American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture

by Audrey A. Fisch

Overview

Audrey Fisch's study examines the circulation within England of the people and ideas of the black Abolitionist campaign. By focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an anonymous sequel to that novel, Uncle Tom in England, and John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia, and the lecture tours of free blacks and ex-slaves, Fisch follows the discourse of American abolitionism as it moved across the Atlantic and was reshaped by domestic Victorian debates about popular culture and taste, the worker versus the slave, popular education, and working class self-improvement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521660266
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/10/2000
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.51(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: communicating 'a correct knowledge of American slavery': J. B. Estlin and the 'breeder' in Frederick Douglass's Narrative; 1. 'Exhibiting Uncle Tom in some shape or other': the commercialisation and reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England; 2. Abolition as a 'step to reform in our kingdom': Chartism, 'white slaves', and a new 'Uncle Tom' in England; 3. 'Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing': the ideological work of American slave narratives in England; 4. 'Negrophilism' and nationalism: the spectacle of the African-American abolitionist; Epilogue: 'How cautious and calculating?': English audiences and the impostor Reuben Nixon.

Editorial Reviews

"she has provided a fascinating insight into the British response to a brief, intense cultural phenomenon worked in the context of mid-nineteenthy-century England and America." Victorian Periodicals Reveiw

From the Publisher