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29 - Out of My Place

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2021

Alasdair Pettinger
Affiliation:
Scottish Music Centre
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Summary

Beginning in July 1846, a series of intriguing letters appeared in the New York Mirror. Signed by Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, they recorded his impressions of Britain, France and Italy as he travelled in Europe, encountering (or referring to) many of the individuals we have mentioned in this book: Robert Peel, Lord Eglinton, Elihu Burritt, P. T. Barnum and General Tom Thumb, Charles Dickens, the Hutchinson Singers and the Ethiopian Serenaders. The missives are full of incident, if somewhat implausible, giving a version of the ‘hungry forties’ that might disturb a historian. And no wonder. Pinto was the fictional creation of Charles Briggs, a journalist, magazine editor and author of three novels, who wrote the letters at his home on Staten Island. He based Pinto partly on Nathaniel Parker Willis, a previous editor of the Mirror, a dandy and a snob who worshipped the English nobility and whose own letters from abroad were obliquely satirised in the travel accounts of William Wells Brown (discussed in Chapter 19). But the letters also mock Margaret Fuller, whose despatches from Europe were appearing concurrently in the New York Tribune.

Like Fuller, Pinto undertakes a tour of the Highlands, and, as the guest of the Duke of Argyll at his castle near Inveraray, spends two weeks shooting game on his estate. One day he is told that among some newly arrived visitors is ‘one of the Douglasses, from America, a very famous gentleman’. Pinto cannot recall ‘any celebrity of that name’, although he has ‘a glimmering recollection of [a] rich family of Douglasses on Long Island’. At dinner, the honoured guest is seated too far away for Pinto to identify him, and he asks the Free Church minister beside him who he is. ‘[D]ark enough to be a relation of the family, and a lineal descendant from the black Douglas himself,’ he replies, but even when he goes on to denounce him for ‘trying to make us send back the money’, Pinto is none the wiser. So when he is later introduced to the man in the intimacy of the drawing room he is shocked and insulted to discover that he is ‘a dark mulatto […] no other than the notorious runaway slave, Frederick Douglas’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846
Living an Antislavery Life
, pp. 296 - 304
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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