'The Woman of Colour: A Tale' (1808) - Anon

‘…this was evidently meant to mortify your Olivia; it was blending her with the poor negro slaves of the West Indies! It was meant to show her, that, in Mrs. Merton’s idea, there was no distinction between us—you will believe that I could not be wounded at being classed with my brethren!’

The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808)

Anon

This week, I want to tell you about a recent new favourite of mine, something I hadn’t even heard of until just last year. When I finally read it, I was sorry I hadn’t found it sooner because it’s absolutely tremendous! Published anonymously in 1808, The Woman of Colour is a romance novel that resists cliché, and that has much to teach us about eighteenth-century society and issues surrounding diversity and inclusivity.

Attributed to Jean-Étienne Liotard,
Portrait of a young woman, c. 1790s
(Saint Louis Art Museum)

There has long been a completely inaccurate assumption in popular culture that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society was almost totally populated with white people. Fortunately, this notion is finally beginning to be challenged, not least through a more accurate, representative approach to casting in TV dramas and films (albeit dented by insidious suggestions that this kind of casting is for “political correctness” rather than because the absence of a variety of skin-tone in eighteenth and nineteenth century society is just plain wrong). The other trap of popular belief is to assume eighteenth-century roles for black people must either be slaves or servants – whilst there were sadly very many people of colour who were enslaved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is also very wrong to assume that people of colour were always and only victims of labour exploitation. In The Woman of Colour, a mixed-race heiress recently orphaned by the death of her white slave-owner father sets sail for England. Her name is Olivia Fairfield and her plan is to follow her beloved father’s last request and marry the younger of her two cousins, Mr. Augustus Merton. On the boat journey she meets an attractive single gentleman and his elderly mother, and you might be thinking that this is all starting to sound quite Austenian – it absolutely is of course, but it doesn’t turn out at all the way you might be expecting it to.

Once ashore and introduced to her uncle and his family, Miss Fairfield becomes the target of the social snobbery of her older cousin’s wife, Mrs Merton, something that would also be quite Austenian were it not for the fact that Mrs Merton’s campaign of snide and malevolence is barbed with the most obnoxious racism. That Miss Fairfield is able to rise above Mrs Merton’s wilful offensiveness is only a further indication that she is a heroine in the truest and best sense of the word. Attempts by Mrs Merton to categorise her ‘with the poor negro slave of the West Indies’ for example, fail simply because a presumption that this would be insulting relies upon a perception of race-based inferiority– something that Miss Fairfield roundly and quite rightly rejects when she describes these people living in slavery as her ‘brethren’.

As the novel progresses, it continues to blend romance with a humanitarian assertion of the rights of all people to equality and freedom. Olivia Fairfield gets married (no, I’m not going to tell you who to), but things don’t always go to plan, and it all wraps up with a final outcome that perhaps shouldn’t be as unexpected as it is. Throughout, Olivia Fairfield is a witty, intelligent, affectionate young woman, deeply committed to liberating and improving the lives of people living in slavery. We don’t know who wrote this book – perhaps we never will. In Lyndon B. Dominique’s introduction to his superb edition of the text, he theorises that it might have been authored by one of two sisters whose lives partially reflect that of the novel’s heroine – but there is no absolute proof. Whoever it was, though, the novel’s biting insight into the experience of being the target of racist abuse, together with the comparatively unusual presentation of a genuinely independent woman who does not consider marriage to be the only means of achieving happiness, must surely make it extremely likely that the author of this extraordinary work was, like its title, a woman of colour.

Happy Reading everyone!

You can find this novel here:

The Woman of Colour: A Tale, ed. by Lyndon J. Dominique (Broadview Press, 2007)

(available at most good bookstores – if they haven’t got a copy, they should be able to order it in).

'The Banished Man' - Charlotte Smith

‘In losing every thing but my honour and my integrity, I have learned, that he who retains those qualities can never be degraded, however humble may be his fortune.’

The Banished Man (1794)

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

If you’ve heard of Charlotte Smith at all – and a lot of folks sadly still haven’t – then it will probably be because of her poetry. Her rather more famous contemporary William Wordsworth (the chap who most people will have heard of thanks to a certain poem about clouds and daffodils) described her as ‘a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’. I could write a lot about how amazing her poetry is; but during her writing career Smith also wrote ten novels and it’s upon one of these that I want to focus today. Published in 1794, The Banished Man is a startlingly modern narrative following the adventures of the French aristocrat D’Alonville during the time of the French Revolution. Fleeing persecution in his own country, he journeys through Europe where he faces continual and humiliating suspicion and rejection. Even when the people he meet don’t actually suspect him of being a dangerous revolutionary travelling in the disguise of a refugee, they are often unwilling to involve themselves in assisting a penniless exile: it’s a concept that is as bitingly relevant today as it was two hundred years ago.

The tale’s first audiences believed that the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of an aristocratic main character indicated a shift in Smith’s political allegiance. Smith had initially been a vocal supporter of the French Revolution’s aims of liberty and equality for all. In fact, the truth is rather more nuanced. Rather than expressing overt political support or disdain for either faction, Smith instead focuses her anger upon the selfish and violent individuals who have exploited the Revolution for their own personal gain. A Polish Revolutionary is able to establish a close friendship with the French aristocrat D’Alonville because, even if the two have different opinions, each is willing to listen to and to respect the other’s point of view. Smith’s hero even acknowledges the fact that, had their situations been switched, ‘I might have thought and have acted as you have done’.

Intertwined with the stark realities of D’Alonville’s experiences as a persecuted refugee, is the life of the British woman Arabella Denzil. She is the daughter of an impoverished gentlewoman who supports her family through her writing, and who is widely believed to be an autobiographical portrait of Smith herself. Like Smith’s own husband, Arabella’s father has long since left the scene, and without any significant male relatives the family is left vulnerable to the machinations of sexual predators interested in Arabella’s beauty. Her inevitable romance with D’Alonville is likewise hampered by the unpopularity that attends such a cross-national relationship in the then deeply nationalistic British society.

At the time, one of the most popular genres of novel was the Gothic mode, in which heroes and heroines frequently faced both real and supernatural dangers in exotically portrayed European locations. Smith had written Gothic novels before and would do so again, but in The Banished Man she draws upon the conventions of the Gothic only to twist them around into a realistic portrayal of the genuine hardships suffered by those caught up in the all-too-real horrors of the French Revolution. She even underscores the originality of the novel by including a short section entitled ‘Avis Au Lecteur’ or ‘Advice to the Reader’, in which she points out her avoidance of a boy-meets-girl romance narrative. She writes that she believed ‘the situation of [her] hero was of itself interesting enough to enable [her] to carry him on for sometime, without making him violently in love’.¹ Even though D’Alonville’s and Arabella Denzil do inevitably become involved with each other, this romance remains very much a subplot to the novel’s main aim of presenting and exploring ideas of cultural dislocation, and exile inflicted by civil conflict. The depth, subtlety, and acute perception that Smith demonstrates here make this novel one of her best and most riveting.

You can find Smith’s The Banished Man:

 

Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man (Dodo Press, 2009)
(An affordable, printed copy of this almost-out-of-print novel: despite the occasional typo, this is a very useful edition for a general reader and is available from many popular online stores)

Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. M. O. Grenby, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, vol. 7 (London: Pickering, 2006)

(An excellently edited copy of the text, though rather pricey for a general reader)

You can find more information about Charlotte Smith here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Turner_Smith

(Wikipedia: always a useful starting point) 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Smith

(Encyclopaedia Britannica – a valuable free resource)

¹ Wordsworth's note to "Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint bees' Heads," from ‘Poems Composed or Suggested during a Tour, in the Summer of 1833’, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by E. DeSelincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1949), IV, p. 403.

'An Old Cat's Dying Soliloquy' - Anna Seward

‘O'er marum borders and valerian bed
Thy Selima shall bend her moping head,
Sigh that no more she climbs, with grateful glee,
Thy downy sofa and thy cradling knee;
Nay, e'en at founts of cream shall sullen swear,
Since thou, her more loved master, art not there.’
(lines 39-44)

An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy

Anna Seward
(1792)

If you like cats, and if you have a favourite feline, you will probably want to give it a hug after reading this poem.  Not that it is as morbid as the title implies; in fact, it is really quite sentimental.  In its simplest terms, this is a poem about the affection between a cat and its owner. 

The poem is narrated from the perspective of the cat, who has lived for years in the home of her owner, Acasto.  The narration then gets distracted a little as the cat spends time describing herself, demonstrating typically feline self-appreciation through her claim to being ‘The gentlest, fondest of the tabby race’, with ‘The snowy whisker and the sinuous tail’ (lines 2 & 8).  Yet this immodesty is tempered by the cat’s subsequent acknowledgement of her own limitations – ‘pain has stiffened these once supple limbs’ (line 10).  The cat feels old, and that she has almost run out of her lives: ‘Fate of eight lives the forfeit gasp obtains, / And e'en the ninth creeps languid through my veins’ (lines 11-12).  Yet still the cat feels her future has ‘Much sure of good […] in store’ (line 13), when she finishes the last of her lives and floats off to cat-heaven. 

In the cat’s imagination, heaven is a place ‘where the fish obligingly lie on the shore and birds have no wings’, as Katherine Rogers so succinctly puts it (p. 89).  If you were just beginning to feel a bit tearful over the ailing cat, this wonderful piece of humor should give you a much-needed lift; personally, the only cats I have ever known have been quite attached to the occupation of hunting, and would probably be quite sad to have the whole thing made so easy and effortless.  Fortunately, this cat at least seems rather keen on the idea; yet still she wants ‘Some days, some few short days, to linger here’ (line 30).  And this is where the really sweet part comes, because the reason for wanting to linger is so that, through the ‘softest purrs’ (line 32) she can try to convey to her owner the simple truth that heaven would not be perfect without him.  Preferring the scraps of food from her masters’s table to the beautiful ‘golden fish and wingless bird’ of heaven (line 38), she wants somehow to let him know that, even in heaven, ‘Thy Selima shall bend her moping head, / […] / Since thou, her more loved master, are not there’ (lines 40 & 45).

If you have a cat, you will probably want to give it a hug now. 

Happy reading!

You can find this poem:-

http://www.poetrynook.com/poem/old-cats-dying-soliloquy
(free online copy of the poem!! Purrfect to get reading right away!!)

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-century women poets: an Oxford anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 319-20.

(yes, I’m going on about this one again…but it really is a very fascinating book!!  Perhaps this is a good time to mention that I’m really not on commission…)

You can find out more about Anna Seward here:-

 

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Seward

(this is a shockingly short entry, but still conveys something of her life)

The following book was used in this blogpost:-

Katherine M. Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield (University of Michigan Press, 2001)