Scenes From Bourgeois Life - (III. The Scene With The Trunk-Maker)
Scenes From Bourgeois Life - (III. The Scene With The Trunk-Maker)
Scenes From Bourgeois Life - (III. The Scene With The Trunk-Maker)
Tis is a scene within a scene. In the previous scene, the scene with the specta-
tor (or, Te Scene with Te Spectator), a subject was born—or, as cultural
materialists tend to say, a subject was produced. In any case, this subject, or
rather, these subjects—as there were so many of them, in the end, that they
would come to be considered as a class—lived at least part of their lives at a
distance from the world that had produced them. Both at work and at lei-
sure, they participated in the world through mediation. Tey read about it in
reports and in journals, and they watched it (and one another) at the theatre.
Tey were there, and they were not there. Tey were on the scene, but invis-
ible; they were part of the scene, but apart from it. Tey were the spectators.
In this scene within a scene, one of these spectators goes to the theatre. He
doesn’t go there to see a play, however. In fact no play is even mentioned. In-
stead he goes to the theatre specifcally to see another spectator, a spectator
he has only heard about, presumably from other spectators. Here, at greater
length than the brief citation ofered in the previous scene, is what he fnds:
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It is observed, that of late Years there has been a certain Person in the
upper Gallery of the Playhouse, who when he is pleased with any
thing that is acted upon the Stage, expresses his Approbation by a loud
Knock upon the Benches, or the Wainscot, which may be heard over
101
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102 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
It has been observed, his Blow is so well timed, that the most judicious
Critick could never except against it. As soon as any shining Thought
is expressed in the Poet, or any uncommon Grace appears in the Ac-
tor, he smites the Bench or Wainscot. If the Audience does not concur
with him, he smites a second Time, and if the Audience is not yet
awaked, looks round him with great Wrath, and repeats the Blow a
third Time, which never fails to produce the Clap. He sometimes lets
the Audience begin the Clap of themselves, and at the Conclusion of
their Applause ratifies it with a single Thwack.
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 103
. . .
. . .
In this chapter, I want to go behind the scenes of this scene within a scene,
to explore what theatrical, cultural, and political realities might lie behind
this seemingly rather trivial and lighthearted essay and its recommendation
that someone resembling the Trunk-Maker should be appointed as a salaried
theatre critic. Te salaried theatre critic, is, as I have already suggested from
time to time, an ideal fgure for the bourgeois spectatorial subject whose pro-
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104 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
duction I have been tracking here. What can it possibly mean for Joseph Ad-
dison, of all people, to suggest that this ideal bourgeois subject ought to be,
or at the very least resemble, “a large black Man, whom no body knows”? To
approach this strange proposition, I begin by investigating briefy the his-
torical reality out of which Addison generated this imaginary Trunk-Maker.
What made it possible for Addison to imagine such a fgure? What historical
and cultural circumstances might have enabled his author to imagine him
and write him down, and within what horizon of expectations might he have
become legible to his readers? First of all, it would be useful to know what
sort of a person a trunk-maker would have been, and to think about what
Addison might have meant by attributing or assigning to his spectator spec-
tated this particular employment. It will then be essential to establish what
Addison might have meant, and what his readers might have understood by
the description of the Trunk-Maker as “a large black Man.” With a few his-
torical and literary points of reference in hand, I will then attempt a reading
of this text that aims to make sense of it as a scene from bourgeois life.
The Trunk-Makers
A trunk-maker made trunks: robust and portable containers for the trans-
port of people’s possessions, normally manufactured from wood, and which,
by the eighteenth century, were very widely used, even by people of relatively
modest means, to keep possessions safe while traveling. As Addison’s text
makes it clear, this was an artisan occupation and a form of manual labor that
required strong arms and the use of hammers. A trunk-maker was not, on the
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 105
St. Paul’s Churchyard.4 A trade card from around 1760 advertises the services
of Samuel Forsaith. Engraved by William Clark, this illustrated advertise-
ment identifed Forsaith as having been apprenticed formerly to “Mr. Smith,
Trunkmaker to his Majesty,” and as making and selling “all sorts of Campaign
and strong Iron bound trunks for travelling in foreign Roads, Sumpter &
Portmanteau Trunks, Budgets & Trunks for Post Chaises, Cover’d Hampers,
Canvas and Leather Valeeses for Bedding, Leather Portmanteaus, Saddle
Bags, Fire Buckets, Jacks, Powder Flasks, Harvest Bottles, Peruke Boxes, trav-
elling Writing desks, Cases for Plate, China, Glasses, & Musical Instruments.
With all other Sorts of Trunkmaker’s Goods.” Te card announced that these
goods and services may be obtained at the sign of “Industry and Indolence”
in Long Acre, London (which means it would have been located a very short
walk from both Drury Lane or the Haymarket). According to Phillippa
Hubbard, this illustration also alludes to contemporary discourses on social
issues, which had recently been the subject of William Hogarth’s Industry
and Idleness (1747), a series of engravings that depicted the parallel lives of
one industrious and one idle apprentice. Cards such as this, Hubbard notes,
contributed to the extension during the frst half of the eighteenth century of
the idea of shopping beyond “the prosaic acquisition of necessities” to in-
clude “the pleasures of perusal and decision-making.”5 Trade cards, then, like
journals and the theatre, are media with which bourgeois subjects can exer-
cise their capacities for viewing and judging. Forsaith the trunk-maker’s card,
with its theme of “Industry and Indolence,” might even be suggesting to po-
tential customers that such pleasures are (as indeed they must be) the fipside
of someone else’s industriousness.
By the time of Clark’s engraving for Forsaith, the rather more celebrated
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William Hogarth had lef his own mark on the history of the trunk-maker,
with an image that reveals a further aspect of the trade and sheds light on
what Addison had in mind with his choice of a profession for his imaginary
critic. In his 1751 print Beer Street—produced as one half of a pair, alongside
Gin Lane, that together illustrate the social evils of gin in contrast to the
healthy enjoyment of beer—Hogarth depicts a pile of books, bundled to-
gether with a sign indicating that they are on their way to “Mr. Pastern, the
Trunk Maker, St Paul[’]s C[hurch]y[ar]d.” Books and other printed matter
that nobody needs to read any more were used by trunk-makers to stuf the
lining of trunks.6 To be a trunk-maker, then, is to be either a harsh and de-
structive critic of literary material or an actively antitextual fgure, or both.
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106 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
Tis trope of the trunk-maker as an ironic fgure for the critic (or as a fgure
through whom to mock the critic) was clearly well established by 1750, as it
appears also in Christopher Smart’s dedication of his Horatian Canons of
Friendship to William Warburton—“that admirable critic”—and to “my
good friend the Trunk-Maker at the corner of St. Paul’s Church-yard” who is,
he writes “a man of much more worth and utility.” Smart, who published
these two dedications under the name of Ebenezer Pentweazle (blatant im-
personation or the invention of writing personae for comic efect seems to
have remained a standard literary journalistic device), accused Warburton,
who was a friend of Alexander Pope and produced an edition of his Dunciad
as well as an edition of Shakespeare, of “balderdashing the English language,”
and, in turning from Warburton to the trunk-maker, suggested that the lat-
ter’s destruction of literature performed a much more valuable public service.
He added that nothing in his dedication was “intended to ridicule or refect
upon Mr Nickless, who is an excellent artist in his way, and a very sensible
worthy man.”7 Incidentally, the November 1750 edition of Te Universal
Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure records the death of “Henry Nickless,
trunk-maker, the corner of St. Paul’s Church yard.”8 One might suppose that
Hogarth’s Mr. Pastern took over this business, but it appears that this was not
in fact the case, as Nickless was succeeded upon his death by his nephew,
J. Clements.9 Mr. Pastern may therefore have been a fction. Incidentally,
both Smart’s Horatian Canons and the Universal Magazine were published at
premises on St. Paul’s Church Yard. Te path from publication to trunk was
clearly a short one, and hardly needed to detour by way of Beer Street.
Te trunk-maker as fctional conceit seems to have enjoyed a little surge
in its cultural visibility at around this time: in 1749, he appears in Henry
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 107
I blush not to own, that I was the famous Trunk-Maker, of whom the
Tatler so of made just and honourable mention: as I then gave Laws
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to the Realms of both Teatres, I am now the only Body that can awe
the Footmens Gallery into any tolerable Degree of Order; nor am I
less noted for being universally call’d upon, as an infallible Umpire, in
all disputes that happen betwixt Men or Brutes, at the Bear Garden.13
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108 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
a trunk, he should “peep at the lining & perhaps you may be rewarded by
some glorious stanza stareing [sic] you in the face and claiming admiration.”15
So, to conclude this initial foray into the historical conditions of possibil-
ity for Addison’s Trunk-Maker, the following can be fairly securely afrmed:
trunk-makers were manual workers producing goods for widespread use, but
perhaps with a particular eye for an emergent class of bourgeois consumer;
by the mid-eighteenth century (and probably earlier), trunk-makers were
working in premises that made them close neighbors of the expanding busi-
ness of book and journal publication around St. Paul’s cathedral in the City
of London; that this probably facilitated the use, by trunk-makers, of un-
wanted printed matter to stuf the linings of trunks; that this meant that
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 109
Here, then, is the question with which this all began. What is to be under-
stood by the word “black” in this description? While teaching a graduate
class on spectatorship at Brown University in the winter of 2012, I suggested
that we read together a selection of issues of Te Spectator, which I had se-
lected because they dealt directly with theatre and theatre spectatorship.
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One text in particular captured our attention, and it did so, I am certain,
because it described its central fgure as “a large black Man, whom no body
knows.” What were we to make of this, reading it, as we were, in the United
States in the second decade of the twenty-frst century, with Barack Obama
beginning his second term of ofce as president, but with all the accumulated
damages of slavery and racism making their presence felt in the lives of peo-
ple and of institutions, including the university itself. Perhaps none of us
then anticipated the relegitimation of white supremacy that would follow
fewer than four years later with the election of Donald Trump in November
2016. I certainly did not, and as a visitor to the United States from the United
Kingdom, I was only beginning to understand the extent to which the expe-
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110 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
rience of slavery had shaped US history and culture, and how much that
legacy difered from that inherited in the United Kingdom. Tis is not to
claim that the UK legacy is in any way preferable, but simply to observe dif-
ferences in both historical experiences and contemporary perspectives.
Tis diference is visible in many ways, of which two seem of particular
signifcance today. Te frst is that the consequences of slavery for the forma-
tion and development of institutions, identities, and relations of power in
the United Kingdom have not received anything like the degree of attention,
from historians, politicians, scholars, or citizens in general that they have in
the United States. Tis is now changing, as the impact of important critical
work on slavery and its consequences is beginning to be registered in public
life.16 In Bristol, a city whose merchant wealth was largely a product of the
slave trade, historians and activists have opened up public debate about how
best to acknowledge and respond to this history, resulting in a number of
symbolic acts: the attachment of a red ball and chain to a statue of the slave
trader Edward Colston; the renaming of Colston Primary School and
Colston Hall; and the reopening of the Old Vic Teatre, which had been
built in 1766 with funds supplied by Bristol merchants involved in the slave
trade, with a season that explicitly acknowledged this relationship.17 In
Glasgow, in response to a report that detailed the fnancial contribution
made by the slave trade to its development, Glasgow University has estab-
lished a new center for the study of slavery as part of what it has called a
program of reparative justice.18 In London, at Queen Mary University of
London, where I work, the university’s Pan-African Society organized a cam-
paign to have two plaques commemorating the laying of the foundation of
the Octagon (formerly the college’s library) by King Leopold II of Belgium,
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 111
words “a black Man” (one of only two other uses of this phrase in Te Specta-
tor, other than in relation to the Trunk-Maker). Addison is writing of his
desire to avoid ever accidentally giving ofence to real people by writing de-
scriptions of invented characters in such a way that readers might think he
was referring to someone they could identify by name: “If I write any Ting
on a black Man, I run over in my Mind all the eminent Persons in the Na-
tion who are of that Complection: When I place an imaginary Name at the
Head of a Character, I examine every Syllable and Letter of it, that it may
not bear any Resemblance to one that is real.”21 In this case, Wheeler
argues—contradicting both Samuel Johnson and the Donald Bond, editor
of the standard scholarly edition—“black” cannot refer to a physical charac-
teristic, despite the use of the term “Complection.” Instead “Addison . . .
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112 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
no one other than his closest associates, even though he is regularly to be seen
in all the key locations of London social life. So, although the question of
whether he is “black or fair” is lef unanswered, it is fairly clear that it is a
question about personal appearance, and equally clear, given prevailing as-
sumptions about who is likely to be writing such a text, that it is not a ques-
tion about race as we would understand it today. Context, in the broadest
sense, can guide us reasonably securely in this instance. What of the context
in which the Trunk-Maker is described as “a large black Man, whom no body
knows”? As in the case of Mr. Spectator’s self-introduction, the use of black
to carry primarily moral or religious connotations can, I think, be ruled out.
Tere is nothing in the text to suggest that any questions of moral judgment
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 113
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114 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
notations that choice may have had for readers. Tis section, accordingly,
looks for historical, visual, and textual evidence that might indicate what
experiences of and ideas about “black” men it would be reasonable to assume
might be shared by some or all of the readers of Te Spectator in 1711.
Lingering a moment longer with the text itself, however, a few further
aspects of Addison’s imaginary theatre critic are worth bearing in mind as we
sif the historical evidence that follows. First, he is not only a “large black
Man” but also someone “whom no body knows.” Tis phrase could be read
in at least two ways. Either he is a man who is completely unknown to any-
one, or he is someone whom nobody who matters knows (nobody who could
be imagined reading Te Spectator, perhaps). It is also worth noting that this
description points toward some afnity or correspondence with Mr. Specta-
tor himself, whose identity, as we have seen, is unknown among the society in
which he moves and observes. Like Mr. Spectator, but probably for rather
diferent reasons (even if to similar critical efect), the Trunk-Maker (who is
not known as Mr. Trunk-Maker, incidentally) stands outside society. Of
course, if we accept a modern sociological meaning for society, then he can-
not stand outside it. Te Trunk-Maker can stand outside “society,” however,
if we understand by society what used to be called “polite society”: those
classes of people who participate in the dominant institutions of public life,
or what Habermas called the “public sphere.” Unlike Mr. Spectator, who is
recognized there despite “no body” being able to put a name to his familiar
face, the Trunk-Maker is recognized nowhere—except in the “upper Gallery
of the Playhouse,” of course, where he is a familiar, if still anonymous fgure.
Among the many thousands or millions of people living in or passing through
London in 1711 whose lives and faces “society” would not have recognized—
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people who would have been numbered among those “whom no body
knows” and not counted as participants in the public sphere—would have
been the footmen who habitually occupied this part of the theatre, who
could have been identifed by “society” only by the liveries they wore to iden-
tify whose household they served.
Second, not only is the Trunk-Maker unknown to society, but he is also
represented as being without speech. Perhaps, Addison speculates, he is “a
dumb man,” who expresses himself at the theatre in this unusual manner be-
cause he cannot speak. One other possibility worth bearing in mind, as we
pursue the possible (fctional) explanations for his being (imagined) this
way, is that although he does not speak in the theatre, he speaks elsewhere—
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 115
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116 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
Might readers of Addison’s text, attentive not only to its playhouse setting
but also to its reference to Hamlet, another Shakespeare play with supernatu-
ral elements, also observe some correspondence between Caliban—the is-
land native, who once spoke no English, who hews wood, draws water, and
displays a remarkable capacity for aesthetic appreciation—and the Trunk-
Maker, who seems to share so many of these attributes?
In looking beyond the text itself, at last, and to the historical conditions
in which it was read, I begin with two simple questions: were there any
“black” men in London, and would the readers of Te Spectator have known
that they were there? Te answer on both counts will turn out to be Yes, as
the burgeoning literature on this historical presence and pervasive represen-
tations of people of color in eighteenth-century (and earlier) London has
clearly demonstrated.25 I can’t do justice here to the wealth of scholarly re-
search on the topic of this historical presence and its various media represen-
tations, so a short summary of some key points will have to sufce, by way of
a more substantive answer to the frst of these simple questions. Afer that I
will attempt to develop a further understanding of the representation of such
fgures, focusing primarily, although not exclusively, on material drawn from
Te Spectator and related print publications.
To begin, then, with the simple question about the presence of black peo-
ple in London, and in England more generally, at the time of the Trunk-
Maker text, it has for a long time been very clear—notwithstanding a strong
residual public understanding that the black presence in Britain began in
1948 with the West Indian immigrants aboard the Empire Windrush—that
there have been black people (or rather, people who would be described as
black according to present-day understandings of race) in Britain, albeit
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mostly in fairly small numbers, at least since African soldiers were among the
Roman armies that subjugated Britain.26 Tere are references to Africans at
the courts of James IV of Scotland, Henry VII of England, and James VI of
Scotland, on each occasion appearing as musicians or performers. Tese
feeting appearances in the historical record have been supplemented through
archival research by Imtiaz Habib, who identifes eighty-nine citations of
black residents of England in Elizabethan records, involving at least ninety-
fve individuals—a numbers that, he proposes, suggests there would have
been around ten times that many.27 With the development of English colo-
nial projects from the mid-seventeenth century, as we shall see, these num-
bers increased considerably, both as enslaved people started to feature more
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 117
frequently in wealthy households, and as free seamen and other largely un-
known entertainers and laborers arrived. A few educated fgures, such as
Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho, who lef their own written accounts
of their lives, also began to appear in port cities such as London.28 One inter-
esting indication of their presence and its impact upon the economy of Lon-
don is that the Lord Mayor of London issued an order in 1731 that banned
the employment of “Negroes or other Blacks” as apprentices. Tis would
have prevented any “black Man” from becoming a Trunk-Maker, of course,
but it also suggests that until this ban came into efect there were indeed
black apprentices in London.
Among the most widely discussed materials showing the presence of
black people in England in the early modern period are a series of three open
warrants issued in the name of Queen Elizabeth I, two of which are dated
July 1596, and a third found, in draf form only, in the papers of Robert Cecil,
the Queen’s Secretary of State, which is assumed to have been written in
1601. Te frst notes that “there are of late divers blackamoores brought into
this realm, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie,” and
specifes that ten of those recently brought to England by Sir Tomas Basker-
ville should be removed. Te second also notes that the presence of the
“blackamoores” deprives her own subjects of gainful employment, and or-
ders that the very precise number of eighty-nine should be transported to
Spain by Caspar van Senden, a merchant from Lübeck. Te third also refers
to van Senden, noting, as did the second, that his role in the proposed re-
moval of “blackamoores” is a reward for previous services (in obtaining the
release of English prisoners in Spain). Tese texts have been frequently, and
quite rightly, read as evidence, not only of a signifcant presence of “blacka-
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moores” in England in the late sixteenth century, but also of sentiment that
there are too many such people and that they are threatening the livelihoods
and well-being of the supposedly indigenous English population.29
Tey have also usually been read as edicts of expulsion. Emily Weiss-
bourd, however, argues persuasively that they were not, and that far from
demonstrating the existence of a government policy that sought to remove
such people from the realm, they are actually evidence of English participa-
tion in the growing Iberian slave trade.30 Te documents in question were
not public proclamations and did not enjoy wide circulation: they were used
for the very specifc and limited purposes that they clearly stated—in the case
of the frst two (which are the only ones that we know were actually com-
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118 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 119
humans as commodities. Tey would also have been familiar with the use of
the word “black” to describe such people, even if the precise referent for this
term may not have always been clear, even if other terms were also used, and
even if the word “black” did not have quite the same connotations as it does
for readers in the twenty-frst century. How might they have read this word
in relation to the social reality they inhabited? What might “a large black
Man” mean to them?
Many readers of Te Spectator are very likely to have also been readers of
the Daily Courant (1702–35), and to have been well-informed, as a result,
about London’s economy and politics, and the sources and means of circula-
tion of the multiple products and people whose presence and whose labor
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120 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
was making the economy possible. Generally regarded as the frst daily news-
paper, it was, like Te Spectator, a single sheet, and, like Te Spectator, it car-
ried advertisements afer the (mainly foreign and diplomatic) news items
that were its main texts. Tis means that on a single sheet, published on Janu-
ary 14, 1707, a reader might have been able to read about the passage of the
Act of Union through the Edinburgh Parliament (thus creating the United
Kingdom), the sale of some books, a cure for wind, details of the evening’s
ofering at the Teatre Royal, and a notice ofering a reward for the recapture
of an escaped ‘Negro’. On other days they might have encountered reports on
deliberations in France as to the legal status (are they “Movable” or “Immov-
able”)36 of “Negroes” in “Saint Domingo” (i.e., Saint-Domingue: present-
day Haiti, then a French colony with a growing enslaved African popula-
tion), notice of the arrival at Falmouth of a “Pacqet-Boat” out of Jamaica, and
a few days later, the arrival at the same Devon port of the “Susan Privateer
with a Prize called the Frances Robert of and from Nantz laden with Wine
and Brandy: As also the Mariana of and from Rochelle another Prize taken
by the Neptune Privateer, with Provisions, bound for the West Indies,” an
advertisement for “A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea,
divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts, and Natural History
of all the Kingdoms and Countries therein,” and another for “Bohee-Tea,
Cofee Roasted, Chocolate all Nut or with Sugar, Ipococaan-Roots, Jesuites-
Bark, Sold by Robert Fary Druggist on London-Bridge, with great Encour-
agement to the Buyer,” requests for the return of lost items (etuis, dogs, ser-
vants, snufoxes, and apprentices).37 Enslaved peope, pirates, mass luxury
consumer goods (cofee, tea, chocolate, snuf ), exotic herbal products, maps
of Africa, islands in the West Indies: these were not only the stuf of colonial
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Britain, but the daily reading of its literate bourgeoisie in the early eighteenth
century. Even if these readers never saw anyone from Africa or the West
Indies—which in many cases would be unlikely, as recent historical research
suggests—they will have known that they existed, that they in some sense at
least shared a social space with them, and they will have known something of
the colonial relations into which the “long-distance trade” (see Chapter II)
was organizing them. In other words, such fgures appeared primarily either
as the objects of representation, or as bodies whose distance and proximity
were matters for regulation: are they “Movable” or “Immoveable Goods”;
can they be returned to “the Africa-house in Leaden-hall Street,” please; and
might the maps perhaps show where they come from and where they are
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 121
bound (the Slave Coast, Jamaica, “Saint Domingo”)? Tese are some of the
distances that might enable such readers, such a bourgeoisie, to behave, to
read, and to write as though a “black man” is always someone “whom no
body knows.”
As well as representations encountered through this reading, they—and
fellow Londoners less inclined toward or with less time for this particular
leisure activity—will also have encountered other images of black fgures.
London, as David Dabydeen writes, “if not actually ‘swamped’ (to borrow
the infamous term from the present Prime Minister) by fesh-and-blood
alien blacks, was ‘swamped’ by images of blacks. London in the eighteenth
century was visually black in this respect.”38 Dabydeen is referring here to the
popularity of signboards bearing images of black men, which identifed busi-
nesses (primarily grocers and tobacconists selling goods associated with the
colonial trade) at the signs of “Te Blackamoore’s Head,” “Te Black Boy,”
“Te Black Boy and Sugar Loaf,” and “Te Black Boy and Tobacco Roll.”39
Tis feature of the urban landscape is ofered as background, as it were, for
Dabydeen’s more extensive analysis of the appearance of black subjects in
“hundreds of seventeenth and eighteenth century English paintings and
prints,” including those of William Hogarth.40 He observes that black sub-
jects are represented in such images as occupying multiple social positions:
“footmen, coachmen, page-boys, soldiers, sailors, musicians, actresses, prosti-
tutes, beggars, prisoners, pimps, highway robbers, streetsellers,”41 but not,
typically, as theatre critics, journalists, owners of land or property, or occu-
pants of any other bourgeois positions that might have made them partici-
pants in a public sphere, nor any people of whom it could not be said that “no
body knows” them. For the owner or viewer of such prints and paintings,
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these subjects would therefore, for the most part, appear as “other” than
themselves (pretty much all such owners and nearly all viewers would have
been white property owners, either bourgeois or aristocrat), rather than as
fgures with whom they could imagine themselves identifying. Although the
black subjects in such pictures were, as Dabydeen observes, represented as
“very much a part of white society,” they were, on the whole, a clearly defned
part of that society, a society that, as Dabydeen’s own phrasing acknowledges,
was a “white society.”42 Particularly in representations of black subjects as
members (or servants of ) aristocratic households, Dabydeen notes, they are
frequently depicted as somehow detached from the rest of the image, rather
than as fully participating in the life of the household. Such images tend to
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122 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
What was it that Britishness knew but did not know? What was (or what is,
now) the political unconscious of Addison’s account of the Trunk-Maker?
During the period in which English settlers were consolidating their political
hold over West Indian plantation islands such as Barbados and Jamaica, with
their growing populations of enslaved Africans—from the middle of the sev-
enteenth century—there were signifcant acts of resistance to the imposition
of the new order. In both Barbados and Jamaica, organized resistance to the
development of the English plantocracy took the form of both isolated acts
of arson and sabotage and more substantial organized attacks on white
planter power.46 Some of the most signifcant of these were reported in Lon-
don and circulated in texts such as Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 123
quite comprehend how this was so. English planters in the West Indies early
associated African drum and horn music with mass uprisings of enslaved Af-
ricans seeking their freedom.”48 In the centuries of slavery and oppression
that followed, both the enslaved and those who escaped their chains to form
maroon communities of resistance and freedom would challenge and cir-
cumvent the provisions of such laws and their prohibitions on expression
through the development and practice of their own performance cultures,
involving music, dance, and impersonation.49
Such laws, which would include subsequent legal codes enacted on the
model of the Barbados legislation in the plantation colonies of what would
become the southern United States (Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina),
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124 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
the social death of the black subject, even if the superfcially benign form in
which he is presented might obscure his relation to those conditions. Te
fgure might also be imagined to combine, in a somewhat improbable fash-
ion, a dim Addisonian imagining of the performance cultures of Caribbean
slave societies with an appreciation of the fnest oferings of the white bour-
geois culture of the colonial metropolis. In this act of imagination, on the
part of writer and reader alike, the fgure of the “large black Man, whom no
body knows” is placed at a distance but also utterly present in the everyday
life of London. He is over the horizon, unintelligible, and potentially violent.
He is in London, in the theatre, a recognizable yet unknown part of a famil-
iar social world. In that familiar social world he is also a potential source of
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 125
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126 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
A few supplementary scenes may reveal more. Sir Roger de Coverley is think-
ing of going to the theatre. He’s not been for twenty years, and he’s a little
worried about being out in town late at night, in case he might fall foul of the
Mohocks. Te previous night he had been followed on his way home along
Fleet Street by “three lusty black Men,” and despite having used his fox-
hunting skills to dodge them on this occasion, he requests that he be accom-
panied to and from the theatre by Captain Sentry. Sir Roger is one of the
fctional members of Mr. Spectator’s club—a Tory landowner who has re-
tired to his country estate but makes occasional trips up to town—and this
report of his theatregoing, interlaced with his anxieties about Mohocks, ap-
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 127
accordingly, of the cultural fears about blackness that are producing the very
category of the white bourgeois spectator who remains the subject of this
book: a subject that produces itself, in part, by making jokes about being
scared of black men. Such black men are always in some sense imaginary. But
real black men keep getting killed, all the same.
Even imaginary black men can still show up for real. Tat is what hap-
pened in April 1710, when “four Indian Kings” arrived in London on a diplo-
matic mission, supposedly on behalf of the Haudenosaunee, known in Eng-
lish as the Iroquois Confederacy (of which the Mohawks were one
participating people, along with the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas,
and the Senecas), to secure Queen Anne’s renewed support for a joint
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128 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
ment of the FOUR INDIAN KINGS, lately arriv’d.” A report of this eve-
ning at the Queen’s Teatre, published some forty years later, claimed that
spectators in the Upper Gallery had disrupted the performance to demand
that, since they had paid to see the “Kings,” the “Kings” should be given seats
onstage. Robert Wilks, the theatre manager, who was playing the part of
Macbeth, complied with this request, and the performance apparently con-
tinued. Tis anecdote—whether or not it is an accurate account of the events
of the evening in question—reveals something crucial, I think, about how
the visit of the “Kings” was understood by the reading public. Te program
of entertainments in which the Native American visitors were taken to see
the society they were visiting was a program of double spectatorship. In
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 129
showing their guests the sights, the hosts simultaneously created occasions
for the guests to be the sights. But it was not just a matter of exposing exotic
visitors to the curious gaze of multiple London publics. Te London publics
also witnessed the visitors in acts of spectatorship, watched them as they
watched the entertainments laid on for them, presumably interested not just
in seeing the visitors themselves but in seeing what they made of the culture
they were visiting.
Tis visit, with its various scenes of performance, has been the subject of
a number of rich and interesting analyses, and my account does not aim to
add much to these.53 My aim instead is to linger a little longer with Te Spec-
tator, in order to extend the previous scene’s suggestion that the culture of
early eighteenth-century London, in the process of producing the bourgeois
subjects I am interested in, did so at least in part by producing “black” dou-
bles of its ideal self. It did so, in the case of the “Indian Kings,” by imagining
the doubles, not so much as objects of spectatorship, but as spectators.
Te Spectator No. 50—written, like No. 235 on the Trunk-Maker, by Jo-
seph Addison—is another fction in which Mr. Spectator’s curiosity leads
him into a scene of fantasy about another spectator. In this case, acknowledg-
ing his earlier fascination with the visit of the “Kings,” whose progress around
town he had “followed . . . a whole Day together,” he reports that he has se-
cured the services of a “Friend” to contact the “Upholsterer” in whose house
the “Kings” had stayed, to fnd out what he can about “their Manners and
Conversation.” He does this not simply to form “a right Notion of such
Strangers” but also to learn from any “Remarks” they may have made “what
Ideas they have conceived of us.” In response to the inquiries of this “Friend,”
the “Upholsterer” handed over “a little Bundle of Papers, which he assured
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him were written by King Sa Ga Yean Qua Rash Tow, and, as he supposes, lef
behind by some Mistake.” Mr. Spectator claims that the papers in question
have now been translated and a “Specimen” ofered in “this Paper,” with the
suggestion that more may follow in subsequent editions (a sequel that does
not in fact materialize). Unlike in the case of the Trunk-Maker, for which
Mr. Spectator did the legwork and went to the theatre to see his subject for
himself, even if he apparently made no efort to ask him anything, Mr. Spec-
tator here relies upon a “Friend” (who may, of course, simply be the sort of
“friend” on whose behalf one asks questions) to contact the Upholsterer,
then upon the Upholsterer to provide the bundle of papers, and fnally upon
the labor of a translator to render into English the words he attributes to
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130 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 131
that there might be some other subject position, some other place (of specta-
torship, of participation) from which to view the culture of eighteenth-
century London. Te joke, such as it is, works only because the revelation of
an utterly familiar bourgeois sensibility relies upon the prior assumption by
the reader that a Native American would, in reality, see things very difer-
ently. It is only possible, in other words, to invent a bourgeois by imagining
the not-bourgeois. (To be bourgeois is to be in relation to others.) Te Native
American “black man” stands for that not-bourgeois subject in the very mo-
ment of the substitution by which he is made to appear as the typical bour-
geois.54 It is the role of spectator that makes this substitution so easy.
Would this sort of substitution produce diferent meanings if it were
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132 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 133
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134 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
in the subsequent trial of alleged Mohocks in June could as well have been
drawing on this text as on Gay’s play for their claim that, far from being Mo-
hocks, and constituting a threat to the social order, they were actually vigi-
lante upholders of both law and order.
What does this reversal mean? It seems to bear some resemblance at least
to the reversal ofered in the case of the Trunk-Maker, the “large black Man”
who is proposed, ironically, as we have seen, as a fgure for the bourgeois
critic. What can an early eighteenth-century publication, associated with the
ascendancy of a protobourgeois class, be doing by proposing, however
tongue-in-cheek, that responsibility for the regulation of both law and order
and aesthetic judgment might be handed over to those subject to the new
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 135
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136 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
early months of 1712: the violence that has been and will continue to be nec-
essary to secure and continue bourgeois rule.
But even in this disclosure on the part of the bourgeois spectator’s politi-
cal unconscious, there may be a further displacement. Afer all, slave rebel-
lions and “Indian” wars were by no means the only threat to the orderly prog-
ress of early modern English capitalism. Te civil war in the middle of the
previous century had made it fairly clear that there was a struggle much closer
to “home,” in which protoproletarian subjects had succeeded in organizing
themselves not just in opposition to Stuart rule, but on the basis of develop-
ing critiques of the economic order that the landowner–bourgeois alliance
was seeking to establish. Te enslaved and native Americans were only two
heads of Linebaugh and Rediker’s “Many-Headed Hydra”:
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 137
The Brazilian
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138 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
mained with him, in his waking condition, “as vividly as if they had been
real.” Te image he remembers having retained most vividly in this way, as he
awoke, was of “a black, scabby Brazilian [cujusdam nigri & scabioisi Brasil-
iani], whom I had never seen before.” He found he could make this image
disappear by concentrating on “a book or some other object,” but, as soon as
his attention wandered again, “the same image of the same Ethiopian kept
appearing with the same vividness again and again.”62 Let’s briefy note some
points of comparison between this fgure and Addison’s Trunk-Maker: both
are “black”; one is a man “whom no body knows,” the other is someone
whom the philosopher had “never seen before”; neither of them speak; both
seem to exist in some kind of oppositional relationship to the conscious in-
tellectual practice of reading—the Trunk-Maker because of his profession
that makes books disappear into trunk lining, the “Brazilian” because read-
ing will make him disappear, at least temporarily. I propose the Brazilian as a
predecessor for the Trunk-Maker, however, not merely because of these simi-
larities between them, but because, considered together, they suggest that
both Spinoza and Addison were capable of imagining the collapse of the co-
lonial relation’s appropriate distance, a collapse that, in the case of Spinoza’s
Brazilian, at least, is the fearful content of the future—his dream image be-
ing, as he sees it, the omen of what is to come (unlike the auditory hallucina-
tions that had troubled his friend, Balling).
Warren Montag, in his book on Spinoza entitled Bodies, Masses, Power,
ofers a historical contextualization of the Brazilian that is similar in some
respects to that I have attempted for the Trunk-Maker. Tis contextualiza-
tion, which I shall briefy summarize momentarily, enables him to identify
the Brazilian as a fgure for what Spinoza termed the “multitude,” just as I
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 139
his letter to Balling, the “Caliban problem” is “located within the highest
abstraction of philosophical meditation.”65 As in the case of the Trunk-
Maker, part of the force of the imaginary fgure derives from its anomalous
appearance in a realm of rational discourse—philosophy, theatre criticism—
from which its real-world referents—actual “black” people—are typically
excluded. It is for this reason that such fgures appear, for Negri, as instantia-
tions of Caliban as “contemporary hero.”66
Montag notes that Spinoza’s correspondent, Pieter Balling, was “a mer-
chant engaged in trade with Spain and the Spanish holdings in the Ameri-
cas,” and that Isaac Aboab, one of the elders who had excommunicated Spi-
noza from the Jewish community (in 1656) had previously served as the chief
rabbi in the Dutch colony of Pernambuco in Brazil, until its conquest by the
Portuguese in 1654.67 Residents of Amsterdam, like Spinoza, would have
been well aware of their colonial relations with Brazil (and other American
locations, to which Africans had been enslaved): like the Londoners of the
early eighteenth century, the Dutch of the latter half of the seventeenth
would have known all about slave revolts and the threat posed by maroon
communities to the colonial project. All of these will have been present for
both parties to the Spinoza–Balling correspondence, as familiar materials
from everyday life. In Montag’s reading of the image of the Brazilian it is not,
however, just a case of the potentially threatening presence of “a black, scabby
Brazilian” as a fgure for slave rebellion, but a rather more complicated sce-
nario in which Spinoza makes an unconscious identifcation between him-
self and this “battle-scarred rebel slave” on the grounds that they both faced
the hostility of Rabbi Aboab, who stands in the wings of this scene as both
colonial ruler and religious leader, exercising punitive authority on Spinoza
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and his Brazilian alter ego.68 Spinoza identifes with the Brazilian, then, al-
beit unconsciously, just as Addison, somewhat more consciously, would
identify the Trunk-Maker with Mr. Spectator, and, by extension, himself.
Montag’s reading of the image is supported by his analysis of Spinoza’s Ethics,
where, as he shows, Spinoza wrote far more explicitly than other philoso-
phers of the time, such as Hobbes and Locke, of the potential signifcance of
these subaltern subjects who would one day (for Negri and others) constitute
the multitude. In this, writes Montag, Spinoza is not entirely anomalous; it is
simply that “he addresses directly what haunts the others as the absent centre
of their political projects.”69 In other words, he suggests, Spinoza’s thought,
and this image of the Brazilian that seems to rise up within it, asks a question
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140 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
very similar to the one I have been teasing out of the Trunk-Maker: “to what
extent was early liberal philosophy [or ‘bourgeois life’] shaped by its fear of
the masses”?70 If Spinoza’s image is indeed an omen, as he claims it must be,
it presumably presages a revolution to come that is already under way, a dis-
tant threat to metropolitan and philosophical order that is also already
within the gates. But that is, of course, to get way ahead of ourselves.
Notes
1. Te Spectator, No. 235 (November 29, 1711). See also Joseph Addison and Rich-
ard Steele, Te Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2: 413–
16.
2. Henry Nickless, whom we will encounter again shortly, apparently died with a
fortune of £20,000 in 1750. See Ambrose Heal, Te Signboards of Old London Shops: A
Review of the Shop Signs Employed by the London Tradesmen during the XVIIth and
XVIIIth Centuries (London: B. T. Batsford, 1947), 172.
3. G. Hinchlife, “Impressment of Seamen during the War of the Spanish Succes-
sion,” Mariner’s Mirror 53, no. 2 (1967): 137–42.
4. See Heal, Signboards, 171.
5. Phillippa Hubbard, “Trade Cards in 18th-Century Consumer Culture: Circula-
tion, and Exchange in Commercial and Collecting Spaces,” Material Culture Review 74–
75 (2012): 30–46, at 35.
6. See Denise Gigante, “Sometimes a Stick Is Just a Stick: Te Essay as (Organic)
Form,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 5 (2010): 553–65.
7. Christopher Smart, Te Horatian Canons of Friendship (London: J. Newbery,
1750), i, v, iv, iii, viii.
8. “Births, Marriages, Deaths, Preferments, Promotions, and Bankrupts,” Universal
Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure 7 (November 1750) [monthly; London: John Hin-
ton]: 238–39, at 238.
9. See Heal, Signboards, 172.
10. Henry Fielding, Te History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (London: Vintage Books,
2007), 122.
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11. Henry Fielding, [“Uses to Which Learning Is Put”], Covent Garden Journal, 1,
no. 6 ( January 21, 1752); reprinted in Alexander Drawcansir [Henry Fielding], Te Cov-
ent Garden Journal, vol. 1, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1915), 167–72, at 169, and in Denise Gigante, ed., Te Great Age of the English Essay: An
Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 169–74, at 171–2.
12. For an account of these prints see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd,
rev. ed. (London: Te Print Room, 1989), 145–48, and for reproductions of the prints
see plates 185–86. Paulson suggests that Hogarth may have taken the idea of the books
being sent to the trunk-maker from Smart’s Horatian Canons.
13. James Ralph, Te Touch-stone; or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and
Teological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town (London, 1728), xvi.
14. George Gordon Byron, Te Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Tomas
Moore (London: John Murray, [1830] 1932), 471.
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 141
15. Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago:
Northwestern University Press, and Chicago: Newberry Library, 1993), 377.
16. See, for example, the “Legacies of British Slave-ownership” project at University
College London.
17. Vanessa Torpe, “New Life for Historic Teatre as It Faces Up to ‘Slave Trade’
Past,” Te Observer, September 9, 2018; online at https://www.theguardian.com/
stage/2018/sep/09/bristol-old-vic-slave-trade-theatre-reopens-25m-facelif (accessed
September 28, 2018).
18. Martin Belam, “Glasgow University to Make Amends over Slavery Profts of Past,”
Te Guardian, September 17, 2018; online at https://www.theguardian.com/educa-
tion/2018/sep/17/glasgow-university-to-make-amends-over-slavery-profts-of-past (ac-
cessed September 28, 2018).
Te report itself is Stephen Mullen and Simon Newman, Slavery, Abolition and the Uni-
versity of Glasgow (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, History of Slavery Steering Committee,
2018), and is available at https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_607547_en.pdf (accessed Sep-
tember 28, 2018).
19. Some of the most signifcant scholarly contributions on this dimension of British
theatre have been by writers and researchers working in North America. See for example,
Felicity Nussbaum, “Te Teatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” in A
New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–
1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–90, and
Te Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Daniel O’Quinn,
Staging Governance: Teatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005). One area in which there has for a long time been sig-
nifcant British scholarly work on race and colonialism in the theatre has been in the
study of Shakespeare, where signifcant interventions have made since the 1980s. Much
of the early work of this kind was clearly part of the cultural materialist turn in literary
scholarship, much of it focused on Shakespeare and the early modern period, which I
discussed in Chapter II, “Te Scene with the Spectator.” See, for example, Paul Brown,
‘“Tis Ting of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: Te Tempest and the Discourse of Colo-
nialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dol-
limore and Alan Sinfeld, 48–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); Peter
Copyright © 2020. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.
Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London:
Methuen, 1986); Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 1989), and many other books and essays since.
20. For an indication of student and institutional engagement with the history of co-
lonial slavery in Rhode Island and the role of Brown University in promoting that en-
gagement and refecting upon its own involvement, see the following articles by Anne
Wootton in the university newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald (all accessed online Sep-
tember 28, 2018):
“In Colonial Rhode Island, Slavery Played Pivotal Role,” October 17, 2006; http://
www.browndailyherald.com/2006/10/17/in-colonial-rhode-island-slavery-
played-pivotal-role/
“Campbell Introduces First-Years to Slavery and Justice Committee,” Brown Daily
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142 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
dah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the Afican, 9th ed. (London, 1794). For Sancho, see
Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, an Afican. To Which Are Prefxed,
Memoirs of His Life (London: J. Nichols, for C. Dilly, 1784).
29. See, for example, Fryer, Staying Power, 10–12; Kim F. Hall, “Reading What Isn’t
Tere: ‘Black’ Studies in Early Modern England,” Stanford Humanities Review 3, no. 1
(1993): 23–33; Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (New York, 1989); and
Emily C. Bartels, “Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination, and Elizabeth
I,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 46, no. 2 (2006): 305–22, whose work sought
to connect what had been assumed to be only an expression of a racist expulsion policy
to other political and economic factors involved.
30. Emily Weissbourd, “‘Tose in Teir Possession’: Race, Slavery, and Queen Eliza-
beth’s ‘Edicts of Expulsion,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2015): 1–19. See
also Miranda Kaufmann, “Caspar van Senden, Sir Tomas Sherley and the ‘Blackamoor’
Project,” Historical Research 81, no. 212 (2008): 366–71, for an earlier engagement with
Ridout, Nicholas. Scenes from Bourgeois Life, University of Michigan Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 143
the same archival evidence that also challenges the view that these texts are evidence of an
expulsion policy.
31. Weissbourd, “Tose in Teir Possession,” 17.
32. Tere is a useful survey of much relevant literature supporting this kind of argu-
ment in Charles Hirschman, “Te Origins and Decline of the Concept of Race,” Popula-
tion and Development Review 30, no. 3 (2004): 385–415.
33. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: Te Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
34. See Lisa Lampert, “Race, Periodicity and the (Neo-) Middle Ages,” Modern Lan-
guages Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2004): 391–421; Geraldine Heng, “Te Invention of Race in
the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature
Compass 8, no. 5 (2011): 258–74, and “Te Invention of Race in the European Middle
Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8, no. 5 (2011): 275–93; and
Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern
Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 1–13.
35. Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power afer Slav-
ery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1–2; emphasis mine.
36. “Movable” means that they are deemed to be chattel slaves. In other words they are
not attached to the land or property where they work (“Immovable”) but, as the personal
possessions of their owner, may be used as collateral for borrowing purposes. Teir status
was in fact established in Le Code noir of 1685, issued by Louis XIV and supposedly
drafed by Colbert, which governed the treatment of slaves in all French colonies:
“Déclarons les esclaves être meubles.” In French the terms “meubles” and “immeubles”
refer, with the same basic sense, to “furniture” and “buildings.” Tis decision in France
would have aligned the position in Saint-Domingue with the legal position established
by the British slave colony of Barbados in 1661, and followed in subsequent slave codes
in colonies that would later become part of the United States, such as South Carolina,
Virginia, and Maryland. Te settlement of this “remarkable Question” in such codes rep-
resent signifcant legal moments in the process by which the personhood of the “black”
subject was obliterated and their character as commodity established. Presumably the
decision referred to in the Daily Courant is a legal confrmation of this status.
37. Daily Courant, 1707. Jesuit’s bark is a Peruvian bark used as a malaria cure. Ipoco-
caan root was found in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil and was
Copyright © 2020. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.
used an emetic.
38. Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks, 17. As the 1987 publication date of Dabydeen’s book
indicates, the prime minister in question was Margaret Tatcher. Dabydeen refers to a
1978 interview, when the then leader of the opposition said: “If we went on as we are,
then, by the end of the century, there would be four million people of the new Common-
wealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are
really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a diferent
culture.” Margaret Tatcher, TV interview for Granada World in Action, broadcast Janu-
ary 30, 1978, transcript online at https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103485
(accessed February 12, 2019).
39. A directory of such signs may be found in Heal, Signboards. Subsequent work has
identifed trade cards, like that printed for “Samuel Forsaith, Trunkmaker,” as another
source for such representations that, like signboards, would have been part of the every-
day life of even fairly modest bourgeois consumers who might not have had the chance
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144 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
to admire the paintings Dabydeen analyses. See Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect
Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), particularly Chapter 5, “Pleasurable Encounters,” which exam-
ines trade cards for tobacco products.
40. Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks, 18.
41. Ibid., 20.
42. Ibid., 18.
43. Ibid., 21.
44. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton and Oxford: Prince-
ton University Press, 2011), 26.
45. Ibid., 28. Gikandi’s use of the term “political unconscious” encourages a consider-
ation of his analysis in relation to Fredric Jameson’s work, which does indeed appear in
Gikandi’s bibliography even though it is not referred to explicitly. In my own attempt to
deploy the kind of interpretative strategy outlined by Jameson in Te Political Uncon-
scious, it is not slavery as such that is rendered visible, but rather the relationship between
slavery and the production of bourgeois subjects. My suggestion is not that British cul-
ture was unconscious of slavery, but rather that its white bourgeois participants were
unable consciously to articulate the terms of the relationship between themselves and the
system of slavery that made their way of life possible. See Fredric Jameson, Te Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981).
46. Slave rebellions, portrayed with varying degrees of sensitivity, sensationalism, and
sympathy, provided dramatic material for theatrical productions from William Shake-
speare’s Te Tempest (1611) to Tomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), adapted from
Aphra Behn’s prose fction of 1688, which was rewarded with favorable comment from
Addison in Te Spectator, No. 40 (April 16, 1711).
47. “A Supplemental Act to a Former Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of
Negroes,” April 21, 1676, CO (Colonial Ofce papers) 30/2, 114–25, PRO (Public Re-
cord Ofce, London); cited in Jerome Handler, “Slave Revolts and Rebellions in
Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide
56, no. 1–2 (1982): 5–42, at 17. Bans on musical instruments, and particularly drums,
were in force in Jamaica by 1688, according to Hans Sloane, and were enforced in St. Kitts
in 1711 and again in 1722, and were included in a new slave act in Jamaica in 1717. See
Copyright © 2020. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.
Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 58–59.
48. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY and London:
Cornell University Press, 2003), 79.
49. Kathleen Wilson, “Te Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Or-
der in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound,” William and Mary Quar-
terly 66, no. 1 (2009): 45–86. Paul Gilroy explores with exemplary care and historical
attention the possibility that such practices might constitute an alternative black aesthet-
ics, recognizing that to do so involves risking drinking from a “poisoned chalice,” but
nonetheless afrming “that the history and practice of black popular music point to
other possibilities and generate other plausible models . . . that bourgeois democracy in
the genteel metropolitan guise in which it appeared at the dawn of the public sphere
should not serve as an ideal type for all modern political processes.” He adds that we
“need to make sense of musical performances in which identity is feetingly experienced
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 145
in the most intensive ways and sometimes socially reproduced by means of neglected
modes of signifying practice like mimesis, gesture, kinesis and costume. Antiphony (call
and response) is the principal formal feature of these musical traditions. It has come to be
seen as a bridge from music into other modes of cultural expression, supplying, along
with improvisation, montage, and dramaturgy, the hermeneutic keys to the full medley
of black artistic practices.” Paul Gilroy, Te Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Con-
sciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 77–78.
50. Although slave traders clearly recognized that the Africans they had taken pris-
oner and transported across the Atlantic came from what eighteenth-century discourses
understood as separate African “nations,” their enslavement and transport sought—not
always successfully—to erase such distinctions. Such erasure was thus a contributory fac-
tor to the development of “race” during the eighteenth century as the term by which to
distinguish them from people of European birth or origin—who, of course, retained
their national identities, and failed to recognize their own whiteness as “race.” See Nicho-
las Hudson, “‘From Nation to Race’: Te Origin of Racial Classifcation in Eighteenth-
Century Tought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 247–64.
51. For an argument about the development of “visuality” enabled by systems of plan-
tation surveillance, see Nicholas Mirzoef, Te Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visual-
ity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
52. Tis argument is indebted to numerous theorizations of blackness and the his-
torical legacy of slavery, particularly as it has been experienced in the United States, but
from which geographical distance provides the United Kingdom, then as now, with no
alibi. Te following texts have been of particular signifcance for the present argument:
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1982); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Fred Moten, In the Break: Te Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White and in Color:
Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003);
Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social
Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225–40; Wagner, Disturbing the Peace; Jared Sexton, “Te So-
cial Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions Journal 5
(2011): 1–47, online at http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php
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146 • Scenes from Bourgeois Life
64. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumula-
tion (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude:
War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). See also Roberto
Fernandez Retamar, Lynn Garafola, David Arthur McMurray, and Robert Márquez,
“Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Our Culture in America,” Massachusetts Review
15, no. 1–2 (1974): 7–72.
65. Antonio Negri, Savage Anomaly: Te Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics,
trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991),
86. Negri’s Italian text was frst published as L’anomalia selvaggia: Saggio sul potere e po-
tenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981).
66. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 98. Te fgure of Caliban had already been deployed, well
before Negri and Federici, in the work of Caribbean thinkers and writers, most notably
Retamar et al., “Caliban”; and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caliban, Ariel, and Unpros-
pero in the Confict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831–32,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292, no. 1 (1977): 41–62.
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The Scene with the Trunk Maker • 147
Ridout, Nicholas. Scenes from Bourgeois Life, University of Michigan Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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