“So distant and wild a scene”: language, domesticity and difference in Hannah Kilham's writing from West Africa, 1822-1832

Abstract

Abstract Hannah Kilham (1774-1832), a Sheffield Quaker, was involved in philanthropic, educational and missionary work with women in Britain, Ireland and West Africa in the early nineteenth century. In this article the author focuses upon Hannah Kilham's. engagement in the religious and domestic education of African girls and women in the 1820s and 1830s. Through representations of African women as in need of her ‘civilising influence’, Kilham was able to construct a powerful role for herself, and for other white middle-class British women, in the colonial/missionary enterprise. The article explores the significance of notions of gender, domesticity and the Protestant family to the construction of ideas about Africa's ‘difference’ and, through this, British national identity.