The Polite Fictions of Slavery

British Anti-slavery in the 1830s

Bibliographic Data

ID23488161
AuthorsJ Shields (0000-0001-6953-4666, corresponding author)
Year2024
Pages127-146
Publication date2024-06-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueNineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781009268486.007
OpenAlexW4399194730
ISBN9781009268486
LanguageEN
References cited17

This chapter explores the transformation of British responses to slavery during the 1830s through the writing of Frances Trollope. In this decade, Britons declared the abolition of colonial slavery as proof of their superior morals and impeccable manners. Trollope’s travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1838) participated in the reconstruction of racism as a peculiarly American form of bad manners. Although Black women are virtually absent from Domestic Manners , Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is notable for its range of Black female characters and its frank exploration of the sexual exploitation to which enslaved women were subjected. Trollope’s belated acknowledgement of the gendered effects of enslavement reflects the sensational impact of the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831). Trollope reveals a historic kinship and complicity between Great Britain and the United States as slaveholding nations. The reception of Prince’s History among British abolitionists who did not want to acknowledge this complicity demonstrated how well-intentioned good manners could function as a form of racism.

Art · Linguistics · Politeness · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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