On Hopkins Street

‘Tailor and breeches-maker, field-preacher, Radical Reformer, Romance writer, Circulatory Librarian, and Ambulatory dealer in drugs, deism and demoralisation in general’ was the way the Morning Herald described Robert Wedderburn when he appeared in court in 1823. He had worked as a tailor for much of his adult life, but ‘Romance writer’ and ‘Circulatory Librarian’ are euphemisms: he’d been trading in pornography, and, much to the paper’s titillation, was in court trying to reclaim money from an acquaintance who had conned him into buying a job lot of porn that proved less extensive than promised. ‘Radical Reformer’ is accurate enough, but the list doesn’t mention that Wedderburn was an abolitionist and antislavery campaigner – or that he was Black.

He was the son of an enslaved Jamaican woman and the white plantation owner who had raped her. After he left Jamaica as a young man, Wedderburn never returned for fear of being hanged: ‘such’, he wrote of the plantocracy, ‘is their hatred of anyone having black blood in his veins.’ No one tried to hang him in Britain on account of his race, but he never outran the fear and loathing of Black blood; the Morning Herald article went on to ridicule him as ‘a man of colour – something the colour of a toad’s back’. Wedderburn is thought to be the central figure depicted in George Cruikshank’s anti-abolitionist, racist print The New Union Club of 1819, in which derogatory stereotypes of African men and women commingle with white abolitionists in a drunken, debauched frenzy.

He was active during a period of political uncertainty – from the Slave Trade Act of 1807 to the Reform Act of 1832 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 – and his writings constitute an unusual point of interaction between the politics of class and those of race. Abolitionism had an image problem when it came to working-class politics, since it was Whiggish, middle-class and mercantilist, gaining the support of free-marketeers who saw Africa’s future as a trading post and storehouse for the West rather than an increasingly unsustainable source of unwaged labour. Abolitionism didn’t offer an intrinsic critique of capitalism or imperialism, and with parliamentary reform and workers’ rights occupying the popular political consciousness, it was accused of failing to address forms of ‘slavery’ and exploitation present in Britain’s own fields and factories. For a brief time in the 1810s and 1820s, Wedderburn embodied the possibility of common ground between the two major political causes of the early 19th century, abolitionism and the rights of the working class, and sought to establish ties of support and sympathy between working-class Britons and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. He was notorious as a firebrand and rabble-rouser at a time of political suffocation, attracting a following among London’s rebels and revolutionaries and the fear and vengeance of the government.

Wedderburn became notorious not for his political exploits, but for a pair of short letters he sent in 1824 to a popular Sunday paper, Bell’s Life in London, after it printed a piece suggesting that slave owners were not only economically minded men of the kind who would figuratively sell their own children, but that they sometimes did so literally, selling the offspring they had fathered with enslaved women. Wedderburn wrote to Bell’s because he was evidence that such rumours were true. His father, James Wedderburn, had been a prominent Scottish plantation owner and his mother, Rosanna, a member of the domestic staff on Wedderburn’s Jamaican plantation when she twice became pregnant by him. Rosanna went out of her way to make James Wedderburn’s life difficult, and when she became pregnant for the second time, with the child that would be Robert Wedderburn, James decided he’d had enough and sold Rosanna back to her former owner. Robert later described his father as being ‘like a bantam cock upon his own dunghill’, whose house was kept as ‘a Seraglio of Black Slaves, miserable objects of abandoned lust’. He also recounted a harrowing scene he witnessed as a child: his mother being ‘stretched on the ground, tied hands and feet, and FLOGGED in the most indecent manner, though PREGNANT AT THE SAME TIME’.

By the time Robert wrote to Bell’s, James Wedderburn was long dead, and his fortune and plantations had passed to one of his legitimate sons, Andrew Colvile. His father had adopted that surname in order to inherit an estate in Scotland, but probably also to distance himself from an episode of family humiliation: in Joseph Knight v. John Wedderburn, an enslaved man had successfully sued his owner, James Wedderburn’s brother, winning his freedom and forming a precedent that made life difficult for slave owners in Scotland. Andrew Colvile wrote to Bell’s claiming that his father had nothing to do with Robert’s conception and that Rosanna (a woman with a ‘violent temper’) had given her son her master’s surname ‘in a foolish joke’; Robert, he alleged, was merely trying to take advantage of the family’s success. Colvile ended by threatening the paper with legal action.

A week later Robert wrote again. He offered his ‘dear and affectionate brother’ evidence of the truth of his claims: his father’s other son with Rosanna still worked as a free man on a Wedderburn estate; papers relating to his own freedom, granted by his father, were held ‘in the Government Secretary’s Office’ in Jamaica. Far from denying that Rosanna had a temper, Robert wrote with pride of her ‘rebellious disposition’, suggesting that it was appropriate in the face of forced servitude and sexual assault. Finally, he described a meeting with his father in Scotland. He confessed that he had been in dire need of financial support, but said that all he’d gained from visiting his father’s estate was ‘one draught of small beer’ courtesy of the cook and ‘a cracked sixpence’ given by his father’s footman. He ended by promising that his history would be printed in an inexpensive edition, so as to ‘give the public a specimen of the inhumanity, cruelty, avarice and diabolical lust of the West-India Slave-Holders’.

The Horrors of Slavery, which appeared the same year, is only eighteen pages long, and is in large part made up of the letters sent to Bell’s. It doesn’t lay out a programme for emancipation, but instead makes a damning case against the planters and the institution of slavery by describing the actions of James Wedderburn and Colvile (‘verily, he is a “chip off the old block”’). The singularity of the work lies in its perspective. The British reading public was familiar enough with slave narratives, a genre popularised by Olaudah Equiano in the late 18th century, but printed accounts of West Indian slavery written by Black people tended to be muted or highly mediated. Equiano’s polished prose and writerly poise tried to win round an overwhelmingly white and polite audience, and works like The History of Mary Prince (1831) were shaped largely by white editors with much the same aim. Wedderburn’s pamphlet was unvarnished and uncensored: it openly speculates on the relationship between James Wedderburn’s libidinousness and his lack of intelligence, discusses the prevalence of the rape of enslaved women by slave owners and ends by looking forward to ‘a general rebellion and massacre’ of white planters in the West Indies by the Black enslaved. The pamphlet was a good deal cheaper than books like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or other abolitionist works, and appealed to a different class of reader.

Born into slavery in Jamaica in 1762, Wedderburn was made free when he was a small child (he writes that he was born free, and probably believed that was the case), almost certainly as a result of Rosanna’s ‘violent’ petitions and protests. He was brought up mainly by his maternal grandmother, ‘Talkee’ Amy, an enslaved woman who commanded respect and had a degree of autonomy; her ability to carve out some freedom for herself despite the constraints of her position clearly made an impression on her grandson (he was especially fond of the memory of Amy telling his father he was a ‘mean Scotch rascal’). Wedderburn moved to Britain in his late teens, though details of how he made the journey, and why he chose to do so, remain murky. He became politically conscious just as abolitionist societies were being founded in the late 18th century, but his development as a radical writer was slower, since he only became literate later in life. Disillusioned with organised religion and its hypocrisies, he became sceptical of all forms of institutional authority and started to attend radical meetings. The most important moment in his development came when he encountered Thomas Spence in 1813, at the height of the popularity of Spencean thought. Spence, who was born in 1750 and witnessed the harsh effects of the Enclosure Acts – which turned common land into private property – was against landownership and landlords alike, and had a radical vision of a Britain in which land was commonly owned, the aristocracy had faded away and everyone, including women, had the vote. Wedderburn recognised the antiracist implications of Spence’s ideas, describing him as a man who ‘knew that the earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character’. When Spence died only a year after they met, Wedderburn helped to found and lead a new Society of Spencean Philanthropists.

The Spenceans tend to be called ‘ultra-radicals’, in part to distinguish their activities from other forms of radicalism (William Beckford, for instance, was a ‘parliamentary radical’ who had supported voting reforms at the end of the 18th century, but he was also the owner of thirteen sugar plantations and around three thousand enslaved people). The description also implies a value judgment: historians often use the word ‘radical’ as a term of approval, but ‘ultra-radical’ is less straightforward – it usually indicates extremism. The Spencean Philanthropists saw violence as a legitimate means to political ends, and Wedderburn wrote of insurrection as the most efficient path to emancipation. He produced a short-lived journal, the Axe Laid to the Root, in 1817. Alluding to radicalism in its title (radix means ‘root’), it applied Spence’s principles to the problem of plantation slavery in the West Indies. Unlike the usual debates over emancipation, which discussed barring formerly enslaved persons from land ownership, Wedderburn argued that true freedom was possible only if land were handed over to the formerly enslaved. Where it wasn’t given, it should be taken. In its prophetic declaratives as well as its haphazard approach to grammar and syntax, the Axe is reminiscent of passages from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. ‘He that will not contend for his liberty,’ Wedderburn writes, ‘is not worthy of it.’ ‘Do not petition,’ he advises, ‘for it is degrading to human nature to petition your oppressors.’ He goes on to call state pardons for criminals a ‘fludgate to corruption’ and recommends that lawyers be exiled from society since ‘they cannot be honest in their profession.’ Across the journal’s six issues, various contradictory positions are put forward. The first issue begins with a meditation on peaceful resistance, and Wedderburn writes that he will forgive slavers their crimes since they ‘commenced in the days of ignorance’. Yet that issue ends with a vision in which the formerly enslaved ‘will slay man, woman, and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slavery’; ‘my heart glows with revenge,’ Wedderburn writes, ‘and cannot forgive.’ He also asks whether the murder of his own ‘dear brother’ Andrew Colvile would be justified, if it were required to liberate the enslaved workers on his estate.

The ideas in the Axe Laid to the Root would be incendiary in any period, but Wedderburn was writing at a time of almost unprecedented political repression, after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. He could not keep up his journal for long due to the possibility of arrest. As the government’s fear of radicalism grew and free expression was throttled by anti-sedition laws, Wedderburn did what any fervent critic of establishment institutions would do to stay politically active: he got himself ordained. As Reverend Wedderburn, a Unitarian minister, he opened a chapel in Hopkins Street in Soho – a space accessed by a ladder. The cover of religious expression allowed him to give thrice-weekly ‘sermons’ that were actually lectures or debates on politically controversial subjects. Sometimes these criticised organised religion: one proposed in its title that the ‘church establishment’ was ‘a political institution, and a tyrannical imposition on the people, with a view the more easily to enslave them’. On the Christian imperative to ‘turn the other cheek’, Wedderburn complained about ‘that bloody spooney Jesus Christ who like a Bloody Fool tells us when we get a slap on one side of the Face turn gently round and ask them to smack the other’.

We know what Wedderburn said because he was subject to extensive surveillance by the Home Office. Spies went to the meetings on Hopkins Street, and their lengthy reports act as a supplement to Wedderburn’s written works. Printed handbills make clear that one debate was entitled ‘Can it be murder to KILL A TYRANT?’, and subtitled ‘Has a slave an inherent right to slay his Master, who refuses him HIS LIBERTY?’ But we know from the reports of spies that this was widely taken to refer to British liberty – he was making a case for the murder of British politicians. This landed him in court, but the case was thrown out by a surprisingly sympathetic jury.

Wedderburn was arrested several times for sedition, but finally imprisoned on the milder charge of blasphemy. His first spell in prison lasted two years; his sentence might have been more lenient had he not used his appearance in court as an opportunity to harangue the judge, rail against religious authority in front of the jury and advertise a blasphemous publication by one of his radical acquaintances. He was treated harshly in Dorchester Gaol but his arrest in November 1819 probably saved his life. A few months later, in February 1820, a group of London radicals, including speakers at the Hopkins Street chapel, made a plan to murder the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and his cabinet during a dinner on Grosvenor Square. But no such dinner was taking place: the whole thing was a sting. Those involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy were arrested and the leaders charged with high treason. Five of them were executed. Wedderburn, who had expressed the desire to be involved in violent activism, and who had encouraged his fellow radicals to attend meetings carrying weapons, would probably have been involved if he had not been incarcerated.

In prison Wedderburn met William Wilberforce – an event that, depending on your perspective, changed his life or barely affected him. Wilberforce didn’t single out Wedderburn: he routinely carried out prison visits under the auspices of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, trying to turn radicals into moderates and rebels into loyalists. But the meeting has tantalised scholars. We know precious little of what happened, except that Wilberforce gave Wedderburn two books. Despite this, historians have tended to think of the meeting as formative for Wedderburn, who dedicated The Horrors of Slavery to Wilberforce. It’s crucial to Ryan Hanley’s larger argument in Robert Wedderburn that the distinctiveness of Wedderburn’s abolitionism – its radicalism, its extremity, its refusal of establishment codes of respectability – should be unaffected by Wilberforce. This is reasonable enough: anti-slavery sentiment was omnipresent in Wedderburn’s writing and speeches before their meeting; The Horrors of Slavery had its origins in his own experience. All the same, it is provocative for Hanley to dispense with the Wilberforce meeting in a couple of pages.

The letters to Bell’s and The Horrors of Slavery appeared soon after his release, but Wedderburn never got his life back on track. With the price of bread high, he could no longer rely on his work as a tailor to keep him solvent, so he used his contacts at radical presses to move into writing and selling pornography. He tried to open a second ‘chapel’, but his audience dwindled and even the spies lost interest in him. According to Hanley, the rowdy, unruly Wedderburn was rapidly becoming irrelevant in a changing radical scene: a new generation of polemicists, many of them well educated and middle class, was attracting large audiences by emphasising aspiration, self-betterment and respectability. In what seems to have been a wildly misguided effort to be taken seriously again, Wedderburn published a pamphlet arguing that permitting enslaved labourers to purchase their own freedom over time was preferable to immediate emancipation. ‘It is quite just to set the slave free,’ he wrote, ‘and it is equally unjust to rob the master of his value.’ The pamphlet appeared in 1831, two years before the Abolition of Slavery Act.

Hanley’s book makes the case that we should be interested in Wedderburn because he links the politics of race and class, shows us a Black life of the 1800s lived beyond the paradigms of abolition and slavery, but also – and this is key to Hanley’s framing of Wedderburn’s life – because he helps us address an increasingly obvious absence in the archives: the experience of Black women around the turn of the 19th century. His accounts of Rosanna, Talkee Amy and the ‘Miss Campbell’ who supposedly inherited a plantation and freed its enslaved workers bring us, Hanley writes, ‘one step closer to hearing these enslaved women’s stories from their own perspectives’. Wedderburn’s writings show great respect for women, from his insistence that they play a part in insurrectionary activity (‘for they are capable of displaying courage’), to crediting his own drive ‘to see justice overtake the oppressors of my countrymen’ to his mother’s rebellious example.

Hanley never fully reconciles Wedderburn’s own treatment of women with his writings about them, because they can’t be reconciled. He left his first wife, Elizabeth, and their three children, effectively abandoning them to the poorhouse. We don’t know when he and his second wife, with whom he also had children, split up, but she was certainly out of the picture by the time he turned to brothel-keeping, for which he was arrested in 1830. In court, Wedderburn described his home as a house for ‘destitute women’, and it’s possible he saw it that way. But his characterisation of one of the women as ‘Carrotty Eliza’, a figure who could be found ‘padding the hoof’ in the area most evenings, suggests contempt for the vulnerable women he claimed to be protecting.

In 1832 Wedderburn and two teenage boys were arrested for beating, restraining and strangling a woman called Mary Ann Middleton. After crying for help, she was found by police and members of the public in a basement-cum-dungeon below Wedderburn’s makeshift pornographic bookshop, unconscious and with a cord tied round her neck. Newspaper reports are coy about the details, but imply that Wedderburn helped restrain her while she was sexually assaulted. He didn’t deny that he had beaten and bound Middleton, but accused her of entering the house while intoxicated and threatening harm to the boys and to herself; he had been defending himself, he claimed. He was found guilty and fined £5.

Hanley reads this horrendous episode with sensitivity, reminding us that we should side with the victim, but also that the only access we have to these proceedings comes from the sensational despatches of journalists who had long since turned against the faded radical. Wedderburn’s fall into destitution was a common trajectory for Black men in London in the early 19th century, victims of a society that would readily find use for them in servitude or war, but not provide for them in return. (He had prophesied his own fall, when he wrote that landowners had the power to starve the underclass and force them ‘to commit crimes in order to obtain subsistence’.)

Hanley writes that the selective accounts in the newspapers shouldn’t be seen ‘as windows into the reality behind contested versions of events’. Invoking the unreliability of historical records is risky, given that almost everything we know about Wedderburn comes from them. If we think of him as a dangerous radical, that’s largely thanks to a set of documents written by informants, spies and journalists – people who had an interest in painting him as a menacing and criminal radical. But Hanley hasn’t set out to rescue his subject, or make him a hero. A large part of Wedderburn’s value is that he is never going to be a candidate for establishment appropriation.