Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Debbie Lee
in the coolly ironic twenty-first century, but at the time it seemed just the opposite, and it is exactly what fueled both Romantic writing and abolitionist writing. Who else, but someone who thought he or she could make a difference, would publish the large-scale claims found in John Wilson’s “On Reading Mr. Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade”:
Before him lay a quarter of the world,
A mighty land, wash’d by unnumber’d floods,
Born in her bosom,—floods that to the sea
Roll ocean-like, or in the central wilds
Fade like the dim day melting into night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
That he by Heaven is chosen to restore
Mercy on earth, a mighty conqueror
Over the sins and miseries of man.
The work is done! The Niger’s sullen waves
Have heard the tidings,—and the Orient Sun
Beholds them rolling on to meet his light
In joyful beauty.64
Yet despite this grand enthusiasm for global change through poetry, what became increasingly clear was that influential writing had to take up important issues at the same time it had to depart from stale forms and stereotypical images. By the early nineteenth century, so many discourses were saturated with the topic of slavery that writers were hard-pressed to come up with different ways to write about it. In 1809, James Montgomery commented that there was simply no “subject so various and excursive, yet so familiar and exhausted, as the African Slave Trade,—a subject which had become antiquated, by frequent, minute, and disgusting exposure, which afforded no opportunity to awaken, suspend, and delight curiosity, by a subtle and surprising development of plot; and concerning which public feeling had been wearied into insensibility, by the agony of interest which the question excited, during three and twenty years of almost incessant discussion.”65 Coleridge had said exactly the same thing a year earlier, in 1808. In his review of Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, Coleridge explains how slavery’s tenacious hold on the nation ensured that other political events never eclipsed it in power and intensity. He writes: “The nation, throughout city, town, and village, was only not unanimous: and though the almost weekly explosion of new events, all of them more or less directly affecting the interests of Great Britain, drew away their attention, or deadened their zeal, for a time, as to this great subject, yet it was only necessary to proclaim the same facts anew—and the same zeal was rekindled, the same sense of duty felt and expressed by all classes” (SWF, 1:236).66
Given the pervasiveness of the slave issue in the Romantic era, I hope to show in the following chapters how Romantic writing—creative works that concerned themselves with the imagination—took up this issue in more oblique and thus more terrifying ways, as in Coleridge’s 1798 poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” with its grimly repetitive “Alone, alone, all, all alone” and its unbearable burden of guilt. Writers like Coleridge took great care to subtly, not brazenly, embroider their poetry with topics that had been treated with ideological righteousness or soggy sentimentalism in most of the literature of the day. Keats felt the same way, as he said in 1818: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”67 Shelley, too, remarked that when poets explicitly try for a moral aim, “the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to avert to this purpose.”68 Thus, while Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and other writers whose works we continue to read, did write about the African and slave presence, they avoided, in Keats’s words, putting a “palpable design” on their readers. Since the topic had been made so explicit for so long, such writers considered it most powerful when least obvious, most familiar when most unfamiliar, and truly intimate when seemingly distant.
2
The Distanced Imagination
I
It seems obvious that British Romanticism should be interpreted in the context of the debate on slavery. For one, they share exact dates. British Romanticism, as conventionally defined, begins somewhere in the 1780s (with Blake’s publications) and ends somewhere between 1832 (with the passing of the Reform Bill) and 1850 (with Wordsworth’s death). The slave question occupied this same period. The first protests against slavery in Britain, initiated by the Quakers, took place in the 1780s, and these led to a massive effort to abolish the slave trade in the 1790s.1 It was not until 1807 that Parliament outlawed the slave trade, after which followed an even more passionate debate for the emancipation of slaves in the colonies. Although the Emancipation Act was passed in 1833, it did not come into effect until 1834, and then it included a clause regarding apprenticeship that delayed official emancipation until the 1840s.
But beyond sharing dates, slavery and Romanticism are concerned with similar themes. Certainly, one cannot bring the greatest imaginative literature of the period together with the greatest moral question of the age without noticing a common vocabulary of terms like “slave” and “master,” “tyranny” and “oppression.” Nor are these terms used sporadically in Romantic poetry: they appear with startling regularity. For instance, images of freedom and its British opposite, slavery, are mentioned throughout Blake’s poetry, in lines like “the slave grinding at the mill / And the captive in chains,” from The Four Zoas.2 Likewise, Mary Wollstonecraft frequently designates women as “slaves” in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Men, she writes, “will endeavour to enslave woman:—and who can tell, how many generations may be necessary to give vigour to the virtue and talents of the freed posterity of abject slaves?”3 Both Byron and P. B. Shelley use the idea of slavery in their lyrical dramas. In Byron’s Manfred (1817), Manfred himself asks the witch, “Obey? And whom? The spirits / Whose presence I command—and be the slave / Of those who served me? Never!” (2.2:158–60). Throughout Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley explores the irony and injustice of slavery. In one striking instance, Asia asks Demogorgon a question about the dialectic of mastery and slavery, “Declare / Who is his master? Is he too a slave?” (2.4: 108–9). Also, Mary Shelley regularly employs the terms “slave” and “tyrant” in exchanges between the monster and Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein.
Although many of these writers may seem to be using the terms “slavery” and “freedom” in abstract and even universal ways, in the sense that everyone is a slave to something and seeking freedom from it, the terms are, in fact, grounded in the historical specificity of the transatlantic trade and plantation slavery, the stories of which surrounded these writers. This study sets out to demonstrate, in detail, just how this is so. In some cases, the historical specificity of slavery is there in clear view, as in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” (1798).4 Coleridge writes,
Like a cloud that travels on,
Steamed up from Cairo’s swamps of pestilence,
Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth
And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs,
And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint
With slow perdition murders the whole man,
His body and his soul! (47–53)
Romantic writing operates within the context of slavery, certainly, but what is the relationship between slavery and freedom in the poetry? On one level, Romantic works celebrate a kind of personal freedom that stands in alarming contrast to slavery. This is perhaps expressed most clearly in Coleridge’s 1794 “Religious Musings,” where he refers to the depths of slavery and then celebrates the expansive and diffusely free British imaginative self:
The whole one Self! Self that