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Modernism/modernity 11.2 (2004) 353-354



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Black Victorians/ Black Victoriana . Gretchen Gerzina, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Pp. 222. $62.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).

Black Victorians/ Black Victoriana is an arresting title. After all, nineteenth-century Britain is, through oversight as much as by design, commonly imagined to have been an African-free zone. The relative dearth of scholarship on the topic is in marked contrast to the abundance of monographs and historical studies about the eighteenth century. Distinguished black authors of the 1770s and 1780s such as Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano have had their writings reissued as Penguin Classics. Contemporary black poets and novelists—among them Fred D'Aguiar, Sweet Thames (1992) and S. I. Martin, Incomparable World (1996)—have produced work that draws heavily on the Georgian period.

It's common to cite demographics as the main reason for the lack of interest in the "black nineteenth century." After Abolition in 1807 far fewer men and women of African descent disembarked at England's ports. Those who already lived in the country intermarried. Many of them lived in conditions of poverty and died young. It's hardly surprising if those academics who are interested in issues of race and ethnicity in this period tend to scratch around in the margins of canonical novels—Edward Said on Jane Eyre , for instance—or to look at topics such as scientific racism and racial taxonomy, rather than to attend to questions concerning the lives of real black Victorians.

How pleasing it is then to be able to welcome a new collection of essays, edited by Gretchen Gerzina, that attempts to redress this very imbalance. Framed against a series of backdrops—the campaign to end slavery in the United States, the growing ascendancy of race theory and the Scramble for Africa in the final third of the century—the volume has been divided into three sections: "The Black Victorian Experience in Britain," "Transatlanticism and the Migration of Black Victorians," and "Representations, Conceptualizations, and Discourses of Black Victorians."

The first section contains essays on Sally Bonetta Forbes, an eight-year-old girl given to Queen Victoria as a present by the king of Dahomey, and an exploration of the mixed-race heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1913), composer of the hugely popular "The Song of Hiawatha." But its highlight is historian John M. Turner's biography of William Darby (1796-1871). Known to contemporaries as Pablo Fanque, he was one of the most celebrated circus proprietors of the era. So famous in fact that he crops up in the lyrics of "Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite!" on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967):

There will be a show tonight on trampoline
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque's Fair—what a scene
Over men and horses hoops and garters
Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!

Fanque moved around the country, particularly across the North of England, but he wasn't an itinerant or a pedlar; he belonged to the boss class. His was a profession in which blacks more commonly worked as jugglers and gymnasts and lion-tamers. He was unusual, but he wasn't exotic. Turner tells us that local mayors and clergymen loved him. His success led the Reverend Thomas Horne to claim in 1905: "In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour-line." (36)

The second section comprises three essays about visitors to Britain: African envoys of the 1880s and 1890s; Ida B. Wells who came in 1893 and 1894 to campaign against lynching in the States; and Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who served in the Crimea, and who is sometimes dubbed the "black Florence Nightingale." For Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, that Seacole seeks [End Page 353] to claim "the seemingly intangible notion of 'fame,' something that can be held only by individuals, underscores her aspiration to construe herself as a modern subject" (81).

The third section, on representations, is perhaps the most intriguing. Michael Pickering, in "The Blackface Clown...

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