and advantages that metropolitan life offered. Having travelled via Liverpool from New York to London, Harriet Jacobs booked into her lodgings at the Adelaide Hotel and reflected that
for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.29
William Wells Brown marvelled in his autobiography at the capital’s teeming excitement: ‘If one wished to get jammed and pushed about, he need go no farther than Cheapside. But every thing of the kind is done with a degree of propriety in London, that would put the New Yorkers to blush.’30
Brown, like Douglass and Jacobs, encountered little colour prejudice in London. Sent here because American Abolitionists thought it expedient for the English to meet ‘some talented man of colour who should be a living lie to the doctrine of the inferiority of the African race’, he was given an enthusiastic reception at The Music Hall in Stone Street and was also elected – ‘as a mark of respect to his character’ – an honorary member of The Whittington Club whose other members included Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold.31 Brown was buoyed by such friendliness. It freed his tongue and made him more brash. Whilst visiting the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, he had an opportunity to compare English and American racial attitudes.
I was pleased to see such a goodly sprinkling of my own countrymen in the Exhibition – I mean coloured men and women – well-dressed, and moving about with their fairer brethren. This, some of our pro-slavery Americans did not seem to relish very well. There was no help for it. As I walked through the American part of the Crystal Palace, some of our Virginian neighbours eyed me closely and with jealous looks, especially as an English lady was leaning on my arm. But their sneering looks did not disturb me in the least. I remained the longer in their department, and criticized the bad appearance of their goods the more.32
One of Brown’s proudest moments in the capital was on the evening in 1851 when he joined runaway slaves, MPs and Anti-Slavery activists from both sides of the Atlantic to address a packed Hall of Commerce in the City of London where his call for Abolition in the US was greeted with deafening applause.33 Following the instant success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapters from which had been published in serial form throughout the summer and autumn of 1851, black speakers were even more of a prize draw on the capital’s lecture circuit. At Exeter Hall, in particular, they would recount their life experiences and display the scars and welts from slaveholder lashings before packed houses. Some were advised to tell their stories as simply as possible for fear that excessive eloquence would detract from their ‘authenticity’. Indeed, black speakers were often sandwiched between white orators who supplied what were purported to be more sophisticated political and theoretical perspectives.34
In the metropolis black people could also see in person those grand and penetrating thinkers who blithely dismissed them in print as savage and degenerate niggers. Returning from the Crystal Palace by bus, Brown caught sight of Thomas Carlyle who
wore upon his countenance a forbidding and disdainful form, that seemed to tell one that he thought himself better than those about him. His dress did not indicate a man of high rank; and had we been in America, I would have taken him for a Ohio farmer. [ … ] As a writer, Mr Carlyle is often monotonous and extravagant. He does not exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into importance, but generally takes commonplace thoughts and events, and tries to express them in stronger and statelier language than others.35
Though his resources were limited, Brown managed to range across more of the capital than most of the black seamen, students and musicians who flitted through London during the nineteenth century. He spent ten days sight-seeing in September 1850, with two of those days at the British Museum alone. He embraced both high and low culture – visiting the National Gallery and the Tower of London as well as applauding the Punch and Judy show in Exeter Street off the Strand. ‘No metropolis in the world presents such facilities as London for the reception of the Great Exhibition,’ he gushed. ‘Every one seems to feel that this great Capital of the world, is the fittest place whenever they might offer homage to the dignity of toil.’36
Wells Brown wasn’t the only black writer in the Victorian era to attack the ignorant prejudices of leading public figures. Perhaps the most heroic counterblast, almost completely unknown today, came from the pen of J.J. Thomas in his acid polemic Froudacity (1889). The target of his derision was the famous historian James Anthony Froude. A brilliant speaker whose lecture tours attracted huge audiences, a prolific journalist and a writer whose books, like those of his friend Thomas Carlyle, sold tens of thousands of copies, Froude rose to become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1892.
His work celebrated the buccaneering hardiness of English mariners and eulogized the Elizabethan age’s commercial entrepreneurialism, its pioneering individualism. His upbeat rhetoric struck a chord with Victorian audiences basking in the knowledge that maps were painted ever pinker; that with every passing decade the Empire was growing bigger, broader, faster. Froude also produced accounts of his voyages including, in 1888, a typically forthright volume entitled The English in the West Indies, which expressed his disgust about the islands becoming ‘nigger warrens’ and lapsing into barbarism.37
Out in Trinidad the book was read by a local schoolmaster called John Jacob Thomas. Born in 1840, he had spent most of his life in rickety classrooms trying to teach restless agricultural workers in return for little glory or pay. Along the way he had taught himself Greek, Latin, French and Spanish. More unusually, and without linguistic training, he learned Creole and in 1869 produced a groundbreaking book on the language, The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar. It won him, in 1873, election to the Philological Society.
Now, twenty years later, bedridden by rheumatism, with no institutional support and precious few resources, he wrote a devastating critique of the professor’s scholarship. He labelled Froude a ‘negrophobic political hobgoblin’ and accused him of methodological slackness (conversing chiefly with the Anglo-West Indian communities, from whose balcony windows he would gaze down on the sable throngs), lechery (lionizing black women, while claiming black men were truculent layabouts), and gross political naivety (he ridiculed Froude’s assertion that West Indian negroes enjoyed ‘no distinction of colour’ under British rule).38 In 1888 Thomas came to London to study at the British Museum. He was short of money and his health was still poor. A previous visit had had to be abandoned because of sickness. He lived in Guildford Street, off Russell Square, near enough to the library to be able to visit it each day in order to examine etymological texts unavailable in the Caribbean. He also polished his book on Froude only to discover that publishers feared it lacked commercial appeal and wanted him to raise his own subscription list. This he did. Shortly afterwards, in September 1889, he died of tuberculosis at King’s College Hospital.
Froudacity attracted scant attention when it first came out. It did little to topple the Oxford historian off his self-constructed pedestal. In that sense, but only in that sense, it was a failure. Now it reads as a heroic but doomed effort, well in advance of twentieth-century anti-colonialist historiography, to retard the flow of metropolitan propaganda about non-white people. That it was written by one enfeebled,
