Undisciplining Elizabeth Barrett Browning Dashboard
Participants
Description
"Destruction of the Roehampton Estate," Adolphe Duperly (1833); Portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London, 1889-90)
In the grand scope of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (hereafter EBB) poetic ouevre, five poems can be identified as addressing, whether overtly or obliquely, the ongoing issue of slavery. Each piece marks a particular moment in EBB's ideological trajectory, moving from her juvenilia, represented in “The African” (early 1820s) to her more mature pieces, such as the anonymously published "The Appeal" (1833), “The Runaway Slave of Pilgrim’s Point” (1848), “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” (1850), and “A Curse for a Nation” (1856). By contextualizing these particular pieces both within their respective historical moments and our own contemporary perspectives, this COVE edition seeks to explore the nuances of power relations inherent in ongoing issues of race, gender, and class, seen in both the dynamics of EBB, a white woman descended from a plantation-owning family, writing about the plight of enslaved people, and the broader system of racial inequity that persists into the present.
Galleries, Timelines, and Maps
Richard Barrett (1789-1839) was a cousin of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. Richard Barrett was a prominent political figure for much of his life, speaking in Britain's Parliament on behalf of the Jamaican legislature on matters concerning slavery and emancipation. Though he defended the interests of the slaveholders at the time of the Abolition Act (1833) and was himself the owner of two sugar plantations in St. James, he had a reputation for nonviolence towards the enslaved people who worked on the family's land and called for more humane practices by the masters. This reputation may have contributed to the sparing of at least two of the Barrett family's plantation houses, his own Greenwood Great House and Cinnamon Hill, owned by EBB's father, during... more
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's original manuscript of "The African" was completed in the early 1820s when EBB was in her early teens. Inspiration for the narrative poem came from her cousin, Richard Barrett, who owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. EBB kept Barrett's written account of an escaped slave, originally named Copperbottom, but altered the tone of the story significantly in her version.
Material sourced from Baylor's Armstrong Browning Library.
This map includes paratextual information about significant places that help to illuminate and contextualize Elizabeth Barrett Browning's anti-slavery poetry. Charting these locations situates EBB's work within the larger, globalized framework of her own family history, drawing direct connections to their centuries-long standing as wealthy plantation owners in the West Indies.
This timeline tracks key events in the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her anti-slavery poetry, and the fight for abolition across the British Empire and the United States. In doing so, it contextualizes EBB and her work within the scope of nineteenth-century sociopolitics and culture, charting historical moments of overlap and divergence between the two.
Individual Entries
Though construction began in 1734, the Cinnamon Hill great house, located in Jamaica's St. James Parish, wasn't completed until half a century later in 1784. Located on the hill behind the Cinnamon Hill sugar works, the house was built to stand against the dual threats of insurrection and hurricanes, its structure featuring an ocean-facing concrete butress called a "cutwind" that not only protected the house against the intense winds of the stormy season but included holes through which muskets could be shot. Economically associated with the Barrett family's Cornwall estate, Cinnamon Hill is consistently noted as producing sugar, rum, coffee, and pimento, with the occasional inclusion of cattle and land rental, and the precise number of enslaved people on the estate varies, with some years as low as 230 or as high as 573. Like Greenwood Great House and...
more