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 Metropole and Colony in the

English Imagination 1 8 3 0 - 1 8 6 7

C a t h e r i n e H a l l
: ••••
 -> V

C I V I L I S I N G

S U B J E C T S
For Stuart and Gail
 C I V I L I S I N G

S U B J E C T S

Colony and Metropole in the

English Imagination, 1830-1867

Catherine Hall

The University o f Chicago Press

Chicago and London
Catherine Hall is professor of history at University College London.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Polity Press, Cambridge CB2 1UR, United Kingdom
© 2002 by Catherine Hall
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in Great Britain

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 12 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-31334-4 (cloth}

ISBN: 0-226-31335-2 (paper)

CIP data is available.

» The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39,48-1992.
 Contents

G \ 9

List of maps and illustrations vn

Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations xii
Cast of Characters xiii

Introduction

Prologue: The M a k i n g of an Imperial M a n 23

Australia 27
New Zealand 42
St Vincent and Antigua 47
Jamaica 57

Part I Colony and Metropole 67

Mapping Jamaica: The Pre-emancipation World

in the Metropolitan Mind 69

1 The Missionary D r e a m 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 4 2 84

The Baptist Missionary Society and the missionary project 86

Missionaries and planters 98
The war of representation 107
The constitution of the new black subject 115
The free villages 120
VI Contents

2 Fault-tines in the Family of M a n 1 8 4 2 - 1 8 4 5 140

Native agency and the Africa mission 140
The Baptist family 150
Brother Knibb 161

3 ( A Jamaica of the M i n d ' 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 5 4 174

Phillippo's Jamaica 174
'A place of gloomy darkness' 199

4 Missionary M e n and M o r a n t Bay 1 8 5 9 - 1 8 6 6 209

Anthony Trollope and Mr Secretary Underbill 209
The trials of life 229
Morant Bay and after 243

Part II Metropolis, Colony and Empire 265

M a p p i n g the Midland Metropolis 267

5 The 'Friends of the Negro': Baptists and Abolitionists

1825-1842 290
The Baptists in Birmingham and the missionary public 290
Knowing 'the heathen' 301
Birmingham's 'Friends of the Negro* 309
The Utopian years 325

6 The Limits of Friendship: Abolitionism in Decline

1842-1859 338
'A population intellectually at zero' 338
Carlyle's occasion 347
George Dawson and the politics of race and nationalism 363
Troubles for the missionary public 370

7 Town, Nation and Empire 1 8 5 9 - 1 8 6 7 380

New times 380
Morant Bay 406
Birmingham men 424

Epilogue 434

Notes - 442
Bibliography 507
Index 536
 Illustrations

1 The British Empire 1837-1870 26

2 Map of Jamaica 68
Falmouth taken from the church tower (c.1840) 80
3
4 Baptist chapel and dwelling house at Sligoville 126
5 Clarkson Town 129
6 Africa receiving the Gospel 146
7 William Knibb, a print by George Baxter 163
8 Jubilee meeting at Kettering 164
9 Emancipation, 1 August 1834 181
Heathen practices at funerals 188
10
Visit of a missionary and his wife to a plantation village 191
11
Interior of Baptist chapel, Spanish Town 194
12
356
13 Joseph Sturge
364
14 George Dawson
384
15 Carrs Lane chapel
 *

Acknowledgements

0^9

I am deeply grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council, for

their grant (ref. no. R000232169) from 1990 to 1992 to do some of the
work for this book. At that stage I had no idea that it would be such a
loiig project. The fellowship from the Nuffield Foundation for 1995-6
was also invaluable, and enabled me to extend the original scale of the
research. I have worked in three institutions since 1988 (when I con-
ceived the idea of working on England and Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth
century): the University of East London, the University of Essex and Uni-
versity College London. Each institution has made it possible for me,
even in these times, to research and write.
This piece of work has taken over ten years to complete, and I have
received much help and support along the way. I have given papers based
on the research in innumerable institutions: each occasion has helped me
to formulate my own ideas and to debate with audiences. I have been
especially fortunate in being able to present the work across some parts
of that erstwhile empire with which I have engaged. Papers presented
to the Conference on 'Engendering the History of the Caribbean' at the
University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; to the Association of
Australian Historians in Perth; to the Association of New Zealand His-
torians in Wellington; and to the Association of Canadian Historians in
St Johns, Newfoundland, have been particularly significant moments.
In addition, I have given papers in many US and British universities, in
Ireland, South Africa and Brazil over the years, and have always learned
from these occasions. The group of scholars in history and anthropol-
ogy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have been particularly
supportive. I thank all those who have invited me.
I owe an especial debt to the Sisters at Immaculate Conception
Convent in Kingston - in particular, my dear cousin Sister Maureen
 Acknowledgements ix

Clare Hall - who have given me a home in Kingston for all my research
trips. They have been most tolerant of the years of work involved in
this project, while they have been preoccupied with more immediate
needs on the island. Joan Tucker, Audrey Cooper, Annie Paul and David
Scott have all helped me to think about Jamaica. Margaret Allen, Vicki
Crowley, Ann Curthoys, Marilyn Lake and Kay Schaffer helped me
to focus on Australia. In New Zealand Charlotte Macdonald and
Raewyn Dalziel were my main interlocutors. In every instance it has been
a wonderful experience to visit and explore the places on which I am
working.
The librarians at the Birmingham Central Library have been most
helpful. Thanks to Sue Mills at the Angus Library, Regent's Park College,
and Elizabeth Douall, who had special responsibility for the Baptist
Missionary Society archive when I was working there. More recently
Jennifer Thorp, the current archivist, has been most helpful. Thanks also
to the archivists at the National Library of Jamaica and to the staff at
the Jamaica Baptist Union. Between 1990 and 1992 I spent many happy
hours in the reading room of the British Library, then housed in the
British Museum, and I have also found the London Library a wonder-
ful resource. Megan Doolittle's research assistance at the University of
Essex was invaluable. Ruth Percy and Ralph Kingston at University
College both helped me to get the manuscript together at critical points.
Richard Smith's assistance with the illustrations has been much appreci-
ated, as has Bill Storey's photography and Keith McClelland's help with
the bibliography.
Many friends have supported me. My talks with Sally Alexander
about history over nearly thirty years have been, and continue to be, a
joy and a pleasure. Michele Barrett, Avtar Brah, Leonore Davidoff,
Miriam Glucksmann, Alison Light, Jokhim Meikle, Judy Walkowitz and
Sophie Watson have all listened to me, argued with me and sustained
me. David Albury thought of the title Civilising Subjects many years ago.
Gad Heuman and Mary Chamberlain welcomed me to the field of
Caribbean history in Britain. Tom Holt and Brian Stanley both kindly
allowed me to see material before it was published. Clyde Binfield has
shared his unrivalled knowledge of nineteenth-century nonconformity
with me. I have found intellectual sustenance in the growing community
of feminist historians engaged in rethinking empire both in Britain and
the USA. Particular thanks to Antoinette Burton, Joanna de Groot, Clare
Midgley, Sonya Rose, Mrinalini Sinha, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and
Ann Laura Stoler. The seminar on 'Reconfiguring the British', which
Linda Colley and I have organised at the Institute of Historical Research
since 1999, has provided an important intellectual space. The untimely
death of Rachel Fruchter in July 1998 was a great blow. Her expeditions
x Acknowledgements •

with me in Jamaica were a tremendous pleasure, and I like to think she

would have liked this book.
My friends Peter Hulme, Cora Kaplan, Gail Lewis, Keith McClelland,
Jane Rendall and Bill Schwarz have all read and given me invaluable
comments on the entire manuscript, for which I am very grateful. In addi-
tion, the comments from readers at Polity and the University of Chicago
Press have been, very helpful. David Held and the editorial team at Polity
have been most supportive.
Since this book has been a long time in the making, versions of some
of the material have already been published. Part of the prologue
appeared as 'Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West
Indies, 1833-66', in Bill Schwarz (ed.), The Expansion of England: Race,
Ethnicity and Cultural History (Routledge, London, 1996), pp. 130-70.
An early version of the account of the missionaries in chapter 1 ap-
peared as 'Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the
1830s and 1840s', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A.
Treichler feds), Cultural Studies (Routledge, London and New York,
1992), pp. 240-70. This was published subsequently in my own collec-
tion of essays, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism
and History (Polity, Cambridge, 1992), pp. 205-54. The account of the
free-villages in chapter 1 draws on my article 'White Visions, Black Lives:
The Free Villages of Jamaica', History Workshop, 36 (Autumn 1993),
pp. 100-32. The material on Knibb in chapter 1 draws on 'William
Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject', in Martin
Daunton and Rick Halpern (eds), Empire and Others: British Encoun-
ters with Indigenous Peoples' 1600-1850 (UCL Press, London, 1998),
pp. 303-24. Some of the material in chapter 3 appeared as 'A Jamaica
of the Mind: Gender, Colonialism and the Missionary Venture', in
Robert Swansona(ed.), Gender and Christian Religion, Studies in Church
History 34, published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the
Boydell Press, 1998, pp. 362-90. Some of the material in chapter 4 draws
on 'Going a-Trolloping: Imperial Man Travels the Empire', in Clare
Midgley ?(ed.), Gender, and Imperialism (Manchester University Press,
Manchester, 1998), pp. 180-99. An early account of the differences
between George Dawson and R. W. Dale which are explored in chap-
ters 6 and 7 appeared as 'From Greenland's Icy Mountains . . . to Afric's
Golden .Sand: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth Century
England', Gender and History, 5; 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 212-30. I am
grateful to all these, publishers for allowing me to reprint material.
Much of the book was written in Wivenhoe, where the Colne estuary
has provided both solace and inspiration. My immediate and my
extended family have lived with this book for years, some of them very
difficult ones. My father and mother are both threaded through the
 Acknowledgements xi

work. I am only sorry that my father did not live to know that I was
doing it. My sister, Margaret Rustin, is an unfailing source of love and
support. My daughter Becky, and son, Jess, both know what it means
to be black and British. The book is dedicated to Stuart, who first took
me to, and helped me to think about, Jamaica and the relation between
metropole and colony, and to Gail, who helped me to know England
differently.

Catherine Hall
Wivenhoe, June 2001
 Abbreviations

©v0

ASR Anti-Slavery Reporter

BDP Birmingham Daily Post
BFASS British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
BH Baptist Herald and Friend of Africa
BJ Birmingham Journal
BM Baptist Magazine
BMS Baptist Missionary Society
BRL Birmingham Reference Library
CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
JBU Jamaica Baptist Union
JRC Jamaica Royal Commission
LMS London Missionary Society
LNFS Ladies' Negro's Friend Society
MH Missionary Herald *
NAPSS National Association for the Promotion of Social Science
NLJ National Library of Jamaica
PP Parliamentary Papers
YCND Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
 Cast of Characters

John Bright (1811-1889)

John Bright was educated as a Quaker, and first worked in the family
business. A leading campaigner for the Anti-Corn Law League, he
became MP for Durham in 1843, and for Manchester between 1847 and
1857. In the 1850s he was a leading advocate of parliamentary and finan-
cial reform, an opponent of the Crimean War, and a critic of the British
response to the 'Indian Mutiny'. Defeated at Manchester in 1857, he
became MP for Birmingham. He was an active supporter of the North
in the American Civil War, and one of the most important campaigners
and orators on parliamentary reform ,outside the House of Commons in
1866-7.

Thomas Burchell (1799-1846)

Son of a Tetbury wool-stapler, he was converted while an apprentice,
and accepted as a trainee missionary by the BMS in 1819. He went to
Jamaica with his wife, Hester, in 1823, and they settled in Montego Bay,
where black Baptists were already established. In the 1820s, despite
many difficulties with the planters, his congregations grew. In 1831 he
was one of the Baptist missionaries seen as responsible for the rebellion.
He was arrested and forced to leave the island: the Montego Bay chapel
was destroyed. In Britain, he became an active supporter of emanci-
pation, and after his return to Jamaica in 1834, emerged as a powerful
figure, running numerous mission stations and establishing free villages.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) •

Son of a Dumfriesshire mason, educated at the parish school and
Edinburgh University, he abandoned his first plan to become a Presby-
terian minister, and made a career by reviewing and translating Goethe
 xiv Cast of Characters

from the German. He moved to Chelsea in 1834, and in his historical

writing focused especially on the careers of great men. He warned of the
dangers of revolution, democracy and laissez-faire in The French Rev-
olution (1837), Chartism (1839) and Fast and Present (1843). In 1849
he published anonymously his 'Occasional Discourse on the Negro Ques-
tion'. After the events at Morant Bay in 1865, Carlyle led the support
for Governor Eyre and celebrated him as a hero. In his Shooting Niagara:
And After? (1867), Carlyle's fear of democracy was linked with his con-
tempt for black people and their white supporters.

John Clark (1809-1880)

He worked as a printer in London, and became fascinated by the mis-
sionary venture in Jamaica. In 1836 he established a new chapel in
Brown's Town, where he stayed for the rest of his life. The same year he
began a correspondence with Joseph Sturge, who visited him in 1837. In
1839, with the help of his wife, he established the new village of Sturge
Town, and in 1840 the new mission station of Clarksonville. By the mid-
1840s times were much more difficult, and his regular visits to England
always involved seeking financial aid from Birmingham and elsewhere.
In 1866 he was visited by William Morgan. In 1870 his church split, a
source of much distress to him.

John Clarke (1802-1879)

Cousin of John Clark (above), he was inspired by hearing a missionary
preach, and*' became a teacher and trainee missionary. He sailed to
Jamaica in 1829 with his new wife, the daughter of his minister. They
settled in Jericho, and Clarke was amongst the first to work with native
agents. He was selected to lead the mission to West Africa, where he
stayed until 1847, despite difficult relations with some of his co-workers.
Between 1848 arid 1852 he was in England, where he published on
African languages. He then returned to Jamaica.

Robert William Dale (1829-1895)

Son of a dealer in hat trimmings, his mother longed for him to be a min-
ister, and at fifteen he preached his first sermon. He initially worked as
a teacher, but then-went to Spring Hill College in 1847 to train as a min-
ister. As a student, he regularly attended George Dawson's church.
Invited by John Angell James to- become his assistant at Carrs Lane in
1853, he became co-pastor in 1854. At James's death in 1859 he became
sole pastor. A champion of nonconformity and liberalism in Birming-
ham, he established a national reputation from the 1860s as a leading
theologian and public man. One of the great pulpit preachers of his gen-
eration, he. believed in the responsibilities of Christian citizenship.
 Cast of Characters xv

George Dawson (1821-1877)

The son of a Baptist schoolmaster, he started out teaching, but wanted
to be a minister. He was at Glasgow University 1839-41, and started
to preach soon after. In 1844 he became minister of Mount Zion
chapel in Birmingham. A powerful preacher and lecturer, he soon estab-
lished a reputation in Birmingham and beyond. In 1846 his followers
built a new church for him, the Church of the Saviour, dedicated to a
spirit of free inquiry. He enthusiastically supported the struggles for
Italian, Polish and Hungarian freedom. By the late 1850s he had become
increasingly convinced of the importance of the town as a site of social
improvement and reform, and was an architect of Birmingham's 'civic
gospel'.

Walter Dendy (?-1881)

A Wiltshire Baptist, he married a cousin of William Knibb, and sailed
for Jamaica as a missionary (with the Burchells) in 1831. He and his wife
worked initially in Annotto Bay, where they experienced persecution in
the wake of the 1831 rebellion. They then settled in Salter's Hill, near
Montego Bay, where a church had originally been formed by the black
Baptist, Moses Baker. A new chapel was opened in 1836, along with a
schoolroom and a house. In 1841 he travelled to England with two of
his deacons. He remained in Salter's Hill through the anxious years from
the late 1840s. In 1865 he attended one of the Underhill meetings, and
was a critic of Eyre.

David Jonathan East (1816-1904)

A student at Stepney College, which became Regent's Park, he wrote
Western Africa: Its Condition and Christianity the Means of its Recov-
ery in 1843. In 1851 he agreed to become the principal of Calabai; the
training college which had been established in Jamaica in 1841. He was
a great friend of Edward Underbill's, and they corresponded for many
years. He retired in 1892, and returned to England.

Edward John Eyre (1815-1901)

Third son of a Yorkshire vicar, and originally intended for the army, he
went to seek his fortune in Australia in 1833, where he became well
known as an explorer. Sympathetic to Aboriginal peoples, he became
associated with Governor- Grey's policy of assimilation in South
Australia. His first Colonial Office appointment was in New Zealand
(1847), followed by St Vincent, then Antigua, and in 1862, Jamaica.
When rebellion broke out in Morant Bay in 1865, he imposed martial
law with brutality. He was removed from his post by the Liberal gov-
ernment, and retired to Devon.
 xvi Cast of Characters

John Edward Henderson (1816-1885)

Trained as a missionary at Stepney College, he sailed to Jamaica with his
wife, Ann, in 1840. He initially worked in Falmouth with Knibb, and
then established a new church nearby at Waldensia. His initial enthusi-
asm for the island and its future was displaced by increasing gloom from
the late 1840s, as he was beset by financial and other troubles. In 1853
they moved to Montego Bay. In 1865 he was named by Eyre as one of
the most troublesome of the Baptist missionaries. He came to regard
Jamaica as his home, and despite many difficulties remained on the
island, where he died in 1885.

John Angell James (1785-1859)

Son of a draper, he was converted and decided to become a minister.
In 1805 he became pastor at Carrs Lane in Birmingham, and stayed
there until his death. The chapel rapidly became a centre of town life,
and James himself a celebrated figure. A prolific writer, well-known
evangelical preacher and powerful protagonist of separate spheres, his
most influential book was The Anxious Enquirer after Salvation (1834).
An enthusiastic supporter of missionary and abolitionist ventures, he
played a significant role in the development of the Congregational Union.
In 1840 he represented Birmingham and Jamaica at the Anti-Slavery
Convention.

William Knibb (1803-1845)

Born in Kettering, he was apprenticed in Bristol, where he became a
Sunday school teacher. Inspired by the example of his brother, Thomas,
who died while teaching in Kingston, he decided to go to Jamaica. He
sailed with his wife, Mary, in 1825. Initially working in Savanna-la-Mar,
they moved to Falmouth in 1830. In 1831 he became the spokesman for
the Jamaican missionaries at a time when they faced serious persecution.
He came out publicly against slavery, and lectured throughout Britain to
rally support. A regular visitor to Birmingham, he was well known to
Sturge, Morgan and James, In the aftermath of emancipation, he became
the best-known protagonist of the rights of freed men and women and
the acknowledged leader of the missionaries in Jamaica.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

The young Mill's education, at home with his Utilitarian father, and his
reaction against it were famously recorded in his Autobiography (1873).
He first met Harriet Taylor in 1830, and their relationship increased his
interest in the position of women. He supported the Philosophic Rad-
icals in the 1830s, and from 1840 concentrated on writing on philo-
sophical and political subjects. His major works were A System of Logic
 Cast of Characters xvii

(1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Con-

siderations on Representative Government (1861), and The Subjection
of Women (1869). In the 1860s Mill was an active supporter of the
North in the American Civil War and the central public figure in the
Jamaica Committee, set up in 1866 to campaign for justice in the wake
of Morant Bay. From 1865 to 1868 he was MP for Westminster, and
spoke on parliamentary reform, women's suffrage, Jamaica and Ireland.

Thomas Morgan (1776-1857)

The son of a Welsh Anglican farmer, he trained as a Baptist minister at
Bristol College with Dr Ryland, and succeeded Samuel Pearce at Birm-
ingham's Cannon Street chapel in 1802. He was forced to resign because
of illness in 1811, and his wife Ann ran a school to support the family.
In 1815 he began preaching again, and became pastor at Bond Street in
1820. An enthusiast for missionary and abolitionist ventures, he was a
founder member of the town's Anti-Slavery Society and a lifelong friend
of John Angell James and Joseph Sturge. William Knibb stayed with the
family in 1833.

William Morgan (1815-?)

Third son of the above, he trained as a solicitor, and practised in Birm-
ingham. From an early age he was engaged with missionary and aboli-
tionist ventures, and was active in liberal and philanthropic causes.
Co-founder of the Birmingham Baptist Union, he was also secretary of
the Birmingham Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. In 1840 he served as
one of the honorary secretaries of the Anti-Slavery Convention. In the
1840s and 1850s he worked closely with Sturge. In 1866 he went to
Jamaica for the BFASS.

Samuel Oughton (?)

Born in London, and in business with his father, he married the niece of
Hester Burchell, and became a missionary. His first work was with
Thomas Burchell, and then he settled in Kingston, where he became the
minister of the important church on East Queen's Street. Difficulties
within the church embittered him, and he became increasingly sceptical
of the potential of Africans to become fully civilised. In 1866 he
expressed support for Eyre, and left Jamaica to settle in England. He
appears to have had no further connections with the Baptists.

James Mursell Phillippo (1798-1879)

The son of a master builder, he was converted as a young man, and deter-
mined to become a missionary. He was accepted as a trainee in 1819,
and sailed to Jamaica with his new wife, Hannah, in 1823. (In 1822 he
 xviii Cast of Characters

stayed with Thomas Morgan in Birmingham, and established a long-term

friendship with the family.) They settled in Spanish Town, and lived there
for the rest of their lives. They faced many difficulties with the plantoc-
racy in the 1820s, and he spoke out against slavery in the wake of 1831.
A great defender of the free peasantry, he established numerous free vil-
lages in the period after 1838. His church in Spanish Town split, and
there were years of dispute as to the property and the pastor's power.
Phillippo came to terms with this, and remained a patriarchal champion
of freed men and women to the end of his life.

Joseph Sturge (1793-1859)

Born into a Quaker family near Bristol, his father died when he was
twenty-four, and he became responsible for his mother and seven
younger brothers and sisters. A corn merchant, he moved to Birming-
ham in 1822, living initially with his sister Sophia. He became involved
in a wide range of philanthropic and'political activities. An enthusiast
for missionary and abolitionist ventures, he was central to the struggle
for the abolition of apprenticeship. In 1837 he travelled to the West
Indies to investigate conditions for himself. Founder of the BFASS in
1840, he was a key figure in the Anti-Slavery Convention. Increasingly
radicalised by his experience both at home and in the colonies, he was
a lifelong believer in the universal family of man and a supporter of freed
men and women.

Edward Bean Underhill (1813-1901)

The son-of a Baptist, he was himself converted at sixteen. Initially he
went into business, but his fascination with Baptist history and mis-
sionary work took him into the BMS in 1849. In 1854 he went on a
deputation to India for two and a half years, and in 1859 to Jamaica.
His letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1865, about con-
ditions in Jamaica, was seen by Eyre as a provocation. Between 1865
and 1867 he was very heavily involved with Jamaican affairs. Effectively
he directed the BMS for twenty-seven years.
 Introduction

6\£)

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James Baldwin, 'Stranger in the village'

The origins of this book lie in my own history. I was born in Kettering,
Northamptonshire, in 1946. My father, John Barrett, was a Baptist
minister, my mother a budding historian who had become a clergyman's
wife. My father was at that time the minister of Fuller Baptist Chapel,
named after the nonconformist divine and first secretary of the Baptist
Missionary Society, Andrew Fuller. The church, first established in 1696,
now stands in the centre of the town, and is a handsome building, res-
onant of a proud dissenting culture. My parents lived in Kettering
throughout the Second World War, a time when churches and chapels
were particularly important in providing a focus for communities strug-
gling with the experience of war and major conflict. Fuller, as it was
known by everybody, had always played a significant part in the life
of the town. Dissent had had a powerful presence in the county since
the seventeenth century, and it was in Kettering that the Baptist
Missionary Society was formed in 1792, the-first of the great missionary
ventures of the late eighteenth century. William Knibb, a Baptist mis-
sionary to Jamaica who was closely associated with the end of British
colonial slavery, was intimately connected with Fuller. So protfd was
the town of its place in the making of abolition that the arms of
the borough depict the figure of a freed man. 1 In September 1945 my
father held a service of memorial and celebration at Fuller, 100 years
after Knibb's death. The mayor and town dignitaries attended, a recog-
nition of the significance of the legacy of radical abolitionism to the
town's sense of itself. Fuller now boasts a Heritage Room where this
history is told.
 2 Introduction

Kettering was built on the boot and shoe trade, and still has the char-
acter of a small provincial town. With a population of 6.76,000, it is pre-
dominantly white, and has a very different feel from those cities where
the peoples of the erstwhile empire, African-Carib beans, Africans, and
South and East Asians and others, have settled, had children, and
changed these 'contact zones' of the second half of the twentieth century
into something new. In the late 1940s the community around Fuller was
close-knit, including a few well-to-do families but dominated by small
manufacturers and traders, many still working in leather. As young chil-
dren my brother, my sister and I were surrounded by kindly pretend
aunts and uncles, all members of the congregation, binding us into a
narrow, restricted world where propriety and respectability were highly
valued, and membership of Fuller was a critical part of a good life.
Belonging to this community brought great benefits: warmth, friendship,
companionship, a sense of purpose and a place of belonging, where the
ritual moments of life and death were collectively celebrated and
mourned. Yet it had its costs: a privileging of respectability, the require-
ment to live in certain prescribed ways, a disapproval of anything per-
ceived as delinquent, social conformity, assumptions about the truth of
the faith, a fear of critical thinking, a limited intellectual vision. The nar-
rowness of this world was offset, however, by the wider communities to
which the congregation was attached, not only throughout Britain, but
across the empire and the globe. The radical Baptist tradition with which
Fuller was associated was committed to a notion of a universal family
of man, and, more specifically, to a Baptist family which stretched across
the oceans, linking West Indians, Africans, Chinese and Indians in the
embrace of its mission. There were friends in Baptist chapels everywhere.
This was, in its own way, a transnational world.
In 1949, when I was three, we left Kettering. My father had been
appointed superintendent of the north-eastern area of the Baptist Union,
and we went to live in Leeds. We returned to Kettering to visit on a very
regular basis, and Fuller continued to be a place of belonging, of warmth
and acceptance, where our family was loved and my parents revered.
Leeds was a very different experience. My father now had no church of
'his own', and travelled across the north-east preaching in different
chapels every Sunday; but the rest of the family attended the local Baptist
church, South Parade* My father's version of the Baptist faith, with its
focus on the potential of all men and women to become Christians, con-
nected to the founding fathers of the seventeenth century in its em-
phasis on social and political justice, was only one strand within the
denomination. A more rigid, dogmatic and excluding version, with con-
servative rather than radical instincts, was always present. In Leeds, no
longer protected by my father's inclusive style of preaching and reach-
 Introduction 3

ing, I experienced the Baptist congregation as much less like a kindly

extended family. The disapproving, narrow-minded and self-righteous
aspects of this nonconformist culture became ever more apparent as my
sister and I moved into adolescence, hated having to go to church and
Sunday school, and resisted the pressure to become believers. Since the
key doctrine which distinguishes the Baptists from other nonconformists
is their belief in adult baptism on the basis of individual conversion, a
high premium is placed on personal conviction. Without the experience
ofiaith, there can be no full membership of the church. Each individual,
male or female, black or white, Jew or Greek, as St Paul said, must make
their own choice. On that choice depended their entry into the commu-
nity and into salvation. Individual autonomy on matters of faith was
sacrosanct, and this gave a certain freedom, albeit a negative one, to
children of the manse.
At home the sense of a Baptist family stretching across the globe was
always part of domestic life: missionaries from 'the field', 'on furlough',
bringing me stamps for my collection; African students studying at the
university who were invited for Christmas or Sunday tea; the small con-
certs we held to raise money for 'good causes' both near and far. My
mother's involvement in the United Nations Association meant that some
of the specifically Christian dimensions of a connection with other parts
of the world could be displaced by a focus on internationalism. But there
were uncomfortable moments as to quite what the nature of these con-
nections were. A visiting West African student was upset with me when
I exclaimed about the 'funny' feel of her hair and kept wanting to touch
it. A great United Nations enthusiast, an acquaintance of my mother's,
was deeply disapproving of my sister's friendship with some Trinidadian
students. What was the nature of this supposedly universal family? And
how were black people and white people placed within it?
Living in a city made it much easier to find other forms of identity,
other kinds of belonging, beyond that of the church. There was school
and the political activities to which I became attached: YCND (the Youth
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in particular, an extension of my
parents' radical sentiments. It was the political aspects of my parents'
thinking that 1 took up, while the religious dimensions were cast off. At
one-of the CND Easter marches to demonstrate against the nuclear base
at Aldermaston, I met my partner-to-be, Stuart Hall, a Jamaican who
had come to England in 1951 to study. He had never gone home but
settled, one of the first post-war generation of West Indians to 'come
home' to the mother country.
In 1964, now-married, I arrived in Birmingham as a student in the
Department of History. Birmingham was not a city that appealed to me.
Leeds in the 1950s was proud of its radical traditions and its labour
 4 Introduction

movement. Birmingham, represented by Liberals from its inception as a

parliamentary borough, had followed Joseph Chamberlain and turned
conservative and imperialist at the end of the nineteenth century. In the
early 1960s the city fathers were busy destroying much of what was left
of the Victorian town and building the Bull Ring and the motorway
which circled the heart of the city, ugly monuments to the car and con-
sumption. The city was conservative in its culture, celebratory of the
'small man' and his struggles, profoundly unwelcoming to the migrants
from the Caribbean and South Asia whose labour was needed in the car
industry, the metal trades and the public sectors which serviced the
population of the West Midlands. In the election of 1964 race and immi-
gration had surfaced explicitly in Wolverhampton when Patrick Gordon
Walker, the Labour MP, was defeated by the Conservative candidate
Peter Griffiths, who made direct use of what came to be called 'the race
card'. This was a foretaste of things to come, and the ripples were all
too apparent in Birmingham. Travelling on the bus as a mixed-race
couple, or looking for a flat to rent, was a difficult venture, to say the
least.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, it was student politics and then
being a mother to my daughter and son, feminist politics and feminist
history, which absorbed my energies. My 'Englishness' and my 'white-
ness', as I have written elsewhere, seemed irrelevant to my political
project.2 Of course I knew about Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech
in Birmingham in April 1968. I watched the burgeoning of far-right
groups demanding an end to immigration and the repatriation of the
black and Asian migrants already here. I followed the development
of the many organisations based in the West Indian, Indian, Pakistani
and Bangladeshi communities across Birmingham, from Sparkbrook,
Sparkhill and Balsall Heath to Handsworth. There were groups based in
churches, dealing with housing, welfare, youth, police harassment,
employment. What is more, they became preoccupied in different ways
with the question of what it means to be a migrant, how to create some
new kind of place for themselves in postcolonial Britain. For some the
issue became how to construct a new way of being, that of the black
Briton, and here black was an inclusive political identity.3 But the divi-
sion of labour in our household was that Stuart worked on race, which
meant black men, and I worked on gender, which meant white women:
a variation on that common phenomenon on the Left, where men dealt
with class and women with gender. At moments of crisis, it was taken
for granted that 'we' - anti-racists, women's groups, trade-unionists,
Labour movement activists, socialists - would all be out for the demon-
strations against the National Front. Anti-racism was assumed as part
of the socialist feminism with which I was engaged: what might be char-
 Introduction 5

acterised as a humanist universalism, an assumption that all human

beings are equal, was integral to the shared vocabulary of the Left. 'Black
and White together, we shall not be moved,' we sang, just as once I had
sung those missionary hymns which celebrated the Christian family
•across the empire. But the unspoken racial hierarchy which was the
underlying assumption of that humanist universalism had not been con-
fronted in my psyche, any more than I had worked through just what
was meant by the Baptist family of man.
I first visited Jamaica in 1964, soon after independence, but thereafter
went only irregularly until the late 1980s. I found it a difficult place
because it meant encountering my whiteness, meeting hostility simply
because I was white, being identified with the culture of colonialism in
a way which stereotyped me and left no space for me as an English
woman to define a different relation to Jamaica. A new experience for a
white woman, albeit one of the defining experiences of being black, as
Frantz Fanon has so eloquently explored.4 But it was also an exciting
place, so different from England, so profoundly connected: yet that con-
nection was colonialism and slavery. Africa was being rediscovered in
Jamaica, in part through Rastafarianism and the music of Bob Marley.
But in white England, amnesia about empire, which was so characteris-
tic of the period of decolonisation, was prevalent. The empire was best
forgotten, a source of embarrassment and guilt, or alternatively a site of
nostalgia.5
In the summer of 1988, having finished the joint project with Leonore
Davidoff on the intersections of gender and class which appeared as
Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class
1780-18SO, and with time to wonder about what I was going to work
on next, we went as a family to Jamaica. Our daughter, Becky, was going
to stay for a year, in between school and university, intrigued to discover
what her Jamaican heritage meant to her. It was a difficult summer:
family life was about to change drastically; our children were angry ado-
lescents and had little patience with the foibles of their parents. Stuart
was deeply troubled by his relation to 'home'. Jamaica was not 'home'
any more; indeed, it had not been home for a long time: yet part of him
wanted to be seen as Jamaican and was fighting with the difficulty of
accepting that this was no longer the case, that his clothes and his ways
of walking and talking and being identified him as one of those migrants
who had lived in England for longer than in the land of their birth, who,
in the language of Jamaicans, 'came from foreign'. Perhaps his unease
with who he was, Jamaican and/or black Briton, made it more possible
for me to reflect on my Englishness, my whiteness.
'It is a very charged and difficult moment', argues James Baldwin,
when the white man confronts his own whiteness and loses 'the jewel of
 6 Introduction

his naivete'. Whiteness carries with it authority and power, the legacy of
having 'made the modern world', of never being 'strangers anywhere in
the world'. 6 White women carry this legacy in different ways from men,
but they carry it none the less. The white construction of 'the African',
the black man or the black woman, depends on the production of stereo-
types which refuse full human complexity. When the black man insists,
wrote Baldwin, 'that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic
rarity and recognise him as a human being', then that difficult moment
erupts, and the naivete of not knowing that relation of power is broken.
'The white man prefers', he argued, 'to keep the black man at a certain
human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplic-
ity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his fore-
fathers, or his neighbours.' The Christian version of the family of man
and the Left's universal humanism had both acted as screens for me,
allowing me to avoid the full recognition of the relations of power
between white and black, the hierarchies that were encoded in those two
paradigms. But the dismantling of those screens was not simply a matter
of personal will-power (though that is necessarily a part of the process):
rather, it was something which became possible in a particular conjunc-
ture, the postcolonial moment, a moment of crisis for the whole culture.
As Salman Rushdie wrote in 1982:

I want to suggest that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain;

that it's not a peripheral minority affair. I believe that Britain is undergo-
ing a critical phase of its postcolonial period, and this crisis is not simply
economic or political.-It's a crisiskof the whole culture, of the society's
whole sense of itself.7

The postcolonial moment, argues Simon Gikandi, can be understood as

a moment of transition and cultural instability. It is the time when it
becomes clear that decolonisation has not resulted in total freedom.8 It
was the time when the new nations which had become independent
began to recognise -the limits of nationalism, and in the old centres of
empire the chickens came home to roost: in the case of Britain, in che
guise of those once imperial subjects who 'came home'. While first-
generation migrants felt compelled for the most part to make the best
they could of the inhospitable mother country, their children, born here,
made very different claims.9 At this point of transition, Gikandi suggests,
the foundational histories of both metropolitan and decolcmised nations
began to unravel: a disjunctive moment when 'imperial legacies' came
'to haunt English and postcolonial identities'.10 This was also the time
when questions of culture, of language and of representation began to
be understood as central to the work of colonialism. While anti-
 Introduction

colonialism had focused on the expulsion of colonising powers and the

creation of new political nations, the postcolonial project is about dis-
mantling the deep assumption that only white people are fully human
and their claim to be 'the lords of human kind'. 11 In the metropole
this was the moment when second-generation black Britons asked what
it meant to be black and British, when black feminists asked who
belonged, and in what ways, to the collective 'we* of a feminist sister-
hood. That question was posed very sharply in the editorial meetings
of Feminist Review, a journal which I had worked on for some years
and which was forced to rethink its practice at every level by the group
of black feminists who had agreed to join the collective. How inclusive
were those humanist visions that white feminists took for granted? The
idea of the unity of black and white could not simply be taken for
granted: its founding assumptions needed radical re-examination. White-
ness was problematised for me in a way that it had never been before.
My assumption that my black husband and mixed-race children
somehow made me different, that I need not think about the privilege
and power associated with my white skin and white self, was challenged
and undermined, particularly in my encounters with Gail Lewis, Avtar
Brah and Ann Phoenix.12 At the same time, in the wider society, Pow-
ellite formulations regarding the threat to 'our island race' had passed
into the common sense of Thatcherism and conservatism, provoking
more explicit racial antagonisms. Race was an issue for British society
in new ways by the late 1980s: racial thinking had been around for a
very long time, but the bringing of it to consciousness, the making
explicit of the ways in which the society is 'raced', to use Toni Morri-
son's term, is another matter.
Driving along the north coast of Jamaica that summer of 1988, on
the main road from Falmouth, once the prosperous port at the centre of
a trade in enslaved peoples and the market for a complex of sugar plan-
tations, to Ocho Rios, with its modern economy tied to tourism, we came
to the small village of Kettering. I was immediately struck by its name,
and by the large Baptist chapel with the name of William Knibb, the
Emancipator, blazoned upon it. Why was this village called Kettering?
What was its relation to the Northamptonshire town in which I was
born? And why did the Baptist chapel occupy pride of place in the
village? Who was William Knibb, and why was he remembered? What
part did nonconformists play in the making of empire? This was the
beginning of an unravelling of a set of connected histories linking
Jamaica with England, colonised with colonisers, enslaved men and
women with Baptist missionaries, freed people with a wider public of
abolitionists in the metropole. How did the 'embedded assumptions of
racial language' work in the universalist speech of the missionaries and
 8 Introduction

their supporters? 13 The links between Jamaica and England were not
neutral, not simply a chain of connection. The relations between colony
and metropole were relations of power. More significantly, they were
relations which were mutually constitutive, in which both coloniser and
colonised were made. That mutual constitution was hierarchical: each
was party to the making of the other, but the coloniser always exercised
authority over the colonised. My project, as I elaborated it, was>to try
to understand the making of this particular group of colonisers: that was
my task, from where I stood, the politics of my particular location, driven
by my 'trans-generational haunting'. 14
If Kettering, in both its manifestations, provided one point of depar-
ture, Birmingham provided another. The city which had seemed so alien
to me in 1964 was my home for seventeen years, the place where my chil-
dren were born, and I continued to grow up. Powerfully identified with
Powellism, it was in the heartlands of the new forms of racial thinking
of the 1970s and 1980s: a reworking of the legacy of Joseph Chamber-
lain with his passionate belief in empire as essential to the well-being of
Britain. Race, it was clear, was deeply rooted in English culture. Not
always in forms which were explicitly racist, but as a space in which the
English configured their relation to themselves and to others. Racial
thinking was a part of the everyday, part of instinctive English common
sense: and there was no better base from which to try and unpick this
than Birmingham. The work which I had done in the 1980s on the
nineteenth-century Birmingham middle class had focused on thccentral-
ity of gender to middle-class culture.15 It had not reflected on the national
culture, in the sense of how racial thinking inscribes or is inscribed in the
national, or what was peculiarly English, or the imperial aspects of this
culture. These now became much more pressing concerns for me, not
invalidating the previous preoccupations, but recognising the partial
nature of the picture I had produced. There was so much I had not seen
because I had not been looking for* it. Class and gender were indeed
crucial axes of power, differentiating men and women and bisecting this
divide in cross-cutting and complicated ways. But questions of race and
ethnicity were also always present in the nineteenth century, foundational
to English forms of classification and relations of power. The vocabulary
of the men and women of Birmingham, whether they knew it or not, was
a facialised vocabulary, for supposed racial characteristics were always
an implicit part of their categorisations. This was nothing new, this was
part of being English. This was what I wanted to understand.

In his classic account of the revolution in San-Domingue, The Black

Jacobins, C. L. R. James demonstrated the complex dialectic running
across and between colony and metropole. He challenged the assump-
 Introduction

tion that causality always ran from the centre to the colony, and that
metropolitan politics were unrelated to those of the periphery. James
knew the extent to which he was himself a product of both Trinidad and
Britain, his ways of thinking and being constituted through the
Caribbean and the 'mother country', in, but not fully part of, Europe.16
The idea-that colonies and their peoples were made by the colonisers was
of course nothing new: what was new was the argument that this re-
lation went both ways, even if in unequal relations of power- In the
context of the French and Haitian revolutions, James was interested in
the political, economic and intellectual aspects of this cross-over: how
events in both locations affected each other, shaped what happened and
defined what was possible.
The imperative of placing colony and metropole in one analytic frame,
as Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have succinctly phrased it, has been
one of'the starting points for this study.17I was.a historian of Britain who
assumed that Britain could be understood in itself, without reference to
other histories: a legacy of the assumption that Britain provided the
model for the modern world, the touchstone whereby all other national
histories could be judged. World history had been constructed as Euro-
pean histories, and the division of labour that academics made in the
nineteenth century has left deep legacies. As a result, historians took
on the ancient Mediterranean and Europe; orientalists dealt with
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India and China; and the 'peoples without
history' in Africa, South-East Asia, tropical America and Oceania fell to
anthropologists. 18 1 have become a historian of Britain who is convinced
that, in order to understand the specificity of the national formation, we
have to look outside it. A focus on national histories as constructed,
rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created,
rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being
through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking. We
can understand the nation only by defining what is not part of it, for
identity depends on the outside, on the marking both of its positive pres-
ence and content and of its negative and excluded parts. Being English
means being some things, and definitely not others - not like the French,
the Irish or the Jamaicans. T cannot assert a differential identity',,as
Ernesto Laclau argues, 'without distinguishing it from a context and in
the process of making the distinction, I am asserting the context at the
same time.'19 Identities are constructed within power relations, and that
which is external to an identity, the 'outside', marks the absence or lack
which is constitutive of its presence.20 We need, then, to consider how
modernity begins, in Paul Gilroy's phrase, 'in the constitutive relation-
ships with outsiders that both found and temper a self-conscious sense
of western civilisation'.21
 10 Introduction

In this study it is Jamaica which constitutes one kind of inside/outside

to England, though other colonial locations figure to a lesser extent. In
the nineteenth century Jamaica was understood both as a kind of exten-
sion to Britain, a useful source of that necessity, sugar, and as somewhere
completely separate and different. The right to colonial rule was built on
the gap between metropole and colony: civilisation here, barbarism/sav-
agery there. But that gap was a slippery one, which was constantly being
reworked. In one sense Jamaica was a colony. Colonies were thought
of as offshoots of the mother country, new places where the English
(or Irish or Scots) settled: colonies were children, with all the meanings
of connection and separation carried by that familial trope. Depen-
dencies, on the other hand, conquered territories or wartime acquisitions,
with majority non-white populations, were a different matter. The West
Indies were awkwardly placed between these two categories. Jamaica
had a long-established white settler population and a form of represen-
tative government. Yet the vast majority of the population were black or
'coloured' - that is, of mixed race - and were not indigenous peoples
who, according to nineteenth-century thinking, could be confidently
expected to die out. Jamaica therefore sat uneasily between colony and
dependency, an in-between place whose position was constantly being
re-negotiated between the 1830s and 1867.
Metropolitan power, as Partha Chatterjee observes, was structured
through 'a rule of colonial difference' and 'the preservation of the
alienness of the ruling group'. 22 But in a world in which sexuality was
locked into racial and class thinking, with their complex logics of desire,
the boundaries between rulers and ruled were necessarily unstable.
Mixed-race children were particularly problematic, for how was the in "
between to be categorised? The impossibility of fixing lines, keeping
people in separate places, stopping slippage, was constantly at issue in
Jamaica. And this was mirrored in England: Jamaican commodities,
Jamaican family connections, Jamaican property in enslaved people, did
not stay conveniently over there; they were part of the fabric of England,
inside not outside, raising the question as to what was here and what
was there, threatening dissolution of the gap on which the distinction
between colony and metropole was constructed. Europe was only Europe
because of that other world: Jamaica was one domain of the constitu-
tive outside of England.
My reasons for choosing to work on Jamaica are perhaps self-evident
by now: it was the site of empire to which I had some access. It was
the largest island in the British Caribbean and the one- producing
the most wealth for Britain in the eighteenth century. 'Discursively the
Caribbean is a special place,' as Peter Hulme notes, 'partly because of
its primacy in the encounter between Europe and America, civilization
 Introduction II

and savagery.'23 It was through the lens of the Caribbean, and parti-
cularly Jamaica, that the English first debated 'the African', slavery and
anti-slavery, emancipation and the meanings of freedom; and Jamaica
occupied a special place in the English imagination between the 1780s
and 1860s on these grounds. Jamaicans were to re-emerge as privi-
leged objects of concern in Britain in the post-war period, but in a
very different context. Now the Jamaicans were those who had left
their island to come to Britain between 1948 and the 1960s, who had
settled, had children and claimed full national belonging. In so doing
they once again put Jamaica at the heart of the metropolitan frame: ques-
tions of identity and national belonging were again crucially in play, and
Jamaica and England were part of the same story. But this was a repe-
tition with a difference. England was no longer at the heart of a great
empire, and its domestic population was visibly diverse. One historical
power configuration, the colonial, had been displaced by another, the
postcolonial:

Problems of dependency, under-development and marginalization, typical

of the 'high' colonial period persist into the post-colonial. However, these
relations are resumed in a new configuration. Once they were articulated
as unequal relations of power and exploitation between colonized arid col-
onizing societies. Now they are re-staged and displaced as struggles
between indigenous social forces, as internal contradictions and sources of
destabilization within the decolonized society, or between them and the
wider global system.24

It was this new configuration with its repetition, the same but different,
which made possible both the return to the past and a rewriting of con-
nected histories.
My focus is England, not Britain, and my detailed case study is
Birmingham, particularly its nonconformists. Evangelical Christians
were always central to the anti-slavery movement, but the Baptists had
a particular significance in Jamaica. Baptist missionaries were seen
by the plantocracy as responsible for the rebellions of both 1831 and
1865: their teaching had stirred up sedition. In the wake of emancipa-
tion in 1834, freed men and women themselves believed that Baptist
support had been essential to the ending of slavery, and joined the church
in large numbers. The Baptists remain a powerful presence in contem-
porary Jamaica. Baptistsj and more generally nonconformists, were
also a significant grouping in Birmingham. In focusing on a particular
provincial town, Birmingham, known by its nineteenth-century inhabi-
tants as 'the midland metropolis', my aim has been to find out what
provincial men and women knew of the empire, and how they knew it.
 12 Introduction

What representations of empire circulated in a mid-nineteenth-century

town, and in what ways, if any, did the associated knowledge shape polit-
ical and other discourses? Did the empire make any difference 'at home'?
The case study has been central to my method. 25 Birmingham's noncon-
formist and abolitionist population had very close connections with the
Baptist missionaries in Jamaica. The island, its peoples, its geography
and its politics were familiar to the Birmingham public in the early to
mid-nineteenth century. Birmingham, I argue, was imbricated with the
culture of empire.26
My hypothesis, that colony and metropole are terms which can be
understood only in relation to each other, and that the identity of
coloniser is a constitutive part of Englishness, could have been explored
on many different sites. I have chosen to take the- Baptist mission to
Jamaica and the town of Birmingham as ways into my investigation of
how race was lived at the local level. I have been careful to set these case
studies in their wider context, asking, for example, whether a text such
as Thomas Carlyle's 'Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question' had
an impact locally as well as nationally.
The period with which I am concerned, 1830-1867, is framed both
by emancipation and the rebellion at Morant Bay in Jamaica and by the
Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 in England. The historical significance
of these events, I argue, can be understood only in a transnational frame:
hardly a novel idea when the impact of the metropole on the colony is
at issue, but much less accepted when the impact is seen as travelling
both ways/ 7 This is a period commonly seen as critical to Jamaican
history, the formative years of post-emancipation society, but somewhat V
in between .in relation to imperial history. This was the time after the
expansion of empire which followed the recovery from the loss of the
United States and before the expansion of the late nineteenth century. It
was the time of free trade and of the development of responsible gov-
ernment in the white settler colonies. But it was also a time when racial
thinking in the metropole hardened, in response, it is usually argued, to
the 'Indian Mutiny'/Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the American Civil War
and the events at Morant Bay in 1865. There is already a considerable
literature both on the Baptists in Jamaica and on the shift in racial think-
ing in the metropole which has been invaluable to me.28 But my focus is
different.

My questions concern the ways in which a particular group of English

men and women, mainly Baptists and other varieties of nonconformists,
constituted themselves as colonisers both in Jamaica and at home. Did
nonconformists, in their own particular ways, conceive of themselves as
'lords of human kind', superior to others? I take the development of the
missionary movement, one formative moment in the emergence of
 Introduction 13

modern racial thinking, as my point of departure. What difference did

the missionary enterprise, the anti-slavery movement and emancipation
make to thinking about race? What vision of metropole and colony did
these men and women have? What did people in England know about
Jamaica in the heady days of abolitionism? And what happened when
those days were over? What other sites of empire were significant for
them, and why? And how did they know what they knew? Which forms
of representation mattered?
' More precisely, my questions concern the missionaries, their wives
and children, their supporters and friends, their enemies and critics.
Who were the men who decided to be missionaries? Where did they come
from? What did they think they were doing? How was their vision dif-
ferent from that of other colonisers, such as planters? How did their
dream relate to the world of plantation owners and colonial officials?
How did the family figure in their 'new world'? They went to Jamaica
to convert 'the heathen', but became agents in the winning of emanci-
pation and the construction of a new society. But what was the nature
of the transformation they sought? And what happened to their dream?
Who were their supporters at home? What picture of the empire did
Birmingham Baptists have? What forms of belonging to town, nation
and empire did nonconformists in the middle decades of the nineteenth
century -share? Was it the same or different for men and women? How
did it change over the period from the 1830s to the end of the 1860s?
What was the relation between missionary and abolitionist thinking
about race and that in the wider society? What did Birmingham men and
women know about Thomas Carlyle or Robert Knox? What were the
connections between the abolitionists' paternalistic forms of racial dis-
course, with their notions of black sisters and brothers, and those of the
'scientific racists', with their emphasis on fixed, immutable racial differ-
ences? How did race work in nonconformist thinking about English-
ness?29 It is everyday racial thinking that is at the heart of my
investigation, its 'stubborn persistence' in English culture, and the ways
in whjch it structures English ways of life and being.30 Through a focus
on the Baptist missionaries who went to Jamaica and the men and
women of Birmingham, I explore the making of colonising subjects, of
racialised and gendered selves, both in the empire and at home.31

In thinking about the mutual constitution of coloniser and colonised,

Fanon has been an important influence. A child of the French Caribbean,
Fanon left his native Martinique to train as a psychiatrist in Paris. There
he encountered the meanings of blackness in a new way. Best known for
his thinking about the black male subject, Fanon is less often cited for
his recognition of the double inscription of black and white. Deeply trou-
bled by the psychic dimensions of colonialism, he explored his own
 14 Introduction

fractured sense of himself as a black man. 'The black is not a man', he

believed, until he was liberated from himself. 'What I want to do is to
help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has
been developed by the colonial environment.' Colonisers assumed that
black men had no culture, no civilisation, no long historical past. In
learning their masters' language, black men took on a world and a
culture - a culture which fixed them as essentially inferior. Drawing on
his clinical experience as a psychiatrist and his self-knowledge, he
explored the 'epidermalization' of inferiority, how the meanings of black-
ness were taken inside the self by the colonised, both inscribed on the
skin and internalised in the psyche. Lack of self-esteem, deep inner inse-
curity, obsessive feelings of exclusion, no sense of place, T am the other'
characterised what it was to be black.
But Fanon did not dissect only the psyche of the colonised. If black-
ness was constituted as a lack, what was whiteness? In his work as a
psychiatrist in Algeria and Tunisia, treating victims from both sides of
the conflict over decolonisation, he studied the torturers as well as the
tortured. Those torturers were formed by a culture of settlement. Settlers
had to become colonisers, had to learn how to define and manage the
new world they were encountering. Whether as missionaries, colonial
officials, bounty hunters, planters, doctors or military men, they were in
the business of creating new societies, wrenching what they had found
into something different. As Sartre noted in his introduction to The
Wretched of the Earth, 'the European has become a man only through
creating slaves and monsters'. Europeans made history and made them-
selves through becoming colonisers. For Fanon, decolonisation was in-
evitably a violent phenomenon, for it meant 'the replacing of a certain
"species" of men by another species of men'. This involved the 'verita-
ble creation of new -men . . . the "thing" which has been colonised
becomes man', and the coloniser in his or her turn had to be made anew.
In Fanon's mind the world which the settlers created was a Manichean
world. 'The settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil.'
'Natives' could become fully human again only by violently expelling
their colonisers, both from their land and from their own psyche. The
settlers meanwhile were the heroes of their stories, the champions of a
modern world, expunging savagery and barbarism, as they construed it,
in the name of civilisation and freedom.

The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the

absolute beginning: 'This land was created by us'. 'If we leave all is lost
and we go back to the Middle Ages.* Over against him torpid creatures,
wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic
background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism. The
 Introduction 15

settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he con-
stantly refers to the history of his mother country he clearly indicates that
he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which
he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history
of his own nation in relation to all that she skims off, all that she violates
and starves.

'Europe', he insisted in a critical formulation, 'is literally the creation of

the.Third World.' Europeans made themselves and made history through
becoming colonisers, becoming new subjects. Without colonialism, there
would have been no Europe.32
Fanon's Manichean binary, coloniser/colonised, was in part a product
of anti-colonial wars. From his own position in one such war, the
struggle for Palestine, Edward Said also emphasised the hegemonic
identities of 'the West' and 'the Orient'. Said's utilisation of Foucault's
theory of the relation between knowledge and power was critical to the
development of a new field of study. His insistence on the cultural dimen-
sions of imperialism and the impetus he gave to the analysis of colonial
discourse ('an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their
common deployment in the management of colonial relationships') have
contributed to the breakdown of the idea of a common vision and a
single colonial project, of Manichean binaries and hegemonic blocs.33
An important shift in understanding has taken place as anthropolo-
gists, cultural critics, geographers, art historians and historians have
struggled to describe, analyse and define the complex formations of the
colonial world. There were the colonialisms associated with the differ-
ent European empires and the different forms of colonialism which oper-
ated within the British empire. On each of those sites different groups of
colonisers engaged in different colonial projects. Travellers, merchants,
traders, soldiers and sailors, prostitutes, teachers, officials and mission-
aries - all were engaged in colonial relations with their own particular
dynamics.
Different colonial projects give access to different meanings of empire.
The empire changed across time: there was the First Empire, the Second
Empire, the 'informal empire', 'the empire of free trade', the 'scramble
for Africa', the moment of high imperialism and the struggles over
decolonisation, each with the different preoccupations of those specific
temporalities, places and spaces. And there were contestations over
meaning: who had the power to define the empire at any one time? The
early nineteenth-century Baptist missionaries, for example, who believed
that empire could be articulated to particular notions of freedom and
liberty associated with the free-born Englishman? Or planters whose
freedom, they were convinced, entailed the right to own enslaved men
 16 Introduction

and women?34 And who had the power to define the relation of colony
to metropole? Whose meanings won in any particular struggle?35 The dis-
courses of imperialism, as Kathleen Wilson argues in the context of her
study of eighteenth-century English national culture, produced contra-
diction and complexity.3*
And then there is gender. Feminist scholars have been in the forefront
of the effort to write new imperial histories, cognisant of the centrality
of masculinity, femininity and sexuality to the making of nations and
empires. Both men and women were colonisers, both in the empire
and at home. Their spheres of action were delineated, their gendered and
racialised selves always in play.37 In the postcolonial moment we are
perhaps more aware of the multiplicity of positionalities located across
the binary of coloniser/colonised: the distinctions of gender, of class, of
ethnicity. The distinctions between one kind of coloniser and another,
one colonised subject and another, were indeed significant. Colonial offi-
cials, planters and missionaries had very different aims and preoccupa-
tions. An enslaved man acting as gang leader on a plantation exercised
forms of power over others which an enslaved woman serving as maid-
of-all-work in an urban household could not hope to emulate. The black
lover of a white plantation owner was entirely subject to his power
in some respects, although their sexual relationship meant that power
might not flow only one way.38 The times when the collective identity of
coloniser or colonised-overrode all other distinctions were rare, and were
the effect of particular political articulations: the rebellion of 1831 in
Jamaica> or the aftermath of Morant Bay, for example. But even then
there were those who refused to be positioned in that way. The frame-
work of them/us, or what is absolutely the satne versus what is absolutely
other, will not do. It is not possible to make sense of empire either theo-
retically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of
that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking.39 Part of
the task of the historian is to trace the complexity of these metropolitan
and colonial formations across time, to look at the multiple axes of
power through which they operated, and to chart the moments in which
binaries were fixed, even if only to be destabilised.
The time of empire was the time when anatomies of difference were
being elaborated, across the axes of class, race and gender. These elab-
orations were the work of culture, for the categories were discursive, and
their meanings historically contingent. -The language of class emerged as
a way of making sense of the new industrial society in Britain of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.40 The language of 'separate,
spheres' became a common way of talking about and categorising sexual
difference in this same period of transition. 41 It was colonial encounters
which produced a new category, race, the meanings of which, like those
 Introduction 17

of class and gender, have always shifted and been contested and' chal-
lenged. The Enlightenment inaugurated a debate about racial types, and
natural scientists began to make human races an object of study, labour-
ing to produce a schema out of the immense varieties of human life,
within a context of relatively few physical variations. On the one hand,
there were those who operated within a Christian universalism which
assumed that all peoples were the descendants of Adam and Eve, and
that the differences between peoples could be explained by differences
in culture and climate. But this did not mean that all were equal: white
people, it was widely thought, were more advanced, more civilised, than
others. Given the right conditions, those who lived in less developed cul-
tures would be able to advance. Many indigenous peoples, however, were
seen as destined for extinction. On the other hand, there were those who
focused on the notion of permanent physical differences which were
inherited and which distinguished groups of people one from another. In
the context of evolutionary thinking, classificatory racial schemes which
involved hierarchies from 'savagery' to 'civilisation', with white Anglo-
Sfixons at the*apex, became common. 42 But these two discourses, that of
cultural differentialism and that of biological racism, were, as Stuart Hall
has argued, not two different systems, but 'racism's two registers', and
in many situations discourses of both were in play, the cultural slipping
into the biological, and vice versa.43
Nineteenth-century discourses of sexual identity and difference, as
Joanna de Groot has argued, drew upon, and contributed to, discourses
of ethnic and racial identity and difference; these analagous languages
drew on understandings of both domination and subordination. 44 The
scientific theorising which was so strategic to understanding human
variation, Nancy Stepan notes, depended heavily on an analogy linking
race to gender: women became a racialised category, and non-white
peoples were feminised.45 Similarly, class divisions were racialised, the
poor constructed as 'a race apart'. 46 In the colonial order of things,
as Ann Stoler argues, the Dutch, the British and the French all made
new bourgeois selves, across colony and metropole. Each defined 'their
unique civilities through a language of difference that drew on images of
racial purity and sexual virtue'. 47 Marking differences was a way of
classifying, of categorising, of making hierarchies, of constructing
boundaries for the body politic and the body social. Processes of differ-
entiation, positioning men and women, colonisers and colonised, as if
these divisions were natural, were constantly in the making, in conflicts
of power. The most basic tension of empire was that 'the otherness of
colonised persons was neither inherent nor stable: his or her difference
had to be defined and maintained'. This meant that 'a grammar of dif-
ference was continuously and vigilantly crafted as people in colonies
 18 Introduction

refashioned and contested European claims to superiority'. 48 The con-

struction of this 'grammar of difference' was the cultural work of both
colonisers and colonised.
Fanon's settlers were men. But women were colonisers too. The
mental world of a Birmingham middle-class female abolitionist was
peopled with numerous others: imagined 'sisters' suffering under slavery,
her male relatives - husband, father and brothers - and the female ser-
vants working in her household, to name a few. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak has drawn attention to the gendered constitution of imperial
subjects and the making of the white feminist woman. This is a woman
constituted and interpellated not only as bourgeois individual but as
'individualist'. 'This stake is represented', she continues, 'on two regis-
ters: child bearing and soul making. The first is domestic-society-
through-sexual-reproduction cathected as "companionate love"; the
second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social
mission.'49 The imperialist project, Spivak insists, was at the heart of
this white woman's subjecthood. It is family and empire which are
proposed here as the constitutive agents in the construction of the
female bourgeois subject, andT it is the discourses of race which form
the Western female as an agent of history, while the 'native' woman is
excluded. The social mission is as important at home as in the empire:
the civilising of others had to take place on multiple fronts, from the
civilising work which women did on men in the drawing-room or
parlour, to their work with servants in the back kitchen, fallen women
in the city, or the enslaved women of their imaginations.' No binary,
whether of class, race, or gender,' is adequate to these multiple con-
structions of difference.
Spivak is working with Jacques Derrida's notion of differance. Derrida
argues that, rather than meaning being produced through binary oppo-
sitions, it is produced through endless proliferation and constant defer-
ral: the 'logic of the supplement'. As Deborah Cherry puts it: 'Alluding
to the double -meaning in French of supplement as addition and replace-
ment, Derrida writes in La dissemination that the supplement is dan-
gerous precisely because its textual movement is unstable and slippery,
disrupting binary oppositions and securities of meaning.' 50 Differance is
'a playing movement' across a continuum of similarities and differences
which refuses to separate into fixed binary oppositions. Differance char-
acterises a system in which 'every concept [or meaning] is inscribed in a
chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts
[meanings], by means of the systematic play of differences'.51 Meanings,
then, cannot be fixed, but are always in process. Cherry utilises these
insights in her analysis of egalitarian feminism in the 1850s. The term
'sister', she argues, widely adopted by feminists, was doubly inscribed.
 Introduction 19

It slipped between registers of meaning, marking both kinship and a

gap, between philanthropic ladies at home and those they supported and
helped. 'As it conjured a communality', she writes, 'it denied differences
and disavowed the violence of colonial conquest.' The term hinted at
proximity, but established a distance between 'the native female', 'not
quite/not white', and the Western feminist, 'not quite/not male'. Far from
fixing 'native women' in a close sibling relationship to white feminists,
'sister' destabilised and unsettled, leaving meanings ambiguous and
unresolved.52
Working with these same issues, John Barrell utilises a notion of
'this/that/the other' in his analysis of de Quincy's psychopathology of
imperialism. He draws on the distinction which Spivak makes between
'self-consolidating other' and 'absolute other'. The difference between
self and other in de Quincy's writing, he suggests,

though in its own way important, is as nothing compared with the differ-
ence between the two of them considered together, and that third thing,
way over there, which is truly other to them both . . . what at first seems
other can be made over to the side of the self - to a subordinate position
on that side - only so long as a new, and a newly absolute 'other' is con-
stituted to fill the discursive space that has thus been evacuated.

These are the mechanisms, he argues, through which an imperial power

produces a sense of national solidarity; 'for it enables the differences
between one class and another to be fully acknowledged', only then to
be recognised as trivial in comparison with the civilisation which they
share and which is not shared by 'whatever oriental other, the sepoys or
the dervishes, is in season at the time'. De Quincy was constantly ter-
rorised by his fear of infection from the East, argues Barrell, and inocu-
lated himself' by splitting, taking in something of the East, projecting
whatever he could not acknowledge on to the East beyond the East, the
absolute other. But there was always something of the East inside himself,
precluding any possibility of a metropolitan identity safe from colonial
invasions.53 Splitting is central, then, to thinking 'otherness', splitting
between good and bad, taking in or identifying with those aspects which
are seen as good, projecting the bad on to absolute others.
These insights have helped me to think about the nineteenth-century
men and women whose mental worlds and structures of feeling I have
tried to make sense of. In tracing some of the shifts and turns in racial
thinking over three decades, the historical specificity of the distinctions
made between such pairs of terms as good/bad, docile/hostile, industri-
ous/lazy, civilisation/barbarism, are very apparent. The 'good negro* of
the abolitionists became the 'nigger' of the mid-Victorian imagination;
 20 Introduction

the 'docile' sepoy became the terrifying mutineer, The mapping of dif-
ference, I suggest, the constant discursive work of creating, bringing into
being, or reworking these hieratic categories, was always a matter of his-
torical contingency. The map constantly shifted, the categories faltered,
as different colonial sites came into the metropolitan focus, as conflicts
of power produced new configurations in one place or another.54 Gener-
ation mattered too. Those who came to adulthood in the early 1830s
tended to share an optimism about the possibilities for reform and
change. It was a different moment for those growing up in the 1850s: a
different political culture, a more defensive relationship to the world
outside, a bleaker view of racial others. Both coloniser and colonised
were terms the meanings of which could never be fixed. Yet this did not
mean that these terms did not have political effectivity: far from it. This
mapping of difference across nation and empire had many dimensions:
subjects were constituted across multiple axes of power, from class, race,
and ethnicity, to gender and sexuality.55 The map provided the basis for
drawing lines as to who was inside and who was outside the nation or
colony, who were subjects and who were citizens, what forms of cultural
or political belonging were possible at any given time.

The making of an imperial man, Edward John Eyre, provides the pro-
logue to this book. Eyre's narrative, spanning the decades from the 1830s
to the late 1860s, linking metropole and empire, making connections
between the Antipodes and the Caribbean, offers a starting point to
a history concerned with the making of selves through the making of
others. Eyre's life in the empire spanned the chronological frame of the
book, and I have used it as a way into the shifts in racial thinking
between 1830 and 1867. The two case studies of Jamaica and Birming-
ham, both within this same chronology, then follow. The two places and
two sets of people are intimately connected and constantly cross over:
ideally the narrative would have been written as a seamless web, but this
would have been difficult to follow. The colony comes first, in part to
emphasise Jamaica's historical agency in this story.
Part 1, 'Colony and Metropole' is about the Baptist missionaries in
Jamaica. It tells the story of the formation of the Baptist Missionary
Society, the beginnings of the mission to Jamaica, and the decision of
three young men - William Knibb, Thomas Burchell and James Mursell
Phillippo - to go there in the 1820s. It documents their establishment of
the 'mission family', the hostility they met from the plantocracy, their
recognition that slavery and Christianity could not coexist, and their
engagement with the struggles for emancipation, both in Jamaica and 'at
home'. Both planters and missionaries attempted to win public support
for their cause, and a struggle over the representations of slavery ensued
 Introduction 21

in the metropole. This part of the book tells the tale of the missionary
vision of a new society, peopled with black Christian subjects, guided
and led by patriarchal pastors. But this was a dream, a dream which
fragmented as the missionaries came to realise, to a greater or lesser
extent, that they could not control the destinies of others, or indeed
of themselves. Meanwhile, in England opinion was shifting too, and
attempts by the missionaries and their supporters to maintain faith in
the 'great experiment' of emancipation was undercut by travellers such
as Anthony Trollope, who told different stories. By 1865 the mis-
sion family was divided, and the events at Morant Bay brought these
divisions into the public domain. Those missionaries who remained in
Jamaica were a less optimistic group, their Utopian visions of an empire
of new Christian subjects sadly diminished.
Part 2, 'Metropolis, Colony and Empire' focuses on Birmingham, the
'midland metropolis', and its relation to both Jamaica and the empire.
Birmingham was not an imperial city in any conventional sense, yet the
town was imbricated with empire. A stronghold of missionary and abol-
itionist activity in the 1830s, to be a 'friend of the negro' was an ener-
gising identity for both men and women. The Baptists of Birmingham,
alongside their nonconformist brothers and sisters, and with the in-
spiring leadership of the Quaker, Joseph Sturge, a great friend to the
missionaries, enthused the town with a vision of a universal family, to
be led' by the inhabitants of 'the midland metropolis'. By the 1850s,
however, thinking about race was shifting away from ideas of black men
and women as brothers and sisters, to a racial vocabulary of biological
difference. The popular lecturer and preacher George Dawson, disciple
of Thomas Carlyle, was a critical figure in harnessing the energies of
Birmingham men to a new cause, that of European nationalisms. In the
1830s emancipation and reform had been linked in the minds of the
men of 'the midland metropolis', but by the mid-1860s and the debates
in the aftermath of Morant Bay, the rights of white male citizens had
been very clearly delineated from those of black male subjects. While
both men and women could be 'friends of the negro', manly citizenship,
as it was defined in the Reform Act of 1867, was an exclusively white
male prerogative.
My title, Civilising Subjects, has a double meaning. The non-
conformist- men on whom I have focused - and there are more men
than women because of the sources available and the period on which
I have concentrated - believed that they could make themselves anew
and become new subjects. That was their most important task. An aspect
of that new self would be a more civilised self, for Christianity and
civilisation were intimately linked in their minds. But they also carried
the responsibility to civilise others, to win 'heathens' for Christ, whether
 22 Introduction

at home or abroad. The 'heathen' subjects of the empire were a partic-

ular responsibility for those in the metropole, since they had a special
relation to other British subjects. But 'heathen', 'subject' and 'civilisa-
tion' were all terms with complex meanings: each apparently named one
category while masking ambivalent understandings. Colonial subjects
were, and were not, the same as those of the metropole, 'not quite/not
white': colonial heathens were, and were not, more in need of civilisa-
tion than heathens at home. And there was no certainty that England
was civilised: even Dickens, in his moments of harshest racial thinking,
could turn the categories around, terrified of the savage within. 56 In con-
structing imagined worlds across colony and metropole, the men and
women who are the subject of this book were struggling with questions
of difference and power. As Baldwin so eloquently puts it, they were
trapped in history, and history was trapped in them. 57

A note on terminology
Since I regard the categories of 'race', 'gender', 'class' and 'civilis-
ation' as discursive categories, with no essential referents, there is an
argument for the use of inverted commas throughout. I have decided
against it, however, since the text would then be littered with them,
making it difficult to read. Nevertheless, the book should be read with
the historically located and discursively specific meanings of these terms
always in mind.
Similarly, I work for the most part with the terminology of the mid-
nineteenth century, and have decided against signalling the constructed
nature of these terms with inverted commas, since the book is about
those changing representations. Thus 'negro' is the word used by the
abolitionists and commonly adopted by those who wished to adopt a
respectful term for black people. 'Coloured' is the word used to denote
those of mixed-race parentage. 'Mother country' was in common use to
refer to the metropole. I use 'English', not 'British', in part because it
is England and the English which form the object of my study, in part
because English was constituted as a hegemonic cultural identity in this
period. Even Scots such as Thomas Carlyle thought of themselves as
English. 'British', however, was often used in relation to the empire:
a recognition that it was connected to the wider political unit of the
four nations.
 Prologue: T h e Making of an Imperial Man

In October 1865 a riot occurred outside the court house in the small
town of Morant Bay on the south-eastern coast of Jamaica. Months of
tensions between black people and white over land, labour and law
erupted after an unpopular verdict from magistrates led to a demon-
stration and attempted arrests. The police had been resisted, and an
angry c'rowd had gathered and marched on the court house. The Vol-
unteers had been called up in anticipation of trouble, and were mar-
shalled as the crowd came into the square. The local official had already
asked the British governor, Edward John Eyre, for troops, and they were
on their way by sea. Stones were thrown, sticks brandished, the Riot Act
read. The Volunteers fired, and several people in the crowd were killed.
In the subsequent violence, more killings occurred, including eighteen
officials and members of the militia, and thirty-one were wounded.
The next day Governor Eyre received a message, 'the blacks have risen'. 1
The 13,000 Europeans on the island had long feared a rising from the
350,000 black people. More troops were immediately despatched, and
martial law declared. In the month that followed, horrific reprisals took
place. Despite the absence of organised resistance, troops unddr British
command executed 439 people, flogged more than 600 men and women,
and burnt more than 1,000 homes. A mixed-race member' of the
Jamaican House of Assembly, George William Gordon, was hanged.2
The initial response of the British government was cautiously to
endorse Eyre's actions. Jamaica, conquered almost by chance by the
troops* of Oliver Cromwell in 1655, had become the jewel in the British
crown during the halcyon days of Caribbean sugar production in the
eighteenth century. By the 1780s, however, the anti-slavery movement
was challenging the permanence of the plantation economy built on
enslaved labour, and the island increasingly became the source of trouble
 24 Prologue

and strife for the colonial authorities. The abolition of the slave trade in
1807, and of slavery and apprenticeship in 1833 and 1838 respectively,
put Jamaica, as the largest of the British Caribbean islands, at the heart
of 'the great experiment' of the abolitionists - the attempt to construct
a successful free-labour economy with black labour. By mid-century this
experiment looked, from the British line of vision, less than successful,
and Jamaica increasingly appeared in the British imagination as a place
of disappointment and decay, its black population lazy, its planter class
decadent and archaic. The riot at Morant Bay, following in the wake of
the 'Indian Mutiny'/Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the Maori wars of
1861-5, was further evidence for the Colonial Office and the Liberal
government of the day of the rebellious nature of 'native' populations
and the need for strong government.
The government's initial support for Eyre soon came under attack,
however, from abolitionist and dissenting groups. Delegations were
organised to petition the Colonial Office; public meetings were held
following lurid newspaper reports of the actions of the British troops;
questions were asked in Parliament. The government was forced to estab-
lish a Royal Commission to inquire into the events in Jamaica. Mean-
while, a Jamaica Committee had been set up, chaired by Charles Buxton,
the'son of that veteran anti-slavery leader, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton,
in order to monitor the official inquiry and keep the British public
informed of the issues.3
The Royal Commission report, based on evidence collected from wit-
nesses in'Jamaica, was published in April 1866. It claimed that the initial
violence had presented a genuine danger, and that Eyre had1 been right
to react vigorously in order to prevent the spread of the disturbance.
However, the report also concluded that martial law had continued for
too long, that deaths had been unnecessarily frequent, that the floggings
had been excessive and in some instances 'barbarous', and that the
burning of so many homes was 'wanton and cruel'. 4 Faced with this
critical report, themew Tory government decided that since Eyre had
already been suspended on account of the criticisms, a resolution in the
House of Commons deploring the excessive punishments would be an
adequate response. The official leniency provoked the Jamaica Commit-
tee to consider prosecuting Eyre privately, a move which alarmed Buxton
and led to his resignation. He was replaced by that most prominent
liberal intellectual, John Stuart Mill. The threatened prosecution of Eyre
itself caused a backlash and led to a reaction in his defence, culminating
in the formation of an Eyre Defence Committee, pledged to raise money
for-any necessary legal action.5
For months the debate over the Eyre case raged in Britain. On either
side were leading intellectuals and public men. Behind John Stuart Mill
 Prologue 25

were the doyens of the liberal intelligentsia - Charles Darwin, Charles

Lyell, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, John Bright and Frederick
Harrison. They believed that martial law had been misused: British sub-
jects Had been denied their right to the rule of law.6 Jamaica was part of
the British empire, its peoples were British subjects. This was not a
problem without, it was a problem within. The behaviour of the British
governor and the British army had constituted an attack on English
notions of the freedom of the subject. The move from British to English
was crucial: the Empire was a British project, but it was the English, who
defined its codes of belonging, and Englishness which were under attack
when codes of conduct were forgotten.7
Spearheading the defence of Eyre was Thomas Carlyle, the prophetic
voice of mid-nineteenth-century England, backed by Charles Dickens,
John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Carlyle
argued that Eyre's actions had been heroic, that he had saved the white
people from massacre, and that black people were born to be mastered.8
Between the summers of 1866 and 1867 public opinion swung away
from the Jamaica Committee to the supporters of Eyre. By June 1868,
when the third, last and still unsuccessful attempt was made to pros-
ecute Eyre, it was clear that the defence of black Jamaican rights was no
longer a popular cause. Only asmall core of middle-class radicals was
left, led by a disillusioned and disheartened Mill, and relying for support
on working-class radicals. A considerable body of opinion had concluded
that Black people were, essentially, different from whites, and thus could
not expect the same rights. British subjects across the empire were not
all the same.
At stake in this debate were issues about the relations between the
mother country and her colonies, the place of martial law and the rule
of law, and the nature of black people. But also at issue were questions
about Englishness itself. The debate over Eyre marked a moment when
two different conceptions of 'us', constructed through two different
notions of 'them', were publicly contested. Mill's imagined community
was one of potential equality, in which 'us', white Anglo-Saxon men and
women, believed in the potential of black Jamaican men'and women to
become like 'us' through a process of civilisation. Carlyle's imagined
community was a hierarchically ordered one in which 'we' must always
master 'them'.
These questions about the representation of 'us' and 'them', about
colonisers and colonised, about colony and metropole, about the civilis-
ing process, about hierarchy and differentiated forms of power, are some
of the preoccupations which thread through this book. But first let us
see who Edward John Eyre was, and what light his story might shed on
the making of a coloniser. How and why did he come to occupy such a
 J3
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s
no
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 Prologue 27

significant position in relation to debates on race, nation and empire

in the mid-1860s? Eyre's story takes us from England to Australia,
New Zealand and the Caribbean. It documents the new openings for
'imperial men' from the 1830s and the complex sets of relations
across different sites of empire between explorers, colonial officials,
missionaries and those they attempted to colonise. It illustrates
how racial thinking was made and re-made across the span of colony
and metropole.

Australia

In the 1830s, respectable English middle-class men supported the

anti-slavery movement and emancipation. To be a supporter of the weak
and dependent - women, children, enslaved people and animals -
constituted a part of the 'independence' of middle-class masculinity. True
manliness was derived not from property and inheritance, but from
'real religion' - the faith born from religious conversion and a determi-
nation to make life anew.9 True manliness also encompassed a belief in
individual integrity and freedom from subjection to the will of another.
Furthermore, it encompassed the capacity to establish a home, protect
it, provide for it and control it: all these were a part of a man's good
standing. Indeed, domesticity was integral to masculinity.10 Such beliefs
were in part rooted in a refusal of aristocratic patronage, a conviction
that client relationships were demeaning and that 'a man must act'.
True manhood was defined by the capacity to work for oneself in the
world, to trust in the dignity of labour, and to make money, rather than
to live off an existing fortune. Such a definition rested on fragile foun-
dations in a society in which economic crises were frequent - when banks
collapsed and bankruptcy constantly threatened - and when, for many
men, the activities of the marketplace brought not sturdy independence
but fearful anxieties. The vulnerability of manhood was repressed in the
fictions of integrity and independence - whether in the marketplace, the
political arena or the home - but arguably it was this unspoken vulner-
ability which gave discourses of masculinity in this period their dynamic
intensity.12
In the troubled decade of the 1830s, when opportunities for
young men with only modest capital were limited, the empire beckoned
as a source of riches, opportunities and adventure. The American and
French revolutions, together with industrialisation, were changing atti-
tudes to the colonies. In economic terms the colonies already offered
much to Britain. As Peter Marshall argues, the political loss of the North
American colonies did not mean that Britain had lost its economic hold
28 Prologue

on the new USA. But British governments wanted both trade and domin-
ion. By 1818, as a result of grants and conquests, the East India
Company ruled 40 million people, had an army of 180,000 men, and
offered tremendous opportunities of employment. At the same time the
West Indies still appeared to offer considerable rewards, and the Pacific
was increasingly looking like a place of possibility. The empire was an
exciting place, and old and new empires, that of the Atlantic and that of
the East, coexisted alongside the trading ventures of the non-imperial
world. 13 Eighteenth-century mercantilists, as Bernard Semmel argues,
had hoped to fit colonial possessions, particularly those to which emi-
grants from the homelands went, into a system that would benefit both
colony and mother country, though the latter might be expected to
benefit more. The colonies would supply raw materials in exchange for
manufactured goods, and each party would have a monopoly position
in the market of the other, protected by tariffs. Mercantilist nations
expected to use violence to retain or expand their possessions, and
believed that one nation's gain was only possible from the losses of
another. Adam Smith attacked this orthodoxy, arguing that the world's
wealth was not fixed but could increase. He proposed the novel idea of
an international division of labour and a competitive marketplace within
and between nations that would determine the terms of this division.
'In such a world, formal colonies would provide no particular advan-
tages while imposing the expense of governing.' 14 Late eighteenth-
century political economists emphasised the burden of the colonies.
Issues of emigration and settlement were also being widely debated.
Vocal critics of emigration such as Cobbett were arguing that emigrant
paupers were being deprived of their British rights, while Rowland Hill
and other advocates of 'home colonies' argued that emigration was need-
less and costly when thousands of acres in Great Britain were awaiting
development. By the mid-1820s, however, such arguments were under
attack, and,the establishment of the London Emigration Committee was
one sign of the unravelling of the consensus on the colonies.15 Of
strategic importance in challenging the old consensus was a group which
called itself the Colonial Reformers, which advocated empire building as
a necessary - indeed, vital - response to the serious internal problems
faced by Britain. Systematic colonisation a n d the development of respon-
sible government in the white settler colonies were seen as essential to
the prosperity of Britain and Empire.
The chief theorist of this group was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who
had no independent income and had to find ways of making a living. In
1827 he was confined to Newgate for three years as a result of one
of his less respectable ventures: the abduction of an heiress to Gretna
Green. In prison he became fascinated by the colonies and their
 Prologue 29

potential. In his unfettered imagination, Australia became a new and

better England, a construct of desire.16 In A Letter from Sydney, he trans-
ported himself from his prison cell to Australia, a land he had never seen
and which he assumed to be empty, with no indigenous population, and
imagined himself as a farmer with a large tract of land which could not
be worked because of the dearth of labour. He addressed himself to
'young men of rank and connections' and those 'in the intermediate
ranks of life', arguing that the colonies provided 'the most certain means
of obtaining a comfortable settlement'. Industrialising Britain had more
capital than it could usefully employ: this surplus needed new fields of
investment. Australia offered a solution to over-population of England,
and Wakefield eloquently developed the case for an organised system of
emigration for both the middle and the working classes. Wakefield
rejected both slavery and the convict system, a 'system full of evil', as
solutions to the labour problem. He maintained that planned emigration
was possible if colonial lands were sold at a reasonable price and the
proceeds of the land sales, were used to pay for working-class emigra-
tion. The effect of this would be to transform 'a waste country' into a
profitable and civilised extension of Britain, with its class hierarchy
firmly in place.17
In 1833 Wakefield published England and America, which developed
the case he had made in the earlier volume, but emphasised that improv-
ing the conditions of the working classes was crucial if social revolution
was to be avoided at home. The increase of population meant that new
outlets were essential if prosperity was to be maintained: empire build-
ing provided a key. Properly planned colonisation, which meant sup-
porting the emigration of young couples so that each colony would
become 'one immense nursery', would furthermore contribute to the
ending of slavery in America, which arose because of the need for
labour.18 Family and class were both central to Wakefield's scheme.
'A new colony is a bad place for a young single man,' he argued, for 'to
be single is contrary to the nature of a new colony, where the laws of
society are labour, peace, domestic life, increase and multiply.' It was
the woman's moral influence, he believed, which would ensure both that
money was saved and that her husband's energy and prudence would
be encouraged.19
Wakefield, a brilliant publicist, was successful in making systematic
colonisation a public issue. His insistence on mixed-class emigration was
central to finally breaking the link between Australia and convicts,
making it a respectable place for the middle classes. From the arrival of
the First Fleet in 1788, New South Wales had been associated with trans-
portation. It seemed to offer a wondrous solution to fears about crime,
for the evil could be taken to another world. Botany Bay could take up
30 Prologue

what American Independence had made impossible. A population of

7,500 in 1807 had grown to 36,598 by 1828, but the 'convict stain'
became an increasing issue in the 'New World'. 20 Australia needed new,
and clean, blood. The development of pastoralism in New South Wales
and Van Dieman's Land meant that Australia became an area of grow-
ing interest to men who wanted to make their fortunes.21 It-might be an
alternative to America, a place where a man could return to the land.
Wakefield succeeded in converting both Bentham and John Stuart Mill
to his views, the latter insisting that, 'There needs to be no hesitation in
affirming that Colonization, in the present state of the world, is the best
affair of business, in which the capital of an old and wealthy country
can engage'.22 James Mill, Ricardo and other earlier political economists
had emphasised the crucial importance of free trade to the ways in which
Britain could wield informal dominion. Wakefield, as Semmel argues,
was crucial to the development of another strand of colonial thinking
amongst the political economists, one which stressed the importance of
emigration and colonisation. His scheme became the radical alternative
to the old colonial system.23
From a very different starting point Thomas Carlyle also came to be
convinced of the virtues of systematic colonisation. He saw emigration
as a solution to the problem of 'over-population' and as a way to deal
with the economic ills of the time. With characteristic hyperbole he con-
ceptualised the non-European world as a 'vacant earth', calling to be
tilled, and white European man as miraculously benevolent:

If this small western rim of Europe is overpeopled, does not everywhere

else a whole vacant Earth, as it were, call to us, Come and till me, come
and reap me! Can it be an evil that in an Earth such as ours there should
be new Men? Considered as mercantile commodities, as working
machines, is there in Birmingham or out of it a machine of such value?
'Good Heavens!, a white European Man, standing on his two legs, with
his twofive-fingeredhands at his shackle-bones, and miraculous Head on
his shoulders, is worth something considerable, one would say!'

Malthusians, he argued, those dismal scientists who felt helpless in the

face of inexorable economic laws, should stop being so gloomy and
encourage emigration, which promised such riches both for Anglo-
Saxons and for the rest of the world. It was time to revive the heroic
actions of a Clive, to send the 'iron missionaries' - the wonders of
Britain's Industrial* Revolution - into the wilder vineyards of the Lord.
The time was ripe for another major expansion, and white European
man, the powerful, phallic 'fire-pillar' would burst forth from 'swelling,
simmering, never-resting Europe' and plant his seed.
 Prologue 31

Is it not as if this swelling, simmering, never-resting Europe of ours stood,

once more, on the verge of an expansion without parallel; struggling, strug-
gling like a mighty tree again about to burst in the embrace of summer,
and shoot forth broad fondant boughs which would fill the whole earth?
A disease; but the noblest of all - of her who is in pain and sore travail,
but travails that she may be a mother, and say, Behold, there is a new Man
born!... Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-glowing,
still-expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will
enlist and, like fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of
indomitable living Valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and
war-chariot, but with the steam-engine and ploughshare.24

Both Mill and Carlyle were convinced, on very different grounds, that
colonisation could provide a key to a better world.
The proselytising of Wakefield, the support he mobilised and the
organised activities of the Colonial Reformers were to bear fruit. Radical
and Utilitarian pressure groups had plenty of experience to offer. They
knew which influential men to approach, how to organise public meet-
ings, and how to raise issues in Parliament. South Australia, a suppos-
edly 'vacant' land, became the locus of activity, and the South Australia
Association was formed to orchestrate the campaign to introduce sys-
tematic colonisation. Active amongst its supporters was the Hill family,
a family which took the business of reform, in its widest definition, most
seriously. The energetic sons of the educational innovator Thomas
Wright Hill had been devoting themselves to liberal and reforming causes
from their adolescence. Matthew Davenport and Rowland were both
founding members of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
when it was established in 1826. In 1832 Matthew stood successfully
for Parliament (arguing for women's suffrage on his platform), repre-
senting Hull. In the House of Commons he spoke on municipal reform,
discrimination against Jews, anti-slavery and systematic colonisation.
While his brother Rowland, by now a thorough convert to colonisation
beyond the homeland, acted as secretary of the South Australia Associ-
ation, Matthew Davenport took on responsibility for raising the issue
in Parliament. Their sister Caroline, who had married into the Clark
family, old family friends, was amongst the early white settlers in South
Australia. Their house in Adelaide was named after the famous family
school, Hazelwood. 25
The efforts of the Hill brothers and their friends bore fruit. By 1834
long negotiations with the Colonial Office resulted in an Act of Parlia-
ment which opened South Australia to British colonisation with a system
of land sales and free passages, as Wakefield had proposed. South
Australia, a land conceived of as empty, its Aboriginal population for-
gotten, was to be a land for free men, enjoying civil liberties, social and
Exploring the Variety of Random
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Title: Cecilia of the Pink Roses

Author: Katharine Haviland-Taylor

Illustrator: May Wilson Preston

Release date: August 14, 2019 [eBook #60099]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CECILIA OF THE

PINK ROSES ***
"MILK, AN' SUGAR IF YOU HAVE IT"
 CECILIA
OF THE PINK ROSES

BY
KATHARINE HAVILAND TAYLOR

ILLUSTRATED BY
MAY WILSON PRESTON

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY DEAR MOTHER
SOURCE OF MY INNER PINK ROSES

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I Where Is Gawd?
II The Vision of a Promised Land
III The First Step into Canaan
IV Learning
V Disgrace
VI A Hint of Pink
VII Santa Claus
VIII A Little Touch of the Man with the Hour Glass
IX Home
X My Best Friend
XI Acceptance
XII Pain
XIII A Request
XIV Pink
XV Firelight
XVI The Mystery
XVII A Relapse
XVIII Forgiveness
XIX Spring
XX Pulling Off the Thorns
XXI Pink Roses

CECILIA OF THE
PINK ROSES

CHAPTER I

WHERE IS GAWD?

The Madden flat was hot and the smell of frying potatoes filled it. Two
or three flies buzzed tirelessly here and there, now and again landing with
sticky clingingness on a small boy of four who screamed with their advent.
When this happened a girl of seven stepped from the stove and shooed them
away, saying: "Aw now, Johnny!" and Johnny would quiet.

The perspiration stood out on her upper lip and there were shadows,
deeper than even Irish ones should be, beneath her eyes. The sun beat in
cruelly at one window which was minus a shade. At another the shade was
torn and run up crookedly.

In the hall there was the sound of a scuffle, then a smart slap, and a
child's whimpering wail.

"What's—that?" came in a feeble voice from the bedroom off the

kitchen.
 "It's the new gent in the flat across whackin' his kid," answered the small
girl.

"Oh," was the weak answer, and again there was quiet, broken by the
sizzle of hot fat, the tireless buzz of the flies, and now and then the little
boy's cry.

"Here, Johnny," commanded the small maiden, "come have your face
washed off." Johnny objected. She picked him up with decision, and set him
on the table with resounding emphasis, where he screamed loudly during
the rite.

The door opened. A man in overalls came in. "Hello, Paw," said Cecilia
Evangeline Agnes Madden. He answered her with a grunt and kicked off his
heavy shoes.

"Gawd, it's hot!" he said with his first contribution to the conversation.
"Two Dagos got sunstruck. One of 'em he just went like a goldfish outa
water, keeled over, then flop,—flop. The Boss he up an'—"

"Supper, Paw," said Cecilia. She pushed a chair up to the oil-clothed

table, and the man settled, beginning to eat loudly. He stopped and pointed
with his knife to the bedroom door. "How's she?" he asked in a grating
whisper.

"She ain't so good," answered the small girl. Her eyes filled with tears
and she turned away her face.

"Maw—Maw—Maw!" cried Johnny.

"Aw now!" said his sister while she picked up his hot little person to
comfort him.

"Maw—Maw!" he echoed.

Cecilia looked up. Her eyes were like those of a small dog that has been
whipped. "I ain't the same," she said across his brick-dust curls. "He wants
her, I ain't the same. I do my best, but I ain't her."
 The man laid aside his knife. He set his teeth on his lower lip, and then
he asked a question as if afraid to.

"Has the doctor been here?"

"Yes," answered Cecilia.

"Whatud he say?"

"He sez she wasn't so good. He sez she wouldn't be no better 'til the
weather was cooler an'—"

"Celie!" came in the voice from the bedroom. Cecilia put down Johnny.

"Yes, Maw," she answered gently.

"Celie!" came again in almost a scream. Celie vanished. She reappeared

in a few moments. She was whiter than before.

"She throwed up fierce," she said to her father; "something fierce, an' all
black. Don't you want no coffee?" The man shook his head. He reached for
his shoes.

"Where yuh goin'?" asked Cecilia.

"Doctor's," she was answered. He went into the bedroom. "Well, old
woman," he said loudly, "how yuh feelin', better?" The thin creature on the
bed nodded, and tried to smile. The smile was rather dreadful, for it pulled
long lines instead of bringing dimples. Her blue lips stretched and the lower
cracked. A drop of blood stood out on it.

"Gawd, it was hot to-day," said the man. He settled by her bed in a
broken-backed chair. She stretched out a thin hand toward him.

"Mary—!" he said, then choked.

"Aw, Jerry!" said the woman. In her voice was little Cecilia's tone of
patience, with the lilt removed by a too hard life.
 "Do yuh feel some better?" he entreated.

"Sure—I do. Gimme that glass of water—" She drank a mouthful and
again vomited rackingly.

"Oh, Gawd!" said Jeremiah Madden. He laid a rough hand on her

forehead and she pulled it down against her cheek.

"Jerry," she said between long gasps, "I been happy. I want you should
always remember that I been happy. Awful happy, Jerry."

"Oh, Gawd, Mary!" said the man. "If I'd a knew how hard you'd a had to
work, I wouldn't have brung yuh!"

"Don't!" she begged. "Don't say that!" She looked at him, time faded,
and with it a hot and smelling flat. She stood on a wind-swept moor. Jerry,
only eighteen, stood by her. His arm was around her with that reverent
touch that comes in Irish love. "I'll send fer yuh," he'd said, "after I make
me fortune in America."

She had cried and clung to him. With her touch, reason and a rolling
moor had faded for him. "I can't leave you," he had said, "I can't! Mary, you
come with me." And Mary had come. Those days had been beautiful.... But
fortunes in America did not come as advertised. Sometimes Mary thought
of green turf, and the gentle drip-drip of fog, like rain. That rain that came
so often.... Now she thought of it more than ever. She hoped that the Virgin
would allow her a little corner of Heaven that would look like an Irish
moor.... The gold the priest talked of was "grand," but heresy or not, she
wanted a bit of green, with the gentle drip of rain on it.

Jeremiah bent and kissed her. Then he rubbed the spot of blood of her lip
from his. "It wasn't no mistake," he said. Her eyes grew moist.

"Jerry," she said, "Celie is a good kid. She kin do fer yuh. Ain't she, right
along? She won't give yuh no trouble neither. But the kid—he ain't so easy.
It's the kids growin' up in America better'n their folks, that go to the devil.
Watch him, Jerry, watch him good. Won't yuh now?" The man nodded; she
closed her eyes. After a few moments that throbbed with the heat of the flat,
she spoke again.

"Jerry," she said.

"Darlin'?"

"It's this way, Jerry. I always wanted to be a lady—"

"Yuh are!" he interrupted hotly.

 "NOW LAUGH! PAW'S COMING HOME AND
HE NEEDS ALL OUR LAUGHS"

"No," she stated quietly, "I ain't, an' I always thought I could be. The
Irish learns fast. It's this way, Jerry; if ever the time comes when you get
money, you send Celie to one of them schools that learns 'em French and
drawin' and such, Jerry, will yuh?"

"Before Gawd, I will, Mary. If I ever kin."

She closed her eyes and slept quietly, clinging to his hand.

The next day was Sunday so Jeremiah went to Mass and heard it with
especial intention. If his thoughts were more on the gentle Saint slowly
dying in a hot flat than on the Gentle Mother, who can blame him.

Jeremiah went from the baroqued church vastly comforted, and painfully
aware of his Sunday collar, which had rough edges. Cecilia had rubbed soap
on it, but it still scratched. Outside Jeremiah went, not in the direction of his
home, but in the other. He passed a beggar's entreating wail, and then
retraced his steps to bestow a penny,—and even pennies were not easily
spared. Jerry was still a little child at heart. He was courting divine favour.
He needed God and all the Saints on his side.

After a brisk walk of many blocks he turned into a house with a doctor's
sign on it. The office was crowded; he sat, outwardly submissive, to wait
his turn. "Blessed Mother," he prayed, "make him mak'er well. Mother of
the Saviour—" his thoughts were a chaos. "A gold heart!" he promised
rashly, even while he remembered the unpaid grocer's bill. A woman with a
pallid skin and hacking cough crept from the office. Across from him a boy
exhibited a burn to an interested neighbour. "Blessed Mother,—" entreated
Jeremiah, even while his eyes saw the burn and he wondered how it had
happened.

A crisp young person in white, who gave an impression of great

coolness, said, "Your turn next." Jerry jumped and got up. Two little girls, at
the Sheraton period in legs, giggled loudly at his jump, but Jerry didn't
notice. He stopped on the threshold of the inner office. He twirled his hat in
his hands. "Mister," he said, "it's my wife I come about." The doctor had
been up all night. Added to his fact was the fact that he was fitted,
emotionally, to run a morgue.
 "Name?" growled the doctor. Jeremiah Madden sank to a chair and told
his name, of his wife, and how sick she was. He also interspersed a few
facts about Irish moors, love and business in America. And he ended with:
"An my doc he sez' no one can save her but Doctor Van Dorn. He's the
cancer man of New York. The only one who can possibly save her! He sez
that," repeated Jeremiah. "Oh fer Gawd's sake, Doc! I can't pay yuh now but
—"

The doctor swung about in his swivel chair. "My time is entirely
mortgaged," he stated curtly. "I can't keep up to my work. Your wife will
probably die anyway; accept the inevitable. You couldn't pay me, and I
haven't the time. All New York bothers me. Good morning."

He turned back to his desk. Jeremiah went toward the door. His step was
a blind shuffle. Hand on the knob, he paused. "Doc," he said, "I love her so,
an' the little kids, they need her. I feel like she'd live if you'd help her. I
promise I'd pay. All my life I'd pay an' thank Gawd I could—" he stopped.
The doctor moved his shoulders impatiently.

"The Virgin will reward yuh—" said Jeremiah. "Oh, Doc! Fer Gawd's
sake!"

"Good morning," answered the doctor with another impatient move of

his shoulders. Jeremiah left. A young person in crisp white said, "Your turn
next, Madam." Madam went in. "Oh, Doctor, my heart—" she began. The
doctor got up to move her chair so that the light would not trouble her.

Jeremiah spent the morning in going from office to office. First he told
the unfavourable report of his doctor. He met sympathy in some quarters,
curt refusals in others, and worst of all he sometimes met: "Cancer of the
stomach? Not much chance—"

At half after one, sick from the sunlight of the cruelly hot streets, he
turned into an office for his last try. He felt numb.... His tongue was thick.
He looked with resentment on a well-dressed woman who waited opposite
him. "Flowers on her bunnit," he thought, "while my Mary—" He thought
of his hard labour and, with bitterness, of the "Boss." He had never felt this
way before. If he'd had money, he reflected, how quickly that first doctor
would have helped him.... The other refusals had come from truer reasons.
His own doctor's report, although Jeremiah didn't realise this, had stopped
all efforts. If the doctor had said no one but Van Dorn could help her, Lord,
what chance had they? This was their line of reason.

Jeremiah sat in the outer waiting room. At last his turn came. The doctor
looked tired; he was gruff in his questions. "I'll come with you and look at
her," he said at last. Jeremiah felt a sob rise in his throat. The doctor rang a
bell.

"Tell Miss Evelyn," he said to the maid who answered him, "that we'll
have to give up our drive this afternoon. She's my little girl," he explained
to Jeremiah. "Her mother's dead,—I don't see as much of her as I should. A
doctor has no business with a family. I'm ready. Come on."

They went out by a back door, leaving an office full of patients. The sun
was hot. Jeremiah prayed fervently even while he answered the doctor's
questions and responded to his pleasantries. At last they came to the
building which held Jeremiah's home. They mounted the long stairs. Two or
three children, playing on them, stopped their squabbling and looked after
the doctor with awe.

"He's got a baby in that case," said one, a fat little girl with aggressive
pig-tails.

"There is too many now," said a boy. "They don't all get fed, and they're
all beat up fierce. Our teacher in that there corner mission sez as how Gawd
is love. Why don't he come down here an' love?"

There was an awed silence after this. Outright heresy as it was, the
immediate descent of a thunderbolt was expected.

Upstairs Jeremiah opened the door of the flat. The kitchen was full of
women. Several of them sobbed loudly.... Johnny Madden sat on the table,
eating a piece of bread thickly spread with molasses. On seeing Jeremiah
the women were suddenly silent. Jeremiah swayed and leaned against the
door.

The small Cecilia heard him and came from the bedroom.

"Paw," she said, "I'll do all I kin fer yuh. I always will.... She was happy.
She sez as how she seen green fields an' rain." Jeremiah took her in his
arms. He hid his face against her thin little shoulder. His shook. Cecilia was
very quiet. She had not cried. She looked over her father's head at the
roomful of gaping women. Something flashed across her face. Her teeth set.

"She always wanted a bunnit with pink roses on it," said Cecilia. "I don't
see why Gawd didn't give her jest one."

The man sobbed convulsively and Cecilia remembered him. "She was
happy," Cecilia said in a less assured tone. "She sez as how she seen green
fields with rain on 'em like Ireland."

CHAPTER II

THE VISION OF A PROMISED LAND

As Mrs. Madden had said, "The kids that grow up better than their folks
go to the devil." Cecilia felt this at eleven, for she was all of Johnny's
mother, and the role was a difficult one. She had learned to spat him and
kiss him judiciously, and at the proper times. She had learned to understand
his marble games and to coax him into attendance at Catechism.

Cecilia had begun to understand a great many things at eleven that some
of us never understand. One thing made learning easy for her,—she loved
so greatly that she was often submerged into the loved, and so saw their
viewpoint.
 "Paw," said Cecilia. She had turned about on the piano stool, and
Jeremiah looked up from his paper. "Well?" he questioned.

"I been thinking," she said, "that it would be genteel to ask the priest to
supper. It ain't as though we hadn't a hired girl to do fer us, an' it would be
polite."

"That's so, that's so," said Jeremiah. He laid aside his paper. "You're like
your maw," he added. Cecilia knew he was pleased. She smiled happily.

"An' have ice-cream?" suggested the interested Jeremiah.

"Yes," said Cecilia, "an' chicken, an' fried potatoes, an' waffles, an' of
course pie, an' biscuits, an' suchlike. I'd like to entertain Father McGowan,
he's been good to us."

"Yes," answered Jeremiah. They were both silent. The vision of an

overcrowded and smelling flat had come to sober them. Also the memory
that always went with it.... "Play me 'The Shepherd Boy,'" said Jeremiah.
He closed his eyes while Cecilia banged it out in very uneven tempo, owing
to difficulties in the bass.

Johnny came in. He sat down on a lounge covered with a green and red
striped cloth. He looked at Jeremiah with a supercilious expression.

"The other fellahs' fathers wears their shoes in the house," he stated
coldly. "The Shepherd Boy" stopped suddenly. Cecilia went toward the
"parlor." "Johnny!" she called on reaching it. Johnny followed meekly. The
parlor was the torture chamber. When he went in Cecilia put her hands on
his shoulders.

"Johnny," she said in her gentle little way. "Um?" he answered,

wriggling beneath her hands.

"Johnny," she repeated, "it ain't polite to call down your paw."

"But Celie," objected John, "he ain't like the other fellahs' fathers. They
wears collars an' shoes, all the time."
 "I know, dear," said Cecilia. "I know, but it ain't polite to call down your
paw, an' nothing can make it so."

"Aw right," answered John sullenly. Cecilia leaned over and kissed him.
John didn't mind, "none of the fellahs being around." He went back to the
living room. Jeremiah had put on his shoes. He looked at Johnny, awaiting
his approval.

"An' Norah," said Cecilia, excited to the point of hysteria, "you see that I
get the plate with the crack in it, an' the glass with the piece outa it."

"Sure, I will," answered Norah. "Now go 'long."

Cecilia went to the dining room. They were going to eat there, because
they were going to have company. Norah was not going to sit down with
them either. It was to be most formal and "elegant."

And now for the decorations. Cecilia put on two candlesticks, each at a
corner of the table. They did not match, but why be particular? Then she
took a bunch of peonies, and, removing all foliage, jammed them tightly in
a vase that had the shape of a petrified fibroid growth, and had accumulated
gilt, and a seascape for decoration.

"It looks bare," said Cecilia. She went to her room and brought out a new
hair-ribbon, worn only twice. She unearthed this from below a hat trimmed
with pink roses. The hat was gorgeous and beautiful, but she could not wear
it.... Looking on "bunnits with pink roses on 'em" always made her a little
sick. The hair-ribbon was tied around the vase in a huge bow. Cecilia stood
off to admire.

"Norah!" she called.

Norah appeared. "Ain't that grand?" she commented. "Now ain't it?"

"Well," answered Cecilia, "I don't care if I do say it, I think it's pretty
swell! Norah, you use the blue glass butter dish, won't you?"
 "Sure," answered Norah, and then with mutters of waffle batter, she
disappeared. Cecilia stood a moment longer looking at the table in all its
beauty. The plates were upside down. Napkins (that all matched) stood
upright in tumblers. The knives and forks were crossed in what was to
Cecilia the most artistic angle.

"It's grand!" she said with a little catch in her breath. "Just swell!" Then
with a backward glance, she vanished. "I hope paw'll like it," she muttered
as she went upstairs.

Father McGowan was a charming guest. He looked at the decorations

and then on the small Cecilia with softened eyes: "Now I'll bet you fixed
this beautiful table!" he said. Cecilia nodded, speechless. She drew a long,
shaky breath. Life was so beautiful.... Father McGowan put his hand on her
curls. (She sat next to him at the table.) His touch was very gentle.

"Good little woman?" inquired the priest of Jeremiah.

"She's maw and all to all of us," answered Jeremiah. There was a silence
while they ate.

"This chicken," said Father McGowan, "is fine!"

"It's too brown, I'm afraid," answered Cecilia with the deprecatory
attitude proper while speaking of one's own food. Her father looked at her
with pride. The priest's eyes twinkled.

"Paw," said Cecilia, leaning across the table and putting her hand on her
father's, "tell Father McGowan how yuh hit the boss on the ear with the
brick." Jeremiah sat back in his chair, first laying his knife and fork with the
eating ends on the plate and the others on the cloth. He drew a long breath
and told a long tale, at which the priest laughed heartily. He ended it thus:
"An' I sez, 'I ain't deependent on no man. Yuh can do yer own brick layin'
an' here's one to start with!'" With that Jerry had hit him on the ear. It was a
dramatic tale, and one which made Cecilia swell with pride over a
wonderful paw!
 The priest leaned across the table. "Have you a patent protection on
those bricks?" he asked.

"Why, no," answered Jeremiah. The priest talked long and fast. Cecilia
could not understand all of what he said, but he mentioned unusual qualities
of Jeremiah's product. His own knowledge of such things came through a
brother in the same business. The necessity of a little risk and a big push.
He talked loudly, and excitedly. He mentioned Cecilia and John as the
incentive to gain.... He spoke of what he knew to be true of Jeremiah's
product. Jeremiah sat very silent. If what the priest said were true! They
went to the living room, where, over a pitcher of beer, there was more talk,
incomprehensible to Cecilia.

Then the priest smiled, and said: "All right, Jerry. In five years you'll be
a millionaire. Now, Cecilia, I want to hear a piece." Cecilia sat down to play
"The Shepherd Boy." Her fingers trembled so that it wasn't as good as
usual, but the priest was pleased. Then she left, and wiped the rest of the
dishes for Norah. Norah said that the priest was a "swell talker" and that she
hadn't minded the extra work.

Cecilia went up to bed very happy. She slipped out of her pink silk dress
and hung it in the closet. As she reached up, a hat, all over bobbing roses,
slid from the closet shelf to the floor. Cecilia's smile faded. She put it back,
and shut the door.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST STEP INTO CANAAN

Cecilia stood in her bedroom in the new house. The paper in her
bedroom was pink and hung in panels. At the top of each panel was a hip-
diseased, and goitered cupid, who threw roses around,—roses that looked
like frozen cabbages, and stuck in the air as if they'd been glued there.
Father Madden had picked out the paper as a surprise for Celie. When she
had seen it she had gasped and then kissed him very hard. He had said,
"There, Celie, I knew you'd like it."

After he had gone Cecilia had looked around and said, "Oh, dear—Oh,
dear!" Roses always had made her sick, and even to Cecilia, the paper was
"pretty bad." And Cecilia had kissed him hard and said she loved it.

Some one tapped on the door.

"Come," said Cecilia.

"Father McGowan's down," said Norah with a point of her finger over
her left shoulder. "An' the man's down with doughnuts, too." Cecilia
laughed. Norah's mode of announcement always made people sound
diseased. Cecilia had a mental picture of a man in the throes of doughnuts
—with them breaking out all over his person.

"You can take a dozen and a half," said Cecilia, referring to the
doughnut-man, "because Johnny likes them so."

Norah didn't move, but stood in the doorway surveying the tumbled
room. A trunk stood in the centre, lid thrown back. From it exuded frills and
tails. The bed was piled high with more frilly garb. Norah sniffed loudly.
Suddenly, there were sobs and then she dissolved into many tears. "I dunno
how we can do without yuh!" she explained in gulps. "Me, and Johnny and
your paw. Aw, Celie!" Cecilia put her arms around the troubled Norah. She
looked very near tears herself.

"I would rather stay with you, but maw wanted me learned to be a lady,"
she said. Her chin set. "I gotta do it," she added. "Paw promised her." Norah
sniffed and took the apron from her face. "I know yuh gotta, dearie," she
answered. Celie put her arms around the damp Norah. "Norah," she said,
"you will be very good to Johnny and paw? When Johnny wants paw to
wear collars all the time, you take him out and give him doughnuts to divert
him, will yuh?" Norah nodded. She was sniffing again.
 "And, Norah," went on Celie, "don't let the new cook use the blue glass
butter dish everyday."

"N-no, dearie," answered Norah. She still stood irresolute by the door.
"Celie," she said, "when they learn yuh to be a lady, don't let 'em learn yuh
not to love us."

"I'll always love you all," answered Cecilia. Her eyes filled with tears,
and she kissed Norah.

Downstairs Father McGowan sat looking at a gilt cabinet decorated with

forget-me-nots, and a variety of chrysanthemums never seen on sea or land.
On the top shelf of the cabinet was a brick, lying on a red velvet bed. Father
McGowan smiled and then sobered. He remembered a night three years
past when he had pointed out possibilities to Jeremiah Madden, possibilities
in the manufacture of the humble brick. The possibilities had amounted to
more than even he had anticipated. Sometimes he questioned what he had
done.... His hope lay in Cecilia. The boy, he was afraid, would not be
helped by money. Perhaps he'd turn out well. Father McGowan hoped so.
He'd bet on Cecilia anyway. She'd use money in the right way in a few more
years.

There was a rustle at the door. Cecilia, in a new gown bought to wear at
the "swell school," came in.

"Father McGowan, dear!" she said.

"Cecilia Madden, dear!" he answered. They both laughed, and then

settled.

"Have you come to tell me to be a good girl at the swell school?" she
questioned. The father was silent. He was looking at Cecilia's dress. The
dress was of purple silk with a green velvet vest. There were ribbons looped
carelessly on its gorgeousness too.
 "Little Celie," said Father McGowan, "I want to tell you things and I
can't. Now if you had a mother! Sometimes women do come in handy."

Cecilia nodded.

"I want to tell you," said Father McGowan, looking hard at the brick,
"not to be hurt if at first the girls are stand-offish like. That's their way."

"Oh, no," said Cecilia. "I won't be, but I think they'll be nice. Mrs. De
Pui says they're all of the best families with wonderful home advantages."

"Hum—" grunted Father McGowan. He did not seem much impressed.

He still gave the brick his undivided attention. "And," he went on, "if you
should get lonely, remember that there's one Lady you can always tell your
troubles to. She won't laugh, and she always listens."

"Oh, yes!" said Cecilia, and she crossed herself.

Father McGowan drew a long breath. "Now," he said, "remember that if

your clothes are different from theirs that your father has plenty of money
to buy new ones for you. Remember that. A penance is all right, but not at
fourteen."

"Why, my clothes are beautiful!" said Cecilia. She looked bewildered.

"They're all silk and lace and velvet, and I haven't a low heeled pair of
shoes. French heels, Father McGowan, dear!"

"Cecilia Madden, dear," said Father McGowan. His look was

inscrutable. He laid a hand on her hair. His touch was very gentle. "Most of
all," he said, "remember never to be ashamed of your people, and always to
love them. Love those who love you. Reason the truth out in your heart, and
don't accept the standards of little Miss Millionairess, because she is that.
Understand?"

"Yes," replied Cecilia, "I understand, but Father McGowan, I would

always love paw. Wearing shoes and collars in the house is just the
trimmings," she stated bravely. "His heart is genteel."
 "Saint Cecilia!" said Father McGowan in a low voice, and then he
muttered a few words in Latin. Cecilia did not understand them, but she
bowed her head and crossed herself, and felt strong.

After Father McGowan left she stood in front of a mirror admiring a

purple silk dress with green velvet trimmings. "Holy Mary," she said with
quickly closed eyes, "help me not to be too stuck on my clothes!" When she
opened her eyes she looked into the mirror. "Oh, it's grand!" she whispered.
"I am almost pretty in it!" She drew a long, shaking breath.

The room in which Cecilia waited, while not at all like her home,
impressed her. Most of the furniture looked old, and some of it showed a
cracking veneer. The clock especially needed repair. It was a grandfather
one, and had inlaid figures of white wood on the dark. Cecilia wondered
vaguely if it couldn't be repaired and shone up? Dilapidated as she thought
the furnishing, yet it left an impress. Two girls entered the room, they
looked at Cecilia and tried not to smile. Cecilia wondered uncomfortably if
her hat were on crooked, or whether her red silk petticoat hung out.

They selected books from a low case with leisure, then left. Outside the
door Cecilia heard them giggle. One of them said, "Some one's cook."

"Every one has trouble with cooks," thought Cecilia. Then she looked
down and forgot cooks. Her shoes were so beautiful! Pointed toes and high
of heels. And her suit now, all over braid and buttons, with a touch of red
here and there!

Even those giggling girls must have been impressed. Their clothes had
been so plain. Cecilia pitied them. She decided to give them a "tasty" hair-
ribbon now and then.... The waiting was so long. She wished Mrs. De Pui
would come. She thought of paw and Johnny and her eyes filled with hot
tears.

"Oh," she thought miserably, "if Johnny just won't reform paw! People
are so happy when they aren't reforming or being reformed!"
 Again she saw the station at which she'd started for Boston, her father
and Johnny both sniffing. She was so glad she hadn't cried. She had so
wanted to! Her breath caught in her throat. "Please, Gawd," she made
mental appeal, "make them learn me to be a lady quick!"

Weren't they ever coming?

The shabby clock tick-tick-ticked. The sun lowered and made more
slanting rays on the floor. A maid, very smart in uniform, came in. She gave
Cecilia a guilty look, then said: "This way. Mrs. De Pui will see you
upstairs."

"Yes, ma'am," answered Cecilia. She followed humbly. The maid

decided that her forgetfulness hadn't made much difference. She didn't think
that that would report her.... Cecilia went upstairs after the slender black
figure. Her heart beat sickeningly. There were voices from the door at
which the maid paused. Cecilia saw some girls sitting around a table at
which a white-haired woman was pouring tea.

"Oh," said Cecilia impulsively, "I'm interrupting yuh at yer supper."

"No," answered Mrs. De Pui, faintly smiling; "come in. You are
Cecilia?"

Cecilia nodded. Somehow the sobs that had been kept in all day, were, at
the first kind voice, very near the surface. The girls smiled at each other.
Cecilia wondered about her hat, or perhaps her petticoat hung out below her
skirt? Mrs. De Pui motioned her to a chair.

"Annette," she said, "give our new friend some tea."

"How do you take your tea?" questioned Annette crisply.

"Milk," answered Cecilia, "an' sugar if yuh have it." She reddened. Of
course they would have it. She wished she hadn't said that! She stared in
acute embarrassment at her feet. Some one gave her a cup of tea, some one
else a sandwich. She dipped it in the tea, then she remembered that that was
not proper and reddened again. At that move the young person called
Annette had suddenly choked and held her handkerchief over her mouth.
The other girls looked into their cups, with the corners of their lips
twitching.

A fat and dumpy-looking girl seated a little out of the group looked at
Cecilia with sympathy. Mrs. De Pui spoke of a recent exhibition of water
colours, with her well-bred tones trickling over the inanities she uttered, and
making them sound like a reflection of thought.... Even the sun looked cold
to Cecilia.

"I wish I was back in the flat," she thought, and then: "I wonder if I can
bear it!"

CHAPTER IV

LEARNING

A month had passed. Cecilia quite understood what Father McGowan

had meant about clothes. Cecilia wore no more French heels. She had taken
down her hair and discarded her beautiful rhinestone hair-pins. Father
McGowan too, it seemed, had been responsible for her admittance to the
school. Cecilia had found out from Mrs. De Pui that he had written a book!
This astounding fact had been divulged after Mrs. De Pui, more than
usually tried by Cecilia, had said: "Your entrance here has been rather
difficult for me. You see, of course, that the other girls' advantages have not
been yours?"

"Oh, yes, Mrs. De Pui," answered Cecilia, and swallowed hard.

"Realising that, my dear," continued Mrs. De Pui, "I hope that you will
do your utmost to develop a womanly sympathy, and broaden your
character."
 Cecilia said somewhat breathlessly that she would try to, very, very
hard! "And," went on Mrs. De Pui, then coughed, "desist from the use of
such words as 'elegant,'—'refined' (which, when used at all, is refined, not
'reefined'), and 'grand.' Such words, my dear Cecilia, are not used in——"
(Mrs. De Pui nearly said polite society, but swallowed it with a horrified
gulp) "are not used by persons of cultivation," she finished weakly.

Cecilia vanished. She went to her lonely room. (There were no room-
mates.) She settled on the bed. By the bed, on a chair, was a pink silk dress.
It had been her star play, and after a month of boarding school she was
going to give it to the maid. The maid was so friendly!

There were two letters on the small dressing table. Cecilia got them and
read:

"Celie girl, we miss you. It ain't like it was in the house. I hope they are
learning you good and the board is good. I hope they treat you good. Father
McGowan was here last night. He sez he will go to see you soon. Johnny is
well. Norah sez your cat is lonely too. Your father with love,

"J. MADDEN."

The other was a line from John. A petulant line, full of querulous
complaint of a collarless father, redeemed to Cecilia by a word or two at the
end.

"You were so good to me, Celie. I know it now." She threw herself down
on the bed. Her shoulders shook miserably. Tears wet a once loved pink silk
dress, "all over beads and lace."

Upstairs in another room, a group of girls were laughing uncontrollably.

"You know she actually invited Annie to sit down!" said one. (Annie was
the slender maid.)
 "That is not reefined," answered Annette. There was more wild laughter.

"Do ask her up to-night," suggested a tawny haired maiden with cat-
green eyes. "Do! It would be simply screamingly funny!"

Annette, although one of the most unkind, objected. "It doesn't seem
quite nice," she said. However, as the idea promised fun, the majority ruled.

Cecilia answered the tap on her door. "Come up to your room to-night?"
she echoed after the invitation. "Oh, Miss Annette, I'd be that glad to
come!" she smiled, and her smile was like sunshine after rain.

"I do thank you!" she said. "I do!"

Annette turned away. Cecilia closed the door, then she covered her eyes.
"Gawd, thank you ever so much!" she whispered, "thank you! I have been
so lonely! Make them love me. Please make them love me, Gawd." Then
she lifted her head. Her face shone. "I wonder what I shall wear?" she said.

To meet the ideal of one's dreams while carrying a sick cat is

humiliating. And that is what happened to Cecilia Evangeline Agnes
Madden. Her shadowy dream-knight had materialised into human shape
through a photograph. And she met him while chaperoning a sick cat.

Two weeks before she had gone to a party in Annette Twombly's room.
She'd not enjoyed the party very much, in fact she'd been rather unhappy
until she saw the photograph. After that she didn't care what happened. All
the romance of the Celt had leaped.... Her shadowy dreams took form. The
ideal lover developed a body.

"Oh, your heavenly cousin, Annette!" said the green-eyed. "I adore his
hair!" She stood before a large photograph, framed elaborately.

"He is a sweet boy," Annette had responded, "but so particular! I never

knew any one quite so fastidious. It is fearfully hard to please him!"

"Does he get crushes?" asked the green-eyed.