Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On the Eve
- Chapter 2 ‘An Infectious Madness’
- Chapter 3 Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 4 Patterns of Industry
- Chapter 5 Mother Earth
- Chapter 6 The Polite Fictions of Slavery
- Chapter 7 Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 8 Steam and Iron in the 1830s
- Chapter 9 Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840
- Chapter 10 Jorrocks’s Canon
- Chapter 11 Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës:Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘The Foreheads of a New Generation’
- Chapter 12 Boz in London: The 1830s and the Urban Turn in the English Novel
- Chapter 13 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s
- Chapter 14 Railway Imaginary in the 1830s
- Chapter 15 The Emerging Language of Photography
- Afterword
- Index
Chapter 3 - Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2024
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 On the Eve
- Chapter 2 ‘An Infectious Madness’
- Chapter 3 Augustus Hardin Beaumont, Slavery Apologias, and Popular Radical Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 4 Patterns of Industry
- Chapter 5 Mother Earth
- Chapter 6 The Polite Fictions of Slavery
- Chapter 7 Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s
- Chapter 8 Steam and Iron in the 1830s
- Chapter 9 Lithography and the Comic Image 1825–1840
- Chapter 10 Jorrocks’s Canon
- Chapter 11 Tennyson, Dickens, Poe, Browning, and the Brontës:Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘The Foreheads of a New Generation’
- Chapter 12 Boz in London: The 1830s and the Urban Turn in the English Novel
- Chapter 13 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s
- Chapter 14 Railway Imaginary in the 1830s
- Chapter 15 The Emerging Language of Photography
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
Augustus Hardin Beaumont has been acknowledged as a fleeting but important figure in British working-class radical literature during the reform agitation of the 1830s. Little consideration has been given, however, to Beaumont’s past as a Jamaican planter and defender of slavery. Formerly a slaveholder, magistrate, and member of the Jamaican Assembly, Beaumont fought in the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830 before organising a militia to put down the 1831−2 Jamaican Slave Revolt. Ostracised for proposing a gradual scheme of emancipation, Beaumont moved to Britain and became a radical abolitionist despite benefiting from the £20 million fund established to compensate former slaveowners. Far from aberrant, the apparent contradictions of Beaumont’s political career and literary output were underpinned by his admiration for America, the country of his birth, and the influence of Jeffersonian republicanism. He is, furthermore, illustrative of the broader ambiguity within British radicalism’s response to emancipation in the 1830s, which, although nominally anti-slavery, incorporated apologias for chattel slavery, especially in the United States.
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- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s , pp. 62 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024