over him,” therefore completely missing his body with the whip. Since the case itself did not come to any conclusion because Tommy openly admitted to taking the sugar and rusty nails, and he similarly acknowledged that he had not been flogged, the logical question is: what is it doing here?
Although the legal center of Tommy’s case is the number of lashes he was supposed to have gotten, the moral center rests on the objects of the theft: sugar and rusty nails. In this way, Tommy turned the actions of the British, not of the slaves, into a crime. British guilt rested in the crime of excessive flogging, but also in the crime of withholding from slaves the products of their labor. British plantation owners could only make this kind of criminal confusion because they were “distant”—in the sense that they were indifferent to how they treated others. Tommy draws attention to this distance with a subtle vengeance by bringing his case into the rhetorical arena of human rights. He insists on the right to food (sugar to sweeten his water); to shelter (rusty nails to repair his hut); and to ownership of his own body (a restriction on flogging). He demands a say in defining his own humanity to British lawmakers. Through a simple story of sugar and rusty nails, he asks readers and listeners of this case to feel for the humanity of slaves. Tommy and the other slaves who speak through these records ask not for a cursory acknowledgment of their humanity but for a deep awareness of their experience. That they did so in a form that was recorded in the government’s official discourse indicates that the British people in the colonies, or in Britain for that matter, could no longer distance themselves from the violence of slavery as they had done for nearly three hundred years.
But how did this brutally distant attitude occur in the first place? Part of it stemmed from slavery’s geography. From the perspective of the average Briton, slavery had always been an institution situated in the faraway colonies. In fact, the most famous case in the history of the institution—that of James Somerset—was an effort to keep slavery physically distant. In 1771, nearly half a century before Tommy’s complaint, the slave James Somerset was ordered to appear before Judge