Читать книгу The Representation of Business in English Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 19

The comparison of workers with slaves was highly charged in the year 1807, which saw the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. That had come about remarkably quickly following a campaign which really got going only twenty years before. Previously there had been isolated condemnation of slavery and the traffick in Africans which had been echoed in literature. Even John Dyer, whose poem The Fleece enthused about commerce, drew the line at the slave trade. Lawrence Sterne wrote a critique of the treatment of Africans by Europeans in the last volume of Tristram Shandy. While he was working on it he received a letter from Ignatius Sancho, the Duke of Montagu’s black butler. Ignatius wrote: “I am one of those people whom the illiberal and vulgar call a nigger.” He had read and admired Tristram Shandy and also Sterne’s Sermons. One sermon in particular, “Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life Considered,” had impressed him because of what he called a “truly affecting passage” on slavery. “Consider slavery—what it is,” Sterne observed in it, “how bitter a draught! and how many millions have been made to drink of it.” Sancho asked Sterne to write further on the subject, which “handled in your own manner, would ease the yoke of many, perhaps occasion a reformation throughout our islands.” Sterne obliged by including a passage in the ninth volume of Tristram Shandy in which Corporal Trim asks Uncle Toby, doubtingly, if a negro has a soul. Toby replies: “ ‘I suppose God would not leave him without one, any more than thee or me’ . . . ‘Why then, an’ please your honour, is a black wench to be used worse than a white one?’ ‘I can give no reason,’ said my uncle Toby. ‘Only,’ cried the Corporal, shaking his head ‘because she has no one to stand up for her.’ ‘’Tis that very thing, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘which recommends her to protection—and her brethren with her; ’tis the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now—where it may be hereafter, heaven knows.’ ”⁴⁰

“In 1776 Adam Smith wrote the economic death warrant for slavery,” observes David Shields in one of the few investigations of the literary response to the campaign to abolish slavery.

In a passage that became quasi-scriptural among abolitionists during the 1800s, Smith declared that “the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of all. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible.”⁴¹

Shields notes “the formation in the 1770s of a school of poets whose members included William Cowper, John Marjoribanks and Hannah More” who took up the cause of slaves. He also singles out James Field Stansfield’s The Guinea Voyage as “the rhetorical horizon of anti-slavery poetry.”⁴² In it Stansfield imagines the African being handed over to a slave ship.

Confin’d with chains, at length the hapless slave,

Plung’d in the darkness of the floating cave,

With horror sees the hatch-way close his sight—

His last hope leaves him with the parting light.

Historians have lately stressed the economic rather than the evangelical causes behind the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.⁴³ The literary response to the campaign, however, appealed more to the hearts than to the purses of readers in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.