ABSTRACT
Promoted by Enlightenment moral philosophers as the crucial medium of ethicopolitical community, sympathy has developed a modern reputation as being neither consistent enough to constitute an ethical virtue nor charged enough to provide a political motivation. Sympathetic imperatives, seen as wayward and weak, offer an unsatisfactory explanation for the historical emergence of new forms of communal identification, because sympathy is understood, at best, to consolidate preexisting collective bonds. In this essay, I ask how sympathetic appeals in the British antislavery movement might be understood to act in such a way so as to extend collective identification. I focus on the self-reflexive rhetoric of sympathy in three abolitionist poems published in England in 1788, the year of the first nationwide antislavery campaign: Helen Maria Williams’s A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade, Hannah More’s Slavery, a Poem, and Ann Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade.1 While their ideological commitments varied, all three writers were defining the public and political role of poetry in new and ambitious ways. All three, I argue, recognized a performative dimension to their humanitarian verse, as the medium of a sympathetic appeal that seeks to alter the identity of the audience to which it is addressed.
