ABSTRACT
THE JAMAICAN poet Matthew Joseph, overlooked by modern scholars, had been published in Victorian times, as had African writers including Blyden and Dr Horton. Slavery narratives, sometimes sold to gather financial support in the war against slavery, had been authored by Black men and women of the United States, Africa and the islands of the Caribbean. The books of ex-slave Frederick Douglass, no stranger to Victorian Britain, were widely known. Some Black authors wrote for the British: Stanford's From Bondage to Liberty, published in Smethwick in 1889, and Johnson's Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, for example.
