Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (review)

Entitled "Family Worship in a Plantation in South Carolina," the cover illustration for Tim Watson's impressive study was reproduced in the Illustrated London News in late 1863 as a way of casting a nostalgic glance at American plantation society before the "bloody Civil War" on the one hand and Caribbean slavery pre-emancipation on the other (1). Especially relevant for Watson's purposes is how the illustration's "real" dimensions compete with the romantic gloss the editors seek to impose on it. For it turns out that the black man preaching to his fellow slaves and the ostensibly benevolent white master at the center of the congregation (and the image) depicts not a pre-Civil War scene but Port Royal in 1861 during its occupation by the Union Army when Northern missionaries—including the one depicted in the illustration, a master of a markedly different kind—were introduced for purposes of converting and instructing the soon-to-be former slaves.

Watson's incisive treatment of the illustration serves as a compelling entrée into the book's central focuses. In the nineteenth century, writers from distinct locations across the British Empire gauged their relationship to a deeply embedded set of social and cultural dynamics between Britain and its Caribbean colonies by drawing alternately on the conventions of romance and realism in their texts—fiction, but also plantation logs and diaries, court testimonies, print media, travel writings, and uncertain objects such as rebellion-laced placards—for authority and support. Watson urges us to take seriously the Caribbean's important if little appreciated influence on British society and culture writ large in the nineteenth century. Across the study's chapters Watson argues compellingly for the importance—both in a romantic and a real sense—of peripatetic Black politico-religious figures like the Port Royal preacher depicted in the book's cover illustration.

Drawing on scholarship on slavery and genre by Ian Baucom and others, the study's chief analytic is most sharply defined and developed in the first two chapters, which take up writings shaped by and responsive to the debates leading to emancipation in the 1830s. Leaders of the plantocracy such as the notorious Jamaican Simon Taylor wrote in the mode of "creole realism," presenting themselves as possessive of "qualities of reasonableness and enterprise" to defend against attacks drawn in the language of "gothic melodrama and tropical romance" by abolitionists bent on exposing the violence and excess of plantation society (11). Conversely, when novels such as Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) deployed a "metropolitan" realism that rendered illegitimate efforts of Creole realists like Taylor (11), his cultural inheritors—including Charles White Williams for whom Watson makes a compelling case as the author of the anonymously published gothic novel Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827)—adopted an "imperial" version of romance in order "to memorialize the impending loss of the world of the plantocracy" (12). Within such imperial romances, ironically, we begin to glimpse "the enslaved Jamaicans themselves, the real creoles … and the world to come after emancipation in the 1830s" (12).

If the real/romance paradigm allows Watson to manage an otherwise unwieldy array of genres and texts, some readers might yearn for greater precision and consistency in the use of that paradigm across the book's second half, which examines works authored during the post-emancipation period and focused especially on events surrounding the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and its aftermath. Given, moreover, the extensive critical genealogies of the study's key terms, readers might wonder whether Watson understands the influence of Caribbean culture on British romance and realism to be like or unlike the shaping influence of gender and sexuality concerns, of developments in technology and visual culture, or of related colonial cultural sites like India—topics about which scholars in Victorian studies have had much to say. Perhaps we might properly regard such...