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Sidelights on Universal Benevolence, 1789–1820
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
The impact of European habits and customs on the culture and structure of society of undeveloped peoples, particularly those of countries affected by the slave trade, has been the subject of intensive study by historians and sociologists. In fiction too, it has provided popular material at all levels. Now, young writers in Africa, South America and the West Indies are beginning to write on the subject to make their own experience coherent and significant. Although they have treated the theme in different ways according to thenown environments, and although their methods of approach have varied from the symbolic to the satiric, it is substantially the same. It deals with the complete dislocation of life in simple communities, either on account of the rape of their people and their resettlement in exile, or to the insidious destruction of a way of life by the imposition of alien, and inferior, modes of thought and conduct.
- Type
- Cultural Idealism
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1967
References
1 The two attitudes may be seen in (a) the poetry of Senghor, L. S. and the comments on it in the foreword to his Anthology, 1948Google Scholar, by Jean-Paul Sartre, and (b) such novels as Achebe, No Longer at Ease, or T. S. Aluko, One Man One Matchet.
2 Jacobson, Dan in an article (Commonwealth Literature) in the New Statesman, 29 January 1965Google Scholar.
3 In his comments on the Government campaign to suppress allegedly seditious publications, a campaign which led to the Gagging Act and the Six Acts, Francis Place speaks of the comprehensiveness of public knowledge, Place Papers, Additional MSS. 27809, 46.
4 Home Office Papers, Section, 40.
5 The system of offering works split up into “numbers”. An example may be seen in the method of Alderman Kelly who divided the Bible into 170 lots and employed hawkers to sell them at £5 a set. He sold 80,000. After substracting from the £400,000 gross that he received, £200,000 for wages and £20,000 for paper tax, he still made £200,000.
6 The Library. Lines 91–92.
7 Spence; twice sent to gaol for selling allegedly seditious pamphlets in Charing Cross Road.
8 An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, 1728Google Scholar.
9 A treatise of Human Nature. Bk. Ill, Pt. II, Section 1, p. 401.
10 For typical popular statements of the Deteriorationist view, see The London Magazine, Oct., 1756Google Scholar, Vol. 25, and The Lounger, 1787Google Scholar, Vol. 1, No. 19.
11 Zo-onomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 1754–6Google Scholar.
12 Vol. Ill, p. 198 et seq.
13 Good accounts of Utopias in Africa or America or the West Indies may be found in: Smith, Charlotte, The Manor House; Anon., The School for Fathers; or The Victim of a Curse (1788)Google Scholar; The Sincere Huron, trans, from Voltaire, (1802)Google Scholar; Anon., Ariana and Walter (1815)Google Scholar; Dallas, R. C., The Knights (1808)Google Scholar.
14 One of the best examples occurs in Bage, R., Hermsprong or Man As He is Not (1796)Google Scholar.
15 A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791)Google Scholar.
16 See Dr. Moore, John, Zeluco (1789)Google Scholar.
17 As for instance, Miss Tropic in Hawkins, L. M., The Countess and Gertrude (1811)Google Scholar.
18 He claimed to be the accredited agent of the King of Haiti who had sent him to t ry to induce some writers and artists to settle on the island. He accepted specimens of work on which to offer direct invitations. He published a work called Haitian Papers: By Authority. London society lionised him; Wilberforce took an interest in him. After about six months, he disappeared and his identity was never discovered.
19 Published in 1805. Others were: Dallas, R. C., Perceval: or Nature Vindicated (1801)Google Scholar; Davies, J., The First Settlers in Virginia (1806)Google Scholar; Imlay, G., The Emigrants or the History of an Expatriated family (1793)Google Scholar.
20 Mrs. Mackenzie, M. J., Geraldine (1820)Google Scholar.
21 Vol. I, 1807.
22 Lathom, F., Very Strange but Very True (1803)Google Scholar.
23 Published 1805. A Flim Flam is a lie or “tall” story.
24 See Memoirs of Capt. Crowe; Observations from the Windward Coast (1807)Google Scholar. Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade summarises the writings on this topic.
25 Published in 1789. See Vol. I, pp. 147–8, pp. 123–150, p. 379. See also Edward (1796), Chapter 16, p. 153, Chap. 17, p. 159, Chap. 14, p. 127.
26 J. Beaufort (1801).