ABSTRACT
As a group, Black abolitionist writers in Britain were positively affected by their foreign involvement. They made converts against slavery, sold their narratives, and achieved some notoriety. Despite William Wells Brown’s display of literary anxiety in American Fugitive in Europe, the book also reveals his concern for social problems, in keeping with the protest tradition established by slave narrative writers—to speak out against slavery and racial injustice. There were numerous other black Americans in Britain between 1830 and 1860, many of whom published book length narratives and other literary texts. Frederick Douglass himself grew increasingly desperate about a solution to slavery, and he became vulnerable to immediate danger, despite the fact that he was legally free. In 1846 Douglass’ British admirers purchased his freedom from his Maryland master, Hugh Auld, causing some Garrisonian abolitionists to complain that Douglass had sanctioned a transaction which acknowledged the right to sell human beings.
