THE HORRORS OF SLAVERY AND OTHER WRITINGS BY ROBERT WEDDERBURN
Product Description
by Ian McCalman
The Horrors of Slavery vividly records the history, ideas, and rhetoric of Robert Wedderburn, a Scottish-West Indian slave offspring, who was a leader in the movement to abolish slavery in the West Indies. Wedderburn lived an extraordinary life in the slums of Georgian and Regency London during the insurrectionary ferment of the French wars and Reform agitation, working successively as a sailor, tailor, thief, prophet, blasphemous preacher, revolutionary conspirator, and bawdy-house keeper. His publications had an enormous effect in his time, and now for the first time are collected in book form. Its unique documents - including abolitionist autobiography, prophetic piety, pungent radical journalism, and fiery colloquial speeches transcribed by government spies and undercover policemen - are echoes from the criminal and political underworld, enabling us to reconstruct the culture and mentality of a poor, unlettered immigrant black. They disclose the rough, rich, and creative political expressions of a desperate mulatto radical whose tavern oratory, blasphemous preaching, burlesque theatricality and revolutionary rhetoric aimed to liberate the enslaved in the West Indies and Britain, and to turn the world upside down in the manner of Cromwell's preachers. Wedderburn provoked and endured the repressive wrath of the British government and helped to convince London's artisan ultra-radicals of the affinities between black West Indian and British working-class revolution
Paperback: 154 pages
The Horrors of Slavery vividly records the history, ideas, and rhetoric of Robert Wedderburn, a Scottish-West Indian slave offspring, who was a leader in the movement to abolish slavery in the West Indies. Wedderburn lived an extraordinary life in the slums of Georgian and Regency London during the insurrectionary ferment of the French wars and Reform agitation, working successively as a sailor, tailor, thief, prophet, blasphemous preacher, revolutionary conspirator, and bawdy-house keeper. His publications had an enormous effect in his time, and now for the first time are collected in book form. Its unique documents - including abolitionist autobiography, prophetic piety, pungent radical journalism, and fiery colloquial speeches transcribed by government spies and undercover policemen - are echoes from the criminal and political underworld, enabling us to reconstruct the culture and mentality of a poor, unlettered immigrant black. They disclose the rough, rich, and creative political expressions of a desperate mulatto radical whose tavern oratory, blasphemous preaching, burlesque theatricality and revolutionary rhetoric aimed to liberate the enslaved in the West Indies and Britain, and to turn the world upside down in the manner of Cromwell's preachers. Wedderburn provoked and endured the repressive wrath of the British government and helped to convince London's artisan ultra-radicals of the affinities between black West Indian and British working-class revolution
Paperback: 154 pages
