Black Victorians: Hidden in History
£11.40£12.30 (-7%)
A landmark history exploring and celebrating the lives of Black Victorians.
Beyond the patrician vision of Victorian Britain traditionally advanced in our textbooks, there always existed another, more diverse Britain, populated by people of colour marking achievements both ordinary and extraordinary.
In this deeply researched and dynamic history, Woolf and Abraham reach into the archives to recentre our attention on marginalised Black Victorians, from leading medic George Rice to political agitator William Cuffay to abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond; from pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton to renowned composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While acknowledging the paradoxes of Victorian views of race, Black Victorians demonstrates, with storytelling verve and a liberatory impulse, how Black people were visible and influential, firmly rooted in British life.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Duckworth (14 Sept. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 378 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0715654888 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0715654880 |
| Dimensions | 12.8 x 2.7 x 19.7 cm |
by M. F. Cayley
This book describes how black Victorians existed at all levels of society. It is an interesting and engaging read, covering an aspect of British history that has received relatively little attention.
The first section is scene-setting: giving the context in which black Victorians lived their lives, and setting out the widespread prejudice they faced, while recognising that there was also widespread prejudice against other groups like Jews in the Irish. The core of the book is a well-written series of mini-biographies of black Victorians, exemplifying the wide range of roles they filled.
Warmly recommended for anyone interested in life and times in the Victorian era.
by this_girlreads
This book was certainly an enlightening piece of work focusing on the lives of various Black individuals living in the Victorian period ranging from those who held large cultural roles in Britain, to those who led a fight for freedom for those in the United States of America.
It was incredibly moving to read about about a multitude of Black individual’s stories and life events, knowing that a lot of history has been whitewashed. For me, an individual of Caribbean heritage living in England, it was even emotional at times learning so much about Black Victorians who I had never heard of or been taught about before. Throughout this book I spent a lot of time reflecting on how my school never covered black people in British history even though it is now more clear that they were present. Some of the facts were absolutely shocking to me and I found myself highlighting sentences of this book throughout- something that I rarely do! For a non-fiction book, it definitely kept me engaged and I loved that chapters were split into themes which added an enjoyable flow.
This is definitely a must read for EVERYONE who is interested in British history (the non-whitewashed version)!
NB: Thank you to NetGalley and Duckworth Books for giving me an eARC of this book. I voluntarily read and reviewed it. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
by MR J H JENKINS
Fresh on the heels of The Wonders, and writing this time with Keshia Abraham, John Woolf continues his seemingly insatiable quest to explore the Victorian era through the eyes of the marginalised. “Centring the decentred” is Dr Woolf’s admirable raison d’etre, and this timely, empowering book is further evidence of his burgeoning reputation as one of the brightest young historians writing today.
by RF
This was a really interesting and well researched book that covered a wide range of individuals throughout the Victorian period – some I had heard of, and a great number that I had not. The depth and range of individuals was particularly important in highlighting the extent to which Victorian Britain had a long-standing Black community and how, as the authors state, the emphasis on who was ‘the first’ can distract from the length of time that Black people had been important and integral parts of British life.
A very important and interesting read.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC
by phil Buchanan
Brilliant Book well worth the money hidden history of our people
by Nom de plume
My thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy of this book to review. It sets out to address quite why the agency of so many black people has been whitewashed out of the history of an age, which was in fact obsessed with race, as, upon it, rested the ‘moral’ justification for empire. Not just any empire. By 1914 25% of the world’s population and 20% of its land fell under British rule.
I think the book goes some way to succeeding in this endeavour, and, in doing so, describes the lives of a number of hugely fascinating people. Their stories are drawn from many different points of view. There are people on the margins, there are voices of protest, there are black aristocrats, there are black people in the arts, black professionals and there are black leaders of political struggle.
Sometimes I think the book spends too much time supposing what these black people might have thought or felt. Hakim Adi’s new book is better on this aspect because his people are selected for having managed to publish work about their lives, which tells us exactly what they thought and felt.
Also, although the book explicitly sets out to focus on African, Caribbean and African American people, it strikes me as odd, given the wide range of lived lives in the book, to highlight the foundation of the pan African Congress as a sort of culmination of the history of all their struggles.
That said, this is an informative and thought provoking book and I recommend it.