Eliza Haywood's Captive Message

Abstract

Eliza Haywood's Captive Message Catherine E. Ingrassia One of the most popular texts published by Eliza Haywood is one to which few scholars have attended. Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return'd from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America, published in April 1743, was, according to her bibliographer Patrick Spedding, Haywood's "fastest selling work by far."1 By any metric Spedding uses, Memoirs was among the ten most popular texts Haywood published. In 1743 alone, five complete editions were printed in London, along with two Dublin editions and an abridgement in the Gentleman's Magazine. An Italian translation appeared in 1745. Certainly, as Orlando asserts, the text's popularity stemmed, in part, from "the subject matter" of this "fictional topical biography" of the nobleman James Annesley (1715–60), the Irish heir to the Barony of Altham.2 Kidnapped as a child by his uncle Richard (who wanted to claim the title himself), Annesley was sent to the American colonies as what Haywood—and other contemporaneous accounts—termed an "indentured Slave."3 After laboring for thirteen years in the American colonies, Annesley escaped and found passage to Jamaica, where he was discovered, identified, and rescued by Vice Admiral Edward Vernon (1684–1757). Upon his return, Annesley promptly initiated court proceedings to claim his title in a well-publicized trial that began on 11 November 1743. Haywood's Memoirs was one of more than sixty publications focused on Annesley that appeared between 1741 and 1745. Unquestionably, Haywood—who sold the book from her own shop at the Sign of Fame in Covent Garden—sought to capitalize on a narrative with immediate popular cultural currency. Perhaps because of Memoirs' apparent focus solely on the Annesley narrative, this publication has received little critical attention from Haywood scholars, who see it as a bit of an outlier in her oeuvre. Leah Orr, who has confirmed Haywood's authorship [End Page 67] of the text, observes that, as "one of the only works … which fictionalizes a popular news story," the narrative was "unusual for Haywood." It is, she suggests, "an odd choice of subject matter."4 I would assert that Memoirs is not "unusual" or an "odd" choice of subject matter for Haywood if we look closely at what the subject matter really is. I want to suggest in this essay that we must read her complex, popular, and under-discussed text in three distinct but interconnected ways. First, in the story of Annesley's quest to reclaim his title, Haywood addresses birthright, identity, and inheritance. These concerns might have been particularly familiar to Haywood, as Spedding notes, given the experience of her former associate Richard Savage (1697–1743). And, of course, narratives of mistaken male identity populate numerous mid-century novels; in fact, a section of Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle (1751) draws directly on the Annesley affair.5 In tackling the tale of a kidnapped heir—even a true story—Haywood was tapping into themes explored by contemporaries throughout the decade. Second, within Memoirs Haywood explores various forms of domestic or colonial captivity in which British subjects might find themselves. In detailing both the types of confinement Annesley experiences in England, including workhouses and orphanages, as well as the state of indentured servitude in colonial America (the title's "Thirteen Years Slavery"), Haywood creates a narrative of confinement and control that both fascinated and resonated with mid-century readers. The text offers great detail about "the Hardships of an American Slavery," which she characterizes as "infinitely more terrible" than "Turkish" or "West Indian."6 She reminds readers of a world of global captivity. Captivity remained in the consciousness of early modern Britons, suggests George Boulukos, in part because around them existed reminders of the various "ways in which Britons imagined that they themselves could become enslaved."7 After the Transportation Act of 1718, British subjects could be transported as a punishment for a crime (more than 50,000 convicts were sent from England to the colonies between 1718 and 1775) in an era when everything from vagrancy to petty theft could result in that draconian punishment.8 Further, during this period, nearly 200,000 English, Irish, and Scottish subjects entered into...