This study considers the operations of slavery and of abolition propaganda on the thought and literature of England from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Incorporating materials ranging from canonical literatures to the lowest form of street publication, Marcus Wood writes from the conviction that slavery was, and still is, a dilemma for everyone in England, and seeks to explain why English society has constructed Atlantic slavery in the way it has.

• List of plates


• Introduction


• 1: Slavery, testimony, propaganda: John Newton, William Cowper, and compulsive confession


• 2: Slavery, empathy, and pornography in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam


• 3: William Cobbett, John Thelwall radicalism, racism, and slavery


• 4: Slavery and Romantic poetry


• 5: 'Born to be a destroyer of slavery': Harriet Martineau fixing slavery and slavery as a fix


• 6: Canons to the right of them and canons to the left of them: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and memorial subversions of slavery


• 7: The anatomy of bigotry: Carlyle, Ruskin slavery, and the new language of race


• Conclusion


• Bibliography