The Job of Witnessing: Writers and the Voices of the Oppressed
Created by Alexis Brown on Tue, 05/06/2025 - 20:16
Part of Group:
By Ford Madox Brown - http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/brown/brown_work.jpg.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4454264
This timeline follows writers who observed injustice, and those who experienced it. Through these events, I follow writers who felt they had a responsibility to call out systemic issues within the British Empire; to change them in any way they could, and to give voice to those who were denied rights, particularly women, children, and people of color. Because of this, I am highlighting the historical significance to the events outlined here, as it is imperative in British Literature because these seminal writers made empathy and social critique a signifant part of literature as a whole, and makes clear the job of a writer is to give a voice to the voiceless.
Timeline
Chronological table
| Date | Event | Created by | Associated Places | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1789 |
Olaudah Equiano Publishes “The Interesting Narrative”: The Abolition Debate
"File:Olaudah Equiano - Project Gutenberg eText 15399 (cropped).png." Wikimedia Commons. 29 Jul 2022, 00:01 UTC. 7 May 2025, 00:56 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Olaudah_Equiano_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_15399_(cropped).png&oldid=678503901>. Olaudah Equiano's 1789 memoir "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, Written by Himself" in its religious mysticism, brings light to the experience of an ensalved person in England, and tells the story of how he freed himself. It was particularly important because it was, written by himself, in his perspective. He lived through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and he turned his life into testimony. The book is political and personal and it mixes Enlightenment ideas with vivid scenes of violence and survival, and he made it impossible for British readers to ignore the reality of slavery. Equiano held up a mirror to the empire to show its flaws. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 11th ed., vol. D, W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. |
Alexis Brown | ||
| 1831 to 1833 |
Mary Prince, England’s First Black Woman Autobiographer
By Megalit - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93587181 (There are no existing images of her). In The History of Mary Prince, she talks about what it was actually like to be an enslaved woman in the British Caribbean, moving from place to place, working constantly, being beaten, and never having any control over her own life. One of the most powerful parts is when she describes working in the salt ponds, standing in saltwater for hours until it cracked her skin. She vividly describes her experience being enslaved, showing us what it felt like. She gave this testimony to Parliament, which means she wanted her story to lead to real change. The fact that she wrote it herself (with the help of a transcriber) means she was taking back control over how her life was represented, something enslaved people were rarely allowed to do. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. 11th ed., vol. D, W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. |
Alexis Brown | ||
| circa. 1845 |
Friedrich Engels: Labor, Oppression, and Uncovering Material Inequality
By Artistosteles - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88269700 In "The Great Towns" from "The Condition of the Working Class in England," Engels walks through the slums of industrial cities like Manchester, and points out the oppression of poverty. The overcrowded housing, no sanitation, people living on top of each other with no clean air or light. He calls out how the rich avoid these places entirely, and pretend not to see what’s happening. He’s showing how the Industrial Revolution wasn’t just about progress, but it created a system where poor people, especially working families, lived in awful conditions so the wealthy could live more luxuriously, while they were being made invisible. This fits my theme because Engels is using writing to make invisible suffering visible. He saw what was happening and sought to uncover the material consequences of such extreme poverty. He powerfully asserts, "The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not at all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy?" Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The VIctorian Age. 11th ed., vol. E, W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. |
Alexis Brown | ||
| circa. 1855 |
Caroline Norton Writes to the Queen: A History of Divorce
By George Frederic Watts - http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/6885, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=101126107 Caroline Norton's inspiration for writing to the queen came from her personal life; after leaving her husband, because of coverture, she had no access to her income. Her, along with all English women, did not have legal rights over their own children, money, or bodies, while husbands had full legal authority to do as they pleased, with no consequence. Women had very little autonomy within marriage. After surviving an abusive marriage, she started writing publicly about it. She sent letters to Queen Victoria pushing for legal reforms, and even though she wasn’t officially part of Parliament or the law, her voice still helped change things. This moment matters because it shows how writing can work as political pressure. Norton used her own experience to expose how the law treated women like property. Greenblatt, Stephen . The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 11th ed., vol. E, W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. |
Alexis Brown | ||
| 1929 |
Virginia Woolf Publishes a Room of One’s Own
By Unknown author - Harvard University library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36753866 Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. She was a self educated, curious, witty, and sexually liberated (bisexual) person. Although she was very accomplished she often dealt with bouts of depression, particularly after finishing a book. Woolf vehemently believed women's perspectives should be included in literature, education, and literary conversations. "A Room of One's Own," published in 1929, is an essay that critiques male centered academic institutions for oppressing and excluding women. Woolf advoated for the idea that literature should reflect an "androgynous mind" in order to reflect equality. Woolf tragically drowned herself in 1941 because the threat of Nazis invading England during World War II--her husband, Leonard Woolf was jewish. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. 11th ed., vol. F, W.W. Norton and Company, 2024. |
Alexis Brown | ||
| circa. 1995 |
Margaret Atwood’s Beauty Queen: Flipping Gender Perspectives
20 June 2022; Margaret Atwood, Author on the Centre stage, during the opening night of Collision 2022 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Collision via Sportsfile. Margaret Atwood's "Miss July Grows Older" certainly takes on a different tone than the other work I've covered in this project, and takes on more contemporary issues through quippy, witty language, but still does work to subvert gendered perspectives in literature. It is particularly clever for her to write the speaker as an aging, former beauty queen; she would have intimately known the isolation of desirability, and could clearly pinpoint the ways she could use her power to manipulate gazing eyes back, and speaker remembers being seen as an object, not a person. The fact that the speaker is reflecting on this from a distance gives her power back--"You no longer get what you see." Objectification of women is a form of oppression, and in this poem, she creates a personal and witty perspective, that is perhaps, surprising, unexpected, and even empowering. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. 11th ed., vol. F, W.W. Norton and Company, 2024. |
Alexis Brown |
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