Conspicuous consumption: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing in the 1790s.

In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with

some critics arguing that a relatively benign "cultural racism" in the eighteenth century came to be supplanted by a more aggressive biological racism.(1) Patrick Brantlinger, for instance, characterizes late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing as more "positive" and "open-minded" about Africa and Africans than the racist and evolutionary accounts that were to follow in the wake of Victorian social science; in his view, the Victorians must bear responsibility for inventing the myth of Africa as the Dark Continent.(2) But while abolitionism may have taken its roots in philanthropy and a new-found enthusiasm for the universal rights of man, the many tracts it spawned contradict such a clear-cut distinction between the earlier and later periods. In its luridness and violence, late eighteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric points directly, for instance, to the systematic colonization of Africa; it is also rich in the sorts of phobias and bogeys more commonly associated with the later nineteenth century, such as miscegenation, cannibalism, and an essentialist stereotyping of sex and race, such as the perception of white woman's sexuality as a form of degenerate black sexuality.

The close association of woman in this earlier period with slavery, luxury, sexual license, and violent cruelty intersects problematically with the second area of oppositional rhetoric I wish to examine: women's protest writing. In seeking to capitalize upon fashionable anti-slavery rhetoric for their own political objectives, women only increased the general murkiness of abolitionist rhetoric, an effect most evident in their employment of the emotive but cliched analogy between their own disenfranchised lot and the plight of enslaved Africans. While these late eighteenth century women both anticipate and confirm Frederick Douglass's claim, in mid nineteenth-century America, that "the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman's cause," their writings also reveal clearly why any political link between white women and black people was doomed to be a bitter misalliance.(3) As bell hooks has argued, in an essay on the history of racism and feminism in America, the analogy between white women and blacks is a deeply conservative one, concerned to uphold and maintain the racial hierarchy that grants white women a higher status than black people.(4)

My first text is a lecture Coleridge delivered in Bristol in 1795, advertised in the Bristol Mercury as "A Lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance."(5) Although the fight for abolition of the trade had not yet been decisively lost, the impetus had slowed markedly from the heyday of protest in the period 1789-1792. That heyday is probably best illustrated by the immense popularity and circulation of Wedgwood's design of the manacled and supplicating slave, doubly captured by chains and by discourse, with the ventriloquized Christian motto floating above his head: "Am I not a man and a brother". Janus-faced, the motto stands curiously open to a positive or negative response, a reflection perhaps of the white racist spectre that often underlies sentimental ideals of equality between white and black: the spectre of too close a blood kinship, the term "brother" reading literally rather than figuratively in a nightmare confusion of the races through interracial sexy Nevertheless, thousands of seals and cameos with this design were sold or given away gratis; women wore it as pins in their hair, men sported the design on rings, on shirt-pins, or coat-buttons.

The waning of enthusiasm in the mid 1790s was principally caused by the reactionary climate of suspicion and fear generated by the Pitt government. By the time Coleridge made his somewhat belated contribution, abolitionism had begun to lose its respectability, and in some quarters, was even associated with jacobinism. In a daring jest at the end of his lecture, Coleridge flirts with that association between anti-slavery and revolutionism by enjoying, rhetorically, the dangers of the pro-slavers' too easy identification of England's labouring poor with the West Indian slaves. Although he does not mention the recent and bloody revolts on Santo Domingo and other West Indian islands, they clearly form the back-drop to his joking: