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Placing Victorian Abolitionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Lindsey N. Chappell Open the ORCID record for Lindsey N. Chappell [Opens in a new window]
Lindsey N. Chappell*
Affiliation:
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA
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Abstract

This article analyzes Victorian abolitionism after the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, attending to particular epistemological racisms built into our ways of thinking about Victorian texts. Recent scholarship has begun to examine race in Victorian studies, but we've largely eschewed contemporaneous considerations of slavery and its ongoing imbrication with the British Empire. Notably absent are studies of abolitionism from within the U.S. South, where British commentators sought to contain slavery as a local depravity. I analyze narratives around the “Weeping Time,” the largest slave auction in U.S. history, including English actress Fanny Kemble's 1863 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, transatlantic periodical coverage of the auction, and nontraditional histories of local resistance. These texts disrupt the entrenched critical tradition of dividing the U.S. South from Britain, pushing us to reevaluate what we assume about race in Victorian studies today. Race, I argue, shapes Victorian and Victorianist subject positions through the location of bodies and ideologies in specific places. These localizations function as narrative shorthand to evaluate, for example, morality and aesthetics while silently assuming a default white subject position.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 225 - 259
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to my students at Georgia Southern University, whose questions and conversations required me to shift my ideas of Victorian studies. When I came to Georgia in 2018, they pushed me to create scholarship that accounted for the continuities between British imperialism and inequities they still saw around them. I therefore undertook this project as an experiment to explore what it might mean to do Victorian studies in this place and also to consider what might happen to Victorian and transatlantic studies if they take the South into account. Thanks also to Sophia Hsu, whose conversation and feedback have been crucial to this project, and to Abby Goode and AnaMaria Seglie, who have been generous and insightful readers. Finally, I am indebted to the editors and anonymous readers at VLC, whose suggestions were invaluable.

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