Patriarchy and Patrimony

Frederick Douglass was one of the most notable visitors to Irish shores during the nineteenth century. He had left the United States in 1845, following the publication of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, in order to avoid recapture and re-enslavement, and generate support for the antislavery cause in Europe. His travels throughout the then United Kingdom in the two years from 1845 to 1847 had a lasting effect on his social and intellectual status. Alan Rice and Martin Crawford describe him arriving in ‘Britain [and Ireland the] … raw material of a great black figure; [and leaving] … in April 1847 the finished independent man, cut from a whole cloth and able to make his own decisions about the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement’.

Douglass's personal and political transformation found correspondence in the shifting form of his literary work, which became enmeshed in those same strategies and ideologies. In Ireland, his autobiography was re-published by the Dublin Quaker printer, Richard Webb, shortly after Douglass's arrival in September 1845, and went to variant and second Irish editions in 1846. Just as Douglass's personal and professional standing were deeply marked by the experience of being outside the United States, the reprinting of the Narrative in Ireland marks the beginning of a stage in Douglass's literary career that has an impact on contemporary readings of his life and work. Taken in conjunction with his other literary output at this time – the letters to Garrison from Britain and Ireland, which were subsequently published in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator – the Irish Narratives mark a transitional phase in Douglass's emergence as a modern subject and his mediation of nineteenth-century models of identity, specifically those that emerged as part of the international ethical culture of abolitionism.

For with the republication of the Narrative in Dublin came several changes in the form of the work, involving the incorporation of various prefacing devices and appendices that distinguish it from the US edition.