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Chapter 2 - From Plantation to Prison

Wedderburn’s The Horrors of Slavery and London’s Radical Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

Katey Castellano
Affiliation:
James Madison University, Virginia
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Summary

Wedderburn’s view of Black-led abolition was further outlined in his life narrative, Horrors of Slavery. The narrative initially emerged as a series of letters to a working-class periodical, Bell’s Life in London, after the editor had questioned whether plantation owners ever enslaved their own mixed-race children. The question prompted Wedderburn to share his life story, in which he represented himself as a “product” of plantation slavery and testified to his father’s moral depravity as a “slave-dealer.” Although the letters prompted threatening replies from his half-brother, Andrew Colvile, Wedderburn republished the Bell’s Life letters as a pamphlet that was sold by ultra-radical booksellers in London. Horrors radically tracked Wedderburn’s life from slavery on a Jamaican plantation to his harsh sentence of solitary confinement in an English prison for blasphemous libel, making it an essential supplement to more commonly studied Romantic-era slave narratives, such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.

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Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons
Romanticism's Black Geographies
, pp. 45 - 62
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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  • From Plantation to Prison
  • Katey Castellano, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons
  • Online publication: 09 January 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009523875.003
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  • From Plantation to Prison
  • Katey Castellano, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons
  • Online publication: 09 January 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009523875.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • From Plantation to Prison
  • Katey Castellano, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons
  • Online publication: 09 January 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009523875.003
Available formats
×