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Robert Wedderburn as a Black Atlantic Figure at the Crossroads of British Radicalism and Caribbean Performance

Éric Doumerc
p. 261-275

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  • 1 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University (...)
  • 2 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 3

1In 1993 the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic became a landmark in the field of cultural studies as its author tried to rescue that discipline from what he saw as its ethnocentrism inherited from the narrow focus of British historiography.1 Gilroy rejected any kind of ethnic absolutism, any theory based on some kind of “cultural insiderism” and tried to shift the focus to the Black British whom he saw as characterised by a double consciousness inherited from modernity and the great changes affecting both Europe and the “New World” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His book sought to focus on one particular area concerned with these massive changes and which epitomised them: “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that [he] heuristically called the black Atlantic world.”2

  • 3 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 3.

2In his seminal book, Gilroy argued that Black people in Britain, and possibly all over the world, had a worldview characterised by a double consciousness, or the ability to “face (at least) two ways at once.”3 Looking beyond the borders and boundaries of Britain, Gilroy had to cross the Atlantic to develop a new approach and as a consequence the Atlantic became a potent symbol and trope in his theory, as did ships, slave ships, merchant ships, all kinds of ships, criss-crossing the Atlantic disseminating ideas, thought processes and modes of feeling and being in the “New World,” the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Taking his inspiration from the work of the historian Peter Linebaugh, Gilroy identified key Black transatlantic figures like Olaudah Equiano, William Davidson, the Chartist William Cuffay, and the Scottish-Jamaican activist Robert Wedderburn as fitting into this new paradigm.

  • 4 McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: ProphetsRevolutionaries and Pornographers in London 17951840(...)
  • 5 Linebaugh, Peter, Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden (...)

3Over the last twenty years, a growing body of work has developed about Robert Wedderburn. He made an appearance in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and then was one of the figures mentioned in Iain McCalman's Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 17951840.4 McCalman also edited Wedderburn's autobiography The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn (Markus Wiener, 1991), which considerably enhanced Wedderburn’s status as a key figure in the British radical movement. In The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker identify him as a “linchpin” in the “Atlantic working class,” a group made up of subaltern people linked by suffering and resistance and who moved between Britain, the Americas, and Africa. They define a linchpin as “a small piece of metal that connected the wheels to the axle of the carriage and made possible the movement and firepower of the ship’s cannon, Wedderburn was an essential piece of something larger, mobile and powerful.”5

4More recently, as pointed out by Dr Michael Morris of Dundee University, Wedderburn has become an important figure in the growing field of Scottish-Caribbean studies, as more research has revealed the extent of Scotland’s involvement in the slave trade. In 2004 Martin Hoyles published a book about him, entitled The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn and tried to present Wedderburn's story in a novel and entertaining way, by telling a story so to speak. Hoyles probably used McCalman's book as his main source. Ryan Hanley re-evaluated Wedderburn's career as a revolutionary activist in his book Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 and contrasted his uncompromising approach with the more conciliating tones used by Ottobah Cuguoano in his writings.

  • 6 Rice, Alan, “Hidden Heroes of the Black Atlantic,” African-American Review, 45, 4 (Winter 2012), 50 (...)

5Robert Wedderburn’s life and his involvement in various protest movements at the confluence of various traditions seem to identify him as a Black Atlantic figure, as he appears to have been influenced by various intellectual and popular traditions. Alan Rice referred to Robert Wedderburn as a “black radical preacher and protean anarchist” and sees him as a neglected and then recently discovered Black Atlantic figure, with his interventions into British political life, his radicalism, and his defence of West Indian slaves.6 Wedderburn seems to have brought together various strands of political radicalism and fused all these elements into a black, transatlantic world-view. This article thus proposes to look at the way Wedderburn’s story can be framed within the narrative of the Black Atlantic as defined by Paul Gilroy and Alan Rice, the main point being that Wedderburn seems to have stood at the crossroads of various literate and oral traditions. Those oral traditions included the Spencean revolutionary heritage, as well as the rich heritage of performance and street theatre which developed under slavery.

From Jamaica to Britain: the influence of Thomas Spence

  • 7 Hanley, Ryan, “Robert Wedderburn’s Insurrectionary Black Atlantic,” a lecture in three parts, Hutch (...)
  • 8 Hanley, “Robert Wedderburn's Insurrectionary Black Atlantic.”

6Robert Wedderburn was a Scottish-Jamaican mixed-race person who was active in British radical circles and anti-slavery movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was born in Jamaica in 1762. His father was James Wedderburn, a planter from Scotland who owned a plantation in Jamaica, and his mother was a slave called Rosanna. She worked at the Grange estate in Hanover for Lady Bassilia Douglas, who was the wife of Kingston’s customs officer. Rosanna was bought by James Wedderburn who took her to his estate and then raped her.7 When she was pregnant with her second child, Rosanna was sold back to Lady Douglas. Wedderburn was brought up on Lady Douglas's estate and was manumitted by his father in 1765.8 He later reported that he saw both his mother and his grandmother being whipped. Wedderburn was thus a mulatto, that is the child of a white father and a black mother. He was part of the rising class of mulattoes in eighteenth-century Jamaica.

  • 9 Hoyles, Martin, The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn (London: Hansib, 2004), 35
  • 10 Fryer, Peter, Aspects of British Black History (London: Index Books, 1993), 46.

7At the age of sixteen, he joined the Navy and landed in England, where there were already between 10,000 and 20,000 black people living in the country. In London they lived in Paddington, Whitechapel, and St-Giles-in-the Fields.9 As demonstrated by Peter Fryer in his seminal books, the black presence in Britain had been established for quite a long time: “By the middle of the eighteenth century there was in Britain a black population of a at least 10,000, most of them slave-servants brought here by absentee West India planters as part of their household retinues.”10 By the time Wedderburn arrived in Britain, the Mansfield judgement of 1772 had established the fact that no slave could be forcibly removed from Britain to be sent back to the Caribbean.

8In 1785 in Seven Dials Wedderburn happened to chance upon a Methodist preacher who was addressing a crowd perched upon an upturned vegetable crate. Wedderburn stood transfixed listening to the preacher’s sermon, and finally agreed to join his congregation. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the growing dissatisfaction with Anglicanism, especially among the masses in the new industrial villages, led to the birth of a new religious creed which became known as Methodism. Wedderburn came to reject Methodism, which he seemed to find too conservative, and moved to Unitarianism.

9The years between 1785 and 1813, the year when Wedderburn came under the influence of Spencean ideas, were extremely troubled years as the Napoleonic Wars, the legacy of the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution all had a big impact in Britain, influencing the rise of the radical movement. Wedderburn became involved in the radical movement and met Thomas Spence in 1812. In 1813, Wedderburn became a member of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists which Spence had founded in 1801.

10To further his Spencean ideas, Wedderburn opened a Unitarian chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho. He regularly preached in that chapel, which was in fact a hayloft, and he was eventually tried and sent to jail in 1820. He was initially charged with sedition, as government spies reported that he had spoken against the government and in favour of land nationalisation, but he was eventually acquitted. He was later re-arrested on a charge of blasphemy. His trial took place on Friday 25 February 1820, two days after the arrest of the Cato Street conspirators. Wedderburn was already in jail on a charge of blasphemy when the conspirators were taken into custody and thus escaped arrest. Wedderburn was eventually found guilty of blasphemy and sent to Dorchester jail. Wedderburn published a book entitled The Horrors of Slavery in 1824, and then was arrested again on various charges in 1831, before migrating to New York. Back in England, he was last seen in 1834. The exact year of his death is not known, possibly 1835.

  • 11 Rogers, Rachel, Alexandra Sippel, “Introduction”, Miranda [online], “Thomas Spence and His Legacy: (...)
  • 12 Spence, Thomas, “The Real Rigths of Man, a lecture, delivered at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1775,” publishe (...)

11Wedderburn was drawn to Spencean ideas after meeting Thomas Spence in 1813 on the streets of London and helping him sell his books, including copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Thomas Spence was born in 1750 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in a Dissenting family and was influenced by his parents’ Calvinist beliefs. Because he experienced poverty at a young age, he developed his idea of land nationalisation as early as 1775, at the age of 25.11 Spence thought that land was the property of the people and should be redistributed to the true owners of the soil. He developed this idea in an early pamphlet entitled The Real Rights of Man.12 Spence remained in Newcastle until the early 1790s, trying his hand at various trades while living in relative poverty. In 1792, he moved to London and became involved in the radical movement, which had developed in the wake of the French Revolution. The radical movement was the product of several factors: a severe economic recession due to the war, a series of harvest failures in 1794-95 and in 1798-1801, popular discontent, and the spread of revolutionary ideas.

12One of the most influential revolutionary thinkers was Thomas Paine whose Rights of Man was published in 1791 and 1792. Paine had supported the American colonists when he wrote and published Common Sense in January 1976, making the case for full independence from the British crown. In Rights of Man he attacked the hereditary principle and the monarchy, which shocked many people. The publication of the first part of the book in 1791 led to the birth of the London Corresponding Society in 1792 founded by a shoemaker called Thomas Hardy. In London, Spence entered various radical circles like the London Corresponding Society and became active as a propagandist and writer. He set up his bookstall in central London, trying to sell his pamphlets and was tried several times for sedition and for selling Rights of Man, which was banned. Spence defended the rights of women and children, and was against the colonial dispossession of African enslaved persons and Native Americans. In 1801, he was tried for seditious libel, found guilty, and sentenced to a year in Shrewsbury prison.

  • 13 Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root, 48.

13Wedderburn helped Spence to sell his pamphlets at his pitch in St Martin’s Lane, not very far from where Wedderburn lived (in Clare Market, off the Strand). Wedderburn would set up his handcart, and had copies of pamphlets for customers to browse through as well as clean copies to sell, and he would also do some tailoring and patching up on the spot, while chatting to passers-by. Occasionally he would blow a horn to attract customers.13 Thomas Spence died in 1814 and was buried by about forty disciples. The Society of Spencean Philanthropists, which had been formed in 1801, continued to meet for the next six years. William Davidson, another mixed-race radical, was a member too. Several Spencean societies were formed between 1814 and 1817. Discharged sailors and soldiers as well as many artisans joined them.

  • 14 Wedderburn, Robert, The Horrors of Slavery; exemplified in the Life and History of the Rev. Robert (...)

14Spence’s ideas were a mixture of millenarian prophecy, agrarian reform, land redistribution, and opposition to slavery. Spenceans used print, made speeches and chalked slogans on walls. They composed songs too. Wedderburn would have been attracted by Spence’s anti-slavery stance and anti-colonial position (he stood up for the rights of Native Americans) and by Spence’s astute insight into the linkages between the slaves’ struggles and that of the British working classes. Spence’s idea of land redistribution, based on the biblical notion of the Jubilee (Leviticus XV:13), would have been appealing to Wedderburn too, as the latter developed the idea that the planters’ land should be redistributed to the slaves in the Caribbean. In 1817 Wedderburn published six issues of a magazine called The Axe Laid To the Root, whose title is a reference to the Bible, but also to P. B. Shelley's “Queen Mab” (“Let the axe strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall”). The magazine was published in London but was addressed to “the planters and negroes of Jamaica”. In the second letter, published in the first edition of the magazine, Wedderburn evoked the biblical idea of the Jubilee and warned that the emancipation of slaves would be achieved with much violence, thus realising “Spence’s Plan” of land redistribution. He referred to the Haitian Revolution and to the Second Maroon War in Jamaica, during which bloodhounds from Cuba had been used to track down the Maroons: “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you. Get ready your bloodhounds, the allies which you employed against the Maroons.”14 Wedderburn predicted a slave revolution which would overthrow the slavery system in Jamaica, following the example set by the Haitian slaves, and lead to a redistribution of the land:

  • 15 Morris, Michael, “Robert Wedderburn: Race, Religion, and Revolution,” International Socialism, 132 (...)

Recollect the fermentation will be universal. Their weapons are their bill-hooks; their store of provision is every were [sic] in abundance; you know they can live upon sugar canes. They will be victorious in their fight, slaying all before them. Their method of fighting is to be found in the scriptures, which they are now learning to read. They will slay man, woman, and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slavery, whether black, white or tawny.15

  • 16 Morris, “Robert Wedderburn: Race, Religion, and Revolution,” International Socialism, 132 (2011).

15Spence’s influence may also be detected in the correspondence between Wedderburn and his slave-owning half-sister, Miss Campbell, published in one of the final issues of The Axe Laid to The Root. In a letter to his half-sister, Wedderburn asks her to set her slaves free, in line with Spencean ideas of liberty and land redistribution. Although doubt has been cast on the authenticity of these letters, it is still possible to see them as a reflection of Wedderburn's Spencean ideas and a device to create the impression of a dialogue between activists in Britain and slave-owners in the Caribbean.16

16According to Martin Hoyles, Wedderburn had set up his own bookstall next to Spence’s and occasionally helped him sell his material. Two buskers were present there too, which leads us to the performative aspect of Wedderburn's work.

Wedderburn’s performative ethos and his Caribbean heritage

  • 17 Rice, Alan, “Old Print Media, Radical Ideas and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robe (...)

17Wedderburn started preaching at his Hopkins Street Chapel, in Soho, in 1819 and seems to have developed various ideas linked with the plight of slaves in the Caribbean and workers in Britain. According to Alan Rice, Wedderburn can be seen as a Black Atlantic figure because his “linkage of the two horrors of wage and chattel slavery and activism designed to end them brought him into a conflict with the authorities which differentiated him from those black British liberal reformers of the period like Olaudah Equiano who did not consistently take such radical class-based positions or have the same class loyalty as Wedderburn.”17

18His radicalism was already established by the time of the 1780 Gordon Riots, when he boasted of his connection with one of the rioters. In fact, several black people, like John Glover and Benjamin Bowsey, had been involved in the Gordon riots. Glover and Bowsey were sentenced to death, but a stay of execution was later granted.18 A Black woman, Charlotte Gardiner, was hanged on Tower Hill for her involvement in the riots. As pointed out by Peter Fryer, the Black population at the time was part of a wider working-class structure and was feared by the authorities as part of the “Mob”.19

19Wedderburn's political radicalism seems to have developed during his time as a sailor. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy identified service in the Navy as a key element in the development of a Black Atlantic consciousness:

  • 20 Morris, “Robert Wedderburn: Race, Religion, and Revolution,” International Socialism, 132 (2011).

Both Wedderburn and his sometime associate Davidson had been sailors, moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines which were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity. Their relationship to the sea may turn out to be especially important for both the early politics and poetics of the black Atlantic world that I wish to counterpose against the narrow nationalism of so much English historiography.20

20Wedderburn's radicalism could be seen as part of British working-class radicalism, and he condemned the Peterloo massacre in no uncertain terms, calling the prince Regent a “tyrant” at a public meeting in London:

  • 21 Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery, 119.

That the Prince had lost the confidence and affection of his people but that he the Prince being supported by the Army and surrounded by his vile ministers nothing short of people taking arms in their own defence could bring about a Reform and prevent the bloody scene taking place at the next Smithfield meeting as had taken place at Manchester; for his part old as he was he was learning his Exercise as a soldier and he would be one if he fell in the cause, for he would rather die like Cashman if he could but have the satisfaction of plunging a dagger in the heart of a Tyrant.21

21The reference to John Cashman is particularly interesting as he was one of the Spencean revolutionaries involved in the Spa Fields riots of 1816. Cashman was executed in 1817. Wedderburn thus established a link between the Spa Fields riots and the Peterloo Massacre, and seems to have seen himself as part of that revolutionary tradition.

22Another element which seems to identify Robert Wedderburn as a potent Black Atlantic figure is the performative ethos he developed based on the Caribbean oral tradition and what he knew about slave rebellions in the Caribbean. Wedderburn raised people’s consciousness on issues like slavery and workers’ rights by using political theatre and a performative aesthetics. Wedderburn popularised his ideas at his Hopkins Street Chapel, but also by making speeches on the streets of London, and in alehouses and taverns. Ironically, we have access to these speeches only through the testimonies of government spies and agents-provocateurs who were responsible for Wedderburn's eventual conviction for blasphemy.

23In fact, in several of his Hopkins Street Chapel ‘sermons’, Wedderburn actually acted out scenes with his comrades and they would play the parts of current politicians like Lord Sidmouth (whom they dubbed ‘Lord Sadmouth’) and Lord Castlereagh (whom they called ‘Castlefish’). At one of these meetings, according to Martin Hoyles, Wedderburn debated such topics as “Has a Slave the Right to Kill His Master?” and referred to a slave rebellion which had broken out in Barbados in 1816, Bussa’s rebellion, and to an abortive slave insurrection in Jamaica, which nearly broke out in 1815. The aborted slave rebellion in Jamaica was actually mentioned in Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor, together with the song that got the plotters sentenced to death and hanged. That song was used in evidence in court. It is known as the “Song of the King of the Eboes”:

  • 22 Lewis, Matthew, Journal of A West India Proprietor (1834; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1 (...)

Song of the King of the Eboes

Oh me good friend, Mr. Wilberforce, make we free!
God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye!
God Almighty, make we free!
Buckra in this country no make we free!
What Negro for to do? What Negro for to do?
Take force by force! Take force by force!
22

24In his tirade, Wedderburn established a link between the infiltration of radical organisations by government spies in England and the fact that “they have spies in Jamaica too” since the leaders of the rebellion were betrayed by one of them. Wedderburn then asked one of his friends to sing that song, and they repeated the last two lines all together. Then, Wedderburn launched into a long tirade against Wilberforce, calling him a “hypocrite” and a “Jesuit” and accusing him of supporting every measure introduced by the government to restrict civil liberties.

  • 23 Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root, 67.
  • 24 Rice, Alan, “Old Print Media, Radical Ideas and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robe (...)

25At the same meeting, Wedderburn mentioned Bussa’s rebellion in Barbados: “You have all heard of Bussa's rebellion in Barbados three years ago.”23 The context to that rebellion is linked with the agitation in Barbados over the Registry Bill of 1815, which had been introduced to force the planters to register their slaves in a book in order to put an end to the smuggling of slaves which had been going on since the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The planters in Barbados had resisted the imposition of that measure and had accused the British government of trampling on their rights. The slaves were aware of that resistance and equated it with resistance to the idea of Emancipation. They thought or seem to have thought that the British Parliament had abolished slavery, but that the planters refused to implement that measure. One literate domestic slave, Nanny Grigg, claimed that the slaves were to be freed on Easter Monday, 1816, but that the planters would refuse to do so. So the only possibility was to fight fire with fire, as the enslaved persons had done in Saint Domingue. The rebellion broke out on Easter Monday, 1816, and engulfed about a third of the island. It was timed to break out at the height of the harvest season. Wedderburn used references to these slave rebellions to establish a link between the British working class and black enslaved persons, “using Caribbean revolt to urge on the working class in Britain.”24

  • 25 Shannon, Mary L., “The Multiple Lives of Billy Waters: Dangerous Theatricality and Networked Illust (...)
  • 26 Cox Jensen, Oskar, “Joseph Johnson's Hat, or, the Storm on Tower Hill,” Studies in Romanticism, 58, (...)

26Wedderburn’s tirades and speeches can be seen as a form of street theatre and he may have learnt how to stage his performances by watching Thomas Spence sell his books in London. According to Martin Hoyles, Spence sold his books in St Martin’s Lane, not far from the Strand, and was often helped by well-known Black street buskers or entertainers like Billy Waters and Joseph Johnson. Billy Waters wore a tattered shirt, a three-feathered hat decked with ribbons, had a wooden leg, and played the fiddle.25 Johnson had a stick and was supported under the other arm by a crutch.26 He also had on his cap a model of a sailing ship, which recalls a form of popular theatre in Jamaica known as Jonkonnu or John Canoe and which featured revellers carrying ships on their heads. The ships were supposed to represent a microcosm of society and contained various puppets. In Jamaica, the slaves organised their own Carnival which was called “Jonkonnu”. Jonkonnu was a fife-and-drum dance performed at Christmas time and some experts claim that it was a fertility rite. Over the years Jonkunnu became creolised and came to include European elements, like the character of “Jack-in-the-Green” who also appears in English Morris dancing. Jonkonnu gradually became known as “John Canoe”, which shows the creolising process at work. Johnson's ship could be a carryover from Jonkonnu and a way of commenting on Johnson's own situation as a product of the British Empire stranded in London. Indeed, the British writer Matthew “Monk” Lewis was greeted on his arrival in Jamaica in January 1816 by the sounds of a street festival which turned out to be Jonkonnu celebrations and one of the characters carried a “pasteboard house-boat on his head”:

  • 27 Lewis, Journal of A West India Proprietor, 36.

the sudden sounds of the drum and banjee called our attention to a procession of the John-Canoe, which was proceeding to celebrate the opening of the new year at the town of Black River. The John-Canoe is a Merry-Andrew dressed in a striped doublet, and bearing upon his head a kind of pasteboard house-boat filled with puppets, representing, some sailors, others soldiers, others again slaves at work on a plantation, &c. The John-Canoe is considered not merely as a person of material consequence, but one whose presence is absolutely indispensable. Nothing could look more gay.27

  • 28 Dillon Maddock, Elizabeth, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World. 1649-18 (...)
  • 29 Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root, 67.

27As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has shown, enslaved people in the Caribbean used theatre as a form of resistance and subversion, and Jonkonnu was used in a disruptive way to signal an African presence in the Caribbean.28 So Johnson's boat seems to have been a connection between the Jonkonnu tradition and Wedderburn’s own revolutionary outlook. At his Hopkins Street Chapel, Wedderburn was able to synthesise various protest traditions derived from Thomas Spence’s ideas, British radicalism, and the Caribbean oral tradition to produce a potent and radical ideology of protest. The presence of the poet Allen Davenport, of the street buskers Billy Waters and Joseph Johnson, and also of two slaves from Jamaica, Moses and Ephraim, seem to point towards a Black Atlantic tradition being forged right under the very eyes of the government spies who attended these meetings and whose reports, ironically, constitute the only “evidence” we have of the Hopkins Street Chapel proceedings.29

28Wedderburn could be said to have stood at the confluence of various traditions, oral and written, and this is visible, as pointed out by Alan Rice, in the heavily hybridised style he adopted in some passages of his autobiography, The Horrors of Slavery (1824), in which he used a mixture of capital letters, lower-case letters, and exclamation marks in a very unorthodox style:

  • 30 Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery, 50-51.

I being a descendant of a Slave by a base Slave-Holder, the late JAMES WEDDERBURN, Esq. of Inveresk, who sold my mother when she was with child of me, HER THIRD SON BY HIM!!! She was FORCED to submit to him, being his Slave, THOUGH HE KNEW SHE DISLIKED HIM!... I have seen my poor mother stretched on the ground, tied hands and feet, and FLOGGED in the most indecent manner, though PREGNANT AT THE SAME TIME!!! her fault being the not acquainting her mistress that her master had given her leave to go and see her mother in town!30

29In his article on Wedderburn, Alan Rice identifies this style as an example of the hybridised style that Homi Bhabha sees as a form of resistance to the colonialist discourse associated with imperialism. Rice also points out that this unorthodox style could be an example of the subaltern speaking out against a dominant discourse, thus walking in Garyatri Spivak's footsteps. These are useful insights, but Wedderburn’s visually striking style could also be interpreted as his own position at the confluence of two traditions: the written, formal tradition (literacy) and the more demotic oral tradition represented by folk songs and folk tales, and oral testimonies. Wedderburn’s exclamation marks and capital letters may have been an attempt at giving the slaves a “voice” in print, at inscribing their presence in his text.

  • 31 Hanley, Ryan, “Cato Street and the Caribbean,” The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intell (...)

30Robert Wedderburn’s activities as a radical activist in early-nineteenth century London can thus be placed within the Black Atlantic world identified by Paul Gilroy in his seminal book. Wedderburn seems to have been able to synthesise various protest traditions, from the Spencean jubilee to the Caribbean oral tradition based on songs and orality, in order to produce a potent and cogent critique of both capitalism and slavery, thus uniting the Black and “Red” Atlantic traditions with his fiery Hopkin Street sermons. Wedderburn's Black Atlantic internationalism seems to indicate that, as Ryan Hanley wrote, “metropolitan radicalism was neither parochial nor insular.”31

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Notes

1 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

2 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 3

3 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 3.

4 McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: ProphetsRevolutionaries and Pornographers in London 17951840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

5 Linebaugh, Peter, Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000), 325-326.

6 Rice, Alan, “Hidden Heroes of the Black Atlantic,” African-American Review, 45, 4 (Winter 2012), 508.

7 Hanley, Ryan, “Robert Wedderburn’s Insurrectionary Black Atlantic,” a lecture in three parts, Hutchins Center for African-American Research, https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/event/ryan-hanley-1. Monday, April 25, 2022.

8 Hanley, “Robert Wedderburn's Insurrectionary Black Atlantic.”

9 Hoyles, Martin, The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn (London: Hansib, 2004), 35.

10 Fryer, Peter, Aspects of British Black History (London: Index Books, 1993), 46.

11 Rogers, Rachel, Alexandra Sippel, “Introduction”, Miranda [online], “Thomas Spence and His Legacy: Bicentennial Perspectives,” 13/ 2016. https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/8985

12 Spence, Thomas, “The Real Rigths of Man, a lecture, delivered at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1775,” published in The Political Works of Thomas Spence by H.T.Dickinson (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1982).

13 Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root, 48.

14 Wedderburn, Robert, The Horrors of Slavery; exemplified in the Life and History of the Rev. Robert Wedderburn (1824), The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, Iain McCalman ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 83-87.

15 Morris, Michael, “Robert Wedderburn: Race, Religion, and Revolution,” International Socialism, 132 (2011), http://isj.org.uk/robert-wedderburn-race-religion-and-revolution/.

16 Morris, “Robert Wedderburn: Race, Religion, and Revolution,” International Socialism, 132 (2011).

17 Rice, Alan, “Old Print Media, Radical Ideas and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown,” http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/16183/3/Brown%2520and%2520Wedderburn2-2.pdf, 3.

18 “The Gordon Riots,” https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/gordon.htm.

19 Fryer, Aspects of British Black History, 47.

20 Morris, “Robert Wedderburn: Race, Religion, and Revolution,” International Socialism, 132 (2011).

21 Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery, 119.

22 Lewis, Matthew, Journal of A West India Proprietor (1834; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 139.

23 Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root, 67.

24 Rice, Alan, “Old Print Media, Radical Ideas and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown,” http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/16183/3/Brown%2520and%2520Wedderburn2-2.pdf,4.

25 Shannon, Mary L., “The Multiple Lives of Billy Waters: Dangerous Theatricality and Networked Illustrations in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 46, 2 (2019): 169.

26 Cox Jensen, Oskar, “Joseph Johnson's Hat, or, the Storm on Tower Hill,” Studies in Romanticism, 58, 4 (Winter 2019), 548.

27 Lewis, Journal of A West India Proprietor, 36.

28 Dillon Maddock, Elizabeth, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World. 1649-1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

29 Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root, 67.

30 Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery, 50-51.

31 Hanley, Ryan, “Cato Street and the Caribbean,” The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, Jason McElligott, Martin Conboy eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 94.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Éric Doumerc, Robert Wedderburn as a Black Atlantic Figure at the Crossroads of British Radicalism and Caribbean PerformanceCaliban, 65-66 | 2021, 261-275.

Electronic reference

Éric Doumerc, Robert Wedderburn as a Black Atlantic Figure at the Crossroads of British Radicalism and Caribbean PerformanceCaliban [Online], 65-66 | 2021, Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 10 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/10446; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.10446

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