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British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility

Part of the Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Book Series

DOI: 10.1057/9780230501621

ISBN: 978-1-349-52349-8

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK - Springer Journals

Sep 30, 2015

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Introduction

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 1 –17

[In a letter to Laurence Sterne written in 1766, Ignatius Sancho complained that ‘of all my favorite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren’.1 Sancho, an African, former slave, and at the time of writing, a butler to the Duke of Montagu, has been celebrated for...
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The Rhetoric of Sensibility

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 18 –45

[Sentimental literature was characterised by an interest in feelings and emotional states. Much of this literature is devoted to stories of woe and moments of distress, and the quintessential sentimental moment is when one or more of the characters begin to weep. At these moments, it is often...
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Arguing in Prose: Abolitionist Letters and Novels

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 46 –72

[Sentimental rhetoric operated in two spheres: the literary and the political. Both were interested in persuasion, both made use of sentimental heroes, diversion, argument, and parables, both denounced false sensibility, and both made use of the emotional subversion of the intellect. Where they...
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Arguing in Verse: Abolitionist Poetry

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 73 –106

[The earliest unambiguously abolitionist poem, John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro (1773–1775), unmistakably, if problematically, deploys the rhetoric of sensibility. Yet the sentimental strategies of The Dying Negro were not always emulated. Later abolitionist verse was often keen to...
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‘Read This, and Blush’: The Pamphlet War of the 1780s

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 107 –143

[This chapter argues that the use of sentimental rhetoric was widespread in abolitionist pamphlets and essays of the 1780s, as well as in some pamphlets written by proslavery apologists. Throughout the decade, the number of publications addressing slavery grew annually, from just a handful of...
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Feeling Out Loud: Sentimental Rhetoric in Parliament, the Pulpit, and the Court of Law

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 144 –185

[Spoken rhetoric was as important to the campaign against the slave trade as it was to any other political activity. At the local level, scenes of oratory included meetings, debates, readings, and hustings. At another level, priests and judges pronounced on the spiritual and legal reasons why...
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Conclusion: Romanticism, Revolution, and William Wilberforce’s Unregarded Tears

Carey, Brycchan

Pages: 186 –196

[The first efforts of William Wilberforce and others to abolish the slave trade were unsuccessful. The Abolition Committee had set out in 1787 to see the trade abolished at the earliest possible opportunity. By 1792 that opportunity looked as if it might be a long time in coming. After...

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