Blanco White Research Articles

Blanco White and Cernuda, Exile and Anglophilia

This article proposes a brief analysis of the convergences and divergences between the Anglophilia of two exiles from Seville: José María Blanco White (1775–1841) and Luis Cernuda (1902–1963). Blanco White embraced England and to some extent rejected Spain and his Spanishness. Cernuda was also a severe critic of his country, but this did not lead him to any idealization of a foreign culture from which he essentially took what he needed. Despite their diverse experiences of England, there are also some striking similarities in terms of the nature of their Anglophilia and their reasons for at least partially rejecting their own culture. According to Juan Goytisolo, the coincidence between Blanco White and Cernuda is ‘amazing’, and this study seeks to delve deeper and ascertain to what extent Goytisolo’s assertion is justified by what they wrote about England and English literature during their respective exiles.

In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870

Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear whether the book's research, writing, and analysis do it justice.Chapter 1 treats the familiar early Spanish anti–slave trade activists: the statesman Agustín de Argüelles, law student Isidoro de Antillón, and expatriate journalist José Blanco White. With just a few allies, these men singlehandedly initiated public discussion about outlawing the slave trade and slavery itself in Spain—an essential aspect of the author's argument that they “contributed to building the public consensus” against the slave trade (p. 2). But strangely, Sanjurjo barely references—much less analyzes with any thoughtfulness—the body of work that they produced. This is a curious choice because their speeches and publications not only evince deep engagement with the broader abolitionist movements throughout the Atlantic world but also present uniquely Spanish arguments and proposals that merit attention.The next chapter outlines the British diplomatic pressure that resulted in the deeply flawed—and unenforced—Treaty of 1817, by which Madrid agreed to a plan to end the slave trade to the Spanish territories. Here, Sanjurjo references the related 1816 Council of the Indies report that recommended the abolition of the slave trade. He refers to it as “extraordinarily important”—even though it was a dead letter—but does so while attacking other scholars who have written on this topic for downplaying it, misinterpreting it, or failing to mention it altogether (p. 29). Unfortunately, such ruthless attacks against existing scholarship mar much of the book.Chapter 3 has some useful aspects, as it explains the “necessary evil” argument that Spanish elites forged in response to British abolitionist pressure. Sanjurjo shows how instead of attempting to directly counter British arguments about the immorality of the slave trade, proslavery Spanish and Spanish American elites argued that it was a “necessary evil” that would preserve the Cuban economy—and by extension, the economy of the entire empire. Its proponents, Francisco Arango y Parreño among them, framed British abolitionist pressure in terms of nationalistic discourse, suggesting that to be Spanish and Cuban would mean to push back against foreign interlopers who sought to harm Spanish interests under the guise of abolitionism.Chapter 4 examines Cuban historian and politician José Antonio Saco, who is sometimes considered as having contributed to antislavery sentiment. Sanjurjo rightly characterizes Saco as arguing against the slave trade not because he believed it was wrong but because he was convinced that the island's sugar industry and white population would be better off without it. But here again, when given an opportunity to execute original research with new archival sources that could have shed light on such important concepts, the author fails to do so, instead relying on just a few well-known published sources and secondary literature. Throughout the book, in fact, there is a notable lack of substantive engagement with archival sources in England, Spain, and Spanish America. The final chapter—the book is quite short, at only 123 pages of body text—outlines the rise of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid but strangely fails to engage with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's groundbreaking work on the topic or the archives he used, instead delivering a basic outline of historical events largely based on secondary sources.The epilogue offers a thesis that frames antislavery and anti–slave trade thinking as “contradictory and complementary . . . Liberal and absolutist, progressive and conservative, egalitarian and racist” (p. 121). While in theory this gesture toward the confounding complexity of Spanish political sentiment regarding the slave trade is suggestive, the book is simply not up to the task of illustrating such historical nuance. It is hampered by an excessively combative approach to the existing literature and an impoverished understanding of the relevant archival documentation. Throughout, its organization is difficult to follow, and the argumentation is both scant and unclear. The book will be of interest to scholars who work on antislavery and abolition in the Spanish empire, but it brings little new to their table.

Overlooking Blanco White's Abolitionist Consciousness: Menéndez Pelayo and Goytisolo

The purpose of this article is to rethink the modern reception of José María Blanco White's Bosquejo del comercio de esclavos (1814) through an analysis of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo's chapter on Blanco White in his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–1882) and Juan Goytisolo's foreword to his anthology Obra inglesa, selecta de sus obras en esta lengua (1972). By drawing on the insights of the "archival turn" taken by contemporary critics, this essay reveals how Menéndez Pelayo's omission of Blanco White's abolitionism had such lasting effects that Goytisolo was unable to rectify it despite his explicit political commitments to human dignity, antislavery, and antiracism. Ultimately, this article shows that Goytisolo failed to treat Blanco White's abolitionist sentiment as a historical topic in its own right because he mounted a political challenge to Menéndez Pelayo's portrayal of Blanco White, but at the same time left untouched the power inscribed in the Catholic polymath's archival narrative.

La influencia de la epistemología sensualista en la enseñanza literaria de comienzos del siglo XIX: ciencia y literatura en Justino Matute (1804), José María Blanco White (1804) y Félix José Reinoso (1816)

In 1804, Justino Matute and José María Blanco White proposed to the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País of Seville the creation of a Humanities Course to complement the mathematics studies already sponsored by the institution. In these speeches vindicating the humanities, to which we must add a later one by Félix José Reinoso (1816), the academics were forced to reorganise the field of knowledge into which their new discipline, mainly oriented towards poetics and rhetoric, fitted. To do so, they used the epistemological schemes of Locke’s and Condillac’s sensualism, resulting in a gnoseology in which science and literature were distinguished by the faculties that hierarchised each type of knowledge.

A Forgotten ‘Romantic’ Excursion: Joseph Blanco White's A Journey to the Trosacks in 1816

In 1816 Joseph Blanco White visited the Trossachs, having travelled to Edinburgh as a member of the household of Lord and Lady Holland. Soon afterwards he wrote A Journey to the Trosacks in 1816, a short but fascinating account of his trip which has remained unpublished until now. Lucidly penned, this autograph text shows admiration for the Scottish wilderness and interest in technological feats such as the steamboat that he takes on the Firth of Forth, an absolute novelty at the time. Observations on Highlands customs and language, and literary allusions to Sterne, Scott, Johnson and Boswell add to the interest of this forgotten piece, as do remarks about John Murray the publisher and Dugald Stewart the philosopher. The aim of this article is to present for the first time this work as a document of literary and cultural importance, given the renewed interest of Romantic era scholarship in travel writing and in Blanco White, the most important Spanish cultural mediator in Britain during the first decades of the 19th century.

A Neglected Religious Thinker: José María Blanco White (1775-1841)

‘Dissent is the great characteristic of liberty’ was the central tenet in the life of José María Blanco White (1775-1841), a Spanish exile in Britain, whose fame as a man of letters often obscures the fact that he was first and foremost a religious thinker. The milestones of his life were set by his conversions, from Catholicism to Anglicanism (1814), and finally to Unitarianism (1835). Yet his theological ideas continue to be the least researched part of his oeuvre, mostly due to the problematic reception of his work, so that the ex-Catholic Blanco White - rather than the Protestant Blanco White - continues to occupy centre stage. This article reconstructs the spiritual biography of Blanco White, showing how skilfully he navigated through the world of European Protestantism, arguing that it was in Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy (1835) that he reached the peak of his creative powers as an original religious thinker.

Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire

Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire

Adiós a la lengua materna: la escritura en lengua extranjera como acto de disidencia. El caso de José María Blanco White.

Este artículo analiza la relación que José María Blanco White sostenía con el idioma inglés y su propia lengua materna, el español. Exiliado por voluntad propia en Inglaterra a partir de 1810, el autor de origen sevillano expresa en un inicio su voluntad de convertirse en un hombre de letras británico, y de abandonar para siempre la escritura literaria en castellano. Esta renuncia lingüística implica una disidencia tanto política como religiosa, así como un paso en su evolución intelectual. Aunque Blanco White alcanza un alto prestigio como autor en Inglaterra en su lengua adoptiva, nunca abandonará del todo su compleja relación con España ni su expresión en idioma español. Se discute también cómo su supuesta identidad inglesa es una construcción imaginaria del autor que, si bien busca despojarse de sus raíces, carga constantemente a cuestas con ellas.

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACTRobert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.

The spanish exile in London: Heterodoxies of religion and press. Blanco White and Felicia Hemans

The spanish exile in London: Heterodoxies of religion and press. Blanco White and Felicia Hemans

The spanish exile in London: Heterodoxies of religion and press. Blanco White and Felicia Hemans

En su cruzada contra el absolutismo de Fernando VII, los exiliados espanoles en Londres se sirvieron de la palabra impresa no solo como medio de critica politica, sino tambien religiosa en la construccion del Estado liberal espanol. Aunque un tanto obviado en lo referente a esta cuestion heterodoxa al ser considerado periodico politico, El Espanol de Blanco White abrira paso, como pionero en la prensa espanola del exilio londinense, al tratamiento del aperturismo religioso como pilar esencial en el discurso liberal de los emigrados, que despues desarrollaran otros refugiados con cabeceras protestantes impresas en espanol. En interconexion con coetaneos ingleses, como Dickens o Felicia Hemans, la critica religiosa de Blanco, basada en una continua busqueda de la verdad, se extendera ademas a la prensa inglesa con sus Letters from Spain , aparecidas inicialmente en el New Monthly Magazine de Thomas Campbell, en el que Hemans publicara los poemas que estructuraran su referente contra la intolerancia catolica, The Forest Sanctuary , segun la propia autora, su mejor trabajo. El analisis historiografico de esta investigacion se centra en el estudio bibliografico y critico de los textos sobre la tematica expuesta y sus fuentes hemerograficas, con el fin de destacar la aportacion de la hibridacion religiosa entre la obra periodistica de Blanco y Hemans, en el contexto de una mision que desempenara un papel esencial a favor de la libertad religiosa y que se notara en el incipiente rupturismo de la ortodoxia catolica en la obra periodistico-literaria del XIX espanol.

Joaquín Murat y el levantamiento del 2 de mayo

The article aims to present two perspectives, the Spanish and the French one, on the uprising of May 2nd and the previous French occupation of the city of Madrid. In order to delineate the French perspective, letters written by Murat himself to Napoleon will be analyzed; on the other hand, in order to analyze the opinion of the Spanish population, emphasis will be placed on distant expressive forms, such as painting, some examples will be given by Los fusilamientos by Goya, literature with Benito Pérez Galdós’ National Episods, Letters from Spain by Blanco White, Alejo Carpentier’ s Explosion in a Cathedral, the most recent film Blood of May 2008 under the direction of José Luis García Muñoz and more examples of the artistic expression.

The Night-Death Binomial as a Poetic Ploy - A Cross-Cultural Look from the Graveyard Poets to Expressionism

The essay describes the use of the Night-Death binomial and tracks its evolution from the eighteenth century to Expressionism across Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and Austria, at the hand of poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1745), Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht, (1800), José Blanco White’s sonnet “Night and Death” (1828), and Georg Trakl’s “Verwandlung des Bösen” (1914). Romanticism brought along a preference for the nocturnal: night, moonlight, shades and shadows, mist and mystery, somber mood, morbidity, and death, as opposed to the Enlightenment’s predilection for day, light, clarity, and life. The essay analyses how poets from different national contexts and ages employ images and symbols of the night to create an association with death. It furthermore shows how, with varying attitudes and results, they manage to convert this binomial into a poetic ploy.

Blanco White, Spanish America, and Economic Affairs: The Slave Trade and Colonial Trade

Blanco White was one of the most important Spanish intellectuals of the first half of the nineteenth century. Being exiled in England (1810–41) and speaking English fluently enabled him to meet some of the period’s greatest economists, such as Malthus, Whately, Senior, and Mill. Despite this and his having been trained initially as a businessman, he devoted no special attention to economics. Nonetheless, he tackled certain topics of undoubted socioeconomic importance, such as the slave trade and the colonial question and overseas trade. This work aims to contextualize the way Blanco treated these topics within the framework of his Spanish contemporaries, to show that his approach was rooted in a Spanish tradition of thinking. Blanco was already familiar in Spain with some approaches to the slave trade and the colonial question, approaches that he would later fully develop in England.

Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion by Stuart Andrews

Stuart Andrews. Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 270. $95. Stuart Andrews's new book argues for Southey's literary and ... historical importance, and lasting significance of his seeming ... paranoia, both political and religious (xi). It is book, Andrews says, about Southey laureate, rather than Southey poet (ix). It could equally be described as study of question, 1790s 1829, with ensemble cast of Southey, Coleridge, John Milner, Charles Butler, Blanco White, Richard Musgrave, and many others. But emancipation is particularly rewarding angle for life and letters of Southey, who was, in Hazlitt's phrase, shaped on any model. Southey's biographer Bill Speck describes him as oddity and anachronism, almost Quaker, who behaved like a seventeenth-century Anglican at war with both Popery and enthusiasm. (1) But Southey's stance looks less odd in view of antediluvian nature of his (Roman) Catholic enemy. The Romantic epoch of 1798 was also year Napoleon abolished papacy by Act of Sovereign People (1). Robert Peel later recalled how religion, we were told, was ... volcano burnt out, that could never be rekindled (qtd. 172). Like William Pitt, polemicist John Milner asked rhetorically if it was from side of Popery, or opposite quarter of Jacobinism, that Established Church is in most at present day (qtd. 8). But Union of Great Britain and Ireland of 1801 turned defunct danger into contradiction at heart of political life. As Coleridge later summed it up: There is and can be but one question: and there is and can be but one way of stating it. A great numerical majority of inhabitants of one of realm profess religion that professed by great majority of whole realm.... In fewer words, three-fourths of his Majesty's Irish subjects are Roman Catholics, with papal priesthood, while three-fourths of sum total of His Majesty's subjects are Protestants. (Church and State; qtd. 2) The question created problem for political language. After 1801, integral part not only does not imply, but is hostile to, greater whole. Charles Butler suggested that even this was false ... perspective, giving two-page list of vastly more extensive territories where Roman Catholicism was established religion (qtd. 114). Southey reasserted Protestant perspective by mocking such exhibitions of Siamese, and Tonquinese, and ... Cochin-Chinese converts (qtd. 134). But context perhaps helps explain Southey's reductive rhetoric on church and state: facing complex disintegration of parts and wholes, he insisted on complete homology between these two pillars of temple of our prosperity, bound by mathematical necessity stand or fall together (qtd. 55). Andrews describes general shift relatively reasoned, courteous exchanges of debating points in 1790s barrages of vituperative language in 1820s (9, 18, 128). Southey was critic of Catholicism his early experiences in Lisbon in 1795-96. In his 1797 Letters written during short residence in Spain and Portugal, Southey spoke of his mingled ... pity and disgust at [t]he sight of Monastery or Monk ... foul and filthy men without accomplishments or virtues, [because of] system they are subject to (qtd. 4). Southey's visceral sense of Catholicism as throwback was at heart of question. [T]hey will not tolerate, Southey told Charles Wynn in 1807: the proof is in their practice all over Europe, and it is in nature of their principles now (qtd. x). Andrews reads Southey's Letters England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807) as complex double-bluff. In character of Espriella, an able man, bigoted his religion . …

Discovering Shakespeare in Exile: Spanish Emigrés in England (1819-1840)


 The first few decades of the 19th century saw a considerable number of highly educated and professionally qualified Spanish liberals in exile in England. For some of them, their painful experience held a certain compensation in the form of a direct contact with English life, culture and literature and, in particular, a more immediate and deeper acquaintance with Shakespeare’s work. However, this contact with Shakespeare and its effects differed; it reconfirmed some in their Neoclassical faith, it led others to ambiguity or to a calculated eclecticism, while in others it wrought a transformation or a literary conversion. Manuel Herrera (who remained basically indifferent to Shakespeare), José Joaquín de Mora (who then began to be won over by Romanticism and its fervor for Shakespeare) and José Blanco White (who devoted himself wholeheartedly to the cause of Shakespeare) could be taken, respectively, as representative examples. The aim of this article is to analyse the way in which exile in England had a decisive effect on the perception of Shakespeare in some outstanding Spanish exiles, noting the differences between the exiles and the consequences of this perception for each of them.

Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890

In 2010, Joselyn M. Almeida edited Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, a collection of fourteen essays that explores the exchange of cultural production between Britain and the Americas during the romantic era. In her introduction to these essays, Almeida highlights the lack of scholarship on Anglo-Hispanic history during this particular period and provides a general overview of the field. With Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890, Almeida expands on the ideas proposed in the 2010 volume and provides answers to many questions that had been left unanswered. Although she still greatly emphasizes the history of transatlantic cultural production, Almeida engages more with the literature produced at that time and shows how intricately intertwined fact and fiction truly were. Almeida also expands the boundaries of the existing scholarship, which focuses on either a transatlantic or circumatlantic model, and proposes a new panatlantic model, which “follow(s) the translation and transmission of culture and capital and the movement of peoples between Latin America, Africa, and Britain” (4). The panatlantic model therefore represents the triangulation of not only cultural production and capital but also that of empire, enslavement, and liberation; a triangulation that Almeida exemplifies from the book's very first paragraph.Chapter 1 provides readers with a perfect example of this panatlantic model through the analysis of William Robertson's History of America (1777), Francisco Javier Clavijero's Storia antica del Messico (1780), and Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments (1787), each of which argues for its own definition of the New World. The chapter examines the reception and translation history of each of these works and presents the panatlantic connections between Native American and African enslavement. According to Almeida, Clavijero and Cugoano offer different interpretations of the history Robertson presents, with Clavijero emphasizing the Native history Robertson disregards and Cugoano proposing the African slave trade as crucial to European expansion and colonization. Cugoano's approach provides a segue to chapter 2, which highlights two of Britain's projects during the period: the abolition of slavery and the liberation of Latin America. In this chapter, Almeida demonstrates how the narratives of Toussaint Louverture and Francisco Miranda conflate these two projects and how Britain appropriated and altered these narratives for its own purposes. As she states, “This discourse of liberation in the pan-Atlantic, thus interanimated the abolitionist and independista imaginaries in relation to one another” (89).Chapter 3 provides a microscopic view of the role of translation in the exchange of cultural capital within the panatlantic imaginary Almeida has created. The first half of the chapter analyzes José María Blanco White's translations of abolitionist authors, which Almeida poses as the work that forged the connection between British abolition and the reformist project Blanco “envisioned for Spain and the American body politic” (107). The second half of the chapter returns to Richard Robert Madden's translation of Juan Manzanos's Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba (1840), which is the work Almeida uses to exemplify the panatlantic in the book's introduction. This translation is what helped create the image of “Britain as liberator” to the nations forming in the Atlantic (148).The fourth chapter describes how the expeditions of the HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin as “discoverer,” transformed South America into something tangible for the Britons: South America finally moves from British imaginary to British reality through Darwin's journals. The fifth and final chapter begins with the proposal that Darwin's belief in European superiority had been shaken by his findings in South America during the HMS Beagle expeditions; its focus is, however, on the flow of capital between South America and Britain. The first half examines how British periodicals published at that time governed discussions of labor and investments throughout the panatlantic, while the second half analyzes W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land, which exposes not only the trade of labor and capital but also the trade of culture between Britain and Latin America.Reimagining the Transatlantic is a well-written and comprehensive contribution to its field. It thoroughly engages with the current scholarship in transatlantic studies as well as extends it by providing a new conceptualization of the Atlantic through the transport and translation of literature.

Romanticism and the transatlantic imagination: Blanco White, Keats, and the Liberal Dilemma

Este ensayo se centra en el papel de la America espanola en el desarrollo de la literatura britanica durante el periodo romantico, especialmente en relacion con la participacion de la literatura en las controversias politicas que rodean el desarrollo desigual, tanto Gran Bretana como un imperio mundial y de un Estado liberal moderno. Mediante la vinculacion de las historias y los escritos de estas dos zonas geograficas, en particular en los anos entre la revuelta de 1780 del Peru y de los movimientos de independencia hispanoamericanas (1817-1822), este proyecto trata de descubrir los cruces complejos, pero ignorados en gran medida politicas y literarias triangulando entre Gran Bretana, Espana y America Latina durante el siglo XIX. De este modo, se reconstruye el contexto politico transatlantico e intelectual de figuraciones literarias de la America espanola con el fin de examinar las dimensiones historicas que permitieron a los escritores britanicos Jose Maria Blanco White y John Keats a imaginar tanto America Latina como un horizonte importante del deseo colonial y un objeto de las fantasias liberales de la independencia y la liberacion.

“Our brave sans-culotte”. La imagen de Mariano Luis de Urquijo según los escritos de Blanco White y lord Holland

The works of José María Blanco White and Lord Holland are a source to study and to understand the reign of the Spanish king Charles IV. In their writings there are some references to Mariano Luis de Urquijo, a Spanish minister which biographical and political profile is still unclear. In the following pages we try to classify the stories of Blanco White and Lord Holland in their historical context, providing a perspective of how Urquijo’s figure was perceived in Britain.

“Our brave sans-culotte”. La imagen de Mariano Luis de Urquijo según los escritos de Blanco White y lord Holland

The works of José María Blanco White and Lord Holland are a source to study and to understand the reign of the Spanish king Charles IV. In their writings there are some references to Mariano Luis de Urquijo, a Spanish minister which biographical and political profile is still unclear. In the following pages we try to classify the stories of Blanco White and Lord Holland in their historical context, providing a perspective of how Urquijo’s figure was perceived in Britain.