Discussion Post: The Three Gables
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Three Gables and the chosen topic is Black Victorians. (‘Black’ used in the umbrella sense.)
A few facts:
🌍 Our knowledge of the black presence in Victorian London is still seriously under researched. Information on the lives of black women is particularly lacking. However, we will probably never know how many black people lived in London during the Victorian era as information held in many nineteenth century archives such as the national census do not usually record a person's ethnicity, or the colour of their skin… [University College London]
🌍 The black population of Victorian Britain was so small that those living outside of larger trading ports were isolated from the black population. The mentioning of black people and descendants in parish registers declined markedly in the early 19th century. It is possible that researchers simply did not collect the data or that the mostly black male population of the late 18th century had married white women. Abolition of slavery in 1833, effectively ended the period of small-scale black immigration to London and Britain. Though, there were some exceptions, black and Chinese seamen began putting down the roots of small communities in British ports, not least because they were abandoned there by their employers.
By the late 19th century, race discrimination was fed by theories of scientific racism, which held that whites were the superior race and that blacks were less intelligent than whites. Attempts to support these theories cited 'scientific evidence', such as brain size. James Hunt, President of the London Anthropological Society, in 1863 in his paper "On the Negro's place in nature" wrote,"the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European...[and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans.'' In the 1880s there was a build-up of small groups of black dockside communities in towns such as Canning Town, Liverpool, and Cardiff…
Despite social prejudice and discrimination in Victorian England, some 19th-century black Britons achieved exceptional success… [Wikipedia]
🌍 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was an English composer and conductor who was mixed-race; his father was a Sierra Leone Creole physician…
In 1904, on his first tour to the United States, Coleridge-Taylor was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a rare event in those days for a man of African descent. His music was widely performed and he had great support among African Americans. Coleridge-Taylor sought to draw from traditional African music and integrate it into the classical tradition… Having met the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in London, Taylor set some of his poems to music. A joint recital between Taylor and Dunbar was arranged in London, under the patronage of US Ambassador John Milton Hay. It was organised by Henry Francis Downing, an African-American playwright and London resident. Dunbar and other black people encouraged Coleridge-Taylor to draw from his Sierra Leonean ancestry and the music of the African continent...
Coleridge-Taylor's greatest success was undoubtedly his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which was widely performed by choral groups in England during Coleridge-Taylor's lifetime and in the decades after his death. Its popularity was rivalled only by the choral standards Handel's Messiah and Mendelssohn's Elijah… Coleridge-Taylor also composed chamber music, anthems, and the African Dances for violin, among other works. The Petite Suite de Concert is still regularly played. He set one poem by his near-namesake Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Legend of Kubla Khan". [Wikipedia]
🌍 [Coleridge-Taylor] called himself an Anglo-African and fought against race prejudice all his short life. He incorporated black traditional music with concert music, with such compositions as African Suite, African Romances and Twenty Four Negro Melodies. The first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was described by the principal of the Royal College of Music as 'one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history', and this work was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic...
Samuel was named for the poet, and in 1890, aged 15, he entered the Royal College of Music as a violin student. The RCM principal hesitated over Coleridge-Taylor's colour before admitting him, apparently worried that the other students might object. After two years, he swapped violin studies for composition. His tutor, Charles Villiers Stanford, challenged him to write a clarinet quintet without showing the influence of his favourite composer, Brahms. Coleridge-Taylor did it, and when this early work was revived in 1973, the New York Times critic called it 'something of an eye opener…an assured piece of writing in the post-Romantic tradition…sweetly melodic.'
In 1896, he met the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and set some of his poems to music (African Romances), and in 1897 the two men gave joint performances. He also met Frederick J Loudin, former director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the choir that introduced African American spirituals to British audiences in 1873. By 1898 Elgar, then England's leading living composer was describing Coleridge-Taylor as 'far and away the cleverest fellow amongst the young men.' A few weeks later came the triumphant Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which captivated the public, and established him as one of Britain's outstanding young composers. However, despite its enthusiastic reception, Coleridge-Taylor personally reaped very little reward for this great work. In order to live, he conducted and taught. From 1903 to his death in 1912, he was professor of composition at the Trinity College of Music in London, as well as the conductor of the Handel Society, the Rochester Choral Society, and conducted many provincial orchestras...
In 1912, he contracted double pneumonia and died at the age of 37. He left two children, Hiawatha and Gwendolyn, who both had distinguished careers as conductors and composers. [www.100greatblackbritons.com]
🌍 Samuel’s early music training… was supervised by a Colonel Herbert A. Walters, variously described as a silk merchant, army volunteer, amateur musician and honorary choirmaster of St George’s Church, Croydon. Coleridge-Taylor’s daughter Avril (Gwendoline) suggests in her book that the Colonel might have been friends with his father, although there is no evidence to back this up. He also received violin lessons from Joseph Beckwith, a local orchestral musician, and he sang in the choir at St George’s from the age of 10. After his voice broke he sang alto in the parish church of St Mary Magdalene, Addiscombe. Coleridge-Taylor, as he pointed out in later life, was very well aware of the difficulties he faced because of the colour of his skin. His nickname at school, for instance, was ‘coaley’. On the other hand, his friends clearly had something out of the ordinary in mind for his future, and in 1890 Colonel Walters arranged an interview at the Royal College of Music with Charles Grove, its head, (and editor/publisher of the Grove Encyclopaedia of Music). Coleridge-Taylor won a scholarship and was accepted for entry in the same year, originally as a student of violin, then graduating to studying composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, the composer and one of the moving spirits behind the renaissance of English music in the late 19th century...
There is a typical and well-established story of his time at the RCM when Stanford, overhearing another student deliver a racial insult, rounded on the culprit and told him that Coleridge-Taylor had “more music in his little finger” than the other student had in “his whole body”. All the evidence, therefore, contradicts the idea that his career was a simple one of struggle against racism...
Coleridge-Taylor’s success and fame did not exempt him from racial harassment, or from the insecurity which it provoked. Most painful was the fact that his wife (Jessie Walmisley) was also a target of abuse. His daughter records his response to groups of local youths who would often make comments about the colour of his skin: “When he saw them approaching along the street he held my hand more tightly, gripping it until it almost hurt.”
It takes no great imagination to see in Hiawatha’s Wedding a substitute for African American experience. Works like Twenty-Four Negro Melodies reveal the influence of the African American poet, Dunbar. On the other hand, it seems that Coleridge-Taylor’s understanding of race and racial conflict in the USA was gleaned from conversations with his friends and
from the works of such writers as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois… ...Coleridge-Taylor’s view of his racial and African heritage seems to have been filtered through the African-American experience, and he seems to have had little or no contact or interest in Britain’s relationships in the African continent or the Caribbean… ColeridgeTaylor’s pride and interest in his African background certainly does him credit, but in terms of his work, in comparison with, for instance, his contemporary, the African-American composer Scott Joplin, it remains rhetorical, a mild colouring. [Mike Phillips]
🌍 Throughout the 19th century black performers regularly appeared on the London stage, often from theatres in America. The first black actor to become famous was Ira Aldridge, an American who eventually took British citizenship. Another American, Samuel Morgan Smith, was also a huge hit on the Victorian stage...
'The Bayaderes' or 'Temple dancers' came to London from southern Asia in the 1830s. This family of Indian musicians and dancers from Tiruvendipura near Pondicherry began a fashion for authentic Indian dance.
The American anti-slavery novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was adapted as a stage play opening at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1852 to wide public acclaim.
Black faced minstrels were also hugely popular in live performance and marionette shows at this time. Most minstrels were white performers who painted their faces with burnt cork and sang and danced in mimicry of black people. But many black performers also made their name as minstrels including Billy Kersands and ‘The King of all Minstrels’, Juba, who played at Vauxhall Gardens in London in 1848. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
🌍 Few black models were in greater demand than Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, who lived in London from the mid 1850s and sat for the likes of Rossetti and Albert Moore. Ms Eaton is mesmerising in Moore's Mother of Sisera and appears in Rossetti's The Beloved, two of the exhibition's highlights. But she is an object, not a subject, and the underlying prejudice is revealed by one critic, who wrote in 1867: "A black is eminently picturesque, his colour can be turned to good account in picture-making..."
An omission [in Victorian art] is the portrayal of blacks by black artists of the time as no black British artists active in the period have been identified... [Ian Herbert]
🌍 Arthur Wharton (28 October 1865 – 13 December 1930) is widely considered to be the first black professional footballer in the world. Though not the first black player outright - the amateurs Robert Walker, of Queen's Park, and Scotland international player, Andrew Watson him - Wharton was the first black professional and the first to play in the Football League.
Wharton was born in Jamestown, Gold Coast (now Accra, Ghana). His father Henry Wharton was Grenadian, while his mother, Annie Florence Egyriba was a member of the Fante Ghanaian royalty. Wharton moved to England in 1882 at age 19, to train as a Methodist missionary, but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a full-time athlete.
He was an all-round sportsman - in 1886, he equaled the amateur world record of 10 seconds for the 100-yard sprint in the AAA championship. He was also a keen cyclist and cricketer, playing for local teams in Yorkshire and Lancashire. However, Wharton is best remembered for his exploits as a footballer... [Wikipedia]
🌍 Sara[h] Forbes Bonetta (1843 – 15 August 1880) was a West African Egbado omoba [literally ‘child of a monarch’] of Yoruba royalty who was orphaned in intertribal warfare, sold into slavery, and in a remarkable twist of events, was liberated from enslavement and became a goddaughter to Queen Victoria. She was married to Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy Victorian Lagos philanthropist.
Originally named "Aina", Sara[h] was born in 1843 at Oke-Odan, an Egbado village. In 1848, Oke-Odan was raided by a Dahomeyan army; Sara's parents died during the attack and she ended up in the court of King Ghezo as a slave at the age of five. Intended by her captors to become a human sacrifice, she was rescued by Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy, who convinced King Ghezo of Dahomey to give her to Queen Victoria; "She would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites," Forbes wrote later.
Forbes named her Sara[h] Forbes Bonetta, Bonetta after his ship the HMS Bonetta. Victoria was impressed by the young princess's exceptional intelligence, and had Sara[h] raised as her goddaughter in the British middle class... [Wikipedia]
🌍 Pablo Fanque (born William Darby 30 March 1810 in Norwich, England; died 4 May 1871 in Stockport, England) was an English equestrian performer and circus proprietor, the first non-white British circus owner in Britain. His circus was the most popular in Victorian Britain for 30 years, a period that is regarded as the golden age of the circus... While some contemporary reports did not refer to Fanque's African ancestry, other reports noted that he was "a man of colour," or "a coloured gentleman," or "an artiste of colour." (These suggest he was of mixed race, with partial European ancestry as well.) In 1905, many years after Fanque's death, the chaplain of the Showmen's Guild wrote, "In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour-line." He was commenting on Fanque's success in Victorian England despite being of mixed race. [Wikipedia]
🌍 John Turner, who has researched Fanque’s life more thoroughly than any other writer, says that he found little or no evidence that Fanque suffered racial discrimination during his long career. Contemporary newspapers mention his color infrequently, and incidentally, and many paid warm tribute to his charity work; the Blackburn Standard wrote that, in a world not often noted for plain dealing, “such is Mr. Pablo Fanque’s character for probity and respectability, that wherever he has been once he can go again; aye, and receive the countenance and support of the wise and virtuous of all classes of society.” After Fanque’s death, the chaplain of the Showman’s Guild remarked: “In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour line, for, although Pablo was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test, ability.”
Yet while all this may be true—there’s plenty of evidence, in late Victorian show-business memoirs, that Fanque was a well-respected member of an often disrespected profession—racism was pervasive in the nineteenth century. William Wallett, one of the great clowns of the mid-Victorian age, a friend of Fanque’s who worked with him on several occasions, recalls in his memoirs that on one visit to Oxford, “Pablo, a very expert angler, would usually catch as many fish as five or six of us within sight of him put together”—and this, Wallett adds, “suggested a curious device” to one irked Oxford student:
One of the Oxonians, with more love for angling than skill, thought there must be something captivating in the complexion of Pablo. He resolved to try. One morning, going down to the river an hour or two earlier than usual, we were astonished to find the experimental philosophical angler with his face blacked after the most approved style of the Christy Minstrels.
Although Wallett does not say so, the gesture was a calculated insult, and it may also be significant that it took Fanque years to gather up the wherewithal to go into business for himself. He did not own his circus until 1841, three decades into his career, and when he did finally leave Batty it was with just two horses and a motley assortment of acts, all of them provided by a single family: a clown, “Mr. R. Hemmings and his dog, Hector,” together with “Master H. Hemmings on the tightrope and Mr. E. Hemmings’ feats of balancing.’ ” [Mike Dash]
🌍 Mary Jane Seacole OM (née Grant 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a Jamaican business woman who set up the British Hotel behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991…
She acquired knowledge of herbal medicine in the Caribbean. When the Crimean War broke out, she applied to the War Office to assist but was refused. She travelled independently and set up her hotel and assisted battlefield wounded. She became extremely popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war… [Wikipedia]
🌍 Dadabhai Naoroji (4 September 1825 – 30 June 1917), known as the Grand Old Man of India, was a Parsi intellectual, educator, cotton trader, and an early Indian political and social leader. He was a Liberal Party member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom House of Commons between 1892 and 1895, and the first Asian to be a British MP...
Naoroji is also credited with the founding of the Indian National Congress, along with A.O. Hume and Dinshaw Edulji Wacha. His book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India brought attention to the draining of India's wealth into Britain… [Wikipedia]
🌍 ‘Black Victorian Britain’. Paper presented in Wandsworth October 2013
Presented by Jeffrey Green at Northcote Library, 157 Northcote Road, Wandsworth Common, London SW11 6Q on 24 October 2013 as part of Wandsworth Black History Month.
...This talk concentrates on the 19th century. The Windrush of 1948 is not the beginning of the black presence in Britain. And we are not dealing with marginalised people, or victims. I will mention some names and I will show images of black Victorians. The images will indicate how wide one must trawl to find documentation – which itself suggests that the black presence in Victorian Britain was widespread...
Joseph Freeman was a slave in New Orleans who settled in eastern England in the 1840s. The 1871 census records Freeman and his Lincolnshire-born wife Sarah with their six children in Chelmsford. He worked as a labourer at the iron works as did his nineteen-year-old Suffolk-born namesake son.
The Powell family arrived in Britain by early 1851. The Dublin Freeman’s Journal of 8 February 1851 noted Powell was ‘a coloured gentleman, who had come to this country to procure for his children that education and means of supporting themselves by the acquirement of trades or professions denied them in Boston on account of their colour’. There were seven children. William Powell Jr, born in 1834, trained in Dublin and became a Member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of London in 1858.
It is one thing to note from an archive that this or that person qualified in this or that, and another to see the physical evidence. Here from 1899 is the Edinburgh University degree certificate of Trinidad-born John Alcindor who studied medicine there from 1893. He worked in London until his death in 1924. The family retain this.
We can say that the Freeman family in Chelmsford were black and working class. So too, and visible to thousands daily, were street sweepers. London’s Daily News on 8 December 1884 published a lengthy article on crossing sweepers, noting that ‘the old black man’ who swept a crossing in London’s Farringdon Street had bequeathed £800 to the daughter of an alderman who had befriended him, and that another who swept the crossing at Conduit Street and Regent Street was said to have owned two or three houses at the time of his death: ‘There is no doubt that, other things being equal, a black crossing-sweeper would take a great deal more than a white man. A negro is a stranger in a strange land; he is presumably friendless, and, being pretty certainly a native of a hot country, he may be supposed to suffer more from the wet and cold of our climate than an English-man. All these considerations would enable a steady blackman to make a good thing of a well-located crossing’...
The village of Ockham – near the M25/M3 motorways in Surrey – has a black connection. The register of baptisms records that on 2 January 1853 the rector supervised the baptism of Charles Estlin Phillips, son of William and Ellen Craft, ‘fugitive slaves’. On 26 April 1863 two more Craft children were baptised: Stephen Brougham Dennoce Craft and Alice Isabella Ellen Craft. Their father was noted as being ‘on a Mission to Africa’. Ellen and William Craft had been slaves in Georgia since their births in the mid-1820s. Ellen had the colouring of her white father, which was used to advantage in 1848 when, dressed as man and with William as her slave attendant, they escaped north. In November 1850 they sailed from Canada to Liverpool. The Bristol Mercury of 30 August 1851 (copying the London Morning Advertiser) noted the Crafts had enrolled as pupils at Ockham, and that he was instructing boys in carpentry and Ellen was teaching handicrafts to the girls…
Frederick Thomas was born in northern Mississippi in 1872. In 1896-1897 he was in London working as a waiter. He moved on to Paris and Moscow where he became a very successful businessman. Ruined by the revolution of 1917, a penniless refugee in Turkey in 1920, he died in 1928. His Russian-speaking children eventually reached America, and another studied in Prague and settled in France where he died in 1987. His family continues – the lingerie of Chantal Thomass (two s’s) is well known.
People of African descent worked around Britain as ‘Zulus’, appearing in fairs and shows. British military forces advanced into Zululand where 1,200 men were routed at Isandlwana in January 1879. The defence of Rorke’s Drift days later became a Victorian legend and in 1964 was the focus of a successful film, Zulu. Although in the 1870s half of Britain’s adults were illiterate many now associated Africans with Zulus, and Zulus with the destruction of the 24th Regiment of Foot. Being or pretending to be or even looking vaguely like a Zulu became a problem in Britain. In September 1880 a letter was published by the Glasgow Herald: ‘I have the misfortune to be, or rather it has pleased God to create me, a man of colour, and my well-educated wife and daughter are of the same caste as myself. Though I am in a respectable business here my wife and daughter have been subjected to gross insults by crowds of howling men and women, who call them Zulus, & c., even by the very men who ought to protect them – viz., the police – as a young lady in my shop can testify … my wife and daughter cannot go out either by tramway car or on foot without being subject to outrage and insult’. It was signed ‘A man of colour’...
There were employment opportunities as animal trainers… Working as musical entertainers employed growing numbers of blacks… Generally thought to have been white, most 19th century missionaries in West Africa were black… [Jeffrey Green]
🌍 ...during the Victorian era it is much more difficult to trace [in Britain] African descent women than men.
There were African American women who had either escaped from slavery or, free born, sought a better life in Britain. Escaped slave Ellen Craft came with her husband in 1850 and left in 1869, having lived in Ockham (Surrey) and Hammersmith and raised five children… The mother of Mercy and Sarah Powell was a Native American, their father a free born African American. With five sons they settled in Liverpool 1851-1861, where the eldest boy (William Jr) worked as a doctor in the hospital before serving as a doctor in the Union forces in the US Civil War…
Human zoos and ethnic performers included women, such as the Somalis (61 men, women and children) who were on show at the Crystal Palace in the summer of 1895, and two Zulu/South African choirs which toured Britain from 1892. Sannie Koopman broke away from them and was in Chesterfield in 1892. Dahomey Warrior troupes were mainly female. Millie-Christine McKoy, born in slavery in America, for ever linked by a conjoined spine, worked as The African Twins 1855-1857 and returned to tour Europe when freed…
Another free born American, Sarah Remond, toured Britain 1859-1866 explaining slavery, then qualified as a doctor in Italy where she died. Anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells was in Britain in 1893 and again in 1894, and was aided by a Nigerian medical student and his friends in London. Amanda Smith went to India as a Christian missionary, visiting England 1878-1879, 1881, and touring from early 1895 to mid-1896. Her autobiography was published in London in 1894. Hallie Quinn Brown was a temperance lecturer who was active in Scotland from February 1896 for over a year, talking on “women and the drink question”. Eliza Meyer, from Ghana (then the Gold Coast) was educated in England and Switzerland and married Dr Benjamin Quartey-Papafio in St Bartholomew’s church, Smithfield (London) in October 1896.
There was a fashion for African American singers and recitalists, and several had the patronage of the very wealthy Duchess of Sutherland in London. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was in England 1853-1854; Marie Selika in 1882-1883, and Sissieretta Jones (known as the Black Patti) in the 1880s and 1890s. Other female entertainers included actress Amy Height (1866-1913) who was in England from 1883 and died in London, and several who worked in Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows. There were four in a Cabin show in Belfast in January 1879. Cassandra Walmer born in London in 1888 of a black actor father was in Cabin shows at the age of three (Leicester, 1891) whereas Birmingham-born Esther “Hettie” Johnson joined one in her twenties. She died aged 102 in Fareham in 1973. The Poland-born acrobat Olga Kaira was “Miss Lala” and appeared at the London Aquarium in March 1879… [Jeffrey Green]
🌍 The British Empire, by the latter end of the 19th Century, included colonies (some being populated largely or entirely through settlement by Britain, others populated primarily by indigenous peoples conquered or otherwise subjugated by Britain) that were considered part of the same realm as the UK, dominions (colonies which had attained theoretically equal status to the UK as separate realms within the Empire), and protectorates (foreign territories under British administration). The dominions raised their own military forces, under direct control of their own governments. Although British colonies could not raise their own armies, military units were raised in many which existed in a grey zone as neither within, nor without, the British Army. Only one force, the West India Regiment, which had been in existence since 1795, was considered part of the British Army, although its black soldiers were rated as "native", and not recruited under the same conditions or given the same pay as the rest of the British Army. [Wikipedia]
🌍 James Francis Durham was the first African to join the British Army as a fully enlisted soldier...
It was New Year's Day 1886 and de Lisle was leading a mounted party of the Durham Light Infantry. This was the battle of Ginnis, Egypt, and [Captain Beauvoir] de Lisle had set out to capture, the enemy's river transport. The party approached a large nuggar (Arabic river boat), with a considerable number of enemy on board. A charge was made and the nuggar was seized. The Arab inhabitants fled in the darkness, leaving only one behind who was badly wounded. Alongside the nuggar was an infant...
The child was handed over to Sergeant Stuart, who, named him Jimmy Dervish. The boy's real name was Mustapha. It appeared that the child's father, a Sheik, had been killed in the battle of Ginnis. His widow with two children had intended to make her way to Berber, but there was no trace of the child's mother...
When the Battalion received orders to go to India, it was intended that Jimmy should be left in a mission school in Cairo. The sergeants, however, objected and promised to subscribe one rupee a month towards the child's upkeep. Jimmy was baptised James Francis Durham. When the DLI moved to India in 1887, Jimmy went with them, where he attended the school for the regiment's children. In 1898, he accompanied the DLI to their new station at Mandalay. It was in Burma that James Francis Durham made his mark on British military history by applying to enlist as a boy soldier.
Jimmy's application, strongly backed by the sergeants, went all the way to Queen Victoria.
The official decision was favourable, and in July 1899, James Francis Durham was formally enrolled as Boy Solider No. 6758, aged 14 years old.
Although the British Army had employed Black drummers and musicians since the 18th century, and colonial regiments were often black, no African had been allowed to join the regular Army on the same terms as white recruits… [BBC]
🌍 The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight. At some point during their stay, they visited the studio of the London Stereoscopic Company to have group and individual portraits made on plate-glass negatives… The London Stereoscopic Company specialised in carte de visites – small photographs printed on cards that were often traded by collectors or used by performers for publicity purposes – and, as their name suggests, they were all in stereo which, when seen through a special viewer, gave the illusion of a three-dimensional photograph.
The… portraits of the African Choir… are arresting both for the style and assurance of the sitters – some of the women look like they could be modelling for Vogue… [Sean O'Hagan]
🌍 In 1868, a cricket team composed of Australian Aborigines toured England between May and October of that year, thus becoming the first organised group of Australian sportspeople to travel overseas...
The first match was played at The Oval in London and attracted 20,000 spectators. Presumably many of these spectators attended out of curiosity to see members of a strange-looking race perform athletically rather than merely to savour a cricket contest. The Times reported:
"Their hair and beards are long and wiry, their skins vary in shades of blackness, and most of them have broadly expanded nostrils. Having been brought up in the bush to agricultural pursuits under European settlers, they are perfectly civilised and are quite familiar with the English language."
The Daily Telegraph wrote:
It is highly interesting and curious, to see mixed in a friendly game on the most historically Saxon part of our island, representatives of two races so far removed from each other as the modern Englishman and the Aboriginal Australian. Although several of them are native bushmen, and all are as black as night, these Indian fellows are to all intents and purposes, clothed and in their right minds.
Altogether, the Aborigines played 47 matches throughout England over a period of six months, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19; a good result that surprised many at the time. Their skills were said to range from individuals who were exceptional athletes down to two or three other team members who hardly contributed at all. The outstanding player was Johnny Mullagh. He scored 1,698 runs and took 245 wickets. An admired English fast bowler of the time, George Tarrant, bowled to Mullagh during a lunch interval and later said, "I have never bowled to a better batsman." [Wikipedia]
🌍 Starting in the 18th century, [Indian] travellers, emissaries, and petitioners seeking redress for lands lost to the East India Company, or having other complaints against the Company, visited Britain. From about the middle of the 19th century an increasing number of Indians - largely professionals - came to Britain. Some came as a result of the political, social and economic changes brought about under colonial rule. Others came out of a sense of adventure or curiosity to see the land of their rulers, or as in the case of the princes, on official visits or for pleasure. Students, some on scholarships, came to obtain vital professional qualifications to enable them to gain entry into the structures of colonial hierarchy back home. Some, having qualified, stayed on to practice their professions in Britain. Political activists brought the struggle for colonial freedom to London, the centre of imperial power. Businessmen and entrepreneurs came to seek economic opportunities. [British Library]
🌍 The British East India Company recruited seamen from areas around its factories in Bengal, Assam and Gujarat, as well as from Yemen, British Somaliland and Portuguese Goa. They were known by the British as lascars...
Lascars began living in England in small numbers from the mid-17th century as servants as well as sailors on English ships. Baptism records show that a number of young men from the Malabar coast were brought to England as servants. Lascars arrived in larger numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the British East India Company began recruiting thousands of lascars (mostly Bengali Muslims, but also Konkani-speaking Christians from the northern part of Portuguese Goa and Muslims from Ratnagiri District in the adjacent Maharashtra) to work on British ships and occasionally in ports around the world. Despite prejudice and a language barrier, some lascars settled in British port cities, often forcibly due to ill-treatment on British ships as well as being unable to leave due to restrictions such as the Navigation Act and abandonment by shipping masters. Shipowners would face penalties for leaving lascars behind. This measure was intended to discourage settlement of Asian sailors in Britain.
Lascars often lived in Christian charity homes, boarding houses and barracks and sometimes cohabited with local British women...
Although the South Asian presence in London during the 19th century mainly constituted male lascars and sailors, some women were included. British soldiers would occasionally marry Indian women while overseas and send their mixed-race children back to Britain, although the wife often did not accompany them. Indian wives of British soldiers would sometimes ask for passage home after being abandoned or widowed if they did accompany their children. In 1835, Bridget Peter, a native of the Madras region of India, lost her husband, a British soldier serving in His Majesty's 1st Foot Regiment. She petitioned the directors from Chelsea Hospital "in a state of destitution". They paid to return her and her three children to India…
Indian lascar sailors established some of England's first settled Asian-British inter-racial families in the dock areas of major port cities. This led to a small number of "mixed race" children being born in the country. Ethnic minority women in Britain were often outnumbered by "half-caste Indian" daughters born from white mothers and Indian fathers. The most famous of these mixed-race children was Albert Mahomet, born with a lascar father and English mother. He went on to write a book about his life called From Street Arab to Pastor...
In 1842, the Church Missionary Society reported on the dire ″state of the lascars in London″. In 1850 40 lascars, also known as ″Sons of India,″ were reported to have starved to death in the streets of London. Shortly after these reports, evangelical Christians proposed the construction of a charity house and gathered £15,000 in assistance of the lascars. In 1856 "The Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders" was opened in Commercial Road, Limehouse under the manager, Lieutenant-Colonel R. Marsh Hughes. The home helped and supported lascars and sailors from as far as China. The home helped with employment and with leaving Britain. Additionally, it served as a repatriation centre where various sailors were recruited for ships returning East… Lascar immigrants were often the first Asians to be seen in British cities and were initially perceived as indolent due to their reliance on Christian charities. [Wikipedia]
🌍 In the 1840s and 1850s, as slavery continued in the United States, a considerable amount of information reached the British through the spoken and written testimonies of African Americans in Britain. A new genre of writing – the slavery narrative – was developed, and those publications were sold at public meetings. The income supported the authors, aided projects such as settlements in Canada and Africa, and helped pay owners of escaped slaves, setting them free legally.
Tracking African American ex-slaves in contemporary British newspapers confirmed that several high class individuals (including the Duchess of Sutherland, Earl Shaftesbury, Member of Parliament George Thompson and Lord Brougham) were regular associates and supporters…
The documentation tends to show the fugitives being supported by men and women of substance, but Anderson’s photograph-buyers from ‘the poorer class of the community’ and Watkins’s appreciation of the ‘tens of thousands of the poorer classes’ hint that Britons in every walk of life were sympathetic to black fugitives and that they had seen and met them...
In June 1853 the fugitive William G. Allen (free-born but married to a white woman) informed America’s leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that they had safely reached England, and noted ‘the entire absence of prejudice against color’ in Britain. He also commented that Samuel R. Ward ‘whom it is hardly possible to be blacker’ had faced ‘no barrier to the best society in the kingdom’ (Liberator, 22 July 1853). The U.S.A. was a race-minded society whereas Britain was class-based… [Jeffrey Green]
🌍 On October 1865, a local rebellion by peasantry in Jamaica was ferociously suppressed by the island's governor, Edward John Eyre. His actions generated considerable debate in Britain. Those defending his viciousness did so on the grounds not that Jamaicans were black, but that they were no different from English workers. "The negro," observed Edwin Hood, "is in Jamaica as the costermonger is in Whitechapel; he is very likely often nearly a savage with the mind of a child." The liberal Saturday Review suggested that "the negro . . . often does cruel and barbarous things, but then so do our draymen and hackney-coachmen and grooms and farm servants, through want of either thought or power of thinking".
The concept of race today is so intertwined with the idea of colour that it is often difficult to comprehend the Victorian notion of racial difference. For Victorians, race was a description not so much of colour differences as of social distinctions. The English lower classes were to 19th-century eyes as racially different as were Africans or Asians. A report in the Saturday Review about working-class life observed: "The Bethnal Green poor are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact." The Review suggested that class distinctions and separations were fixed, and would "last from the cradle to the grave", preventing any form of association or companionship…
Much recent academic debate has denied the peculiar character of 19th-century thinking about race. Ignoring both the Victorian views of the working class and their perception of commonalities between European and non-European societies, many scholars insist that the main division for Victorians was between "the West" and "the Rest". Influenced by Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism, it has become axiomatic that "race" has always referred to differences of colour, and that Europeans have always tended to view non-Europeans as the "Other" - different, exotic, inferior. According to Stuart Hall, for instance, Europe has defined itself since the Renaissance through the "discourse of the Other", which "represents what are in fact very differentiated (the different European cultures) as homogenous (the West)" and "asserts that these different cultures are united by one thing: the fact that they are all different from the Rest".
In Ornamentalism, David Cannadine provides a welcome challenge to this academic orthodoxy through rethinking British perceptions of its empire… British imperialists loathed Indians and Africans no more or less than they loathed the great majority of Englishmen. They were far more willing to work with maharajahs, kings and chiefs of whatever colour than with white settlers, whom they generally considered to be uneducated trash. Just as Jamaican peasants and East End costermongers were viewed as equally inferior, so Indian princes and West African tribal chiefs were often understood as the social equivalent of English gentlemen. Indeed, British rulers were often amused at the inability of lower-class white settlers to comprehend that aristocratic breeding cut across differences of colour. Lady Gordon, the wife of Sir Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, the governor of Fiji from 1875 to 1880, thought the native high-ranking Fijians "such an undoubted aristocracy". She wrote: "Their manners are so perfectly easy and well bred . . . Nurse can't understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I don't like to tell her that these ladies are my equals, which she is not!" [Kenan Malik]
🌍 "Blacks" in the British Isles are difficult to count because the nineteenth-century census lacked ethnic and racial categories… As no self-identified black communities emerge from archival records, scholars who look for blacks in Victorian Britain inevitably end up studying individuals...
Not only were there contrasting experiences of blackness in Britain and the United States, but there was also a lively trans-Atlantic debate… [There is] ample evidence that contemporary African-Americans were well aware of the transatlantic gulf in attitudes. The delightful Mary Seacole, who challenged the prim, starched nursing style of Florence Nightingale with ministrations of rum and home remedies to British troops in the Crimean War, is a case in point. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's chapter on Mrs. Seacole's book about her experience, Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands, describes her curious progress from West Indian healer to anti-Nightingale on the battlefield. Paravisini-Gebert argues that Seacole "assumes her place in a British society--and history--from which she is initially rejected, by finding in the Crimea a substitute for 'England,' a war zone where the expected barriers to someone of her class, race, and colonial origins can be temporarily lifted." Some such barriers may well have existed, but as Mary Seacole knew only too well from her experience with Americans in Panama, they were far less formidable than those to be found in Atlanta or New York City. When she was rejected as a volunteer for Florence Nightingale's effort, Mrs. Seacole wonders: "Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour [that she had found so offensive in ... Panama] had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?" The answer, Mary Seacole found, was no. Nightingale's class prejudice in favor of English "ladies" caused the rebuff, not her color… [Norman A. Etherington]
Some useful resources:
Jeffrey Green’s website Its focus [is] on the activities of black people in Britain ca 1830-ca 1940… Jeffrey is a historian based south of London. Essentially a website made up of many articles by Jeffrey Green. All fascinating stuff but I’ve picked out a few of the pages that I think are most relevant for 3GAB:
093: Black women in Britain 1850-1897
106: African Americans in Britain 1850-1866
118: African Americans in mid-Victorian Britain
165 : ‘Black Victorian Britain’. Paper presented in Wandsworth October 2013
Hidden histories: the first black people photographed in Britain – in pictures On The Guardian website.
The black Victorians: astonishing portraits unseen for 120 years By Sean O'Hagan, on The Guardian website.
Striking photos reveal hidden history of black Britons in the Victorian era By Monique Todd, on CNN.
Black_British: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor On Wikipedia.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor On 100 Great Black Britons.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) BLACK EUROPEANS: A British Library Online Gallery feature by guest curator Mike Phillips
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor On The Art Song Project. Modern day recordings of five of his songs by soprano Hélène Lindqvist and pianist Philipp Vogler.
Pablo Fanque On Wikipedia.
Pablo Fanque’s Fair By Mike Dash, on The Smithsonian.
Mary Seacole On Wikipedia.
Mary Seacole (1805 - 1881) On the BBC website.
Arthur Wharton On Wikipedia.
Sara Forbes Bonetta On Wikipedia.
Little Known Black History Fact: Olga Kaira By D.L. Chandler, on Black America Web.
Peter Jackson (boxer) On Wikipedia.
Albert Mahomet On Wikipedia.
Dadabhai Naoroji On Wikipedia.
From the archive, 26 July 1892: Britain's first Asian MP elected On The Guardian website.
Black & Asian Performance in Britain 1800-1899 On The Victorian and Albert Museum.
British Army during the Victorian Era On Wikipedia. See ‘Colonial units’ section.
Jimmy Durham: The Sergeants' Boy from Sudan On the BBC website.
Australian Aboriginal cricket team in England in 1868 On Wikipedia.
Why the Victorians were colour blind. In the 19th century, race mattered far less than social distinction: a West African tribal chief was unquestionably superior to an East End costermonger. By Kenan Malik, on NewStatesman.
Contrasts in the Lived Experience of Race in the Nineteenth-Century United States and Victorian Britain Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, reviewed by Norman A. Etherington (Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Western Australia) (January, 2004).
Black Londoners 1800-1900 On the University College London website.
History_of_African_immigrants_in_London: 19th_century On Wikipedia.
Airbrushed out of history: How Victorian Britain portrayed its black community By Ian Herbert, on The Independent website.
Forgotten faces By Kate Kellaway, on The Guardian website.
The shared history of black and white Britons On The Monitoring Group. Jagdish Patel from the Monitoring Group recently met with Satnam Virdee to speak further about his book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider.
Black Britons in the Archive On Google Arts & Culture.
17 stunning photos of black Victorians show how history really looked. By Thom Dunn, on Upworthy. (These are photographs of black Americans.)
The Black Victorians By KC Morgan, on All Day.
Asians in Britain: brief outline (1600-1947) On the British Library website.
Lascar: Nineteenth_century On Wikipedia.
Black and British: A Forgotten History By David Olusoga. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you. And as the site says: This is a preview. The total pages displayed will be limited.
Black Victorians/Black Victoriana Book edited by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you. And as the site says: This is a preview. The total pages displayed will be limited.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
🌍 Our knowledge of the black presence in Victorian London is still seriously under researched. Information on the lives of black women is particularly lacking. However, we will probably never know how many black people lived in London during the Victorian era as information held in many nineteenth century archives such as the national census do not usually record a person's ethnicity, or the colour of their skin… [University College London]
🌍 The black population of Victorian Britain was so small that those living outside of larger trading ports were isolated from the black population. The mentioning of black people and descendants in parish registers declined markedly in the early 19th century. It is possible that researchers simply did not collect the data or that the mostly black male population of the late 18th century had married white women. Abolition of slavery in 1833, effectively ended the period of small-scale black immigration to London and Britain. Though, there were some exceptions, black and Chinese seamen began putting down the roots of small communities in British ports, not least because they were abandoned there by their employers.
By the late 19th century, race discrimination was fed by theories of scientific racism, which held that whites were the superior race and that blacks were less intelligent than whites. Attempts to support these theories cited 'scientific evidence', such as brain size. James Hunt, President of the London Anthropological Society, in 1863 in his paper "On the Negro's place in nature" wrote,"the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European...[and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans.'' In the 1880s there was a build-up of small groups of black dockside communities in towns such as Canning Town, Liverpool, and Cardiff…
Despite social prejudice and discrimination in Victorian England, some 19th-century black Britons achieved exceptional success… [Wikipedia]
🌍 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was an English composer and conductor who was mixed-race; his father was a Sierra Leone Creole physician…
In 1904, on his first tour to the United States, Coleridge-Taylor was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a rare event in those days for a man of African descent. His music was widely performed and he had great support among African Americans. Coleridge-Taylor sought to draw from traditional African music and integrate it into the classical tradition… Having met the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in London, Taylor set some of his poems to music. A joint recital between Taylor and Dunbar was arranged in London, under the patronage of US Ambassador John Milton Hay. It was organised by Henry Francis Downing, an African-American playwright and London resident. Dunbar and other black people encouraged Coleridge-Taylor to draw from his Sierra Leonean ancestry and the music of the African continent...
Coleridge-Taylor's greatest success was undoubtedly his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which was widely performed by choral groups in England during Coleridge-Taylor's lifetime and in the decades after his death. Its popularity was rivalled only by the choral standards Handel's Messiah and Mendelssohn's Elijah… Coleridge-Taylor also composed chamber music, anthems, and the African Dances for violin, among other works. The Petite Suite de Concert is still regularly played. He set one poem by his near-namesake Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Legend of Kubla Khan". [Wikipedia]
🌍 [Coleridge-Taylor] called himself an Anglo-African and fought against race prejudice all his short life. He incorporated black traditional music with concert music, with such compositions as African Suite, African Romances and Twenty Four Negro Melodies. The first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was described by the principal of the Royal College of Music as 'one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history', and this work was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic...
Samuel was named for the poet, and in 1890, aged 15, he entered the Royal College of Music as a violin student. The RCM principal hesitated over Coleridge-Taylor's colour before admitting him, apparently worried that the other students might object. After two years, he swapped violin studies for composition. His tutor, Charles Villiers Stanford, challenged him to write a clarinet quintet without showing the influence of his favourite composer, Brahms. Coleridge-Taylor did it, and when this early work was revived in 1973, the New York Times critic called it 'something of an eye opener…an assured piece of writing in the post-Romantic tradition…sweetly melodic.'
In 1896, he met the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and set some of his poems to music (African Romances), and in 1897 the two men gave joint performances. He also met Frederick J Loudin, former director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the choir that introduced African American spirituals to British audiences in 1873. By 1898 Elgar, then England's leading living composer was describing Coleridge-Taylor as 'far and away the cleverest fellow amongst the young men.' A few weeks later came the triumphant Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which captivated the public, and established him as one of Britain's outstanding young composers. However, despite its enthusiastic reception, Coleridge-Taylor personally reaped very little reward for this great work. In order to live, he conducted and taught. From 1903 to his death in 1912, he was professor of composition at the Trinity College of Music in London, as well as the conductor of the Handel Society, the Rochester Choral Society, and conducted many provincial orchestras...
In 1912, he contracted double pneumonia and died at the age of 37. He left two children, Hiawatha and Gwendolyn, who both had distinguished careers as conductors and composers. [www.100greatblackbritons.com]
🌍 Samuel’s early music training… was supervised by a Colonel Herbert A. Walters, variously described as a silk merchant, army volunteer, amateur musician and honorary choirmaster of St George’s Church, Croydon. Coleridge-Taylor’s daughter Avril (Gwendoline) suggests in her book that the Colonel might have been friends with his father, although there is no evidence to back this up. He also received violin lessons from Joseph Beckwith, a local orchestral musician, and he sang in the choir at St George’s from the age of 10. After his voice broke he sang alto in the parish church of St Mary Magdalene, Addiscombe. Coleridge-Taylor, as he pointed out in later life, was very well aware of the difficulties he faced because of the colour of his skin. His nickname at school, for instance, was ‘coaley’. On the other hand, his friends clearly had something out of the ordinary in mind for his future, and in 1890 Colonel Walters arranged an interview at the Royal College of Music with Charles Grove, its head, (and editor/publisher of the Grove Encyclopaedia of Music). Coleridge-Taylor won a scholarship and was accepted for entry in the same year, originally as a student of violin, then graduating to studying composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, the composer and one of the moving spirits behind the renaissance of English music in the late 19th century...
There is a typical and well-established story of his time at the RCM when Stanford, overhearing another student deliver a racial insult, rounded on the culprit and told him that Coleridge-Taylor had “more music in his little finger” than the other student had in “his whole body”. All the evidence, therefore, contradicts the idea that his career was a simple one of struggle against racism...
Coleridge-Taylor’s success and fame did not exempt him from racial harassment, or from the insecurity which it provoked. Most painful was the fact that his wife (Jessie Walmisley) was also a target of abuse. His daughter records his response to groups of local youths who would often make comments about the colour of his skin: “When he saw them approaching along the street he held my hand more tightly, gripping it until it almost hurt.”
It takes no great imagination to see in Hiawatha’s Wedding a substitute for African American experience. Works like Twenty-Four Negro Melodies reveal the influence of the African American poet, Dunbar. On the other hand, it seems that Coleridge-Taylor’s understanding of race and racial conflict in the USA was gleaned from conversations with his friends and
from the works of such writers as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois… ...Coleridge-Taylor’s view of his racial and African heritage seems to have been filtered through the African-American experience, and he seems to have had little or no contact or interest in Britain’s relationships in the African continent or the Caribbean… ColeridgeTaylor’s pride and interest in his African background certainly does him credit, but in terms of his work, in comparison with, for instance, his contemporary, the African-American composer Scott Joplin, it remains rhetorical, a mild colouring. [Mike Phillips]
🌍 Throughout the 19th century black performers regularly appeared on the London stage, often from theatres in America. The first black actor to become famous was Ira Aldridge, an American who eventually took British citizenship. Another American, Samuel Morgan Smith, was also a huge hit on the Victorian stage...
'The Bayaderes' or 'Temple dancers' came to London from southern Asia in the 1830s. This family of Indian musicians and dancers from Tiruvendipura near Pondicherry began a fashion for authentic Indian dance.
The American anti-slavery novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was adapted as a stage play opening at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1852 to wide public acclaim.
Black faced minstrels were also hugely popular in live performance and marionette shows at this time. Most minstrels were white performers who painted their faces with burnt cork and sang and danced in mimicry of black people. But many black performers also made their name as minstrels including Billy Kersands and ‘The King of all Minstrels’, Juba, who played at Vauxhall Gardens in London in 1848. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
🌍 Few black models were in greater demand than Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, who lived in London from the mid 1850s and sat for the likes of Rossetti and Albert Moore. Ms Eaton is mesmerising in Moore's Mother of Sisera and appears in Rossetti's The Beloved, two of the exhibition's highlights. But she is an object, not a subject, and the underlying prejudice is revealed by one critic, who wrote in 1867: "A black is eminently picturesque, his colour can be turned to good account in picture-making..."
An omission [in Victorian art] is the portrayal of blacks by black artists of the time as no black British artists active in the period have been identified... [Ian Herbert]
🌍 Arthur Wharton (28 October 1865 – 13 December 1930) is widely considered to be the first black professional footballer in the world. Though not the first black player outright - the amateurs Robert Walker, of Queen's Park, and Scotland international player, Andrew Watson him - Wharton was the first black professional and the first to play in the Football League.
Wharton was born in Jamestown, Gold Coast (now Accra, Ghana). His father Henry Wharton was Grenadian, while his mother, Annie Florence Egyriba was a member of the Fante Ghanaian royalty. Wharton moved to England in 1882 at age 19, to train as a Methodist missionary, but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a full-time athlete.
He was an all-round sportsman - in 1886, he equaled the amateur world record of 10 seconds for the 100-yard sprint in the AAA championship. He was also a keen cyclist and cricketer, playing for local teams in Yorkshire and Lancashire. However, Wharton is best remembered for his exploits as a footballer... [Wikipedia]
🌍 Sara[h] Forbes Bonetta (1843 – 15 August 1880) was a West African Egbado omoba [literally ‘child of a monarch’] of Yoruba royalty who was orphaned in intertribal warfare, sold into slavery, and in a remarkable twist of events, was liberated from enslavement and became a goddaughter to Queen Victoria. She was married to Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy Victorian Lagos philanthropist.
Originally named "Aina", Sara[h] was born in 1843 at Oke-Odan, an Egbado village. In 1848, Oke-Odan was raided by a Dahomeyan army; Sara's parents died during the attack and she ended up in the court of King Ghezo as a slave at the age of five. Intended by her captors to become a human sacrifice, she was rescued by Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy, who convinced King Ghezo of Dahomey to give her to Queen Victoria; "She would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites," Forbes wrote later.
Forbes named her Sara[h] Forbes Bonetta, Bonetta after his ship the HMS Bonetta. Victoria was impressed by the young princess's exceptional intelligence, and had Sara[h] raised as her goddaughter in the British middle class... [Wikipedia]
🌍 Pablo Fanque (born William Darby 30 March 1810 in Norwich, England; died 4 May 1871 in Stockport, England) was an English equestrian performer and circus proprietor, the first non-white British circus owner in Britain. His circus was the most popular in Victorian Britain for 30 years, a period that is regarded as the golden age of the circus... While some contemporary reports did not refer to Fanque's African ancestry, other reports noted that he was "a man of colour," or "a coloured gentleman," or "an artiste of colour." (These suggest he was of mixed race, with partial European ancestry as well.) In 1905, many years after Fanque's death, the chaplain of the Showmen's Guild wrote, "In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour-line." He was commenting on Fanque's success in Victorian England despite being of mixed race. [Wikipedia]
🌍 John Turner, who has researched Fanque’s life more thoroughly than any other writer, says that he found little or no evidence that Fanque suffered racial discrimination during his long career. Contemporary newspapers mention his color infrequently, and incidentally, and many paid warm tribute to his charity work; the Blackburn Standard wrote that, in a world not often noted for plain dealing, “such is Mr. Pablo Fanque’s character for probity and respectability, that wherever he has been once he can go again; aye, and receive the countenance and support of the wise and virtuous of all classes of society.” After Fanque’s death, the chaplain of the Showman’s Guild remarked: “In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour line, for, although Pablo was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test, ability.”
Yet while all this may be true—there’s plenty of evidence, in late Victorian show-business memoirs, that Fanque was a well-respected member of an often disrespected profession—racism was pervasive in the nineteenth century. William Wallett, one of the great clowns of the mid-Victorian age, a friend of Fanque’s who worked with him on several occasions, recalls in his memoirs that on one visit to Oxford, “Pablo, a very expert angler, would usually catch as many fish as five or six of us within sight of him put together”—and this, Wallett adds, “suggested a curious device” to one irked Oxford student:
One of the Oxonians, with more love for angling than skill, thought there must be something captivating in the complexion of Pablo. He resolved to try. One morning, going down to the river an hour or two earlier than usual, we were astonished to find the experimental philosophical angler with his face blacked after the most approved style of the Christy Minstrels.
Although Wallett does not say so, the gesture was a calculated insult, and it may also be significant that it took Fanque years to gather up the wherewithal to go into business for himself. He did not own his circus until 1841, three decades into his career, and when he did finally leave Batty it was with just two horses and a motley assortment of acts, all of them provided by a single family: a clown, “Mr. R. Hemmings and his dog, Hector,” together with “Master H. Hemmings on the tightrope and Mr. E. Hemmings’ feats of balancing.’ ” [Mike Dash]
🌍 Mary Jane Seacole OM (née Grant 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a Jamaican business woman who set up the British Hotel behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991…
She acquired knowledge of herbal medicine in the Caribbean. When the Crimean War broke out, she applied to the War Office to assist but was refused. She travelled independently and set up her hotel and assisted battlefield wounded. She became extremely popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war… [Wikipedia]
🌍 Dadabhai Naoroji (4 September 1825 – 30 June 1917), known as the Grand Old Man of India, was a Parsi intellectual, educator, cotton trader, and an early Indian political and social leader. He was a Liberal Party member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom House of Commons between 1892 and 1895, and the first Asian to be a British MP...
Naoroji is also credited with the founding of the Indian National Congress, along with A.O. Hume and Dinshaw Edulji Wacha. His book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India brought attention to the draining of India's wealth into Britain… [Wikipedia]
🌍 ‘Black Victorian Britain’. Paper presented in Wandsworth October 2013
Presented by Jeffrey Green at Northcote Library, 157 Northcote Road, Wandsworth Common, London SW11 6Q on 24 October 2013 as part of Wandsworth Black History Month.
...This talk concentrates on the 19th century. The Windrush of 1948 is not the beginning of the black presence in Britain. And we are not dealing with marginalised people, or victims. I will mention some names and I will show images of black Victorians. The images will indicate how wide one must trawl to find documentation – which itself suggests that the black presence in Victorian Britain was widespread...
Joseph Freeman was a slave in New Orleans who settled in eastern England in the 1840s. The 1871 census records Freeman and his Lincolnshire-born wife Sarah with their six children in Chelmsford. He worked as a labourer at the iron works as did his nineteen-year-old Suffolk-born namesake son.
The Powell family arrived in Britain by early 1851. The Dublin Freeman’s Journal of 8 February 1851 noted Powell was ‘a coloured gentleman, who had come to this country to procure for his children that education and means of supporting themselves by the acquirement of trades or professions denied them in Boston on account of their colour’. There were seven children. William Powell Jr, born in 1834, trained in Dublin and became a Member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of London in 1858.
It is one thing to note from an archive that this or that person qualified in this or that, and another to see the physical evidence. Here from 1899 is the Edinburgh University degree certificate of Trinidad-born John Alcindor who studied medicine there from 1893. He worked in London until his death in 1924. The family retain this.
We can say that the Freeman family in Chelmsford were black and working class. So too, and visible to thousands daily, were street sweepers. London’s Daily News on 8 December 1884 published a lengthy article on crossing sweepers, noting that ‘the old black man’ who swept a crossing in London’s Farringdon Street had bequeathed £800 to the daughter of an alderman who had befriended him, and that another who swept the crossing at Conduit Street and Regent Street was said to have owned two or three houses at the time of his death: ‘There is no doubt that, other things being equal, a black crossing-sweeper would take a great deal more than a white man. A negro is a stranger in a strange land; he is presumably friendless, and, being pretty certainly a native of a hot country, he may be supposed to suffer more from the wet and cold of our climate than an English-man. All these considerations would enable a steady blackman to make a good thing of a well-located crossing’...
The village of Ockham – near the M25/M3 motorways in Surrey – has a black connection. The register of baptisms records that on 2 January 1853 the rector supervised the baptism of Charles Estlin Phillips, son of William and Ellen Craft, ‘fugitive slaves’. On 26 April 1863 two more Craft children were baptised: Stephen Brougham Dennoce Craft and Alice Isabella Ellen Craft. Their father was noted as being ‘on a Mission to Africa’. Ellen and William Craft had been slaves in Georgia since their births in the mid-1820s. Ellen had the colouring of her white father, which was used to advantage in 1848 when, dressed as man and with William as her slave attendant, they escaped north. In November 1850 they sailed from Canada to Liverpool. The Bristol Mercury of 30 August 1851 (copying the London Morning Advertiser) noted the Crafts had enrolled as pupils at Ockham, and that he was instructing boys in carpentry and Ellen was teaching handicrafts to the girls…
Frederick Thomas was born in northern Mississippi in 1872. In 1896-1897 he was in London working as a waiter. He moved on to Paris and Moscow where he became a very successful businessman. Ruined by the revolution of 1917, a penniless refugee in Turkey in 1920, he died in 1928. His Russian-speaking children eventually reached America, and another studied in Prague and settled in France where he died in 1987. His family continues – the lingerie of Chantal Thomass (two s’s) is well known.
People of African descent worked around Britain as ‘Zulus’, appearing in fairs and shows. British military forces advanced into Zululand where 1,200 men were routed at Isandlwana in January 1879. The defence of Rorke’s Drift days later became a Victorian legend and in 1964 was the focus of a successful film, Zulu. Although in the 1870s half of Britain’s adults were illiterate many now associated Africans with Zulus, and Zulus with the destruction of the 24th Regiment of Foot. Being or pretending to be or even looking vaguely like a Zulu became a problem in Britain. In September 1880 a letter was published by the Glasgow Herald: ‘I have the misfortune to be, or rather it has pleased God to create me, a man of colour, and my well-educated wife and daughter are of the same caste as myself. Though I am in a respectable business here my wife and daughter have been subjected to gross insults by crowds of howling men and women, who call them Zulus, & c., even by the very men who ought to protect them – viz., the police – as a young lady in my shop can testify … my wife and daughter cannot go out either by tramway car or on foot without being subject to outrage and insult’. It was signed ‘A man of colour’...
There were employment opportunities as animal trainers… Working as musical entertainers employed growing numbers of blacks… Generally thought to have been white, most 19th century missionaries in West Africa were black… [Jeffrey Green]
🌍 ...during the Victorian era it is much more difficult to trace [in Britain] African descent women than men.
There were African American women who had either escaped from slavery or, free born, sought a better life in Britain. Escaped slave Ellen Craft came with her husband in 1850 and left in 1869, having lived in Ockham (Surrey) and Hammersmith and raised five children… The mother of Mercy and Sarah Powell was a Native American, their father a free born African American. With five sons they settled in Liverpool 1851-1861, where the eldest boy (William Jr) worked as a doctor in the hospital before serving as a doctor in the Union forces in the US Civil War…
Human zoos and ethnic performers included women, such as the Somalis (61 men, women and children) who were on show at the Crystal Palace in the summer of 1895, and two Zulu/South African choirs which toured Britain from 1892. Sannie Koopman broke away from them and was in Chesterfield in 1892. Dahomey Warrior troupes were mainly female. Millie-Christine McKoy, born in slavery in America, for ever linked by a conjoined spine, worked as The African Twins 1855-1857 and returned to tour Europe when freed…
Another free born American, Sarah Remond, toured Britain 1859-1866 explaining slavery, then qualified as a doctor in Italy where she died. Anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells was in Britain in 1893 and again in 1894, and was aided by a Nigerian medical student and his friends in London. Amanda Smith went to India as a Christian missionary, visiting England 1878-1879, 1881, and touring from early 1895 to mid-1896. Her autobiography was published in London in 1894. Hallie Quinn Brown was a temperance lecturer who was active in Scotland from February 1896 for over a year, talking on “women and the drink question”. Eliza Meyer, from Ghana (then the Gold Coast) was educated in England and Switzerland and married Dr Benjamin Quartey-Papafio in St Bartholomew’s church, Smithfield (London) in October 1896.
There was a fashion for African American singers and recitalists, and several had the patronage of the very wealthy Duchess of Sutherland in London. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was in England 1853-1854; Marie Selika in 1882-1883, and Sissieretta Jones (known as the Black Patti) in the 1880s and 1890s. Other female entertainers included actress Amy Height (1866-1913) who was in England from 1883 and died in London, and several who worked in Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows. There were four in a Cabin show in Belfast in January 1879. Cassandra Walmer born in London in 1888 of a black actor father was in Cabin shows at the age of three (Leicester, 1891) whereas Birmingham-born Esther “Hettie” Johnson joined one in her twenties. She died aged 102 in Fareham in 1973. The Poland-born acrobat Olga Kaira was “Miss Lala” and appeared at the London Aquarium in March 1879… [Jeffrey Green]
🌍 The British Empire, by the latter end of the 19th Century, included colonies (some being populated largely or entirely through settlement by Britain, others populated primarily by indigenous peoples conquered or otherwise subjugated by Britain) that were considered part of the same realm as the UK, dominions (colonies which had attained theoretically equal status to the UK as separate realms within the Empire), and protectorates (foreign territories under British administration). The dominions raised their own military forces, under direct control of their own governments. Although British colonies could not raise their own armies, military units were raised in many which existed in a grey zone as neither within, nor without, the British Army. Only one force, the West India Regiment, which had been in existence since 1795, was considered part of the British Army, although its black soldiers were rated as "native", and not recruited under the same conditions or given the same pay as the rest of the British Army. [Wikipedia]
🌍 James Francis Durham was the first African to join the British Army as a fully enlisted soldier...
It was New Year's Day 1886 and de Lisle was leading a mounted party of the Durham Light Infantry. This was the battle of Ginnis, Egypt, and [Captain Beauvoir] de Lisle had set out to capture, the enemy's river transport. The party approached a large nuggar (Arabic river boat), with a considerable number of enemy on board. A charge was made and the nuggar was seized. The Arab inhabitants fled in the darkness, leaving only one behind who was badly wounded. Alongside the nuggar was an infant...
The child was handed over to Sergeant Stuart, who, named him Jimmy Dervish. The boy's real name was Mustapha. It appeared that the child's father, a Sheik, had been killed in the battle of Ginnis. His widow with two children had intended to make her way to Berber, but there was no trace of the child's mother...
When the Battalion received orders to go to India, it was intended that Jimmy should be left in a mission school in Cairo. The sergeants, however, objected and promised to subscribe one rupee a month towards the child's upkeep. Jimmy was baptised James Francis Durham. When the DLI moved to India in 1887, Jimmy went with them, where he attended the school for the regiment's children. In 1898, he accompanied the DLI to their new station at Mandalay. It was in Burma that James Francis Durham made his mark on British military history by applying to enlist as a boy soldier.
Jimmy's application, strongly backed by the sergeants, went all the way to Queen Victoria.
The official decision was favourable, and in July 1899, James Francis Durham was formally enrolled as Boy Solider No. 6758, aged 14 years old.
Although the British Army had employed Black drummers and musicians since the 18th century, and colonial regiments were often black, no African had been allowed to join the regular Army on the same terms as white recruits… [BBC]
🌍 The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight. At some point during their stay, they visited the studio of the London Stereoscopic Company to have group and individual portraits made on plate-glass negatives… The London Stereoscopic Company specialised in carte de visites – small photographs printed on cards that were often traded by collectors or used by performers for publicity purposes – and, as their name suggests, they were all in stereo which, when seen through a special viewer, gave the illusion of a three-dimensional photograph.
The… portraits of the African Choir… are arresting both for the style and assurance of the sitters – some of the women look like they could be modelling for Vogue… [Sean O'Hagan]
🌍 In 1868, a cricket team composed of Australian Aborigines toured England between May and October of that year, thus becoming the first organised group of Australian sportspeople to travel overseas...
The first match was played at The Oval in London and attracted 20,000 spectators. Presumably many of these spectators attended out of curiosity to see members of a strange-looking race perform athletically rather than merely to savour a cricket contest. The Times reported:
"Their hair and beards are long and wiry, their skins vary in shades of blackness, and most of them have broadly expanded nostrils. Having been brought up in the bush to agricultural pursuits under European settlers, they are perfectly civilised and are quite familiar with the English language."
The Daily Telegraph wrote:
It is highly interesting and curious, to see mixed in a friendly game on the most historically Saxon part of our island, representatives of two races so far removed from each other as the modern Englishman and the Aboriginal Australian. Although several of them are native bushmen, and all are as black as night, these Indian fellows are to all intents and purposes, clothed and in their right minds.
Altogether, the Aborigines played 47 matches throughout England over a period of six months, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19; a good result that surprised many at the time. Their skills were said to range from individuals who were exceptional athletes down to two or three other team members who hardly contributed at all. The outstanding player was Johnny Mullagh. He scored 1,698 runs and took 245 wickets. An admired English fast bowler of the time, George Tarrant, bowled to Mullagh during a lunch interval and later said, "I have never bowled to a better batsman." [Wikipedia]
🌍 Starting in the 18th century, [Indian] travellers, emissaries, and petitioners seeking redress for lands lost to the East India Company, or having other complaints against the Company, visited Britain. From about the middle of the 19th century an increasing number of Indians - largely professionals - came to Britain. Some came as a result of the political, social and economic changes brought about under colonial rule. Others came out of a sense of adventure or curiosity to see the land of their rulers, or as in the case of the princes, on official visits or for pleasure. Students, some on scholarships, came to obtain vital professional qualifications to enable them to gain entry into the structures of colonial hierarchy back home. Some, having qualified, stayed on to practice their professions in Britain. Political activists brought the struggle for colonial freedom to London, the centre of imperial power. Businessmen and entrepreneurs came to seek economic opportunities. [British Library]
🌍 The British East India Company recruited seamen from areas around its factories in Bengal, Assam and Gujarat, as well as from Yemen, British Somaliland and Portuguese Goa. They were known by the British as lascars...
Lascars began living in England in small numbers from the mid-17th century as servants as well as sailors on English ships. Baptism records show that a number of young men from the Malabar coast were brought to England as servants. Lascars arrived in larger numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the British East India Company began recruiting thousands of lascars (mostly Bengali Muslims, but also Konkani-speaking Christians from the northern part of Portuguese Goa and Muslims from Ratnagiri District in the adjacent Maharashtra) to work on British ships and occasionally in ports around the world. Despite prejudice and a language barrier, some lascars settled in British port cities, often forcibly due to ill-treatment on British ships as well as being unable to leave due to restrictions such as the Navigation Act and abandonment by shipping masters. Shipowners would face penalties for leaving lascars behind. This measure was intended to discourage settlement of Asian sailors in Britain.
Lascars often lived in Christian charity homes, boarding houses and barracks and sometimes cohabited with local British women...
Although the South Asian presence in London during the 19th century mainly constituted male lascars and sailors, some women were included. British soldiers would occasionally marry Indian women while overseas and send their mixed-race children back to Britain, although the wife often did not accompany them. Indian wives of British soldiers would sometimes ask for passage home after being abandoned or widowed if they did accompany their children. In 1835, Bridget Peter, a native of the Madras region of India, lost her husband, a British soldier serving in His Majesty's 1st Foot Regiment. She petitioned the directors from Chelsea Hospital "in a state of destitution". They paid to return her and her three children to India…
Indian lascar sailors established some of England's first settled Asian-British inter-racial families in the dock areas of major port cities. This led to a small number of "mixed race" children being born in the country. Ethnic minority women in Britain were often outnumbered by "half-caste Indian" daughters born from white mothers and Indian fathers. The most famous of these mixed-race children was Albert Mahomet, born with a lascar father and English mother. He went on to write a book about his life called From Street Arab to Pastor...
In 1842, the Church Missionary Society reported on the dire ″state of the lascars in London″. In 1850 40 lascars, also known as ″Sons of India,″ were reported to have starved to death in the streets of London. Shortly after these reports, evangelical Christians proposed the construction of a charity house and gathered £15,000 in assistance of the lascars. In 1856 "The Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders" was opened in Commercial Road, Limehouse under the manager, Lieutenant-Colonel R. Marsh Hughes. The home helped and supported lascars and sailors from as far as China. The home helped with employment and with leaving Britain. Additionally, it served as a repatriation centre where various sailors were recruited for ships returning East… Lascar immigrants were often the first Asians to be seen in British cities and were initially perceived as indolent due to their reliance on Christian charities. [Wikipedia]
🌍 In the 1840s and 1850s, as slavery continued in the United States, a considerable amount of information reached the British through the spoken and written testimonies of African Americans in Britain. A new genre of writing – the slavery narrative – was developed, and those publications were sold at public meetings. The income supported the authors, aided projects such as settlements in Canada and Africa, and helped pay owners of escaped slaves, setting them free legally.
Tracking African American ex-slaves in contemporary British newspapers confirmed that several high class individuals (including the Duchess of Sutherland, Earl Shaftesbury, Member of Parliament George Thompson and Lord Brougham) were regular associates and supporters…
The documentation tends to show the fugitives being supported by men and women of substance, but Anderson’s photograph-buyers from ‘the poorer class of the community’ and Watkins’s appreciation of the ‘tens of thousands of the poorer classes’ hint that Britons in every walk of life were sympathetic to black fugitives and that they had seen and met them...
In June 1853 the fugitive William G. Allen (free-born but married to a white woman) informed America’s leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that they had safely reached England, and noted ‘the entire absence of prejudice against color’ in Britain. He also commented that Samuel R. Ward ‘whom it is hardly possible to be blacker’ had faced ‘no barrier to the best society in the kingdom’ (Liberator, 22 July 1853). The U.S.A. was a race-minded society whereas Britain was class-based… [Jeffrey Green]
🌍 On October 1865, a local rebellion by peasantry in Jamaica was ferociously suppressed by the island's governor, Edward John Eyre. His actions generated considerable debate in Britain. Those defending his viciousness did so on the grounds not that Jamaicans were black, but that they were no different from English workers. "The negro," observed Edwin Hood, "is in Jamaica as the costermonger is in Whitechapel; he is very likely often nearly a savage with the mind of a child." The liberal Saturday Review suggested that "the negro . . . often does cruel and barbarous things, but then so do our draymen and hackney-coachmen and grooms and farm servants, through want of either thought or power of thinking".
The concept of race today is so intertwined with the idea of colour that it is often difficult to comprehend the Victorian notion of racial difference. For Victorians, race was a description not so much of colour differences as of social distinctions. The English lower classes were to 19th-century eyes as racially different as were Africans or Asians. A report in the Saturday Review about working-class life observed: "The Bethnal Green poor are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact." The Review suggested that class distinctions and separations were fixed, and would "last from the cradle to the grave", preventing any form of association or companionship…
Much recent academic debate has denied the peculiar character of 19th-century thinking about race. Ignoring both the Victorian views of the working class and their perception of commonalities between European and non-European societies, many scholars insist that the main division for Victorians was between "the West" and "the Rest". Influenced by Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism, it has become axiomatic that "race" has always referred to differences of colour, and that Europeans have always tended to view non-Europeans as the "Other" - different, exotic, inferior. According to Stuart Hall, for instance, Europe has defined itself since the Renaissance through the "discourse of the Other", which "represents what are in fact very differentiated (the different European cultures) as homogenous (the West)" and "asserts that these different cultures are united by one thing: the fact that they are all different from the Rest".
In Ornamentalism, David Cannadine provides a welcome challenge to this academic orthodoxy through rethinking British perceptions of its empire… British imperialists loathed Indians and Africans no more or less than they loathed the great majority of Englishmen. They were far more willing to work with maharajahs, kings and chiefs of whatever colour than with white settlers, whom they generally considered to be uneducated trash. Just as Jamaican peasants and East End costermongers were viewed as equally inferior, so Indian princes and West African tribal chiefs were often understood as the social equivalent of English gentlemen. Indeed, British rulers were often amused at the inability of lower-class white settlers to comprehend that aristocratic breeding cut across differences of colour. Lady Gordon, the wife of Sir Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, the governor of Fiji from 1875 to 1880, thought the native high-ranking Fijians "such an undoubted aristocracy". She wrote: "Their manners are so perfectly easy and well bred . . . Nurse can't understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I don't like to tell her that these ladies are my equals, which she is not!" [Kenan Malik]
🌍 "Blacks" in the British Isles are difficult to count because the nineteenth-century census lacked ethnic and racial categories… As no self-identified black communities emerge from archival records, scholars who look for blacks in Victorian Britain inevitably end up studying individuals...
Not only were there contrasting experiences of blackness in Britain and the United States, but there was also a lively trans-Atlantic debate… [There is] ample evidence that contemporary African-Americans were well aware of the transatlantic gulf in attitudes. The delightful Mary Seacole, who challenged the prim, starched nursing style of Florence Nightingale with ministrations of rum and home remedies to British troops in the Crimean War, is a case in point. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's chapter on Mrs. Seacole's book about her experience, Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands, describes her curious progress from West Indian healer to anti-Nightingale on the battlefield. Paravisini-Gebert argues that Seacole "assumes her place in a British society--and history--from which she is initially rejected, by finding in the Crimea a substitute for 'England,' a war zone where the expected barriers to someone of her class, race, and colonial origins can be temporarily lifted." Some such barriers may well have existed, but as Mary Seacole knew only too well from her experience with Americans in Panama, they were far less formidable than those to be found in Atlanta or New York City. When she was rejected as a volunteer for Florence Nightingale's effort, Mrs. Seacole wonders: "Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour [that she had found so offensive in ... Panama] had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?" The answer, Mary Seacole found, was no. Nightingale's class prejudice in favor of English "ladies" caused the rebuff, not her color… [Norman A. Etherington]
Some useful resources:
Jeffrey Green’s website Its focus [is] on the activities of black people in Britain ca 1830-ca 1940… Jeffrey is a historian based south of London. Essentially a website made up of many articles by Jeffrey Green. All fascinating stuff but I’ve picked out a few of the pages that I think are most relevant for 3GAB:
093: Black women in Britain 1850-1897
106: African Americans in Britain 1850-1866
118: African Americans in mid-Victorian Britain
165 : ‘Black Victorian Britain’. Paper presented in Wandsworth October 2013
Hidden histories: the first black people photographed in Britain – in pictures On The Guardian website.
The black Victorians: astonishing portraits unseen for 120 years By Sean O'Hagan, on The Guardian website.
Striking photos reveal hidden history of black Britons in the Victorian era By Monique Todd, on CNN.
Black_British: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor On Wikipedia.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor On 100 Great Black Britons.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) BLACK EUROPEANS: A British Library Online Gallery feature by guest curator Mike Phillips
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor On The Art Song Project. Modern day recordings of five of his songs by soprano Hélène Lindqvist and pianist Philipp Vogler.
Pablo Fanque On Wikipedia.
Pablo Fanque’s Fair By Mike Dash, on The Smithsonian.
Mary Seacole On Wikipedia.
Mary Seacole (1805 - 1881) On the BBC website.
Arthur Wharton On Wikipedia.
Sara Forbes Bonetta On Wikipedia.
Little Known Black History Fact: Olga Kaira By D.L. Chandler, on Black America Web.
Peter Jackson (boxer) On Wikipedia.
Albert Mahomet On Wikipedia.
Dadabhai Naoroji On Wikipedia.
From the archive, 26 July 1892: Britain's first Asian MP elected On The Guardian website.
Black & Asian Performance in Britain 1800-1899 On The Victorian and Albert Museum.
British Army during the Victorian Era On Wikipedia. See ‘Colonial units’ section.
Jimmy Durham: The Sergeants' Boy from Sudan On the BBC website.
Australian Aboriginal cricket team in England in 1868 On Wikipedia.
Why the Victorians were colour blind. In the 19th century, race mattered far less than social distinction: a West African tribal chief was unquestionably superior to an East End costermonger. By Kenan Malik, on NewStatesman.
Contrasts in the Lived Experience of Race in the Nineteenth-Century United States and Victorian Britain Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, reviewed by Norman A. Etherington (Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Western Australia) (January, 2004).
Black Londoners 1800-1900 On the University College London website.
History_of_African_immigrants_in_London: 19th_century On Wikipedia.
Airbrushed out of history: How Victorian Britain portrayed its black community By Ian Herbert, on The Independent website.
Forgotten faces By Kate Kellaway, on The Guardian website.
The shared history of black and white Britons On The Monitoring Group. Jagdish Patel from the Monitoring Group recently met with Satnam Virdee to speak further about his book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider.
Black Britons in the Archive On Google Arts & Culture.
17 stunning photos of black Victorians show how history really looked. By Thom Dunn, on Upworthy. (These are photographs of black Americans.)
The Black Victorians By KC Morgan, on All Day.
Asians in Britain: brief outline (1600-1947) On the British Library website.
Lascar: Nineteenth_century On Wikipedia.
Black and British: A Forgotten History By David Olusoga. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you. And as the site says: This is a preview. The total pages displayed will be limited.
Black Victorians/Black Victoriana Book edited by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you. And as the site says: This is a preview. The total pages displayed will be limited.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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Date: 2017-07-02 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-02 03:54 pm (UTC)But I did find an awful lot of interesting stuff ^^
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Date: 2017-07-02 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-02 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-24 03:49 pm (UTC)For me, as well. It takes some time and effort to pull off -- I want to be reasonably confident I'm not inadvertently disrespecting someone's family when I write -- but the resulting stories are so much better, I think.
And not just more aesthetically pleasing: if I do it right, I'm a lot more comfortable with how a story of mine fits into the world.
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Date: 2017-07-24 03:49 am (UTC)For now, if I may add some links from my own researches?
Mary Seacole's memoirs are available on Gutenberg: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
Beyond the Frame, an article about a British Library exhibit about Asians in Britain, 1858-1950. It includes mention of many interesting figures, including Abdul Karim, attendant to Queen Victoria, Sophia Duleep Singh, suffragette and Victoria's goddaughter, and Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to read law at Oxford.
The British Library page you linked above is one of a suite of pages on Asians in Britain: the index is here, and most of the sub-pages include historical quotes and photos from primary sources.
Ayah's Home in Hackney, which was a charity to help Indian nannies who had been abandoned in Great Britain by the families who had employed them for the sea passage. Photos of the home and the women it served at this link.
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Date: 2017-07-25 03:50 pm (UTC)