Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Debbie Lee
upon him. The woman, says Park, “stopped to observe me, and perceiving that I was weary and dejected, inquired into my situation, which I briefly explained to her; whereupon, with looks of great compassion, she took up my saddle and bridle, and told me to follow her.”52 She and her daughters feed Park, and then sing to him:
The winds roared, and the rains fell.—The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree.—He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man; no mother has he, &c. &c.53
Park’s narrative is filled with modest moments of compassion, and words like “unexpected kindness,” “hospitality,” and “benefactress” are scattered throughout the pages of his narrative describing his encounters with Africans. His book thus made readers, who were trained to think of African-European encounter in terms of slaves and masters, imagine Africans in new ways.
For this, and other reasons, the narrative was an instant literary classic, necessitating two more editions after an initial sellout and German, French, and American editions by 1800.54 Park’s observations on Africans were also used by scientists, other explorers, and poets. They were the subject of a play called “Mungo’s Address,” a song by the duchess of Devonshire called “A Negro Song from Park’s Travels” and a poem by Felicia Hemans. James Montgomery quoted Park in his popular abolitionist poem of 1809, The West Indies, and Mary Russell Mitford celebrated the narrative itself in “Lines, Suggested by the Uncertain Fate of Mungo Park”: “Oh! When secure in Albion’s happy land, / He trac’d his dangers with recording hand.”55 After Park, poets portrayed Africa as a place through which the hidden depths of the self could be imagined.
But the imaginative use of Park differed from the political use of him. On 25 May 1799 Banks told the African Association that Park had “opened a Gate into the Interior of Africa into which it is easy for every nation to enter and to extend its Commerce and Discovery from the West to the Eastern side of that immense Continent.” If Britain did not “possess” itself of the “Treasures” of Africa discovered by Park, “some Rival Nation” soon would. Chief among those treasures was gold, which Park had seen traded as dust. “Science,” Banks stated, “should teach these ignorant savages that Gold which is Dust at the mouth of a river must be … in the form of Pebbles when near the place from whence it was originally washed.” He also thought Britain should send troops up the Niger to secure the gold reserves: five hundred, supported by artillery, would overcome “the whole Forces which Africa could bring against them.”56 In the end, Britain sent out a more modest expedition. Park led it; he was supported by a troop of soldiers and together they shot their way along until, weakened by disease and ambushed by the Africans, they most likely drowned in the Niger.
Given this fact, it is not surprising that today, among historians and literary critics, Mungo Park and his exploration of Africa are viewed in the same light as African slavery, as a shameful legacy. Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, features Mungo Park as one of the key agents of empire, written about through the myth of “anti-conquest.” According to Pratt, “Park’s book owes much of its power to [its] combination of humanism, egalitarianism, and critical relativism anchored securely in a sense of European authenticity, power, and legitimacy.”57 Ashton Nichols, in an article dedicated to Mungo Park, also sees Park’s journey as intimately tied to the language of domination. He writes: “At a time when British, like European, self-definition had been destabilized in so many ways—political revolutions, social and economic restructuring, class anxiety—Park’s Romanticized Africa, and the subsequent romanticization of Park’s own life by Europeans, contributes in important ways to the creation of the discourse of the colonizing culture that would soon ‘dominate’ the globe.”58
IV
Both African exploration and the antislavery movement coincided with the rise of print culture. While people consumed slave products—tobacco, rum, steel, cotton, indigo, mahogany, coffee, and the addictive white substance, sugar—the vast majority knew about Africans and slaves only through written accounts. From the 1780s onward, the British presses issued millions of pages in the form of parliamentary debates and newspaper columns, sermons and speeches, poems and novels and stage performances, medical tracts and anatomical inquiries, African travelogues and West Indian histories. Legislative debates were often printed in the papers—Gentleman’s Magazine, for instance, regularly printed the debates, such as the Fifth Session in 1788, which included an open discussion of the revenue produced from the slave trade. It was talked about publicly in the streets—John Bidlake’s “The Slave Trade: A Sermon” preached at Storehouse Chapel in December 1788, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lecture on the Slave Trade given in Bristol in June 1795. Antislavery discussion and propaganda took many forms—James Montgomery’s long poem The West Indies (1809), Monk Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre (1798), Maria Edgeworth’s novel Grateful Negro (1804), William Cowper’s ballad “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788), paintings such as Fuseli’s The Negro Revenged (1806–7) and Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), religious tracts such as John Newton’s Thoughts on the African Slave Trade (1788), narratives such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), travelogues like Mungo Park’s, and medical treatises like Letters and Essays on [diseases] of the West Indies (1787). The debate also impinged upon works of natural history and science like Charles White’s Account of the Regular Gradations in Man (1799) and James Cowles Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813), as well as histories such as Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) and Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808). Each of these genres is more complex than any neat categorization could suggest; they overlap and intertwine to make slavery and African exploration two of the most ubiquitous topics of the era.
Because of changes in print culture and the literary marketplace, many of these writers regarded themselves as having global importance and world-historical influence.59 As literary historians Jon P. Klancher and William G. Rowland Jr. have shown, a profound shift took place in the early nineteenth-century writer’s sense of audience. What made the Romantic period special in this sense, writes Klancher, was that “perhaps for the last time, it was still possible to conceive the writer’s relation to an audience in terms of … a personal exchange of power’ between writer and reader.” Romantic audiences lived in a “moment of transition,” where people’s sense of themselves as individual readers was constantly combined with their sense of being part of a larger audience.60 Klancher says that writers of the British Romantic period shifted between the sense of a personal audience and of a massive audience that they had never met. This could give them either a sense of power or a feeling of despair. Rowland, extending Klancher’s idea, argues that Romantic writers’ activity “forced them to confront a general feeling of their epoch, sometimes called alienation and sometimes called modern selfhood.”61 “The romantic elevation of the self,” writes Rowland, “had its darker counterpart in bourgeois despair, the widespread feeling that individuals can do nothing to change a monolithic social order, composed as it is of a ‘mass’ of people and the attendant uncontrollable, inexplicable forces.”62 Yet even with this dark alienation closing in on them, Romantic writers clung to the belief that their work had had the force of change. Nowhere is this more strenuously or more eloquently articulated than in Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads:
In spite of the difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things gone silently out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (W Prose, 1:141)
The present-day American poet Michael Ryan observes that “by imagining the audience to be permanent and universal instead of immediate and particular, [Wordsworth] awards the poet a larger, lasting, more important role in ‘the vast empire of human society,’—far beyond Britain in 1800.”63
What we also have to remember about the writers of this period and