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Chapter 9 - Silent Center, Vocal Margins

British Literary Response to the US Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2024

Pamela K. Gilbert
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Summary

Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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