ABSTRACT
In Colonial Encounters, Peter Hulme writes: “Yarico begins her career embedded as an anecdote in a biographical/historical memoir and is transferred by means of an ‘essay’ to the whole gamut of ‘literary’ genres” (9), including prose sketches, poems, epistles, plays, operas, ballets and pantomimes. Indeed, Richard Ligon provided the historical source for The Spectator No. 11 (Tuesday 13 March 1711) with his A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), and it was via Steele’s essay that the story of a native girl, who rescues and loves a shipwrecked English merchant, was propelled into British cultural production and the imaginations of English readers. Critics generally attribute the widespread and enduring popularity of this story to George Colman the Younger’s musical extravaganza (1787), which appeared at the onset of the abolitionist movement and was one of the most popular comic operas of the late eighteenth century. But according to Hulme, “from the standpoint of literary history” Steele’s version of Inkle and Yarico is surely the most influential.
