Representing Black Victorians: A view of ‘The Black Man’ in Britain from Dickens’s All the Year Round.

Abstract:

This session will explore the representation of Black history in Britain as set out in an essay published in Dickens’s periodical All The Year Round in 1875.  Entitled ‘The Black Man’, the piece presents a history of ‘The Black Man’ in Britain, drawing on academic quarrels and cultural practices to consider their lives across several centuries up to the 1870s.  The Black man in this essay is thus both a historical figure and a contemporary individual, a runaway slave and a free man.  The essay is interesting as a means to explore how the presence of Black people in Britain was understood in the 1870s and for the familiarity of the questions the essay raises: when did the first black man arrive on British shores;  What did the term ‘black’ mean in different historical periods; who were the individuals that created the need for runaway slave advertisements and what happened to the black community in Britain after the abolition of the slave trade and enslavement in the 1830s? But in this paper I will focus a discussion on the author’s determination to exclude Black people from an idea of Britain’s future, both through the omission of women and the desire to exclude Black people from the modern city.

Suggested reading: ‘The Black Man’, All the Year Round, ed. Charles Dickens, March 1875

About the Speaker:

Caroline Bressey is a Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography at University College London.  Her research focuses on surfacing the lives of Black Victorians in the archives, particularly Black working-class women who lived in London.  Her current book project is an account of the multi-ethnic communities of Victorian England.

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