American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature. - Review - book review

Audrey A. Fisch. Cambridge University Press. [pound]35.00/US$59.95. 139 pages. ISBN 0-521-66026-2. This little book examines an aspect of nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations: how English liberals were affected by the northern American liberals' campaign to end U.S. slavery. In the long and complex history of mother-daughter relations, this is one of the most famous and, for the sheer scale of English liberal hypocrisy and ignorance, one of the most fascinating aspects.

English liberals were obsessed by Negro slavery, much as their descendants were by apartheid. Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional account of slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was central to English attitudes and to this book: the mentally lazy always prefer novels to facts. For English liberals, anti-slavery was great fun and reinforced their belief that England remained superior to America. (The campaign nowadays over U.S. capital punishment fulfils the same fu nction and so the show rumbles on.) This book examines the whole range of anti-slavery activity although the author does not refer to Fanny Trollope's influential anti-slavery novel, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw..., to Thackeray's humorous strictures on the wretched Mrs Stowe and her friends or to the work of John Cassell in promoting Mrs Stowe's book among working class audiences. (J.M.)

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