American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture

Audrey Fisch’s study examines the circulation within England of the people and ideas of the black Abolitionist campaign. During the 1850s, African-Americans and others active in the campaign to abolish slavery, journeyed to England to present the slave experience and rouse opposition to American slavery. By focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an anonymous sequel to that novel, Uncle Tom in England, and John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia, and the lecture tours of free blacks and ex-slaves, Fisch follows the discourse of American abolitionism as it moved across the Atlantic and was re-shaped by domestic Victorian debates about popular culture and taste, the worker versus the slave, popular education, and working class self-improvement. Despite its popular appeal, she claims, the African-American abolitionist campaign actually re-energised English nationalism. This book will be of interest to students of African-American literature, and nineteenth-century American and English literature.

• Innovative and widely researched study of an important area • Hits three markets: African-American studies, American Literature, English Literature • Should interest historians of the period as well as literary scholars

Introduction: Communicating ‘a correct knowledge of American slavery’: J. B. Estlin and the ‘breeder’ in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative; 1. ‘Exhibiting Uncle Tom in some shape or other’: the commercialisation and reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in England; 2. Abolition as a ‘step to reform in our kingdom’: Chartism, ‘white slaves’, and a new ‘Uncle Tom’ in England; 3. ‘Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing’: the ideological work of American slave narratives in England; 4. ‘Negrophilism’ and nationalism: the spectacle of the African-American abolitionist; Epilogue: ‘How cautious and calculating?’: English audiences and the impostor Reuben Nixon.