The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  8 Numbers 12:1; Petronius, The Satyricon, chap. 102. Prejudice is certainly represented, however, since Giton objects, ‘We can’t make our lips so hideously thick, can we? We can’t kink our hair with a curling-iron, can we?’

  9 On all the topics in this paragraph, see Winthrop D. Jordan’s excellently indexed White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York, 1977).

  10 On Islamic slavery and the Arab crows see especially Bernard Lewis, ‘The Crows of the Arabs’, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, ed. H. L. Gates Jr (Chicago, IL, 1986), pp. 107–16.

  11 See Jordan, White over Black, p. 6.

  12 Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Book VI, chap. 10, ‘Of the Blackness of Negroes’.

  13 On Noah, Ham and Canaan, Genesis 9:21–7; Peter Heylyn is quoted in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), p. 143; for Jeremy Taylor and Sir Edward Coke, see Jordan, White over Black, p. 54.

  14 On debasement see especially Jordan, White over Black, pp. 24–8; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), Query 14, ‘Laws’, final paragraph (before table of punishments).

  15 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789), chap. 2. Though densely informed, Equiano’s Narrative may be in part fictional. Possibly he was born in America and Africanized his origins to assist the success of his book and/or of his active campaigning against the slave trade. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, GA, 2005), and also Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, The Igbo Roots Of Olaudah Equiano: An Anthropological Research (Owerri, 1989).

  16 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Edinburgh, 1759), Part V, chap. 2; James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1980), p. 876.

  17 David Hume, footnote added in 1753 to his essay ‘Of National Character’ (1748), The Philosophical Works of David Hume (Bristol, 1996), vol. III, p. 228; Herder’s remarks, from his Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanität (1797) and his Philosophieder Geschichte der Menschheit (1784) are quoted by Robert Palter in ‘Eighteenth-century Historiography in Black Athena’, in Black Athena Revisited, ed. M. R. Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), p. 373.

  18 Johnson, ‘An Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain’, The Literary Magazine, 1 (London, 1758); Cowper, The Task (London, 1785), Book IV, ll. 28–30.

  19 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London, 1871; in facsimile, Princeton, NJ, 1981), Part I, chap. 6, p. 201.

  20 C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, The Female Offender (New York, 1895), ‘phenomena of atavism’, p. 124; ‘obsessive obesity of prostitutes’, p. 113; ‘Hottentot, African’, p. 114; ‘to kill’, p. 171.

  21 Benjamin Rush, ‘Observations Intended to Favour a Supposition that the Black Color (As It Is Called) of the Negroes is Derived from the Leprosy’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. IV (1789), pp. 289–97.

  22 See Sander L. Gilman, ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-century Art, Medicine, and Literature’, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, ed. Gates, pp. 223–57.

  23 Mungo Park, The Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa (New York, 1858), ‘remarkably black’, chap. 5, ‘black and deep’, chap. 9.

  24 On the perception and visual illustration of Africa and Africans, see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent’, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, ed. Gates, pp. 185–222.

  25 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd edn (London, 1874), chap. 7, ‘Of the Formation of the Races of Man’.

  26 On the changing understanding of ‘race’, see especially C. Loring Brace, D. P. Tracer, L. A. Yaroch, J. Rob, K. Brandt and A. R. Nelson, ‘Clines and Clusters versus ‘Race’: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 36 (1993), pp. 1–31.

  27 Sir Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone [1872], chap. 7, pp. 179–80 (Vercelli, 2006).

  28 For ‘The Light and the Truth of Slavery, Aaron’s History’ [1845] and ‘The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen’ [1833] see http://docsouth.unc.edu.

  29 For The Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson [1857] see http://docsouth.unc.edu.

  30 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. C. L. Markman (London, 1986), especially pp. 3, 5, 116, 86, 95, 106, 108.

  31 Ibid., pp. 5, 147, 7.

  32 On colour symbolism among the peoples of the lower Congo, see especially Anita Jacobson-Widding, Red, White and Black as a Mode of Thought (Stockholm, 1979).

  33 On the ‘Black Stone’ of the White Fathers see for instance White Fathers White Sister, 354 (October–November 2000), 21; also Jean-Philippe Chippaux, Ismaila Diédhiou and Roberto Stock, ‘Étude de l’action de la pierre noire sur l’envenimation expérimentale’ (July–September 2007), available at www.jle.com. In addition to Jacobson-Widding, Red, White and Black, see James Faris, Nuba Personal Art (London, 1972); Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1967), especially pp. 59ff, ‘Colour Classification in Ndembu Ritual: A Problem of Primitive Classification’; Alfonso Ortiz, The Tawa World (London, 1969).

  34 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (London, 2001), pp. 251–5.

  35 Biographical information about Senghor, the French texts and the English translations of them are drawn principally from Sylvia Washington Bâ, The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton, NJ, 1973): ‘Black Woman’, pp. 132, 190; black milk, pp. 88, 250; black blood, p. 251; ‘emotion is black’, p. 75; ‘une negresse blonde’, p. 82; Paris snow, p. 50; ‘nuit diamantine’, p. 84; ‘mines d’uranium’, p. 50.

  EIGHT: Black in the Enlightenment

  1 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1781), vol. III, chap. 31, 2nd paragraph; William Cowper, The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782), stanza 6. For the earlier point about Louis XIV and dancing, I am grateful to Professor Peter Burke.

  2 Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 148, 156.

  3 Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th corrected edn (London, 1730), Book I, Part IV, Observation 5, p. 326; Book I, Part I, Proposition I, Experiment I, p. 21; Book II, Part III, Proposition VII, ‘for the production of black’, p. 260.

  4 Newton, Book II, Part III, Proposition VII, ‘for the production of black’.

  5 Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (London, 1664), Part the Second, ‘Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness’, chap. 2, section, 2, p. 119.

  6 Ibid., pp. 127, 130.

  7 The medical details are from a correspondent of Priestley’s, Thomas Percival MD, whose letter to Priestley is reprinted as item Number III in the Appendix to Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2nd edn (London, 1775).

  8 See, in Pepys’s diary, the entries for 8, 15 and 17 October 1666.

  9 Samuel Richardson, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, letter 24. The blackening of the teeth originated in South Asia, and in twelfth-century Japan was practised by noblemen and samurai; by the eighteenth century, the practice was limited to women.

  10 Pepys, diary entry for 12 June 1663.

  11 Pepys, diary entry for 18 February 1667.

  12 On the history of the London masquerades, see especially Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford, CA, 1986), pp. 1–51.

  13 Andrew Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1681), ‘The Gallery’, stanza 2.

  14 See in William Blake’s Poetical Sketches (1783), ‘Fresh from the dewy hill’ (‘But that sweet village, / where my black-eyed maid / Closes her eyes in sleep’, stanza 5) and ‘When early morn walks forth in sobery grey’ (‘to my black-eyed maid I haste away’, line 2), and in
Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24) the Romagnole, Canto IV; ‘some female head . . . presumes / To thrust its black eyes through the door’, Canto V; ‘Mahomet . . . Who only saw the black-eyed girls in green’, Canto VIII; ‘black-eyed Sal’, Canto XI; ‘whether black or blue’, Canto XIII; ‘her black, bright, downcast, yet espiegle eye’, Canto XVI.

  15 See Fanny Burney, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), chap. 3, ‘A Masquerade’.

  16 Edward Young, The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts (1742–5), ‘dreadful masquerader . . . devours’, Night Fifth, ll. 860–81;

  17 Young, Night Thoughts, ‘sable goddess’, Night First, l. 18; ‘How populous’, Night First, l. 116; Robert Blair, ‘The Grave’ (1743), ll. 28–40.

  NINE: Britain’s Black Century

  1 George Routledge, Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette (London, 1860), Etiquette for Gentlemen, chap. 7, ‘Dress’; Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds [1872], chap. 28, ‘Mr Dove in His Chambers’, p. 294 (Harmondsworth, 2004).

  2 Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now [1875], chap. 4, ‘Madame Melmotte’s Ball’, p. 33 (Harmondsworth, 1994); Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, Longman’s Magazine, 9 (July 1883), p. 258.

  3 Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, The New Crusade (London, 1847), chap. 1; Catherine Gore (Mrs Gore), The Banker’s Wife; or, Court and City, a Novel (London, 1843), vol. II, chap. 2, p. 74.

  4 Dinah Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (London, 1856), chap. 30; Charlotte Bronte, Shirley [1849], chap. 25, p. 417 (Harmondsworth, 2006); Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London, 1861), ‘Duties of the Laundry-maid’, in chap. 41, ‘Domestic Servants’, section 2383.

  5 Beeton, The Book of Household Management, ‘In Paying Visits of Condolence’ in chap. 1, ‘The Mistress’, section 30; Sarah Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London, 1839), p. 321.

  6 Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now [1875], chap. 26, pp. 202ff (Harmondsworth, 1994). On black and democracy see p. 243ff later in this chapter.

  7 Routledge, Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette, Etiquette for Ladies, chap. 7, ‘Dress’.

  8 Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (London, 1869), pp. 116, 166, 191.

  9 Beeton, The Book of Household Management, ‘Duties of the Coach-Man, Groom and Stable-Boy’, in chap. 41, ‘Domestic Servants’, section 2220.

  10 See Simon Metcalf and Eric Turner, ‘The Conservation of a c. 1867 Cast Iron Hat Stand: A Dresser Design and Original Coalbrookdale Paint Scheme Revealed’, DAS The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present, 26, at www.decorativeartssociety.org.uk.

  11 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, p. 236.

  12 John Ruskin, Elements of Drawing (London, 1857), p. 232; Letter VIII, ‘Of Colour and Composition’, Section C, c.

  13 The process of mezzotint was invented in the 1640s by the German artist Ludwig von Siegen, as a way of adding tone to a plate without the use of lines. It quickly travelled to England, where Samuel Pepys noted on 5 November 1665, ‘Made a visit to Mr Evelyn [John Evelyn, his friend and fellow-diarist], who . . . showed me . . . the whole secret of mezzo-tinto and the manner of it, which is very pretty, and good things done with it.’

  14 The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and Their Applications to the Arts, trans. Charles Martel, 2nd edn (London, 1855), uniforms, p. 243; effect on skin colour, p. 251; colours for dark skins, pp. 256ff.

  15 Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, translated from the Third German Edition, ed. James P. C. Southall (Menasha, WI, 1924), vol. II, p. 131; chap. 20, ‘The Compound Colours’.

  16 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London, 1840, reprinted in facsimile Cambridge, MA, 1970): Newton’s castle, pp. xliiff; ‘the dark nature of colour’, p. 275 (para. 694). Cf. ‘Colour itself is a degree of darkness’, p. 31 (Para. 69), ‘shadow is the proper element of colour’, p. 236 (para. 591), ‘each colour, in its lightest state, is a dark’, p. 277 (para. 699). Goethe’s general view of blackness is qualified by his translator (who is not the Charles Eastlake who wrote Hints on Household Taste, but his uncle, who was also a painter and was first Keeper of London’s National Gallery). See Eastlake’s ‘Note U’ (pp. 398–9): ‘the cold nature of black and its affinity to blue is assumed by the author throughout . . . but in many fine pictures, intense black seems . . . the last effect of heat, and in accompanying crimson and orange may be said rather to present a difference of degree than a difference of kind.’ Eastlake’s ‘Notes’ remain a valuable corrective to the narrow parts of Goethe’s colour theory – which Eastlake himself still found, on the subject of colour-harmonies, a more valuable text for artists to read than the actual Opticks of Newton.

  17 W. M. Thackeray, ‘May Gambols; or, Titmarsh on the Picture Galleries’, in Ballads and Miscellanies (London, 1899), XIII, pp. 419–45.

  18 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1861), vol. III, p. 238.

  19 John Ruskin, The Ethics of Dust (Rockville, MD, 2008), p. 137, Lecture X, ‘The Crystal Rest’; Thomas Carlyle, Latter-day Pamphlets (Cambridge, 1898, in facsimile 2010), 37 (‘The Present Time’, 1 February 1850).

  20 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (London, 1845): metal-workers, Book III, chap. 4; miners, Book III, chap. 1. It should be noted that the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, which followed the graphic report of the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) in 1842, prohibited the employment of boys under ten and all females in work underground.

  21 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) [Leipzig, 1844], trans. Florence Kelley Wischnedwsky (New York, 1887, London, 1891, reprinted 1943), black spittle, p. 247; black mutinous discontent, p. 117 (Engels cites Chartism, p. 34); the ‘Rebecca’ disturbances, p. 271; Charlotte Brontë, Shirley [1849], see chap. 8, ‘Noah and Moses’, pp. 121ff (Harmondsworth, 2006).

  22 Blackened brick, p. 39; Long Millgate, p. 50; Ashton-under-Lyne, p. 44; Bradford, p. 40; the Medlock, p. 59; the Aire, p. 39; the Irk, pp. 49–50.

  23 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. III, tall chimneys vomiting, p. 302; the original hue, p. 338.

  24 Black all the way, p. 313; once black, p. 333; a beautiful suit of black, p. 419; fustian and corduroy, p. 379; squalor and wretchedness, p. 313.

  25 William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (from the Pickering Manuscript, 1803?), ll. 123–4.

  26 Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby [1863], chap. 1, p. 14 (Harmondsworth, 2008).

  27 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London, 1830), pp. 494–5 (Northern Tour, ‘Sheffield, 31st January 1830’).

  28 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1840–41), chaps 44 and 45; Dickens, Hard Times [1854], Book the First, chap. 5, p. 27 (Harmondsworth, 2003).

  29 Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, chap. 45, p. 340; Dickens, Hard Times, Book the First, chap. 5, p. 27.

  30 In Barnaby Rudge (London, 1841) the crackling fire, the army of devils and the demon labours are in chap. 55; the legion of devils in chap. 68; the demon heads and savage eyes in chap. 50 and Lucifer among the devils in chap. 65; in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London, 1859), see Book the Third, V, ‘The Wood-Sawyer’.

  31 The quotations from Bleak House (London, 1852–3) are all from chap. 63, ‘Steel and Iron’; see Little Dorrit [1855–7], Book the First, chap. 23, ‘Machinery in Motion’, p. 285 (Harmondsworth, 2012).

  32 Goethe, Theory of Colours, p. 329 (para. 843).

  33 On the colour changes of the French Revolution, see Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (London, 1988). See Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’, chap. 18, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (London, 1972), p. 105. Carlyle, Latter-day Pamphlets, p. 9 (‘The Present Time’, 1 February 1850).

  34 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, p. 236; Charles Reade, Hard Cash (originally Very Hard Cash, London, 1863) (Fairfield, G
los., 2009), chap. 41, p. 400.

  35 Bishop Edmund Gibson, ‘To the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations Abroad’, Two Letters of the Bishop of London (London, 1727), p. 11.

  36 George Berkeley (then Dean of Derry), A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in Our Foreign Plantations, and for converting the Savage Americans to Christianity by a College to be erected in the Summer islands (London, 1725), from The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1948–57), chap. 7, p. 346.

  37 See Robert Currie, Methodism Divided: A Study in the Sociology of Ecumenicalism (London, 1968), p. 165.

  38 Dickens, Hard Times, Book the Third, chap. 6, p. 265.

  39 Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du Siècle (Paris, 1880), p. 11; Honoré de Balzac, ‘Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du présent temps’, La Mode, February–April 1830; for Eastlake, see Hints on Household Taste, p. 236; for Mayhew, see John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London, 1971), p. 63.

  40 W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London, 1847–8), chap. 32, last sentence.

  41 The account of Wellington’s funeral is drawn chiefly from Joseph Drew, A Biographical Sketch of the Military and Political Career of the Duke of Wellington, including the most interesting particulars of His Death, Lying in State and Public Funeral (Weymouth, 1852): ‘strength and muscle’, p. 24; ‘polished mahogany’, p. 25; ‘fashion of royalty’, p. 28; ‘black horses’, pp. 46–7; ‘sentiments sublimer’, p. 43.