Poetic backlash
John Vincent discovers how a genteel lady’s illustrated verse for children helped to end the slave trade.
Caught in the cross-hairs of protesters in these most censorious of times are those figures from Britain’s past who prospered from slavery. Scores of memorials and tributes to slave traders, colonialists and those regarded as racists have been removed since Edward Colston’s statue was torn down in Bristol nearly a year ago.
What has been forgotten, or ignored, by some is Britain’s role in ending the trade – abolishing slavery throughout the Empire in 1833 as the climax of a campaign first mooted by the younger Pitt in 1787 and pursued thereafter by numerous ardent social reformers, particularly the Quakers and evangelical politician William Wilberforce. Britain’s abolition came, incidentally, 32 years before America followed suit in 1865.
One vociferous abolitionist was Norwich-born physician’s daughter Amelia Opie, née Alderson (1769-1853), a poet, novelist and playwright. Now a rare and slightly battered first edition copy of her illustrated anti-slavery poem, The
Black Man’s Lament, published in 1826, has surfaced at a Bonhams sale, where it realised £1,400.
Designed from its inception for the juvenile market, the hand-coloured, wood-engraved illustrations depict such images as slave ship quarters, men boiling and cooling sugar, filling casks, clearing weeds and being beaten. The opening woodcut shows a child signing a petition to end the trade and the poem relates the story of an African man’s capture, his journey to the West Indies on a slave ship and forced labour on sugar plantations.
One particularly emotive picture shows an exhausted slave being whipped after collapsing from exhaustion. Below it is the verse:
But woe to all, both young and old, Women and men, or strong or weak, Worn out or fresh, those gangs among, That dare the toilsome line to break. Opie worked with Anna Gurney (17951857) to create a Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Norwich and her name was first on a petition signed by 187,000 people presented to Parliament. She also attended an Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 but, as a woman, was refused permission to speak. After a visit to the Norfolk seaside resort of Cromer, she caught a chill, took to her bed and died a year later on December 2, 1853.
The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, a rare example of legislation running counter to Britain’s economic and financial interests, freed more than 800,000 slaves. Less well remembered is that it cost the nation £20m to compensate slave owners, 40 per cent of its budget and equivalent to £20bn today. The vast loans the Government took out to fund it were finally paid off only in 2015.
The hand-coloured illustrations depict such images as slave ship quarters.