Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ed.. Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003. x + 222 pp. $62.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8135-3214-1.
Reviewed by Norman A. Etherington
Published on H-SAfrica (January, 2004)
Contrasts in the Lived Experience of Race in Black Victoriana, scholars who go in search of a the Nineteenth-Century United States and Victori‐ collective black experience in the nineteenth cen‐ an Britain tury "colonize the Victorians" (p. 187). They are Any attempt to recover the "black experience" made "to stand for the racist Other in binary op‐ of Victorian Britain faces formidable obstacles. position to our implicit nonracist Self." As no self- Who was "black" in the nineteenth century? To identifed black communities emerge from what extent can such a racial identifcation be as‐ archival records, scholars who look for blacks in signed to people from diverse cultures and na‐ Victorian Britain inevitably end up studying indi‐ tionalities? Racial epithets such as "nigger" cer‐ viduals. tainly existed in the nineteenth century but were David Killingray's quest for "persons of applied to a much larger portion of humanity African descent and origin in Victorian Kent" fo‐ than those who had African ancestors. The term cuses on newspapers and photographs. People "black" had a wide currency in the Victorian era identifed as "Negro" in newspaper reports get in‐ but carried little of the intellectual resonance the cluded in his survey; people who may have word acquired when certain Americans cast aside African ancestors but who cannot be specifcally self-identifcation as "Negroes" in the 1960s in fa‐ identifed are inevitably ignored. People in photo‐ vor of a more assertive posture associated with graphs who "look black" get mentioned; there is "Black Power." It denoted neither an oppressed no way of telling whether others may also have group, nor a collective adjective for "people of col‐ shared an African gene pool. A remarkable exam‐ or," nor a self-conscious community. ple of the former is "a photograph of a black Met‐ "Blacks" in the British Isles are difcult to ropolitan policeman at Chislehurst, taken in Sep‐ count because the nineteenth-century census tember 1910, when all the conventional history lacked ethnic and racial categories. As Douglas states that black men were denied entry to the Lorimer trenchantly observes in Black Victorians/ H-Net Reviews force on the grounds of race until the frst ap‐ by relying "on a limited selection of sources pointment in 1968" (p. 56). wherein extreme racist views are presented as John Turner takes a diferent tack, following representative opinion" while ignoring "altogeth‐ the ups and downs of one man, William Darby, er those Victorians who were critical of the pre‐ who was both a circus performer and a propri‐ vailing racist orthodoxy of the time" (p. 187). We etor of a traveling company. Darby excellently il‐ know that certain abstract lines of scholarship de‐ lustrates the problems of writing about blackness. veloped scientifc theories of racial diference in Born in Norwich in 1796, Darby was by any cul‐ the course of the nineteenth century. Some of tural measure an Englishman. Turner merely them derived from physical anthropology, some guesses that "it is possible that his father was from the bizarre blood theories of Gobineau, and African born and had been brought to the port of some from the polygenesists of the United States. Norwich and trained as a house servant" (p. 21). [1] How far these theories infected the general By taking the stage name "Pablo Fanque," Darby populace in Britain during the Victorian era is still positioned himself as an exotic--Pablo being Span‐ a matter of conjecture. They clearly reached the ish and Fanque vaguely suggesting a West African Canterbury newspaper reporter who observed of connection (if pronounced "Fankwa"). He married the African-American actor, Ira Aldridge, in 1847 Susannah Marlaw, the daughter of a Birmingham that: buttonmaker, and produced a son who also joined "Mr. Aldridge is a man of no common intel‐ the circus, performing as "Ted Pablo." Turner lect--he is one instance at least that the distinction fnds difculty in spotting any aspect of Darby's drawn by Blumenthal, Gail, Coombe, and other life that refects a Victorian "black experience." physiologists, between the cerebral development His material fortunes rose and fell like anyone of the European and African head, may admit of else's in his uncertain profession. Some reports very important exceptions." (p. 61) refer to him as "a man of colour" or "a coloured On the other hand, there was a vigorous gentleman" or "an artiste of colour" (pp. 24, 32, Evangelical counter-culture that had no time for 34). That is all, except for an arresting anecdote those theories or what was then known as "colour told by a friend who used to fsh with Darby on prejudice." Kenan Malik has argued convincingly the River Isis. Noticing Darby's extraordinary suc‐ that racial theory must be related to the social and cess as an angler, an Oxford student turned up cultural contexts in which it emerged.[2] Theories with his fshing rod on the river one morning devised for the reactionary purpose of racializing "with his face blacked after the most approved social class in Europe should not be indiscrimi‐ style of the Christy Minstrels" (p. 35). A fnal com‐ nately applied to black-white relations in Jamaica ment made in 1905 by a chaplain of the Show‐ or Australia. man's Guild claims that "in the great brotherhood A case in point is another man of the circus, of the equestrian world there is no colour-line" West Indian-born Arthur Williams, who per‐ (p. 36). formed "as a wild man in skins and feathers" un‐ A great deal hangs on what we make of the der the name "Macomo" (p. 21). Though John contrast between the statement of the clergyman Turner does not mention it, the name strongly and the calculated mockery performed by the Ox‐ suggests Maqoma, a Xhosa chief who fought the ford student: circus lowlife and educated high‐ British in a number of South African frontier brow. Lorimer puts his fnger on the problem by wars and who was often referred to as Macomo in criticizing those who try to reconstruct the lived books and periodicals of the time. This was a kind experience of racial diference in Victorian times of black more like American Indian chiefs than
2 H-Net Reviews slaves in the Old South. Britain's South African with ministrations of rum and home remedies to frontier generated ideas about African capacities British troops in the Crimean War, is a case in and character quite diferent from those that ob‐ point. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's chapter on tained in Baltimore or Mississippi. Even Robert Mrs. Seacole's book about her experience, Won‐ Knox, the pre-eminent British medical proponent derful Adventures in Many Lands, describes her of racial science in the early Victorian era, who curious progress from West Indian healer to anti- had formed his early opinions about Africans as Nightingale on the battlefeld. Paravisini-Gebert an army surgeon in South Africa, made them argues that Seacole "assumes her place in a something of an exception. Based on his experi‐ British society--and history--from which she is ini‐ ence of African warriors, he predicted that they tially rejected, by fnding in the Crimea a substi‐ would not melt away before the advance of white tute for 'England,' a war zone where the expected settlement. "Macomo," the wildman of Manders' barriers to someone of her class, race, and colo‐ Menagerie, prefgures the image of blackness that nial origins can be temporarily lifted." Some such Rider Haggard would celebrate in his late-Victori‐ barriers may well have existed, but as Mary Sea‐ an tales of Shaka and "Umslopogaas." cole knew only too well from her experience with Neil Parsons's excellent chapter on chiefy vis‐ Americans in Panama, they were far less formida‐ itors to England from Southern Africa reminds us ble than those to be found in Atlanta or New York that this was a kind of African that the British City. When she was rejected as a volunteer for Flo‐ public knew well and the American public not at rence Nightingale's efort, Mrs. Seacole wonders: all. Although the Zulu king Cetshwayo had been "Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the defeated in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879-80, Queen frst and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible Victoria received him at court in top hat and frock that American prejudices against colour [that she coat. London crowds cheered his progress had found so ofensive in ... Panama] had some through the city. This is all the more remarkable root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting because Cetshwayo had been demonized in the my aid because my blood fowed beneath a some‐ lead-up to the confict. ("Britain's quarrel is not what duskier skin than theirs?" (p. 74). The an‐ with the Zulu people but with their tyrannical swer, Mary Seacole found, was no. Nightingale's king" was the kind of comment often made in of‐ class prejudice in favor of English "ladies" caused cial dispatches.) Our distance from that time can the rebuf, not her color. be measured by the impossibility of any such re‐ Ida Wells, of Memphis, Tennessee, who ception being accorded to Saddam Hussein after toured England to gain support for an anti-lynch‐ the second Gulf War. ing campaign in the 1890s, noted the same distinc‐ Not only were there contrasting experiences tion between American color-consciousness and of blackness in Britain and the United States, but British attitudes to diference. It was precisely be‐ there was also a lively trans-Atlantic debate. It is a cause a sympathetic audience could be found pity that the contributors to this anthology on there that Wells went to Britain. That was why the Black Victorians did not do more to explore the frst Pan-African Congress of 1900, described in nuances and dimensions of that ongoing conver‐ this volume by Jonathan Schneer, was held in sation about race. The book ofers ample evidence London rather than in any of the increasingly seg‐ that contemporary African-Americans were well regated cities of the United States. While the Evan‐ aware of the transatlantic gulf in attitudes. The gelical pressure group Exeter Hall lacked the pow‐ delightful Mary Seacole, who challenged the prim, er it had wielded in Parliament in the 1830s and starched nursing style of Florence Nightingale 1840s, it was not dead. Harriette Colenso traveled from South Africa to London in the same era, to
3 H-Net Reviews get in touch with philanthropic networks that and reconstructed over time" (pp. 188-189). How‐ might be expected to show sympathy for exiled ever many similarities might be found in racial king Dinizulu (son of Cetshwayo).[3] For that rea‐ theory and social practice in the nineteenth centu‐ son I doubt Nicole King's assertion that for Ida ry, the United States and Britain were diferent Wells in England "presenting herself as re‐ places. Future scholars would be well advised to spectable was a doubly difcult task because be attentive to the diferences as well as the like‐ Wells was black, and thus easily misread as any‐ nesses. thing but respectable" (p. 93). That would certain‐ Notes ly have been true in Memphis and probably in [1]. Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: New York, but it was not true for many sections of British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (London: respectable British society in the late-Victorian Macmillan, 1965), pp. 363-72; and William Stan‐ era. ton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientifc Attitudes to‐ A similar problem aficts Michael Pickering, ward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago: Univer‐ who takes a cultural studies approach to explain‐ sity of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 24-43. ing the fgure of "the Blackface Clown." He dis‐ [2]. Kenan Malik, Race, History and Culture in misses all previous studies that have tried to place Western Society (London: Macmillan, 1996). the blackface fgure and Victorian clowning in a deeper historical context. Eric Lott is a particular [3]. Jef Guy, The View across the River: Harri‐ target for Pickering: ette Colenso and the Zulu Struggle against Imperi‐ alism (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), especially pp. "Yet while Lott attends carefully to the polyse‐ 298-348. mous qualities of blackface and the variety of pur‐ poses the minstrel mask could serve, he dubiously lumps early minstrel types together at an unspeci‐ fed intersection of slave culture and the harle‐ quin of the commedia dell'arte and the 'blackman' of English folk drama. For Lott, this intersection 'establishes the political and emotional range within which minstrel songs characteristically worked.' It does no such thing. All it establishes is the exact danger of generalization in clowning analysis that I have noted." (p. 162) As an historian, I would expect Pickering's counter-argument, that "blackface then operated as nothing other than comic racial mockery" (p. 172), to be backed up by some empirical evidence, yet he ofers nothing but his own reading of rep‐ resentations. This is not a good advertisement for the cultural studies method. There is much more to be said for Lorimer's argument that attention to "the language of race relations" will reveal "more clearly the disconti‐ nuities in the history of racism" and demonstrate "how forms of racism were both deconstructed
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Citation: Norman A. Etherington. Review of Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, ed. Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews. January, 2004.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8797
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