ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an excerpt from Julia de Roubigné, which shows a deepening of the disparate discourses of sympathy for slaves already witnessed in Sterne. The judicial context in the mid-1770s was rapidly changing. Lord Mansfield’s judgment in the defining Somerset case of 1772 was understood by many as outlawing slavery in England de facto. According to Scott, in Julia de Roubigné Mackenzie’s ‘object was less to describe external objects, than to read a lesson on the human passions. The plot of this epistolary novel combines elements from Rousseau’s Julie and Shakespeare’s Othello. The vignette excerpted in the chapter concerns Savillon’s experimental emancipation of the slaves on his Caribbean plantation, narrated in a letter to his friend Beauvaris. A practical ‘man of feeling’ as compared to the idealistic Beauvaris, Savillon reforms slavery and also economically benefits from the emancipation in the manner suggested by Adam Smith.
