Why are we ‘cancelling’ Ted Hughes for his ancestors’ sins?

In life as in death, the poet Ted Hughes became the object of ferocious criticism by those who blamed him for the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Now he has even less reason to rest in peace, for his name has been added, with his fellow writers Lord Byron, George Orwell and Oscar Wilde – as well as Cardinal Manning and Sabine Baring-gould, the author of such popular hymns as Onward, Christian Soldiers

– to the British Library’s list of “figures associated with wealth obtained from enslaved people or through colonial violence”.

The library’s aim in compiling this list is to further its “commitment to become an actively antiracist organisation”. It draws much of its information from the database of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slaveownership, based at University College London.

This is an important and necessary field of study, but what exactly are we being told by the British Library’s list? The site acknowledges that, in Wilde’s case, “no evidence was found” of tainted legacy; in Orwell’s, “the money had run out” by his father’s time. As for Hughes, the dodgy money had vanished by 1624, when his distant relation, Nicholas Ferrar, lost a fortune in the Virginia Company. Ferrar retired to a life of prayer, philanthropy and bookbinding in the Huntingdonshire village of Little Gidding.

Hughes was proud of his Ferrar ancestry: he and Sylvia Plath named their son Nicholas Farrar Hughes (spellings of the name vary). We may conclude that their choice was an acknowledgment of Ferrar’s role in preserving for posterity the work of his friend, the metaphysical poet George Herbert, who gave Ferrar the manuscript of his English poems on his deathbed, telling him to burn it if he thought it unworthy of publication.

It is the moral duty of every generation to interrogate the legacy of the past: from that often painful enquiry, great reforms are born. But part of that interrogation is context. When reading Diana Mosley’s elegant and affectionate pen-portraits of her friends Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, the composer Gerald Berners and the novelist Evelyn Waugh in her 1985 book, Loved Ones, it is undoubtedly relevant to know that she was married to the Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, in Goering’s drawing room.

But it is harder to see what clarity is offered by the British Library’s naming of Hughes and his fellowauthors, not least since its list is riddled with omission, insinuation and factual error. Orwell’s “links” to colonialism are traced through his grandfather, rather than his own employment in the Indian Imperial Police, which he later self-laceratingly anatomised in his writing. Byron is condemned by association: the poet who died fighting for Greek independence against the colonialist Ottoman Empire apparently “associated with many slave owners during his lifetime”. More troubling still is the entry for the gentle priest Sabine Baring-gould, whose entry gives not his own biography, but his father’s (though no doubt he, too, would be damned by association).

Language, as we know from the cancellings of social media, is a powerful tool, and as our national custodian of language and literature, the British Library occupies a position with heavy responsibilities. All the more reason, then, for it to bear in mind Stalin’s dictum: “Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”