ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century British abolitionism was acted out on many stages. From the mid-1760s, when the new and, at the time, rather eccentric antislavery ideals of American Quakers began to reach the British public, to 1807, when parliament voted to outlaw the trade in human beings in British ships, the reading public were bombarded with thousands of poems, pamphlets, novels, tracts, sermons, articles, treatises, and essays offering reasons why, or why not, the slave trade should be abolished. Some of these were performed: essays read out at public meetings, speeches delivered to parliament, poems and novels shared among family members, sermons intoned before pious congregations, tracts read aloud to illiterate village swains. At the height of the abolition movement-the heady five years between 1787 and 1792-antislavery was daily performed in the pulpit and in parliament, on the streets and in sitting rooms. It even put in a few short appearances on the stage where theatergoers were entertained with representations of suffering overcome, injustice rectified, and cruelty ameliorated, often lubricated with copious tears from actor and audience alike. Twentieth-century critics found such scenes distasteful. Wylie Sypher, the first critic of British antislavery literature, reflected the critical prejudices of his day when he argued of Thomas Bellamy’s play The Benevolent Planters (1789) that “few works are more drenched with sentimentality; possibly a complete drama of anti-slavery would have been more enervating than anti-slavery verse.”1 Most recent critics have ignored the play entirely, proving that silence is itself an eloquent form of criticism. Bellamy’s play is indeed thoroughly sentimental, although it most likely disappeared without trace after two performances not because of its sentimentality but because it argued for the reformation of slavery rather than for its abolition. Nevertheless, with its insistence on dramatizing the suffering of the enslaved through lachrymose sentiment rather than through the tragic heroism of an Oroonoko, it typifies many of the plays tackling the slavery issue that appeared between 1760 and 1800.
