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CHILDREN AGAINST SLAVERY: JUVENILE AGENCY AND THE SUGAR BOYCOTTS IN BRITAIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2020

Kathryn Gleadle Open the ORCID record for Kathryn Gleadle [Opens in a new window]  and
Ryan Hanley Open the ORCID record for Ryan Hanley [Opens in a new window]
Ryan Hanley
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The Whitfield Prize Winner
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Abstract

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, many contemporaries observed a striking phenomenon: that children were especially active in the boycotts of sugar produced by enslaved people. First-hand accounts often suggested that children's activism was unilateral and unmediated, whereas historians of British abolitionism have tended to assume that children were passive recipients of antislavery literature and adult influence. Engaging with both the historiography on British abolitionism and the new histories of childhood, this article examines the nature of juvenile engagement within the sugar boycotts. Collecting together some of the extensive but dispersed evidence of juvenile antislavery across the country, and focusing upon a case study of the Plymley household of Shropshire during the early 1790s, we explore the intricacies of children's involvement. Children's agency, we argue, needs to be understood as a specific, historicised phenomenon. Adults often chose to represent children's abolitionist activities as self-determined, for their participation in the boycotts affirmed both adult positions and their own child-rearing practices. However, whilst adults frequently solicited particular types of juvenile response, children often responded independently and in unexpected ways, negotiating their own positions in relation to their parents, siblings, and peers. We situate juvenile antislavery as a recursive process, operating within complex, intergenerational interactions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 30 , December 2020 , pp. 97 - 117
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society

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References

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19 Girls were deemed to attain the age of discretion at twelve years, although boys not until fourteen. Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos, ‘The Legal Status of Children in 18th-Century England’, in Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity, ed. Anja Müller (Aldershot, 2006), 47. In her study of eighteenth-century childhood, Alysa Levene chose to treat those under the age of thirteen as children, noting, for example, this was the age at which children were generally bound out as apprentices. Levene, Alysa, The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London (Basingstoke, 2012), 16–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 During the 1820s and 1830s, children working in factories were themselves increasingly likened to slaves. This was one facet of an increasingly complex and troubled relationship between working-class reform and abolitionism during this period. Understanding how these contexts affected representations of juvenile antislavery among the poor demands dedicated attention to the dynamics of class, labour, radicalism and reform, which is regrettably beyond the scope of the present article. See Gray, Robert, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge, 2002), 21–47Google Scholar; Kathryn Gleadle, ‘“We Will Have It”: Children and Protest in the Ten Hours Movement’, in Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914, ed. Nigel Goose and Katrina Honeyman(Farnham, 2013), 215–30; Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England, 1814–1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016), 103–23; Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford, 2002), 141–80.

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29 See Oldfield, Popular Politics, 147.

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31 Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 89–90, 107–8.

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33 Plymley Notebooks, Shropshire Archives (hereafter SA), 1066/9 (1792), f. 18. Our thanks to the owners of the Plymley archive and to Shropshire Archives for their kind permission to use the Plymley material.

34 Scholars have only identified sporadic publications prior to this. For the increase in antislavery literature from the 1820s, see Oldfield, ‘Anti-Slavery Sentiment’, 50–1.

35 See, for example, Moodie, Susanna, ‘The Vanquished Lion (1831)’, in Moodie, Susanna, Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie, ed. Thurston, John (Ottawa, 1991), 31–42Google Scholar.

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37 The Fifth Report of the Female Society, for Birmingham … for the Relief of British Negro Slaves (Birmingham, 1830), 68.

38 Ibid., 68; The Third Report of the Female Society, for Birmingham … for the Relief of British Negro Slaves (Birmingham, 1828), 35.

39 Twells, The Civilising Mission, 97.

40 See, for example, Roxanne Eberle, ‘“Tales of Truth?” Amelia Opie's Antislavery Poetics’, in Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (Lexington, 1999), 71–98, at 76.

41 See Gleadle, Kathryn, ‘Playing at Soldiers: British Loyalism and Juvenile Identities during the Napoleonic Wars’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2015), 335–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45 Ibid., 18 (emphasis in original).

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47 T. Wemyss Reid, The Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Foster (2 vols., 1888), i, 21.

48 Joseph Corbett (formerly Plymley) changed his surname to Corbett in 1806, having inherited his uncle's estate in 1804. Johanna Dahn, ‘Women and Taste: A Case Study of Katherine Plymley, 1758–1829’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2001), 153. For the sake of clarity, Joseph will be referred to as Corbett.

49 Corbett married Matty Dansey in 1790. They had further children, but it was agreed that Katherine and Ann would continue to care for the three eldest children. For detailed discussions of Katherine Plymley, see Kathryn Gleadle, ‘“Opinions Deliver'd in Conversation”: Conversation, Politics and Gender in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions, ed. José Harris (Oxford, 2003), 61–78; Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Gentry, Gender, and the Moral Economy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Provincial England’, in Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, ed. Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport (Columbus, 2013), 25–40; Dahn, ‘Women and Taste’.

50 Corbett's sons, Panton and his half-brother Uvedale, were later elected directors of the antislavery African Institution. As a Member of Parliament, Panton supported the antislavery campaign. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820–1832 (Cambridge, 2009), ed. D. R. Fisher, www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/corbett-panton-1785-1855; SA 1066/90 (1812), f. 40.

51 See, for example, SA 1066/48 (1797), f. 18. The family's opinion of him later cooled, regretting, amongst other things, his move towards Unitarianism. See SA 1066/131–4 (1825–8).

52 SA 1066/1 (1791), f. 1.

53 SA 1066/4 (1792), ff. 10–12.

54 SA 1066/1 (1791), ff. 12–13. Timothy Whelan, ‘William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42 (2009), 397–411.

55 SA 1066/4 (1792), ff. 10–12.

56 SA 1066/9 (1792), ff. 10–11.

57 SA 1066/46 (1797), ff. 9–10.

58 Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer, ‘Feeling through Practice: Subjectivity and Emotion in Children's Writing’, Journal of Social History, 51 (2017), 104.

59 SA 1066/56 (1800–1), f. 22.

60 SA 1066/9 (1792), f. 4.

61 SA 1066/14 (1792–3), ff. 17–18.

62 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987), 111.

63 Boulukos, George, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge, 2008), 201–32Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Jamie, ‘The Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy’, in Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830, ed. Ahern, Stephen (Farnham, 2013), 171–88Google Scholar; Carey, Brycchan, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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66 SA 1066/9 (1792), f. 20.

67 For example, Josephine E. Butler, Memoir of John Grey of Dilston (1874), 127; Catherine Marsh, The Life of the Rev. William Marsh, By His Daughter (1868), 72–3; Gleadle, Borderline Citizens, 101–3.

68 SA 1066/13 (1792), f. 2

69 SA 1066/2 (1791), ff. 22–3.

70 SA 1066/13 (1792), ff. 2–3.

71 See Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions (New Haven, 2017), ch. 1.

72 SA 1066/21 (1793), 19.

73 SA 1066/9 (1792), ff. 10–11.

74 SA 1066/21 (1793), ff. 18–19. A sweet bag is a small cloth bag containing herbs.

75 SA 1066/56 (1800–1), ff. 4–5. Clarkson's prize-winning student dissertation was translated from Latin into English as An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1788), and marketed extensively by SEAST.

76 SA 1066/2 (1791), f. 22.

77 SA 1066/147 (n.d.), ff. 34–5.

78 William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797).

79 Ibid., 34.

80 SA 1066/46 (1797), f. 9.

81 SA 1066/90 (1812), ff. 10–12.

82 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (1995), 61–72; Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 1.

83 SA 1066/46 (1797), ff. 9–10.

84 SA 1066/3 (1791), ff. 5–6.

85 SA 1066/58, f. 19. Michèle Cohen, ‘Gender and the Private/Public Debate on Education in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Public or Private Education? Lessons from History, ed. Richard Aldrich (2004), 2–24.

86 SA 1066/53, f. 15.

87 Christoph Houswitschka, ‘Locke's Education or Rousseau's Freedom: Alternative Socializations in Modern Societies’, in Fashioning Childhood, ed. Müller, 81–8; Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain, 1750–1850 (Aldershot, 2007), chs. 1–4.

88 Miller, Susan A., ‘Assent as Agency in the Early Years of the Children of the American Revolution’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 9 (2016), 48–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 SA 1066/148 (n.d.), ff. 5–6.

90 We follow Karen Sánchez-Eppler in adopting Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's formulation. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, ‘Practicing for Print: The Hale Children's Manuscript Libraries’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1 (2008), 188–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, 2004), 35–6Google Scholar.

91 SA 1066/56 (1800–1), f. 18.

92 Gleadle, ‘Gentry, Gender, and the Moral Economy’, 30.

93 SA 1066/9 (1792), f. 10.

94 Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), 355.

95 SA 1066/17 (1793), ff. 5–7.

96 For socialisation as a dialogical process in this period see Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin, ‘Introduction’, in, Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, ed. Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (Farnham, 2009), 6–8.

97 Michael McDevitt and Steven Chaffee, ‘From Top-Down to Trickle-Up Influence: Revisiting Assumptions about the Family in Political Socialization’, Political Communication, 19 (2002), 281–301.

98 Blauvelt, Martha, The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830 (Charlottesville, 2007)Google Scholar.

99 Ibid., 198.

100 See above, footnotes 7 and 8.

101 Gleason, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap’, 457.