Chapter 3 - Byron, Brougham, and the End of Slavery

Summary

At once a “burlesque” of literary forms including the historical novel and a satire of political “bigwigs,” Whitehall (1827) looked back at early nineteenth-century London from an imagined future.¹ But in contrast with many accounts of those decades then and since, Irish-born author William Maginn gave the abolition of slavery a crucial role in the politics of the period. The novel imagines a freed Jamaican man (and his enslaved servant) visiting the center of power, where concern about unrest in the West Indies has become palpable. “At that period,” the narration states, “the fermentation of popular sentiment in the Antillic Colonies was at its height,” while a veteran member of the Admiralty remarks that “the case is plain”: “Barbadoes [sic], Demerara, Jamaica herself, are on the eve of insurrection!” It was not “from the Caribbean colonies alone that the proud supremacy of the English tyranny was menaced,” but also the “millions” agitating nearer home.