ABSTRACT
Wylie Sypher’s analysis of imaginative literature is persuasive but tends to suggest that this mythical creation was virtually the only Negro image in eighteenth century Britain. Winthrop Jordan, in the largest-scale study of seventeenth and eighteenth century attitudes, places some emphasis on the descriptive and synthesizing material in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But as it is the essence of his thesis that by 1700 racial slavery dominated New World attitudes, his treatment of the eighteenth century necessarily depends very little on such evidence, since his main concern is the Negro image in America. From almost as early pro-slavery writing added its own distortions to images of the Negro. In the eighteenth century, there were numerous monthly journals which, in reviews and precis of the geographical writings, added to public awareness of the Negro. One of the earliest of a succession of Negroes whose colour earned them special treatment in British society was Francis Williams.
