Robert Burroughs
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594748 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Burroughs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Burroughs |
| SIGNATURE | BURROUGHS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leeds Beckett University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8048-1312 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
S.J. Celestine Edwards
In the 1890s, a Dominican named S.J. Celestine Edwards (1858–94) became the first black editor of a British periodical. In fact, he edited two. Having established himself as a popular speaker in east London, where he defended Christianity against rising atheistic belief, in August 1892 he created a weekly newspaper promoting the Christian Evidence movement, titled Lux. The following July, he took over the editorship of the Society for Recognition…
Autographs, Autobiography, and Black History in Britain
This article utilises a recent discovery of a textual trace of black people’s self-representation in Edwardian Britain. It concerns an autograph book, currently kept in private hands, bearing entries by black students who attended the African Institute, Colwyn Bay, in around 1905. This short text speaks to the difficulty of accessing private writings and self-representations by black people who lived in Victorian- and Edwardian-era Britain. Thoug…
Black Students in Imperial Britain
This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known Black people’s experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or ‘Congo House’, at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism…
The Redeemed Life of Lena Clark, Christian Missionary in the Congo Free State
I give an account of the development of church and humanitarian activity in Leopold II’s Congo Free State as it shaped the life of a Congo-born woman, Lena Clark. In her movements between Africa, Europe, and America, and in and out of mission service, Lena Clark’s life captures the motivations, frustrations and ironies of religious and humanitarian interventionism in the Congo. Circumstances surrounding her controversial departure from missionary…
The Racialization of Gratitude in Victorian Culture
Gratitude was racialized in Victorian culture. Drawing on a wide historical framework, which takes in eighteenth-century proslavery arguments as well as twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourses, I explore how Victorian-era texts placed demands upon enslaved, formerly enslaved, and colonized peoples to feel thankful for their treatment as British imperial subjects. My article ranges over contexts and academic debates, and surveys nineteenth-…
The Nautical Melodrama of Mary Barton
In his Memoirs of an Unfortunate Son of Thespis (1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan's School for Scandal that was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russ…
Weirdfarangthing
Notes1 Alex Garland, The Beach, London: Penguin, 1997, pp 163-164. I would like to thank James Collinge and two anonymous reviewers for instructive comments on a draft version of this article.2 Roger Bowen, ‘Journey's End: Conrad as Revenant in Alex Garland's The Beach’, Conradiana 39(1), 2007, pp 39-57, p 45.3 Garland, The Beach, p 19.4 For example, John Hatcher, ‘Lonely Planet, Crowded World: Alex Garland's The Beach’, Studies in Travel Writing…
Sailors and Slaves
Journal Article Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama Get access Robert Burroughs Robert Burroughs 1Leeds Metropolitan University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1 December 2011, Pages 305–322, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2011.611693 Published: 01 December 2011
The travelling apologist
May French Sheldon was one of a handful of travellers to the Congo Free State who denied the accuracy of other travellers’ reports of widespread atrocities in the colony. This article analyses how these travelling apologists wrote about themselves and their journeys in their pro-Congo reportage, and it considers the reception of that reportage among anti-Congo agitators in Britain. It finds that, to undermine the travelling apologists’ claims, Br…
Eyes on the Prize
Eyewitness accounts of voyages in slave ships seized as prizes during the Royal Navy's anti-slave-trade patrols were an important source of information and subject of discussion for abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century. In a close reading of the chaplain Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill's Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel (1844), this essay assesses representations of slave-ship prize journeys, and responses to these re…
Imperial Eyes or ‘The Eyes of Another Race’? Roger Casement's Travels in West Africa
In 1894, long before his famous humanitarian investigations in the Congo Free State and the Putumayo region of Amazonia, Roger Casement wrote four accounts of his travels in West Africa as an employee of the Niger Coast Protectorate administration. These manuscripts have regularly been overlooked in research of Casement. In a close reading of these texts, which combines contextual information with literary theories of travel writing, this essay g…
[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’
(2009). ‘[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’: Kru seafaring identity in British travellers’ accounts of the 1830s and 1840s. Journal for Maritime Research: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 51-67
In Conrad’s Footsteps
Travel writing about Central Africa in English reverberates with the language of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . This essay considers how that canonical text, in shaping twentieth‐century travellers’ understandings of Central Africa and the travel genre, also shapes literary critics’ understandings of the same subjects
Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence
Composing Standards and Composing Teachers
This article considers whether National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification may be as much an evaluation of a teacher's writing about his or her teaching as it is an evaluation of the teaching itself. The experiences of two NBPTS certification candidates are explored. As a theoretical background, an analysis of writing difficulties in NBPTS portfolio entries is performed. The candidates' experience with the certificati…
Creating Community and Coherence in High School Literature Curricula
Studies how experienced teachers of literature created a sense of continuity and coherence in a curriculum over relatively long periods of time. Finds that although the classrooms created a stable set of domain conventions, similarity in broad topics and goals within the curriculum masked great diversity at the level of classroom practice
Eyes on the Prize
Eyewitness accounts of voyages in slave ships seized as prizes during the Royal Navy's anti-slave-trade patrols were an important source of information and subject of discussion for abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century. In a close reading of the chaplain Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill's Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel (1844), this essay assesses representations of slave-ship prize journeys, and responses to these re…
[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’
(2009). ‘[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’: Kru seafaring identity in British travellers’ accounts of the 1830s and 1840s. Journal for Maritime Research: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 51-67
Sailors and Slaves
Journal Article Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama Get access Robert Burroughs Robert Burroughs 1Leeds Metropolitan University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1 December 2011, Pages 305–322, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2011.611693 Published: 01 December 2011
Creating Community and Coherence in High School Literature Curricula
Studies how experienced teachers of literature created a sense of continuity and coherence in a curriculum over relatively long periods of time. Finds that although the classrooms created a stable set of domain conventions, similarity in broad topics and goals within the curriculum masked great diversity at the level of classroom practice
Composing Standards and Composing Teachers
This article considers whether National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification may be as much an evaluation of a teacher's writing about his or her teaching as it is an evaluation of the teaching itself. The experiences of two NBPTS certification candidates are explored. As a theoretical background, an analysis of writing difficulties in NBPTS portfolio entries is performed. The candidates' experience with the certificati…
Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence
In Conrad’s Footsteps
Travel writing about Central Africa in English reverberates with the language of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . This essay considers how that canonical text, in shaping twentieth‐century travellers’ understandings of Central Africa and the travel genre, also shapes literary critics’ understandings of the same subjects
Imperial Eyes or ‘The Eyes of Another Race’? Roger Casement's Travels in West Africa
In 1894, long before his famous humanitarian investigations in the Congo Free State and the Putumayo region of Amazonia, Roger Casement wrote four accounts of his travels in West Africa as an employee of the Niger Coast Protectorate administration. These manuscripts have regularly been overlooked in research of Casement. In a close reading of these texts, which combines contextual information with literary theories of travel writing, this essay g…
[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’
(2009). ‘[T]he true sailors of Western Africa’: Kru seafaring identity in British travellers’ accounts of the 1830s and 1840s. Journal for Maritime Research: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 51-67
The travelling apologist
May French Sheldon was one of a handful of travellers to the Congo Free State who denied the accuracy of other travellers’ reports of widespread atrocities in the colony. This article analyses how these travelling apologists wrote about themselves and their journeys in their pro-Congo reportage, and it considers the reception of that reportage among anti-Congo agitators in Britain. It finds that, to undermine the travelling apologists’ claims, Br…
Eyes on the Prize
Eyewitness accounts of voyages in slave ships seized as prizes during the Royal Navy's anti-slave-trade patrols were an important source of information and subject of discussion for abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century. In a close reading of the chaplain Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill's Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel (1844), this essay assesses representations of slave-ship prize journeys, and responses to these re…
Sailors and Slaves
Journal Article Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama Get access Robert Burroughs Robert Burroughs 1Leeds Metropolitan University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1 December 2011, Pages 305–322, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2011.611693 Published: 01 December 2011
Weirdfarangthing
Notes1 Alex Garland, The Beach, London: Penguin, 1997, pp 163-164. I would like to thank James Collinge and two anonymous reviewers for instructive comments on a draft version of this article.2 Roger Bowen, ‘Journey's End: Conrad as Revenant in Alex Garland's The Beach’, Conradiana 39(1), 2007, pp 39-57, p 45.3 Garland, The Beach, p 19.4 For example, John Hatcher, ‘Lonely Planet, Crowded World: Alex Garland's The Beach’, Studies in Travel Writing…
The Nautical Melodrama of Mary Barton
In his Memoirs of an Unfortunate Son of Thespis (1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan's School for Scandal that was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russ…
The Racialization of Gratitude in Victorian Culture
Gratitude was racialized in Victorian culture. Drawing on a wide historical framework, which takes in eighteenth-century proslavery arguments as well as twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourses, I explore how Victorian-era texts placed demands upon enslaved, formerly enslaved, and colonized peoples to feel thankful for their treatment as British imperial subjects. My article ranges over contexts and academic debates, and surveys nineteenth-…
Black Students in Imperial Britain
This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known Black people’s experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or ‘Congo House’, at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism…
The Redeemed Life of Lena Clark, Christian Missionary in the Congo Free State
I give an account of the development of church and humanitarian activity in Leopold II’s Congo Free State as it shaped the life of a Congo-born woman, Lena Clark. In her movements between Africa, Europe, and America, and in and out of mission service, Lena Clark’s life captures the motivations, frustrations and ironies of religious and humanitarian interventionism in the Congo. Circumstances surrounding her controversial departure from missionary…
Autographs, Autobiography, and Black History in Britain
This article utilises a recent discovery of a textual trace of black people’s self-representation in Edwardian Britain. It concerns an autograph book, currently kept in private hands, bearing entries by black students who attended the African Institute, Colwyn Bay, in around 1905. This short text speaks to the difficulty of accessing private writings and self-representations by black people who lived in Victorian- and Edwardian-era Britain. Thoug…
S.J. Celestine Edwards
In the 1890s, a Dominican named S.J. Celestine Edwards (1858–94) became the first black editor of a British periodical. In fact, he edited two. Having established himself as a popular speaker in east London, where he defended Christianity against rising atheistic belief, in August 1892 he created a weekly newspaper promoting the Christian Evidence movement, titled Lux. The following July, he took over the editorship of the Society for Recognition…
History (11 works) · History (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Ancient history (6 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Travel Writing and Literature (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)