This blog post was written by Dr Karen Attar, Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library, University of London. You can explore more about Senate House Library’s collections and over 90 other history collections across the UK at History Day 2024 – sign up to join us.
Among the avowedly historical tomes in Senate House Library’s special collections nestles a lot of history that was never intended to be history: in books, in periodicals, and especially as pamphlets. Penned and printed quickly and sold cheaply, pamphlet literature is often polemical and can be vicious or emotive. For me, three areas of this “now” history stand out. The first is a large group of pamphlets written during the Civil War, within Lt. Col. Alfred Claude Bromhead’s collection on the history of London. The second is a plethora of pamphlets from the second and third decades of the eighteenth century concerning the South Sea Bubble of 1720, acquired by Herbert Somerton Foxwell as part of a large economics collection. And the third is a set of pamphlets concerning slavery and the abolition of the slave trade amassed by Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester (1776-1787) and then of London (1787-1809). Porteus’s collection is especially alive because it expresses the man. Bromhead (1876-1963) and Foxwell (1849-1936) were buying their material in the twentieth and later nineteenth centuries respectively. Both knew the historical importance of the events and times about which they acquired printed memorials. But for Beilby Porteus (1731-1809), the slave trade was a current affair. Porteus was a close associate of William Wilberforce (1759-1833). He was the first senior Anglican clergyman to have a consistent concern for the welfare of enslaved people on British plantations. In 1783 he preached a sermon which was printed in his Sermons on Several Subjects (1789) and reprinted several times, ‘The civilization, improvement, and conversion of the Negro slaves in the British West-India islands recommended’. Porteus campaigned for enslaved people to have Sundays off work and to have Saturday afternoons free to work on their own allotments, and for the children of enslaved people to be educated. As a member of the House of Lords, he legislated against the slave trade and was a leading figure in the effort to get abolition through both houses of Parliament. His printed material about the slave trade reflected his crusading passion.
A number of Porteus’s books and pamphlets were by prolific authors and campaigners, like William Wilberforce. Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) and Granville Sharp (1735-1813). Wilberforce’s Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807) had begun as a pamphlet. It subsequently grew into a book which consolidated and restated the two decades of evidence and argumentation that Wilberforce had accumulated. Clarkson and Sharp wereco-founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. They provided facts for other abolitionists and raised the profile of, and public sympathy for, the cause. Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) is an English translation of what started out as a Latin prize essay written as a Cambridge student. It stands out for having been the motivation for Clarkson’s lifelong campaign. Sharp was also a biblical scholar, and his titles in the Porteus collection tend to have an explicitly theological ring, such as The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, Compared with the Unbounded Claims of the African Traders and British American Slaveholders (1776). Passion and indignation thunder from the title in a way possible only do events close to the heart. “Know thy enemy”: opinions in the pamphlets cover all parts of the spectrum. William Beckford (1744-1799) urged the humane treatment of enslaved people but stopped short of condemning slavery (Remarks Upon the Situation of Negroes in Jamaica, 1788). The sugar planter James Tobin (1736/7-1817) argued in his writings that slavery and the slave trade were essential for the economy, and claimed that slaves were treated well. Olaudah Equiano accused him flatly of lying. (Tobin’s son James Webbe Tobin was, incidentally, an abolitionist – what were relationships like in that family?) James Ramsay (1733-1789), who as a surgeon on plantations in St Kitts saw how brutally enslaved people were treated, described that treatment and its effects in his influential Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784), in Porteus’s library. While his writing impressed some people, including Pitt and Wilberforce, several planters were incandescent. They responded acrimoniously in print, and their views are recorded. As for John Gardner Kemys, a relatively obscure figure who died in 1793, his descriptions of enslaved people in Free and Candid Reflections Occasioned by the Late Additional Duties on Sugars and on Rum (1783) are both nauseating and unquotable.
It is no surprise to find first editions in Porteus’s library of two exceedingly popular works by prominent abolitionists of colour who came from a background of slavery and lived in London. To British abolitionists, Ignatius Sancho symbolised the humanity of Africans and the immorality of the slave trade. His posthumously published Letters (1782), of high literary quality, ran quickly through several editions. So did the abolitionist autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). His description of his experiences as an African at the time functioned both as a diary and as an attack on slavery and the slave trade. It was, incidentally, also a foundation stone in the genre of Black writing. Had Porteus been a conscious book collector, wanting books as objects, he may well have acquired multiple editions of both works. Instead, we see him purchasing newly published works for their content. He is acquiring what is readily available: American imprints are lacking in the collection – and are irrelevant from the point of view of remedying evil at home.
Porteus had one manuscript catalogue of his library generally, and a second catalogue devoted specifically to slavery — evidence of the issue’s importance to him. Several works on slavery are inscribed to Porteus by their authors. Vividness breathes easily through strong opinions or detailed descriptions of contemporary events. When the person who brought the opinions and descriptions together was personally involved in the matter, the living pulse is especially marked. Come and read for yourselves.