"I trust that I am a Liberal": The Politics and Poetics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Early Antislavery Verse

Abstract

"I trust that I am a Liberal":The Politics and Poetics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Early Antislavery Verse Jerome S. Wynter (bio) In 1821, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861, hereafter EBB) wrote in her autobiographical essay "Glimpses of My Own Character and Life": "I trust that I am a Liberal for bigotry and prejudice I detest."1 This precocious avowal underlines EBB's entire poetic and political career. In fact, by 1856, she had composed three poems attacking race and slavery in the United States to support its antislavery efforts. These American antislavery poems—"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1847), "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850), and "A Curse for a Nation" (1855)—have received substantial critical attention from feminists and historians alike.2 Far less consideration has been given, however, to EBB's earlier antislavery poems: "The African: A Poem in Two Cantos" (ca. 1822) and "The Appeal," published in May 1833.3 Here, for the first time, by focusing on these virtually unknown poems, I show that paying attention to EBB's early work directly contributes to our understanding of her mature antislavery writings. In later years, EBB would downplay the significance of her early compositions. Censoring them as the "sins" of her "rawest juvenility," she chose to acknowledge only her work beginning with the 1838 publication of The Seraphim and Other Poems, which she remarked has her "voice in it" and is the product of her "mature mind" (BC, 16: 159–161; WEBB, 4: 287–315; BC, 7: 352–357). Indeed, her first abolitionist poem, "The African," composed around her sixteenth birthday during a period of convalescence from 1821 to 1822, was never published in her lifetime and survives in manuscript (BC, 1: 128n1). Identifying it in the early 2000s when the manuscript was loaned to the British Library, the editors of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning note that it is one of three unpublished poems EBB wrote around 1822, the other two being "The Enchantress" and "Leila: A Tale" (WEBB, 5: 391–392). Although we know [End Page 297] of EBB's failed attempt to publish "Leila," there is no mention of "The African" in any of her early correspondence to family and friends (BC, 1: 164–165n1). It was not until twenty years later that EBB alluded to the poem in a letter to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, dated January 12, 1842, acknowledging her indebtedness to her cousin Richard Barrett for "the subject of a poem about a runaway negro," which, she told Mitford, she still has "somewhere in his hand-writing."4 That poem is "The African."5 What makes "The African" more significant than its unpublished counterparts? Notably, it represents EBB's first known involvement in writing about Atlantic slavery. Alan Richardson has observed that once the British slave trade was abolished in 1807, there was no urgency to continue the campaign to emancipate the slaves and that because "emancipation seemed less pressing," it received virtually no poetic treatment.6 The young EBB, however, did not lose interest. Indeed, the composition of "The African" is surprisingly prescient, as it was written prior to the rebirth of the campaign in Britain to emancipate the slaves in 1823, the year a new organization, the Society for Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of British Colonial Slavery, revived popular sentiment and public call for the emancipation of the slaves.7 Interestingly, despite this development, only a handful of antislavery poems were published that year, among them Thomas Pringle's "Slavery" (Richardson, 4: 342–343). Matters were very different when EBB wrote "The Appeal" in 1832. That year was a time of great public upheaval in Britain and personal setback for her. She anxiously followed the debate on the Reform Bill, which would enfranchise a large section of the British population, writing, when it was passed on June 4, that the English were a "freer people" (BC, 2: 25). The sale by auction of the family's Hope End home and their relocation to London that August also created incredible financial and emotional distress (LEBB-MRM, 1: 8; BC, 3: 24–32, 40–48). These events of 1832 formed the backdrop to "The Appeal," published...