307. Austen vs Brontë: Unmasking Slavery Heiresses

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpur. So we're doing this series on empire and literature. And one of the things that's really striking, Willie, is actually bits of empire that are completely absent from literature. And, you know, that's a real thing for you, isn't it? Well, not just bits. It's extraordinary because over the course of 300 years, the British kind of invaded almost everywhere. I've just checked and there are only 22 countries in the world that the British didn't invade. so much so that freedom from British rule is the single most popular secular festival anywhere in the world.

1:05Every six days somewhere celebrates freedom from British rule. Independence Day. Independence Day. And yeah, if you look in British, you know, domestic English literature of the period, it's almost completely absent to a weird extent, looking from our point of view in the present. There are hints of it in the back of Thackeray, there's E.M. Forster, there's a little bit of Kipling, echoes of it at the background of Sherlock Holmes. But most novels of the period do not deal with it. There is a small body that do that and they're analysed in post-colonial literature classes. And it's extraordinary how little there is, I always think.

1:41We're going to look at a specific period. It's sort of the cusp between the Georgian and Victorian era. And this is a time when greats, literary greats like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte wrote. And if you've done English literature anywhere in the world, they will almost certainly have been on your curriculum. But what you don't get is the sense that they were writing at a time when slavery was one of the major drivers of the economy and also when the abolitionists were starting to really amplify their voices against it. Now, these are the connections we're going to explore in this episode.

2:18If you've listened to our slavery series, you'll know the Georgian period saw people like Wilberforce and Equiano, who was campaigning to end the transatlantic slave trade. But actually, just as William said, in the literature itself, it's kind of a background. It's almost like a passing landscape of big buildings. And, you know, so-and-so's uncle is going off overseas to the Caribbean, but no explanation as to why so-and-so's uncle with a very big house is going to the Caribbean. So I think, William, shall we remind people who haven't listened to our slavery series, go back and listen. What have we been doing?

2:50But in a nutshell, Jill, just sum up what the Georgian era was like when it came to slavery. It's something that is not happening very clearly in Britain. It's something that's happening in the room next door we're about to discover. It does leak into Britain. But the great majority of enslaved people are kept out of sight in the Caribbean slave colonies. And Britain dominated the transatlantic slave trade, transporting millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean as laborers for colonial plantations. And this participation generated immense wealth for the British merchant classes and financiers, funding the construction of whole cities like Bath and Liverpool and cultural institutions like, I don't know, the Bristol Old Vic.

3:38and the period also saw the rise, of course, of the abolitionist movement, partly driven by formerly enslaved people like Equiano. So yes, go back to episode 52 to listen to our series on transatlantic slavery. Yeah, I mean, although slavery was technically not allowed in England, it was practiced because you did see, actually, in sort of the drawing rooms of England, servants from the West Indies, sometimes even branded and collared in Britain. You'll remember from, if you did hear our slavery series, that there was a 1772 case that prevented masters from forcing slaves out of England, but it didn't actually abolish slavery itself.

4:22That was the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Then you had another act, sort of two waves of abolition, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. So this is the backdrop against which giants of British literary establishment, the giants of British literary establishment, wrote some of their most enduring works. And now we can introduce our guest who has been sati-notting. Our very special guest today is the brilliant Miranda Kaufman, author of Black Tudors. That was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef al-Rodan Prize and the Wolfson Prize. And now she's got this freshly baked Heiresses, Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery.

5:03And let me tell you, it is an absolute must read. It's so fascinating. So many stories. I thought I knew about the period and she's opened my eyes to so much more. Welcome, Miranda. Hello. Hello. Now, look, for the purposes of our podcast, your book is called Heiresses. What is an heiress? How do you define what an heiress is for us? Well, I was looking at heiresses who had inherited wealth from enslavement and specifically plantation enslavement. So they were women who came from families who had plantations in the British Caribbean. How actively were they involved in managing the plantations?

5:38I think a lot of people just assume that women had no agency in these stories. But actually, the more I looked into it, the more we have some pretty active businesswomen in the stories. You know, sometimes they would inherit the whole family estate, particularly when they were, before they married and after their husbands died, they were pretty much in charge, you know, writing to attorneys on the plantations. And it's because they're absentee, because they're living in Britain, that we have all the evidence of these letters that they were sending back and forth with the men who were managing things for them on the ground.

6:10You know, one woman writes a very detailed shopping list of all the supplies she wants sent out to the plantations. She says what they should be planting and not. And she puts in an order for more enslaved people and talks about what brands they should have put on them. One person I was really interested in, Mary Oswald. What can you tell us about Mary Oswald? So Mary is interesting because of all the women in my book, she spent the longest living in the Caribbean. So she's actually born in Scotland, but travels with her parents to Jamaica at the age of two, and then lives there, grows up in Kingston until she's about 20 when her father dies and then she and her mother return to Scotland.

6:48And then she marries a Glasgow tobacco merchant called Richard Oswald. By that point, they're both in London. She has a£20 ,000 inheritance from her father's activities in Jamaica, which were predominantly mercantile, selling Jamaican sugar back to Britain and other products. But he does also have an investment. He's just started a plantation in Westmillan, Jamaica, with one of his friends before he dies. And that ends up in a court case because everyone's always owing each other money in the British Caribbean. And she has properties in Kingston as well. But her assets allow him to buy into a slaving fort off the coast of Sierra Leone called Bounce Island.

7:29That endeavour with his business partners, they end up shipping 13 ,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic while the fort is active. Now, every Scot knows that Alloa is the home of Robbie Burns, and it's the setting for Tamashanta, which I had to learn as a boy. Tell us about the relationship of Mary to Robbie Burns. Right. So they make all this money partly from slaving and also when he gets the job to supply the entire British army with bread in Germany during the Seven Years' War. And again, her business skills sort of started in Kingston with her father come to good use in Germany. She really is a key part of his operation in managing this thing.

8:11But once they get back from Germany, it's time to spend the money. And that's when her portrait by Zoffany gets commissioned. And my favorite thing about Zoffany, he's the only Royal Academician who was definitely a cannibal. Oh my goodness. Explain. I'm not making this up. On his way back from India, he got shipwrecked on an island and had to eat one of the fellow survivors. Or rather, when he wasn't a fellow survivor, when the other guy died, Zoffany had to eat him. I would challenge any of our listeners to tell me the name of another cannibal who was a Royal Academician. I think you're on a winner there, Willie.

8:44Miranda, this does go into tangents on this podcast, and I apologise, but you were going to tell us the connection between Alois' famous son, Robbie Burns, you know, Scotland's national poet, for those who don't know, and William at the drop of a hat. And nobody drop a hat can quote. I was just about to say. Do not drop any hats. Can quote at enormous length. Quickly, tell us, how did Robbie Burns have a connection with Mary Oswald? Yeah. So, William, do you know the ode to Mrs. Oswald of Ock and Crewe? I can't say I do. That one has escaped me. Tell me about it. What a shame. I don't believe that Burns and Mary Oswald ever met, but he was inspired to write a particularly, let's call it, bitchy poem about her.

9:30Am I allowed to say that? You're allowed to say anything you like. He did good scurrilous. I think the word I used in the text was vituperative. poem about her because of this bizarrely colourful incident. So she and Richard had bought a big estate in Ayrshire called Ochencrube, but she died in London, but she wanted to be buried next to Richard in Scotland. And so there was this large funeral cortege, a group of men who transported her body all the way from Westminster to Ayrshire to St Quivocs, where she was buried. It arrived in Sankar late at night and the innkeeper only had one person staying, but he chucked him out to accommodate this large bunch of wealthy Londoners.

10:14The guy who got chucked out was Robbie Burns. He's not someone to take that lying down. No, absolutely. He's already started a friendly bowl of tobacco with his hosts. It's a January storm and he has to travel on to the next inn on his horse Pegasus, who is not as kind of romantic as the name seems because from his other poems, we know that he's a slipshod horse who has a tendency to sort of fart. He says you can always smell shit when you get on Pegasus. The next inn is sort of like, you know, not a long drive today, but on a horse in a storm before the big roads have been built, it takes him ages and it's freezing cold and windy and rainy.

10:56And so he starts composing this poem to Mary in his head. And when he gets to the next inn, he sits down and as his sinews are thawing, he writes this thing. But he had heard of her because he did grow up in the area where they have the estate. So he may well have heard about her through her tenants and servants. But he just says she's going to hell, essentially. What, for making him cold and wet and making Pegasus fart all the way to the next inn. She's going to hell. Yeah, basically. So, I mean, just one interesting little vignette about Mary and her husband, Richard. I mean, they had enormous standing because Mary entertained American delegates at the end of the Revolutionary War.

11:40I mean, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay all sat at her table. And didn't Richard have a hand in actually negotiating the final peace treaty with the Americans? Yeah, exactly. Well, he was the main British commissioner who was sent out to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Paris. We dealt with him in our Franklin episode. We dealt with him. Yeah, and he ends up coming home from Paris with two portraits of Franklin and a lot of other art. He had 28 chests of pictures and prints that he brought back from Paris. But Mary sent out tea to Paris for them to drink while they were negotiating the peace.

12:17But it's funny, whenever I see kind of American documentaries about the revolution, they're always just saying, And the British, the British, but they never bother mentioning him by name. And Burns, of course, himself very nearly went out to the Caribbean, didn't he? He was going to get a job in the customs. It was only a happen chance that he didn't go. Well, I thought it was as an actual driver. I mean, I thought it was more hands-on than that. It was something awful that he was applying for, a job to, you know, sort of take the cudgel up, wasn't it? Yeah, well, he described it would have been a Negro driver is what he said.

12:46The other heiress I wanted to talk about before we get into our authors, and they will be Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, I promise you, is Frances D 'Ell. Now, she is really interesting because she has mixed heritage. Is that right? Yes, she's actually the one I mentioned earlier with the shopping list and ordering the brand for the enslaved people. Her grandmother was an enslaved African. Her mother was born enslaved, but then later freed. they're in Kingston, Jamaica again. But she ends up moving to England, meeting her husband in Bath and he is the son of a Scottish Earl. As a mixed heritage woman, did people accept her, you know, in England?

13:29I mean, you know, sort of really bluntly was her skin colour an impediment to her place in society? Well, she ends up at court. She goes to, you know, George II's birthday party. I think that it was quite hard. It was irritating because I was trying to find a few more like clear examples of prejudice in the archive but there wasn't as much as you might expect. His parents are not particularly happy when they find out that they're engaged but there are several reasons. Yeah they might equally have been annoyed that she was of illegitimate birth or that she was a merchant's daughter. I want to talk about Jane Austen's auntie Jane Chumley.

14:08Now tell us about Jane Chumley and tell us about you know their relationship. So Jane Chumley who I call Jenny in the book to distinguish her from Jane Austen because I like to be on first name terms with my subjects. Jenny is born in Barbados to a Barbados family there. Her father's a lawyer in Bridgetown but they later get a financial interest in an estate called Braces because her mother loans a lot of money to Edward Brace, Reverend Edward Brace who set up that estate. But she like like Francis and many of the other women in my book is sent to England for school around the age of six. She marries James Lee Perrett.

14:48James Lee Perrett was the brother of Cassandra Lee, who becomes Mrs. George Austin, so Jane Austen's mother. And by the time Jane Austen is grown up, Jenny is her only kind of living aunt. So she refers to her as my aunt in her letters. She knew her pretty well. She didn't like her very much. How do we know she didn't like her? I mean, does she appear in caricature in the novels? I mean, there's the more explicit evidence of her letters where she complains about her complaining. I mean, she's stingy. She won't spend any money. She definitely doesn't want to give any to the Austins who really need it.

15:25She complains about being deaf or she's worried that her house in Bath is going to be broken into. I mean, she's just constantly unhappy with her lot, despite the fact that she's got everything she could possibly need. I think there's also a relationship with the East India Company. One of Jane Austen's cousins was married to Warren Hastings. and I've been to her grave outside Mashidabad. Gosh, the spread of this family is interesting. But also what's interesting is, you know, with this aunt that she doesn't like who's stingy and doesn't help her family, she does give her one gift. I mean, she gives her sort of a roof over her head at one point.

15:58Jane does spend some time with her and she begins writing Northanger Abbey, which is, you know, sort of one of her well-known novels, under the roof of Jane Chumley. Yeah, so Jane and James Lee Perrett have a house in Bath. Their main house is in Berkshire, a place called Scarlet's. So Jane Austen's first visit to Bath, she goes to stay with her aunt and uncle, and she starts writing Susan, that is later published as Northanger Abbey. And interestingly, in Northanger Abbey, you have a young girl going to Bath and staying with a Mr. and Mrs. Allen, who are also childless. And Mrs. Allen is also a bit of a...

16:39Well, she's ghastly. She's kind of ghastly, is what she is, isn't she? So Mrs. Allen is one of the characters in Austen's novels that scholars have identified as potentially being partly inspired by Jenny, by Jane Lee Perrett. I got a little quote about a description of Bath at this period from Smollett, which I'm longing to read out, sent to me by my sister-in-law when I told her what I was doing today. And it's a wonderful quote. If anyone had romanticized ideas about Bath via Bridgerton, look at the reality of Smollett. He says, imagine to yourself a high, exalted essence of mingled odors arising from putrid gums, impostulated lungs, sour flatulences, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments and embrocations, hungry water, spirits of lavender, asphodita drops, musk, heartthorn and salvatai.

17:37eye is the fragrant ether we breathe in the plight assemblies of bath i mean that's so disgusting can i can i just make two observations one is that your family whatsapp group is really weird and number two i just you know sort of have this vision of people going to taking the waters of going in fairly okay and coming out with suppurating gonorrhea i mean it just sounds sounds horrendous but thank you thank you for sharing there's another smollett quote uh from humphrey clinker where where he complains that bath is full of jumped up newly wealthy colonists from both the east and west indies who are spending their wealth with no taste whatsoever and it's particularly ironic because tobias smollett of course married a jamaican heiress called Anne Lessels.

18:25So he's one of the many kind of writers and scientists in our history who were able to pursue their creative endeavours because they were bankrolled by money from heiresses. Gosh, just, I mean, the producers very correctly said not everybody will have read Jane Austen and that's quite right. So, I mean, just a little thumbnail sketch for you. She's the daughter of a country clergyman and that comes out sort of very much in her books because all of her heroines are sort of slightly poverty-stricken and looking for a better circumstance. She grows up in the English countryside. She's one of those sort of quiet people who's always in the corner of the room watching people and how they behave and sort of manners and ambitions and the behaviour of rural gentry is meat for her mill, if you like.

19:11And she's funny. She's a funny writer. She's sort of rebellious because women weren't meant to poke fun at men at the time and certainly not put it on paper when they did. She wrote anonymously. She produced classics like Pride and Prejudice, like Emma. She has a deserved place in the pantheon of great British writers. But, Miranda, but, but, but, there is a furious row that sort of rumbles around. And are they called Janeites or Austenites, the people who sort of worship at the altar of Jane Austen? You've had a few skirmishes in your time with them, haven't you, Miranda? No, I just sort of live in fear of having one.

19:48because there are today's your lucky day love tell us about Jane Austen and slavery and why yeah but I mean I am also a bit of yeah I'm not a Jane but oh gosh I you know I do love the stories the stories are fantastic and you know I am of an age I was a teenager when Colin Firth dived into that lake which is not in the text obviously I love the stories I do Clueless is one of my favorite adaptations which is based on Emma But no, I mean, I think as we've been saying, Georgian society is so riddled with connections to empire that it would be bizarre if Jane Austen was sort of untouched by that.

20:26And I mean, there are just so many links between her and her social circle. You know, as you were saying, you have the Indian connection, William through her cousin. As I recall it, you know, there was a bit of what I call a storm in a teacup, literally, when I think back in 2020, the Jane Austen Museum said that they were going to talk about connections between Jane Austen and enslavement. But they they kind of use what I would call a kind of weak link because they were sort of talking about drinking tea and how, you know, we know the tea is from India or China and the sugar is from the Caribbean.

20:59And that kind of shows how the society was was connected, which it was. But I think that there are so many stronger connections. So her father becomes a trustee of an estate in Antigua. And this was a family that Jane would have known well because one of the sons of the family was actually being taught by her father as a child. Her sister Cassandra is engaged to a guy called Tom Fowle, who actually is killed when he goes out to Haiti. He went out as army chaplain and was killed in 1797 while the British were trying to take Haiti back after the Haitian Revolution and re-enslave all the Haitians.

21:39Is this a time of Toussaint L 'Avature? The British see what's going on in Haiti and think they'll have a go at trying to take over the island because it's so fertile and was producing such an insane amount of sugar for the French. Those are just two examples. I mean, there were so many people that Jane Austen knew that had these links. But I think Jane Austen's aunt is the strongest. Does she have, you know, shoot it down as a conspiracy theory? Absolutely. But were there family members, close family members of hers? I'm talking about on a brother kind of closeness who go out to the Caribbean and might there be Austins who are mixed race in the Caribbean or is this you know is this something you've come across to this day well I think the people who want to sort of put a better spin on all this um talk about her brothers as you know because of their connections to abolition later on as if that somehow affects her even though it kind of happens after her death but but I met I met some people from Bermuda who began to put me in touch with people who are saying that they're descended from the Austen brothers and their sons while they were based in Bermuda.

22:49I am in correspondence with people who are saying that between two of Jane Austen's brothers and potentially their sons who all served in the Navy and were based in Bermuda at some point or another, that between them they potentially fathered three children with black Bermudan women. And with all of those connections, with all of those possibilities, what is again, and I go back to William's initial point at the top of the podcast, it is extraordinary how little that Caribbean life is mentioned or colours, and I use that word advisedly, the books, because you do have mentions. I mean, Mansfield Park is one of the most blatant mentions.

23:27You've got Fanny Price, who is the heroine, sent to live with her rich uncle and aunt in Northamptonshire. And it does say very explicitly her uncle is a plantation owner in Antigua. So, you know, there's that, but not much more. And people have been deeply critical of that. It's very much souped up, isn't it, in the movie with Harold Pinter as the retired slave owner. And again, this was a controversy because they make much more of it in the movie than is actually there in the novel. It's there, but very, very briefly. Yeah, but I mean, some people have just, you know, they're so hacked off with even that.

24:01I mean, people like Edward Said are absolutely scathing about Jane Austen. And in particular, he talks about Mansfield Park and he says Antigua represents the colonies. and that actually sort of the Jane Austen way of talking about the colonies is a whitewash of what the colonies were. I'll quote a little bit. He says, you know, Austen's not a racist, he concedes, but he says, you know, everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery, a white, privileged, insensitive, complicit. He slams her mostly in this essay that he writes for not addressing any of it at all or even talking about it.

24:41sort of making it invisible. What I think, though, is that it kind of was invisible to somebody like Jane Austen. She would see, obviously, the proceeds of it in the scale of the houses of the rich people that are coming back, in the fact that her brothers were being employed there. But the whole point, I think, was it was managed so that you didn't see the pain and the suffering and the enslavement and the whips and the shackles. It was something that was happening offstage. And that's why I think it doesn't appear more in the novels. But Edward Said has a different take on this. Edward Said says that the novels by Austen and her contemporaries are willfully silent about colonial cruelty.

25:19They all know about it, but they're indifferent to it. And what he says was colonial writers like Kipling, Conrad, are prepared for by Austen, Thackeray, Defoe, Scott and Dickens. saying that it is genuinely troubling to see how little Britain's great humanistic ideas stand in the way of accelerating imperial process. I would say that Austen dies in 1817. There is no way that she wouldn't have known about the cruelties of enslavement given the whole abolition campaign. Also, she said she was in love with Thomas Clarkson as an author. Oh, really? Oh, really? I think actually Thomas Clarkson gets underwritten out of the story by Wilberforce's sons.

26:03So Thomas Clarkson, I think, is more of the hero of the story. Explain who he is, Miranda, for those who don't know. So, yes, so Thomas Clarkson was one of the leading abolitionists. I think he should get more credit than Wilberforce. But I think Wilberforce's sons wrote the story. And so, you know, the victor writes the story. So Thomas Clarkson was a young student at Cambridge and had to write an essay in Latin about the subject of enslavement. In the process of researching it, he became an ardent abolitionist and then was a strong campaigner working with Wilberforce, going around the country.