| While anti-slavery sentiment eventually
dictated policy in both the United States and Great Britain, the course of
abolition differed greatly in the two nations. In America, the institution of
slavery was strongly defended in a debate that ultimately resulted in the Civil
War of 1860. In Britain, by contrast, slavery was done away with by 1807 and
barred throughout its colonial possessions by 1833. In analyzing Britain's
course, historians have well documented the influences of economic change,
humanitarian protest and reform movement. One factor that has been largely ignored by scholars, however, is the {{U}}impetus{{/U}} that was provided by children's literature. This medium gained great popularity in Britain during the last half of the 18th century and provided direct access to young, impressionable minds. Consequently, children's literature constituted the perfect vehicle for spreading of humanitarian ideas and played a vital role in creating anti-slavery concerns. In 1761, John Newberry's Tom Telescope included the first known reference to the slave trade in children's literature. Tom, the book's hero, took issue with a man who was fond of his household pet yet, as a slave merchant, thought "nothing of separating the husband from the wife, the parents from the children". Slavery was not only cruel and oppressive, Tom seemed to be saying, but it was also irrational and contrary to natural law. Written before much of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade were revealed, Torn Telescope contained an implicit message. Soon afterwards, writers and publishers were in a position to be more explicit. One of the leaders in this movement was the Society of Friends who, in 1787, published Little Truths. Passages in this work directly related conditions aboard slave ships: "children were in the ship, pressed like fishes in barrel ." Around the turn of the 18th century, blacks were introduced for the first time as main characters in children's literature. An early example of this device is found in Thomas Day's immensely popular The History of Sandford and Merton, in which a black beggar miraculously rescues Harry Sandford from a raging bull. Significantly, Day says very little about the institution of slavery itself, but the reader is left with no doubt that it is inhuman and cruel. While it would be misleading to assume that every children's book published between 1750 and 1850 contained anti-slavery sentiments, the numbers are significant enough to suggest that they played a vital role in shaping their attitudes toward blacks. At the same time, even when the capabilities of blacks were recognized, there was always a tendency to depict them as different rather than equal. Perhaps unwittingly, children's literature helped to form a stereotype that — while successfully attacking slavery — also strengthened the 19th century Englishmen's sense of racial superiority. |