Sugar as Allegory

In stark contrast to its centrality in both the abolitionists and Grainger, sugar occupies a marginal position in Lewis's Journal. Despite the promise conferred on the text by its Byronic epigraph – ‘I would give many a Sugar Cane / Monk Lewis were alive again!’ – overt allusions to the commodity are fairly lightly sprinkled across what is, generically and thematically, a highly eclectic work. These allusions may even be easily missed in the quick switches between prose and verse and the frequent shifts of tone and focus, as Lewis whirls the reader from playful asides about water-melons and centipedes to serious reflections on the aesthetics of Caribbean landscape and the particularities of slave culture. As Keith A. Sandiford summarizes, Lewis ‘exhibits no compelling narrative interest in sugar either as an object of natural history or for its long tradition of engendering metaphysical and aesthetic ideas’, making ‘references to [it]’ which ‘are by no means continuous or extensive’.

Yet if Lewis's text says little about sugar, sugar has a lot to say about the text, as can be gleaned from the journal entry for 11 January 1816, written shortly after his arrival at the Cornwall plantation.