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  • Maria Edgeworth’s “Grateful Negro” and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery
  • George E. Boulukos*

When a sympathetic character in Maria Edgeworth’s 1804 story “The Grateful Negro” wishes that “there was no such thing as slavery in the world,” one sees why critics take Edgeworth for an “abolitionist.” 1 However, to read this line as “abolitionist,” or as antislavery, one must take it out of the context of the paragraph, of the story, and of the late eighteenth-century British slavery debate. In fact, Edgeworth’s speaker here, the good planter Mr. Edwards, moves quickly from his abolitionist “wish” to a resigned, “reasoned” support for slavery. The line continues:

but he was convinced, by the arguments of those who have the best means of obtaining information, that the sudden emancipation of the Negroes would rather increase than diminish their miseries. His benevolence, therefore, confined itself within the bounds of reason. He adopted those plans for amelioration of the state of the slaves which appeared to him most likely to succeed without producing any violent agitation or revolution. 2

Here, Mr. Edwards takes a position much like that of the planter, Bryan Edwards, whom Edgeworth acknowledged as her primary source of information about slavery and the British West Indies.

This misreading of Edgeworth’s stance on slavery is not merely a sign of the small effort that has been made to understand and contextualize an author on the margins of the canon; it also reflects a mistaken assumption about the nature of antislavery writing. The established account of antislavery links it to the broader “humanitarianism” and “sentimentalism” of late eighteenth-century British culture. 3 As this story goes, sentimental humanitarianism—and the deeper social forces causing it—led inevitably to the end of slavery. Antislavery and sentimentalism were, together with free-labor ideology, the triplet offspring of Capitalism and Bourgeois Ideology as the couple entered its fecund adulthood. The consensus behind this story is surprising—literary and historical scholars, on both the left and the right, subscribe to it, differing primarily in tone and evaluation. On the left, the triplets are understood as the malevolent agents of their parents, helping to bring about the shift to an oppressive “bourgeois society”; on the right, they are presented as the cherubic, smiling faces of middle-class benevolence and progress.

The problem with this consensus is that, in whiggish haste to show the onward movement of history, it misrepresents the complexities of British thought about slavery in the two crucial decades at the turn of the century. In retrospect, such distortions—stemming primarily from a lack of attention to positions other than the extremes of the slavery debate—may seem unimportant, because the story accounts for the coming of emancipation so neatly. However, accepting emancipation [End Page 12] as inevitable suggests a curious helplessness regarding social problems: if positive changes like the end of slavery were inevitable, does this mean that we should passively await the end of problems that have remained with us, such as racism and poverty?

I will argue that Edgeworth’s attempt to re-imagine slavery as humane is actually part of a minor tradition deploying sentiment to support slavery. Still, hers is a “moderate” position, self-consciously placing itself between two extremes, striving for a middle ground between “wishing” for the immediate end of slavery and total acceptance of plantations as they are, and remaining ambiguous about the slave trade. I will read Edgeworth’s position on slavery by contextualizing her story “The Grateful Negro” with sentimental works apologizing for slavery such as Bryan Edwards’, and in so doing I hope to recover a neglected, but important, moment in the history of British representations of slavery.

In “The Grateful Negro,” Edgeworth envisions slavery made palatable: she imagines it reformed in the image of wage labor. The key to her reform is bringing slaves to accept their condition voluntarily, to see it as in their interests, and to accept it much as a free laborer theoretically accepts a contract. The good planter Mr. Edwards broaches the question of the difference between slaves and wage laborers directly: “granting it to be physically impossible that the world should exist without rum, sugar...

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