"A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement": Recovering the Biography of Frank J. Webb

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Eric Gardner

It seems likely that this was the time during which Frank wrote most of The Garies; at the very least, Lapsansky is probably correct when he says that, "while Frank may have been working on his novel for some time, he probably wrote the bulk of it during his enforced leisure after his business failed" (36). The first known mention of the novel comes in a letter from Perkins to Catherine Gilman, which the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center has tentatively dated October 23-26, 1856. In the letter, Perkins writes that "Mr. Webb has written a story & we hope it will take." [9]

Stowe's willingness to preface the novel and especially the Webbs' ties to the British nobility--the novel is dedicated "by her kind permission" to Lady Noel Byron and contains an approving preface from Henry. Lord Brougham--undoubtedly aided Webb in securing publication, and the novel was published in late 1857 by the London firm of G. Routledge and Company. As Lapsansky notes, "though the book was well received in England" and "though the publisher ... had a distribution network" in the U.S. (including a New York imprint), scholars have not yet found record of any significant American response (28).

Stowe's preface may contain some clues about why and how this happened. She notes, for instance, that "the author takes pleasure in recommending this simply and truthfully-told story to the attention and interest of the friends of progress and humanity in England" (xx; italics mine). Designing the text for British sale would certainly have made sense; the Webbs were well-connected there, and, as Lapsansky notes, because The Garies was technically "not an antislavery novel" but rather "an anti-racist work" set in the North, American audiences--especially white audiences--might have had difficulty with it. [10] Regardless, the Webbs did not stay in Great Britain for long after the novel's publication. As the National Anti-Slavery Standard reported, Mary's health declined significantly during her time in England--she suffered from consumption--and Mary was "compelled entirely to suspend her public readings" and spend several months in the South of France on orders from a doctor (3).

In part because Mary's health "rendered a residence in a warmer climate necessary," the Webbs' British friends worked to secure Frank an appointment in the Post Office of Kingston, Jamaica (3). Webb apparently wrote home to apprise family and friends of this development. Grimke's March 1, 1858, diary entry, for example, notes that "Mr. F. Webb has received an appointment as postmaster in Jamaica" (289). The Webbs did stop in the U.S. prior to Frank's taking the appointment; they arrived in the U.S. on March 1, 1858, aboard the steamer America (which ran from Liverpool to Boston). [11] The Webbs' arrival was duly reported in the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, which noted, in an implicit allusion to the Sam Slick incident, that the Webbs "received the warmest kindness ... at the hands of Capt. Moodie, and all of the officers and persons attached to the ship" and that they noticed "a marked change for the better in the deportment of the American passengers, as compared with the former experie nces of many of their friends in like circumstances" (3).