ABSTRACT
In the 'Advertisement' prefacing his West-Indian Eclogues, Edward Rushton announces an awkward complicity in the slave trade he is about to attack: 'The author of the following Eclogues has resided several years in the West-Indies'. The selections reflect Rushton's development, over almost three decades, as a poet and political thinker. Rushton celebrates the achievements of the British forces who appear to be defeating the rebels in the American War of Independence; the latter, much longer, poem, defends the right of the victorious Americans to liberty. For Rushton, the body politic of the British empire has been 'dismembered' less by the rebels or the French, than by the ambition, greed and subsequent effeminisation of its own rulers and merchants. Rushton deserves to be remembered for his contribution to the gathering momentum of the abolition campaign, but a more direct achievement, perhaps, was the large part he played in the establishment of the Liverpool School for the Blind in 1790.
