This chapter focuses on modes of resistance in the writings of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772), Ignatius Sancho (1782), Ottobah Cugoano (1787), Olaudah Equiano (1789), and Mary Prince (1831), who published some of the first publications in English by writers of African descent. The chapter describes their different backgrounds and explores how they used diverse literary forms, including letters, essays, polemics, and life-writing, to address a range of social and cultural issues. Comparative in focus, it examines how these writers’ published works can be linked through an analysis of the genres of life-writing and autobiography as narratives of resistance to slavery, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and its inequalities and inconsistencies. It places these publications in the context of Enlightenment racism, and shows some of them, especially Equiano and Cugoano, were written in the context, and to advance the cause, of the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade.  The chapter ends with a consideration of the literary legacy of this body of writing by showing how they have been reimagined by contemporary black British novelists.

THE TEA-TABLE is an object, an event and a concept. In the first iteration, the tea-table is a piece of furniture, a table on which the tea equipage is placed. The term also refers, in a second iteration, to the social gathering at which tea is consumed. It further identifies a third sense, the topic of this chapter: a new and hybrid form of polite sociability in the early eighteenth-century centred around the consumption of tea, that engages both women and men in a liminal zone between public and private spheres. The tea-table as event and concept is imbricated in practices of, and discourse about, talk and conversation. As a location for women's talk and conversation, the tea-table has been consistently identified with, or scapegoated by, gossip and scandal. Each of those aspects is closely embedded in the discourse of sociability as it was practised and understood in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In this sense, the tea-table makes an intriguing and largely under-researched contribution to debate about women's participation in the public sphere in this period. Resituating the tea-table within this debate further requires reconsideration of the discursive formation of gossip and scandal.

The context for tea-table sociability in Britain is the emergence in the late seventeenth century of the consumption of tea, the hot infusion of the oxidised and prepared leaves of Camellia sinensis. All tea consumed in Britain in this period was imported from China and Japan: it was in very limited supply and remarkably expensive. Tea drinking was at first especially associated with socialising amongst elite women at the royal court, and retained a symbolic connection with refinement and elite women even after its consumption became common. In this it differed from its main rival in the market for hot beverages, coffee, which, sourced from the Levant, had become almost ubiquitous in London and provincial cities by the 1670s, where it was closely associated with the public socialising of men in the coffeehouse. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, tea consumption rapidly expanded in Britain. Whereas in the seventeenth century tea had been mostly sourced through the Amsterdam sales of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), in the 1690s and after, increasing quantities were imported into Britain by the English East India Company (EIC), from Canton and other factory ports in China.

Prostitutes, and prostitution, were notoriously visible in eighteenth-century European culture, a visibility that was amply reflected in political and cultural discourses. Commonly understood as an index of the moral temperature of society, the perceived increase in prostitution in the major cities of Europe offered its own conclusions. Moral reformers, who considered prostitutes a ‘common nuisance’, were numerous. In London, the Rev. William Dodd, writing in the Public Ledger in 1760, discovered in prostitution a telling sign of public vice:

Pierre Jean Grosley, a French academician, in his A Tour to London (1772), reported that in 1765, prostitutes, or ‘Women of the Town’, as he called them,

What is enlightenment? In the twentieth century, scholars have found the term ‘the Enlightenment’ a convenient designation for the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, although there has been little agreement between different scholars, disciplines and national traditions about what the term might mean. In his landmark study The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, first published in German in 1932, and belatedly translated into English in 1951, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) defined the Enlightenment as ‘a value-system rooted in rationality’, whose history was bounded by the lives of two philosophers, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In Cassirer's intellectual history, the term ‘Enlightenment’ denotes the major movement in the history of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, defining the modernity of the period, championing rationality over faith and superstition, reason and liberty over custom and tyranny, science over religion. Yet in the period itself, the term ‘Enlightenment’ was almost unknown: the Oxford English Dictionary suggests the term was not used in English in the modern sense until the 1860s, when it was derived from a translation of the German Aufklärung.

This essay explores the coincidence between three phenomena in the intellectual life of late 1790s' Britain. The first is the emergence of the subgenre of Romantic fiction that later became known as the gothic novel, particularly that of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and Matthew Lewis (1775–1818), but also in a group of minor novelists.