The question above is one that abolitionists encouraged blacks to ask when considering their treatment and subservient position at the hands of British slaveholders. The question sought an unequivocally positive response; an affirmation that blacks were of the same species as whites, in which belonging to the human family conferred upon them basic rights and respect. However, the rhetorical nature of this question was far from secure, as even after emancipation in1833 there were plenty of voices to offer either a resounding or meditative 'no' in response. Ingrained stereotypes associating blackness with inferiority were perpetuated and expounded by the rise of 'scientific' racism and racial pessimism, resulting in a society that polarized around 'The Negro Question'. This essay will endeavour to trace how in the national imagination race became entangled with politics, class, religion and gender, focussing on how post-emancipation West Indian blacks were represented in the fears and fantasies of British society.

            The concept of race, as explained by Shearer West, is socially created and historically variable, with representations of the racial other modulating and feeding on existing preoccupations.[1] Certainly this is true of the period 1833-1867, which I will be examining, framed as it is by the emancipation of slaves and the Governor Eyre controversy. 'Race thinking' offered the Victorians explanations of differences and antagonisms between human groups, allowed for the existence of an imperial racial hierarchy, and justified the control of 'inferior' races in a greatly expanded overseas empire. Cultural identities were constructed through the markings of difference with others,[2] of which the most visible was skin colour. As Jordanova has noted, "the other is treated as an object, something to be managed and possessed, and as dangerous and threatening. At the same time the other becomes an entity whose very separateness inspires curiosity, invites enquiring knowledge."[3] Jordanova believes that the other "is to be veiled and unveiled" by science[4], and while an examination of how the young science of anthropology impacted upon Victorian understandings of racial difference is necessary I believe it also important to recognize that scientific doctrines of racial inequality were overwritten by sentiments expressed in visual culture, literature, public ceremony and the language of social life itself. According to West, "fact and fiction merge with race double-coded as biological reality and Victorian mythology."[5] Indeed, perceptions of blacks were mediated as much by the imaginary spaces they were located in as by actual events in the West Indies.

            Despite the stability of certain racial stereotypes that relegated blacks to the lower branches of the morphological and aesthetic trees of humanity, racial attitudes in the mid-Nineteenth Century changed and hardened. Since the end of the eighteenth century the abolitionist movement had been vocal in its criticism of the 'peculiar institution' of slavery, and appealing to British ideals concerned with liberty, the rights of man and good Christian behaviour had succeeded in removing blacks from the liminal spaces of empire, repositioning them instead as highly visible elements. The oppressed 'Negro' was presented pleading for sympathy and protection, deserving of pity and solidarity for the injustices suffered during centuries of subjugation. Strickland, in the Narrative of Ashton Warner (1831), embraced slaves as fellow human beings, asking "does the African mother feel less love to her offspring than the white woman? Or the African husband regard with less tenderness [his] wife...Is his nature so brutalised that the sacred associations of home and country awaken no emotions in his heart."[6] Here blacks are subject to the same domestic and patriotic sentiments as the British, and thus deserving of freedom. Despite the Slave Trade Act of 1807, it was not until 1834 that with pressure from the Anti-Slavery Society emancipation was conceded, and not fully completed until 1 August 1838 with the termination of apprenticeship. As Hall has demonstrated, emancipation offered a chance for the "constitution of a new Black subject", for the creation of a new moral world in which through embracing British norms of civilisation and religion blacks could learn to be responsible, industrious, independent and Christian.[7] William Knibb remarked upon "deplorably dark and benighted" villages, which he attributed to the legacy of slavery, but he was committed to enacting a transformation of the human material so blacks could "take a proper stand in society as men."[8] Knibb noted an increase in "morality, social order and domestic happiness", the "universal observance of marriage", and industry wherever blacks were "fairly treated", and was duly satisfied with children attending schools and wives fulfilling "the station for which they were intended...their families and home."[9] For Knibb, economic, social and moral successes were being established in free villages "independent of the White people", serving as proof that blacks were capable of prospering and advancing themselves, and as a reminder to whites of "the necessity of treating them with justice and moderation."[10]

The (British and Foreign) Anti-Slavery Society[11] and missionary groups where primarily print movements, and distributed millions of copies of tracts, sermons, speeches and publications. As part of the national print culture they were in a position to inform and shape public policies through the sustained force of public opinion.[12] Books such as Phillippo's Jamaica – Its Past and Present State (1843) contributed to an optimistic "Jamaica of the Mind"[13], where the transformative power of British Christian values and mores allowed the imagining of a "new world" and a "new order of beings", albeit under the paternalistic guiding hand of the British Missionary Society.[14] Black histories of 'savage' Africa and slavery were assumed to have been eradicated in the moment of emancipation and conversion, but syncretic forms of black culture, religion and way of life shaped by the specific historical legacy of slavery undermined missionaries' vision of utopia. The practice of Obeah and Myalism caused particular concern, representing distinct resistance to European values and controls. Sexual licentiousness and certain ritualistic displays affirmed that blacks were still only in the early stages of civilisation, and without watchful and fostering care would, due to a childlike lack of restraint, revert back into the barbarism of their African forbearers. A successful Jamaican future would only be heralded, according to Phillippo, if black inhabitants embraced the missionary doctrines that served as a blueprint for forging a 'new man': "independent, yet patient and submissive in spirit".[15] Those that were transformed, "men endowed with minds in equal dignity, equal in capacity...men of the same social dispositions and affections", could expect "to occupy the same rank with ourselves in the great family of man."[16]

            However, this view of the progressive black subject was contested, and running parallel to the missionary/evangelical view of free blacks as subjects ready to accept guidance, learn, labour and live respectably was an imagined figure who was lazy, infantile, lacking in judgement and in need of compulsion by his/her assumed superiors. Under these views the black man could not cast off his dependent status, let alone attempt to project himself in the image of an Englishman. From the mid-1840s into the 1850s the march of the utopian vision which the missionaries had considered inevitable slowed. A decline in sugar production brought economic distress, the abolitionist cause was divided over the consequences of free trade in sugar, and the power of the missionaries was in decline - their congregations split, their leadership rejected and the Native Baptists flourishing. The identities constituted since emancipation could not hold, and increasingly the character of the Negro was called into question; blamed for economic problems and castigated for not displaying the level of moral and spiritual reformation that had been assumed. Indeed, following select evidence as to the retrogression and degradation of the free-black population it became possible for commentators to suggest that blacks were possessed of innate weaknesses and inherently inferior, that "If left for many years without European influence, they will... fall into as low a position as some of the worst tribes of Africa."[17]

            The failure of blacks to respond satisfactorily to freedom, most importantly their reluctance to assimilate to British norms and adopt a capitalist work ethic, meant the abolitionist image of industrious, self-improving and self-reliant free-blacks was increasingly untenable, and ever more it was noted that they seemed to cultivate instead the lazy profligate habits of the residuum in Britain.[18] Reformers facing intractable poverty in Britain had long felt that only the deserving poor should be assisted, evidenced by the passage of the New Poor Law (1834), and able-bodied blacks, deserving in slavery, could in poverty-stricken freedom be dismissed as just another part of the undeserving poor.[19] Indeed, Lorimer has suggested that blackness was identified with a socially inferior status, as respectable people extended conventional attitudes held towards the lower-classes to all blacks. This more strident racialism, which by 1850s had led to a denial that the concept of a 'black gentlemen' could exist, arose out of the identification of blacks with a slave past and the association of this servile status with the British lower orders.[20] Interestingly, an examination of Mayhew's study of London Labour and the London Poor reveals that those occupied in most degrading, dirty vocations, such as chimney sweep or scavenger, were racialized in visual representations, demonstrating that darkness was synonymous with the 'great unwashed'.[21]

Humanitarians, witnessing a decline in the influence of their organizations, condemned as "windy sentimentalists" indulgent towards 'Nigger Philanthropy', found it impossible to surmount accusations and attacks that were encouraging and popularising racialist thinking. The rise of scientific racism altered racial attitudes; monogenesis was challenged by theories of polygenesis, and certain credence was extended towards theories of biological determinism. These 'scientific' constructs appealed to Anglo-Saxon notions of supremacy, and conveniently marked the difference of the black other, relocating them into an inferior racial category determined as much by the past as by the present.

            Studies of race by ethnologists and anthropologists such as Robert Knox and James Hunt challenged the tradition of protective benevolence towards blacks, claiming as they did that moral and intellectual traits as well as physical traits were biologically determined. Confusing cultural and physical characteristics, race assumed an all-inclusive meaning so that it became, in the eyes of its exponents, the most significant determinant of man's past, present and future. Indeed, in Knox's words "Race is everything...civilisation depends on it."[22] As Stepan has argued, the body became naturalised – "the construction of races as natural, biologically grounded entities...rendered their members as lesser or even non-individuals...distinct in their biology and differentiated from an implicit white, male norm."[23] Stepan highlights the danger of "creating group identities in difference", as in doing so it was possible to deny certain freedoms, equalities and rights.[24] James Cowles Prichard, the champion of monogenesis, maintained in the 1830s-40s that it was not the biological element that determined race, but rather religious, philosophical, political, social and environmental influences.[25] However, while Prichard identified that cultural and physical traits were open to change and improvement, others believed they were fixed by biological inheritance. During the 1850s-60s the ethnocentrism of scientists intensified into racism, with race becoming not only a physical category but also the determinant of intellectual, psychological and moral nature.[26]

            Knox, inspired by these beliefs, argued in Races of Man (1850) that the physical type could and did impose limits on cultural achievement, and that subsequently some races were not capable of the fullest human development. Knox identified absolute difference between the bodies, cultures and behaviours of blacks and whites: "Look at the Negro...Is he shaped like any white person? Is the anatomy of his frame, of his muscles and organs, like ours? Does he walk like us, think like us, act like us? Not in the least."[27] Here 'educated' looking is used to manipulate evidence and indoctrinate the viewer into a belief in primordial difference. However, Knox also holds reservations about whether the future will offer any improvement of the black race: "They are shrewd, and show powers of mimicry – acquire language readily, but can never be civilised."[28]         Here a certain humanity is reluctantly attributed, but civilisation, the touchstone of progress and modernity, is denied. Accordingly, where the Anglo-Saxon "still hopes ultimately to be masters of the world" destiny "seems to have marked [the dark races] for destruction."[29] The equality of races is vehemently denied, and the inferiority of blacks highlighted, which for Knox will continue in perpetuity. Hunt, president of the Anthropological Society in the 1860s, was much taken with Knox's racist theories, and in papers 'On the Physical and Mental Characters of the Negro' and 'On the Negro's Place in Nature', for example, concluded that blacks were of a different species to whites, were inferior intellectually and in civilisation to Europeans, and that humanity could only be achieved when in "natural subordination to the European".[30]

            The ardent racist stance taken towards blacks, represented by Knox and Hunt, did not go unchallenged, and such outspoken views and misinformed opinions of a vocal minority could not be embraced unreservedly by mid-Victorian society. The reception of ideas was a critical and selective process; the violent racist invective of (scientific!) racists were rarely expressed in private correspondence. However, literature and art, along with other forms of popular media, were receptive to and informed by the racial attitudes that were circulating, simultaneously accepting, enforcing and contributing to polarized beliefs and images. Individual authors indulged in a degree of sensationalism (particularly evident in newspapers or cartoons) to arouse readers' interests or sensibilities, ultimately providing a distorted, exaggerated view of racial attitudes.

Carlyle's 1849 essay Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question is indicative of this. As Hall notes, this essay is significant as it broke the discursive frame established by abolitionism, replacing pity with contempt. Planter discourse was rearticulated from the heart of the metropolis, insistent on immutable difference constructed hierarchically"[31], where blacks must be ruled by whites, "born wiser than you...that is and always was the way of the world".[32] Carlyle's exaggerated writing style was influenced by personal racism, Romanticism, and a singular pleasure in causing offence to pious and sanctimonious evangelical Christians, whom he despised for encouraging weakness through dependency. Carlyle, infused with spite and vitriol, painted an exceedingly derogatory picture of the black West Indian population, who in worth – "quantity of intellect, faculty docility, energy and available human valour and value" – were not even an approximation of whites.[33] With a total disregard for the complexity of the West Indian economy and its human material, Carlyle attributed all failings to the indolence of blacks, whom he purported would not "labour honestly according to the ability given them", and thus had "an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled".[34] "Quashee" was variously described as a "poor blockhead", "dead soul" and "rotten mass of idleness", but also feminised as "a pretty kind of man...a handsome glossy thing".[35] By projecting an indolent, unintelligent, and significantly feminine image of blacks, it became possible to locate them in a natural position of subservience to superiors. It was the 'white man's burden', in contrast, to pursue the masculine task of carrying "the whole world and its business upon our backs", thus legitimising the re-organization of society in the "service of great men".[36]

            In response to Carlyle's invective, John Stuart Mill issued a prompt, combative response. He acknowledged that Carlyle's position regarding blacks belonged to the "doctrines and spirit of which ought not to pass without remonstrance", lamenting the "mischief" such a work would do in propagating a thoroughly negative view of blacks loaded with racist sentiment.[37] Mill recognised that the British were culpable of using "their strength to keep the others [blacks] weak", and thus had impaired the growth of black society.[38] He denied that whites were "born more capable of wisdom", theorising that difference among human beings is not to be attributed to differences in nature, but rather "to an infinitely greater variety of accidents and external influences."[39] Mill's utilitarianism sought the "minimization of pain", whereby the exploitation of another, especially on the basis of race, was an abhorrent injustice that should never be permitted by a 'civilised' nation.

            These essays highlight the irreconcilable positions adopted in the construction of a racialized black identity. Although these positions were not necessarily fixed and hegemonic, and it was possible to negotiate and rework identities, popular imaginings of blackness were frequently influenced by the discursive framework evident in Carlyle and Mill's work, or the conflicting beliefs of anti-slavery societies and scientific racial theories. For example, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Thomas Day's Five Years in the West Indies (1852), or Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859) all engage with the question of race, assuming a generally negative view of blackness while reifying British superiority. In Jane Eyre Bertha Mason is described as "discoloured" and "blackened", and her depiction as a racial other leaves her "morally stained by intemperance, infidelity, impurity, profanity, madness and bestiality."[40] She has the been the victim of what Said has termed "colonial desire" – the longing and fascination expressed by Rochester towards the physical self of Bertha Mason illustrates how through sexuality blacks were able to penetrate the personal world of white 'superiors'. It is significant that such a union ends in flames. Day's book, refuting the notion of Jamaica as Caribbean paradise, describes it instead as a Hell full of lunatic Negroes, in which, like Carlyle before him and Trollope after, he creates the fantasy of a pure Negro type. A review in Blackwood's magazine criticizes Day's adamant intolerance towards anything non-British, but there is a striking parallel between Day's vision of a Caribbean Hell and Rochester's.[41] All three texts highlight black inferiority, but Day's and Trollope's accounts purport to be objective accounts that put forward the truth dispassionately as seen by the authors. Trollope particularly is guilty of resurrecting many of the arguments of Carlyle, such as the intellectual weakness and laziness of blacks. He elaborates on these stereotype to argue that accordingly blacks are possessed of self-hatred: "he despises himself thoroughly, and would probably be content to starve for a month if he could appear as a white man for a day."[42] Trollope's assumption that blacks revered the white man and yearned to imitate him succours the belief in British superiority that runs through all the texts, while affirming black inferiority. Day's pseudo-scientific analysis attributes "Negro inferiority" to genetic and environmental conditions, much like Rochester, who believes he has the right to as a white male to relocate the racial other spatially. In locking Bertha away in the attic he denies her humanity while affirming his patriarchal control, but in doing so reveals British anxieties about the madness and violence of which the racial other is capable of.

However, it would be a mistake to suggest that a solely negative identity of blackness was constructed by mid-Victorian literature. Individual biographies, often written with the support of anti-slavery groups, gave blacks a human voice, and demonstrated the ways that they could insert themselves and their histories of abuse into the mid-Victorian consciousness. The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole is one such text. Mary Seacole, the black heroine, demonstrates that she is as capable as any Englishwoman of acquiring learning, civility, morals and respect. Despite being rejected by the War Office, she circumvents official channels and succeeds in serving as a nurse in the Crimean war.[43] Her adulation for war and the brave English soldiers place her at the heart of empire, and her position is validated by her knowledge and learning gained not from English civilisation, but from her industrious doctoring black mother. Significantly she reverses the associations of blackness with childlike primitivism, constructing her own imperial narrative in which she is 'Mother Seacole' looking after England's sick and dying sons. She claims her slave heritage, acknowledges the 'colonial desire' between her parents and condemns racism, but ultimately surrenders to the superior values and judgement of British culture, locating herself firmly within it.[44]

            Seacole, a mulatta, took pride in her black heritage: "If [my complexion] had been as dark as any nigger's, I should have been just as happy and useful, and as much respected by those whose respect I value..."[45] She rejects discourses of whitening and indeed any society that would not offer her admittance. However, as Malchow has shown, mulattos were often viewed with anxiety and were represented as unstable elements with suspect loyalties.[46] Shelley's 'Frankenstein' or Bronte's Bertha Mason, the product of "three generations of lunatics", illustrate a discourse of degeneracy and the Victorian fear of miscegenation. Trollope, commenting on hybridity, believed that "as a race [mulattos] have deteriorated in both mind and body", and were lacking "the intelligence and ambition of their white forefathers."[47] Clearly blackness was associated with retrogression, and whiteness with "civilisation, commerce...education".[48] However, Trollope promoted whitening, suggesting that "when sufficient of our blood shall have been infused into the veins of those children of the sun" the British can "bid farewell" to the West Indies.[49] According to Trollope, only when blackness is eliminated could the British, confident in their inherent superiority, congratulate themselves on the success of their civilising mission.

            The Morant Bay rebellion (1865) underlined the fact that the civilising mission was not complete in the West Indies, seemingly affirming many negative stereotypes, while convincing some that that blacks were not to be trusted under freedom. Martial law was declared by Governor Eyre, who executed 439 blacks and coloureds, flogged 600 and burned over 1000 domiciles. With memories of Haiti and the recent Indian Mutiny embedded in the Victorian imagination, journalists substantiated exaggerated rumours and confirmed preconceived notions about the propensities of black savages.[50] The reprisals were defended as a preventative necessity to stop the 350,000 blacks massacring the 13,000 whites. However, as more accurate details of the revolt and heavy-handed repression became apparent, notions of a black conspiracy against whites were refuted and critics of the colonial government found reason to believe that white Jamaicans were back at their "old slaveholding tricks."[51]

            Public opinion divided sharply over the controversy, which Lorimer has attributed to the fact that racial attitudes were closely bound to differences in political outlook, as beneath disagreements about race laid conflicting views about domestic political and social order.[52] A Royal Commission designated to inquire into the matter failed to condemn Eyre's actions, and so in response the Jamaica Committee sought a prosecution. With Mill as a figurehead they expressed outrage at the cruel and wanton excesses committed under martial law against British subjects, and believed that those responsible should be held to account. However, the militant activity of the Jamaica Committee provoked a defence committee in sympathy of Eyre, who was regarded by Carlyle among others as a genuine British hero; a defender of British interests and the rule of law in the face of "inhuman", brutish anarchy and "miserable mad seditions".[53] Ultimately Eyre and his cohorts were never prosecuted, demonstrating that abuses of power committed against blacks could be excused, then forgotten. Essentially there was a tacit adherence to the belief that blacks were not the same as whites, and thus were not subject to the same laws.

            In conclusion, it is apparent that mid-Victorian society was deeply divided in their perceptions of blackness. As Hunt noted, "hardly two persons use such an important word as race in the same sense."[54] While the physical characteristics of blacks remained constant, the psychological and social attributes assigned to the stereotype of the Negro altered according to the context of the observer. A dichotomy of blackness existed, where it was possible to observe the obedient and humble servant or the lazy, profligate worker; the natural Christian or the unredeemable sinner; the patient and suffering fellow man or the cruel and vengeful savage. The decline of the West Indies following emancipation combined with the rise of scientific racism affected an atmosphere of racial pessimism that was not effectively countered by missionary and anti-slavery societies, whose opinions on race were less influential in public debates during the 1840s and 1850s. However, binary divisions between black and white were both reaffirmed and questioned; the construction of a 'pure Negro type' in popular literature (or indeed science) was often attempted, but rarely went uncontested, and while diverse actors and authors may have disseminated their own views, these were often inflected by personal or political perspectives. A belief in the superior intelligence and civilisation of the British is apparent in the majority of commentators on race, which is reflected in the structure of the imperial racial hierarchy. The backwardness of blacks, defined morally, culturally and physically in opposition to whites, had a self-evident status in mid-Victorian Britain, exemplified by Underhill's statement that the entire black population of the West Indies stood "intellectually at zero". Considering their lack of hereditary advantages the question was whether they could, as Underhill hoped, respond positively to the benefits of British civilisation, by embracing Christian mores and values, or whether, as Carlyle supposed, they were doomed through indolence, ignorance and inferiority to always be "mastered". Although there could be no consensus on the physical, emotional and psychological makeup of black subjects, there was a widely held belief that blacks were childish, and thus required succour, guidance and support, or perhaps discipline and even compulsion. A paternalism, sometimes benevolent but always present, was thus exercised through assumptions of British superiority that locked blacks in a subaltern position.