In mid-June this year the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and its aftermath stole global headlines. The 2013 BLM (Black Lives Matter) campaign was rekindled and many people were prompted to re-examine the wide-spread and often subtle ways in which the notorious transatlantic slave trade has long permeated cultural life. The vast wealth accrued by Caribbean planters and their business investors – many of the latter well-known philanthropic Stuart and Georgian names – was ploughed into the building of magnificent civic structures – schools and hospitals, graceful squares and crescents, as well as most of those ‘stately homes’ we visit today and which are now preserved by the National Trust.
Before Covid-19 struck our shores, SOF Merseyside and North Wales held its meetings in a Liverpool flat near the site of the Goree Piazzas, warehouses named after an island off Senegal, where captured slaves were auctioned before transportation across the Atlantic. Liverpool itself had overtaken Bristol by the 1780s as the European capital of the slave trade. Before 1807 when the British Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed, Mersey ships had transported nearly 1.5 million African slaves across the Atlantic, more than 10% of all slaves carried by Europeans to their colonies in appalling and overcrowded conditions, many dying en route in the infamous ‘Middle Passage’.
Not many former hardened captains of slave ships were like the remarkable John Newton, author of Amazing Grace, who underwent a dramatic religious conversion in mid-life and left Liverpool to become a pious Evangelical Anglican clergyman. Newton, at his living in Olney, collaborated with the poet William Cowper to write the famous Olney hymn collection and became a staunch abolitionist. Today Liverpool’s excellent International Slavery Museum tells in great detail the complex and horrific story of the notorious trade from Africa, via the sale platform to plantation life. The clear brief for this article is to illustrate the strong links in the writings of Jane Austen (1775-1817) to this woeful period in our history, and to show how, in particular, she has ‘translated’ – albeit substantially adapted – a very unusual real story that she came across, namely the life of Dido Belle (born circa 1761), into the novel Mansfield Park (published 1814).
Although there are brief references to the slave trade in several of her other novels, Emma in particular, (such mention often appearing in dialogue), slavery is, as Paula Byrne puts it, ‘the shadow story’ in Mansfield Park, and it is here that Jane Austen’s immediate family’s true abolitionist colours fly. Jane was actually not unconnected to the sugar plantations herself, through wider family and friends, as so many British people were.
The pater familias of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram, is portrayed as a typical Georgian sugar plantation owner, although one who is not a total absentee from his Antiguan land. His family live in leisurely comfort in a mansion set in a landscaped park. The girls are typically educated for ladies of the time, learning how to display themselves and their ‘accomplishments’ to best advantage, ultimately to attract marriage offers from similarly cultured young gentlemen. Into their comfortable midst suddenly arrives young Fanny Price, who, although a niece of Lady Bertram, has been brought up in contrastingly straightened circumstances because Lady B’s sister has married ‘beneath her’. At first Fanny is overwhelmed by her new environment, but she copes and eventually thrives, thanks mainly to the sympathetic understanding and help she receives from her upright cousin Edmund. But it is not until towards the end of the book that her fortune changes assuredly for the better. Sir Thomas returns from Antigua, her beloved naval officer brother visits and the Bertram family at last recognise Fanny for the good, wise – and by now well-educated – person that she is.
Into a scene around the Bertram family dining table after Sir Thomas’s return, Austen skilfully inserts a short piece of pointed dialogue to illustrate Fanny’s fearlessly intelligent curiosity about the slave trade. As conversation freezes uncomfortably in response to her questions (which are not answered by Sir Thomas) we are persuaded that Fanny’s sympathies are located in the right place. Bertram’s financial return from his plantations is described as dwindling – possibly as a result of shipping difficulties during the Napoleonic Wars, or even the success of the Anti-Saccharite ladies’ campaign to boycott the purchase of sugar and rum.
Austen herself was clearly well-informed about the transportation trade, sale and work on the sugar plantations. Not only did her favourite writers include the poet William Cowper, Dr Johnson and Thomas Clarkson, all abolitionists, the latter a leading campaigner, but she would have come across the many anti-slavery pamphlets published after 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed. She would have learned something about it too from her brother Captain Charles Austen RN.
Now to the particular story that captured Jane Austen’s imagination: Dido Elizabeth Belle, as she was baptised at St. George’s, Bloomsbury in 1766, was the mixed-race daughter of Scottish Captain John Lindsay RN (later a distinguished Admiral) and Maria Bell, an African slave. We know little about Dido’s birth, whether it was at sea or in Scotland. All we know is that her mother died before she was 4 or 5, at which time Captain Lindsay delivered her to Kenwood House in Hampstead to be brought up by his childless uncle and aunt, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield and Murray’s wife, Lady Elizabeth (née Finch). At around the same time the Mansfields also adopted Lady Elizabeth’s six-year-old great-niece, daughter of the recently widowed Lord Stormont, a distinguished diplomat posted to Vienna. The two little girls, technically cousins and near contemporaries, were brought up as sisters.
Although it was relatively common by the 1760s to find freed black servants, usually footmen, in the great country houses, it was extremely unusual, if not unique, for high-ranking families like the Mansfields to accept, openly acknowledge and unashamedly display a black child as a bona fide relative living on virtually equal terms with other family members. A fascinating double portrait by Johann Zoffany, which was later titled ‘Lady Elizabeth Finch-Hatton and Negress’, is a beautiful and deeply symbolic painting: it portrays an adolescent blonde Lady Elizabeth Murray sitting formally with an open book on her knees, smiling demurely and extending a hand to Belle. By contrast, darkly beautiful Belle stands behind Elizabeth yet leaning forward animatedly, dressed in oriental costume, smiling quizzically and bearing a basket of exotic fruits. That Lord Mansfield should have ordered a double portrait shows his clear approval of – and pride in – both his adopted great-nieces.
As far as can be discerned, Belle’s later life was happy and comfortable. She had been left a basic annuity of £100 by Lord Mansfield, a sum to which he later added £200 ‘to set out with’ and a further £300. Belle married John Davinier, a (white) French servant, whom she had probably met when he was working for Lord Stormont, the new Earl of Mansfield. The couple lived in a comfortable house in up-and-coming Pimlico. Belle had 3 surviving children who all did well, particularly Charles, the eldest, who had attended a respectable private school that prepared him, aged 14, to join the East India Company as a clerk. From there he rose to become a distinguished officer in the Indian Army. Sadly, Belle herself, still only in her early 40s, died in 1804 and before the abolition of the slave trade.
Now to William Murray, Lord Mansfield himself: Despite the ready and compassionate response by this intelligent Scotsman (1705-1793) to the request to provide a home for his two great-nieces, he appears to have been more circumspect when it came to his support for the abolitionist cause. His cautious approach to taking sides may well have been formed as a thirteen-year-old, when his desperate desire to win a King’s Scholarship to Westminster School meant a determination to extricate himself from suspicion of sharing his father’s Jacobite sympathies. As Lord Chief Justice for a remarkable 32 years, Mansfield’s many rulings had considerable influence not only in England and the British colonies, but also on foundational USA laws.
One of these was the Somerset case where in 1772 Mansfield ruled in favour of granting Habeas Corpus to a runaway slave (i.e. regarding the slave as a person rather than a chattel), but it was his ruling over the horrendous Zong Massacre of 1783 that brought him to wider prominence. The ‘Zong’ was an English slave ship, dangerously overloaded with 442 African slaves bound for Jamaica. An inexperienced officer panicked when the ship overran her destination and water was dangerously short, making the cruel decision to jettison 132 slaves into the Caribbean, calculating harshly that this would make economic sense to the ship’s owners. The syndicate made an insurance claim of £30 per slave lost. The insurers refused to pay up so the syndicate took the case to court. Although Mansfield’s ruling did not require the insurers to pay up (so at least partial justice was done), and the ruling generally drew further welcome attention to the abolitionist cause, the case was strictly treated as an insurance matter rather than one of murder. Many suspect his change of heart over abolition was due to Belle’s influence.
Mansfield was probably dead by the time Jane Austen visited Eastwell Park in Kent and met Lady Elizabeth, Belle’s cousin, now married, but found her disappointingly dull. The Finch-Hattons were friends of Jane’s brother Edward. Whether Belle herself ever visited the house is not clear, but this was possibly the place where Jane pieced together Dido Belle’s story, later to translate it into a much-loved classic Austen novel.
Sources: Belle by Paula Byrne, William Collins (2014); Belle, DVD of screenplay (2014) starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Belle and Tom Wilkinson as Lord Mansfield; Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814), Penguin Classics edition (1996) ed. Kathryn Sutherland.
Penny Mawdsley is a long-term member of SOF. She has been a SOF trustee, chair of trustees and a past editor of Portholes. She now convenes the Merseyside and North Wales SOF Group.