Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole
Item
The Horrid Torture of Impalment [sic] Alive as a Punishment on Runaway Slaves, September 1808
Title
The Horrid Torture of Impalment [sic] Alive as a Punishment on Runaway Slaves, September 1808
Description
When compared with "Slavery," the two prints, produced seventy years apart, reflect, on the one hand, the longstanding metaphorical use of "slavery" to describe various perceived indignities suffered by white Europeans and, on the other, the institution's brutal reality for enslaved Africans and their descendants. In Slavery, the "slaves" are the British merchants who, not feeling themselves to be sufficiently protected by the Crown, suffer under Spain's powerful marine presence. The Horrid Torture of Impalment [sic] as a Punishment on Runaway Slaves, by contrast, endeavors to depict plantation slavery's brutal "disciplinary" regimes; highly graphic in content and created amid the heights of abolitionism, it spectacularizes –even fetishizes –black suffering to incite anti-slavery sentiments among whites. Catalog Record
Contributor
Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library
Creator
William Elmes
