Professor Robert Burroughs

Critical assessments of Elizabeth Gaskell have tended to emphasise the regional and provincial aspects of her writing, but the scope of her influence extended across the globe. Building on theories of space and place, the contributors to this collection bring a variety of geographical, industrial, psychological, and spatial perspectives to bear on the vast range of Gaskell's literary output and on her place within the narrative of British letters and national identity. The advent of the railway and the increasing predominance of manufactory machinery reoriented the nation's physical and social countenance, but alongside the excitement of progress and industry was a sense of fear and loss manifested through an idealization of the country home, the pastoral retreat, and the agricultural south. In keeping with the theme of progress and change, the essays follow parallel narratives that acknowledge both the angst and nostalgia produced by industrial progress and the excitement and awe occasioned by the potential of the empire. Finally, the volume engages with adaptation and cultural performance, in keeping with the continuing importance of Gaskell in contemporary popular culture far beyond the historical and cultural environs of nineteenth-century Manchester.

This article explores the literary geographies through which Elizabeth Gaskell negotiates ethical and social questions in North and South (1854-55). Specifically, it examines the novel’s (dis)connecting of maritime and urban spaces, characters, concerns, and languages, as well as how gendered and class identities are forged within these spheres. The industrial-dispute plot of North and South is mirrored, in complex ways, by the sub-plot concerning Frederick Hale’s mutiny on the Orion. Heroic figures succeed by applying the lessons of seafaring craft which the novel’s naval personnel seem unable to compute, or to bring to bear upon the plot. The protagonist Margaret Hale’s absorption of these heroic traits also is complicated by the novel’s conception of the gendered limitations of a female protagonist. By focusing on the novel’s ambivalent explorations of seafaring and its relevance to life on dry land, this article reveals the occlusion of maritime work from the narrative economies that formulated the Victorian ‘condition of England’. It presents a complex case study of how the Victorian realist novel assigns weight and importance to certain terrestrial contexts of labour over maritime ones.

This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known black people’s experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or ‘Congo House’, at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism of the late-nineteenth-century civilising mission, the students were not simply the objects of British charity. They were also agents in a culture of evangelical humanitarianism. Some were fully absorbed in the civilising mission, becoming leading missionaries. Others adapted their experiences to new ends, participating in networks of pan-Africanism that questioned race prejudice and colonialism. In their negotiations of the challenges and opportunities at the heart of the empire, the students of Congo House reveal how the global currents of black history shaped the localised cultures of Victorian philanthropy. From racism to pan-Africanism, this study sheds new light on key issues in black British history.

I give an account of the development of church and humanitarian activity in Leopold II’s Congo Free State as it shaped the life of a Congo-born woman, Lena Clark. In her movements between Africa, Europe, and America, and in and out of mission service, Lena Clark’s life captures the motivations, frustrations and ironies of religious and humanitarian interventionism in the Congo. Circumstances surrounding her controversial departure from missionary service reveal pressures felt by Protestant missions in central Africa as locally based critics under public and political scrutiny. Lena Clark’s story reveals new questions on Protestant missions and humanitarian campaigning.

This book examines eyewitness travel reports of atrocities committed in European-funded slave regimes in the Congo Free State, Portuguese West Africa, and the Putumayo district of the Amazon rainforest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During this time, British explorers, missionaries, consuls, journalists, soldiers, and traders produced evidence of misrule in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, which they described their travel and witnessing of colonial violence in travelogues, ethnographic monographs, consular reports, diaries and letters, sketches, photography, and more. As well as bringing home to readers ongoing brutalities, eyewitness narratives contributed to debates on humanitarianism, trade, colonialism, and race and racial prejudice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In particular, whereas earlier antislavery travelers had tended to promote British imperial expansion as a remedy to slavery, travel texts produced for the three major humanitarian campaigns of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century expressed - and, indeed, gave rise to - changes in the perception of Britain as a nation for whom the protection of Africans remained paramount. Burroughs's study charts the emergence of a subversive eyewitness response in travel writing, which implicated Britons and British industries in the continuing existence of slave labor in regions formally ruled by other nations.

Travel writing about Central Africa in English reverberates with the language of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This essay considers how that canonical text, in shaping twentieth-century travellers’ understandings of Central Africa and the travel genre, also shapes literary critics’ understandings of the same subjects.

In his Memoirs of an Unfortunate Son of Thespis (1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan's School for Scandal that was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russell 104). As apocryphal as the encounter seems, it is not the only account of mariners rushing the early-nineteenth century stage to join in with the drama. In her analysis of these anecdotes Gillian Russell comments that though they may have been intended to depict the sailor “as naïve and unsophisticated, unable to make the distinction between fiction and reality. . . it is not surprising that the sailor should have disregarded the rules of mimesis and the distinction between stage and auditorium” (104), for the sailor's life lent itself to, and was structured by, theatricality. Service in “the theatres of war,” or more generally in the “wooden world” of the ship, demanded strict performance of custom and ritual in the forging of social identities and relations, not least of all in the ritualistic initiation ceremonies and corporal punishments that were enacted in front of the amassed audience of the crew (Russell 139–57; see Dening). At sea and in dock sailors entertained themselves with amateur theatricals. On shore, they were keen theatre-goers, and in auditoriums and elsewhere they played up to the characteristics of the sailor in the brazen assertion of an identity that was celebrated in stories, songs, and plays, but frequently also belittled, bemoaned, and victimized, the latter particularly while the press gangs were active.

Eyewitness accounts of voyages in slave ships seized as prizes during the Royal Navy's anti-slave-trade patrols were an important source of information and subject of discussion for abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century. In a close reading of the chaplain Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill's Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel (1844), this essay assesses representations of slave-ship prize journeys, and responses to these representations in Britain. It argues that because voyages of this kind provided uncomfortable reminders of the shortcomings of abolitionist policies, they were not readily incorporated into the dominant narrative that glorified Britain's antislavery movement.

This article explores the rhetorical comparison of naval sailors' exploitation to that of African slaves in pre- and early-Victorian discourses on naval reform. It is structured around an analysis of J.T. Haines's nautical melodrama My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), in which the hero, having been press-ganged by the navy, risks his life freeing enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage even though he considers himself a slave to his nation. This plot was both timely and provocative: first performed in the immediate aftermath of the illegalization of slavery in Britain's colonies, it dramatizes an analogy between slaves and sailors that was contested by campaigners for naval reform and their opponents. Ultimately, My Poll and My Partner Joe palliates radical commentary on sailors' rights, in its second and third acts, as the sailor patriotically celebrates his freedom in antithesis to African slavery. Rather than read its denouement simply as romantic escapism, I argue that it proposes resolutions to conflicts that had arisen in British understandings of slavery and freedom, and racial and national identity, as a result of the debate on naval reform. To researchers of imperial, humanitarian, and working-class cultures and identities of the nineteenth century, this article reveals the underlying importance of race and slavery to debates on maritime labour. It further highlights the complex, dialectical character of pre- and early-Victorian representations of sailors-on the stage and beyond it. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

In 1894, long before his famous humanitarian investigations in the Congo Free State and the Putumayo region of Amazonia, Roger Casement wrote four accounts of his travels in West Africa as an employee of the Niger Coast Protectorate administration. These manuscripts have regularly been overlooked in research of Casement. In a close reading of these texts, which combines contextual information with literary theories of travel writing, this essay gives insights into Casement's early development as a traveller and writer. It is argued that, rather than simply projecting pre-established imperialist or anti-imperialist attitudes, Casement's reports show a traveller negotiating his political outlook on empire in descriptions of the societies and cultures that he encounters.

May French Sheldon was one of a handful of travellers to the Congo Free State who denied the accuracy of other travellers’ reports of widespread atrocities in the colony. This article analyses how these travelling apologists wrote about themselves and their journeys in their pro-Congo reportage, and it considers the reception of that reportage among anti-Congo agitators in Britain. It finds that, to undermine the travelling apologists’ claims, British Congo reformers accentuated differences in the methods of travel used by pro- and anti-Congo travellers. They claimed that while the critics had undertaken rigorous, ‘authentic’ journeys, making close contact with peoples of the Congo River basin, the apologists had travelled in the superficial manner of tourists. This article thus reveals how the long-standing tourist/traveller dichotomy made its appearance in the debate on Congo atrocities, and discusses the broader significance of this for the understanding of travel writing from this context.

This book examines eyewitness travel reports of atrocities committed in European-funded slave regimes in the Congo Free State, Portuguese West Africa, and the Putumayo district of the Amazon rainforest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During this time, British explorers, missionaries, consuls, journalists, soldiers, and traders produced evidence of misrule in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, which they described their travel and witnessing of colonial violence in travelogues, ethnographic monographs, consular reports, diaries and letters, sketches, photography, and more. As well as bringing home to readers ongoing brutalities, eyewitness narratives contributed to debates on humanitarianism, trade, colonialism, and race and racial prejudice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In particular, whereas earlier antislavery travelers had tended to promote British imperial expansion as a remedy to slavery, travel texts produced for the three major humanitarian campaigns of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century expressed — and, indeed, gave rise to — changes in the perception of Britain as a nation for whom the protection of Africans remained paramount. Burroughs's study charts the emergence of a subversive eyewitness response in travel writing, which implicated Britons and British industries in the continuing existence of slave labor in regions formally ruled by other nations.

In hisMemoirs of anUnfortunate Son of Thespis (1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan's School for Scandal that was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russell 104). As apocryphal as the encounter seems, it is not the only account of mariners rushing the early-nineteenth century stage to join in with the drama. In her analysis of these anecdotes Gillian Russell comments that though they may have been intended to depict the sailor “as naïve and unsophisticated, unable to make the distinction between fiction and reality. . . it is not surprising that the sailor should have disregarded the rules of mimesis and the distinction between stage and auditorium” (104), for the sailor's life lent itself to, and was structured by, theatricality. Service in “the theatres of war,” or more generally in the “wooden world” of the ship, demanded strict performance of custom and ritual in the forging of social identities and relations, not least of all in the ritualistic initiation ceremonies and corporal punishments that were enacted in front of the amassed audience of the crew (Russell 139–57; see Dening). At sea and in dock sailors entertained themselves with amateur theatricals. On shore, they were keen theatre-goers, and in auditoriums and elsewhere they played up to the characteristics of the sailor in the brazen assertion of an identity that was celebrated in stories, songs, and plays, but frequently also belittled, bemoaned, and victimized, the latter particularly while the press gangs were active.

Gratitude was racialised in Victorian culture. Drawing on a wide historical framework, which takes in eighteenth-century proslavery arguments as well as twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourses, I explore how Victorian-era texts placed demands upon enslaved, formerly enslaved, and colonised peoples to feel thankful for their treatment as British imperial subjects. My article ranges over contexts and academic debates, and surveys nineteenth-century discourses, but it coheres around a case study concerning media reportage of the brief residence of a young West African, Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II, in Colwyn Bay, Wales, in 1893. In a contextual examination of the press reaction to Eyo’s decision to abandon his British schooling, this article draws attention to the implicit, submerged inequalities, exemplified in the demand for gratitude, through which Victorian Britain articulated the affective qualities of white hegemony.

Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, and the style is more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors providing a reflection on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, and the style is more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors providing a reflection on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

The volume draws on the concept of the 'keyword' as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text, 'Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society', in order to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing ...

The humanitarian movement against Leopold’s violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators. Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted. Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate, as such this is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history and humanitarian history.

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates.

This article utilises a recent discovery of a textual trace of black people’s self-representation in Edwardian Britain. It concerns an autograph book, currently kept in private hands, bearing entries by black students who attended the African Institute, Colwyn Bay, in around 1905. This short text speaks to the difficulty of accessing private writings and self-representations by black people who lived in Victorian- and Edwardian-era Britain. Though there exist substantial texts written by black people in late-nineteenth-century Britain, including texts of an autobiographical type (broadly defined), self-expressive writings by black people are unquestionably rare. In retracing black lives, scholars frequently piece together information from archival and print sources. The autograph book is itself a work of fragments, though given their autobiographical character they are both rare and valuable: quotations from Shakespeare, sketches, original verse, epigrams, and quotations from scripture. These writings afford some degree of insight into the personalities of the students, who are otherwise generally represented by onlookers in the primary and secondary literature of the Institute.

Rethinking Fiction of Empire and the British Press: Reception and Testimony in Britain, 1897-1917 critically examines Victorian and Edwardian Britain’s reception of fiction of empire. It identifies a gap in scholarship that surveys the relation between the British press, literature, and imperialism, which has paid little attention to the contribution that literary reviews gave to public discourse. The thesis argues that literary reviews were an important element of the culture of empire, alongside reporters, foreign correspondents and authors. The findings illustrate how fiction of empire was expected to relay reliable information, and was deployed as fictional testimony in the service of public debate. Through archival research of British newspapers, journals, and periodicals between 1897 and 1917, this thesis thematically analyses reviews of literature to uncover what attributes contemporary readers chose to discuss about fiction of empire. It is an interdisciplinary study that combines historical research with literary analysis. It comprises three qualitative case studies: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902), Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (1902). The cases were chosen to demonstrate three places of conflict where the British press was mobilised to influence the public on imperial matters: Congo Free State, South Africa, and Sudan. This thesis is the first of its kind to bring together and analyse comprehensively these texts and their reviews. The British public came in to contact with empire through narratives circulated by the press and popular literature. By examining reviews of literature, an intermediary position between journalism and literature, this thesis traces the rhetoric and representations that informed Victorian and Edwardian cultures. The way imperialism was conveyed to the British public on a day-to-day basis is revealed—and, the narratives that informed Britain’s perception of empire are laid bare.

The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade has puzzled nineteenth-century contemporaries and historians since, as the British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote. The assembled authors bridge the gap between ship and shore to reveal the motives, effects, and legacies of this campaign. As the first academic history of Britain’s campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in more than thirty years, the book gathers experts in history, literature, historical geography, museum studies, and the history of medicine to analyse naval suppression in light of recent work on slavery and empire. Three sections reveal the policies, experiences and representations of slave-trade suppression from the perspectives of metropolitan Britons, liberated Africans, black sailors, colonialists, and naval officers.

This study seeks to investigate the extent to which American literature is inherently Gothic. Its significance lies in shedding light on the relevance of history to Gothic literature, particularly in revealing the American Gothic's distinctiveness. The study focuses on the American Gothic mode in the works of three writers, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. It employs textual, historical, and psychological methodologies to demonstrate the convergence of these approaches in what constitutes the American Gothic. The study's primary finding is that all three writers used the Gothic mode for different purposes. Faulkner employed it to explore the Gothic nature of the “white psyche” and its struggle to come to terms with its past. On the other hand, Ellison used it to examine the inherently Gothic nature of the African-American experience and the struggle to be recognised in a society that denies one's existence. Morrison used it to give African-Americans a collective voice. The study also finds that all three writers used Gothic and non-realist writing techniques to parallel real-life Gothic events through the literary Gothic form. This created a “Gothic unreal” style for white writers, who portrayed how the “white psyche” creates psychological fears, alongside the “Gothic real” for African-American writers, where reality is shown to be just as true in reality as in the mind. These findings suggest that studying Gothic texts through a historical lens can provide fascinating insights into their inherent prejudices and traumas. This nuanced examination of the links between history and the Gothic mode highlights the importance of understanding how Gothic literature can serve as a vehicle for exploring complex social and cultural issues.