Editorial Note: This review forms the first part of a pair by our reviewer. You can find a link to the second review at the end of this document.
Common wisdom holds that there are two primary reasons for the
longstanding peripherality of Robert Wedderburn to writing on Black
Romanticism. First is the "desperate poverty, rumbustious temper, and
unrepentant anticlericalism" (Hanley 154) that barred Wedderburn from a
respectable society that he himself bore no inclination to join. His
writing was therefore largely self-published and lacked the support of
wealthy white abolitionist benefactors. And second, until the 1990s,
scholars "had primarily understood [Wedderburn's] work and experiences
through a restrictively national framing--as a radical whose life could
be understood almost entirely with reference to British social history"
(186). Katey Castellano and Ryan Hanley, however, are writing in the
spirit of Shelby Johnson's recent call to center "Caribbean history in
our approaches to Wedderburn, whose career in London looms large in
critical assessments of his work" (365). Through their respective
monographs, the first ever to focus on Wedderburn directly, Castellano
and Hanley are not only working to end Wedderburn's peripherality in
Black Romantic studies. They are showing us what we've been missing all
along.
Hanley begins in medias res. We find Wedderburn on August
21, 1817, hoisted atop his friends' shoulders in the City of London
Tavern. From such lofty heights, he heckles the factory-owning social
reformer, Robert Owen, who is midway through a speech concerning "what
could be done to relieve Britain's distressed poor?" (1). Wedderburn is
kicked out of the tavern. But when he breaks back in, he joins Owen on
the stage and begins to speak about his mother and the horrors of
slavery. The scene provides an apt introduction to Wedderburn: he forces
his way into the limelight and lays down some bitter pills. In opening
with and continuing to emphasize Wedderburn's penchant for the
audacious, Hanley does what Vincent Carreta says it behoves the
biographer to do: to "identify and represent his or her subject's
character."
In a sprawling yet succinct critical biography of one of the most
overlooked insurgent actors of the Age of Revolution and Black British
writing, Hanley follows Wedderburn through his experiences on Jamaica's
plantations (Chapters 1 and 2); his exposures to the "grinding poverty
and the glaring injustices" (74) of London's poorest neighborhoods
(Chapters 3 and 4); his rise to notoriety as part of what Iain McCalman
has called London's "radical underworld" (Chapters 5 and 6); his
gruelling imprisonments in London (Chapter 7); his public disputes with
his half-brother over their shared parentage and corresponding right to
inheritance (Chapter 8); and, finally, his reckoning as an
"unrespectable" outcast in a post-Peterloo radical scene increasingly
concerned with respectability (Chapter 9). Throughout, Hanley stays in
close and respectful correspondence with Wedderburn's own literary
oeuvre, chiefly his abolitionist and radical periodical The Axe Laid
to the Root (1817), his "slave narrative" The Horrors of
Slavery (1823), and his final "Address to the Right Honourable Lord
Brougham and Vaux" (1831).
The biography is in three parts of three chapters each. Part 1
explores Wedderburn's ancestry drawing on stories from his own writing,
and supplementing them with fragmentary details from Jamaica's colonial
archives and the more thoroughly documented Wedderburn family history.
Hanley recounts the lives and practices of communality, resistance, and
meaning-making employed by Wedderburn's mother, Rosanna, and
obeah-practitioner grandmother, Talkee Amy. In doing so, Hanley brings
attention to what Saidiya Hartman identifies as the "acts of everyday
resistance" by enslaved women that informed Wedderburn's youth.
Importantly, he also affirms Wedderburn's maternal kin as inspirations
for Wedderburn's political commitments. To close Part 1, Hanley also
investigates the unlikely and consequential place of the Jacobite
uprising in the global history of slavery. When Wedderburn's Jacobite
grandfather was executed, his father and uncle, James and John, took
flight to Jamaica. Without the Jacobites' defeat, then, Wedderburn would
never have been born. Another contingency of that defeat was the
imbrication of the Wedderburn family in Joseph Knight v. John
Wedderburn--the case through which the unconstitutionality of
slavery was formally established in Scottish law. Thus, for Hanley,
Wedderburn's life further entangles the already entwined revolutionary
and legal traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hanley's tireless work in the archives is particularly compelling in
Parts 2 and 3, where he shifts his focus from the Caribbean slavery
archives to London newspaper records and Home Office spy reports. While
it has long been essential for historians to consult official
surveillance and censorship records in order to illuminate the
conditions under which ultra-radicals like Wedderburn operated, it has
also remained essential to "critically fumigate[]" those records to
avoid ceding narratives of resistance to the oppressors (Thompson 493).
Given Wedderburn's status as a racialized ultra-radical who was subject
to heightened surveillance, Hanley's project requires extra caution.
Hanley does an excellent job of not letting anxious
surveillance archives distort Wedderburn's lived experience.
Parts 2 and 3 turn to Wedderburn's representation in the periodicals
and private writings of his radical peers. Richard Carlile's
correspondence in The Republican, for example, "allows us to
follow [Wedderburn] inside Dorchester Gaol" (138) where he was, Carlile
explains, "confined to the Bridewell, or Ward of Solitude" and subjected
to singularly "abominable" treatment (qtd. 140). And in another gem of a
paragraph, involving a petulant Wedderburn stealing a whole room's worth
of furniture from his former associate Thomas Evans, Hanley weaves
together details from multiple Home Office and newspaper reports to
describe Wedderburn's split from the more respectable, reformer
contingent of the London radical scene. Rigorous and innovative,
Hanley's endeavours in notoriously unreliable archival territory enrich
our perception of Wedderburn's ever-changing place in a radical
underworld that was itself substantially altered by his engagements in
it. Sometimes the stories that crop up are outrageous. Other times they
are quite tragic. And other times still they are satisfyingly banal--a
matter of chronicling chronological events.
If a critique is to be mounted of Hanley's excellent work, it would
concern his narration of events set predominantly in Jamaica. One of
Hanley's main aims in his first two chapters is to affirm Rosanna and
Talkee Amy's roles in politicizing Wedderburn. One of the most
insightful moments in the entire biography arrives through this effort.
By speculating about Talkee Amy as a spiritual authority within her
enslaved community, Hanley fruitfully suggests how Black women in
Jamaica may have pursued individuation through insurgent Black
communality underneath but undiscerned by the surveilling gaze of the
plantation. Although here Hanley admirably refuses the totality of
slavery's dehumanizing efforts, elsewhere he perhaps too readily treats
the individual and communal practices of enslaved people as if they are
reducible to their antitheticality to slavery. For example, rather than
frame Rosanna's persistent acts of resistance as freedom practices in
their own right, Hanley describes her as being "determined to make
[James Wedderburn's] life as difficult as she possibly could" (30). And
despite opening Chapter 1 by conceding that "there was often something
pornographic about how violence against enslaved women was represented
by the British press" (19), only ten pages later Hanley describes the
sexual violence endured by Rosanna as "the originating
narrative in a shared family history" (28, emphasis added). This is not
to say that defiant responses to sexual exploitation were not central to
Wedderburn's recollection of Rosanna, so much as that they are among
many reasons Wedderburn celebrates her memory. He repeats one of these
reasons in both Horrors and Axe: it is to her
self-sacrifice he owes his own freedom. Rosanna made it "one of the
stipulations of" her own acquiescence to sale "that the child which she
then bore should be FREE....I was that child," says Wedderburn
(Horrors 48).
All in all, Hanley's biography is as he means it to be--a story about
the social, racial, political and economic fluctuations that made up
Wedderburn's world. Hanley should be praised for his sustained efforts
to map these intersecting paths. For Hanley, to study Wedderburn is to
study how abolition is one legacy of the Jacobite rebellion; how obeah
inspired the Cato Street Conspiracy; how "rebellious" (Horrors
59) enslaved matriarchs altered the emancipatory strategies of
London-based radicals; how pornographers in London published one of the
world's most searing abolitionist tracts. Hanley frequently reminds us
of the integrality of Wedderburn's maternal ancestors (Rosanna, Talkee
Amy, and Wedderburn's half-maroon half-sister Miss Elizabeth Campbell)
in a discourse typically dominated by the Wedderburn's white associates
in London (Thomas Spence, Thomas Evans, Robert Owen, Robert Carlile,
Charles Jennison, George Cannon, Jack Mitford, William Benbow, William
Dugdale, and William Wilberforce). This biography is and will remain an
invaluable resource for scholars of Wedderburn, British radicalism, and
the revolutionary Black Atlantic.
Alick McCallum is a PhD student in English at Rutgers University.
Works Cited
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