Dr Lizzie Rogers examines the impact of the abolitionist cause on the age in which Jane Austen and her family lived
In October 1562, English merchant John Hawkins set sail from Plymouth for the West African coast. Having heard of the great profits to be made from capturing people there and selling them in the Caribbean, he filled his ships with enslaved Africans – and became the first known Briton to profit from the transatlantic slave trade. Over the following three centuries, some 12 million Africans were forcibly transported.
During Jane Austen’s lifetime, abolition and slavery became an incredibly important moral, political and social issue, intertwined with various aspects of life in Britain. Indeed, her father, Reverend George Austen, was co-trustee of a marriage settlement that included a responsibility for dispersing the property of a plantation and its profits.
Austen’s novels feature several allusions to slavery. In Mansfield Park, the wealthy Bertram family owns estates in Antigua, and the name of the titular country house is a nod to the first Earl of Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice from 1756 to 1788. He ruled in significant cases that helped promote the notion of the illegality of slavery in England. In 1772, he ruled that it was unlawful for Charles Stewart, who had purchased an African named James Somerset in Virginia and then brought him to England, to forcibly deport that man to slavery in the Americas. Somerset’s lawyer was Granville Sharp, an influential anti-slavery campaigner and scholar. Such rulings bolstered the abolition movement in a period marked by uprisings by enslaved people, such as the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture from 1791 to 1804, and the dynamic actions of campaigners such as Sharp.
FORCES FOR GOOD
Perhaps the best-known abolitionist was William Wilberforce, MP for Hull, who in 1787 began campaigning for the cause in Parliament. He was influenced by the writings of Thomas Clarkson, a prolific protester who travelled widely to gather information about the slave trade, and who undertook speaking tours to promote the abolitionist cause. In 1808, he published The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. Jane Austen remarked in an 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra that she was “much in love” with Clarkson’s writing. Their brother Henry was a delegate at the 1840 World
