Following the in depth conversations about Carlyle’s connections to slavery in class, Group Five decided to focus on the overall attitude Victorians displayed in regards to slavery in class. One person we focused on was Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1843-1880). Sarah was born a princess of the Egbado clan of the Yoruba people in Nigeria. She was kidnapped during a slave raid at the age of four, and then sent by King Gezo of Dahomey to Queen Victoria of England as a “gift.” She was then baptized. She met the queen in 1850, who was so struck by her intelligence that she determined that Sarah would be her goddaughter, and paid for her education at Palm Cottage and the Female Institution in Sierra Leone. With permission from the queen, Sarah married a British captain, and had three kids before dying of tuberculosis in 1880.
As a group, we began to see striking comparisons between the writings of Thomas Carlyle and the overall attitudes expressed by British Victorians such as Queen Victoria. While Queen Victoria chose to free Sarah from slavery, it was only because of what she thought were her own unique qualities, and not because of an overall acceptance or calls for emancipation. Additionally, Queen Victoria still appeared to pointedly distinguish Sarah and her children to some extent just as Carlyle did with people of color, writing the morning she died, “Saw poor Victoria Davies, my black godchild, who learnt this morning of the death of her dear mother.” Although Carlyle would use the good deeds of Africans as a comparison to shame the actions of the wealthy class, his overall view of those of African descent was that they were unworthy of equality. We found an article titled “Fearful Symmetry: Hypocrisy and Bigotry in Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse[s] on the Negro Question’”, that goes into detail on Carlyle’s disturbing views on slavery. It says that he viewed it “as a divinely mandated condition of humanity dueled intellectually with the forces who viewed Carlyle as great because he had recognized the universal value of Anglo-Saxon destiny as the foundation of the southern way of life.” He wrote several poems that further dehumanized slaves, as well as columns for the newspaper that would be called into question by critics who were attempting to promote equality.
Although there were people such as Carlyle in Victorian England that attempted to justify slavery, he had his fair share of critics on the part of liberal intellectuals. John Stuart Mill, for example, wrote a letter to the editor following a particularly outrageous column written by Carlyle. For Mill, Carlyle had done “the true work of the devil” for assuming that Africans were inferior, for lacking moral sentiment, for contending that the blacks of the West Indies should be “compelled to work,” for using terms such as “Quashee,” and overall for dehumanizing the downtrodden victims of imperial slavery (31, 25, 28). The article, however, pointed out that from a modern standpoint, not even Mill’s perspective holds up. Modern critic David Theo Goldberg believes that Mill’s professed outrage is hypocritical from a person who spent most of his working life promoting and extending the cause of Imperial Britain, especially in India. This is part of why it can be so difficult to get a full grasp of the situation from a modern lens.
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