Our April 24th meeting featured acclaimed author Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, professor at Vassar, Barnard College of Columbia University, Dartmouth, and, currently, UMass at Amherst. Her BBC radio series, Britain’s Black Past, highlights the lives of black people who settled in Britain in the 1700s and early 1800s, expanded into a book she edited. “I’m really interested in these forgotten lives,” she said.
Professor Gerzina has published nine books, including Black London: Life before Emancipation (now coming back in print in the UK as Black England) and Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend. The latter is the story of two former slaves who were early settlers in Vermont.
Researching hidden histories is arduous. It’s difficult to find accurate first-hand accounts, though Peter Fryer’s seminal work, Staying Power, is a good starting place for information on black British history. Gerzina spent seven years on the Prince book, combing through letters, sifting for truth, and uncovering documents. Surprisingly, her mother, a genealogist, had a source in her collection that revealed that her white ancestral family had once owned Abijah Prince. Professor Gerzina said she believes she was meant to tell the Princes’ story.
As she researched, she was “really careful not to be angry.” Some stories shocked her, such as the history of Nathaniel Wells, a mixed-race man, the son of an enslaved woman who inherited his white father’s plantations and fortune and became a slave owner himself. He was the first black high sheriff in England, and married two white women. Gerzina said that descendants are sometimes surprised to discover they had black ancestors.
Unlike in the Caribbean and the U.S., Britain never had laws against mixed marriages. Most black men who lived in England in the 18th century married white women, she said, because few black women were brought over at the time. In Britain, social standing, family connections, and money aided status, though many remained working class or poor.
Blacks in England during this period worked in a variety of roles including servants, shop workers, and tavern workers, while others remained poor. Among those who opened shops were Ignatius Sancho and Francis Barber (servant of Samuel Johnson). Sancho was mentor to Julius Soubise, “a man about town,” who later was a horse trainer in India.
Such examples were less common, since it was difficult for black people in England to establish themselves in business. Without financial training and membership in a guild or parish, they found entrepreneurial success hard to achieve. Though some attained higher status, others labored in more menial occupations or were reduced to begging.
Professor Gerzina clarified points regarding slavery laws in England. Lord Chief Justice the Earl of Mansfield did not end slavery in the 1772 Somerset case. “He wasn’t Abraham Lincoln,” she said. He only very narrowly ruled that Somerset, an escaping slave, could not be forcibly removed from England and sent to slavery in the West Indies.
That distinction did not stop people of the time from interpreting the ruling as ending slavery. Some enslaved people also believed that if they were baptized, they could not be enslaved in England. Slavery didn’t end in the British colonies until 1807- ‘08, she explained, and full emancipation in 1834 in the Carribean.
The discussion included many fascinating factoids, such as Joshua Reynolds’ practice of borrowing black servants from other households to add to a portrait as to make the pictured family appear wealthier. This trading of images makes it hard to trace the true identities of the black people in those portraits.
When asked about current popular Regency dramas, Professor Gerzina said though she liked the “what if” quality of Bridgerton, she’s not a fan of the series Sanditon, which she said is not true to Austen in its portrayal of Miss Lambe, and the characters’ mannerisms and body language are not true to the period. “Austen was more aware of the world than people think,” she said, and little hints are in her work.
Her final anecdote was a true ghost story regarding a Jane Eyre manuscript’s journey from Haworth to the British Library accompanied by a curator and the novel’s spectral author. Participants were left with delightful shivers at the end of the meeting.
