Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Research Seminar

This term's first meeting of the English Faculty's 18th-Century and Romantic Studies seminar will take place on Thursday 18th October at 5pm in the Board Room, Faculty of English. Professor Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University) will speak on the subject, '"Deem our nation brutes no longer": Animals, Affect, and Abolitionism". A synopsis of his paper follows below. All are welcome.

Slavery has been considered brutalising since ancient times, and throughout history observers have routinely compared enslaved people with captive or domesticated animals. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century plantation manuals described the management of enslaved people in the same terms as that of farmyard animals, explicitly offering advice on the husbandry of 'Negroes, horses, mules, and cattle'. Such comparisons may have been acceptable to colonial planters, but many metropolitan readers found them shocking. From the 1780s to the 1830s, campaigners, many influenced by the then fashionable discourses of sensibility, worked to abolish slavery and also to alleviate cruelty to animals. From Thomas Day, who combined antislavery and anti-bull-baiting passages in his novel Sandford and Merton (1784-9) to William Cowper, who wrote extensively on both slavery and animals, to William Wilberforce, the abolitionist and co-founder of the RSPCA, campaigners increasingly asked the British public to sympathise with both slaves and animals. By simultaneously working to advance the boundaries of sympathy to include both enslaved Africans and domesticated animals, campaigners certainly promoted freedom and alleviated suffering, but there was a cost. Conflating the two issues ran the risk of perpetuating racial ideologies that ultimately entrenched rather than challenged the notion of a hierarchy of races. This paper explores this phenomenon by reading a wide range of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century literature concerned with both slavery and the anti-bull-baiting debate, including Day and Cowper but also the lesser known Percival Stockdale and Elizabeth Heyrick.

Suggested reading: Most of the texts cited in this talk are rather obscure, but it should be easy enough to locate: William Cowper, 'Charity', lines 83–244 and William Cowper, 'The Negro's Complaint'. The bull-baiting passages in Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton, should also be relatively easy to track down on ECCO. Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton, A Work Intended for the Use of Children, (1783–89), 8th edn, 3 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1798), II, pp. 290–308 and III, pp. 279-80. For passages on whaling, see II, 180–88.

Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University, Vice-President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland. He is the author of From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658–1761 (Yale University Press, 2012) and British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) as well as several editions and edited collections, most recently an edition of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative for the Oxford University Press World's Classics series. His forthcoming works include a monograph, Unnatural Empire: Slavery, Abolition, and Colonial Natural History, 1650–1840, forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2019, and an edited collection, Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840, forthcoming from Palgrave in 2020.