Breakfast with “Her inky Demons”: Celebrity, Slavery, and the Heroine in Late Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract

Late eighteenth-century British newspapers were vehicles of celebrity and scandal; they were also venues for the advertising of slaves. The juxtaposition made newspapers a potentially explosive and productive object in British fiction. This essay identifies a formulaic scene, originating in William Hayley’s popular poem The Triumphs of Temper (1781) and recurring in various forms in fictions by Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as many less well-known novels of fashionable life, in which a young white woman experiences sudden unwanted celebrity by reading about herself in a morning newspaper. This essay introduces the term “dyspathy” for the mechanism by which these fictions present the heroine as always threatened by, but inevitably rescued from, a newspaper sphere in which older discourses of blackness, and metropolitan unease at the commodification of humans, were tightly but implicitly associated. Emerging white supremacist ideas of race are shown to be fundamental to the construction of feminine domestic subjectivity in these fictions.