Dark Victorians (review)

"For the first time in my life," wrote Harriet Jacobs of her 1845 visit to England with her employer, "I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion." Travelling in the same year Frederick Douglass exchanged "'the bright, blue sky of America' for 'soft grey fog,'" writing: "'instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government' yet 'I breathe, and lo! The chattel becomes a man'" (qtd. in Dickerson 60). This was, perhaps, a high point in what Vanessa D. Dickerson calls "black America's romance with Victorian Britain" (4). Douglass's ironic sense that such freedom could be experienced under monarchy is further heightened by its context. The hungry forties in Britain provoked dismay at the decline in revenues from the West Indian colonies in the wake of the abolition of slavery and a concomitant rise in racial thinking. The antislavery sentiments of Douglass's hosts and most of his audience were not, as Dickerson notes, universally shared by other Britons, as the latter's firsthand reports of slavery in the United States make clear.

Dark Victorians sets out to map the complicated cultural transactions between African Americans and Victorian Britain, encounters that involved both actual travellers and those whose transatlantic journeys occurred in the imagination only. Drawing usefully on pioneering studies by R. J. M. Blackett, Christine Bolt, and Douglas A. Lorimer, as well as more recent research by Paul Gilroy and others, Dickerson argues that both categories of travellers had imaginative as well as pragmatic investments in what they found. The book opens with the accounts and activities of British observers: Frances Trollope's indifference to the plight of slaves stands in striking contrast to her friend and companion Fanny Wright's utopian project to educate free blacks and whites together in Nashoba. Through figures like Captain Frederick Maryatt and the phrenologist George Combe, Dickerson shows how easy it was for some Britons to remonstrate against the institution of slavery while believing equally strongly in African inferiority. An interesting orchestration of visitors' views, this discussion would have profited greatly from a more extensive treatment of abolitionist Harriet Martineau's complex, provocative account of slavery in the United States in her two popular travel books from the 1830s. It ends instead with a long account of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous antislavery poem, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1848), which adds little to, and does not seem to draw on, recent critical and historical treatments of the poem.

When Dickerson focuses on African-American visitors to Britain, she offers a judiciously balanced account of their presence in Britain. Dark Victorians highlights the kind of opprobrium that antislavery activists encountered from fellow passengers on board ship and in the American press, as well as the hospitality and celebrity they often enjoyed in Britain. Foreign travel and the encounter with what in contrast seemed like a racially tolerant society sharpened the conflicts of identity for African Americans, whether former slaves or free men and women of color, in which a natural affection for "home," its physical geography and affective ties, was always accompanied by anger and loathing at the racial violence suffered there. Dickerson argues that the lecture tours across Britain and other activities of black activists from Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Ida B. Wells, and others, not only garnered support for antislavery and anti-racist causes abroad, but heightened the reputation and visibility of African-American professionals in the United States. We get a vivid snapshot of the thoughts and impressions of the relatively small numbers of African Americans who made this journey to campaign, study, and live in Britain, but a more blurred and incomplete picture of the complex political and social background, in particular the strong pro-South as well as abolitionist sentiments that existed in Britain in the lead-up to the Civil War, and the rising tide of homegrown racism that extended from Britain's own abolition of slavery through the end...