At the Margins of Utopia: Jamaica in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall

Abstract

What does Jamaica contribute to Sarah Robinson Scott’s Millenium Hall? The narrator says little about the colony, andmodern readers exaggerate its prominence by reading the opulentplanter of The History of Sir George Ellison into the anonymous narrator of its predecessor. Yet the peripheral presence of Jamaica in a novel is often rich in implication. In Pamela, the place of that island in the Sally Godfrey story qualifies Mr B’s assertion of absolute class superiority. Although the wealth derived from England’s Caribbean slave colonies was widely if uncomfortablyacknowledged, some people nevertheless opposed slavery. Its protagonist every inch the repatriated colonial planter, Sir George Ellison would ameliorate an intractably inhumane institution. Its narrator a returned merchant planning independence on a modest (even feminine) scale, Millenium Hall accepts that capital is tainted but imagines, radically but locally, that a few gentlewomen if not servants and slaves can become proprietors instead of virtual possessions. A marginal presence, Jamaica enables a social critique by voices usually silenced.