the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists of all ages.38
The discrepancy between the social and moral hierarchies was also a concern of the eighteenth-century novel. Although it is often regarded as a bourgeois art form it is much more concerned with the landed classes than with the business world. Eighteenth-century novelists explored the social relationships of the aristocracy and gentry rather than those of the middle classes. Insofar as they dealt with concerns of those below the landed elite they tended to discuss professional men—the clergy, doctors, lawyers and soldiers—rather than merchants and manufacturers.
Until the 1790s novelists did not generally attack the landed elite per se. On the contrary, while they castigated landlords who abused their privileged position, they held out the prospect of their heroes and heroines acquiring elite status as a desirable goal. Under the impact of the French Revolution, however, novels began to appear which challenged the desirability of identifying with aristocracy as such. In Gothic novels aristocrats were depicted as exploiters of their position in society in order to exert social and psychological terror over their inferiors. The most notorious of these figures was Montoni, the tyrannical Italian nobleman of Anne Radcliffe’s sensational Mysteries of Udolpho. He was but the archetype of Gothic villains in this popular genre. Jacobin novels were even more explicit in their condemnation of aristocrats. Godwin’s Caleb Williams castigated not just individuals who failed to live up to the patriarchal ideals of aristocracy but the very system itself which sustained the landed elite in its position.
Writers in the late eighteenth century did not, however, espouse bourgeois values to offset those of the aristocracy. On the contrary they deplored the increasing urbanisation of the century’s closing decades and advocated a rural rather than an urban way of life. In the incipient class war associated with industrialisation they tended to sympathise with the poor against their new exploiters, the industrial entrepreneurs. The early Romantics thus anticipated the debate on whether the social impact of the Industrial Revolution had been more detrimental than beneficial, a debate which still can divide historians into optimists and pessimists. The Romantic view was definitely pessimistic.
William Cowper anticipated the Lake poets in many ways in his poem The Task, and not least in deploring the way men had lost sight of Nature in cities which “breathe darkness all day long.” The celebrated Preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1798 criticised “the increasing accumulation of men in cities.” As for the impact of industry, Blake’s condemnation of “dark satanic mills” is well known, though it can be disputed whether it refers to factories or mental processes. A less equivocal critique of industrialisation came from Robert Southey who, writing about the increase in poverty in his Letters from England (1807), claimed that
many causes have contributed to the rapid increase of this evil . . . . But the manufacturing system is the main cause; it is the inevitable tendency of that system to multiply the number of the poor, and to make them vicious, diseased and miserable.
He illustrated these propositions by getting the fictitious author of the Letters, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, to visit a Manchester cotton mill. It employed two hundred hands, including small children. The mill owner assured Espriella that they were well treated. “Here Commerce is the queen witch,” observed the Don, “and I had no talisman strong enough to disenchant those who were daily drinking of the golden cup of her charms.” For in Southey’s view the reality was very different. Debauchery, disease, ignorance and poverty were prevalent. The employees either died of diseases inherent in their environment,
or they live to grow up without decency, without comfort and without hope, without morals, without religion, and without shame, and bring forth slaves like themselves to tread in the same path of misery.39
LITERARY CONDEMNATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE
The comparison of workers with slaves was highly charged in the year 1807, which saw the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. That had come about remarkably quickly following a campaign which really got going only twenty years before. Previously there had been isolated condemnation of slavery and the traffick in Africans which had been echoed in literature. Even John Dyer, whose poem The Fleece enthused about commerce, drew the line at the slave trade. Lawrence Sterne wrote a critique of the treatment of Africans by Europeans in the last volume of Tristram Shandy. While he was working on it he received a letter from Ignatius Sancho, the Duke of Montagu’s black butler. Ignatius wrote: “I am one of those people whom the illiberal and vulgar call a nigger.” He had read and admired Tristram Shandy and also Sterne’s Sermons. One sermon in particular, “Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life Considered,” had impressed him because of what he called a “truly affecting passage” on slavery. “Consider slavery—what it is,” Sterne observed in it, “how bitter a draught! and how many millions have been made to drink of it.” Sancho asked Sterne to write further on the subject, which “handled in your own manner, would ease the yoke of many, perhaps occasion a reformation throughout our islands.” Sterne obliged by including a passage in the ninth volume of Tristram Shandy in which Corporal Trim asks Uncle Toby, doubtingly, if a negro has a soul. Toby replies: “ ‘I suppose God would not leave him without one, any more than thee or me’ . . . ‘Why then, an’ please your honour, is a black wench to be used worse than a white one?’ ‘I can give no reason,’ said my uncle Toby. ‘Only,’ cried the Corporal, shaking his head ‘because she has no one to stand up for her.’ ‘’Tis that very thing, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘which recommends her to protection—and her brethren with her; ’tis the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now—where it may be hereafter, heaven knows.’ ”40
“In 1776 Adam Smith wrote the economic death warrant for slavery,” observes David Shields in one of the few investigations of the literary response to the campaign to abolish slavery.
In a passage that became quasi-scriptural among abolitionists during the 1800s, Smith declared that “the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of all. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible.”41
Shields notes “the formation in the 1770s of a school of poets whose members included William Cowper, John Marjoribanks and Hannah More” who took up the cause of slaves. He also singles out James Field Stansfield’s The Guinea Voyage as “the rhetorical horizon of anti-slavery poetry.”42 In it Stansfield imagines the African being handed over to a slave ship.
Confin’d with chains, at length the hapless slave,
Plung’d in the darkness of the floating cave,
With horror sees the hatch-way close his sight—
His last hope leaves him with the parting light.
Historians have lately stressed the economic rather than the evangelical causes behind the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.43 The literary response to the campaign, however, appealed more to the hearts than to the purses of readers in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.
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