ABSTRACT

By 1807 when the British Parliament finally voted to end the slave trade, both the rhetoric of sensibility and writing by women had become decisive elements in the pressure for abolition. While late-eighteenth-century Britons were coming to believe that women possessed exceptional access to virtue and sympathy, women saw in abolition an occasion to turn domestic virtue to service in public policy debates. Though the idioms of sensibility permeated writing by both men and women, women were especially inclined to enlist support for abolition by cultivating sympathy for those who suffer under slavery’s oppression. Sentimental tableaus of violently sundered personal ties, patient suffering, and physical agony saturate this literature, where the tears of shattered victims communicate freely to become the tears of the reader, inspiring benevolent action that will lead the state itself to virtue through abolition. Recent studies examining the literary and rhetorical deployment of sensibility in the cause of abolition have particularly attended to these ambitions, whereby feeling was put into circulation through verbal and visual formulas that had become widely familiar in order to then be channeled to public effect.1 But though compelling, these accounts leave unexplained a more material

1 In The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for example, Markman Ellis demonstrates that contemporary fiction and critical commentary engaged in some of the most public controversies, including the abolition of slavery. Jennifer Keith takes up the topic as one in which the structure of the gaze produced through pathetic vignettes creates challenges to antislavery poets who hope to avoid objectifying slavery’s victims, in “The Formal Challenges of Antislavery Poetry,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 97124. While his British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) examines the rhetoric of sensibility in abolitionist letters, novels, poetry, pamphlets, sermons, and parliamentary speeches, Brycchan Carey’s essay in the current volume extends this analysis to drama. Most recently, in Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 17591815 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), Srividhya Swaminathan has shown that pathos is

aspect of some antislavery literature: the alarming sense that British complicity with slavery was spreading moral corruption throughout society in the form of physical degeneration that corresponded to the corrosion of the mind. One such work is Anna Letitia Barbauld’s relatively early contribution to the abolition debate, her Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (1791). A devastating portrait of the individual and national consequences of moral failure, Barbauld’s poem is often cited in discussions of British women’s abolitionist writing, but rarely does it receive extended close scrutiny.2 I depart from that practice here by analyzing the poem to illuminate what Alan Richardson has called the “contradictions, cruxes, and charged moments” that reflect “embodied approaches to the mind.”3 A charged poem from beginning to end, the Epistle to Wilberforce can clarify some neglected details of other sentimental abolitionist writing while elucidating an important thread in understanding the physiological foundations of emotion as it appeared in the period’s discourse of sensibility, a discourse that was central to the abolition debate.