The Meaning Hidden in Wordsworth's Teacup and Mary Shelley's Hair

New York Times

18-07-2025

THE TREMBLING HAND: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, by Mathelinda Nabugodi
William Wordsworth liked his tea, and he had a favorite cup to drink it from, one 'painted in an Orientalist design,' as Mathelinda Nabugodi writes, with little birds 'flying around beneath' its glaze. That cup is now in the archives of St. John's College, in Cambridge, England, and, as Nabugodi recounts in 'The Trembling Hand,' her new book about the entanglement of British Romanticism and slavery, she first saw it while attending a seminar at the college on abolitionism in 18th-century Britain.
Wordsworth's alma mater had educated some prominent abolitionists, and in 1833 the movement finally succeeded. Parliament abolished slavery, and ever since the English have told what Nabugodi, a literary scholar at Cambridge, rightly calls a 'self-congratulatory' story about its end, while turning 'a blind eye' to the fortunes they made from it. The seminar she attended was not blind. The instructor reminded participants that many people in Britain saw slavery as a positive good, and among the documents on display was a letter from the overseer of a Jamaican sugar estate about the purchase of ever more men and women to work in its fields.
Sugar was a brutal business. Razor-like machetes to cut the cane, heavy rollers to press its juice and constant flames to boil it down: All had to be done fast, to keep that juice from spoiling, and severed limbs and disabling burns were common. When Wordsworth got his teacup in 1816, almost every spoonful of sugar in Britain had been produced by Caribbean slave labor, and Nabugodi assumes he drank it sweet. But his connections to slavery were much closer than that. The Lake District nobleman who employed Wordsworth's father owned a plantation in Barbados, and an early patron had one as well, on the tiny island of Nevis. Indeed, it was at that slave owner's house in 1795 that Wordsworth first met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The creative friction of their friendship led to some of the greatest poems in the English language, and the birth of the movement called Romanticism.
'The Trembling Hand' recognizes that greatness. Nevertheless, Nabugodi wants her readers to see how fully entwined the cultural and material wealth of Britain's Romantic era was with slavery, and how long a presence Black people have had on that island. Much of this is well known to specialists; 30 years ago Gretchen Gerzina's 'Black London' described their workaday presence in the metropolis during a period that exactly corresponds to Nabugodi's own. 'Bridgerton' it wasn't.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.