American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture

Audrey Fisch's study examines the circulation within England of the people and ideas of the black Abolitionist campaign. During the 1850s, African-Americans and others active in the campaign to abolish slavery, journeyed to England to present the slave experience and rouse opposition to American slavery. By focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an anonymous sequel to that novel, Uncle Tom in England, and John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia, and the lecture tours of free blacks and ex-slaves, Fisch follows the discourse of American abolitionism as it moved across the Atlantic and was reshaped by domestic Victorian debates about popular culture and taste, the worker versus the slave, popular education, and working class self-improvement. Despite its popular appeal, she claims, the African-American abolitionist campaign actually re-energised English nationalism. This book will be of interest to students of African-American literature, and nineteenth-century American and English literature.

Audrey Fisch is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Women's Studies at New Jersey City University.