Lona Manning's blog

CMP#119 "The Negro is Our Fellow Creature"

8/15/2022

Thanks to Debatenstein of Twitter for my new logo, "Side-eye Jane Austen"!

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here.

CMP#119 Representations of Black Georgians: Laugh When You Can

In my last two posts, I reviewed a forgotten 1812 novel about a Black man living in Georgian England.
British novelists, poets, and playwrights played an important role in the long struggle to end slavery. No-one living in the United Kingdom in the late 18th century could pretend not to notice the poems, novels, plays and essays which portrayed the cruelty and horror of the slave trade. Dramatic poems like “The Dying Negro” were intended to awaken the consciences and appeal to the emotions of British readers. A poem for children, written in the cadences of the Old Testament, associated the consolations of religion with the fight against slavery:

"Negro woman, who sittest pining in captivity,
and weepest over thy sick child;
though no one seeth thee, God seeth thee;
though no one pitieth thee, God pitieth thee: raise thy voice, forlorn and abandoned one;
call upon him from amidst thy bonds, for assuredly he will hear thee."

Naturally enough—since these poems were intended to raise empathy and spur people to action—these representations of enslaved persons emphasized their suffering and vulnerability. In the famous Wedgewood portrait “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” the enslaved man is pictured kneeling, raising up his shackled arms, pleading for help.
However, Georgian playwright Frederick Reynolds took a different approach—he used the vehicle of comedy, not tragedy, to stress the humanity of people of colour...

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CMP#117 Yamboo, or, the North American Slave

8/8/2022

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. I’ve also been blogging about now-obscure female authors of the long 18th century. For more, click "Authoresses" on the menu at right. Click here for the first in the series.

CMP#117 “Soon everybody forget poor black boy:” Hey, what about Yamboo?

Chawton House, the center for early women's writing and former home of Jane Austen's wealthy brother, has made a number of obscure novels available for study on their website. You would think that scholars would fall on a novel entitled Yamboo, or, the North American Slave, like a duck on a June bug. But no, they are too busy poring over Mansfield Park. Too bad there are no actual enslaved persons in Mansfield Park and slavery is never discussed, let alone condemned.
How about looking at an 1812 novel which actually has an enslaved person as the titular character? Yamboo's anti-slavery message is far more explicit than Mansfield Park and serves as yet another refutation of the notion that authors, particularly women authors, couldn't talk about slavery back then.
Leaving aside the literary merits of the book and focusing on its message, we can say this in favour of Yamboo:

The novel strongly asserts the titular character’s humanity.
It confronts the issues of racial as well as class prejudice.
Yamboo is portrayed as having agency; that is, he acts and is not merely acted upon...

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CMP#115 Clarissa: the Unromantic Heroine

7/11/2022

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Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. I’ve also been blogging about now-obscure female authors of the long 18th century. For more, click "authoresses" on the menu at right. Click here for the first in the series.

 CMP#115 "As scenes of courtship are truly uninteresting"

The many generous subscribers to Miss M.C. Squire’s first novel, The Beggar and His Benefactor (1809), must have wondered if they got their money’s worth. The book is only 120 pages long; it’s the barest sketch of a novel grafted onto a travelogue about Plymouth and Cornwall. For a novel of the long 18th century, it's singularly devoid of sentiment or sensation.
So why is Miss Squire my author of the week? Well, for one thing, even trite and second-rate novels give me food for thought about the opinions and preoccupations of Austen's era. I'm learning about attitudes toward the class system and relations between the sexes. And for another, I'd like to bring Miss Squire to the attention of scholars because Squire uses people of color to teach a moral lesson in her first novel and her second novel includes a narrative of the slave trade. But first, a bit about the plots of her two novels...

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CMP#113 Treading the Boards with Ann Ryley

6/30/2022

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Fanny took "up the volume which had been left on the table, and begin to acquaint herself with the play of which she had heard so much... she ran through it with an eagerness which was suspended only by intervals of astonishment... that it could be proposed and accepted in a private theatre! Agatha and Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other, so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins [Maria and Julia] could be aware of what they were engaging in... -- Fanny Price reading Lover's Vows in Mansfield Park

CMP#113 Fanny Fitz-York, part 5: Unexceptionable as to morals

Edmund Kean as Macbeth

In previous posts, I've looked at the forgotten novel Fanny Fitz York (1818) in terms of its plot, its female characters. and the moral and political opinions the characters express. In this post, we're going to the theatre and dealing with some other bits and pieces.
Lady Ann, the mother of the heroine, carefully safeguards her daughter's morals. When they are invited to take in a play, Lady Ann asks if the actors are any good, then asks: "And the piece-- is it a moral one?” When she is assured it is “Unexceptionable,” she decides to take a box. “The young folks no doubt will be highly gratified, and if, as you say, the play is unexceptionable, improved. The drama, under proper restrictions, would not merely be an innocent amusement, but a very high source of edification…”
It's not surprising that Anne Ryley has opinions about the theatre. Her husband, S.W. Ryley, was an itinerant actor and comedian, and she herself trod the boards as a young wife. No doubt the scenes described in Fanny Fitz-York are based on Ann Ryley's real experiences playing in front of rowdy Georgian audiences.
On this first trip to the theatre, young Fanny is enthralled by everything. She pays “close attention to the performance,” which draws the sarcastic attention of other theatre-goers, because “any attention to Shakespeare, or those whose acting is his brightest illustration, is an offence so barbarous, vulgar, and unfashionable, that it is universally rated a bore…”
Fanny and her friends go to the theatre and the opera frequently in Fanny Fitz-York, and some little incident always occurs. Author Ann Ryley has thoughts about noisy, inattentive theatre patrons...

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CMP#119 "The Negro is Our Fellow Creature"

CMP#117 Yamboo, or, the North American Slave

CMP#115 Clarissa: the Unromantic Heroine

CMP#113 Treading the Boards with Ann Ryley

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