Affective Dynamics of Colonial Reform and Modernisation in Antigua,1815–1835

Introduction

On 3 July 1823, the Methodist missionary Thomas Pennock wrote from Antigua to the Reverend Joseph Taylor:

English Harbour was the site of a large naval dockyard, and from 1780 to 1814, in the context of imperial rivalry and wars between the British and French, was supported by the development of ‘a massive garrison complex at Shirley Heights’ (Weaver, 2002: 8). After the British defeat of Napoleon in 1814, work at the dockyard and the naval complex was scaled back. Concubinage and sex trafficking and the social problems they generated were a stimulus to the formation of the charitable enterprises. There are today archival traces of some of the charities: the Female Refuge Society, the English Harbour Sunday School Society, the Female Juvenile Association and Male Juvenile Association attached to the Sunday School, and the Benevolent Society. The driving force behind the establishment of the English Harbour Sunday School in 1809, reportedly the first Sunday School in the West Indies, and the Female Refuge Society in 1815 was Anne Hart Gilbert (1768–1834), the first known published African-Caribbean woman writer. Gilbert's social and cultural vision in consolidating and expanding a benevolent sphere for evangelical laity and her major roles in benevolent organisations and as a teacher and Methodist class leader evince a creolisation of the African diasporic practice of othermothering and biblical models of female excellence (Thomas, 2011c: 230–233). Gilbert's charitable work had a transatlantic reach through the distribution of the annual reports of the Female Refuge Society, which she co-authored, and through her brother-in-law William Dawes. The reports would have a profound impact on the direction of female anti-slavery activism in Britain (ibid.: 236–237). Her progressive vision of a Caribbean future focused on the cultural and moral improvement of an ‘independent peasantry’, a widespread model of freedom among enslaved and freed people in Caribbean plantocracies (Craton, 1982: 252). The community building integral to improvement—racial uplift would be the US term—was furthered by means of what may be theorised as an ‘emotion’ culture (Koivunen, 2010: 19) around the education of ‘creditable, though humble, and industrious young people’ and the establishment of an affective sociality of care and compassion. Gilbert positions the Creole benevolent sphere as a ‘negative opposition’ to the blighting miasma of late plantation slavery culture, underscoring the local political implications and scope of the projects. She noted acerbically in an 1824 letter to Mrs Luckock, wife of a missionary for the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves, that to its critics the Female Refuge Society, despite its ecumenical evangelicism, was a sign of ‘methodistical intrusion and innovation’ (quoted in Dawes, 1824).

Some of the annual reports of the Female Refuge Society (1818, 1819, 1822, 1823, 1828) and of its sister charity, the Distressed Females’ Friend Society (1819, 1821, 1822, 1823, 1828), survive in the Church Missionary Society Archive, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society Archive and a report on religious instruction collated and prepared by Governor Sir Benjamin d'Urban for the Colonial Secretary in 1824 now among Colonial Office papers in the British National Archives. The leading overseas fundraiser for the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society was William Dawes (1762–1836), who had settled in Antigua in 1813 with his second wife white Creole Grace Gilbert. A very devout evangelical Anglican and former British naval officer, he had served on the Committee of the Church Missionary Society in England, and would, on the recommendation of Zachary Macaulay, be appointed in 1820 Director of its Schools in the West Indies, a position he held until 1829. He had had three terms as governor of Sierra Leone for the Sierra Leone Company; his friendship with Macaulay dated from the first of these terms. ¹ Macaulay ‘enthusiastically encouraged’ female anti-slavery societies (Midgely, 1992: 48). The Daweses lived in Anne and John Gilbert's home in 1815. A white Creole Methodist lay preacher, John was the Naval Storekeeper at English Harbour. The earliest extant materials about the formation and transatlantic reach of the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society (operating around St John's, Antigua) are articles in the Missionary Register, a journal of the Church Missionary Society, in 1816. William Dawes forwarded annual reports of both charities to the Church Missionary Society and included in his correspondence with its Secretaries transcriptions of some letters by Anne Gilbert written in her capacity as agent of the Female Refuge Society. The extant papers of the Society, and her letters and memoirs, are addressed to Christian audiences; there are no traces of how she might have code-switched linguistically in speaking to engage non-Christians. Apart from her co-authored annual reports, her publications are A Short Memoir of Grace Gilbert Hart, a Child Belonging to the English Harbour Sunday School, published in Antigua in early 1821 by William Dawes, which survives in handwritten form in the Church Missionary Society Archive; a conversion narrative in the Methodist genre of the account or experience published in the Methodist Magazine in 1821 (‘West Indies’), a heavily edited version of ‘A Short Account of Peregrine Pickle (Now Baptised Peter) a Negro Belonging to His Majesty and Employed in the Naval Yard at English Harbour, Antigua’, the manuscript of which is in the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Archive; and the co-authored Memoir of John Gilbert, Esq. Late Naval Storekeeper at Antigua. To Which Are Appended, A Brief Sketch of His Relic, Mrs. Anne Gilbert, by the Rev. William Box, Wesleyan Missionary. And a Few Additional Remarks by a Christian Friend (Gilbert et al., 1835), edited by her sister-in-law Grace Dawes, the ‘Christian Friend’.

The first two of these texts predate The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831), considered until recently the ‘only extant work written by an enslaved woman from the British Caribbean colonies’ (Brereton, 1995: 64). It was published by Thomas Pringle, the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, on his own undertaking; Susanna Strickland, later Moodie, was Prince's amanuensis. Since the republication of The History of Mary Prince in 1987, it has achieved significant scholarly attention ² and popular reach. In 2012, Mary Prince was named a national hero of Bermuda, her birthplace. The narratives of Anglophone African-Caribbean bondswomen Ashy and Sibell (1799) and Florence Hall, unpublished in their day, have been discussed by Handler (1998) and Aljoe (2012) and by O'Callaghan (2004) and Aljoe (2012), respectively. Anim-Addo (2007) and I (Thomas, 2004, 2008) have analysed court testimonies of bondswomen and their reception. Watson (2000) has studied the correspondence between the family of Old Doll and Thomas Lane over manumission.

Anne Gilbert has not attracted as much scholarly attention as Prince, ³ in part because so little of her writing has been republished to date, ⁴ in part because of her religiosity and in part because of the complexities of her ‘free-coloured’ heritage. My archival research on early Caribbean life narrative is disclosing more of her writing and enabling a closer appreciation of her historical and literary significance (Thomas, 2011b, c, forthcoming) and that of her sister Elizabeth Hart Thwaites (Thomas, 2011b, 2012). Warner-Lewis highlights three reasons for the relative neglect of evangelical writing in the historiography and literary historiography of plantation slavery cultures: that the Christian ‘piety of the narrator's sentiments are [sic] likely to be distasteful to some, even contemptible’, that rather than being straightforwardly ‘for the anti-slavery agenda’ it was produced for pious audiences, and that it ‘does not satisfy the post-1970s unidimensional lionization of the slave as resister, runaway or rebel’ (2007: 18). There is in the standard historiography characterised by Warner-Lewis too simple a binary between anti-slavery and Christian piety. Mack pertinently observes in Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism that today both the ‘secular scholar’ and the ‘secular reader … may be largely tone-deaf to religious sensibilities’ (2008: 11). Neither are they particularly familiar with the genres of evangelical narrative. Recently, Aljoe (2012) and I (Thomas, 2011d) have discussed the co-authored Lebenslauf, or life course, of freed slave Salome Cuthbert, a member of the Moravian congregation at Gracehill in Antigua, published in Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, Established among the Heathen in 1829, Aljoe reading the text as slave narrative and me reading it as a Lebenslauf alongside The History of Mary Prince. Prince was a Moravian convert. Cox, while not familiar with Ferguson's scholarship on Anne Gilbert and Elizabeth Thwaites (1993a, b), observes that ‘[s]cholars have generally portrayed free coloureds in the Caribbean “as having identified themselves with the dominant whites” who controlled the colonies’ major socio-political and economic institutions’ and the paucity of research on ‘radical free-coloured activities and possibilities’ (2007: 41). The Creole benevolent sphere that Anne Gilbert played a leading role in developing is a signal instance of such radicalness.

A Creolised Emotion Culture of Benevolence

The Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society provided foster care for free girls of colour at the request of their impoverished mothers or guardians. In Antigua, free black and coloured people were not eligible for parochial relief. The charities were designed to address poverty that placed young women at risk of economic and moral coercion into concubinage and prostitution: ‘a life of unchastity, to which they have constant solicitations after the age of fourteen or fifteen years’ (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 141). The girls in the care of the societies were educated, encouraged to Christian piety and apprenticed, often as seamstresses, sewing being a trade by which women were able to earn a living in Antigua (Gaspar, 2004: 71–73). Foster care is central to the African and African diasporic tradition of othermothering and its ethic of community activism and nurturance (O'Reilly, 2004: 12). The Distressed Females’ Friend Society also financially supported indigent elderly women. By the late 1820s, both societies were subsidising their costs through sale of sewing and millinery done by the older girls in their care. While Anne Gilbert is sceptical about obeah (Ferguson, 1993a: 59–61), she firmly posits the existence of ‘common’ standards of ‘civilization and decency’ across cultures in Antigua (English Harbour Female Juvenile Association, 1823).

Anne Gilbert's understanding of the provenance of an emotion culture of benevolence was also grounded in Methodist practice. Mack observes that early

John Wesley promoted ‘practical piety … a way of life encompassing charity, sociability, and the health of the body’ (Mack, 2008: 32). Gilbert's ethic of compassion, an ethic she promulgated in her teaching and community example, focused on opening hearts and hands to the suffering and emotions of others (Female Refuge Society, 1819). Mack draws out how Methodists ‘embraced modernity’, especially through ‘fus[ing] self-transcendence and agency’ in the terms of its emotion culture with ‘belief in universal human rights and in social and material progress’ (2008: 295).

Brennan (2004: 2) reports that ‘non-Western as well as premodern, preindustrial cultures assume that the person is not affectively contained’ (emphasis in original), and this may suggest part of the appeal of a Methodist emotion culture to people of African heritage. In 1804, the missionary John Baxter gave the scale of the Methodist congregation in Antigua as 3,516 ‘blacks and colored’ and 22 ‘whites’ (quoted in Coke, 1971, Vol. 2: 455–456). The blending of cultural heritages—diasporic African and Christian—was producing a creolised church among the laity. Descriptions of Antiguan congregations from the turn of the eighteenth century (ibid.: 361, 452) suggest that they were what is termed ‘shouting Methodists’, practising a creolised style of worship structured around oral interaction between preacher and audience, and emotive, embodied performance of the power of God descending upon them (Taves, 1999: 78), which manifested the ‘ecstatic qualities’ of African religious observances (Henry, 2000: 25). Gilbert's writing also affirms a creolisation of African and Methodist philosophy. For her, ‘creative power’ is of the spirit, although she names the power in Methodist terms ‘enthusiasm’ (Female Refuge Society, 1822: 9) rather than Ashe (Henry, 2000: 30). Henry draws attention to African ideas of the “‘ontic unity” of the self … as a cosmogonic challenge that was analogous to the creating of society out of the wilderness’ (ibid.: 31), an idea manifested in a creolised Christian form in Gilbert's writing.

In 1816, the ‘distressed’ children around English Harbour were generally, Dawes writes, the ‘illegitimate offspring of white men, principally in the Navy and Army’, and, as some of their mothers’ personal histories showed, the ‘duration’ of concubine relations was ‘precarious’: ‘they almost universally terminate with the decay of personal appearance, or the incumbrance of children’ on the part of the women (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 141). ‘[D]ecay of personal appearance’ might be a euphemistic reference to contraction of venereal disease. In the letter reproduced in the article, Dawes draws out the ‘wretched’ social and cultural dimensions of the naval and military presence in Antigua and of the racialising of provision of parochial relief by offering a general outline of the cycles of poverty and degradation in the local community, and developing what he styles ‘anecdotes’, meaning ‘[s]ecret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history’ exemplified in the lives of unnamed individual girls (Oxford English Dictionary Online). One subject of cursory anecdote is identified only as ‘the natural daughter of the late Lord Falkland, … still a slave’ and being ‘among those whose hearts appear to be touched by Divine Grace, and [she] feels sensibly the evils of her condition’. These details establish her simply as a type of her class, girls with mothers ‘sunk in sin, poverty, and wretchedness’, ‘daily witness[ing] scenes, the most improper and shocking that can well be conceived’, and at risk of ‘being reduced to the dreadful alternative of either famine or prostitution’. Orphaned girls in the care of ailing relatives were vulnerable to being ‘dispose[d] of … as concubines to men who are able to provide them with food and raiment, and to put it in their power to relieve their distressed relations’. The second anecdote concerns the beneficial effect of the provision of clothing, shoes and education for an unnamed orphaned girl. The example of her guardian, an aunt, who ‘had just entered into high keeping’ (concubinage), might have been ‘a specious bait to the young and unwary’ (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 141–142). Dawes’ representations of girls at risk counter the stereotype that women of African descent ‘were naturally promiscuous’ (Altink, 2005: 273) or hypersexual (Lambert, 2005: 86). The temptations to interracial sex or coercion into it are the racialised material inequalities of plantation slavery culture and sexual exploitation endemic to garrison complexes. Dawes points out that some of the people with whom the girls might be boarded were themselves ‘in indigent circumstances’ (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 143). He indicates how literacy, education, a trade and clothing would transform the futures of the girls, including by fitting them to the prospect of companionate marriage. In Scott's terms, Dawes’ narrative of the relation between the colonial present and a reformed future follows the ‘story-form of Romance’: ‘colonial slavery is defined essentially by what it denied: its debasements, its burdens, its repressions, its cruelties, its degradations, its inhumanities’ and the vision of reform vindicates shared humanity and local politicised agency (2004: 50, 94). ‘Evangelical Christians’, Brant notes, ‘had particular conventions for articulating spiritual distress: a suffering soul used letters to cry out’ (2006: 25).

With mincing irony and disgust, Dawes quotes from Hebrews 11:25 to characterise worldly material gain by concubinage and prostitution as ‘the pleasures of sin for a season’ (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 141, emphasis in original). Slaves directly from Africa were subjected to a demoralising ‘seasoning’ for life and work in West Indian colonies, an introduction to its routines, sometimes conducted by experienced bondspeople. Dawes’ pun on season highlights the centrality of sexual exploitation and abuse to the production and reproduction of colonial plantation cultures and the amenity of patriarchal British military cultures, the potential power of example and the nature of the refuge from such experience that could be proffered through benevolent support of the Female Refuge Society. As the garrison complex at English Harbour was scaled back and the Female Refuge Society developed an island profile, the girls it assisted were increasingly the daughters of white male plantation personnel (Dawes, 1825a). In an 1824 letter to Mrs Luckock, Gilbert cites the same biblical verse in excoriating the institutions of concubinage and prostitution, and praising the women raised by the ‘Benevolent Societies’ for having chosen, ‘like Moses, rather to “suffer affliction with the people of God”’. The likening of the women to Moses posits their choice as a prospect of deliverance from captivity of ‘soul and body’. ‘[M]y heart frequently yearns over them with affectionate sympathy’ for their ‘privations’, she writes (quoted in Dawes, 1824). The biblical exodus narrative is an important point of reference for her, as it is for so many African-heritage Christians. In her libretto Imoinda; Or She Who Mill Lose Her Name, Anim-Addo (2008) compellingly highlights the seasoning of enslaved women through cross-racial rape and sexual abuse as a foundational experience of African-Caribbean women. Anne Gilbert draws out for Mrs Luckock the collusion of Christian churches in, in effect, sanctioning sexual seasoning by indulging ‘corrupt[ing]’ local racialised sexual institutions. She writes contemptuously, too, of ‘Ladies, who wish to be considered extremely decorous and delicate, promot[ing]’ sexual seasoning ‘by the sale of Slaves for such purposes, and by exactions of hire, which they know cannot be raised in any other way’ (quoted in Dawes, 1824).

Affective Dynamics

William Dawes represents the purpose of his letter being ‘to shew that there is a loud call at present upon Christians to deny themselves superfluities; and, as they have received of God, to help the distressed’ (Missionary Register, 3 April 1816a: 142). In working to transmit the affect of the racialised class and sexual economies he outlines on the ‘good’, he maps what David Lambert characterises as a transatlantic ‘moral geography of humanitarian duty’ towards coloured and black girls and women in the late plantation slavery period, inscribing English Harbour as ‘an aberrant colonial space requiring metropolitan intervention’ (Lambert, 2005: 141) and the intervention of a multi-racial ‘people of God’ in the form of benevolent interest and support, both Christian duties (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 141, emphasis in original). Laquer points out that the genre of the ‘humanitarian narrative’ that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘subsists in the matrix of detailed cause and effect, specific wrong and specific action’, a ‘logic of specific intervention’ (1989: 178, 182). Highlighting, but not lingering over the embodied experience of poverty, the outline of cause and effect in the annual reports of the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society does not court salaciousness. The ‘logic of specific intervention’ proposed demonstrates to the implied addressee of the appeal how to ‘shift its affections (its being-affected) into action’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 2) through proven benevolent means.

Brennan argues that ‘the projection or introjection of a judgment is the moment transmission [of affect] takes place’ (2004: 5), and there is surviving evidence of the reception and judgement of situations reported by Dawes, the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society in Britain. The Church Missionary Society, ‘painfully reminded’ by Dawes’ 1816 letter of the ‘actual … STATE OF BRITISH COLONIAL SOCIETY, IN RESPECT OF MORALS AND RELIGION’, declare it a ‘melancholy subject’ (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 144), the word melancholy meaning ‘depressing’, ‘deplorable’ and ‘conducive to reflection’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online). The capitalisation in my quotation registers the Church Missionary Society's abhorrence of the usually hidden history of exploitation Dawes exposes. The published reflections on Dawes’ ‘affecting appeal’ are that ‘it is as impolitic as it is criminal, to thwart or retard the influence of genuine Christianity on the population of our Foreign Possessions’ and a donation of £100 towards the work of the English Harbour Sunday School and the Female Refuge Society (Missionary Register, 1 April 1816a: 144). In a subsequent issue of the Missionary Register, an article on Antigua quotes a letter from an ‘Anonymous Lady’ who donated ‘trinkets’ (now ‘superfluities’ in Dawes’ framing of her position relative to the girls whose interests he is representing), the sale of which should go ‘toward the education of those pitiable girls in Antigua, who, without some affectionate aid, are doomed to the wretchedness of vice, or the accumulated distress of poverty and slavery’. Showcasing the letter's successful appeal to her sensibility, she writes that her ‘heart is some way touched with the deplorable state of temptation and misery to which some of her own sex are exposed’ (Missionary Register, 1 May 1816b: 191). James Gordon, ‘an associate of the evangelical Clapham Sect’, a group that was a driving force of the anti-slavery campaign in Britain, and ‘a leading figure in the radically conservative wing of evangelical Anglicanism, which rejected compromise with the world’ (Wolffe, 2004), became a generous personal benefactor of the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society in the late 1810s (Female Refuge Society, 1818, 1819; Distressed Females’ Friend Society, 1819).

The Female Refuge Society would achieve its widest reach through the female anti-slavery societies that began to proliferate after 1825, when the ‘first, largest, … most influential’ female anti-slavery society, the Female Society for Birmingham (Midgely, 1992: 45), was founded. Responding to the annual reports of the Female Refuge Society, the Female Society for Birmingham committed itself ‘to endeavour[ing] to awaken (at least in the bosom of English women) a deep and lasting compassion, not only for the bodily sufferings of female Slaves, but for their moral degradation’ (Female Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves, 1826: 3, emphasis in original) and to distribute the reports in their workbags. The Ladies’ Association for Salisbury, Calne, Melksham, Devizes, &c. also supported the Female Refuge Society (Thomas, 2011c: 237). The Ladies’ Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves (as the Female Society for Birmingham became) chose material for the workbags to encourage ladies ‘to “remember those in bonds as bound with them, and those that suffer adversity, as being herself also in the body;” Heb. xiii.3’ and to ‘desire that her own sex may no longer be treated as brutes’ (Ladies’ Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, n.d.). Monies from the sale of the workbags would support its activities (including dissemination of the reports of the Female Refuge Society) and enable donations to organisations like the Female Refuge Society under the resolution to ‘reliev[e] NEGLECTED AND DESERTED NEGROES’ (ibid.). The term relief in the name of the organisation has a range of resonances: ‘deliverance of a besieged … people from an attacking force’, ‘[assistance in time of danger, need, or difficulty’, ‘deliverance from distress, anxiety, or some other emotional burden’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online). The ethic of compassion expounded here is grounded in affective identification across racialised, social, cultural and geographical boundaries, and it risks what Black might identify as ‘invasive imagination’ (2010: 32). As an ideal, though, the Biblical allusion suggests ‘imaginative projection as an expansion of selfhood’ attentive to ‘asymmetries of privilege’ and an ‘act of imagining others [that] requires actively reimagining one's own social location’, which Black characterises as potentially less dominating forms of empathy at the level of representation (ibid.: 40, 44, 42, emphasis in original). When the Distressed Females’ Friend Society bought a property to house the girls it supported in 1827, Mary Cropper, wife of leading anti-slavery activist James Cropper, and the Liverpool Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society made a significant contribution of £51 to the cost (Distressed Females’ Friend Society, 1828). The Daweses had close family contacts in Liverpool. The Birmingham Society ‘supplied] … tracts and pamphlets’ to many other female anti-slavery societies, including the Liverpool Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, which was closely modelled on the Birmingham Society (Midgely, 1992: 47).

What is striking in the extant annual reports of the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society are the abstract images of the conditions in which the girls they helped were living in the ‘before’ of a ‘before and after contrast’ (Van Sant, 1993: 34). The 1822 report of the Distressed Females’ Friend Society, for instance, describes the conditions as ‘hovels of the sick and indigent’, ‘exposed innocence’, ‘unfriended helplessness, or affecting destitution’, ‘scenes of misery’, ‘cheerless recesses of poverty’, and ‘sin and sorrow wielding their iron scepter over suffering humanity, and innocence languishing in situations so uncongenial’, and the girls as ‘the involved and perishing subjects of every personal, every moral, and every religious privation’. The Committee of the Female Refuge Society refers in its 1818 report to ‘poverty and misery’, ‘consign[ment], perhaps, to everlasting destruction’ and in its 1819 report to the ‘extremes of physical and moral wretchedness’. Even when the Committee uses extended metaphor, it represents the girls in abstract terms:

Van Sant shows that in the period the view in Britain was that ‘imagination requires particularity’, that ‘in order to affect the heart, one must work through the eyes, creating vivid images through particularization’ (1993: 28). The Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society, though, as my examples show, use vivid typification rather than particularisation in their reports. Van Sant quotes from Henry Home's Elements of Criticism (1762): ‘Abstract or general terms have no good effect on any composition for amusement; because it is only of particular objects that images can be formed’ (Home quoted in Van Sant, 1993: 29). The typification works against ‘invasive imagination’ on the part of the implied addressees of the reports. When the Female Refuge Society was most pressed by shortage of funds to help those requesting support, Dawes would include in his correspondence with the Church Missionary Society extracts from letters by Gilbert, the Society's agent, which play more to sentiment in their evocation of distress, both of those the society was established to help and her own in being unable to extend more assistance. ⁵ He terms the more sentimentalised narratives affecting anecdotes. Initials, and once a first name, rather than names that might fully identify people whose cases are discussed are used in the transcribed letters. Gilbert's anecdotes focus on the need and desire for safe housing of impoverished children. What is most affecting in them tends to be the description of unmet direct and tacit appeals for support. In her writing, Gilbert, too, uses Christian allusion to characterise the tenor of a corrupt plantation slavery culture through aurality: it is a ‘howling Wilderness’ (Church Missionary Society Archive; Deut. 32:10); she enjoins a compassionate listening to and acting on ‘the cry of the wretched’ poor, ‘the widow's and the orphan's groan’ (English Harbour Female Juvenile Association, 1823; Wesley, 1889).

The reports of the Female Refuge Society and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society project a putative relation between their management committees and the objects of their charity and between subscribers and donors and the recipients of their benevolence. Lambert and Lester argue that ‘the trope of “the family” was the one most often used by nineteenth-century [metropolitan] philanthropists and evangelicals to characterize colonized populations … a trope that asserted a common identity [rather than “absolute racial otherness”], as well as mutual ties of duty and responsibility between its members’. It is ‘a trope with patriarchal and infantilizing connotations that could have deeply disempowering implications for colonized people’ (2004: 332). Friendship, directly referenced in the name of the Distressed Females’ Friend Society, is the model of benevolence and obligation favoured by it and the Female Refuge Society. The 1818 report of the Female Refuge Society and the 1819 report of the Distressed Females’ Friend Society, for instance, appeal to ‘friends of humanity’; in his correspondence to raise funds, William Dawes refers to ‘friends of the rising generation’ (Church Missionary Society Archive). The first term posits and vindicates a shared humanity. Referencing a social and spiritual ethic of ‘improvement’, the second renovates a phrase (‘the rising generation’) that was by the 1810s commonplace. Wood notes that ‘the most influential and widely circulated and adapted image across the slave diaspora was the design that the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade … created as its seal in 1789 … This showed the body of a kneeling male, and later [in 1827] female slave, asking respectively, “Am I not a man and a brother?” “Am I not a woman and a sister?”’ (2010: 38). Hall notes the ‘assumption of white superiority’ implicit in the icon (1992: 214). In relation to the icon, the word ‘rising’ suggests assumption of a rightful spiritual and racial equality on the part of non-white people. In the 1823 report of the Female Refuge Society, there is a telling allusion to the medallion: ‘Your Committee are no speculators on imaginary sorrows, nor are they skilled to paint fictitious griefs; the unprotected orphan stands before you—misery has raised its voice to them—they leave it to make its prayer to you—unknown, unpitied—without a home or shelter—or a friend to guide.—Are ye men and brethren, and can ye leave it so?—’ The ‘unprotected orphan stands’ rather than kneels, ‘misery’ speaks in the name of shared humanity, and the ‘voice’ is not weak or timid, but ‘raised’. The question asked of potential benefactors—'Are ye men and brethren, and can ye leave it so?’ — posits compassion, rather than whiteness, as the sign of the human (and the multi-racial Committee of the Female Refuge Society as the embodiment of this). The ‘exhortation’ to action also alludes to Acts 13:15 and Acts 13:26, implying that compassion ‘is the word of salvation’ (Acts 13:26). In its 1822 report, the Distressed Females’ Friend Society constructs the figure of a ‘Female of common benevolence’ and urges all female subscribers ‘to adopt the humble task of begging … perseveringly’ for funds and accuses those who would hesitate of ‘insensibility’, ‘false delicacy and inactivity’, ‘allowing objects of extreme moral or physical want’ with ‘claims’ on them ‘to perish’. Rather, she should view her begging as a ‘sum vested in souls, upon no doubtful nor unproductive interest—a speculation for Eternity’. Begging in this ‘interest’ is ‘neither improper nor disreputable’. The recommendation of such speculation is an instance of the phenomenon of friendship with ‘calculation’, ‘calculation on the future’ (Smith, 2010: 130).

There is particularisation of girls in the care of the societies at two local functions, accounts of which are included by Dawes in letters to the Church Missionary Society; the accounts illuminate the social vision of the societies. In 1820, the Distressed Females’ Friend Society organised a meeting of children in its care, Committee members and people with whom they were boarded, so that in the words of the Committee the girls’ ‘improvement in reading, writing, working, and behaviour might be enquired into’ (quoted in Dawes, 1820). The texts to test writing and reading were a hymn and a Biblical chapter in which Hannah ‘rejoice[s] in her salvation’ (1 Sam. 2:1), including acknowledgement that God ‘raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory’ (1 Sam. 2:8). Frye and MacPherson characterise Hannah's song as thematising the ‘revolutionary activity of God … a complete overturning of social standards’ and ‘hierarchy’ (2004: 123). In the account, the children are positioned as ‘experimental material’, ‘evidence of the institution's utility’, ‘suggest[ing] that the experiment was repeatable, the results replicable’ (Van Sant, 1993: 34). On the occasion of a vice-regal visit to the English Harbour Sunday School, girls supported by the Female Refuge Society and other charities and the ‘young women’ with whom they were boarded were introduced to Lady d'Urban's party (Gilbert, undated letter to Grace Dawes, quoted in Dawes (1822)). Lady d'Urban was the patron of the Female Refuge Society. Among other performers, Livy, one of the girls supported by the Female Refuge Society, recited from Isaac Watts's hymn ‘Praise to God for Learning to Read’ with its thanksgiving to God for having been ‘taught and learnt so young/To read his holy word./That I am taught to know/The danger I was in;/ By nature, and by practice too, /A wretched slave to sin’. ⁶ The meeting sang ‘Rule, Brittania’, perhaps an instance of ‘sly civility’ (Bhabha, 1994: 93) towards the official party, as enslaved pupils and descendents of bondspeople, subjects of Britain, proclaim as the nation's providential ‘charter’ that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’ in a civil sense. ⁷ There is another instance of ‘sly civility’ in the proceedings, a reading, perhaps disingenuously presented by Gilbert as a slip by Jane Sleaven, which drew attention to the worldly hypocrisy of the occasion. Sleaven was to read from the Lord's Prayer, but instead read Matthew 6:3: ‘When thou doest alms let not thy left hand know what they right hand doeth’. Henry Mathew comments on the passage in which the verse appears: ‘In these verses we are cautioned against hypocrisy in giving alms. Take heed of it. It is a subtle sin; and vain-glory creeps into what we do, before we are aware’. ⁸ Sleaven was citing Gilbert's own readily promulgated credo about beneficence (Gilbert, 1821; Female Refuge Society, 1822). The young Sleaven invites a critical, racialised and classed gaze back at the official party, which was making a public spectacle of its charity and patronage. The ‘sly civility’ instances what Bhabha describes as ‘[t]he colonialist demand for narrative carr[ying], within it’, a ‘threatening reversal’ of the ‘problem of truth’: ‘Tell us why we are here’ (1994: 99–100, emphasis in original).

Conclusion

Like Moravian convert Rebecca Protten, whose life has been so brilliantly reconstructed by Jon Sensbach, Anne Hart Gilbert and the benevolent network in which she was such a crucial innovator and player have as their political context a gendered plantation slavery culture, ‘the Afro-Atlantic freedom struggle, and the rise of black Christianity’ (Sensbach, 2005: 235). As Richardson argues in relation to British philanthropic women, it is important to draw out the ‘intellectual arguments’ and contexts of projects situated at a ‘complex’ confluence of ‘gender, philanthropy, and imperialism’ (2008: 91–92). Gilbert's philanthropic ethos and social vision was grounded in a creolisation of African diasporic and evangelical Christian philosophy and practice and the promulgation of a creolised emotion culture with a transatlantic reach that significantly shaped the course of British anti-slavery activism.