Abolition Poetry, National Identity, and Religion: The Case of Peter Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona
Tomko, Michael
The Eighteenth Century, Volume 48, Number 1, Spring 2007
Abstract
British antislavery poetry spoke with two voices: one seeking to liberate enslaved Africans, and one struggling to maintain a national movement that cultural historian David Turley has described as an uneasy allegiance divided like English society as a whole. So even though eighteenth-century abolitionism appealed to cosmopolitan benevolence for the enslaved, Linda Colley has argued that it also helped forge a “Britishness” complicit with national and imperial domination. Critics such as Moira Ferguson, Tim Burke, and Alan Richardson have investigated how this dual agenda in abolitionist literature shaped cultural models and popular understandings of race, class, gender, and national identity. Ferguson has shown that “in order to successfully propagandize and gain support, white British women writers felt they had to fashion verse in keeping with campaign demands”; these nationalist demands often entailed not only the subordinating representation of Africans as “unproblematized, unvoiced, unthinking, and unnamed” victims but also the promotion of conformist positions on gender and imperialism. Likewise, Burke and Richardson have critiqued an incipient racialism that distorted abolitionist literature by working-class and women writers from Liverpool and Bristol, respectively. These reconsiderations have complicated our understanding of abolitionist literature by showing the ideological ambivalence of marginalized writers negotiating the pressures of nation and empire as well as the interrelated formal complexity of their often neglected works.
This essay expands this revision of abolitionist culture to discuss religious identity, a particularly important but also potentially fractious element of an abolition movement that brought together mainstream Anglicans, nonconformist dissenters, and evangelicals. To elucidate this tense interaction of religion, ideology, and aesthetics, I will focus on The Wrongs of Almoona, or the African’s Revenge (1788), published in Liverpool anonymously under the pseudonym “A Friend to All Mankind.”
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