John Thelwall in Saint Domingue: Race, Slavery, and Revolution in The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times (1801)

Abstract

I John Thelwall was a clear opponent of the slave trade and slavery as an institution. Although his political writings have received much scrutiny in recent years, his writings about slavery have received rather scant attention. The most serious current criticism of them is by Marcus Wood who finds that ‘Thelwall was most unusual among radicals in his uncompromising vision of poor white and poor black labour as equally exploited by the nascent forms of capitalism’. Challengingly, Wood argues that British radical hostility to the Evangelical Abolitionist political agenda and its own concern with the domestic poor led to its distancing the movement from abolitionism. Wood claims that, against this trend, Thelwall produces ‘one of the most trenchant pleas for the ideological unification of abolition and reform theory’ and is ‘one who stood out against the Negrophobe orthodoxies of English Radicalism.’ There is some truth in this assertion, although this seriously overestimates Thelwall’s isolation as a reformer from other radical abolitionists, such as William Roscoe, James Currie, and Edward Rushton, a group of Liverpool abolitionists with whom Thelwall was clearly engaged in serious and sustained discussion and committed radical abolitionists, such as Benjamin Flower. Oddly, however, Thelwall’s most powerful engagement with Caribbean slavery and one of his major works is seldom discussed or even noticed. This is the powerful and detailed fictional representation and critique of the Haitian slave revolution (in what was then French Saint Domingue) in his pseudonymously published novel, The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times of 1801. This essay will discuss Thelwall’s engagement with anti-slavery and seek to re-establish the importance, as well as the limitations of this critique by surveying the scope and substance of Thelwall’s only novel.