Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain

Circulations

James Gillray (1756–1815)

Barbarities in the West Indias, 1791

Etching with hand coloring

Published 23 April 1791 by Hannah Humphrey

 

Gillray’s print references an account of torture that British politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce included in an April 18, 1791, debate over the abolition of the slave trade. Here, an overseer uses a scourge to hold an enslaved man beneath the surface of a boiling vat of sugar-cane juice, as punishment for his being ill and unable to work. Nailed to the wall are various creatures, together with a black arm and pair of ears, symbolizing acts of dehumanization and dismemberment. Further, the print suggests that the blood and sweat of enslaved persons are contaminating the British body and spirit.

Artist unknown, monogram F.Ch., after Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827)

Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes, 1823

Pen and ink from an album page

Inscribed in ink, lower right: “FCh/Decmbr 31, 1823”

 

Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) after Sir E. Bunbury (possibly Henry William Bunbury [1750–1811])

Black Brown & Fair, 1807

Etching with hand coloring

Published 6 May 1807 by Thomas Tegg

 

The creator of this scrapbook page combined a print made by an unidentified artist with clippings of three poems. The print is of Rachel Pringle, a black woman from Barbados who ran a brothel in Bridgetown, and appears to be based upon an earlier work by Thomas Rowlandson. The creator of the scrapbook’s print has removed all context, truncated Pringle’s figure, tempered her slight smirk, and lowered the cameo of a soldier hanging around her neck such that he stares directly into her left breast. These alterations, combined with the poems’ articulations of love and loss, render Pringle available to artistic fantasy.

In Black Brown & Fair, the brothel has come to the East London district of Wapping. The accompanying ballad combines the white male sailor’s interracial eroticism with his promise always to return to Mary, presumably a white woman in the metropole.

Samuel Ireland (d. 1800) after William Hogarth (1697–1764)

Qui Color albus erat, nunc est contrarius albo, 1788

Etching and engraving

Published 1 May 1788 by Molton & Co.

 

This print depicts a black woman rising from a bed, with the insinuation that she has replaced the white woman who lay there previously. She reaches out to John Highmore, former manager of Drury Lane Theatre. The text below notes that Mrs. Hogarth, wife of artist William Hogarth, who originally etched this scene, remembered the controversial print as “The Discovery.” The scene’s illumination by candlelight combined with the language of “discovery” perhaps satirizes Enlightenment thinkers’ erotic entanglements with their colonial subjects. The title additionally evokes contamination—the blackening of the white British domicile and, by extension, the nation.

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812)

From Soho, ca. 1776

Graphite pencil with pen and black ink

 

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812)

From Soho

Etching with drypoint and hand coloring

Published 1 May [1790] by William Holland

 

This drawing and print provide a glimpse into the processes behind the creation and reproduction of prints as they relate to racial formations. In de Loutherbourg’s original drawing, a woman wearing fashionable attire stands in partial profile. He does not indicate her race or location. By contrast, one print version of the drawing, published as From Soho, situated the woman as native to an area of Westminster known for entertainment, the shading darkened her skin color, and contemporary commentator Henry Angelo identified her as “a certain well-known lady abbess”—a woman who runs a brothel. The hand coloring of another version, exhibited here, suggests that the woman is black.

The White Negro Girl

Broadside

Published ca. 1762, London

 

Mrs. Newsham the white negress [realia]: to be had at the Curiosity House, City Road, near Finsbury Square, London, 1795

Copper token

 

Amelia Lewsham or Newsham was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, around 1748. Her parents were black and her mother was an enslaved woman who worked in the home of Sir Simon Clarke, sixth baronet. Amelia’s albinism made her a “curiosity” and, perhaps for this reason, in 1753, when she was around five years old, Clarke sent her to his son in England, who sold her. An April 1, 1754, announcement in the London Daily Advertiser described her as “A Negro Girl born quite white,” “fairer than most Europeans,” “a surprising Genius,” and “the greatest Phænomenon of Nature ever known.” It lists her price as four hundred guineas.

 

This later broadside, from around 1762, continues to present the girl as an object for the curious European gaze. In 1766 she was baptized as Amelia Harlequin and, equating baptism with freedom like many other black people in England at the time, she left her owner and began exhibiting herself. She married a white man, took his last name, and had at least six children with him. It is possible that she is the individual whom black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano records having seen in London in 1777 in his Interesting Narrative (1791). She continued to make appearances, as advertised on this 1795 token. The last documentation regarding her is a West Ham, Essex, court record from May 1, 1798, of her acquittal after a charge of public disturbance related to her exhibition there.