ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the representation of two differing forms of slave resistance and revolt in two lesser-known Romantic-period works, Robert Southey's six Poems on the Slave Trade of 1797 and Charlotte Smith's 'The Story of Henrietta' from her late novel Letters of a Solitary Wanderer of 1800. In Frantz Fanon's paradigm, freedom could never be granted to the slaves by the enslaver because such an act of legal emancipation validates the authority of the slaves' prior enslavement. The British Emancipation Act of 1833, even in its flawed state, was occasioned on the back of a series of violent and bloody slave revolts and their brutal suppression in Demerara, Virginia, and Jamaica. Southey's poems present the full tableau of slavery, moving from a war-torn Africa, via the middle passage, to the plantation, with its cycle of backbreaking work, sorrow, resentment, revolt, punishment, and execution, focused on one victim of the process.
