Immortal Memory
In an old country in which each successive generation makes its home amongst the ruins and legacies left by the accumulated centuries, History is inescapable. It surrounds us, frames our understanding of ourselves and lends meaning to the places in which we live out our lives. Memorialisation, therefore, is not a minor issue and we should not be surprised that it is so often a controversial one, particularly as it offers a particularly easy route by which public understanding of the past can be doctored, reputations laundered and History adulterated with pseudo-historical narratives, narratives that, if left unchallenged for long enough, become part of the Historical inheritance in their own right.
It was with all of these things in mind that I read Stephen Bush’s recent article on
East London street names. It is an excellent little piece and covers these issues very well. Reading his observation that there was a degree of anti-slavery agitation from Quakers in the early 18th century, I was suddenly struck by this thought: that there is something to be written on the connection between the Anti-Slavery movement in Britain and the information revolution of the late 18th century, with the birth of mass literacy, sweeping improvements in the printing industries and the resulting boom in the written word in all its forms, from the novel and standard reference works, to strange semi-pornographic anti-Monarchy propaganda in Revolutionary France.
Or, to put things another way, that public tolerance of the abominable trade had hitherto rested to a considerable extent on public ignorance of it, and that the more a broad public became aware of exactly what was going on, the stronger and fiercer public opposition to it became. Where once angry Nonconformists denounced the evils of West Indian slavery to other angry Nonconformists, they now found that they could reach wider audiences and were even able to form a powerful ecumenical alliance with certain Anglicans over the issue, an extraordinary thing to happen give the fierce and often violent sectarianism of the period. This was a virtuous circle in all senses and its foundation was perhaps the most brilliantly effective propaganda campaign in British history. Polemics were penned and published, testimony was collected, edited into a readable form and received widespread circulation, and powerful images were engraved and distributed. It is a testament to the brilliance of this campaign that its products are still capable of producing an emotional response today: William Blake’s engravings of brutality and murder on the plantations of the West Indies remain truly and viscerally shocking, while the famous emblem of the movement – the kneeling slave demanding his humanity be recognised distributed by Josiah Wedgwood and possibly drawn by Thomas Bewick – moves us with its Classical dignity.
Against this growing tide of public revulsion – one that soon started to register its impact in scattered but important political and legal victories – the West India Lobby, without doubt one of the most genuinely formidable conspiracies to have actually existed, began to change tack. Overt defence of the slave trade and of the plantations was largely abandoned to crank backbenchers,
1 and opposition to abolitionism was instead increasingly couched in the dishonest language of
practicalities. Indeed, by the early 19th century, the most intelligent members of the West India Lobby even began to pretend to be abolitionists, so untenable did they deem the open advocacy of their true position to be.
It is thus interesting to observe that nearly all of the (now and rightly) infamous slavers widely memorialised in particular places (Sir John Cass in the East End of London, Edward Colston in Bristol, etc.), were active in the earlier phases of the slave trade, their names being more associated with the financial legacies they left behind and with the administration of these by others than by their own activities, the exact details of which were often forgotten until exposed by archival research in the 20th century.
2 Indeed, the relatively few memorialised figures associated with British slave plantations in their later stages were generally notable for other reasons, with their ties to slavery typically being obliterated in the public consciousness by the very act of memorialisation: the case of Thomas Picton being particularly egregious. This wall of pseudo-history has now collapsed and there can be no rebuilding of it: public awareness is now too high, and with it public disquiet and disgust. What, in any case, would be the point? To pretend that men who were involved in a business that horrified the average Briton of the 18th century as soon as they became fully aware, were not involved in it because previous generations had forgotten that they had been? A more absurd exercise in futility would be hard to invent: it has taken a long time, but History has finally triumphed. This should not be a cause for consternation, but for a certain sort of comfort: for if we must live alongside History and if History is essential to to how we see ourselves and the land around us, then it might as well be the real thing in all its gaunt glory and not a tottering edifice of dubious provenance.
1. A large number of whom represented the slave-port of Liverpool where the franchise was restricted to freemen of the borough.
2. With large gaps invariably existing between archival exposure and widespread public knowledge of the facts.
This essay was written in the April of 2021.
