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Anatomy of an Afterthought: Charles Kingsley, the “Accursed Slavery Question,” and the Quadroon's Function in Two Years Ago

2013; Routledge; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905495.2013.785821

1477-2663

Marc Muneal,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Despite his modest sales, Kingsley found his reviewers and critics a tough audience in the early years. Klaver points out that Kingsley's good friend J. M. Ludlow, Alton Locke's (1849) first reader, offered a decidedly mixed review, praising parts but lamenting the whole's lack of consistency; reviews from the Times, Blackwood's, and Fraser's were either lukewarm or unfavorable (210, 213-14). Reviews of Yeast (1849) were more generally favorable, but critics still itemized their reservations (263). Hypatia (1853) found a vehement critic in George Henry Lewes during its serialization for its reimagining of history (329). The lucidity and crispness of many of Kingsley's sermons, on the other hand, sometimes verge on the remarkable. Writing for an audience who needed to absorb his message on the fly, the Rector rose to the occasion in terms of both prose and structure. An affliction that plagued Kingsley for much of his life—his stammering—sheds some light on the paradox. Writing to James Hunt for advice on the condition, Kingsley noted that he “never hardly [stammers] in speaking to the poor” but stammers most in “beginning a conversation, so as to have an extreme dread (though I move much in society) of introducing 2 persons to each other, or of asking a servant whether his master is at home” (ALS Huntington Library, HM 32204-32261). Ease of communication for Kingsley, whether written or oral, largely depended on context. For additional perspectives on Kingsley's stammering and its relationship to his social work, see Louise Lee's “Voicing, De-Voicing and Self-Silencing” (2008). One humorous anecdote does survive. Stowe apparently didn't endear herself to some of the Kingsley children when she made disparaging remarks about hunting and hunters; the faux pas, however, seems to have readily been forgiven by Charles and Fanny (Klaver 431). Hedrick affirms the pleasantness of the trip: “Harriet enjoyed this quiet trip to England more than her first one; with greater control of her itinerary and energies, she spent much of her time with artists and writers…. She went out of her way to arrange a visit with Charles Kingsley…” (264). Kingsley had also written to Stowe praising her novel shortly after its publication in 1852, yet another reason he could not afford to lose face during her visit to Eversley (letter qtd. in Hedrick 234). Derbyshire pinpoints the character of Kingsley's philanthropy: “He evinces no desire… to cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly. He was happy that the lowly should remain lowly, but he wanted them cleaner, better housed, better instructed, and better treated” (63). Catherine Hall discusses Kingsley's attitudes to race and blackness before embarking on his pivotal trip to the West Indies:On his journey Kingsley prepared himself “to compare books with fact, and judge for myself of the reported wonders of the Earthly Paradise.” An impossible task, since his vision was framed by a particular imperial gaze. His discursive task was to reconcile his preconceived notions with his observations, and to confirm what he already knew: that the negro race was inferior, and that the only real hope for a West Indian future was the European.(439) Other pieces of information that add dimension to this discussion include Kingsley's position in the Governor Eyre Controversy (aligned with Carlyle and other Eyre supporters), his sympathies for the South during the U.S. Civil War, and his rationalized refusal to contribute to the National Freedman's Aid Foundation; on the other end of the spectrum, consider his affection for and appreciation of Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands during her visit to England and his enlightening trip to the Caribbean late in life. Perhaps Kingsley's most famous statement on “the negro question,” however, comes in a 1867 letter to his friend Hughes: The Negro has had all I ever possessed; for emancipation ruined me. And yet I would be ruined a second time, if emancipation had to be done over again. I am no slave-holder at heart. But I have paid my share of the great bill, in Barbadoes [sic.] and Demerara, with a vengeance; and don't see myself called on to pay other men's! (Letters and Memories II. 258) The fictional town of Aberalva approximates a Devonshire town; according to the 1842 Local Reports on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of England, many residents in the County of Devon lived in near squalor and resisted attempts to amend their habits or surroundings (1-15). These local reports accompanied Chadwick's famous General Report of the same year. We do well to remember Hamlin's important caveat that Chadwick's report “is a political document. The problems it addressed were only incidentally problems of health or even of decent living conditions…. At risk were the survival of the state in the face of revolution, and the grand question of whether the class relations of liberal industrial society could work” (157). While Kingsley was a frequent collaborator of Chadwick's in sanitary efforts, Two Years Ago simultaneously buys into the goal of upholding social order while resisting the urge to “dehumanize the poor” (discussed below), which Hamlin argues is an unstated goal of the Sanitary Report (157). Una Pope-Hennessey famously described the novel as “shapeless and higgledy-piggledy in conception as it is in execution” (152). Larry Uffelman agreed with the characterization, calling the subplot “intrusive” (62). Gilbert argues: Slavery, and its analogues in the novel—hysteria, addiction, disease—emasculates, barbarizes, and derationalizes, undermining the project of national progress through social improvement—sanitary reform, education, colonization—that Kingsley identifies as the central project of both Britain and her “child,” the United States. Slavery, like addiction or disease, implies the vulnerability of self to the abject, whether as dependence on a drug, economic dependence on the degrading practice of slavery, or invasion by the unnatural “disorder” of disease. The novel invokes sanitary and abolition rhetoric in the name of national development and couches the story of national development in terms of individual masculinity and spiritual/physical regeneration. (161) The claim that Marie is “the only Negro” is incorrect. In addition to Sabina Mellot's black servant, Marie remembers—and becomes—her elderly, enslaved black grandmother in one of the novel's most important scenes. Stangrave's suspicion does not lack foundation; Tom Thurnall is a man of the world, and in addition to Tom's near-assault on Grace, the novel makes many allusions to his un-narrated sexual exploits. Kingsley actively cultivated this flaw in his hero for effect, as he explained to John Bullar in a letter of 3/19/1857: Many thanks for your favourable opinion of the book (‘Two Years Ago’); But I fear you take Tom Thurnall for a better man than he was, and must beg you not to pare my man to suit your own favourable conception; but consider that that is the sort of man I want to draw, and you must take him as you find him. My experience is, that men of his character (like all strong men till God's grace takes full possession of them) are weak upon one point [i.e. women and sex]—every thing can they stand but that; and the more they restrain themselves from prudential motives, the more sudden and violent is the temptation when it comes. I have indicated as delicately as I could the world-wide fact, which all know and all ignore; had I not done so, Thurnall would have been a mere chimera fit only for a young lady's novel. (Letters and Memories II.19-20) From Uncle Tom's Cabin: Eva stood looking at Topsy.There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of society. Thefair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice! Something, perhaps, of such thoughts struggled through Eva's mind. But a child's thoughts are rather dim, undefined instincts; and in Eva's noble nature many such were yearning and working, for which she had no power of utterance. (244-45) Eva's act of observing Topsy both predicts and prescribes the way in which the white British and American readers' gazes cannot avoid the black otherness on the page. The focalization here supplies that audience Eva's view and allows them to complete the identification and become Eva as they behold Topsy. Martin fails to note the return to painting in his appraisal of Claude's artistic progress: “Claude, the painter, is frankly a useless member of society… except when he paints realistic and didactic scenes which elevate the morality of the viewer. Significantly, by the end of the book, he has deserted painting for photography, which Kingsley indicates can do everything which paint can achieve—and better” (204). Kingsley does not, by any means, suggest supplanting one medium with the other, and speaking through Claude, he greatly limits theories of superiority vis-a-vis both. No fewer than five white Toms appear in Uncle Tom's Cabin, all used by Stowe in juxtaposition against the black Uncle Tom to illustrate different dimensions of slavery's insidiousness as well as multiple visions of America's future via three young Toms; the white Toms are bounty-hunter Tom Loker, auctioneer Thomas Flint, and the children Tom Lincon, Tom Harris, and Tom Bird. Stowe would continue the strategy in Dred, her second major novel. Kingsley continues in Sermons for the Times: Therefore, when in the Catechism you solemnly ask the child its name, you ask it no light question… . And then you ask the child who gave him his name, and make him declare that his name was give him in baptism, wherein he was made a member of Christ and a child of God… . You make the child confess that his duty as a person is not towards himself to do what he likes, and follow his own carnal lusts: but toward God and toward his neighbours, who are in God's kingdom of heaven as well as he. (59-60) The lines that close Chapter XXVIII were an unfortunate addition on Kingsley's part: “He [Tom] has escaped once more: but his heart is hardened still. What will his fall be like” (II.284). Many critics and reviews of the novel lamented the suddenness of Tom's conversion as poor craft. The two poorly worded sentences are most directly responsible for inspiring an essentially unfair critique: they undermine what Kingsley carefully builds as a gradual and incremental change in Tom's attitudes, discussed below. While the prayer has been canonized in its familiar form as part of the Catholic liturgical tradition, it derives from a number of verses appearing in the Gospel of Luke (see especially 1:28 and 1:42). I should point out here that both of these names bear other resonances that, while outside the scope of the present analysis, certainly would not have escaped readers' attention. Grace Harvey's pulling Tom Thurnall from the sea is doubtless reminiscent of Grace Darling, who performed a heroic feat of sea rescue by rowing out with her father to save drowning sailors during an 1838 storm. The act received national attention, and accolades poured in from all corners, not the least of which was a subscription to their reward fund by Queen Victoria (Reynolds vii-viii). Grace Darling was later immortalized in art and poetry, including a play by Edward Stirling and poems by Wordsworth and Swinburne. Kingsley himself cited Grace Darling as a true example of a heroine in his essay “Heroism.” Stangrave (chronologically) later claims his preference for a gradual end to slavery that would bring the least upheaval, in line with Kingsley's own views (I.10-11).