From Oroonoko to Gambia, from Zanga to Hassan, from Karfa to Couri, from Muley to Black Sam, through all the manifestations of Pompey and Quashee, the black figure on the early nineteenth-century English stage embodied the processes of a racism continually reinventing itself culturally. Theatre then was much like television now. Before mass education and mass literacy, and in a period of explosive urban and industrial growth, it was the popular medium, drawing its audiences from all but the very poorest, with many going night after night. Bills were long, lasting from around six until midnight or maybe later, and varied, changing every few days. The appetite for new material was insatiable, much of it cobbled together from a variety of elements. There were old favourites and pastiches of them, stuff pirated from rival theatres, versions of French plays, reports of British victories past and present, circus, spectacle and pantomime, dumbshow, performing elephants, lions, dogs … And in all this melee, the black character (inevitably a white actor in heavy makeup) fawned or thundered, was, by turns, terrible, contemptible, grotesque. In this he expressed not just that well-known psychological projection, the ‘Other’, but an ingrained, dynamic relationship to the development of racism in the nineteenth century.

While the raw material for these representations came from the accretion of folkloric prejudices built up over centuries, the crucible in which the elements were initially combined was largely fashioned from much earlier literary sources.