I am having a bit of an emphasis on black in my latest reading challenge, especially with this book Black Victorians by Keshia N Abraham and John Woolf. It’s a history book about the presence of Black people in Britain during the nineteenth century – in this case they are using the word Black to describe people of African heritage, although they may have been born in the Caribbean or America or in Britain. I bought this book a while ago because I thought it might be interesting from the excellent Juno Books in Sheffield (see here for their website) – they stock new books which amplify marginalised voices. I usually pick up a new book from them if I am nearby. I know that I bought this one a while ago because the bookseller had tucked into its pages a bookmark about a competition which had a closing date of February 2024 so I must have acquired it before then.
This book looks at the Black people who lived and worked in Victorian Britain with a view to celebrating their lives and their contribution to the country’s culture, economy and daily life The authors have discovered evidence of lives lived in and among the white community which have not all been acknowledged. Some of these people did very menial work such as sweeping the roads but others painted, acted, wrote, composed, became bishops, ran businesses or engaged in political campaigning. Many of them wrote and lectured about their own experiences to help to end slavery in Britain and its colonies. The story of these lives is interesting and the authors examine contemporary views of Black people which engendered racism and discrimination. They also spend some time looking at the lives of Black women where their subjects faced even greater marginalisation.
The authors aim to highlight the number of Black people in Britain at this time, many of whom were not recent immigrants, and how were involved in the life of the country and the changes that were taking place in society at the time. They also show the additional hurdles which Black people had to overcome and how they had to display in their lives qualities that society and culture felt were missing in those of African heritage otherwise they were not heard. The discussion is interesting but the heart of this book is the biographical sketches of men and women with widely differing experiences and positions in society.
I enjoyed this book a lot as I am interested in social history and, although I had previously read about a few of the subjects, much of the discussion and detail about Black life in Victorian Britain was new to me. I have some books on various aspects of slavery so I shall shelve this volume with those and keep it in case I ever find the time to read it again.
Anne Is Reading 