This paper examines Harpur’s ‘The Slave’s Story’ (1855, 1863, 1868), in which an enslaved Black man retells his kidnapping to a white traveller. Relaying a Black man’s voice for the majority of the text, the manuscript poem is part of nineteenth-century white abolitionist print culture, in which enslaved people are ventriloquised to elicit sympathy and political support. Written post-British abolition and during the height and aftermath of US slavery debates, I argue that Harpur draws on these circumatlantic currents to bolster his vision of the poet as a Romantic democratic artist engaged with global as well as national politics.
After situating ‘The Slave’s Story’ amongst abolitionist literature circulating in Australia (poetry, reports, essays, theatrical adaptations), including the influential work of Emerson, I read the racialised Romantic politics of character and voice in the poem, building on work on Harpur’s racial character (Ackland, 1988) and use of perspective (Falk, 2019). Like the earlier ventriloquised ‘The Aboriginal Mother’s Lament’ (1845, 1853) and much abolitionist poetry, Harpur inverts racialised assumptions of character, making his Black speaker an innocent parental figure and portraying the white enslaver as a manipulative monster. Incorporating third person sketch, first person lyric and second person address, Harpur triples the reader’s perspective so they are simultaneously disembodied spectator, Black slave and white listener, asking the reader how it would feel to not only experience such a story but hear it and to respond to it too. An exercise in attempted cross-racial empathy and sympathy, Harpur utilises a vulnerable colonised voice to engender white civic development in the emerging nation.
Hannah Murray is Lecturer in English at La Trobe University, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her first book Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction (Edinburgh, 2021) examines fluid and precarious whiteness in American fiction 1798-1857 and additional work on race and literature has appeared in English, The Eighteenth Century, Gothic Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. She is currently researching a project on racial transformation in colonial Australian literature, including literary engagement with the circumatlantic slave trade.