Normal Women, page 36
A Monk of the Order of St Francis, Nocturnal Revels, M. Goadby, 1779 (The History Collection/Alamy)
The Nocturnal Revels described her life in England with her owner, in the offensive terms of the time:
Notwithstanding the beauties of this Island often attracted his attention, and he frequently gave loose to his natural appetites with his own country women, still she remained unrivalled as a constant flame; nor was it in some respect extraordinary, although her complexion might not be so engaging as that of the fair daughters of Albion, she had many attractions that are not often met with in the female world who yield to prostitution. She was faithful to his bed, careful of his domestic concerns, exact in her accounts, and would not suffer any of the servants to impose upon their master, and in this respect, she saved him some hundreds a year. Her person (to follow her) was very alluring: she was tall well-made and genteel, and since her arrival in England, she had given her mind to reading, and at her master’s recommendation, had perused several useful and entertaining books, calculated for women, whereby she had considerably improved her understanding, and had attained a degree of politeness scarce to be paralleled in an African female.5
Despite her loyal service, when Harriot’s master died of smallpox, he left her with nothing but her clothes, some trinkets and £5 in cash, and she joined a brothel and became the favourite of ‘a score of peers and 50 commoners who never presented her with anything less than a soft paper commonly called a bank note’.
She earned enough from prostitution to buy her own house in King’s Place, London, and hired her own girls to work as prostitutes. The Nocturnal Revels reports that she fell in love with a guards’ officer, paid his debts and refused to have sex with other men. A visit to Brighton left her London servants unsupervised and they stole her goods and ran up debts that she could not meet. At the time of the writing of the Nocturnal Revels, Harriot was in the King’s Bench for debt, and there is no apparent record of her release or life after imprisonment.
Other African women worked as prostitutes in London; another guide mentions: ‘The curvaceous Miss Lowes of Upper Charlotte Street, Soho, and Miss Wilson of Lichfield Street, Soho, who was of very pleasing features and intelligence and frequently to be found at the theatre in the evening.’6
Some women managed to free themselves from slavery and make successful lives in England. One of these was Mary Prince, who was born into slavery in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, in 1788, the daughter of a sawyer and a house slave. When the plantation owner died, Mary’s mother and her six brothers and sisters were sold to a new owner as house slaves. Mary was the companion slave of the new owner’s granddaughter, but when she was 12 years old she was hired out to another owner and had to leave her mother and siblings: ‘I cried bitterly at parting with my dear mistress and Miss Betsy, and when I kissed my mother and brothers and sisters I thought my young heart would break it pained me so; but there was no help I was forced to go.’7
Mary was beaten by her new owner and his wife, and sold into hard physical labour in the Salt Ponds, in the Turks and Caicos islands, where she worked waist-deep in water shovelling salt to dry. After ten years she was taken to Bermuda by her master on his retirement and from there to Antigua. She had painful rheumatism and was regularly beaten, but she attended a Moravian church, where she met her husband, a carpenter who had bought his freedom. Mary saved money from extra work and tried to buy her freedom, but her owners – the Woods family – refused to sell. They whipped her for marrying without their permission and separated her from her husband, taking her on a visit to England without him, growing more impatient as her poor health worsened. Finally, after several quarrels, they threw her out:
I did not know well what to do. I knew that I was free in England; but I did not know where to go, or how to get my living; and therefore, I did not like to leave the house. But Mr Wood said he would send for a constable to thrust me out; and at last I took course and resolved that I would not be longer thus treated, but would go and trust to Providence. This was the fourth time they had threatened to turn me out, and go where I might, I was determined now to take them at their word; though I thought it very hard, after I had lived with them for thirteen years, and worked for them like a horse, to be driven out in this way like a beggar.8
Mary found her way to the abolitionist Thomas Pringle and became a servant to him and other abolitionists. Her legal position was uncertain. She had been born into slavery – a legal state in Bermuda – and although she had been thrown out by her owners in England, she had not been officially freed by them, and they would not allow her to buy herself out of slavery. After a year’s stay in England, her owners prepared to return to Antigua. Mary was trapped in England – if she returned to her husband Daniel in Antigua, she would return to a state of legal slavery and would belong to the Woods family again. A petition to Parliament failed, and when the family sailed for Antigua, Mary was left behind, a free woman only in England, but separated from her husband in Antigua. She dictated the story of her life to a sympathetic white woman – Susanna Moodie, sister of the historian Agnes Strickland – and it became the first female slave narrative to be published. After publication, she disappears from the record. All slaves were freed in Bermuda and Antigua in 1834 by the legal abolition of slavery, so she could have returned as a free woman to her husband then.
Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761–1804) is perhaps the best-known English slave, thanks to the fame of her owner, and books and a film about her. She was born to a slave mother Maria Belle in the West Indies, the daughter of Sir John Lindsay, a naval officer who took the four-year-old girl with him when he returned home to England. Rose-tinted accounts of his relationship with her mother suggest that he may have rescued her from slavery while on an anti-slavery patrol and cared for their baby at her death,9 but as an enslaved woman she had no consent to give. Whether rapist or rescuer, Lindsay took the child to his uncle at Kenwood House, London. William Murray and his wife Elizabeth, a childless couple, were raising their legitimate white niece Lady Elizabeth Murray, and the little girl Dido was raised with her to serve as her companion.
William Murray was 1st Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice, sitting on several important cases testing the legality of slavery in England. His prolonged and thoughtful deliberations were intentionally ambiguous. Though often hailed as the English judge who freed slaves in England, he only ever made individual arguments for the freedom of individual slaves and speaking generally he said: ‘I don’t know what the consequences may be if the masters were to lose their property by accidentally bringing their slaves to England. I hope it never will be finally discussed; for I would have all masters think them free, and all negroes think they were not, because then they would both behave better.’10
Dido Belle lived with Lord Mansfield’s family as a poor relation – present at family occasions but not at large dinner parties, a companion and a family member but not a social equal, paid a smaller allowance than her white, legitimate cousin. She lived the life typical of a poor genteel relation to an elite family as companion, personal assistant, even secretary to William Murray. But the difference between the white heiress Elizabeth and her illegitimate cousin Dido was noted at the time. The portrait of Elizabeth Murray (see plate section) shows Dido Elizabeth Belle in an exotic costume with a turban headdress, placed behind her kinswoman, carrying pine cones. The young white woman holds a book in one hand with the other hand resting rather awkwardly on Dido’s arm – as if holding her back.
The portrait is not a sentimental depiction of a tender relationship. It is a quite typical example of slave paintings, in which Black slaves or servants are contrasted with their white owners, demonstrating the owner’s wealth, and emphasising the physical beauty of both slave and owner – with the spotlight on the white person, who commissioned the painter and owned the slave. Other portraits of slaves and owners also feature the slave carrying exotic fruit or flowers: a picturesque emblem of the slavery work of production.
Despite Lord Mansfield ruling on the freedom of individual slaves in England, he was so doubtful of Dido Belle’s safety that he ‘confirmed’ her freedom in his will – to make it clear that whatever she had been during his life – she was freed by his death. He left her a small inheritance that enabled her to marry a white upper-household servant and set up house with him in middle-class Pimlico: a typical marriage and home for a poor relation of an elite family.
Saartjie Baartman was the daughter of a cattle drover of the Khoikhoi people of Southern Africa. She was brought to England in 1810 with her master, Hendrik Cesars, a freed slave, by Alexander Dunlop, a surgeon in the Cape Slave Lodge, who had a sideline in showing exotic animals in Europe. Dunlop showed her, as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, for 2s per person in London, one of several Khoikhoi children exhibited as curiosities.
The African Association took Saartjie Baartman’s case to the King’s Court and argued that she was enslaved and had been described by Dunlop as ‘property’. The inquiry accepted the claim that Baartman was free, was working as she chose and would be paid half of the profits of her exhibition. Cesar and Dunlop took Saartjie to country fairs for exhibition and in 1811 she was baptised a Christian in the name of Sarah Bartman, and married a man of African descent.11
Despite the promises of her freedom, she was sold to a French owner, exhibited in Paris for 11 hours a day, and after her death in 1815 her body was dissected and her remains kept in a museum, only returned to South Africa for burial in 2002.
Matilda Foster was born a slave in 1818 on the Elim Estate in St Elizabeth parish, Barbados, and conceived a child to a white man and gave birth to a daughter, Fanny, a year after the legal abolition of slavery, so the baby was born free.
Matilda and her daughter got to England and were recorded in the 1851 census living in St Pancras: Matilda working as a laundress and Fanny as a domestic servant. Fanny married or lived with James Eaton, a porter, and had ten children with him. As well as domestic work, Fanny Eaton worked as an artist’s model at the Royal Academy of Arts, often posing as a non-white heroine for a sketching club that included some of the pre-Raphaelite painters. She also modelled for artists Rebecca Solomon and Joanna Wells, but her modelling fees were not enough to free her from domestic service. She ended her days living with one of her married daughters, and died at the age of 88.12
Theories of racial inferiority developed after the first African kidnaps, as an attempt to justify and excuse the massively profitable growing transatlantic slave trade. When slaves had been kidnapped from Ireland in the seventeenth century, a myth of Irish inferiority had arisen as justification; earlier racism had been directed towards other exploited groups: Jewish people and so-called ‘gypsies’. The fanciful notion that African people were suited for slavery, and even that slavery was beneficial for them, was put forward by the people who profited from slavery. Racism became a hugely popular concept – but only in countries that had profited from slavery and longed to believe that enslaving someone proved the superiority of the slaver. It is no coincidence that the modern expression that ‘might is right’ was coined by an abolitionist in 1846: ‘“Might makes right,” and hoary folly totters on in her mad career, escorted by armies and navies.’13
English imperialists on their mad career escorted by armies and navies had already persuaded themselves that they were innately superior to all women, Jewish peoples, Irish people, some Asian peoples and people of the first nations in the Americas, and in Australia. Racism and sexism justified the rule of elite white men over half their own country and potentially all the rest of the world. Citing God (and finding racism and sexism in the Bible), citing the classics (and finding misogyny and slavery in ancient Greece), citing the new sciences which conveniently found whatever anyone wanted, English imperial men used religion and science to justify kidnap, slavery and excluding people from their own lands, opportunities, education and freedom.
Racism was a transparent attempt to justify slavery and the British Empire; it did not cause it. Belief in female inferiority was trumpeted after the oppression of women – it did not cause it. In the eighteenth century, some women saw the connection and protested both, and some women saw the benefits they gained as slave owners and elite women and made no protest. Elite women directly owned slaves, and when compensation was paid to slave owners for their losses at abolition, 41 per cent of the payments would be made to identifiable women.14
Mary Seacole (1805–81), now hailed as a heroine of nursing, was rejected as a nurse by the British government and the official charities because of prejudice against her colour. She was the free descendant of slaves, the daughter of a lodging house keeper and a British army lieutenant, raised, married and widowed in Jamaica who had worked on the island and in Panama as a health practitioner. She arrived in London to volunteer as a nurse for the British army in the Crimean War but was rejected both by the government and by the official charity, the Crimean Fund. She thought it was racial prejudice: ‘Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?’15
Thought to be one of only two original photographs of Mary Seacole (1805–81), found in Winchester College archives where Mary is the only non-combatant in the collection
Mary Seacole in a collection by Ely Duodecimus Wigram, discovered by Dr Geoffrey Day at Winchester College (Winchester College/Mary Seacole Trust/Mary Evans)
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) claimed she only sat for one photograph – at the request of Queen Victoria. Here’s another, by Regent Street portraitist William Edward Kilburn
Florence Nightingale by William Edward Kilburn, c.1856, Royal Collection Trust (Alpha Historica/Alamy)
Mary Seacole applied directly to Florence Nightingale’s assistant: ‘Once again I tried, and had an interview this time with one of Miss Nightingale’s companions. She gave me the same reply, and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it.’
Seacole took passage on a ship to Crimea, where she built her own boarding house from the wreckage of other houses destroyed by shelling in the ruins of a town only a mile from the British headquarters. She nursed wounded soldiers and supported them as they returned from the fighting to be shipped home, providing food and drink for paying officers and for wounded soldiers for free. It was said that you could buy anything from an anchor to a sewing needle from ‘Mother Seacole’. She had a cool meeting with Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) in Crimea. Nightingale wrote: ‘I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs Seacole’s advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!) . . . Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness – also much drunkenness and improper conduct.’16
Mary Seacole won a bet that she would be the first English woman into Sebastopol, entering the town with the triumphant British army in September 1855 and serving the soldiers until the end of the war, at a financial loss. She was awarded the Crimea Medal, and several fundraising events were held to celebrate her service and pay her debts.
She published her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, in July 1857, before returning to Jamaica for a visit, eventually making a comfortable home in London, where she died in 1881, leaving £2,500 in her estate. She was proud of her mixed race and her history:
I am a Creole, and have good Scots blood coursing through my veins. My father was a soldier of an old Scottish family . . . I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns.17
Servitude
To be an apprentice in eighteenth-century England, especially one of the increasing number of children legally kidnapped from their parents by the poor laws, was to be in a state of short-term slavery: servitude, bound for seven years to a master, unpaid and exposed to criminal cruelty. Sarah Metyard and her daughter owned a millinery workshop at Bruton St, in the capital, with five pauper apprentice girls from parish workhouses. The two women tortured one girl, Anne Naylor, tying her up, beating her and starving her to death, but were only arrested four years later when parts of the girl’s body were found. Metyard and her daughter were executed for murder at Tyburn in July 1762.18 The scandal-loving Newgate Calendar reported Elizabeth Brownrigg, a midwife, living with her husband, a plumber, at Flower-de-Luce Court, Fleet Street, who tortured and starved three young girls who had been put in her care from the poor house. When one girl escaped and reported her injuries, the local authorities released her from her apprenticeship, but failed to pursue the Brownrigg family. Neighbours reported the torture of another girl who died after her release, and Elizabeth Brownrigg was finally arrested and executed at Tyburn in September 1767, while her husband and son were sentenced to six months imprisonment.19
There was no room in the Foundling Hospital for a two-year-old toddler, found on a doorstep at Castle Street, Holborn, in 1809, and the child was sent to the parish workhouse and ‘dropped’ – left to die of exposure – by Thomas and Elizabeth Pugh, who claimed that the deserting father had promised them £300 for his child’s death. They were imprisoned for six months each.20 In 1829, Frances Colpitt, a ten-year-old girl was apprenticed by the parish to Mrs Esther Hibner, to learn tambour work. All apprentices at the workshop were cruelly treated, starved and beaten, and Frances died. During the trial it was discovered that another child apprentice had died too. Hibner was executed; her daughter and their assistant Anne Robinson were found guilty of assault and imprisoned in the house of correction.21
Slaves Protest Against Slavery
The most effective protest from enslaved women and men in England was to simply run away. A majority of the people of African descent in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries courageously took their own freedom, some repeatedly escaping until they found a hiding place – often with white working-class families. A very few slaves were freed on arrival, as their owners believed that no legal state of slavery existed in England and employed them as servants, paying a wage. But when these owners wanted to return to their colonial homes, they often tried to take servants back with them – returning to legal slavery and enslaving them all over again. Many slaves fled to avoid return, and many accounts describe runaways and rescues from ships returning to the West Indies or the Americas. Some ex-slaves helped others to get away. The Daily Advertiser of 17 June 1743 recorded:
