Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle. Paula Byrne
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For my godson Dominic
Contents
1 The Girl in the Picture
2 The Captain
3 The Slave
4 The White Stuff
5 ‘Silver-Tongued Murray’
6 The Adopted Daughters
7 Black London
8 Mansfield the Moderniser
9 Enter Granville Sharp
10 The Somerset Ruling
11 The Merchant of Liverpool
12 A Riot in Bloomsbury
13 A Visitor from Boston
14 The Zong Massacre
15 Gregson v Gilbert
16 Changes at Kenwood
17 The Anti-Saccharites
18 Mrs John Davinier
Appendix: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Connection
1. The double portrait (By kind permission of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace)
2. Captain Sir John Lindsay, Dido’s father (Burrell Collection, Glasgow)
3. ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade’, by Isaac Cruikshank (Private collection)
4. Still life with meat, kettle, cup, sugar loaf and sugar lumps, by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)
5. Elevations of the north and south fronts of Kenwood House, and the interior of Lord Mansfield’s Library, by Robert and James Adam
6. Lady Mansfield, Dido’s adoptive mother, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (By kind permission of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace)
7. Detail from ‘Four Times of the Day: Noon’, by William Hogarth (Private collection)
8. William Murray, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo (Kenwood House, courtesy of English Heritage)
9. Granville Sharp, by George Dance (Frontispiece to Prince Hoare’s Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 1820)
10. Report of the Somerset case (In T.B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20, 1816)
11. Wedgwood anti-slavery pendant (Kenwood House, courtesy of English Heritage)
12. The Gordon Riots, 1780 (Private collection)
13. ‘Caen Wood in Middlesex, Seat of Earl of Mansfield’, engraving by James Heath, after a drawing by Richard Corbould (Private collection)
14. The Zong: slaves being thrown overboard (Courtesy Everett Collection/REX)
15. Mansfield as Lord Chief Justice, engraving after a portrait by Reynolds (Private collection)
16. Dido Belle, amanuensis to the Lord Chief Justice (The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, by kind permission of the Treasurer and Masters of the Bench of Lincoln’s Inn)
17. ‘Anti-Saccharrites’, by James Gillray (Private collection)
18. The marriage of ‘John Davinie’ and Dido Elizabeth Belle (Westminster City Archive)
19. Eastwell Park (Private collection)
1. The Double Portrait
A portrait from the late eighteenth century, it depicts two beautiful young girls. The white-skinned, fair-haired one in the foreground sits on a large, green, high-backed bench, and is dressed in pink silk with intricate lace trimmings. She has a garland of pink flowers in her hair and a double strand of pearls around her neck. She is holding a book. She is reaching out to the girl behind her, taking her arm as if pulling her into the frame. She hardly needs to do so, as the eye is drawn irresistibly to this other girl, with the high cheekbones and the enigmatic dimpled smile.
The girl