I once almost got into a fight with a Beefeater in the Tower of London when I dared suggest that Shakespeare might have been wrong about Richard III killing off his nephews. Shakespeare’s version of the story has become enshrined as something “everybody knows.” And “everybody knows” is a problem if you want to get something right.
I was thinking about this while re-reading Black London,* a terrific and fascinating book by Gretchen Gerzina about the history of Africans in England. Early in the book Gerzina tells of going into a bookstore looking for material about people of color in London. The saleswoman told her, with a touch of asperity, that everyone knew that there were no blacks in England prior to the end of WW II.
In fact, there were so many blacks in England during the reign of Elizabeth I that she issued an edict ordering them to leave the country (it was largely ignored). And slavery, which we in America tend to think of as our own “peculiar institution,” was legal in England until as late as 1772. There were African slaves in England–most of them domestics–because up until that point there had been no specific law against slavery.
What changed? A slave named James Somersett, brought by his owner to England from the Massachusetts colony, was beaten and left to die by his owner, Charles Stewart. Instead, he was rescued, taken to the hospital, and when he was well, apprenticed as a free man. By chance, a year or so later, Stewart saw his erstwhile slave, hale and productive, and demanded that the man be returned to him. A huge legal battle ensued, with public opinion vocally divided. The judiciary was forced to make case law, finding that, while colonial laws might explicitly permit slavery, there was no Parliamentary act or common law that made slavery in England legal, and that it was therefore illegal.
Somersett was freed, as were the 10,000 or so African slaves in England.
The slave trade continued, making port cities like Bristol and Plymouth into centers of commerce; slavery in the British colonies flourished. But the abolitionist movement, stirred to life by the Somersett case, struggled against economic interests, and in 1807 the slave trade in England was abolished. It took almost thirty more years (1834) for the institution itself to be banned throughout the Empire.
That means that during Jane Austen’s lifetime there were black people in England. It’s clear (particularly from Mansfield Park) that Austen was well aware of the slave trade as it was practiced in the British colonies, and her letters suggest that she was part of the abolitionist camp. Austen did not live a cosmopolitain life (she disliked London and Bath) but it is not unlikely that she encountered black Britons–those persons who had lived in England as domestics for decades, or had come to Britain after the American Revolution (many slaves were promised freedom by the Crown if they fought for England, and some took the offer and wound up there after the war–albeit not always very happily). There was a tendency among white Britons to lump all people of color together, but at the same time freed slaves were arriving from America, immigrants from the British colony of India were arriving too. My favorite is the Bengali entrepreneur who introduced the word “shampoo” — meaning head massage — into the English language. He was considered “black.” He operated a spa (Mahomed’s Steam and Vapor Sea Water Medicated Baths) which offered a combined Turkish bath with massage (sounds great). As the British Empire spread its influence, there were more and more persons of color in England. The clerk Gerzina encountered at the bookstore may have cited “everybody” in her opinion, but she was dead wrong.
Whenever I hear someone saying “everybody knows,” I’m pretty sure I’m in for a whopping historical error.
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* Yes, I’m researching for Sarah Tolerance #5...
