London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

arch in Westminster with his four young children all of whom were dressed in white garments. It was a fleeting vision of purity in a landscape of blackened murk. Indians were most commonly found peddling scarves and foodstuffs in Petticoat Lane, as well as at St Giles and Whitechapel where they performed as contortionists and tumblers for rapt audiences, swept crossings, vended curry-powder, played ‘tum-tum’ while spinning round and round, and sold Christian tracts from boards suspended in front of them. An 1848 issue of Punch depicted one sweeper at St Paul’s churchyard who allegedly demanded a toll for crossing the street. Such contributions to the daily economic life of the city and to the cosmopolitan crosstown traffic were not confined to South Asians. Reflecting on the changing face of the metropolis during Queen Victoria’s reign, one popular historian claimed that many people ‘would not like to lose the courteous negro omnibus conductor nor the picturesque black shop porters who now and again help us to realize that London is the capital of an empire which includes many different races of people’.²⁷

      Grim and inglorious as London was for very many blacks and South Asians during the nineteenth century, it seemed like heaven to black people on the other side of the Atlantic. For those toiling as slaves or indentured labourers in the States and the Caribbean, the English metropolis was but a vague and impossible dream. To be poor and vagrant was a small price to pay for individual liberty. It was a place of escape and comfort, just as Paris was to be for novelists such as Chester Himes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin a century later.

      Such sentiments are expressed, albeit fleetingly, in the autobiographies of black American fugitive slaves such as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl (1861). Memoirs like these rarely deal with life in England for more than a few pages at best. They were published to abet American Abolitionism and, consequently, focused on the physical and moral savagery inflicted by Southern plantation owners, as well as on the terrors and hazards slaves faced during their bids for liberty. London, inasmuch as it cropped up at all in the autobiographies of slaves such as Moses Roper or William and Ellen Craft, was a place whose value lay in what it wasn’t (Carolina, say, or Virginia) rather than what it was. London was not a city they fled to; rather, it was a city away from their real homes. If any place was to be romanticized or celebrated, it was the former slave port of Liverpool which was the English city where most fugitive slaves arrived. William Farmer, agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, claimed in his preface to William Wells Brown’s memoirs that Liverpool was ‘to the hunted negro the Plymouth Rock of Old England’.²⁸

      Not all writers, however, were insensitive to the freedoms and advantages that metropolitan life offered. Having travelled via Liverpool from New York to London, Harriet Jacobs booked into her lodgings at the Adelaide Hotel and reflected that

      for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.²⁹

      William Wells Brown marvelled in his autobiography at the capital’s teeming excitement: ‘If one wished to get jammed and pushed about, he need go no farther than Cheapside. But every thing of the kind is done with a degree of propriety in London, that would put the New Yorkers to blush.’³⁰

      Brown, like Douglass and Jacobs, encountered little colour prejudice in London. Sent here because American Abolitionists thought it expedient for the English to meet ‘some talented man of colour who should be a living lie to the doctrine of the inferiority of the African race’, he was given an enthusiastic reception at The Music Hall in Stone Street and was also elected – ‘as a mark of respect to his character’ – an honorary member of The Whittington Club whose other members included Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold.³¹ Brown was buoyed by such friendliness. It freed his tongue and made him more brash. Whilst visiting the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, he had an opportunity to compare English and American racial attitudes.

      I was pleased to see such a goodly sprinkling of my own countrymen in the Exhibition – I mean coloured men and women – well-dressed, and moving about with their fairer brethren. This, some of our pro-slavery Americans did not seem to relish very well. There was no help for it. As I walked through the American part of the Crystal Palace, some of our Virginian neighbours eyed me closely and with jealous looks, especially as an English lady was leaning on my arm. But their sneering looks did not disturb me in the least. I remained the longer in their department, and criticized the bad appearance of their goods the more.³²

      One of Brown’s proudest moments in the capital was on the evening in 1851 when he joined runaway slaves, MPs and Anti-Slavery activists from both sides of the Atlantic to address a packed Hall of Commerce in the City of London where his call for Abolition in the US was greeted with deafening applause.³³ Following the instant success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapters from which had been published in serial form throughout the summer and autumn of 1851, black speakers were even more of a prize draw on the capital’s lecture circuit. At Exeter Hall, in particular, they would recount their life experiences and display the scars and welts from slaveholder lashings before packed houses. Some were advised to tell their stories as simply as possible for fear that excessive eloquence would detract from their ‘authenticity’. Indeed, black speakers were often sandwiched between white orators who supplied what were purported to be more sophisticated political and theoretical perspectives.³⁴

      In the metropolis black people could also see in person those grand and penetrating thinkers who blithely dismissed them in print as savage and degenerate niggers. Returning from the Crystal Palace by bus, Brown caught sight of Thomas Carlyle who

      wore upon his countenance a forbidding and disdainful form, that seemed to tell one that he thought himself better than those about him. His dress did not indicate a man of high rank; and had we been in America, I would have taken him for a Ohio farmer. [ … ] As a writer, Mr Carlyle is often monotonous and extravagant. He does not exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into importance, but generally takes commonplace thoughts and events, and tries to express them in stronger and statelier language than others.³⁵

      Though his resources were limited, Brown managed to range across more of the capital than most of the black seamen, students and musicians who flitted through London during the nineteenth century. He spent ten days sight-seeing in September 1850, with two of those days at the British Museum alone. He embraced both high and low culture – visiting the National Gallery and the Tower of London as well as applauding the Punch and Judy show in Exeter Street off the Strand. ‘No metropolis in the world presents such facilities as London for the reception of the Great Exhibition,’ he gushed. ‘Every one seems to feel that this great Capital of the world, is the fittest place whenever they might offer homage to the dignity of toil.’³⁶

      Wells Brown wasn’t the only black writer in the Victorian era to attack the ignorant prejudices of leading public figures. Perhaps the most heroic counterblast, almost completely unknown today, came from the pen of J.J. Thomas in his acid polemic Froudacity (1889). The target of his derision was the famous historian James Anthony Froude. A brilliant speaker whose lecture tours attracted huge audiences, a prolific journalist and a writer whose books, like those of his friend Thomas Carlyle, sold tens of thousands of copies, Froude rose to become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1892.

      His work celebrated the buccaneering hardiness of English mariners and eulogized the Elizabethan age’s commercial entrepreneurialism,