Hello, my lovely readers! Today in America is a holiday called Juneteenth, the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.

While Juneteenth is an American holiday, Americans don’t have a monopoly on racism or the significance of race in society and literature. In keeping with this summer’s theme of all things Jane Austen, I tracked down someone at the University of Sydney to discuss the realities and experiences of race in Austen’s Regency-era England.

Dr. Olivia Murphy is a postdoctoral research fellow whose interests include Romanticism, 18th and 19th century British novels, women’s writing, and Jane Austen. You can find more about her work and various publications on the University of Sydney’s website.

Many white readers of Jane Austen, in my experience, don’t think about race in relation to the Regency era at all. When they do, it’s often an assumption that ‘of course Black people existed in Britain then, but they were probably all slaves.’ Is this an accurate or fair idea of race during that time period?

​The short answer is “no” — the longer answer is that it’s much more complicated. First of all, “black” in this period didn’t necessarily mean what it often does today, that is people of relatively recent sub-Saharan African descent. In Austen’s time (1775-1817) it did mean that, but it could also mean anyone from the Indian subcontinent, “lascars” (mostly sailors from the Indian subcontinent or from South-East Asia) or even white Britons who worked in occupations like coal mining (and who were, therefore, literally blackened by their work). Those meanings gradually dropped away as racist ideologies were developed and made “scientific” in the later 1800s. I’ll focus here on those people who might identify as black if they were alive today.

There have been some black people in Britain since Roman times, but European colonialism brought many black people to Britain. Many of them came against their will, as slaves from British-owned slave plantations in the Americas. In Britain these children, men and women were in a strange legal position. It was largely assumed that they continued to be owned property, but they lived around (white) servants who were definitely not. And sometimes they were not at all enslaved – for instance Samuel Johnson’s servant and heir Francis Barber was not a slave, and Johnson was strongly opposed to slavery. Historians often point to Lord Mansfield’s judgment of 1772 in Somerset v. Stewart as an important turning point. In that judgment, Mansfield decided that a black man, James Somerset, could not be forced to go to Jamaica to be sold in the slave market there. Somerset had been bought legally in Massachusetts and taken to England, where he had escaped from Stewart.

After the Somerset case, many people (including Austen’s beloved poet Cowper) believed that there could be no slaves in England — that setting foot on English soil made any enslaved person automatically free. Not everyone agreed, and slave owners continued to openly print notices in British newspapers seeking help for recapturing slaves who had escaped. But, as Peter Fryer argued in Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984), gradually over the next few years most black people in Britain “voted with their feet” — they left situations they didn’t like, or where they felt vulnerable to being enslaved or mistreated. Helped by a growing community of other black and non-white Britons, and some sympathetic white working-class people too, they established new, free lives for themselves. That wasn’t because of one (white man’s) judgment, or the activity of other white anti-slavery activists: black people did it for themselves.

Did racism exist in Austen’s era? What did racism look like (or sound like) in her time?

​Yes, it did exist, but the racism that we are fighting against today is more a product of the later nineteenth century and the twentieth century. It was starting in Austen’s time, but it wasn’t almost universally shared, as it would be later. The sort of “scientific” racism that we associate with eugenics, nazism, etc. hadn’t yet developed. Racist ideology developed to support racist activity, and it usually came after the fact. So one of the few serious racist arguments, Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774), is pretty unusual in the period, and it’s important that Long was a slave-owner, and had grown up in a slave-owning culture that was intent on de-humanising the people it was treating like livestock. See this article by David Olusoga on Long: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery.

There’s also a notorious footnote in a book by the philosopher David Hume that is horrifyingly racist. On the other hand, people doing more serious science, like the anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, insisted that black people were just as intelligent as anyone else, and his opinion was widely quoted. Slave owners and slave traders had an obvious economic interest in promoting abhorrent ideas: that black people were less sensitive than whites, less intelligent, less susceptible to pain, sexually promiscuous, etc. All of these lies became entrenched later in the nineteenth century, and they are still part of the systemic racism faced by black people all around the world today.

In Austen’s England, however, there was a major social movement to abolish the slave trade. This was a mass movement, and it drew together Britons from both the progressive and conservative sides of politics during a very divided period. It had overwhelming public support — the only place it didn’t have support was in parliament, because so many MPs were themselves slave-owners. Remember that only about 1% of the population could vote — Britain wasn’t a representative democracy. It took a long time before this movement succeeded in banning the slave trade, and many more decades before slavery was banned in England’s colonies (and much, much longer before slavery actually ended).

If you take any historical person, or any character from a book from this period, unless there is some reference that suggests they own slaves, statistically speaking they are probably against the slave trade. That doesn’t mean they necessarily want slavery banned. Plenty of people who actually owned slaves were still against the slave trade. But that gives you an idea of how unpopular (although massively profitable) the slave trade was.

What did racism look and sound like? Well, in its worst cases it looked like a massively profitable system for selling armaments to the big west African empires in return for slaves, most of whom were children; shipping those children and some adults in the most appalling conditions imaginable across the Atlantic; throwing the dead (and sometimes the living) overboard and collecting insurance on them; and then selling survivors in disgusting markets in the Americas and the Caribbean. There, they worked in unimaginably harsh conditions, producing highly profitable crops (sugar cane, tobacco, cotton depending on where they were) for sale back to Europe. Women were subject to routine sexual abuse, and everyone was physically abused. There is a terrific modern novel, The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James, which gives a very good sense of what life was like.

But back in England it was easy not to think about all that. Amongst most English people there were a lot of assumptions about what people from other countries were like: basically, not as good as the English. That’s true of French, Irish, Spanish people as well as people from Benin or China. Where English people encountered — and often massacred or stole territory from — First Nations people they held a lot of assumptions derived from the idea of the “Noble Savage.” First Nations people were assumed to be both primitive and, in some respects, superior to Europeans, especially physically, because they lived closer to nature. That didn’t stop any European power from taking their land or from killing them, of course.

One of the first novels in English, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) is a tragedy about an enslaved man and his wife, and both are very explicitly noble.

There’s a fair bit of racism expressed in some novels of this period, making fun of accents and that sort of thing. Maria Edgeworth was asked by her father to rewrite a section of Belinda (1801) which had a black servant marrying a white servant. In later editions that doesn’t happen. But there were a lot of marriages between black and white people in real life.

Black people would not have had it that easy in Austen’s Britain, but we know that many rose to positions of economic security and comfort. At the same time we mostly know about this because of racist complaints about it. It’s also important to remember that the British government was keen to keep black people out of Britain. Many black people fought for the British in the American War of Independence, having been promised their freedom in return. They were supposed to be allowed to move to Britain at the end of the war, and some did, but the British also established a new country, Sierra Leone, where they sent these freed slaves. Sierra Leone was a notoriously mismanaged colony amongst a worldwide network of mismanaged colonies.

If you agree that racism is more about what people, laws and governments do, rather than what they think or say, then I would say that Britain in Austen’s time was extremely racist.

As Latinx writer Marcos Gonsalez wrote, the luxury the British main characters in Austen’s works enjoy is built largely on imperialism and colonialism. How did the politics and history of the British empire inform her life and work? How does that affect a modern understanding and enjoyment of her stories and themes?

​I completely agree, and I think Austen would have done too. It was well understood that British wealth came from their imperial and colonial ventures. In her lifetime the shorthand for an ostentatiously rich person shifts from “nabob” — someone who had grown rich in India, to “West Indian” — a (typically) white person who had grown rich through slavery. Austen makes a lot of references to the kinds of luxury goods that signal this global imperial endeavour — she mentions a “verandah” in Persuasion, for instance, which was a new word coming into English from Hindi; in The Watsons there’s talk of “nankeen boots” which was originally from Nanking (actually Nanjing) in China. Austen was also personally connected to some of these imperialist acts through Warren Hastings. He was her cousin — later sister-in-law — Eliza’s godfather, and possibly her biological father too. The Austen family followed his trial for abuse of power in India closely.

To be honest, I find it a lot easier to enjoy Austen’s work today than I do a lot of Victorian writers who are much more overtly racist, or much more engaged with colonialism as a Good Thing, the kind of work that a novel’s hero might do. In Austen’s time many people were a lot more ambivalent about the British Empire. They were concerned about the potential for abuses of power and there were attempts to direct public attention to massacres and other crimes. I think it’s significant that none of Austen’s heroes owns a slave plantation, even if (as in Edmund Bertram’s case) some of their wealth comes from that source. We don’t know what Colonel Brandon did in India, but we also don’t know his first name — I think Austen is deliberately trying to make us a bit afraid of him. I also think Austen is very conscious of the ways in which all of us are compromised to one extent or another by our need for material security. If you’re writing books in which young women seek to marry for money, you have a pretty good understanding that no one is perfect.

I also find it easier to enjoy Austen’s work than to be in places that I know owe a massive debt to slavery but don’t acknowledge it. Birmingham museum, for example, is all about the history of its manufacturing, but never mentions that what it manufactured (guns and the like) went to Africa to enslave people. Or Manchester — they have a fabulous people’s museum, but again there’s almost no mention that the cotton that was woven in Manchester factories was picked by enslaved people in the US. The Prime Minister William Gladstone inherited one of the largest slave plantations then in existence, but there’s no mention of this at Gladstone’s Library in Wales.

I live in Sydney, Australia, so I’m part of the history of British colonialism, and I’m aware of that every day. But so is pretty much everyone, especially in the Anglophone world, and I do think, having lived in the UK and spent a lot of time there, that even educated people in Britain are much less conscious of where their country’s wealth came from.

Modern white readers often talk about Austen as a feminist (though that word did not yet exist in her time). The same readers frequently analyze her stories devoid of any consideration of race. Should the concept of intersectional feminism and the convergence of race and gender impact our modern reading of Austen’s feminism?

​I don’t see why not. But by the same token I don’t think we need to assume the characters of Austen’s novels are all white. There’s only one character who specifically has a mixed ethnic heritage — Miss Lambe of Sanditon. All we know about her is that she’s “half mulatto, chilly and tender” (that is, she has one black grandparent and she feels the cold — presumably she hasn’t been in England all that long) and that she’s very wealthy. The fact she’s wealthy is presented as the key thing. It’s what makes her important within her small school community. But the novel isn’t finished and we don’t learn anything else about her.

I think it’s only sensible to read Austen with everything we can bring to her today — all our understanding of literature, of history, of politics. But I think we should be careful not to impose our own assumptions, or our own racism, on her.

Black writer Tyrese L. Coleman wrote in a piece about racism in Jane Eyre that “Books like Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion lend themselves to replacing white characters for black or any other kind of ethnicity because race is absent from the narrative…because Austen’s society is so definitively white.” Would you agree with this assessment?

​I definitely agree that Austen’s characters could very easily be played by non-white actors. In fact I think that there’s no way to justify yet another Austen adaptation without colourblind casting. I don’t agree that Austen’s society is “definitively white,” although I do agree that it is in the popular imagination. See this excellent research by Nicole M. Wright on the use of Austen by racist and sexist extremists (the alt-right): https://www.chronicle.com/article/Alt-Right-Jane-Austen/239435.

​If you define Austen’s “society” as the main characters of her novels, that’s a tiny slice of the gentry — what we would think of as the upper-middle-class. Not the richest people in the country but still definitely the 1%. Most black people in Britain in Austen’s lifetime weren’t that wealthy, but some were.

My concern is that there’s a vested interest even now in the UK — and in American Anglophilia — that wants Regency England to be white, and only white. Even though that’s not at all historically accurate. It’s that endemic racism that is keeping black faces out of period adaptations, although it does seem like some small steps are being made to correct the problem.

Speaking of Jane Eyre, racism in Bronte’s work is undeniably present, with the depiction of Bertha, Rochester’s imitation of a Romani woman, and many references to dark or brown skin in a negative tone (such as the complexions of Mrs. Reed and her son). It’s easy as a modern, uninformed reader to assume this is just a product of the time. Yet Austen’s work, when she does reference skin tones, is more nuanced. Northanger Abbey‘s Catherine says her type would be “Brown–not fair, and–and not very dark,” and Tilney is described as having brown skin. Mansfield Park calls Henry Crawford black and plain, but a gentleman. A character in Emma says of Jane Fairfax: “‘Did you ever see such a skin? — such smoothness! such delicacy! — and yet without being actually fair. –One cannot call her fair. It is a most uncommon complexion, with her dark eye-lashes and hair — a most distinguishing complexion! So peculiarly the lady in it. –Just colour enough for beauty.'” Should these be read as different attitudes toward race? Why does this discrepancy exist between peers?

​I think the crucial thing here is the different dates – like other Victorian writers, Charlotte Brontë has absorbed a lot of pseudo-scientific ideas about race. So you get a lot of meaningful references to skin colour, facial features, behaviour (especially sexual behaviour) and the like. Austen lived before those ideas took hold. So I think she just doesn’t think that way. Austen is also keen to redress the bias for very fair (white, pale) skin that was fashionable in her time. Darker skin was associated with being lower class, because working class people worked outside, got more sun, and could get a bit tanned. Darcy is quite pointed in finding Elizabeth Bennet just as attractive with a tan. And Marianne Dashwood is also explicitly quite brown, and beautiful. But Willoughby treats her the way he would treat a girl of lower social standing than Marianne claims.

I wouldn’t have a problem with reading these through a critical race studies lens, but I think that, generally, Austen isn’t thinking through the phrenological, everyone-has-to-be-classified-according-to-their-racial-characteristics perspectives that the Victorians took for granted.

A huge thank you to Dr. Murphy for joining us today, and indulging my geeking out over the convergence of politics and classic literature.