Victorian Jamaica 9780822374626

Citation preview

VICTORIAN JAMAICA

01 Jamaica 4PP_fm-pt1_pi-xx_1-277.indd 1

2/27/18 10:09 AM

T I M B A R R I N G E R A N D W A Y N E M O D E S T [  Editors ]

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2018

Victorian Jamaica

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved

Printed in China on acid-­f ree paper ∞ Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by BW&A Books, Inc. Cover art: A. Duperly and Sons, Statue of Governor Metcalfe at the Landing Pier, Kingston Harbour, 1900. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/100, 122.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Barringer, T. J., editor. | Modest, Wayne, editor.


Title: Victorian Jamaica / Timothy Barringer and Wayne Modest, editors.


Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.


Identifiers: LCCN 2017039418 (print) | LCCN 2018000300 (ebook) |   ISBN 9780822374626 (ebook)  ISBN 9780822360537 (hardcover : alk. paper  ISBN 9780822360681 (pbk. : alk. paper)


Subjects: LCSH: Jamaica—Civilization—19th century. | Jamaica— History—19th century. | Jamaica—Social life and customs—

19th century. | Great Britain—Colonies—History—19th century.


Classification: LCC F1886 (ebook) | LCC F1886 .V53 2018 (print) | DDC 972.92/04—dc23


LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039418
  Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support

of Yale University, which supported the publication of this book from an endowment provided by Paul Mellon.

Contents Acknowledgments  xix Introduction  Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer  1

OBJECT LESSONS

Introduction to Object Lessons  Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer  51 1. The Cruickshank Lock, circa 1838  Wayne Modest  55 2. Table, circa 1830–­1840  John M. Cross  59 3. A Tread-Mill Scene in Jamaica, 1837  Diana Paton  61 4. Sligoville with Mission Premises, 1843  Catherine Hall  63 5. A View of Coke Chapel from the Parade, circa 1846–­1847  James Robertson  67 6. The Ordinance of Baptism, 1843  Dianne M. Stewart  69 7. Kidd’s New Plan of the City of Kingston, Jamaica, 1854  Rivke Jaffe  73 8. Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica, 1865 Wayne Modest  77 9. Map Recording the Rebellion of 1865  Gad Heuman  79 10. Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867  Jennifer Raab  83 11. Newcastle, Jamaica, 1884  Tim Barringer  85 12. Opening the Railway Line at Porus, 1885  James Robertson  89 13. Day School Children, Jamaica, circa 1900  Patrick Bryan  91 14. Wedding Group, Jamaica, circa 1900  Anthony Bogues  95

15. Child’s Outdoor Cap. Lace-­bark, circa 1850–­1861  Steeve O. Buckridge  97 16. Grandmother on Mother’s Side, circa 1895–­1905  Patrick Bryan  99 17. Mary Seacole, 1871  Jan Marsh  103 18. Fatima, circa 1886  Erica Moiah James  105 19. Selection of Jamaican Wood Samples Made for the 1891 Exhibition  Veerle Poupeye, Nicole Smythe-­J ohnson, and O’Neil Lawrence  109 20. Illustration of an Obeah Figure, 1893  Diana Paton  111 21. Castleton Gardens, 1908  Krista A. Thompson  115 22. Queen Victoria, 1915  Petrina Dacres  117 PA R T I

MAKING VICTORIAN SUBJECTS

Chapter 1

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica  Diana Paton  125

Chapter 2

Victorian Jamaica: The View from the Colonial Office  Gad Heuman  139

Chapter 3

Liberalism, Colonial Power, Subjectivities, and the Technologies of Pastoral Coloniality: The Jamaican Case  Anthony Bogues  156

Chapter 4

Dirt, Disease, and Difference in Victorian Jamaica: The Politics of Sanitary Reform in the Milroy Report of 1852  Rivke Jaffe  174

Chapter 5

Creating Good Colonial Citizens: Industrial Schools and Reformatories in Victorian Jamaica  Shani Roper  190

Chapter 6

Botany in Victorian Jamaica  Mark Nesbitt  209

Chapter 7

Victorian Sport in Jamaica, 1863–­1909  Julian Cresser  240

Chapter 8

Rewriting the Past: Imperial Histories of the Antislavery Nation  Catherine Hall  263

PA R T I I

V I S U A L A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E S

Chapter 9

Land, Labor, Landscape: Views of the Plantation in Victorian Jamaica  Tim Barringer  281

Chapter 10

The Duperly Family and Photography in Victorian Jamaica  David Boxer  322

Chapter 11

Noel B. Livingston’s Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans  Gillian Forrester  357

Chapter 12

Picturing South Asians in Victorian Jamaica  Anna Arabindan-­Kesson  395

Chapter 13

Victorian Furniture in Jamaica  John M. Cross  420

Chapter 14

Jamaica’s Victorian Architectures, 1834–­1907  James Robertson  439

Chapter 15

Creole Architecture in Victorian Jamaica  Elizabeth Pigou-­D ennis  474

Chapter 16

“Keeping Alive Before the People’s Eyes This Great Event”: Kingston’s Queen Victoria Monument  Petrina Dacres  493

Chapter 17

“A Period of Exhibitions”: World’s Fairs, Museums, and the Laboring Black Body in Jamaica  Wayne Modest  523

PA R T I I I

RACE, PERFORMANCE, RITUAL

Chapter 18

“Most Intensely Jamaican”: The Rise of Brown Identity in Jamaica  Belinda Edmondson  553

Chapter 19

“Black Skin, White Mask?”: Race, Class, and the Politics of Dress in Victorian Jamaican Society, 1837–­1901  Steeve O. Buckridge  577

Chapter 20

Kumina: A Spiritual Vocabulary of Nationhood in Victorian Jamaica  Dianne M. Stewart  602

Chapter 21

Jamaican Performance in the Age of Emancipation  Nadia Ellis  622

Chapter 22

Black Jamaica and the Victorian Musical Imaginary  Daniel T. Neely  641

Chapter 23

“A Mysterious Murder”: Considering Jamaican Victorianism  Faith Smith  658

Contributors  675 Index  685

List of Illustrations Figs. I.1–­6

Adolphe Duperly, Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery on the

Fig. I.7

David Lucas, The First of August​  8

Figs. I.8–­9 Fig. I.10 Fig. I.11

Fig. I.12 Fig. I.13

Fig. I.14 Fig. I.15

Fig. I.16 Fig. I.17

Fig. I.18

First of August 1838  2–6

Chalice, inscribed with the words “Purchased . . . by the slaves of the Golden Grove”​  10

Isaac Mendes Belisario, Koo-­Koo, or Actor-­Boy 

13

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Mountain Cottage Scene, Cocoa Nut Trees in the Fore Ground  14

Photographer unknown, Susannah (Old Slave) and Blagrove  15

Louis Julian Jacottet, A View of the Court-­House (Taken on the Day of an Election)  17

The Dalziel Brothers, The Black Question  18 John Tenniel, The Jamaica Question  18

Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward John Eyre  19

Adolphe Duperly and Co., George W. Gordon  20 Portrait of a Man  22

Fig. I.19

Edna Manley, Paul Bogle  22

Fig. I.21

David Boxer, Queen Victoria Set We Free/​Year of Jubilee (after

Fig. I.20

Fig. I.22 Fig. I.23

Fig. I.24 Fig. I.25

Fig. OL.1

Fig. OL.2

David Boxer, Passage: Queen Victoria Set We Free  37 Duperly) 38

A. Duperly and Sons, Christmas Morning  38

Roberta Stoddart, Privy to the Adventures of Nation Building  39 Roberta Stoddart, Queen Victoria’s Veil  41

Omari Ra, A Folk Drama: Vicki Hated the Sun but She Loved Playing with Her Necklace and Her Sceptre  42 The Cruickshank lock 56 Ralph Turnbull, table 58

Fig. OL.3

A Tread-­Mill Scene in Jamaica  60

Fig. OL.5

Philippe Benoist, A View of Coke Chapel from the Parade  66

Fig. OL.4 Fig. OL.6

Fig. OL.7

James Mursell Phillippo, Sligoville with Mission Premises  64 George Baxter, The Ordinance of Baptism, as administered by

­missionaries connected with the Baptist Missionary Society to 135 persons near Brown’s Town, in Jamaica  70

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Kidd’s New Plan of the City of Kingston,

Jamaica 74

Fig. OL.8

Fig. OL.9

Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica  76

John Parry, Map of the County of Surrey in the Island of Jamaica, shew-

ing its topographical features — ​­the lines of the March of the Maroons and the Situation of the Several Villages burnt or partially so during the dis-

Fig. OL.10 Fig. OL.11

Frederic Church, Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica  82

Capt. Robert Hay, Newcastle, Jamaica  86

Fig. OL.12

Opening of the Railway Line at Porus  88

Fig. OL.14

Wedding Group, Jamaica  94

Fig. OL.13 Fig. OL.15

Day School Children, Jamaica  92 Child’s outdoor cap 96

Fig. OL.16

J. W. Cleary, Grandmother on Mother’s Side  100

Fig. OL.18

Mrs. Lionel Lee, Fatima 106

Fig. OL.17

Fig. OL.19 Fig. OL.20

Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-­Langenburg, Mary Seacole  102 Selection of Jamaican wood samples made for the 1891

Exhibition 108

Illustration of an Obeah figure 112

Fig. OL.21

A. Duperly and Sons, Castleton Gardens  114

Fig. 1.1

George Frederic Watts, Sir John Peter Grant  130

Fig. OL.22 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

After Mrs. Lionel Lee, Queen Victoria  116

(Pietro) Carlo Giovanni Battista Marochetti (Baron Marochetti), Sir James Stephen  140

Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir Henry Taylor  141

George Chinnery, Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, 1st Baron Metcalfe  143 Portrait of Akbar II with Sir Charles Theophilus ­Metcalfe and court

dignitaries 144

Matthew Noble, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Lord Darby  146

Block plan of the Boys’ Reformatory in Stony Hill 198

Boys working in the workshop of the Reformatory at Stony Hill 200

Stool made by boys at Reformatory at Stony Hill 203 On the road to Castleton  211

Palmetum at Castleton Gardens  215

Fig. 6.3

William Fawcett’s proposed geographical plan for the Hope

Fig. 6.4

Marianne North, Jamaica Orchids growing on a branch of the Calabash

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7

x

turbances in Oct and Nov 1865  80

Gardens 216 tree 219

Medicinal plants 220

Plants as materials 222

Edward J. Wortley, Souvenir seller  225

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

Fig. 6.8

Marianne North, View in the Fernwalk  227

Fig. 6.10

James Henry Stark, Banana women  234

Fig. 7.2

Kingston Cricket Club, 1902 247

Fig. 6.9 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

The Jamaica Section at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition  229

Collegiate school team, 1897 246

Primrose Cricket Club — ​­Martinez Cup champions  254 Jamaica Team, 1896 257

Fig. 9.1

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Good Hope  283

Fig. 9.3

James T. Willmore, Richmond Terrace, Surrey  289

Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5

Fig. 9.6 Fig. 9.7

Fig. 9.8

Fig. 9.9

Fig. 9.10 Fig. 9.11

Fig. 9.12 Fig. 9.13

Fig. 9.14 Fig. 9.15 Fig. 9.16 Fig. 9.17

Fig. 9.18

Fig. 9.19

Fig. 9.20

Figs. 10.1–3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5

Fig. 10.6 Fig. 10.7

Fig. 10.8

Fig. 10.9

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Montego Bay from Upton Hill  288 Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Montego Bay from Upton Hill [detail] 289

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Distant View of the Plains of Westmoreland / Looking towards Savannah la Mar  291

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Mountain Cottage Scene, Cocoa Nut Trees in the Fore Ground  293

James Mursell Phillippo, Sligoville with Mission Premises  297 C. Muller, Golden Grove Estate (St. Thomas in the East)  299

Philippe Benoist, Holland Estate (St. Thomas in the East)  300

Thomas Sutherland, Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East  300

Alexander R. Catter, Plan of Holland Estate, Works and Buildings, St. Thomas 301

Adolphe Duperly and Co., Moore’s Sugar Estate  303 J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford, Hordley Estate  304

After photograph by J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford, The Hordley Estate, Morant Bay, Jamaica  307

Thomas Harrison, Isometric Drawing of Ellis Caymanas Estate Works, St. Catherine 309

James Henry Stark, Interior of a Sugar Factory  310 John Cleary, At Home  313

A. Duperly and Sons, Banana Carriers  314 Cleary and Elliott, Jamaica Peasantry  315

J. W. C. Brennan, Constant Spring Hotel  316 Adolphe Duperly, Henri Louis Duperly  324

Adolphe Duperly, Cascade of Roaring River  325

After photograph by John Savage, Slaves Packed Below and on Deck 327

After photograph by John Savage, Sleeping Position of Slaves in the Pack  327

After photograph by John Savage, Slaves at Fort Augusta  327 Adolphe Duperly, carte de visite of an unknown man 329 F. A. Freeman, Jamaican Woman, Kingston  330

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

xi

Fig. 10.10

John Jabez Edwin Mayall, carte de visite of Queen Victoria 331

Fig. 10.12

Freeman Studio, Isabel Carnes Church  332

Fig. 10.11

Fig. 10.13

Fig. 10.14 Fig. 10.15

Fig. 10.16 Fig. 10.17

Fig. 10.18 Fig. 10.19

Fig. 10.20 Fig. 10.21

Fig. 10.22 Fig. 10.23

Fig. 10.24 Fig. 10.25

Fig. 10.26 Fig. 10.27

Fig. 10.28

Fig. 10.29

Fig. 10.30 Fig. 10.31 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3

Fig. 11.4 Fig. 11.5

Fig. 11.6 Fig. 11.7

Fig. 11.8

J. S. Thompson, Schoolgirls 334

H. S. Duperly, Country Negroes  335

After Adolphe Duperly, Market Street, Falmouth  336–37 J. S. Thompson, Market Street Falmouth  337

T. Sulman, Ruins of the Fire at Kingston, Jamaica  338

T. J. Mills, Execution of Rebels at the Ruins of the Court House, Morant Bay  340

Duperly Bros., Maroons with Col. Fyfe in their “War Costumes”​  341 Duperly Bros., Natives of Jamaica​  342

The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads near Morant Bay Where the Rebels

Assembled Immediately before the Attack on the Court House  343

Attributed to Russell Bros. and Moncrieff, Views of Morant Bay  344 Isaac Mendes Belisario, Milkwoman 346

A. Duperly and Sons, Country Negroes  347 Henri Duperly, portrait of a woman 348 Henri Duperly, portrait of a man 348

Armand Duperly, By the Rio Cobre  350

J Valentine and Sons, Negro Boy, Jamaica  351 J Valentine and Sons, Negro Boy, Jamaica  351

Dr. James Johnstone, Jamaica, one-penny stamp featuring Llandovery Falls 352

A. Duperly and Sons, Arrival of Prince George at Victoria Pier for the Opening of the 1891 Exhibition  353

Livingston Album page picturing R. Mayo, Alexander James Brymer, Flora Livingston and Ross Jameson Livingston, James Sinclair  359 Samuel Alexander Walker, Enos Nuttall  360 Charles Chapman  361

Mrs. Daughtry, formerly Mrs. Chapman  361 Reverend Dr. Andrew Kessen  361 Reverend C. E. Nuttall  361

Reverend Richard Panton  362 Sir John Peter Grant  362

Fig. 11.9

Francis D’Avignon, John Caldwell Calhoun  366

Fig. 11.11

William Walker Whitehall Johnston, Cosmopolitan Gallery,

Fig. 11.10

Fig. 11.12

xii

Freeman Studio, Frederic Edwin Church  332

Sorabji Jehangir, The Late Nawab Sir Salar Jung  366 Kingston 367

Livingston Album page picturing Philip Chapman, Samuel Paynter Musson, John Harris, Mr. Saunders  371

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

Fig. 11.13

Livingston Album page picturing Reverend Murphy, Reverend Canon

Fig. 11.14

Livingston Album page picturing Memento of the Great War of 1870,

Fig. 11.15 Fig. 11.16 Fig. 11.17 Fig. 11.18

F. L. King, Reverend John Radcliffe, Reverend Fletcher  372

Wilheim I, General Mite (Francis Joseph Flynn), Milly Edwards  374 Dr. James Miranda Barry with his servant, Dantzen or John, and his

dog 375

Livingston Album page picturing Lady Darling, Sir Charles Darling, Edward John Eyre, Sir Henry Knight Storks  376

Livingston Album page picturing Sir John Peter Grant, the Earl of Elgin, Edward John Eyre, Captain William Cooper  377

Livingston Album page picturing General Luke Smythe O’Connor and his Staff, Mrs. Shannon, George Levy, Alexander Berry  380

Fig. 11.19

Livingston Album page picturing George William Gordon, General

Fig. 11.20

William Walker Whitehall Johnston, A group of fourteen non-­

Fig. 11.21 Fig. 11.22

Luke Smythe O’Connor, Gordon Ramsay, Charles Price  381

commissioned officers in 1st West India Regiment at Up Park Camp, Kingston, Jamaica  382

Alexander Dudgeon Gulland album page picturing Up Park Camp, George William Gordon, Sidney Levine, B.D. Lindo  383

Alexander Dudgeon Gulland album page picturing General Luke Smythe O’Connor, William Walker Whitehall Johnston, Lieutenant-­

Colonel John Elkington; Brigadier-General Abercromby Nelson and Alexander Dudgeon Gulland; General Luke Smythe O’Connor and his Staff; Walter Steward; Maroons in their “War Costumes”; Colonel Alexander Fig. 11.23 Fig. 11.24

Fig. 11.25

Fyfe and Maroons  385

Alexander Dudgeon Gulland album page picturing Victims of the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865  386

Alexander Dudgeon Gulland album page picturing Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica; The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads near Morant Bay; Natives of Jamaica; Fort Neuf; Corfu 388 Frederick Douglass  389

Fig. 12.1

Small village with occupants 396

Fig. 12.3

Copied by C. Griffiths, East Indian Family, Ram Ram Golden Vale

Fig. 12.2

Fig. 12.4 Fig. 12.5

Fig. 12.6 Fig. 12.7

Fig. 12.8

Fig. 12.9

Rev. W. Baillie, Indian Cooking Outside Her House  396 Plantation, Port Antonio  396

H. Graves, Jamaica, Coolies Working on Banana Plantation  397 A. Duperly and Sons, Coolies at Worship  398

Nathan and Co. Ltd, Coolie Housay, Sa La Ma (Negril)  399

William Baillie or H. Atwell, East Indian Women Preparing Rice  403 H. Duperly, Imported Indian Coolie Washer Woman  404 Woman Sitting with Hat  405

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

xiii

Fig. 12.10 Fig. 12.11

Fig. 12.12

Coolies Preparing Rice, Jamaica  408 Sugar Cane Juice Press  408

Fig. 12.13

A. Duperly and Sons, East Indians in Jamaica: Family in Front

Fig. 12.14

A. Duperly and Sons, Greetings from Jamaica, Coolies  410

Fig. 12.15 Fig. 13.1

Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3

Fig. 13.4 Fig. 13.5

Fig. 13.6 Fig. 13.7

of Palm Trees  410

A. Duperly and Sons, Group of East Indians in a village  411 Ralph Turnbull’s trade label 423

Handwritten label for Ralph Turnbull specimen table 423

Handwritten key for a writing box by Ralph Turnbull 424 William and James Pitkin, cabinet and label 425

Specimen wood circular table, attributed to the Pitkin brothers​ 

425

Broken rail with Henry Page’s stamp 426 Washstand with fretted decoration 427

Fig. 13.8

Bed, stamped by Henry Page 427

Fig. 13.10

Four-­poster bed with double-­turned Solomonic columns 430

Fig. 13.9

Fig. 13.11

Fig. 13.12 Fig. 13.13

Fig. 13.14

Figs. 13.15–­16 Fig. 13.17

Fig. 13.18

Fig. 13.19

Fig. 13.20

Victorian Windsor chair 429

Four-­poster bed with diminishing Solomonic columns 430 Mahogany headboard 431 Sideboard 432

Sofa, probably made in the Falmouth area 432 Cupboard with gothic arched doors 433

Congolese religious artifact with X incised decoration 434 Daybed 435

Congolese religious artifact with drum turnings 435 Sideboard with carved backboard 435

Fig. 14.1

Tower Street before 1907 440

Fig. 14.3

Annesley Voysey, S. W. View of Christ Church, Port Antonio,

Fig. 14.4

Marlie Mount 446

Fig. 14.2

Fig. 14.5

Iron Church for Jamaica  442

Jamaica 443

Brown’s Town Chapel, Jamaica  447

Fig. 14.6

Holy Trinity, Montego Bay 447

Fig. 14.8

John Calvert, incomplete reconstruction of the eighteenth-­century

Fig. 14.7

Fig. 14.9

Fig. 14.10 Fig. 14.11

Fig. 14.12

xiv

A. Duperly and Sons, Sugar Cane Cutters  407

Free Methodist Chapel, Claremont, St. Ann 448 St. Catherine Parish Church 450 Port Royal Street, Kingston 451

Nineteenth-­century window “coolers” from Spanish Town 452 Plan of a new revenue office in Port Antonio 453 Charles Lazarus, Devon House 454

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

Fig. 14.13

Fig. 14.14 Fig. 14.15 Fig. 14.16 Fig. 14.17

Fig. 14.18 Fig. 14.19

Fig. 14.20 Fig. 14.21

Fig. 14.22 Fig. 14.23

Fig. 14.24 Fig. 14.25 Fig. 15.1

Fig. 15.2 Fig. 15.3

Fig. 15.4 Fig. 15.5

Constant Spring Hotel, St. Andrews 455

Edward Bridges, courtyard façade for a new reception block at ­Kingston’s Myrtle Bank Hotel 456

Edward Bridges, cross section of the new opulent reception block for the Myrtle Bank Hotel 456

Jamaica College’s Simms Building 457

George Messiter, United Synagogue, Duke Street, Kingston 458

Rev. Charles and Mrs. Emma Barron, Annotto Bay Baptist Church, entrance front, detail 458

DeMonetevin Lodge, Port Antonio 459

Spring Park, Black River, St. Elizabeth 460 Swift River Bridge, Portland 461

Yallas River Bridge, Easington, St. Thomas 462

Cross section of proposed extension for Queen’s Hotel, No. 8 ­Heywood Street, Kingston 463

Dr. Lockett’s house on Duke Street 464

Earthquake damage to the Wesleyan Manse at Gordon Town 465 James Mursell Phillippo, Heathen Practices at Funerals  477

James Mursell Phillippo, Visit of a Missionary and Wife to a Plantation Village 477

Attributed to Isaac Mendes Belisario, Highgate, Jamaica  478 James Mursell Phillippo, Clarkson Town  479 Claremont St. Ann  486

Fig. 15.6

Fern Court, Beechamville 487

Fig. 15.8

Alderton Pink House 488

Fig. 15.7

Fig. 15.9

Fig. 15.10

Faith Glade, Beechamville 487 House at Claremont 488

Detail of transom over front entrance, Fern Court, Beechamville 489

Fig. 16.1

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, Kingston 494

Figs. 16.3

John Bacon, Admiral George Rodney  496

Fig. 16.2

Fig. 16.4 Fig. 16.5

Fig. 16.6 Fig. 16.7

Fig. 16.8 Fig. 16.9 Fig. 16.10

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria  495

Edward Hodges Baily, Charles Metcalfe  496

Statue of Charles Metcalfe at Parade Gardens, Kingston 497

R. G. Miller, Edward Jordon  498

A. Duperly and Sons, Statue of Governor Metcalfe at the Landing Pier, Kingston Harbour  498

G. R. Lambert and Co., Group Photograph with Statue of Queen ­Victoria in Government House, Singapore, 1888–­1889  499

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria statue on the presidential grounds of the Istana, Singapore 506

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, detail 506

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

xv

Fig. 16.11

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, Kingston, detail with roundel

Fig. 16.12

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, Kingston, detail of roundel of

Fig. 16.13

Fig. 16.14 Figs. 16.15–­16 Fig. 16.17 Fig. 16.18 Fig. 17.1

Fig. 17.2

Prince Edward VII 509

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria statue on the presidential

grounds of the Istana, Singapore, detail of roundel of Princess Alexandra 509

Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria statue on the presidential grounds of the Istana, Singapore, 1888, detail of roundel of Edward VII 509 A. M. Croal, Diamond Jubilee Address of the Jamaica’s Teachers Union [detail, front and back cover] 513

A. Duperly and Son, Kingston on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Statue of Her Majesty Queen Victoria  514

W. and D. Downey, Queen Victoria, Diamond Jubilee official portrait 516

Henry Vizetelly, Colonial Produce  528 Date Tree Hall  535

Fig. 17.3

Branding iron 536

Fig. 17.5

A. Duperly and Sons, Visitors Arriving by Carriage and Horse-­Drawn

Fig. 17.4

Fig. 17.6

Shackles 536

Tram at the Exhibition Building  542

Sir Henry Arthur Blake, gcmg, dl, jp 543

Fig. 18.1

After William Makepeace Thackeray, Miss Swartz Rehearsing for the

Fig. 18.2

C. H. Graves, Schoolchildren, Mandeville, Jamaica  562

Fig. 18.3

Fig. 18.4 Fig. 18.5

Fig. 18.6 Fig. 18.7 Fig. 19.1

Fig. 19.2

Drawing Room  560

Residents of Belmont Orphanage, Stony Hill 562 The Honorable Richard Hill 565

Attributed to Adolphe Duperly, “Negro Woman,” Lydia Ann  566 Dr. Oates of Vere 567

Eliza Jane Verley, mother of Miss Daisy Verley 569

Philippe Benoist, A View of The Kingston Church  581 A Brown Girl  584

Fig. 19.3

Philippe Benoist, A View of The Kingston Theatre  585

Fig. 19.5

Isaac Mendes Belisario, Lovey 587

Fig. 19.4 Fig. 19.6 Fig. 19.7

Fig. 19.8

Fig. 19.9

Fig. 19.10 Fig. 19.11

xvi

­featuring Princess Alexandra 509

Philippe Benoist, A View of King Street  586 Mrs. Tom Ellis of Vere 589 Mrs. M. Davis 589

Lady Blake, wife of the governor of Jamaica 590 J. W. Cleary, lady dressed for sport 591 Mr. Aguilar 592

A member of the elite dressed in frock coat 593

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

Fig. 19.12 Fig. 19.13

Fig. 19.14

After A. S. Forrest, A Coloured Lady on a Race-­Course  594

Attributed to Adolphe Duperly, Nineteenth Century Negro Girl, Celia 596

On the Way to Market  597

Fig. 20.1

Diagram of Dikenga Kongo  612

Fig. 21.2

James Mursell Phillippo, Emancipation, 1st August, 1834  627

Fig. 21.1

Fig. 21.3

Fig. 21.4 Fig. 21.5

Fig. 22.1

Fig. 22.2

Thomas Picken, Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica  624

R. A. Leighton, Celebration of the 1st August 1838 at Dawkins Caymanas near Spanish Town, Jamaica  627

Isaac Mendes Belisario, Jaw-­Bone, or House John-­Canoe  631

Maria LaYacona, photographer, Pocomania [National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica]  634

Isaac Mendes Belisario, Red Set-­Girls and Jack-­in-­the-­Green  A Set, or A Christmas Scene in King Street  645

644

L i s t o f Ill u s t r a t i o n s

xvii

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments It has become a stock-­in-­trade for editors to acknowledge all the people who contributed to or supported their book project. As the editors of a book that was more than five years in the making, has twenty-­two authors, and features more than three hundred images, we face an enormous challenge in naming all who helped us. What follows, therefore, is offered with apologies, in the knowledge that it must be incomplete. As the joint editors of this book, we share overlapping networks of persons and institutions without whom this project would not have been possible. We would like first to thank the thirty authors included in this publication. We knew from the outset that inviting them to contribute would yield a collection of individual essays grounded in significant new scholarship; more importantly, however, the book developed into a wonderful collaborative project. This collaborative spirit was confirmed in the two-­day workshop we attended in Jamaica, where we read and commented on each other’s papers in a critical yet supportive manner. This made the process for us, as editors, a delight, like a conversation among friends. Our colleagues and participating institutions in Jamaica were extraordinarily generous in welcoming the members of the workshop into study rooms and storerooms and in sharing the riches of their collections and ideas. By taking seriously the promise to explore objects, the material and visual culture of any period or place, as this book does, we engaged and are indebted to a network of institutions and persons who are the caretakers or owners of these collections. As the preservers of one of the largest archives of materials, including photographs, maps, prints, and drawings, covering the period we explore, the National Library of Jamaica, under the directorship of Mrs. Winsome Hudson, deserves our especial thanks. We thank in particular Mrs. Yvonne Clarke and her special collections team, who granted the editors and contributors access to the collections and made possible an extensive campaign of photography. Without their support, this book would not have been possible. Other institutions in Jamaica to which we must give thanks include the National Museum of Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica, both departments of the Institute of Jamaica. We particularly thank Dr. Veerle Poupeye and her staff for making possible a study session with collections in

store at the National Gallery. At the National Museum of Jamaica we want to thank Dr. Jonathan Greenland and his staff, especially the head of the research department, David Stimpson. Together these institutions have done a bulwark job of preserving their collections in the face of numerous challenges over the years. We are also grateful to all the other institutions and private collections that have permitted us to reproduce materials in this volume. Thanks also to Donnette Zacca, the photographer for many of the collections in Jamaica. Numerous individuals helped to make this book possible. Thanks to Valery Facey and the late Maurice Facey, and to artists Roberta Stoddart, Omari (African) Ra, and the late David Boxer for allowing us to include their work in this publication. David Boxer, however, did even more. We are grateful to him for kindly allowing us to consult and use his impressive collection of Jamaican photography from the period, lovingly assembled over many years, to illustrate this book. Like the institutions named above, his unyielding interest in the preservation of Jamaican art and photography will be recognized as an essential part of Jamaica’s archival practices for decades to come. This book would not have been possible without the financial support of several funders. The Yale Center for British Art provided funding for the workshop we held in Jamaica in 2011, and the book has been made possible by endowment funds gifted to the History of Art Department at Yale by Paul Mellon. It goes without saying that every book, every piece of academic writing, is built on the works of earlier scholars. We have managed to include in this book some of the most important scholars on this period in British imperial and Jamaican history. As editors, then, our task was made easier. In addition to these scholars, we want also to thank the numerous other scholars who have been interested in this history; while not named here, their works appear in this book’s extensive bibliography. We are grateful to our editors at Duke University Press, Kenneth Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault, who were always supportive and responsive to our numerous questions. Rona Johnston Gordon edited an earlier draft with great alacrity. Emily Sessions, who helped finalize this publication through the arduous task of obtaining high-­quality images and permissions, has been invaluable. As always, Tim Barringer would like to thank Rebecca McGinnis for her unyielding support through yet another long-­term project; Wayne Modest thanks Rivke Jaffe, whose encouragement, unquestioning support, and caring critique have made yet another project not only possible but also enjoyable.

xx

Acknowledgments

Introduction WAY N E M O D E S T A N D T I M B A R R I N G E R

Adolphe Duperly’s lithograph titled Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery on the First of August 1838 (fig. I.1) records the apparent blaze of jubilation with which the city of Kingston inaugurated the period discussed in this book: the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–­1901). The slow and painful process of emancipation had finally brought an end to slavery, the condition of most Jamaicans for the previous two centuries. By historical coincidence, emancipation occurred at the beginning of the reign of a monarch almost five thousand miles away. Victoria, queen of a worldwide empire that had included Jamaica since 1655, had been crowned just a month earlier, on June 28, 1838.1 Victoria’s name would become identified with the dominant ideologies, social codes, and aesthetic tastes of the second half of the nineteenth century, even beyond the wide reach of her titular domain. The long period of her reign has attained the status of a historical unit principally because of the emblematic character of the Queen herself. Victoria was to be remembered by black Jamaicans as the Queen who set them free, despite enslaved Jamaicans’ long history of resistance (most recently the Christmas rebellions of 1831–­1832) that had precipitated the passing of the Emancipation Act and the fact that the legislation predated her reign. Victoria’s special status in the Jamaican imaginary is recalled in a Bruckins song performed in 1887, on the fiftieth anniversary of her accession: Jubalee, jubalee This is the year of jubalee Augus’ mornin’ come again (×2) Augus’ mornin’ come again This is the year of jubalee Queen Victoria give we free.2 Bruckins is a uniquely Jamaican dance form with associated music that began in 1838 as an annual commemoration of emancipation. It is characterized, according to the folklorist Olive Lewin, “by stately dipping and gliding movements” and “exaggerated posturing with swords.” 3 Based on her observations of Bruckins at Manchineal in Portland, Jamaica, from 1967 onward, Lewin crisply

recorded that “in the mind of some of our most senior citizens it is to ‘Missis Queen’ that we owe our freedom, regardless of what history records.” 4 The persistence of this historical memory reflects the success of colonial officials and missionaries more than a century earlier who had been keen to promote the association of Victoria’s name with a new era of freedom. The words illuminated by fireworks in the right middle ground of Duperly’s lithograph do not mention slavery. Rather, we read: “Victoria: God Save the Queen” (fig. I.2). This book explores the complexities of Jamaican culture and history in the six decades following emancipation — ​­a period in which the ambiguities and limits of hard-­won freedom became very clear. The contributors acknowledge the oxymoronic, though creative, tension between the terms “Victorian” and “Jamaica,” between the lifespan of an Englishwoman who never visited the Caribbean, on the one hand, and an island colony whose population of hun-

Fig. I . 1 Adolphe Duperly, Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery on the First of August 1838, 1838. Lithograph with ­watercolor. ­Courtesy of the National ­Library of Jamaica.

2

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

dreds of thousands was made up largely of formerly enslaved people of African descent, on the other. We argue, however, that every aspect of Jamaican culture during the period was in dialogue, and often in conflict, with ideas, attitudes, behaviors, and restrictions generated in the imperial center. More contentiously, we take as axiomatic that a Caribbean perspective is essential to a full understanding of British history of the Victorian age and that discussion of both empire and the Caribbean belongs at the center of discourse about that period. By attempting to address the totality of Jamaican life in the sixty-­four years of Victoria’s reign — ​­including social, economic, cultural, and even spiritual issues — ​­and by examining the material survivals of Jamaican architecture and objects, visual representations as well as textual sources, this book aims to provide a portrait of the Victorian age in a Caribbean colony.5 For Jamaica, the long reign of Queen Victoria was a period of unresolved transition and crisis rather than the golden era envisaged by many on August 1, 1838. Hints of this uncertain future are present in the chiaroscuro of Duperly’s emblematic lithograph. Its dramatic contrasts of light and dark, of peaceful celebration and violent eruption, offer a prescient, indeed prophetic, interpretation of the emancipation celebration and its aftermath. The gathering took place on the racecourse at Kingston the night after emancipation, August 2, 1838, and was attended by many thousands of newly freed men, women, and children, to whom Duperly alludes in the sea of distant faces. This is a well-­ disciplined jubilant crowd, not a mob. However, this mass of people, emerg-

Introduction

F i g s. I .2 a n d I .3  details of fig. I.1

3

Fig. I . 4  detail of fig. I.1

ing suddenly into legal and economic personhood, constituted an unknown, untested force — ​­a new polity. In the foreground, Duperly represents members of the elite of Kingston, Jamaica’s premier port and commercial city (Spanish Town remained the capital and seat of government until 1872), with their carriages and servants (fig. I.3). The print highlights disjunctures within the colony’s demographics. The majority of the population was of African origin, but wealth and political power remained overwhelmingly in the hands of the tiny white minority, and emancipation did nothing to change this imbalance. The Victorian period saw the emergence of a black and brown middle class, whose social, economic, and cultural contributions are discussed extensively in this book and some of whose members played a prominent role in Jamaican public life. The majority, however, despite their new legal status, were excluded both by limitations on the voting franchise and by a wider range of informal cultural exclusion, from the political process and from governance of the island, throughout Victoria’s reign. Because black Jamaicans were denied representation in political institutions and in established media such as newspapers, cultural expression — ​­particularly through music, though performance practices such as masquerade and dance, through clothing and dress, and, perhaps most importantly, through religion and spirituality — ​­offered a crucial means of collective self-­expression. A visual hint of such forms of expression can be seen in Duperly’s crowd, wherein black

4

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

Jamaican women wear elaborate cloth head ties derived from West African forms (see fig. I.4). Despite the attempts of plantation owners, colonial reformers, and churchmen to suppress African traditions, they remained a significant presence in black Jamaican culture. In many cases, practices and forms derived from African sources had been transformed and had reemerged in distinctive creolized forms. After the Emancipation Act on August 1, 1834, the island’s population of enslaved men and women had entered a period of “apprenticeship,” which demanded that they continue to work for the former slaveholders under highly restrictive conditions but that they receive wages for their labor. Apprenticeship was justified on the basis that it would equip formerly enslaved men and women to deal with their newly gained freedom as subjects. In fact, it provided a cushion for the plantation owners, ensuring that they had access to cheap labor in the transitional period. Although, according to the original plan, apprenticeship was to last for six years, it proved unsustainable, as more and more apprentices abandoned plantations. On August 1, 1838, “full freedom” — ​ ­the event celebrated in Duperly’s print — ​­began, and with it Jamaica’s Victorian age. The planters had demonstrated notable intransigence, and in some cases brutality, in enforcing strict labor discipline under apprenticeship. Having bitterly opposed emancipation, many predicted swift economic collapse for the colony. One might imagine the wealthy man seated in a coach high above the fray at the extreme left of Duperly’s plate to be a skeptical old planter predicting ruin and anarchy, as many did in 1838 (see fig. I.3). The artist himself associated emancipation with “ruin and misery.” 6 While emancipation afforded the formerly enslaved formal status as individual subjects of the British crown, rather than as the property of others, questions remained in the minds of colonial social reformers about whether they were sufficiently “civilized” to live up to the responsibilities of their freedom. The term “civilizing mission” has been used to describe the attitudes and actions of missionaries, colonial officials, and proponents of social reform in Jamaica after emancipation, and this phrase has become emblematic of attempts to inscribe upon the people of Jamaica the normative values of Britain’s culturally dominant middle class. According to Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, for missionaries and reformers, “creole culture, particularly the Afro variant, was characterized by gross immorality, debauchery, superstition, fetish and paganism. . . . This culture had, therefore, to be eradicated if Jamaica were to become a modern civilized society, and the standard for that would be the incorporation of middle-­class Victorian, Christian values and morals which would produce the guiding principles of decency and decorum.” 7

Introduction

5

After the imposition of direct rule from London in 1866, Moore and Johnson characterize a “coalition” of the “whole of elite society,” including “the missionaries and the churches with which they were associated, wealthy white planters and merchants, educated middle-­class browns (coloreds) and blacks, the press and the new colonial officialdom,” as engaging in “an open war for civilization.” 8 While many interest groups shared in the project of the imposition of European Protestant bourgeois values, such an account goes too far in implying a homogeneity among the “elite society” of Victorian Jamaica. Just as British culture was divided ideologically between a range of liberal and conservative positions and along fault lines of class, race, and religion, so too the Jamaican elite was characterized by difference, as Moore and Johnson themselves acknowledge. Any model emphasizing a Manichaean binary, an “ideological confrontation between the forces of creolization and Anglicization,” coded respectively as good and bad, does not allow sufficient space for interstitial positions, hybridity, and creative forms of appropriation by Jamaicans of all classes and ethnicities.9 In this volume, we seek to avoid binary models of difference and to offer a pluralistic view of nineteenth-­century Jamaican society, in which the multifarious forms of cultural activity could provide spaces for exchange and interaction between black, brown, and white Jamaicans across lines of class, gender, and religion. As if exploring these possibilities in visual form, Duperly’s lithograph emphasizes the juxtaposition and intermingling of black, brown, and white figures. The artist refuses to bifurcate society simply along an axis of black

Figs. I . 5 a nd I . 6  details of fig. I.1

6

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

and white. In 1838, such a vision could betoken a future utopia in which the divisions present in Jamaican society from its foundations would be erased or renegotiated. Black and white men recline together in harmony on the grass at the Kingston racecourse: an Afro-­Jamaican figure raises his right hand in celebration (see fig. I.5) as if echoing the widely circulated emancipation image by Alexander Rippingille, originally produced in 1834 (see fig. I.7) and reprinted in 1838, with the title Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies.10 Duperly’s allusion to potential racial harmony and even intimacy between black and white people disguises the unequal conditions under which black Jamaicans lived just before, and indeed long after, emancipation. Even those churchmen who believed black people were capable of being the equals of their former masters considered that a homogeneous culture of equality could be achieved only at a later stage, after the process of “civilization” had been completed. And Duperly’s own characterization of black figures skirts close to caricature: the two men at the extreme right of the composition, for example, are portrayed in a hostile fashion, depicted with what ethnologists of the period described as a “prognathous jaw,” which was understood as a sign of inferiority. James Cowles Prichard, the leading ethnologist of the period, thought this protruding jaw to be typical of “the rudest tribes of men.” 11 A chalice from Golden Grove, a plantation in the parish of St. Thomas, gives material form to this inequality, but also reifies an attempt on the part of the enslaved to correct it (see fig. I.8 and fig. I.9). Inscribed with the words Purchased by the slaves of the Golden Grove and created in 1830, before emancipation and eight years before full freedom, the chalice was commissioned by the enslaved to make it possible for them to receive communion when they were prohibited from drinking communion wine from the same receptacle as the white members of the congregation. Such incidents demonstrating the unequal status of blacks continued to occur frequently, even generations after emancipation. A similar incident is recorded at Kingston Parish Church in 1902, just after the end of Victoria’s reign and as slavery was passing out of living memory: it was alleged that “would be whites and the money-­made whites, sit in the front pew of the Church, so that their lips may touch the wine cup . . . before it becomes blackened by Ethiopian lips.” 12 The chalice attests to more than the enforced racial inequality for blacks under slavery. Numerous scholars, including several represented in this book, have explored the importance of religion to black agency during slavery, noting the emergence of creolized religious forms and the role religion played in the emancipation process: Dianne M. Stewart offers a sophisticated development of this argument in this collection. The chalice, by contrast, suggests a different

Introduction

7

F ig . I . 7   David Lucas, after Alexander Villiers Rippingille, The First of August, 1834 (reprinted in 1838 as Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies), mezzotint with watercolor. Courtesy of the Christopher Issa Collection, Jamaica.

proposition. With the accompanying paten, the chalice would have been used during the Eucharist or Holy Communion, which is one of the central practices within the Christian liturgy. The ceremony recalls the Last Supper, where Christ shared wine and bread with his disciples, representing his blood and his body, respectively. While the Eucharist has come to mean different things for different Christian denominations, in all cases it is considered to be a redemptive act for the soul. To deny communion to the enslaved, then, was to exclude them from the redemptive promise that Christianity through the Holy Communion offered. By commissioning their chalice and paten, and thus ensuring their participation in communion, the enslaved members of the Golden Grove congregation reclaimed the humanity denied them by slavery. Emancipation seemed to offer a guarantee that the humanity of black Jamaicans would be universally acknowledged, but it certainly did not guarantee equality in Victorian Jamaica. Duperly’s lithograph is replete with reminders of the incendiary, radical possibilities raised by emancipation. Most potently, the celebratory pyre — ​ ­echoing the bonfires traditionally lit on coronation night in England — ​­may portend here a social and political inferno following from the end of slavery. Many voices among the planters prophesied catastrophe, and the dark, swirling clouds of smoke emitting from the bonfire to the left of the composition (a fire appropriately made from old sugar barrels or hogsheads, symbolic of the hard labor of enslaved Jamaicans on sugar plantations) seem to signify impending disaster (see fig. I.6). Such a disaster occurred in 1865. While the lives of some black people improved after emancipation, freedom did not result in the transformation that had been expected. The gross inequity between the lives of the poor and the elite barely changed; unemployment was rife, and basic facilities such as medical care, which had sometimes been available on the plantations, were virtually nonexistent. The Jamaica Assembly, still dominated by planters, enacted harsh legislation that curtailed many aspects of life for the poor. In 1865, black agitation for better conditions reached its tipping point when, in response to what was believed to be the unfair charging and imprisonment of one of their fellow peasants, a group of blacks stormed the jail at Morant Bay, in the parish of St. Thomas, to free him. Several days later Paul Bogle, a respected black preacher from the town of Stony Gut, also in St. Thomas, marched with a group of protesters to air their concerns. They were met by militiamen who opened fire on them, killing seven of Bogle’s associates. In the days that followed, sympathetic working-­class Jamaicans staged a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of two white planters and forced others to leave their plantations.13 The colonial army, following the commands of the governor, Edward John Eyre, responded

Introduction

9

Figs. I . 8 a nd I . 9  Chalice inscribed with the words “Purchased . . . by the slaves of the Golden Grove,” 1830. Collection of Golden Grove Church, permission granted by the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

brutally. Hundreds of black Jamaicans were killed in the suppression of the rebellion and, after court martial, in the public hangings that followed.14 The uprising of 1865 was followed by a crisis in governance of Jamaica that led to the imposition of direct rule from London: Jamaica became a Crown Colony, and the influence of local representative politics, which had been conducted by the House of Assembly, was curtailed. Meanwhile, in Britain, Jamaica became the focus of intense debate for the first time since emancipation as a group of leading political and intellectual figures including John Stuart Mill pressed for the impeachment of Eyre. Many of the chapters in this collection allude to the events of 1865 as a watershed in Jamaican history, and in the history, too, of the British Empire. A public and irrefutable registration of the incompleteness of the project of emancipation and of the deep frustration of black Jamaicans at the remaining inequalities and impediments to their progress, the Morant Bay rebellion also provides a startling example of the incompetence and vengefulness of colonial administration. The slow process of economic and political reconstruction in the following decades saw slightly greater investment from the coffers of the British government, which supported projects such as the takeover of the Jamaican railways in 1879 and subsequent expansion of the system and the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891. The economy of Jamaica underwent a significant transition toward the end of the nineteenth century, too, as bananas emerged as a major export crop, challenging sugar as the island’s economic mainstay. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was emerging as Jamaica’s most significant trading partner.

Visual and Material Histories This book offers a portrait of Victorian Jamaica that moves beyond established political, social, and economic approaches by examining Jamaican culture and society based on material, as well as documentary, sources. We are as interested in what Victorian Jamaicans wore, where they lived, and how they fashioned their identities through processes of representation such as photography as we are in their struggles for political representation and economic stability. While Victorian Jamaica aims to provide a broad historical account, it attends particularly to questions of visual and material culture, to literary and pictorial representations, and to the material survival of objects, buildings, and infrastructure from the Victorian period. These are some of the most vivid and immediate of all primary sources, yet until recently their consideration by both art historians and historians has been very limited. Research in the history of Jamaican art

Introduction

11

and visual culture has largely focused on the period of slavery and, in a separate set of writings and exhibitions, on the twentieth century, though the collections of the National Gallery of Jamaica include rich holdings from the Victorian period as well as the years before and after it. As we indicate by opening with Duperly’s lithograph, a lively print culture thrived in Jamaica from the late eighteenth century until the 1830s. In addition to images produced in Jamaica, a significant number of engravings and works in other print media representing Jamaican scenery and social life were made in Britain. The artistic production of the period before 1838 was the subject of a substantial publication, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, which accompanied an exhibition held at the Yale Center for British Art in 2007. It is an interdisciplinary study whose authors include historians of art and music, ethnographers, and cultural and religious historians. Its primary subject is a series of twelve hand-­colored lithographs, Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, published by the Jamaican-­born, British-­trained artist Belisario in 1837–­1838 — ​­placing them right at the beginning of the Victorian era and at the end of apprenticeship. Conceiving his lithographs as a retrospective view of an Afro-­Jamaican culture that was fast disappearing, Belisario confessed to “a desire to hand down faithful delineations of a people, whose habits, manners, and costume, bear the stamp of originality, and in which changes are being daily effected by the rapid strides of civilization.” 15 In the present volume, Nadia Ellis, writing on Jamaican performance culture, and Daniel Neely, discussing Afro-­Jamaican music in the Victorian era, take Belisario’s sketches as a starting point, noting that despite his astute visual observation, Belisario’s understanding of Afro-­Jamaican performance traditions was strictly circumscribed by his positionality as a colonial observer. A plate such as the vibrantly hand-­colored lithograph Koo-­Koo, or Actor Boy (fig. I.10) is valuable not only in recording the spectacular costume of one of the performers but also in suggesting the dynamic culture of the streets of Kingston, alive with music and with commerce, at the moment of Victoria’s accession in 1837. A white female shopper makes her way through the throng to the Henriques emporium, while a group of black and brown Jamaicans enjoy the Actor Boy’s recitation from behind his white mask.16 The present volume acts, in part, as a sequel to Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, acknowledging that elite forms of artistic production such as painted portraiture, represented in the late eighteenth century by Philip Wickstead (active 1736–­86), and picturesque landscape painting, a tradition carried into the nineteenth century by James Hakewill and Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, declined precipitously after 1838 with the collapse of the plantocracy as a cultural and

12

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

F ig . I . 10   Isaac Mendes Belisario, Koo-­Koo, or Actor-­Boy, lithograph with watercolor, from Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (1837). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Folio A 2011 24.

F ig . I .1 1   Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Mountain Cottage Scene, Cocoa Nut Trees in the Fore Ground, hand-­colored lithograph, from Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns Harbours and Scenery (1840). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, T 686 Folio C.

economic unit. Kidd, who had two extended periods working in Jamaica between 1835 and April 1838 (leaving before “full free”), produced a lavish series of prints eventually published in London between 1837 and 1840 as West Indian Scenery: Illustrations of Jamaica.17 The last of the great Caribbean picturesque print series, Kidd’s works suggest a nostalgia for the most opulent days of the sugar industry under slavery, but, conversely, they also seem to map out the potentialities of Jamaica after emancipation. Several of the plates, such as Mountain Cottage Scene, Cocoa Nut Trees in the Fore Ground, offer hints of a self-­determined future for freed Afro-­Jamaican men and women in profitable small-­scale agriculture, in contrast to the harsh work discipline and minimal rewards of the plantation (see fig. I.11). Mountain Cottage Scene represents the provision grounds formerly allotted to enslaved Jamaicans, often far from the plantation, where food could be grown for subsistence and sale. Kidd’s vision of an orderly and productive Afro-­Jamaican culture, beyond the reach of the disciplinary machinery of the plantation, provided an optimistic fantasy of a harmonious future in the years after 1838. Kidd’s prints soon proved to be outmoded in technical as well as iconographical and ideological terms. Photography was announced almost simultaneously in Paris and London in 1839, only six months after the final enactment of emancipation. A significant shift in visual culture, immediately understood as such, coincided both with the reformulation of Jamaican society and with the beginning of the Victorian era. These dates ensure that there could be no photographs under the condition of slavery in the British Empire, though many people who lived through slavery later sat before the photographer’s lens.18 One example is a faded photographic print perhaps taken as late as circa 1900 that is captioned “Susannah (Old Slave) and Blagrove” (fig. I.12). The elderly woman, her eyes rheumy, stares to the photographer’s left, supporting herself on a long staff: she is statuesque. The middle-­aged man in immaculate white colonial attire, apparently captured in motion and while speaking in what one imagines to be clipped tones, seems to be Henry John

Introduction

F i g . I .1 2  Photographer unknown, Susannah (Old Slave) and Blagrove, circa 1900. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

15

Blagrove of Cardiff Hall, born in 1855, grandson of John Blagrove, slaveholder and owner of the Cardiff Hall plantation in its most profitable years, around 1800. The photograph provides an enigmatic trace of the relationship between two Victorian Jamaicans whose lives were spent in proximity. Born before 1834, Susannah could have been Blagrove’s nursemaid, yet the dramatic contrasts of dress and comportment captured by the photographer indicate the deep legacies of inequality, present alongside paradoxical intimacies, found in Jamaican culture even many decades after the end of slavery.19 Even the contrast of headgear speaks to generations of difference: the woman’s hand-­woven head wrap with a battered straw hat, its brim detached, is a specifically Afro-­Jamaican cultural manifestation, while the plantation owner’s pristine white pith helmet was probably made in London for use in the British colonies and could be worn by men of the same class in India, South Africa, or the Malay States. While earlier forms of visual representation had embedded such cross-­racial encounters in the archive, none did so with the indexical exactitude of photography. Fixed in the photosensitive chemicals on paper is a poignant, enigmatic moment in which two historical subjects encounter each other, their physical proximity defying the nineteenth century’s elaborate edifice of difference. Photographers were active in Kingston from the early 1840s: Adolphe Duperly, the lithographer with whose image we opened, acquired a daguerreotype camera and had made an extensive series of landscape photographs by about 1846. These images formed the basis for an elaborate publication of lithographs, Daguerian Excursions. A product of the combined effort of Duperly in Jamaica and a group of expert French printmakers to whom he delegated the lithographic work, Daguerian Excursions is rooted in the traditions of the picturesque. Together, the plates provide a vivid image of a new and vibrant Jamaica (fig. I.13). A View of the Court House (Taken on the Day of an Election) provides a photographic image of a new polity — ​­the public body of Jamaicans, most of them formerly enslaved and now unable to meet the conditions of the franchise and thus not entitled to vote. The camera, ultimately a democratic technology, here captures the paradox of postemancipation Jamaica where, as in Victorian Britain, most men and all women were denied a direct say in their political representation. At the level of the image, the process of visual enfranchisement quickly expanded to included middle-­class white and brown men and women, since by the mid-­1850s Jamaicans with a disposable income could acquire portraits of themselves in daguerreotype or carte-­de-­visite form. This, of course, excluded most blacks. This book includes two chapters dedicated specifically to photography in Jamaica in the Victorian period. David Boxer lays out the history of Jamaica’s

16

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

F ig . I . 13   Louis Julian Jacottet, after Adolphe Duperly, A View of the Court-­House (Taken on the Day of an Election), lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (ca. 1846–­1847). Courtesy of the Christopher Issa Collection, Jamaica.

photographic studios, with the Duperly family as the prime movers, and Gillian Forrester examines the compilation of a photographic album as an act of social formation among Kingston’s largely white middle class. Many other authors think through the importance of the medium in shaping subjectivities within the Caribbean: Anna Arabindan-­Kesson examines the photographic image in relation to the dress, labor, and religious practices of immigrants from South Asia; Steeve O. Buckridge finds in the photographic collections of the National Library of Jamaica documentation of the complexities of men’s and women’s dress in Victorian Jamaica. Photographs made using the wet-­collodion process became a significant means for documenting the Jamaican landscape and processes of labor (discussed in Tim Barringer’s essay) and the built environment (discussed by James Robertson and Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis). As Krista Thompson has demonstrated in her groundbreaking study An Eye for

Introduction

17

F ig . I . 14   The Dalziel Brothers, after unknown artist, The Black Question, wood engraving, from Fun (London, November 25, 1865). Courtesy of Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Fi g . I .1 5   John Tenniel, The Jamaica Question, wood engraving, Punch (London, December 23, 1865). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

the Tropics, photography was not so much a passive mirror of Jamaican society as a powerful force in shaping change, a transformative element not only in visuality but also in society as a whole.20 Thompson’s work reveals that late nineteenth-­century photographs, picture postcards, and photolithographic prints reshaped Jamaica, presenting the colony as a space of fecundity for agriculture, especially for the cultivation of bananas, and as a picturesque location for tourism. In rare moments Jamaica captured the imagination of the Victorian metropole. The convulsions following the 1865 rebellion produced some vitriolic press representations of the rebels. In the satirical magazine Fun, a full-­page wood engraving questioned the basis of emancipation under the heading “The Black Question” and with the subsidiary caption “Am I a man and a brother?” (fig. I.14). The engraving recalls hostile images of the rebel sepoys, Indian soldiers in the pay of the British who were the key figures in the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857, a very recent and massive crisis of governance in the British Empire. In the engraving from Fun, a wildly leaping black man holds a cutlass and a flaming torch, while the dead bodies of white women and children lie beneath his feet. In the background can be seen the burning remnants of the Morant Bay courthouse, but the draughtsman and engraver pay closest attention to the wild, simian leer of the figure, notable for exaggerated white teeth. Unlike the caricature of the “effeminate Bengali,” this figure — ​­perhaps intended to represent Paul Bogle — ​­is one of hypermasculinity, a dangerously effective, rather than a laughably inept, miscreant, as seen from London.21 The statelier satirical journal Punch, critical of the support of the rebels by leading churchmen, weighed in the next month with a full-­page “great cut” by the eminent artist John Tenniel. Mr. Stiggins, the fictional, hypocritical Anglican minister in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, takes the arm of a sullen Jamaican rebel, and together they walk away from a field of uncut sugarcane. A “White Planter,” represented as being conciliatory and beneficent, is neglected by his own kind (or so Punch would have us believe), and himself, grotesquely, adapts the antislavery slogan: “Am I not a man and a brother too, Mr Stiggins?” This iconography of martyrdom and ill-­treatment relating to the colonial elite reached

Introduction

F i g . I .1 6   Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward John Eyre, 1867. Albumen print. © National Portrait Gallery, London, npg P985.

19

Fig. I . 17   Adolphe Duperly and Co., George W. Gordon, date unknown. Carte de visite. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

a high point in one of the great photographs of the nineteenth century: Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Governor Eyre (fig. I.16). Publicly reviled as a murderer and stripped of his office by an embarrassed British government, Eyre was considered a man of principle and a martyr by a large section of the British public. Cameron, fascinated by the concept of the Great Man, believed Eyre to have been wronged, and she chronicles in a brilliantly lit photograph the deeply etched contours that made Eyre’s ageing face appeared to bear the marks of suffering. By allowing the snowy edges of Eyre’s beard to overexpose, Cameron creates a softness and vulnerability in a figure who two years earlier had ordered the brutal reprisals after the rebellion. While it is relatively simple to produce a gallery of imperial shame, there are no surviving contemporary representations of the leaders of the rebellion; indeed, all visual representations of the rebellion and its aftermath are retrospective except for photographs by Duperly & Co. that reproduce amateurish drawings of the hangings made by an eyewitness, T. J. Mills, quartermaster of

20

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

the hms Aboukir (see fig.  10.18 in chapter 10).22 The Duperly firm did make a carte de visite of George William Gordon, a brown Jamaican businessman and highly articulate advocate for the rights of black Jamaicans (see fig. I.17). A remarkable character, Gordon was the son of a wealthy planter, Joseph Gordon, and an enslaved woman. He was manumitted by his father and eventually became a merchant in Kingston and the owner of extensive landholdings. He married a white woman and his businesses prospered. In 1861 the missionary James Phillippo baptized Gordon, who became associated with the Native Baptists, leading his own congregation in Kingston. The Duperly photograph is a standard bourgeois self-­image showing a bookish and prosperous figure — ​­a debonair representative of the group of brown Jamaicans who had thrived in the early Victorian years. Gordon was hanged for his alleged involvement in the rebellion, although he was many miles away. The true leader of the rebellion, Paul Bogle, was a more modest figure of whom no photograph was known at the time: he did not appear in the Duperlys’ advertisement for the sale of photographic “Portraits of the late victims who fell at the Rebellion in St. Thomas ye East. Also portraits of the Baron, Price, Walton, Hire, Hitchens, and other victims of the Rebellion in St. Thomas ye East — ​­also the Arch-­traitor G. W. Gordon.” 23 Since Jamaican independence in 1962, Bogle has been recognized as one of the greatest of Jamaican heroes and extensively commemorated, and is an emblematic figure of the Victorian period. Bogle’s name has become associated with a powerful image of a thoughtful, well-­dressed, and handsome young black man (fig. I.18) whose face once adorned the Jamaican two-­dollar bill and who, at some remove, formed the basis for Edna Manley’s striking memorial sculpture at Morant Bay, erected to commemorate the centenary of the rebellion, in 1965 (fig. I.19). Although it most likely does not represent the historical Paul Bogle who was about forty-three years old in 1865, the photograph (the original of which is now lost) has become Bogle: the image has filled a significant need of an independent Jamaica to visualize heroic figures in the struggle against empire. Our task in this book is not only to understand the events in Morant Bay in 1865 but also to track later representations of, and responses to, those events and to evaluate the power of images in shaping national history and identity. In addition to its interrogation of the visual record, this book emphasizes the material culture of Jamaica, an area of critical inquiry largely absent from scholarship. Where such inquiry exists, natural history or archaeology, especially of the Amerindian population of the island, has been emphasized. Analyses of Afro-­Jamaican culture, including religion and masquerade traditions, have attempted to address some of the material culture associated with these practices. Still, these studies are few. Discussions of the Caribbean and of the Black

Introduction

21

F i g . I .1 8   Artist unknown, Portrait of a Man, date unknown. Tintype. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Fig. I . 19  Edna Manley, Paul Bogle, 1965. Bronze. Photograph courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Atlantic more generally have emphasized performative cultural traditions and their connections to a presumed ontological home, Africa. Such an approach often relegates material objects to secondary status. An often u­ nspoken, but widely held, assumption is that black cultures of the New World are performance cultures rather than material cultures.24 More recently this assumption has begun to change, with the appearance of pioneering scholarly works on Jamaican furniture and dress.25 It could be argued that Jamaica, and the Caribbean region as a whole, missed the material turn in the humanities.26 Few studies of the region’s history have taken as their starting point material objects or the importance of things in structuring social relations. We address this lack by opening the book with short studies of twenty-­two culturally resonant objects. These “Vignettes,” written by leading scholars in the appropriate fields, highlight the importance of material evidence in understanding the cultural, economic, and political fields and in conceptualizing class, gender, and race in Victorian Jamaica. A significant issue here is the status of Jamaican objects in the imperial collections of art and cultural artifacts in London. Jamaica, like other places within the colonial Caribbean, held little interest for nineteenth-­century collecting except in the fields of archeology and natural history. Although his remarks were not addressed specifically to museums, David Scott’s call for a rethinking of modernity in the Caribbean described the region in a way that is germane here: “Neither properly ‘primitive’ nor ‘civilized,’ neither ‘non-­Western’ on the conventional criteria nor unambiguously ‘Western’ (in short, neither fish nor fowl), the Caribbean has never quite fit securely within any anthropological agenda.” 27 And Scott goes further, quoting the words of Sidney Mintz: “Whereas New Guinea, Africa, Amazonia offered kinship systems, costumes, coiffures, cuisines, languages, beliefs, and customs of dizzying variety and allure, to almost all anthropologists the Caribbean islands and their surrounding shores looked rather too much like a culturally burned-­ over, second hand, unpristine world. Whether it was kinship or religion or language or anything else, Caribbean people all seemed culturally midway between there and here — ​­everything was alloyed, mixed, ground down, pasted on, the least common denominator.” 28 Accordingly, the great colonial collections such as the British Museum and the South Kensington, later Victoria and Albert, Museum, which amassed vast bodies of material from South Asia and other colonial spaces, largely neglected the Caribbean. It is in the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, rather than in the great art collections, that one can find a modest collection of “ethnographic” objects from the region. These items include basketry and articles of dress made from lace bark. Such materials were collected for the purposes of “economic botany” rather than ethnography,

Introduction

23

and their presence is the result of an extensive campaign of collecting the natural history of the region that lasted for the entire colonial period. If the imperial archives in the metropole provide only fragmentary glimpses of Jamaican cultural history, the Institute of Jamaica, by contrast, houses the most significant collection of the island’s material culture. The institute is itself essentially a Victorian phenomenon, founded in 1879 “for the encouragement of literature, science and art” in the colony. Under the leadership of Frank Cundall, secretary and librarian of the institute from 1891 to 1937, it acquired a range of documentary materials and publications that eventually became the National Library of Jamaica; Cundall was also active in the collection of portraits and other works of art reflective of the history of Jamaica, most notably the history of the colony’s white elite. Cundall’s collecting activities provided the core of the archives that have made this book possible. The contributors to this publication, then, insist that the study of the material and visual cultures of Jamaica during the Victorian period is key to understanding the complex entanglements of colonial society, especially in the aftermath of emancipation. And if the study of material and visual culture aids us in understanding Jamaica, so, too, does a Caribbean focus assist in our rethinking the history of art and material objects. Furniture, in John Cross’s chapter, becomes a site around which to ask questions about stylistic and material flows between metropole and colony and about the emergence of new motifs out of creolized forms. Similarly, by studying exhibitionary institutions in Jamaica in the nineteenth century, as in Wayne Modest’s engagement with the 1891 Jamaica Exhibition, we can better understand the emergence of modern cultures of collecting and display and the birth of the modern museum. Architecture, too, presents important survivals, despite the destruction wrought by both natural and man-­made disasters, from earthquakes and fires to neglect of historical structures and redevelopment schemes that have swept them away. Jamaican architecture of the Victorian period raises questions about the relationship between metropolitan styles and colonial functionality. Vernacular architectural traditions, discussed here by Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, embody practical responses to the climate and the materials at hand as well as transformations of building types inherited both from Europe and from Africa. Together, the chapters of this book provide a first history of the material and visual culture of Jamaica, located within the larger discursive and ideological matrix of the colonial world. While the nature of archives and historical survival makes the recovery of nonwhite histories a significant challenge, the authors of this book have placed the lives and concerns of nonwhite Jamaicans at the core of the volume, focusing on objects and structures, from a lace-­bark bonnet to

24

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

small cottages made from timber and plaster, and on literary traces and notations of performance to provide a fragmentary but nonetheless vivid portrait of Afro-­ Jamaican life in the Victorian period. The chapters respond to Richard Price’s challenge to seek the traces of Caribbean histories outside traditional sources, beyond the so-­called absence of those “ruins” that result from “great” histories.29 While we agree with Price (as with Wilson Harris, who makes similar claims), we propose a rereading of these extant ruins against the grain to uncover the complex entanglements of raced, classed, and gendered subjectivities that were created and brought into relationships — ​­some contested — ​­around these material remains.30 David Scott, in a critique of Price’s work, has cautioned against the search for a single authoritative historical consciousness — ​­a singular shared memory or retention of either “Africa” or “slavery” — ​­among New World people of African descent, preferring the more capacious concept of “tradition,” which he understands as “a differentiated field of discourse whose unity, such as it is, resides not in anthropologically authenticated traces, but in its being constructed around a distinctive group of tropes or figures, which together perform quite specific kinds of rhetorical labor.” 31 Scott’s evidence remains firmly in the linguistic sphere, but we would go further and include, even prioritize, the material remains of Victorian Jamaica. Furthermore, rather than deny the evidential power of the Caribbean’s “ruins” — ​­Victorian architecture or colonial furniture — ​­we want to use these material traces as ways better to comprehend both the structures of colonial rule and, perhaps most importantly, the agencies of the different subjects under this rule.

Race, Class, and Colonial Governance Questions of racial subjectivities are addressed throughout, by all the authors: race is, inevitably, a presence in every chapter, even as we challenge the reification of racial categories and resist the imposition of artificial taxonomies of racial type. The growing importance of ideas about race in Britain during the Victorian era, and the key role that Jamaica played in these discussions, make this topic central to any exploration of the period in British imperial history. Indeed, though concepts of racial difference have their own long histories within Western thought, the idea of race reached what one recent publication describes as its moment of ontological realism in the mid-­to late nineteenth century, during Victoria’s reign.32 As Clarke and Thomas have argued: The initial European voyages of exploration and discovery, and the development of mercantile capitalism generated a novel situation whereby, for the first time, racialised labor became central to the new Introduction

25

plantation-­based system of economic production. At the same time, within European religious, philosophical, scientific, and political dis­ courses, hierarchies of human value were increasingly mapped onto gendered, racial, and civilizational differences.33 Numerous other scholars have identified the mid-­to late nineteenth century as the moment when scientific racism reached its highest articulation, buttressed by emergent academic disciplines such as ethnology and anthropology.34 Publications such as James Cowles Prichard’s Natural History of Man and Robert Knox’s Races of Men: A Fragment, published in 1843 and in 1850, respectively, represented contending ideas at the time about evolutionary bases of humankind.35 Believers in polygenesis, such as Knox, who was a comparative anatomist by training, argued that the races had emerged separately and were distinct species. Monogenesis, by contrast, a stance taken by earlier abolitionists, presumes the common origins of all races, which coincided with biblical ideas about mankind. Gentlemen of science including Knox, Prichard, and James Hunt, cofounder of the Anthropological Society of London in 1863, participated in fervent debates about issues of race. Similarly, many attempts were made to identify a scientific basis for an alleged hierarchy within mankind, placing whites at the top and the “negro” at the bottom.36 Yet race was a contested issue, and there was a wide range of opinions within both scientific and popular circles. As Douglas Lorimer has noted, for many Victorians in the metropole, black people under the civilizing force of New World slavery were considered different from black Africans, even if both were believed to be inferior to whites within metropole and colony alike.37 Events in Jamaica played an important role in shaping late nineteenth-­ century ideas about race, despite the island’s peripheral location within the British Empire, whose major investments now lay in India, Africa, and Australasia. The Morant Bay rebellion demonstrated the fault lines in racial thinking in Britain at the time. It is already a well-­rehearsed story that prominent politicians and other men of influence took sides in the controversy over whether Eyre should be tried for murder. Thomas Carlyle, for example, was a strong supporter of Governor Eyre and an unreserved believer in the inferiority of black people, while John Stuart Mill advocated the impeachment of Eyre. Racial thinking in the colony itself had a distinctive color, even while there was traffic in racialized ideas between metropole and colony. That ideas about race had relegated the enslaved in the colony to the status of property, rather than human subject, complicated the legal status they would receive with emancipation. Questions about the ability of black Jamaicans to handle their freedom and their responsibilities as freed subjects to the crown continued beyond the nineteenth century. In the period immediately after the Morant 26

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

Bay rebellion, British domestic politics was preoccupied with debates about an expansion of the franchise to include the working classes, which resulted in the Reform Act of 1867.38 As James Patterson Smith has noted, “Key Liberal leaders thought in racial categories and had done so long before they came to their commitments of extending liberty within Great Britain. With their hands full in working out the implications of democratization at home, the Liberals showed no inclination to take up the torch in the turbulent West Indies.” 39 Rather than a movement toward laissez-­faire and an increased franchise, as in Great Britain at the time, the imposition of Crown Colony rule in Jamaica resulted in decreased self-­determination but increased imperial investment and governmental involvement in daily life.40 For Patterson Smith this development constituted “an opposite and anti-­liberal direction” to policies adopted at home. He concludes that “the Liberals’ decision on the West Indies offers an instructive example of Victorian era racial categorization constricting the application of what were held to be universal principles of human governance.” 41 These ideas about liberal governance and the complexity of racial subjectivities after emancipation are addressed directly in chapters by Diana Paton, Tony Bogues, and Gad Heuman but also inform almost every contribution to this book. If we take the apprenticeship period at face value, it, too, was based in the belief that blacks had to learn how to be subjects, had to be civilized (here a transitive verb) into how to be free. Such ideas about black infrahumanity would reach a climax at the time of the Morant Bay rebellion, which placed the “Negro problem” high on the British political, academic, and popular agendas. Indeed, much government action for the remainder of Victoria’s reign was dedicated toward fashioning a new image of the island, through museums, international exhibitions, and ultimately such modern media as marketing campaigns. The intention was to counter widespread metropolitan skepticism about the possibility of black “improvement” and to suggest that blacks were hardworking, productive, and even picturesque subjects (see chapters by Modest and Barringer). While there is an important body of writing on questions of race and Jamaican history, our cue in developing these debates is taken from recent scholarship on colonial cultures that attempts a more complex inquiry into the historically entangled relationship between ideas about race and embodied human action.42 Our concerns, accordingly, lie at the intersection of racial subjectivities, materiality, and visuality. We ask especially what studies of the material and visual cultures of the Victorian period in Jamaica can tell us about how racialized subjects were produced and how they were governed. What can such materials reveal about the everyday embodied realities of Victorian Jamaicans? This is not simply a story of black versus white, however vivid and dramatic

Introduction

27

such a narrative may appear.43 As Belinda Edmondson notes in chapter 18, a shift in terminology saw Jamaicans of mixed African and European heritage, earlier described by terms such as “coloreds” or “mulattos,” come to be identified by the colloquial term “brown.” A text of 1850 describes the wife of the then-­mayor of Kingston as “brown,” which was “the name given to all the intermediate shades between a decided white and a decided black complexion.” This group grew in numerical terms and in cultural influence during the Victorian period: novels and journalism of the period often associated brown Jamaicans with an urban, middle-­class lifestyle associated with consumerism. Sometimes brown Jamaicans were associated with newly confident social, and even political, ambitions. Edmondson argues that during the Victorian period there occurred “a browning of the European spaces of colonialism,” tempering and transforming European cultural influence in urban spaces. The anxiety about the availability of cheap labor for the plantations after emancipation, and the solution found in employing indentured laborers from India, China, and Africa, and in some cases people from Europe, produced what could be regarded as an early form of a multiracial diversity.44 Shortly after emancipation, in 1845, the first set of Indian laborers arrived on the island on the Blundell Hunter, under an agreement to serve limited five-­year indentureships. Anna Arabindan-­Kesson points out in her chapter that less than 40 percent of those who arrived in Jamaica returned to India; the majority established new communities across the island. The last ship of indentured laborers arrived in 1921, and the laborers were to serve their five-­year term until 1926. The importation of Chinese laborers started almost ten years after the arrival of the first Indians, in 1854, but had a smaller impact on Jamaica’s culture and economy, ending in 1884 (see Patrick Bryan’s vignette in this volume). Beyond the racial hierarchy that placed whites at the top, how did the relationships between different groups play out on the ground? How did Indians and blacks or Chinese and Jews or whites and Indians interrelate in Victorian Jamaica? The American John Bigelow’s account of his visit to Jamaica in 1850 gives us a glimpse of race relations shortly after emancipation, even if his tone is belittling, tinted by an American racial lens. Bigelow’s narrative is infused both with a disdain for Jamaica and with essentializing disparagement of unfamiliar ethnic groups. Describing Indian laborers he saw in the streets of Kingston, he writes: I here beheld, for the first time, a class of beings of whom we have heard much, and for whom I have felt considerable interest. I refer to the Coolies. . . . Those that I saw were wandering the streets, dressed rather tastefully, but always meanly, and usually carrying over their shoulders a 28

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

sort of chiffionier’s sack, in which they threw whatever refuse stuff they found in the streets, or received as charity. Their figures are generally superb, and their eastern costume, to which they adhere as far as their poverty will permit of any clothing, sets off their lithe and graceful forms to great advantage. Their faces are almost uniformly of the finest classic mould, illuminated by pairs of those dark swimming and propitiatory eyes, which exhaust the language of tenderness and passion at a glance.45 After such a glowing description, Bigelow continues, “But they are the most inveterate mendicants on the island.” 46 In this book, Arabindan-­Kesson explores how the image of Indians simultaneously emphasized difference and lauded the economic contribution made by the indentured laborers. Discussing social relations between blacks, whites, and Jews in Jamaica, Bigelow records his astonishment at what he regarded as the “diminished importance attached here to the matter of complexion.” While we find Bigelow’s account somewhat idealized, demonstrating a willful misreading of the situation as it appears in other sources, his text gives an intriguing picture of the intersection between race and class in Jamaica in 1850. Such entanglements between racial categories and everyday embodied human actions form the core of the analyses published in this book. Jaffe, for example, examines the official report on the Kingston cholera epidemic of 1850–­ 1851, revealing how it evidences anxieties about the ability of newly freed blacks to achieve Victorian ideals of civilization, cleanliness, and morality. The resulting actions of the colonial government conformed to a larger aim of liberal administration, to produce economically productive subjects. Heuman and Paton explore governmental practices, especially the forms of political administration that emerged after emancipation to govern nonwhite subjects within the colony. Heuman’s contribution reveals the tensions between metropole and colony, as well as those within the colonial government itself, about how to govern the different subjects. Shani Roper’s discussion of Jamaica’s system of industrial schools and reformatories provides a case study of the broad issues of governance raised in Paton’s chapter. Governmental practices in relation to vagrant children, Roper reveals, were framed around Victorian ideals of social uplift of black children. The idea of social uplift is addressed later in the book by Wayne Modest, in his discussion of the emergence of exhibitionary technologies such as museums in Jamaica in the Victorian period. Such displays aimed to propagate the virtues of productive labor and political quiescence. The Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, inaugurated a series of world’s fairs in which Jamaica, as part of the British Empire, was represented largely by a display of raw mateIntroduction

29

rials and, occasionally, craft products. As Mark Nesbitt notes in his chapter, there was intense interest in Jamaica’s flora by the staff of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London, whose extensive collaboration with the Jamaican government’s Botanical Department (under several names) resulted in the development of seven botanical gardens in Jamaica and several schemes for the cultivation of introduced species such as cinchona from South America (whose bark yielded quinine) and coffee. One of the major botanical sites, Castleton Gardens, placed significant emphasis on making available plants that could be cultivated on smallholdings, which had been reclaimed from the wilderness or parceled out from former plantation land now tended by formerly enslaved Jamaicans and their descendants. Jamaica supplied to Kew an unending series of plants for research purposes — ​­four hundred specimens, for example, were shipped in 1869, living additions to the imperial archive — ​­while Kew also exported species from India and other colonies for propagation in Jamaica. Just as human bodies continued to circulate around imperial networks, so too did plants, Kew personnel, and scientific expertise. On occasion, such expertise was treated with skepticism by residents of Jamaica of all classes. The scientists from Kew were insufficiently respectful of the skills of Afro-­Jamaicans who derived both their livelihoods and many other benefits, especially medicinal ones, from the flora of the island. In the final chapter of this book, Faith Smith provides a gripping reading of a gothic short story, “A Mysterious Murder,” published in the Jamaica Times in 1898. The leading character, Dr. Shalton-­Armont, is a brilliant, highly trained white doctor who, as part of an experiment, murders and removes the heart of his “negro” gardener, James Joson. This is a clear allegory of slavery, but it also reveals a warranted suspicion that Victorian science was not being deployed for the benefit of the whole population. As Smith notes, the crime is solved by the “brown” detective Linxie, who combines an educated approach, which provides forensic and deductive skills, with common sense and humanity. Here is a hero to whom the “middlebrow” audience of the Jamaica Times could relate.47 The short story deftly inverts sensationalized European and American accounts of the allegedly occult practices in Afro-­Caribbean cultures and provides a witty satire of the notion of the benevolent effects of metropolitan science for the colonial subject.

Afro-­Creole Since the late 1980s scholars have drawn a much richer portrait of Afro-­ Jamaican culture in the Victorian period. These scholars have been working within a broader and even earlier tradition that attempted to locate theoretical

30

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

models for thinking about the Caribbean, such as the creole society, proposed by Edward Kamau Brathwaite in 1971, the plural society, advanced by Michael Garfield Smith in 1965, and the plantation society, the core concept of George Beckford’s study of 1972.48 Such examination of Afro-­Caribbean cultures has produced a large body of foundational works, by scholars such as Barry Chevannes, Maureen Warner-­Lewis, Mervyn Alleyne, and Robert Farris Thompson, that have excavated many aspects of African traditions, including language and religion in the New World.49 Their explorations of resistance and accommodation by Africans under enslavement fall into two broad strands of thinking: a cultural retention of Africa, on the one hand, and a new world creation, or a creolization model, on the other. Those who subscribe to the “African retentions” model of Caribbean cultural identities try to excavate the reemergence of African aesthetic and ritual practices that survived the transatlantic slave trade and reawakened in the Caribbean. Creolization model thinkers, conversely, argue for the adaptation and reinvention of African cultural forms in the Americas.50 For Jamaica, Robert Dirks’s The Black Saturnalia (1985) and Richard D. E. Burton’s Afro-­Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (1997) examined the interwoven histories of masquerade, spirituality, and political resistance. 51 In this volume, Nadia Ellis examines performative aspects of Jamaican culture, noting, however, that the behavior of the colonial authorities was also characterized by theatrical gestures, such as the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Cultural forms long established under slavery, like Jonkonnu, continued into the Victorian era and often occurred at moments of social protest.52 As Ellis notes, when the mayor of Kingston banned the Jonkonnu festivities in 1841, revelers continued their masquerade, asserting (in a statement reported to the Colonial Office in London) that “they were free and would not be made slaves of ” by acceding to the mayor’s injunctions.53 Ellis notes that Jonkonnu was closely linked to Myal, a Jamaican spiritual practice with distinctive aesthetics and performance practices. Afro-­Jamaican religion and spirituality have been the subject of pioneering works. Traditions including Revival, Kumina, Obeah, and later Rastafari have also received attention from scholars, even if much work remains to be done. Chevannes, for example, has explored Revival and Rastafari within a broader framework of African Caribbean worldviews, while Warner-Lewis and, more recently, Dianne M. Stewart have carried out extensive work on the Kikongo tradition of Kumina.54 Obeah is the focus of an important essay collection edited by Diana Paton and Maarit Forde. 55 These recent studies have examined Creole religious practices and belief systems to identify their constituent elements, derived both from African traditional beliefs and from Christian-

Introduction

01 Jamaica 4PP_fm-pt1_pi-xx_1-277.indd 31

31

2/27/18 10:09 AM

ity. Revival, for example, is understood to have two main components: Zion Revival and Pocomania. While both traditions emphasize ancestral veneration and spirit possession, Zion Revival, which is said to have emerged in Jamaica in 1860, demonstrates greater affinities with traditional Christian belief systems. Pocomania is believed to have emerged in 1861 and works with different ­spirits — ​­described by one informant as the spirits of the earth — ​­than does Zion Revival. Chevannes has argued that even if these varied belief systems and practices appear distinct, they are connected by an African sensibility.56 The political concerns of Afro-­Jamaicans are explored in a comparative framework by Mimi Sheller in Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica.57 Her notion of a black “counter-­public” has proved useful for many of the contributors to this volume. The cultural life of that counter-­public and the emergence of a modern popular culture in Jamaica have been extensively charted by the distinguished social historians Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson.58 In “They Do As They Please” (2011), Moore and Johnson have assembled a massive compendium of material, mainly concerning Afro-­Jamaican culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, that provides a vivid picture of an emerging modern Jamaica across the full range of cultural activities, from popular entertainments to sport. The focus on oral culture and on the Jamaican Creole language is especially valuable. In this volume, Julian Cresser provides a close analysis of the cultural importance of sport in Victorian Jamaica. He indicates that while some clubs and sporting associations were bastions of exclusivity and the colonial distinction between “gentlemen” and “players” was mapped onto a range of discriminatory practices, sport gradually provided an opportunity for Afro-­Jamaicans and other excluded groups to compete and excel. The movement of cricket from a game of the colonial elite to a national pastime is not the least significant of such developments in Victorian Jamaica.

Between Historical and Contemporary In a chapter based on wide reading of now largely neglected, but once influential, texts, Catherine Hall describes the “selective forgetting” that characterized Victorian accounts of the history of Jamaica. Hall notes that as the sugar industry declined in profitability and the results of emancipation were deemed ambivalent at best, the colony was marginalized from accounts of the history of Britain and its empire. The Victorian period has been relatively neglected by historians of Jamaica ever since. The period of slavery and apprenticeship and the decades leading up to independence in 1962 have been the subject of far greater attention

32

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

than has the period between 1838 and 1901, and less still has been written about the years between Victoria’s death and the First World War. Victorian Jamaica occupies a crucial position: it narrates the transition from slavery to freedom, and it provides the earliest chapters in the history of modern Jamaica, presaging both the struggle for independence and the major economic challenges that would face Jamaica through the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first. Yet there is no single monographic study of Victorian Jamaica. Thomas Holt’s magisterial The Problem of Freedom (1992) extends its coverage into the twentieth century and deals mainly with the social history of black Jamaicans and the formulation of colonial policy in relation to them: particularly notable is Holt’s essay “Liberal Democratic Society in Theory and Practice.” 59 Two decades after its publication, Holt’s rich synthesis offers much to the contemporary reader, as does Patrick Bryan’s distinguished social history of the late ­Victorian period, The Jamaican People 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (1991).60 Bryan reveals the extent to which the colonial authorities, under the influence of contemporary racial theory, circumscribed the opportunities available to black Jamaicans during this period and imposed a framework of severe economic and legal restrictions. Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867, provides a penetrating study of the plurality of British discourse about emancipation and the society that the end of slavery created. Drawing on a rich archive of missionary writings and documents, as well as state papers and numerous published sources, Hall provides a masterly exposition of British ideas about Jamaica while crisply exposing their shortcomings. She examines British and Anglo-­Jamaican religious, economic, and political ideas and arguments about race and representation. An important theme in Hall’s work is the movement of ideas and personnel around the British Empire, a concept addressed by many of the contributors to this book.61 Diana Paton’s exemplary monograph on punishment as a constituent, and paradigmatic, element in state formation in Jamaica, No Bond but the Law, covers the period from slavery to the Morant Bay rebellion, but, like Hall’s Civilising Subjects, it ends at the historical moment when the “great arch” of Jamaican “state formation” was transformed by Crown Colony rule.62 For primary sources, scholars must rely on the copious official documents produced by the British government, even where the ideological preoccupations of their authors led to the suppression or omission of the elements most interesting to today’s reader. An alternative, though equally partial, archive can be found in Jamaica’s lively newspapers of the period, of which the surviving Gleaner, founded in Kingston in 1834, was only one of many. Many of the books and articles published during the period were written for polemical purposes

Introduction

33

or occupy a distinctive and highly partisan political or religious position. Missionaries such as James Mursell Phillippo produced accounts of their lives and works that became substantial accounts of Jamaican society. Phillippo’s Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, published in 1843 (discussed in this volume by Catherine Hall, Tim Barringer, and Elizabeth Pigou-­Dennis), is both apologia for the Baptist missionary’s acts and analysis of developments in Jamaican society after the era of slavery. American antislavery campaigners also published accounts of their visits to the island, reflections that were clearly intended as interventions into debates about the likely effects of emancipation in the United States. John Bigelow’s Jamaica in 1850, quoted above, is one of several examples; his work is replete with details about life in Jamaica carefully selected to support his arguments. 63 Edward Bean Underhill, a Baptist minister, visited Jamaica in 1859–18­60 and engaged in a very public critique of British policy that included a book titled The Tragedy of Morant Bay.64 Historians in the mid-­twentieth century were mainly concerned with questions of slavery and emancipation and with the motivations underlying British legislative action. William Laurence Burn’s Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies 65 remains the most detailed account of the administrative processes of emancipation, while Philip D. Curtin’s Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–­1865 is a pioneering examination of British government policy during the period. Douglas Hall’s Free Jamaica, 1838–­1865: An Economic History provides chapter and verse to confirm the impediments to economic progress facing black Jamaicans after 1838 but also draws attention to the development of a peasant economy.66 Scholars have recognized the crisis of 1865 as a key not only to the history of Victorian Jamaica but also to the history of British colonial policy. Bernard Semmel’s pioneering study of 1962 began the work of reconstructing both events on the ground and the debates they provoked in London and around the world.67 Gad Heuman’s The Killing Time adds a wealth of documentary evidence, transforming our understanding of the events of 1865 and the ensuing years.68 David Scott and other scholars have interpreted the rebellion in the light of postcolonial theory and of the works of theorists of discourse and power, principally Michel Foucault, while Mimi Sheller, in an illuminating recent study, has taken the reemergence of a photographic album (much discussed also in this book) as a basis for reexamining the history of the rebellion.69 The chapters of this book are intended to constitute a comprehensive view of Jamaican culture in the Victorian era. They are organized not chronologically but according to three major themes. The first theme, “Making Victorian Subjects,” embraces colonial governmentality, liberalism, and the limits of freedom

34

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

in postemancipation Jamaica. This section addresses the various ways that strategies of governance are institutionalized and the broader imperial contexts in and through which this institutionalization took place. The chapters examine the machinery of state, local government, and education, as well as informal forms of social interaction such as sport. The second thematic category, “Visual Material Cultures,” invokes photography, painting, sculpture, furniture, museum display, and other collections such as those of natural history provide a rich and hitherto neglected archive. This untapped resource, we argue, can reveal much about both governmental transitions and changes in people’s own practices and assessments of what might be possible for them. The close interrogation of such objects produces readings that throw new light on power structures, constructions of race and gender, and less tangible issues of aesthetics and affect. The chapters in the third thematic category, “Race, Performance, Ritual,” examine the body and its adornments, the world of musical and dramatic performance, and questions of religion and spirituality. The broader issue here is how Jamaicans both accommodated and completely transformed the practices, languages, and conceptual frameworks available to them. Gender, a primary category of analysis throughout the volume, is foregrounded in the final section, which focuses on the encultured body. The reader will note that there are overlapping concerns and points of intersection both within and between these thematic groupings. The result, we hope, is a “thick description” of Jamaican culture and its artifacts that moves beyond what is possible within the framework of narrative history.70

Victorian Hauntings: Archive and Heritage in the Present Vestiges of the Victorian period abound in contemporary Jamaica. As the chapters of this book attest, a substantial and important archive of the Victorian period remains in institutions across Jamaica, even if much of it has yet to be explored fully. Faith Smith argues in her chapter, “A Mysterious Murder,” that echoes of the Victorian era penetrate the culture industry and media representations of Jamaica today, a rich and troubling legacy that amounts to a haunting. “Shame, amnesia, melancholy, respectability,” writes Smith, “all might be said to be constitutive of the Victorianism that has been invoked and critiqued so forcefully in the novels, poetry, memoirs, and film that have been such a key component of nationalist, feminist, and anti-­colonial self-­fashioning across the Caribbean.” 71 Petrina Dacres contributes to this book a new analysis of the origins of, and responses to, statues of Queen Victoria that provided noteworthy landmarks in the symbolic and actual geography of the island. The statues have been removed

Introduction

35

from the positions of prominence they once occupied, but Victorian architecture speckles the island with dilapidated railway stations, refurbished houses, and churches, and Victoria is still remembered in some folk traditions. In the Jamaican context, however, the image of Victoria is by no means the bland icon it has become in Britain. Rather, representations of Victoria have resurfaced as the subject of critical attention from several positions. John Homiak has recounted the incident in 1966, during Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Jamaica, wherein a Rastafari elder damaged the Victoria statue in St. William Grant Park.72 According to Homiak, this violent attack on the statue was intended “to unmask in a powerful and dramatic way the false image of the Queen as a ‘mother’ figure and the Crown as ‘protector.’ ” 73 The attack should not be surprising; as one of the most important anticolonial movements in the twentieth century, Jamaican Rastafari views the British monarchy as a site or structure of oppression, as Babylon. Tying Queen Elizabeth II to Queen Victoria (her great-­great-­grandmother) and to the local political establishment that had for decades taken an anti-­Rastafari stance, the destruction of the statue was a symbolic attack on systems of domination. As important was Rastafari’s denial of the legitimacy of the British monarchy’s sovereignty over Jamaica, and over blacks more generally. Indeed, it was Empress Menem, the wife and consort of Emperor Haile Selassie I, who was Rastafari’s queen. While this incident occurred in the immediate aftermath of Jamaica’s independence from Britain in 1962 and at a moment when the Jamaican state still targeted Rastafari as a threat, the image of Victoria has also been subjected to critical reflection by Jamaican contemporary artists interested in exploring the links between contemporary structures of domination and the colonial past and between the past and contemporary negotiations of identity and belonging in Jamaica. Telling examples of this engagement of the past in the present can be found in the work of artists David Boxer (who contributes to this volume in his capacity as curator and art historian), Omari (Afrikan) Ra, and Roberta Stoddart. Boxer recalls that his interest was piqued by the contradiction he felt when he first heard the refrain of the Bruckins song quoted above: “Augus’ mornin’ come again / This is the year of jubalee / Queen Victoria give we free.” 74 A sense of deep irony underpins several of his works from between the late 1980s and 2007. In 1988 he created an installation, “Queen Victoria Set We Free,” in which he draws a parallel between the Queen and his own family’s genealogy. The work reveals his personal story, mining Jamaica’s colonial history to question his own place in contemporary Jamaica as a white-­identified Jamaican. Boxer recalls an account that Queen Victoria, on reading about the misfortunes of his

36

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

F ig . I . 2 0   David Boxer, Passage: Queen Victoria Set We Free, 1994. Mixed media/​collage, used postage stamps, on card. Triptych with predella. Paint on portion of wall on which predella is hung. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

ancestor Admiral Edward Boxer (1784–­1855), a distinguished naval officer who had died at Balaclava in the Crimean War, gave a grace and favor apartment at Hampton Court to the admiral’s bereaved family.75 In Passage, produced in the early 1990s (fig. I.20), Boxer created a triptych wherein the Brookes slave ship diagram — ​­the most potent emblem of the Middle Passage — ​­is “iconicized,” framed by countless penny stamps bearing the head of Victoria. The triptych format and framing pay homage to the London-­ based twentieth-­century artist Francis Bacon, whose works often explored the extremes of violence, degradation, and human misery. Boxer’s approach also references minimalism: the stamps are arranged in a tight grid, reminiscent of the manner in which the enslaved were represented, jammed into the hold of the ship, in the Brookes diagram. At the base of the middle panel, Boxer appended a small predella. On this lower panel, Jamaican Elizabeth II stamps overlie the layer of Victoria stamps. In one of the showings of this work, Boxer added a representation of blood dripping from the predella. With Passage, the artist revealed the complex relationship between Victoria, associated in Jamaican popular memory with abolition, and the violence of slavery under the authority of an empire whose wealth and privilege she inherited. By bringing Victoria together with Elizabeth in the same image, Boxer forcibly reminds us that the violence of the colonial past resonates vividly in the present. In Queen Victoria Set We Free-Year of Jubilee (after Duperly), 2007 (fig. I.21), Introduction

37

Fig. I . 2 1   David Boxer, Queen Victoria Set We Free/​Year of Jubilee (after Duperly), 2007. Mixed media/​ collage, used postage stamps. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Fig. I . 2 2  A. Duperly and Sons, Christmas Morning, circa 1890. Albumen print mounted on oversize cabinet card. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Boxer creates a collage by superimposing a photograph by Adolphe Duperly, Christmas Morning, that represents a large crowd of black Jamaicans strolling peaceably through a street in Kingston. The Duperly image is spliced into a dramatic perspectival rendering of the interior of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, by Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–­1765), drawing a broad critique of European grandeur of the imperial project.76 Here, fashionably dressed black Jamaicans flood through the edifice, as if to claim it as their own. Boxer moves between navigating a personal history and exploring Jamaica’s history within a larger history of empire: in these histories, Victoria is the nodal point, a figure ultimately of ambiguity, tainted with colonial violence but, despite it all, associated with redemptive acts. Roberta Stoddart proposes a similar excavation of the colonial past in the present, even while she, too, explores her personal history of family, ancestry, sexuality, and country. Her work pushes beyond histories or national narratives that seek to exclude some people based on racial or sexual subjectivities. Much of Stoddart’s work is animated by a recurring concern for questions of mental illness, shame, addiction, and codependency, experiences that, for Stoddart, are “all symptoms and outcomes of patriarchal histories and values.” 77 Personal exploration is abstracted to a more universal story, interrogating our common condition of living with the disturbing past. In this way, Stoddart’s art proffers an urgently political stance for the present. Issues surrounding racial and political subjectivities intertwine as she questions the politics of belonging in contemporary Jamaica. In Privy to the Adventures of Nation Building (fig. I.23), created shortly after Stoddart returned to Jamaica in 1991 after a long period abroad, Queen Victoria

Introduction

F i g . I .2 3   Roberta Stoddart, Privy to the Adventures of Nation Building, 1995. Mixed media. Courtesy of Roberta Stoddart. Photo: Abigail Hadeed.

39

and Jamaica’s then governor-­general, Sir Howard Cooke, the official representative of the Queen (Elizabeth II is Jamaica’s head of state under the Commonwealth system), are seated adjacent to each other within a corked bottle. Both are regally dressed. A ship is also inside the bottle, in the background and seemingly moored on the sand. Stoddart recalls the tradition of sailors placing messages in a bottle, transmitting a communication from the past to the present. The mysterious coral setting perhaps locates the image in the tropics, in Jamaica. The sepia hue gives the figures color; however, this coloring also renders the image eerie, even ghostly. Queen Victoria fixes Cooke with a watchful and serious gaze, while Cooke stares out of the image at the viewers with the authoritative air of someone carrying out his duty. As a black Jamaican dressed in ceremonial regalia associated with the British Empire, Cooke takes on the character of what Homi Bhabha has called a “mimic man.” 78 His left hand holds what seems to be a canoe — ​­a small, powerless boat in comparison to the large ship in the background exemplifying Britain’s naval power — ​­while the length of cord from a noose lying in a bundle on the right passes over his right hand, in which he holds a scrolled piece of paper. He is both authoritative and absurd, a figure of menace and melancholy. A statement about the vestige of colonial rule that retains the British monarch as Jamaica’s head of state, still watching over the Jamaican people, the work also comments on capital punishment and the role of the Privy Council — ​­a group of advisers to the British monarch that dates to Tudor times — ​­as Jamaica’s highest court. Stoddart’s work finds pathos in the condition of a country trapped in a struggle to come to grips with the past in the present. In Queen Victoria’s Veil (1995), Stoddart engages with Victorian values, especially those regarding lesbian identity. A miniature image of Stoddart herself in the crook of Victoria’s elbow, covered only by the Queen’s transparent veil. Both Stoddart and Victoria appear to be under the sea: a stream of bubbles moves upward from Victoria’s mouth and from Stoddart’s hair, which moves freely in water. Shells decorate both women’s hair. With her left hand, Stoddart holds a pendant at Victoria’s neck. Ornamented with what seems to be a vulva, the pendant is again veiled by the translucent fan Victoria holds. Here Stoddart draws attention to the veiled presence of Victorian prudery in contemporary Jamaica that seeks to govern, and even proscribe, lesbian identity, in much the same way that Victorian Britain applied repressive and often hypocritical restrictions on sexuality and sexual behavior.79 Mapping onto a Jamaican present that is rife with intolerance for homosexuality and at the same time tries to define the nation as black to the exclusion of other racial identities, Stoddart again draws attention to how exclusionary politics, whether through Victorian

40

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

F ig . I . 2 4   Roberta Stoddart, Queen Victoria’s Veil, 1995. Mixed media. Courtesy of Roberta Stoddart. Photo: Abigail Hadeed.

Fig. I.2 5   Omari Ra, A Folk Drama: Vicki Hated the Sun but She Loved Playing with Her Necklace and Her Sceptre, 2007. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

42

prudery or contemporary racialization, continue to do violence to some subjects within Jamaican society. Artist Omari Ra, also known as “Afrikan” and a former member of the radical artist initiative Afrikan Vanguards that emerged in the early 2000s,80 also created a series of mixed media works on canvas that utilized Victoria’s image. In his painting A Folk Drama: Vicki Hated the Sun but She Loved Playing with Her Necklace and Her Sceptre, created in 2007 (fig. I.25), Victoria appears three times. The central and most visible image of Victoria is flanked by two other blurred images in which Victoria’s face is painted out. While in the image on the right Victoria is still visible, black paint runs over her face, beginning to obscure her features. On the left her face is indiscernible, totally covered by paint. This painting is complemented by a second, with what appears to be a penis or serpent. These works critique the legacies of empire, or what Ra describes as “empir-

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

ism” in contemporary Jamaica.81 For Ra empirism — ​­an irrational pathology that is the inverse of rational empiricism — ​­is like a hydra that will not be defeated; it will not disappear from contemporary Jamaica but returns in multiple forms, its tentacles finding ways into different aspects of Jamaican society. Victoria becomes a specter of empire haunting the Jamaican present. Ra contends that instead of opposing the legacies of colonialism, Jamaicans are embracing them. These works were created in 2007 and first displayed at the Institute of Jamaica. Coinciding with the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, their production was part of Ra’s ongoing critique of the way history is written in Jamaica — ​­namely, with limited attention to black life and history and with a presumption in favor of all things colonial. This is a challenge we have attempted to meet in this volume on Victorian Jamaica.

Notes 1. Victoria acceded to the throne on June 20, 1837, on the death of her uncle William IV. The coronation took place just over a year later. 2. Olive Lewin, Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 117. Lewin describes Bruckins parties as “a competition of skill and endurance beginning at nightfall on July 31 and continuing until dawn on August 1.” She transcribes several Bruckins songs (115–­16). 3. Lewin, Rock It Come Over, 116. 4. Lewin, Rock It Come Over. 5. The phrase “portrait of an age” was first used in relation to Victorian Britain as the title of an elegant and influential monograph by G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936). This work takes its place in the long list of publications on Victorian England that neglect Jamaica, which does not appear in the text. As if portending the return of the repressed, a chronology at the end of the book includes the unexplained phrase “Prosecution of Eyre”; see G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 236. 6. Jamaica Dispatch and New Courant 711 (October 23, 1834), 2. 7. Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, “They Do As They Please”: The Jamaican Struggle for Cultural Freedom after Morant Bay (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2011), 2. The same authors laid out the “civilizing mission” in an earlier monograph, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). These two substantial volumes make a significant contribution to the social and cultural history of Victorian Jamaica. 8. Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 5. 9. Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please.” 10. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Introduction

43

University Press, 2007), 368–­69. 11. James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man: Comprising Inquiries into the Modifying Influence of Physical and Moral Agencies on the Different Tribes of the Human Family ([1843]; London: H. Ballière, 1848), 107. 12. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902 (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991), 87. The quotation is from Felix Holt (likely a pseudonym derived from the title of George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, the Radical [1866]), “Confessions of a Planter,” Jamaica Advocate, October 4, 1902. Similarly, toward the end of the nineteenth century, at the St. Andrew Parish Church a Rev. Isaacs was referred to as “Sidegate” Isaacs because in greeting his congregation he would direct nonwhites to enter through the side gate, not the main entrance. 13. Mimi Sheller has argued that at its greatest extent, the rebellion included brown and working-­class white Jamaicans as well as black Jamaicans; see Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Caribbean, 2000). 14. For more a detailed exploration of the rebellion, see Gad Heuman, ‘The Killing Time’: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994). 15. Isaac Mendes Belisario, letterpress from Sketches of Character, reproduced in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 196–­259. 16. For a full analysis of this image, see Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 433–­34. 17. See Barringer essay in the present volume. See also Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 524–­29, and Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–­1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 18. Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” Representations (2011): 39–­71. 19. The Blagrove inheritance was the subject of complex litigation in the Victorian period. See the Jurist, n.s., 2, pt. 2 (London: H Sweet, 1857): 1080. 20. Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and the Framing of the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 21. See Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 22. As Gillian Forrester notes in her essay in this volume, the Duplerly firm did advertise photographs of Robert Nicholas and Alexander Taylor “taken at the Jail Yard,” but no prints are known. 23. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, November 18, 1865, n.p. 24. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-­Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 25. See, for example, Steeve Buckridge, Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica 1760–­1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). Also, John M. Cross, “Ralph, Cuthbert and Thomas Turnbull: A Nineteenth-­Century Jamai-

44

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

can Cabinet-­Making Family,” Furniture History (2003): 109–­20. 26. See Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, eds., Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History, and the Material Turn (London: Routledge, 2010). 27. David Scott, “Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean,” History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1 (2004): 191–­210. 28. Sidney Mintz, “Foreword,” in Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-­Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 15, quoted in Scott, “Modernity that Predated the Modern,” 192. 29. Richard Price, “An Absence of Ruins: Seeking Caribbean Historical Consciousness,” Caribbean Review 14, no. 3 (summer 1985): 24–­29, 46. 30. See Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-­Cultural Imagination (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983). 31. David Scott, “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 3 (winter 1991): 261–­84; the quotation appears on 278. 32. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–­1940 (Canberra: anu Press, 2008), 4. 33. Deborah Thomas and Kamari Clarke, “Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 305–­25. 34. See, for example, Douglas Lorimer, “From Natural Science to Social Science: Race and the Language of Race Relations in Late Victorian and Edwardian Discourse,” Proceedings of the British Academy 155 (2009): 181–­212. 35. For a detailed discussion of the complex role played by race within the Victorian empire and by some of the main thinkers such as Prichard, Knox, and Hunt, see Douglas A. Lorimer, “Science and the Secularization of Victorian Images of Race,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 212–­35. See also George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991); Robert Knox, Races of Men: A Fragment (London: H. Renshaw, 1850); and Prichard, The Natural History of Man. 36. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) was also deployed, both to support and to counter ideas of racial hierarchy. Darwin was a member of the Jamaica committee in support of blacks in response to the Morant Bay rebellion. Moreover, Darwin was in contact with the Jamaica naturalist Richard Hart, who supplied Darwin with details of his research into Jamaican natural history. 37. Lorimer, “Science and the Secularization of Victorian Images of Race”; see also Douglas A. Lorimer, Race, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978). 38. Keith McClelland, “Rational and Respectable Men: Rethinking the 1867 Reform Act,” in Gender and Working-­Class Formation in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonia Rose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 280–­93. 39. James Patterson Smith, “The Liberals, Race, and Political Reform in the British West Indies, 1866–­1874,” Journal of Negro History 79, no. 2 (spring 1994): 131–­46, quotation

Introduction

45

from 131. See also James Patterson Smith, “Retrenchment, Reform, and Empire: Lord Kimberley and the Liberal Imperial Dilemma, 1868–­1874” (Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1984). 40. Smith gives the example of the creation in 1871 of government health services in Jamaica, wherein plantation medical officers were placed on the government payroll. James Patterson Smith, “Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and the ‘Civilizing Mission’ in the Sugar Colonies, 1868–­1874,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 27, no. 2 (summer 1995): 253–­77. 41. Patterson Smith, “The Liberals, Race, and Political Reform,” 131. 42. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–­1940 (Canberra: anu Press, 2008), 4. 43. See, for example, Nettleford’s notion of “battle for space,” in which he suggests that colonial and postcolonial struggles in the island can be seen as a fundamental conflict between black and white, between Europe and Africa; see Rex Nettleford, Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993). 44. See Verene Shepherd, Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845–­1950 (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994); Patrick Bryan, “The Settlement of the Chinese in Jamaica: 1854–­c.1970,” Caribbean Quarterly 50, no. 2 ( June 2004): 15–­25. 45. John Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850; or, The Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom in a Slave Colony (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 17–­18. 46. Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850, 18. 47. Belinda Edmondson, Caribbean Middle Brow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). 48. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–­ 1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Edward Garfield Smith, The Plural Society in the West Indies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in the Plantation Economies of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 49. Barry Chevannes, Betwixt and Between: Explorations in an African and Caribbean Mindscape (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2006); Maureen Warner-­Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2003); Mervyn C. Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1988); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-­American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983). 50. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-­American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective ([1976]; Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). See also Chevannes, Betwixt and Between. 51. Robert B. Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987); Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-­Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 52. On Jonkonnu, see Kenneth Bilby, “More than Met the Eye: African-­Jamaican

46

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

Festivities at the Time of Belisario,” in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 121–­36; see also Judith Bettelheim, “The Jonkonnu Festival in Jamaica,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 3 (1985): 85–­105. 53. Elgin to Stanley, December 16, 1842, quoted in Swithin Wilmot, “The Politics of Protest in Free Jamaica: The Kingston John Canoe Riots, 1840 and 1841” Caribbean Quarterly 36, nos. 3/​4, Konnu and Carnival — ​­Caribbean Festival Arts (Dec. 1990): 65–­75, quotation from 73. See also Ellis, “Jamaican Performance in the Age of Emancipation,” in this volume. 54. Maureen Warner-­Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2003); Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Barry Chevannes, ed., Rastafari  and Other African-­Caribbean Worldviews (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).  55. Diana Paton and Maarit Forde, eds., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 56. Chevannes, Betwixt and Between. 57. Sheller, Democracy after Slavery. 58. Brian L. Moore, The Struggle for the Cultural Soul of Jamaica after Morant Bay: The Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture (Mona, Jamaica: Department of History and Archaeology, University of the West Indies, 2009); Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven; Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please.” 59. Holt, Problem of Freedom, 179–­213. 60. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991). 61. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 62. Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–­1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). See also Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 63. Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850. A new edition of this text, edited by Robert J. Scholnick, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006. See also Annette Palmer, review of Jamaica in 1850, by John Bigelow, Journal of African American History 92, no.  3 (summer 2007): 431–­33; and Gale L. Kenny, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-­Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–­1866 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). 64. Edward Bean Underhill, The Tragedy of Morant Bay (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971). On Underhill, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects, 208–­64. 65. William Laurence Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London: J. Cape, 1937). 66. Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–­1865 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica: An

Introduction

47

Economic History, 1838–­1865 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959). 67. Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: Macgibbon and Key, 1962). 68. Gad Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). 69. For a recent summary, see Sarah Winter, “On the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre-­George William Gordon Controversy, 1865–­70,” branch: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-­Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web, accessed April 10, 2014; Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 70. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 13. 71. See Faith Smith, in the present volume, chapter 23. 72. John Homiak, “The Mystic Revelation of Rasta Far-­Eye: Visionary Communication in a Prophetic Movement,” in Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 236–­42. 73. Homiak, “The Mystic Revelation of Rasta Far-­Eye,” 239. 74. David Boxer, interview with Wayne Modest, February 5, 2014. 75. J. K. Laughton, “Boxer, Edward (1784–­1855),” Rev. Andrew Lambert, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004–­, accessed April 3, 2014, www.oxforddnb​.com/​view/​article/​3096. 76. In his earlier series Memories of Colonization, 1985, Boxer utilizes British palaces to make a more specific comment on British colonization. 77. Roberta Stoddart, e-­mail to Wayne Modest, March 2014. 78. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (spring 1984): 125–­33. 79. See Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 80. While the term “Afrikan Vanguard” has come to be associated with the group, it is likely that this was not their original name but one acquired after an early exhibition under that name at the Mutual Galleries in Kingston. 81. Omari Ra, e-­mail to Wayne Modest, February 5, 2014.

48

Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer

Introduction to Object Lessons WAY N E M O D E S T A N D T I M B A R R I N G E R

The twenty-­two short essays included in this section, essays that we term “object lessons,” underscore our intention in this publication to foreground the material and visual culture of Jamaica during the Victorian period. The objects are arranged in loosely chronological order, spread across the six decades of Victoria’s reign. Eighteen authors, some of whom also contribute longer essays to this publication, respond to surviving historical objects as a means of exploring both the complex entanglements that characterized colonial relations in Jamaica during the Victorian period and the broader implications of these relations for the history of empire. As we note in the introduction above, there exists a growing and highly sophisticated body of work discussing Jamaica’s history and culture during the colonial period. Yet very few of these studies have dedicated sustained attention to art and material culture produced under empire and to the ways that material objects reflect, and acted to structure, social relations. The absence is even more pronounced if we consider the rapidly growing and theoretically innovative field of material culture studies, arguably one of the livelier areas of thinking across the humanities and social sciences, which has not challenged this relative disregard for questions of materiality in the Caribbean. Indeed, only a few studies engage with the Caribbean and materiality in a theoretically sophisticated way, a possibility exemplified by the work of Daniel Miller and Heather Horst.1 Where such studies do exist for the Caribbean, they have emerged mainly from the disciplines of archaeology or natural history. This has begun to change over the last decade, as scholars in art history and visual culture studies have turned to Jamaican archives. Historians of photography have been in the vanguard. Notably, An Eye for the Tropics, by Krista Thompson, who contributes a new essay to our “Object Lessons,” analyses the work of photography in fashioning ideas about the colony and the role of the colonial government.2 Thompson’s work, alongside the fundamental archival and curatorial research of David Boxer, provides an essential backdrop for the richly contextualized analyses of photographs offered here by Tony Bogues and Patrick Bryan.

Kay Dian Kriz’s Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement and her coedited volume, with Geoff Quilley, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the North Atlantic World, 1660–­1830, have also been important in highlighting the significance of art within the colonial project, during a period earlier than the one we explore in this book.3 The exhibition-­related book Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, discussed in the introduction, with its focus on Jamaica and on the period just before emancipation, insists that art deserves a central place in the history of colonial relations and social life in Jamaica. It provides a first scholarly discussion of a modest group of material objects as well as a large corpus of paintings, prints, and photographs, from ephemeral works to grandiose metropolitan phenomena such as Frederic Church’s spectacular essay in the sublime, Vale of St Thomas, Jamaica, revisited here in a penetrating analysis by Jennifer Raab.4 Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, whose central act is the close study of Sketches of Character by Isaac Mendes Belisario, pays particular attention to the rich print culture of the early nineteenth century, including work produced and consumed in Jamaica itself and a larger corpus of engravings, aquatints, and lithographs generated in Britain. This tradition of reproductive printmaking is represented in “Object Lessons” by Diana Paton, Rivke Jaffe, James Robertson, and Dianne Stewart, all of whom reveal the cultural value and evidential richness of objects often deemed to be of little value. In recent years, pioneering work in the historical study of furniture and fashion has appeared, and research has also been undertaken on other types of object, such as gold and silverware. John Cross examines the organization and output of Jamaican furniture makers in his chapter in this book, while his object lesson focuses on a magnificent table that serves as a demonstration of both the virtuosity of the maker, John Turnbull, and the richness of Jamaican natural resources. Other categories of object, such as Jamaican silverware and metalwork generally, have received less attention. Documentary research such as that of Robert Barker remains difficult to find other than in specialist periodicals.5 Important work on fashion in Jamaica has been undertaken by Steeve O. Buckridge, whose seminal book The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–­1890 remains the only monograph dedicated to fashion and dress during the island’s colonial period. Buckridge’s object lesson discusses a rare surviving example of a child’s cap fashioned from lacebark. As telling as it is fragile, this remarkable object, transported to London as an ethnographic and botanical specimen and preserved at Kew Gardens, constitutes, in Buckridge’s words, “a tantalizing hint of the culture and life of Victorian Jamaica.” These twenty-­two object lessons are therefore intended to serve two purposes within this publication. First, they bolster our point that an emphasis

52

Object Lessons

on a history from things offers a valuable addition to existing studies of Jamaica within a broader history of empire. Here we take objects as evidencing and embodying a set of relations that characterize colonial cultures, and therefore these object lessons introduce many of the main themes of the book. Second, we hope that these short interventions will stimulate further attempts to study the material and documentary archive of empire from the colonial Caribbean perspective. As a result of vicissitudes of climate and disasters such as fires and earthquakes, the survival of objects from Victorian Jamaica is patchy. James Robertson writes about a photograph of the opening of the railway station at Porus in 1885. The photograph, a poignant document of a moment of optimism and expansion, is in ruinous condition, and the railway line has long since been abandoned and overgrown. The Institute of Jamaica, however, holds rich resources, from important works of fine art — ​­such as Count Gleichen’s terracotta bust of Mary Seacole, discussed here by Jan Marsh — ​­to display pieces such as the magnificent “Library of Wood Samples” shown at the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891. The National Library of Jamaica holds the finest collection of maps and photographs relating to Jamaican history, while the formation of the National Gallery in 1974 marked a major commitment to the creation of a canon of Jamaican art. The richness of the collections, and the scholarly work on which they are based, is a tribute to its curators, notably David Boxer, who contributed to this volume, and to Veerle Poupeye, the present executive director, who contributes an object lesson coauthored with two colleagues. The National Gallery holds a fine collection of drawings, such as the panoramic watercolor by the British officer Capt. R. Hay discussed here by Tim Barringer, which reveals much about the ambitions and limits of colonial power. The National Gallery has assembled a fine collection of oil paintings, including the enigmatic Fatima: A Creole, subject of Erica James’s object lesson. This work was painted in oils on canvas in 1891 by the artist known only as Mrs. Lionel Lee, her identity submerged in that of her husband, the collector of taxes for the parish of Clarendon. Petrina Dacres examines another of Mrs. Lee’s works, a loosely executed sketch of the sculpture of Queen Victoria by Edward Geflowski erected in 1897, which can still be seen in St. William Grant Park in downtown Kingston today. Mrs. Lee’s drawing was reproduced photolithographically in Historic Jamaica, by Frank Cundall, a stalwart colonial historian and the curator of the Institute of Jamaica, revealing an intricate network of colonial aesthetics and knowledge production. While much of this unexplored archive is in Jamaica itself, in the imperial repository of natural history at Kew is to be found the wooden door lock dis-

Object Lessons

53

cussed here by Wayne Modest. Made in the 1840s by James Cruickshank of Golden Grove estate, the lock is a rare example of an object fashioned by an Afro-­Jamaican craftsman whose name we know. From this object emerges a group of pressing questions about black craftsmanship, labor, and the circulation of goods, including to museums and exhibitions during the colonial period. Relatively few objects of Afro-­Jamaican craftsmanship with documented provenance survive. In some cases wherein the original object is lost, its trace survives in representation. Diana Paton discusses an “Obeah Doll” exhibited at the 1891 Jamaica Exhibition, illustrated in a wood engraving published in the British journal Folk-­Lore. In another case, a work of art, such as the color print of the mass baptism of Afro-­Jamaican Christian converts by missionaries — ​ ­made in 1843 using George Baxter’s newly patented technique — ​­offers a hint of what Africans brought to the Baptist tradition. Dianne Stewart finds in this image suggestions of “a spiritual orientation rich in its engagement with the natural world and teeming with symbolic vocabularies.” As a visual introduction to the major themes taken up in this volume’s longer essays and as a supplementary archive, these object lessons will suggest, we hope, that histories of the Victorian period, of exhibitionary practices, and of photography and art in relation to empire might be written differently.

54

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSON 1

The Cruickshank Lock, circa 1838 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  |  W A Y N E

MODEST

At first glance it is no more than a wooden lock separated from the door it was to secure. Yet this lock’s significance lies in its rarity, its biography, and the identity of its maker. The label affixed to the lock itself, and the object tag also pictured, identify it as “identical with the wooden locks of the ancient Egyptians.” However, this lock was made on Golden Grove estate in St. Thomas, Jamaica. It entered the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1848, sent by Mark J. McKen, along with several other natural objects, to the director, Sir William Jackson Hooker. McKen identified the lock as having been made by James Cruickshank, “a young man from the estate” who, according to McKen, “has promised some other articles for the museum.” McKen’s letter and the object label identify the lock as having been “made by the negroes of Jamaica.” While this labeling identifies James Cruickshank as black, it is uncertain what exactly is being suggested. Did McKen mean that this elaborate object was representative of the locks typically made by black Jamaicans — ​­an unlikely claim — ​­or simply that “a negro” made this lock? If we take together the information “identical with the wooden locks of the ancient Egyptians” and “made by the negroes of Jamaica,” we come up with yet another interpretation. The lock could stylistically represent a lock from nineteenth-­ century Africa. Similar locks are found in, for example, Mali and Burkina Faso. Moreover, some locks made by the Maroons of Suriname share stylistic similarities.6 This interpretation would suggest that Cruickshank had recalled in wood an African tradition of lock making and not that he had simply learned about this style of lock while working on the plantation. McKen’s letter also identifies the types of woods used: the lock itself is made from neesberry bullet wood, the bolts from olive, zenra, and Spanish elm, and the door plate from mahoe, which, according to McKen, would “look better.” But who was James Cruickshank? Was he a cabinetmaker? Was he enslaved before emancipation? Answers to these questions are difficult to find. Yet the fact that Cruickshank, a black craftsman, was named is significant: even after the end of slavery it was very uncommon to put a name to black craftsmanship. We know the names of white furniture makers like Turnbull or Pitkin, who are

The Cruickshank lock, circa 1838. Wood. Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Photo: Andrew McRobb.

also identified by the labels they affixed to their furniture. These renowned furniture makers engaged black craftsmen. Turnbull is known to have employed up to sixty craftsmen in his Kingston shop at one time, many of whom were black, but they usually remained unnamed in the records. From Golden Grove estate in Jamaica, Cruickshank’s lock traveled in 1848 to Kew Gardens and was later exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. This lock shares a similar genealogy with a group of locks that are currently unlocated: the Descriptive Catalogue of Articles Exhibited by the Royal Society of Arts, Jamaica at the International Exhibition 1862 includes “Eboe or African Wooden Locks, used by the Negroes to fasten their doors in days of slavery.” In their absence, Cruikshank’s lock is one of the few remaining examples of black Jamaican craftsmanship from the Victorian period.7

Object Lessons

57

Ralph Turnbull, table, circa 1830–­1840. Courtesy of the National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica.

OBJECT LESSON 2

Table, circa 1830–­1840 Ralph Turnbull. Institute of Jamaica.  |  J O H N

M. CROSS

The Ralph Turnbull table in the Institute of Jamaica’s collection typifies Jamaican furniture at its finest. Turnbull’s workshop produced other items of furniture as well as sewing and writing boxes and card and game tables, but boxes and tables were the workshop’s staple products. In this occasional table, the veneered platform with a square veneered column is chamfered, supporting a frame that holds the tabletop or the compartments that contain the backgammon counters, chess pieces, and other equipage necessary for an evening’s entertainment. Ralph Turnbull’s work is characterized by the use of specimen woods. Every known object bearing a Turnbull label has at least one surface decorated with an array of timber samples. This distinctive feature was copied by other Jamaican furniture makers, such as J. and W. Pitkin and J. Soulette. Many anonymous makers also produced inferior work in the manner of Turnbull, illustrating Turnbull’s influence during his lifetime and throughout the Victorian period. The repeated use of specimen samples is indicative of a keen interest in the timber available on the island. Indeed, Turnbull employed a “scientific gentleman” to identify timber on the island that could be utilized in his workshop. Like the collection of specimen woods made in 1891 (see object lesson 19), Turnbull’s use of a vast array of timbers illustrates a fascination with the natural resources of the island in the nineteenth century. There was substantial interest in the use of these woods among local manufacturers and in how they could be exploited commercially in the wider British Empire. It is likely that Ralph Turnbull was educated in Britain, either in northeast England or southeast Scotland, and emigrated to Jamaica in the first or second decade of the nineteenth century. In stylistic terms, his furniture conformed to mainstream European and American taste. He employed orthodox construction and veneering techniques, despite climatic conditions that rendered these methods extremely challenging. The virtuosity of the firm’s craftsmen was widely recognized, and Turnbull furniture appeared at several international exhibitions in the nineteenth century.

A Tread-­Mill Scene in Jamaica, wood engraving, from A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (1837). Library of Congress.

OBJECT LESSON 3

A Tread-Mill Scene in Jamaica, 1837 Wood engraving. From A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, London: W. Ball, 1837. Library of Congress.  |  D I A N A

PAT O N

This engraving titled A Tread-Mill Scene in Jamaica (also published in a variant version titled An Interior View of Jamaican House of Correction) played an important role in the abolitionist campaign against the apprenticeship system.8 Apprenticeship — ​­planned as a six-­year transitional system and in the end lasting only four years — ​­was introduced in Jamaica in 1834. It renamed enslaved people as “apprentices” and compelled them to work for those who had formerly been their owners. Although apprenticeship was initially accepted by most British antislavery campaigners as a gradual means of ending slavery, the conflicts and violence that accompanied it eventually convinced these abolitionists to campaign for its end. Because apprentice-­holders, unlike slaveholders, were not legally permitted to use direct physical violence as a means of control, apprenticeship saw an increase in the use of the prison system as a form of labor discipline. Many of the most serious and widely publicized abuses during apprenticeship took place in Jamaican prisons. This abolitionist print, which illustrated a shocking first-­person account, A Narrative of Events . . . , by James Williams, a former apprentice, attempts to capture them all. At the center of the image is a treadmill. Treadmills were introduced into most Jamaican prisons during apprenticeship as a supposedly humane form of punishment. As this abolitionist exposé emphasizes, they soon became sites of torture. Prisoners were supposed to step regularly upward, several inches at a time, turning the wheel as they did so. In practice, the wheel often turned so fast that those “working” it had no chance of maintaining their footing, and so slipped off, hanging by wrists strapped to a bar above the wheel as the wheel turned and its steps repeatedly struck their legs. Prison drivers flogged those who came off the wheel and sometimes those who had not, in an attempt to force them to continue to step or to refind their footing if they had fallen off. The whip added to the pain inflicted by the punishment.

The print also illustrates the importance of gender to the abolition campaign. Three of the eight prisoners on the treadmill are women. One has lost her footing, while another is being flogged. The whip has apparently torn the clothing from her back, revealing her seminaked body. Another woman, at the end of a line of chained prisoners carrying hoes, is also being flogged. The flogging of women and the nakedness and thus immodesty it entailed had been used repeatedly in abolitionist propaganda during slavery, and proponents of the apprenticeship system had claimed that the ending of the flogging of women as even a judicially imposed punishment marked an improvement over slavery. By including images of two women being flogged, the illustration made clear that despite the change in the law, women in Jamaica were still being flogged, although now under the guise of “prison discipline.” The print also invites viewers’ shock at the sight of women with babies in prison. The engraving drew a hostile reaction from Jamaican planters. The proplanter newspaper the Jamaica Dispatch described it as “seditious” and referred to it as “a gross libel on the Magistracy and Judges of the land.” The Dispatch called for “the miscreants, who drew the picture, to be prosecuted as lying rebel incendiaries.” 9

62

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSON 4

Sligoville with Mission Premises, 1843 Unknown artist, wood engraving, illustration for James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: John Snow, 1843).  |  C A T H E R I N E

HALL

In 1843 James Mursell Phillippo, a long-­established Baptist missionary in Jamaica, published Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, a book that celebrated the triumph of emancipation and the transformation it had wrought on the island. His work included a series of plates representing the before and after of slavery, focused particularly on the contribution of Baptist missionaries in bringing Christianity to Africans locked in darkness and superstition. Emancipation and conversion were twinned in Phillippo’s mind; together they had provided the route to freedom. In the wake of full freedom in 1838, a new struggle had begun between the planters and the emancipated. The planters tried to use their control over what had been slave huts and provision grounds to orchestrate a new kind of forced labor. Many Afro-­Jamaicans aimed to leave the plantations and establish free villages, working as subsistence farmers. A group of Baptist missionaries raised money in England to buy land and to found new settlements that would be under their aegis. Sligoville was one of the first of the Baptist free villages, initially established by Phillippo in the hills not far from Spanish Town, where he was pastor of the major Baptist church. The image, engraved in London, perhaps based on a sketch by Phillippo himself, represents Sligoville as Phillippo wanted it to be. Named after the paternalistic governor the Marquis of Sligo and set in beautiful countryside, the village had as its central buildings the Baptist chapel and the mission house, surrounded by neat huts for the peasantry. These villages were to be centers of civilization as imagined by the missionaries, displacing the world of the plantation with its cruelty and sexual depravity. The pastor would be the leader and father of the community, the chapel would be the center of life, and the villagers would live as families in well-­appointed cottages. The men would work

James Mursell Phillippo, Sligoville with Mission Premises, from Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

for wages on the plantations and have small plots for subsistence; the women would be domesticated; and the children would attend the mission school. The days of the whip would be over. Men would be industrious; women, freed from the oppression of the slave o­ wner, would learn subordination to their lawful husbands; and children would grow up in the ways of the Lord. This was the missionary dream, a dream that inevitably fractured.

Object Lessons

65

Philippe Benoist, after Adolphe Duperly, A View of Coke Chapel from the Parade, lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). © The British Library Board.

OBJECT LESSON 5

A View of Coke Chapel from the Parade, circa 1846–­1847 Philippe Benoist (b. 1813), after Adolphe Duperly (1801–­1864). Lithograph with watercolor. From Adolphe Duperly, Daguerian Excursions, Kingston, Jamaica, circa 1846–­1847.  |  J A M E S

ROBERTSON

On its completion, the Coke Chapel became the cathedral of Jamaican Methodism, complementing the splendid neoclassical Wesley Chapel of 1823 on Tower Street. The new chapel testified to the size, respectability, and increasing confidence of Kingston’s Methodist congregations — ​­a group whose enrolled membership had grown rapidly, all but doubling between 1833 and 1840 — ​ ­within the newly reshaped society after emancipation at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign. Named after Rev. Thomas Coke, whose visits to Jamaica fifty years earlier, in 1789 and 1790, had begun the Methodists’ West Indian mission, the brick-­built Coke Chapel was a prestigious project begun in the years after emancipation, when the Jamaica Assembly was prepared to contribute substantial funds toward building and expanding chapels. In the 1840s Jamaica’s Methodists considered it “one of the noblest architectural ornaments of which the British West Indies can boast.” 10 This building, with its neomedieval turrets, side aisles, pointed arched windows, and battlements, offered a striking contrast to the boxy format of earlier nonconformist chapels. It occupied one of the most prominent sites in Kingston, on the eastern edge of the Parade, where the Windward Road — ​­the south coast’s main east–­west route — ​­enters the town’s main square. The site juxtaposed the new chapel with a showpiece of early eighteenth-­century Jamaican Anglicanism, the Kingston Parish Church, on the Parade’s southern side. This image catches Kingston’s Parade at a particular moment. It is still a large open space, with barracks on its northwest corner, though here, on what looks like a Sunday morning, its normally bustling sweep of gravel is largely empty, with only a throng of well-­dressed worshipers chatting after service and a single horseman trotting past. This view across the open Parade lasted for

only another dozen years. In the 1860s the large, dusty rectangle was broken up by a substantial central garden that has been recast several times. The brick complex displayed here was shaken by the 1907 earthquake and, like the nearby Kingston Parish Church, subsequently reconstructed. The stone steps that are so conspicuous remained a prominent venue within Kingston’s unofficial urban topography: they offered a space where, in the years before radio call-­in shows, speakers of all sorts would seek informal audiences for their views, however controversial. Marcus Garvey, Leonard Howell, and speakers advocating suffrage and nationalism all stood on these steps to address casual passersby or the crowds who gathered here.

68

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSON 6

The Ordinance of Baptism, 1843 George Baxter, after Joseph Bartholomew Kidd. “The Ordinance of Baptism as administered by the missionaries connected with the Baptist Missionary Society to 135 persons near Brown’s Town, in Jamaica, in 1843,” colored wood engraving. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.  |  D I A N N E

M. STEWART

This print by George Baxter (1804–­1867), after a drawing by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, portrays a characteristic scene during a transitional period in the religious formation of African descendants in Jamaica and indeed the wider Anglophone African diaspora. The Baptist mission to enslaved and free Africans in Jamaica began during the 1780s under the leadership of an African American missionary, George Liele, and continued with clerics from the Baptist Missionary Society throughout the nineteenth century. On the surface, Baxter’s print impresses upon the viewer the success of this nonconformist denomination over other ecclesial bodies in converting African descendants to Christianity. Among the denominations active in Jamaica during the Victorian era, the Baptist Church was the first to immerse candidates in natural bodies of water when accepting them into the communion of saved Christians. The act of baptism, so poignantly depicted in Baxter’s print, symbolized for candidates Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, events that secured their salvation when they first professed faith in him. The candidates’ white vestments, coupled with their prayerful postures, add intensity to the aura of intimacy, purity, and solemnity characterizing the entire scene. The figures of invested participants meditating under the gaze of a watchful audience and hazy sky are rendered through swirls of soft colors with hints of deep shades. Such blended and contrasted hues evoke in the viewer an aesthetic appreciation of the human quest for the divine. This contemplative communal exercise was a ritualized invitation to “sin no more” in candidates’ new life as followers of Jesus Christ and members of the Baptist Church. Yet the history of the enslaved in Jamaica complicates the religious narratives that transported the 135 women and men to a sacred sea in the vicinity of Brown’s Town on the auspicious afternoon in question. Africans

George Baxter, after James Bartholomew Kidd, The Ordinance of Baptism, as administered by missionaries connected with the Baptist Missionary Society to 135 persons near Brown’s Town, in Jamaica, 1843. Colored wood engraving. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, E.2777–­1932.

brought to the Baptist tradition a spiritual orientation rich in its engagement with the natural world and teeming with symbolic vocabularies. One formal constellation of this spirituality emerged during the eighteenth century when a society of women and men known as Myalists gathered for ceremonies and garnered some attention from the colonial ruling class. Perhaps the earliest extant references to Myal appear in the slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood’s 1768 and 1769 brief diary entries, the latter of which describes Myal as an illicit “dance” that his enslaved mistress’s daughter held in her quarters at Paradise Estate (Westmoreland). Notations about Myal surface in the commentaries of other colonial writers with thicker descriptions than those of Thistlewood. Still it is not until the postemancipation era that we come across a specific detail about Myal rituals that intersects a central motif in this image. The Jesuit priest Abraham J. Emerick, who served as a missionary in Jamaica (1895–­1905), indicated that “Mialists” wore white robes during their ceremonies, and he linked this feature to the white robes donned by Revivalists and Bedwardites during the early twentieth century. White was and remains the most prominent color symbolizing the world of invisible powers (deities, spirits, ancestors, etc.) in West and Central Africa. Witnessing or undergoing the baptism ritual likely would have reinforced the numinosity of the color white and the involvement of invisible entities beyond the Christian Trinity in a transformative initiatory experience for African converts, whether of Igbo, Asante, or Kongo heritage. These three groups and their neighbors composed the largest percentage of Africans to enter Jamaica during the entire trans­atlantic slave trade. In particular, the Kongo kingdom, which had come under Catholic influence beginning in the late fifteenth century, gave Jamaica’s Myal tradition its name and purpose. BaKongo groups interpreted bodies of water as a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds. Moreover, the Simbi, a class of guardian spirits associated with waterfalls, springs, rock formations, and other phenomena in nature, might have edged their way into the theological imagination of some candidates as they waded and were washed in the water. In Kongo, those initiated into the societies of ritual and healing experts were capable of contacting invisible forces that could remedy social and personal afflictions. Myal societies in effect were reconstituted ritual societies of Kongo persuasion mirroring the healing activities of Lemba, Nkimba, Kimpasi, and Ndembo custodians in Central Africa. The baptismal death and resurrection purification rite performed through candidates’ immersion into and rising from the water had a counterpart in Jamaica’s African spiritual traditions. The Myal death and resurrection rituals in which novitiates would appear lifeless until ceremonial experts resurrected

Object Lessons

71

them into a new life of knowledge and ritual leadership within the society are perhaps the most tangible examples we have on record today. If Myal members wore flowing white robes before the Baptist tradition came to Jamaica, extant preemancipation descriptions of the society do not make any mention of it. The Christian rite of baptism, in which candidates — ​­adorned in ankle-­length white robes — ​­encountered the numinous in the natural environment, would have cemented the connections that Africans seeking to belong to two overlapping worlds (the Baptist and the Myal) were bound to draw between them. In the Victorian universe of Christian denominations, the Baptist tradition bended most pliably toward African modes of religious apprehension. Initiation into this legitimate society offered converts access to knowledge, power, enhanced training, and status — ​­all social goods that allowed them the best chances to prosper in postemancipation Jamaica. For Baptist converts with comparable commitments to Myal denominations, the same social goods obtained within the private cosmos they constructed among themselves, a world they understood as theologically and spiritually conversant with some of the central symbols and rituals of the Baptist faith.

72

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSON 7

Kidd’s New Plan of the City of Kingston, Jamaica, 1854 RIVKE JAFFE

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd’s mid-­nineteenth-­century map of Kingston conveys a clear sense of urban order. The harbor’s edge, to the south, and the parish of St. Andrew, to the north, display something of the wobbly, organic lines of nature. In the bird’s-­eye view that this map presents, however, the city of Kingston is a crisp, orderly grid. Legends patterned around the edges of the map provide a guide to the city’s public buildings and its streets, and Kidd even listed the width of the main streets and the size of different lots. But his map does more than help newcomers navigate a bustling port city. Both the urban grid plan (which is typical of many colonial cities in the Americas) and this mapped representation of it can be seen as attempts to imprint colonial order onto a potentially unruly social and physical landscape in the aftermath of emancipation. The central square of the Parade, which served as a stage for displays of military might and social status, jumps out. Militia drills, public executions, and elite socializing all took place on the Parade, and in 1870 a public park that would later boast a statue of Queen Victoria was laid out there. At the southeast edge of the city, the General Penitentiary (its foundation stone laid in 1846, the map tells us) and the Workhouse await those who might transgress the postemancipation social order. The expression of authority through the built environment was evident in various ways in colonial Caribbean cities such as Kingston. Urban planning was often directed toward controlling the black and low-­income populations, and impressive architecture served to bolster ideas of European civilization. In addition, strict regulations delineated the dimensions, materials, styles, or colors to be used in the construction of buildings and streets. Such rules were applied less rigorously in the informal lower-­income areas on Kingston’s periphery. Apart from sporadic interventions in the name of public health or security, until the twentieth century colonial authorities tended to adopt a more laissez-­faire approach toward these areas. This general inattention enabled the development

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Kidd’s New Plan of the City of Kingston, Jamaica, 1854. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

of vernacular, hybrid forms of using and adorning the built environment, as these shantytowns, communal yards, and building and decorating styles offered the opportunity for architectural expression outside the control or interest of elites. Kidd was an itinerant Scottish landscape painter who spent time in Jamaica between 1835 and 1838. Given that this “new plan” was published in 1854, either it shows the city as it was over a decade earlier, when Kidd visited, or Kidd utilized someone else’s drawings and cartography to create an up-­to-­date image. The top and the bottom of the map show tranquil topographic views similar to the tropical Jamaican landscapes Kidd painted in Jamaica and the series of lithographs he published after returning to London. Dotted with barracks and impressive houses, the mountains and hills surrounding the city grace the top border. Below, we see Kingston Harbour, with some two dozen calmly floating sea vessels demonstrating the port’s prosperity. These scenes of nature contrast with the sharply gridded city plan and with the left and right borders of the map, which are embellished mainly with views of important buildings in or near Kingston: Military Head Quarters House, Kingston Theatre, the Parish Church, the Kirk, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, and the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. The inclusion of these different religious buildings emphasizes not only Kingston’s cultural diversity but also its segregation. Like all maps, colonial-­era maps are telling not just for what they show but also for what they exclude. Many eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century maps were bordered with embellishments that featured exotic peoples in native costume. Although Kidd’s map portrays the most populous city in the British West Indies, it is hard to make out any people at all. More significantly perhaps, the map’s version of Kingston seems to ignore the presence of the urban majority, composed of newly freed Afro-­Jamaicans. To what extent were their lives circumscribed by the orderly lines we see here?

Object Lessons

75

Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica, albumen print, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

OBJECT LESSON 8

Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica, 1865 Albumen print mounted in album assembled by Alexander Dudgeon Gulland. Firestone Library, Princeton University.  |  W A Y N E

MODEST

Elegantly written in cursive, the caption below the image identifies it as the “Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica.” This photograph is one of the few remaining images from the British colonial government’s violent suppression of the rebellion of blacks in Jamaica in 1865. It is one of twenty-­five images of the rebellion included in a photographic album assembled by Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, a British Army officer stationed in Jamaica during the rebellion. Gulland’s album was acquired in 2009 by the Firestone Library at Princeton University. At a fork in the road, two adults stand in front of a mound of dirt that allegedly covers the bodies of eighty rebels executed on the orders of Governor Eyre. The men are accompanied by a child, who is off to the side, next to a donkey-­drawn carriage. They look into the camera from the shadow of a large cotton tree that towers over them. One can infer that these persons in the photograph, with their carriage, are gravediggers. Or could they be mourners? While the mound is ostensibly the subject of the image, the cotton tree dominates the composition. In the immediate background is a thatched vernacular house behind a fence. Giving the image depth, the dirt roads draw our eyes farther into the background, where we find a more grandiose house for comparison. Although the exact location of the grave is unknown, the burial site has cultural significance. The cotton tree and the crossroads both have symbolic meaning within Afro-­Jamaican traditions. The silk cotton tree is a place where the spirits reside, as well as a locus of the power of healing. In African and Afro–­New World cultures, moreover, the crossroads is a gateway to other worlds, where the guardian figure Esu-­Elegbara, or Legba, also known as a trickster, resides.

But perhaps the power of this photograph lies elsewhere, not in its symbolic importance within an Afro-­Jamaican worldview. Its power is conceivably in its eventfulness. Here I take my cue from Ariella Azoulay and other more recent scholars who have been interested in the event of photography.11 Emancipation occurred in Jamaica in August 1838; photography was first demonstrated six months later, in January 1839. This coincidence in chronology means that the documentary properties of photography, its evidentiary function, were not available to capture the fact of slavery and the emancipation proclamation and celebrations. Yet despite the lack of chronological overlap, Krista Thompson has demonstrated how photography produced after the official end of slavery in the British Caribbean has been taken to represent the conditions of slave life.12 But for Azoulay the event of the photograph is not simply the event that the photograph captures, the fleeting instant that the image fixes chemically on paper — ​­what Henri Cartier-­Bresson described as the “decisive moment.” 13 The event of photography emerges out of the set of relations between maker, subjects, and the viewer of the photograph. In this sense, the photograph is a situation, an event, and Azouley’s approach is to think about “a certain form of human being-­with-­others in which the camera or the photograph are implicated.” 14 Now we are led to wonder about that relationship between Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, the British Army officer, and the subjects pictured, whether mourners or gravediggers. Or, more cogently, between this functionary of the colonial state, whom we can presume to have been complicit in this state-­ sanctioned violence and who now trades his rifle for a camera, and those eighty so-­called rebels buried under the mound pictured. And, we can extend Azouley’s claim about the eventfulness of photographs even further: for the event of photography, on her account, continues even after the photograph’s making, emerging as an “infinite series of encounters,” in relation to the photograph.15 The process of emancipation that was inaugurated in 1838 was ongoing and incomplete in 1865, when this photograph was taken, and would last throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and beyond. With each encounter, then, this image of the Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica produces the event anew in relation to its viewer.

78

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSON 9

Map Recording the Rebellion of 1865 Map of the county of Surey in the Island of Jamaica “shewing its topographical features — ​­the lines of the March of the Maroons and the Situation of the Several Villages burnt or partially so during the disturbances in Oct and Nov 1865.” Prepared for the information of the Royal Commissioners by John Parry, Engineer of the County of Surrey, March 1866. National Library of Jamaica.  |  G A D

HEUMAN

This map was prepared for the Royal Commission that investigated the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. It was made by the chief engineer of the County of Surrey, John Parry, and shows the routes taken by the forces sent to suppress the rebellion. The lines in red represent the activities of the British troops. They landed at Morant Bay, the scene of the rebellion, the day after it had taken place. The force included one hundred men of the 1st West India Regiment, a force of black soldiers established in 1795, plus twenty men of the Royal Artillery. These troops were subsequently dispatched to Manchioneal on the southwestern border of the parish of St. Thomas in the East, where they liaised with other soldiers who had traveled overland from their barracks at Newcastle, in the mountains above Kingston. On their march, the troops burned down any house that allegedly contained stolen goods and killed people wantonly. By the time they reached Manchioneal, the soldiers had killed more than sixty people, many of them shot while running away from the gunfire. This pattern was repeated across the parish of St. Thomas in the East: people killed, houses burned, villages destroyed. Yet the colonial forces encountered no resistance. While the soldiers crisscrossed the parish, the Maroons, runaway slaves who had established independent communities in the interior of Jamaica, met with Governor Eyre and Colonel Fyfe, in Port Antonio. Fyfe was placed in charge of a group of twenty Maroons, who were paid to fight with the colonial force.

John Parry, Map of the County of Surrey in the Island of Jamaica, shewing its topographical features — ​­the lines of the March of the Maroons and the Situation of the Several Villages burnt or partially so during the disturbances in Oct and Nov 1865, 1866. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

They subsequently marched south to the town of Bath and to a nearby village, Torrington, where there was a skirmish with some of the rebels. Their line of march is shown in blue on the map. In the skirmish, the Maroons killed seven rebels. For the Maroons, this was only the beginning. They marched through the parish, setting fire to houses as they advanced. In Torrington, for example, 136 houses were burned down, effectively the entire village. They shot people in their homes, some of whom were clearly ill and could have taken no part in the rebellion, and they shot people without any pretense of a trial or court martial. When the Maroons were asked why they had killed an old African man who had been ill for many years, they said that they had shot all the men. In total, during the suppression of the rebellion nearly five hundred black Jamaicans were killed by shooting or hanging, six hundred flogged, and at least one thousand homes destroyed.

Object Lessons

81

Frederic Church, Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 1905.21, bequest of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt.

OB JEC T LESSON 10

Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867 Frederic Edwin Church. Oil on canvas, 122.7 × 214.9 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn., bequest of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt.  |  J E N N I F E R

RAAB

In April 1865, after the deaths of his two children, the distinguished Ameri­ can landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church left the United States for a six-­month sketching tour of Jamaica. From his voluminous studies, he would produce only one major canvas, Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica (1867), a painting constructed around a bright but empty area in the foreground. The picture’s two most striking features — ​­proliferation and absence — ​­are intimately related to the Jamaican landscape itself, which was marked by both lush botanical diversity and sugar plantations abandoned in the wake of emancipation. The painting’s illuminated prospect affords the viewer a sense of proprietary control, offering an elevation that has social, economic, and political connotations in the discourse of the picturesque. British representations of Jamaica from the first half of the nineteenth century used the picturesque to naturalize the plantation landscape into spaces of order and calm productivity. 16 But Church’s painting has no humans, animals, or signs of successful cultivation. Nor are there any religious symbols in the foreground. Here is the place where landscape sets the stage for allegory, where we are asked to look and expect to learn. And yet here is an evocative absence.17 Absence characterized the Jamaican landscape at mid-­century. By 1850, nine-­tenths of the island’s land was owned by absentee landlords, and four hundred thousand acres of plantations lay abandoned.18 This was the scene that Church encountered in 1865. Just over a month after the artist returned to the United States, violence erupted between black Jamaican ex-­slaves and white British colonials in Morant Bay.19 For days, bands of rebels roamed the mountains at the eastern end of Jamaica. Although there are no overt references to the bloody Morant Bay rebellion in Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, violence and death are nonetheless suggested.20 In Church’s image, the cultivation of sugar

by enslaved Africans is no longer visible, yet its presence haunts the scene.21 The painting’s darkness testifies to this haunting: Church’s dramatic veil of dark sky recalls the thick black smoke produced by the island’s sugar refineries. Through the sweep of storm clouds above and the bright but empty spot of earth below, Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica thematizes the history of the Jamaican landscape and the unsettling erasure of that very history.

84

Object Lessons

O B J E C T L E S S O N 11

Newcastle, Jamaica, 1884 Capt. Robert Hay. Watercolor on paper. National Gallery of Jamaica.  |  T I M

BARRINGER

This panoramic watercolor was made not by a professional artist but by a soldier surveying the view from the British Army’s barracks at Newcastle, high in the Blue Mountains. The fort was a Victorian addition to the island’s military establishment, the result of the insight of Major General Sir William Maynard Gomm, lieutenant-­governor of Jamaica, that British troops survived far better at a high altitude. Yellow fever, in particular, was prevalent in Kingston but not in the mountains. Accordingly, in 1841 a large barracks was constructed on the site of a coffee plantation at Newcastle. The barracks could be clearly seen from Kingston, and surely its distant presence suggested a panoptic gaze of power over the city’s imperfectly controlled streets, even if access to and from the barracks was in practice slow and difficult. The view downward to Kingston and Port Royal, whose snaking promontory can clearly be seen in the bay, allowed the British soldiers what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “monarch-­of-­all-­I-­survey” vantage point.22 The panoramic mode of this watercolor, painted across two large sheets of paper, recalls the huge 360-­degree paintings that exerted a tremendous impact on European and American visual culture in the nineteenth century. Visitors would stand on a viewing platform and command an unquestioned mastery over a terrain — ​­often a representation of a distant imperial location — ​­conjured up with striking verisimilitude through the clever use of perspective. Here the panoramic mode provides a visual analogue for the ideological viewpoint of the Colonial Officer class. Captain Hay finds all the world beneath him, whether the small, and ill-­drawn, figures of Afro-­Jamaican coffee plantation laborers or the multifarious population of Kingston by the water. The tradition of military officers making extensive prospect views extended back into the eighteenth century, when Thomas Sandby was employed to offer a training in landscape draftsmanship at Sandhurst, the leading military college in Britain. Hay’s style is descriptive rather than interpretative; he portrayed what was before him in naive, workmanlike fashion, paying more attention to

Capt. Robert Hay, Newcastle, Jamaica, 1884. Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica, O 1974-­i oj.268.

man-­made features, such as the roadside village on the nearby hillside, than to the natural features — ​­geology, meteorology, flora and fauna — ​­that were the special interest of the leading English-­language art critic of the period, John Ruskin. Artists in Britain, across the British Empire, and in the United States were profoundly influenced by Ruskin’s Modern Painters (published in five volumes, 1843–­1860), which argued for strict truth to nature. The underlying aesthetic category in Hay’s watercolor, however, is an older one: the sublime. Awesome stretches of open land give way to the open sea. Despite the pedestrian technique of its maker, this study of the magnificent vista from Newcastle enshrines both the natural and the imperial sublime. If Captain Hay was celebrating the extent of empire’s reach, however, he also acknowledged the limits of imperial knowledge. How well did he really know what was being said and done on the plantation around him? And how much did he really know of the culture of the streets of Kingston and Port Royal? The panorama offers a fiction of knowledge but ultimately provides only a distant prospect of Jamaica, imperfectly rendered and faded with age.

Object Lessons

87

Opening of the Railway Line at Porus, circa 1885. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

O B J E C T L E S S O N 12

Opening the Railway Line at Porus, 1885 Photograph, 1885. National Library of Jamaica.  |  J A M E S

ROBERTSON

Railways constituted a primary catalyst for economic development during the Victorian era. Jamaica was the first of Britain’s transatlantic colonies to float a railway company on the London stock exchange, and on November 21, 1845, the Jamaica Railway Company opened a fourteen-­mile line from Kingston to Spanish Town, with a branch to Angels. Plans for extensions abounded, while prospectuses for ten more companies proposed laying three hundred more miles of track. After the collapse of Britain’s railway boom in October 1845, however, fresh investment had ceased. Hopes remained for railway-­driven development. In 1867, the new Crown Colony administration received fresh plans, but as long as the Jamaica Railway Company remained in private hands few additions occurred. In 1879, the 1860s schemes were revived when the government of Jamaica purchased the company, and between 1880 and 1885 the line was extended west to Porus, in rural Manchester, and north to Ewarton, to give the Jamaica Government Railway sixty-­four miles of track. In 1887 new surveys for further extensions across the mountains to the north shore were commissioned and then evaluated by a local commission of inquiry. Low income projections led the governor to veto the proposal. Local journalists, along with many merchants and planters, believed that the extended network, along with Jamaica’s newly developed trades in bananas, citrus, and tourism, which the railway promised to facilitate, would revive the island’s economy. After elections to the Legislative Council fought on the issue of “railway extension,” the veto was overturned, and in 1889 the colony’s railway was sold to an American corporation, the West India Improvement Company, which completed the lines to Montego Bay in 1894 and Port Antonio in 1896 before defaulting on its bond payments in 1898.23 Porus gained a station in 1885, when the then Jamaica Government Railway completed a twenty-­four-­and-­a-­half-­mile extension northwest from Old Harbour. The official opening ceremony was a gala event, with the governor, his family, guests, journalists, and the 1st West India Regiment’s band all trans-

ported by a special train to join a massive local crowd. From 1891, when extension recommenced, Porus provided the starting point for the fifty-­four-­mile line to Montego Bay. The West India Improvement Company was obliged to complete twelve and a half miles of new track each year to retain possession of the railroad. As the new work proceeded and the line crept west, the station at Porus hosted further official events when the colony’s engineers assessed the additional track before accepting it into the network. There were multiple occasions for a welcoming crowd to assemble. Once the Porus–­Montego Bay line was completed, in June 1894, construction work switched to a second extension running north from Ewarton. This track reached Port Antonio in 1896. In this photograph, a local group has assembled at Porus, with laborers perched on a cart behind them. The platform’s construction contrasted with the line’s older stations. Its roof used machine-­cut North American pine lumber, while the cutting for the track was faced with imported concrete rather than local stone. The raised platform accommodated the Government Railway’s British-­style carriages; the American company’s rolling stock could be boarded from ground level. It is a hopeful image. Everyone here, the laborers watching from a cart and the local worthies assembled on the platform awaiting the arrival of further dignitaries, recognized the new railway’s potential benefits.

90

Object Lessons

O B J E C T L E S S O N 13

Day School Children, Jamaica, circa 1900 Photograph, circa 1900. National Library of Jamaica.  |  P A T R I C K

B R YA N

The photograph is a vivid image of children attending a small thatched-­roof elementary school in rural Jamaica around 1900. The pupils flank either side of the small school building, pulling the eyes of the viewer toward the focal point at the center of the image, where a teacher stands, modestly clad in an apron, her hands clasped together. The photographer has artfully massed the background, allowing the rustic schoolhouse to emerge from the base of a dark pyramid of foliage. Yet it is the students who are the focus of this image, all proudly dressed in their best clothes, as formal as they are tattered. Some carry slates or tablets from the classroom. The jackets and hats of the children suggest that they were specially dressed for the photo shoot: they are carefully arranged, and a man, perhaps the head teacher, stands behind the group to the teacher’s right. The children’s bare feet seem to clash with the formal wear, yet up to the 1950s at least, many elementary schoolchildren did go to school barefooted. Given the number of children and the few staff in the photograph, we can speculate that there was massive overcrowding. Indeed, the report of the inspector of schools in 1882–18­83 showed some distress at the condition of school buildings in Jamaica, which were small, crowded, and “generally unsatisfactory.” Up to the middle of the twentieth century, “classrooms” in elementary schools in Jamaica were often separated not by walls but by blackboards resting on easels. An elementary school classroom was a noisy business. When weather allowed, some classes would have been conducted outside the building. Until the last decades of the nineteenth century, elementary education in Jamaica was provided mainly by religious bodies. The number of elementary schools increased from 286 in 1869 to 962 in 1895. Government grants to these schools gradually removed the need for fees, which poor rural parents had found prohibitive. In the 1880s Jamaica spent far less on education per capita than did Barbados, Trinidad, and British Guiana. That low expenditure perhaps explains why there was a shortage of desks, so that students sometimes had to write in a kneeling position, their benches doubling as desks, and why some schools had no clocks. Most teachers were untrained. At the end of the

Day School Children, Jamaica, circa 1900. Albumen print. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

nineteenth century, plans for compulsory education were shelved in the face of economic depression, the consequent reduction in expenditure on education, and the reduced income of religious bodies. Children first attended elementary school at approximately age seven and graduated at age fourteen or fifteen. There were only very reduced opportunities for further education, since the establishment, especially the plantation establishment, believed that only limited education was necessary for the children of the working class. Education, they argued, spoiled labor. Children of the white social and political elite and those of mixed blood had access to the small number of secondary schools. Wealthy Jamaican families sent their children (or at least their boys) to England for their secondary education. School attendance was limited by the widespread use of child labor. Children were economic assets. It was well known that schools was virtually deserted on Fridays, when children accompanied their parents to market. In some areas harvest time took a heavy toll on attendance. At sixty-­five schools inspected in 1887, average attendance was only 61 percent of the students on roll. Discipline, which was extremely harsh in schools, mirrored the severity with which the black population — ​­including children — ​­was treated in general. The punitive nature of the society was demonstrated by Law 8 of 1896, which prescribed up to thirty-­six lashes of the tamarind switch for children aged ten to sixteen who had committed an offense. The severity was partly a function of a broader socialization policy that advocated moral training, obedience, punctuality, acceptance of one’s place in life, and reverence for the British Empire. Yet this image, despite the tattered condition of the children’s clothes and the modest size of the schoolhouse, provides a vivid indication of the value placed on schooling by the Jamaican population at the end of the Victorian period, and offers tantalizing hints of the inner life of a group of children — ​­the soulful girl dressed in black who places her hand on her chest; the playful youth in an outsize sun hat who thrusts his right leg into the foreground. The image is vivid testimony to photography’s ability to capture the exact appearance of a group of figures otherwise lost to history.

Object Lessons

93

Wedding Group, Jamaica. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

O B J E C T L E S S O N 14

Wedding Group, Jamaica, circa 1900 Anonymous photograph. National Library of Jamaica.  |  A N T H O N Y

BOGUES

Is this an image for reading a time, for signifying a moment? A memory for the future, for representing a becoming, a natal moment? What is the bride saying to us today? What does her confident, smiling, black face communicate? She is resplendent in white, hair tightly (properly) coiffed, with white gloves and a pair of white shoes peeping out from under the wedding dress. What does she represent from a time past? What does she want us to remember about her, about women like her? Women for whom the only full black skin shown is the extraordinary face; that and the small gap between the gloves and dress on the left hand. No other skin should be shown. Why an image of women? And where are the hats, a missing signifier seen only on the head of the woman to the far right back, almost out of the frame? Then there are the dignified black men. The groom is in dark morning coat, bowtie, and white pants. He is dapper. Is he sitting beside his father or the bride’s father, or just a man who stands in for a father? He is slightly farther back in the frame, the most forward image of the frame being the bride’s. He has taken off one glove. He and his bride have walked into a life together with the markings of black respectability. The picture is a monument to be placed prominently in the home they will build. Later, without the morning coat and the white dress, they will recall this moment in which they were clothed in the trappings of what colonial society said was right. And then there is the little girl on the right — ​­the ring bearer, perhaps? She stares straight ahead, her face etched into the time of the frame. Her single bangle reminds us over a hundred years later that bangles were a mark of dressing up for young girls. A bangle was a sign of becoming a lady and was worn on special occasions. Scanning this frame more than one hundred years later, one wonders how many beginnings and inductions into respectability the ex-­slave had to make to be seen as human and as her majesty’s subject.

Child’s outdoor cap, lace-­bark, circa 1850–­1861. Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Photo: Andrew McRobb.

O B J E C T L E S S O N 15

Child’s Outdoor Cap. Lace-­bark, circa 1850–­1861 Milliner unknown. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Center for Economic Botany, Richmond, United Kingdom.  |  S T E E V E

O. BUCKRIDGE

The object, a child’s outdoor cap, was made in the parish of St. Elizabeth in Jamaica between 1850 and 1861. It provides a tantalizing hint of the culture and life of Victorian Jamaica. The cap is made from Jamaican lace-­bark, obtained from the laghetto, or lace-­bark tree, native to Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti. The inner bark of the lace-­bark tree trunk was of a fine texture, almost elastic, and very strong, and after being soaked in water, it could be drawn out by the fingers, dried, and bleached white in sunlight. The end product resembled fine manufactured lace. Lace-­bark, which was durable, versatile, and withstood washing extremely well, was considered the equal of the best artificial lace. In Victorian Jamaica, lace-­bark was used to make clothing and accessories such as bonnets, fans, and slippers. European royalty found lace-­bark appealing, and in 1851 Queen Victoria was presented with a dress made from Jamaican lace-­bark.24 The lace-­bark cap is ornamented with brown acacia seeds strung together to form a unique cascading geometrical design that circles the crown of the cap and the peaked brim. The cap’s high crown suggests that it was designed to cover much of the wearer’s head, thus shielding the eyes and complexion from the hot sun. Lace caps were an essential part of a well-­to-­do Victorian child’s wardrobe in England, a costume accessory popular among children of elite and middle-­class families. In early Victorian England, both girls and boys between the ages of one and three wore lace caps to complement embroidered outfits trimmed with lace. The presence of this object in Victorian Jamaica suggests the emergence of a middle class. As in Victorian England, in Jamaica, too, the elite and middle class adopted laced caps for their children to convey social standing and affluence.

The cap also represents creole dress, commingling African and European influ­ences. While the typology of the cap is European, the hanging seeds are reminiscent of the beaded headdresses worn in some West African cultures, such as the Yoruba. Some Jamaicans sought to preserve their African heritage while creating a space for themselves in the Victorian society. By refusing to conform completely to Victorian customs and instead nurturing African characteristics, they challenged the normative Victorian aesthetic. Creole dress in Victorian Jamaican was symbolic of resistance, a form of fashionable subversion that sought to deconstruct the limiting binaries of Jamaican colonial society.

98

Object Lessons

O B J E C T L E S S O N 16

Grandmother on Mother’s Side, circa 1895–­1905 J. W. Cleary, Kingston. Photograph, circa 1895–­1905. David Boxer collection.  |  P A T R I C K

B R YA N

This photograph, made in the studio of J. W. Cleary in Kingston sometime between 1895 and 1905, is inscribed “Grandmother on Mother’s Side.” We are unaware of who the sitter is; nor do we know the name of the grandchild to whom the inscription refers. The studio fixtures are unchanged from those in the many portraits of middle-­class Jamaicans that were made in Cleary’s studio, but the attire of the subject would have immediately marked her cultural difference from other members of Jamaican society. Backdrops were intended to create the environment within which the subject was photographed and therefore to indicate how the subject was to be perceived by the viewer. The blurring of the backdrop here, rendering it almost unreadable, helps to foreground the sitter: her identity as a Chinese immigrant is emphasized. Very few photographs of members of Jamaica’s Chinese population survive from the Victorian period, even though they formed an important part of Jamaican society from the mid-­nineteenth century onward. After the emancipation of African enslaved laborers in Jamaica in 1838, planters embarked on policies that were intended to convert the formerly enslaved but recently freed into a permanent plantation labor force. The measures adopted included the importation of Scots and Germans to occupy the highlands of Jamaica, to reduce access by the ex-­enslaved to the hinterland. A second measure was to pass legislation against squatting, and a third, partly in the interests of keeping labor costs down, was the recruitment of indentured workers from India and China. The entry of Chinese indentured laborers began in 1854 and ended in 1884. Impatient with conditions on estates and with the abuse of contracts, the Chinese workers resorted to rioting and, more importantly, left the estates to establish small businesses, including laundries, vegetable gardens, and groceries. By 1943 a few individuals of Chinese descent were manufacturers as well.

J. W. Cleary, Grandmother on Mother’s Side, circa 1895–­1905. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

In the early twentieth century, a second wave of Chinese entered Jamaica, not as indentured laborers but as entrepreneurs. This voluntary immigration of Hakka-­speaking Chinese from south and southeast China was encouraged by the turbulence in these regions. Many were also in touch with Chinese relatives and friends already resident in Jamaica. Indeed, the records of the Gorgistan in 1921 revealed that all on board already had contacts with Chinese entrepreneurs in various parts of rural Jamaica. Chinese domination of the grocery trade resulted from competitive hours of operation, including on Sundays (despite the Sunday closure law), and from the generous terms of credit they offered to Jamaican shoppers. Links with the black urban population were strengthened by the introduction of forms of gambling that were new to Jamaica. Several shopkeepers did not immediately sever their relationships with China and conducted business in both Jamaica and China. Chinese business prosperity aroused hostile commentary. Regarded as infidels in a nominally Christian country, the Chinese retained aspects of their culture, including practicing polygamy, wearing Chinese dress and hairstyles, observing the Chinese New Year, and maintaining a Confucian temple. Gradually the Chinese community adopted Christianity, in particular by joining the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. However, a strong sense of their ethnic identity and isolation within a hostile community ensured that they also established their own institutions, such as the Chinese Athletic Club, a school for Chinese children that taught the Chinese language, and the Chinese Benevolent Association, which acted as mediator between newly arriving Chinese and the colonial authorities. Chee Kong Tung, the Chinese freemasonry society, had an exclusively Chinese membership. They celebrated Gar-­San at the Chinese cemetery in memory of ancestors. Initially, Chinese migration was primarily undertaken by men. Shopkeepers who prospered might send for their wives in China or return to China to find a bride. Others settled with Jamaican Creole women, giving rise to a visibly mixed Chinese population. The colonial authorities encouraged the migration of the fiancées and wives of Chinese immigrants. We can only assume that this grandmother was among those who came over from China as an indentured worker or as the bride of one. The photograph emphasizes her status as an outsider in Jamaican society, despite perhaps having lived in the colony for many years.

Object Lessons

101

Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-­Langenburg, known as Count Gleichen, Mary Seacole, 1871. Terracotta bust. Courtesy of National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica.

O B J E C T L E S S O N 17

Mary Seacole, 1871 Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-­Langenburg (1833–­1891), known as Count Gleichen. Terracotta bust. Institute of Jamaica.  |  J A N

MARSH

Mary Seacole (ca. 1805–­1881) was a Jamaican woman who became a hero to British military forces during the Crimean War of 1853–18­56. She is now celebrated as a nursing pioneer, and in 2004 in an online poll she was voted the Greatest Black Briton. Born Mary Grant in Kingston and of mixed ancestry, Seacole followed her mother as a hotel keeper and healer, using Creole remedies against cholera and yellow fever. She lived in Black River with her British-­born husband, Edwin Seacole, until his death in 1844. Always keen to travel, she then established a base in Panama on the overland route between the Caribbean and the Pacific, and when war in the Crimea was declared she sailed to volunteer for Florence Nightingale’s nursing team. “Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?” she would later ask.25 Undeterred, Seacole financed her own voyage to the Black Sea, to set up her “British hotel” between the battle sites of Balaklava and Sevastopol, offering hot food, wine, medicine, and other items. To the soldiers she was affectionately known as “Mother Seacole.” The London Times’s war correspondent recorded: “I have seen her go down, under fire, with her little store of creature comforts for our wounded men and a more tender or skilful hand about a wound or broken limb could not be found among our best surgeons.” 26 Bankrupt when the war ended, Seacole returned to Britain, where supporters organized a benefit fund-­raiser and she published her vivid autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole (1857). Although her war service was not recognized officially, she was proud of her contributions, and in all her portraits she wears replica medals from the campaigns. She was widely greeted in London, and she notes in the conclusion to her autobiography, “Where, indeed, do I not find friends? In omnibuses, in river steamboats . . . in quiet streets and courts, where taking short cuts I lose my way oft-­times, spring up

old familiar faces. . . . The sentries at Whitehall relax from the discharge of their important duties of guarding nothing to give me a smile of recognition . . . the very newspaper offices look friendly . . . and the Punch office in Fleet Street laughs out loud.” 27 This warmth is visible in this sympathetically modeled bust by sculptor Victor Gleichen, cousin of Queen Victoria and himself a Crimea veteran. Half life-­size, it was sculpted in his studio at St. James’s Palace and is incised with the date 1871. With Seacole sitting in front of him, the sculptor worked the damp clay with smooth wooden tools, closely observing details of her features, hair, and clothing. The surface is delicately rendered, especially in the hair and in the gently puckered skin around the eyes, which reflects her age — ​­she was in her late sixties. The eyes are deeply gouged, a sculptural technique to indicate a responsive gaze. Seacole’s mature composure is conveyed with a relaxed, alert expression. Her commemorative medals and large-­beaded necklace complete the image. Once it was dry, the clay bust was hollowed out in two halves, rejoined, and fired in a kiln. Small holes behind the ear and on the crown of the head prevented misfiring. The result, known as terracotta, is an ancient technique that most closely resembles the human face; it is fragile, however, prone to chipping and damage, and the bust currently shows some abrasion. It was exhibited in London in 1872 alongside royal and military portraits. When and how it reached Jamaica remains a mystery; possibly it was presented to Seacole, who in later years divided her time between Kingston and London. Her history was rediscovered in the 1980s and now figures on the British school curriculum. A memorial to her work is to be placed outside St Thomas’s Hospital, London.

104

Object Lessons

O B J EC T L E SS O N 18

Fatima, circa 1886 Mrs. Lionel Lee. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery of Jamaica.  |  E R I C A

MOIAH JAMES

Positioned against a shallow, undifferentiated background, her broad shoulders lying parallel to the picture plane, Fatima is rendered with an alert but impassive facial expression. Her lack of direct engagement with the audience was not unusual for the period and can be read as a sign of feminine modesty. In the historical and cultural context of late nineteenth-­century Jamaica, this lack of direct contact with viewers encourages a reading of the work as ethnographic. Fatima wears a collarless blue-­striped tunic slightly open at her throat, revealing crisp, white undergarments beneath. The stripes of the shirt are not continuous, suggesting that the less restrictive garment was pieced together from swaths of fabric such as indigo-­dyed Guinée cloth, marking Fatima’s class position as a worker. Her prominent head tie lacks the articulated, origami-­like folding patterns seen across the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and documented in paintings by Agostino Brunias in Dominica in the 1770s.28 The muted red slip of cloth supports a basic tie that leaves her hair partially uncovered, suggesting the subject’s lack of access to social and economic systems that might have aided in her acquisition of more copious bolts of vibrantly patterned or colored material. In a culture where a significant purpose of the head tie was to capture, restrain, hide, or protect hair, it is notable that Fatima’s ample hair is allowed to escape its hold. The functional head tie provided protection from the sun, kept hair free from dust and debris, preserved hairstyles fashioned during limited free time, and when necessary, concealed dirty, disheveled hair. It has also played a role historically in visually desexualizing and physically protecting creole women from attack or from the punishment of shorn locks, particularly for those who worked in domestic settings. Hair texture is as much a marker of race in the Caribbean as skin color. While careful attention is paid to delineating Fatima’s flawless, honey-­colored skin and fine physical features, presumably to suggest racial mixture, the rendering of her curled escaping hair suggests that whatever the mix, in it lies

Mrs. Lionel Lee, Fatima, circa 1886. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica.

African ancestry. Fatima’s name and the specificity of her features, head tie, and large gold earring, an accessory not typically worn in a work setting, render the painting both a portrait and an illustration of an exotic creole type. Yet Fatima remains as elusive as the less directly named and visually absent Mrs. Lionel Lee who painted her.29 The painting was exhibited in London in 1886 in the largest of all imperial displays, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, where it was paired with another oil painting by Lee, Tomasina, a Negress.30 The vast majority of the Jamaican exhibits were agricultural products; visual culture was represented by photographs of Jamaican scenery and by some large scenographic paintings based on early images of Jamaica. Mrs. Lee’s two portraits were the only figurative works on show, rendering Fatima and Tomasina emblematic of Jamaica itself.

Object Lessons

107

Selection of Jamaican wood samples made for the 1891 Exhibition. Courtesy of the National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica.

O B J E C T L E S S O N 19

Selection of Jamaican Wood Samples Made for the 1891 Exhibition V E E R L E P O U P E Y E , N I C O L E S M Y T H E - ­J O H N S O N , AND O’NEIL L AWRENCE

This extraordinary object was produced by the Jamaica Public Works department for the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891. It contains some two hundred samples of endemic and indigenous woods, which were cut in the shape of books and presented in an elegant five-­tiered bookshelf. The samples were meant to be removed and inspected, inviting a tactile experience of the woods. The unusual format amounted to an aestheticized display of natural resources, which reflected that exhibition’s mandate to promote Jamaica as a site of industry and creativity. The shelf format brings to mind not only libraries and the classificatory impulses that inform natural history but also the furniture production associated with the local timber industry. Trees were among the natural resources that were exploited during the colonial period, for the production of timber and dyes and for medicinal and food purposes. This practice, which involved endemic and indigenous trees such as mahogany and introduced species such as breadfruit, significantly modified the Jamaican landscape. Several indigenous and endemic tree species, including the West Indian mahogany, are now endangered. The Taino name for the island, Xaymaca, is conventionally translated as “land of wood and water.” This designation continues to inform the national imaginary, and trees and woods have become associated with the indigenous, despite the history of colonial exploitation. The blue mahoe is Jamaica’s national tree, and the Lignum vitae blossom is the national flower. Certain trees, such as the silk cotton tree, are associated with the spiritual in African-­derived religions and also invoke diasporic origins, since such trees have similar significance in parts of Africa. When the modern sculptor Edna Manley campaigned to create iconic artistic representations of the black population, she chose materials such as mahogany to represent the nuances found in black skin. The use of these indigenous resources was consistent with the nationalist leanings of a group

of modernist artists in the mid-­twentieth century and supported them in their project of defining a uniquely Jamaican identity. The wood-­sample cabinet is now part of the natural history collection of the Institute of Jamaica. In 2007 it temporarily became a part of Fred Wilson’s installation An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica with the Unnatural History of That Place in the Institute’s Materialising Slavery exhibition, which interrogated the invisible histories and ideologies that animate museums and evocatively tied collection objects to Jamaica’s violent histories. In 2013, it was a part of the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Natural Histories exhibition, where it was positioned as an art object, significant for its beauty and for the “memories” it carries as a foundational piece in Jamaica’s symbolic economy.

110

Object Lessons

OBJECT LESSON 20

Illustration of an Obeah Figure, 1893 Wood engraving after J. R. Emslie. Published in May Robinson, “Obeah Worship in East and West Indies,” Folk-­Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution and Custom 4 (1893): 207–­13.  |  D I A N A

PAT O N

This engraving appeared in the British journal Folk-­Lore in 1893, in an article entitled “Obeah Worship,” by May Robinson.31 Robinson reported that it represents an “Obeah figure . . . brought to England in 1888” by a naval officer. The letters “J R Emslie del 1893” inscribed on the platform on which the figure rests identify the artist by name. The figure had been confiscated by police from a man named Alexander Ellis, who was convicted in May 1887 under the laws prohibiting obeah. It incorporates feathers that Robinson tells us are from a senseh fowl — ​­a hen or cockerel with a bald neck. The feathers are attached to the neck of a reclining human figure perhaps carved from wood or modeled from cloth. The figure is clothed in a jacket and a pair of trousers, but in other ways it seems quite crudely produced, with limbs ending in stumps. There is almost no direct evidence about Ellis’s use of the figure. Robinson explains — ​­although the basis for her explanation is unclear — ​­that it “was regarded as a particularly powerful and evil Obeah, and no negro would willingly touch it, or be in the room with it.” It is tempting to speculate on the figure’s kinship with other spiritually powerful representations of the human form, such as some versions of Kongo nkisi, but direct connections are difficult to sustain. In the context in which the image was published, its main function was to emphasize for a British audience the allegedly primitive state of Caribbean societies. Obeah had been illegal in Jamaica since 1760, and in 1887 the laws against obeah allowed for a maximum punishment of a year’s imprisonment, although Ellis was sentenced only to fifteen days. Material objects used in ritual practice were frequently presented as evidence in obeah trials, but visual images of such objects are extremely rare. Representations of people were not commonly found in the material culture of Caribbean spiritual healing. The heads and hands of

Illustration of an Obeah figure, wood engraving, from May Robinson, “Obeah Worship in East and West Indies,” in Folk-­Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution and Custom 4 (1893). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

manufactured china dolls appear in a number of obeah trials,32 but this apparently hand-­produced object appears to be unique. The figure was returned to Jamaica and briefly exhibited at the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891, as part of a display produced by Herbert Thomas, a policeman. However, Thomas’s exhibit was removed after only a few weeks because it was said to deter potential visitors.33

Object Lessons

113

A. Duperly and Sons, Castleton Gardens, circa 1900. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

OBJECT LESSON 21

Castleton Gardens, 1908 Photograph by A. Duperly and Sons. Published in A. Duperly and Sons, Picturesque Jamaica, 1908.  |  K R I S T A

A. THOMPSON

The Kingston photographic firm of A. Duperly and Sons published this photograph of Castleton Gardens in its book Picturesque Jamaica in 1908 and in successive editions of the publication, which was produced until 1929. Advertisements in newspapers marketed the book to tourists. The Duperly firm also sold the image as a photographic print and postcard. The image was part of a broader set of photographs in Jamaica created by promoters of a burgeoning tourism industry at the turn of the twentieth century, an era hailed by British colonial authorities and local elites as “The New Jamaica.” Such picturesque images aimed to counter fears, among potential travelers and white settlers, of the tropics and the Caribbean as places of wild nature and unruly natives. The notion of the picturesque in Jamaica is epitomized in Castleton Gardens. The picturesque often designated images that conformed to ideals of a tamed, safe, and artfully cultivated disciplined tropical nature. This photograph portrays a curated jungle, presenting a shallow lily pond surrounded by a profusion of tropical coconut and travelers’ palms. In many instances picturesque photographs focused on parts of the landscape that had been transplanted by successive colonial regimes, whether on the royal palm trees that had lined sugar plantations during slavery or on vegetation imported from other colonies. In Jamaica, botanical gardens like Castleton Gardens, opened in 1863, became miniature repositories of British colonial ideals of tropical nature.34 In this regard, picturesque photographs framed parts of the island that had materially been remade into an ideal of a cultivated tropical environment. Promoters of tourism marketed viewing and photographing the picturesque landscape as a central tourist activity. The Castleton Gardens image is rare in that it features a photographer in the process of photographing the garden. A male figure poses in front of him. That the landscape was photographable, a site worth seeing, was itself a testament to the island’s readiness for tourists, its inhabitability as a tropical space. The image, circulated in book form for decades, served simultaneously as advertisement, souvenir, evidence of colonial transplantation, and prompt to the tourist to photograph parts of the landscape.

After Mrs. Lionel Lee, Queen Victoria, wood engraving, from Frank Cundall, Historic Jamaica (1918). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

OBJECT LESSON 22

Queen Victoria, 1915 After Mrs. Lionel Lee. Wood engraving. Published in Frank Cundall, Historic Jamaica, London: published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West India Committee, 1915.  |  P E T R I N A

DACRES

This illustration derives from a pencil and ink drawing on card made by the artist Mrs. Lionel Lee, the wife of the collector of taxes for the parish of Clarendon. It is one in a series of illustrations of Jamaica’s sites and monuments produced for Frank Cundall’s publication Historic Jamaica, of 1915 . The statue of Queen Victoria by Edward Geflowski, erected in 1897 (see chapter 16), stands in the center of the composition, on a pedestal resting on a tall base. The image provides scant detail for placing the statue in a recognizable context, although short vertical lines in front of it suggest grass blades at the boundary of a sidewalk. The lines are repeated in an iron railing behind the figure, in taller, more evenly spaced lengths. The order of the railing contrasts with the hurried lines of varied direction and thickness that form trees and shrubs in the background towering over the central figure. In Lee’s illustration, the rich treatment of the background contrasts with the artist’s light-­handed touch on the statue and its relative small size in the composition. But, as Susan Stewart has argued, the ideological or semiological power of the miniature is enhanced by its intimate size: “The reduction of physical dimensions results in a multiplication of ideological properties.” 35 Indeed, the darkness of the background, amplified by the lighter value at the edge of the card, acts as a halo around the small figure. Despite the tiny scale of Lee’s illustration, the iconography suggests we are viewing a figure of power, one that has passed into the realm of gods and myths, into timelessness. We are here reminded of Clifford Geertz’s scholarship on the symbolic language of power in precolonial Bali. Kingly power, he argued, rather than simply being displayed, was constituted through elaborate rituals that reflected the social and, more importantly, the cosmic order — ​­an order that situates the king atop the social hierarchy and his leadership as divinely ordained. Rituals make overtures to a timeless history, to the mythical past and the sacred world, and in doing so provide state power with legitimacy.36

The anthropologist Maurice Bloch recognized ritual relationship to the divine order as only one dimension of monarchial legitimacy. He would further argue that spectacles are successful as symbolic constructions of monarchical power because they also involve practices or forms that have symbolic import in the everyday life of the people.37 As if to echo this complex relationship to such power figures that wavers between familiarity and distance, in Lee’s work the Queen is indicated only lightly, with just enough detail for our eyes to attempt to finish the shape of the body. We recognize the familiar monarchical signs of crown and scepter, but we cannot read the fullness of the statue’s cheeks or the details of the patterns on the dress. We are visually kept at bay by Lee. I would like to suggest that her distancing strategies profess the limits of recognition and identification with such power figures.

118

Object Lessons

Notes 1. See, for example, Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (London: Berg, 1994); and Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (London: Berg, 2006). 2. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 3. Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–­1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, eds., An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the North Atlantic World, 1660–­1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 4. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 5. Robert B. Barker, “Jamaican Goldsmiths, Assayers and Their Marks from 1665–­ 1765,” Journal of the Silver Society 3, no. 5 (1986): 133. 6. See, for example, locks 3903-­99 (Burkina) and 4440-­150 (Suriname) in the collection of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. 7. The term “used by Negroes” was also employed to describe a lock in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; that lock is a copy of Cruickshank’s lock commissioned by Augustus Henry Lane-­Fox Pitt Rivers for his collection. 8. See Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 372–­73. See also Diana Paton, ed., Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), xxvii–­xxviii. 9. Jamaica Dispatch, quoted in the British Emancipator, June 27, 1838. 10. Peter Duncan, A Narrative of the Wesleyan Mission to Jamaica (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1849), 383. 11. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012). 12. Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2012): 39–­71. 13. Henri Cartier-­Bresson, The Decisive Moment: Photography by Henri Cartier-­Bresson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952). 14. Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 13. 15. Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 18. 16. See Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement; and Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representations of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–­1830, ed. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003). On the “Jamaican picturesque” and Church’s reworking of the picturesque prospect, see Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and

Object Lessons

119

the Labor of the Enslaved,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz, 50, 60. 17. On the question of absence and the intersections between race, economics, and colonial violence, see Jennifer Raab, “Details of Absence,” in Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 122–­45. 18. By 1854 more than half the estates in St. Thomas in the Vale, the parish that Church’s painting depicts, had been abandoned. Before emancipation, St. Thomas in the Vale had been one of the most prosperous interior parishes in the country. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 115. 19. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser was the first to propose a connection between the events in Jamaica and Church’s choice of subject matter; see Kornhauser, American Paintings before 1945 in the Wadsworth Atheneum, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press; Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1996), 208. 20. More than four hundred Jamaicans were killed and a thousand homes burned during the Morant Bay rebellion. For extensive discussions of the rebellion, see Gad J. Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Holt, Problem of Freedom; and Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962). 21. See also Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved,” 60–­61. 22. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 201. 23. A. John Dickenson, “The Jamaica Railway, 1845 to 1915: An Economic History” (M.Sc. thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona, 1969), 136–­63; Jamaica Archives 4/97/1, Gunter Papers, Sir Gregory Gunter, “Centenary History of the Jamaica Government Railway,” May 30, 1945; Veront M. Satchell and Cezley Sampson, “The Rise and Fall of Railways in Jamaica, 1845–­1975,” Journal of Transport History 24, no. 1 (March 2003): 1–­21; and James Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–­2000 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005), 186–­87, 245–­46, 248–­50. 24. Emily Brennan and Mark Nesbitt, “Is Jamaican Lace-­bark a Sustainable Material?” Text: For the Study of Textile Art, Design and History 38 (2010–­11): 17–­23; Georgina Pearman, “Plant Portraits,” Economic Botany 54, no. 1 (2000): 4–­6. 25. Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands ([1857], rept., ed. Sarah Salih, London: Penguin, 2005), 73–­74. 26. Letter to the editor from W. H. Russell, London Times, April 11, 1857. 27. Seacole, Wonderful Adventures, 170. 28. See, for example, Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, ca. 1775–­1780, Yale Center for British Art. 29. At the Institute of Jamaica’s Competitive Art Exhibition in 1892, Mrs. Lionel Lee won first prize for paintings in three categories: figure piece, landscape and fruit, and flower or still life; see Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 1, no. 3 (May 1892): 92. She also provided illustrations for Frank Cundall, Studies in Jamaica History (London: Samson, Low, Marston, 1900).

120

Object Lessons

30. Jamaica at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London: Spottiswoode, 1886). 31. May Robinson, “Obeah Worship in East and West Indies,” Folk-­Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution and Custom 4 (1893): 207–­13. 32. For instance, see Herbert T. Thomas, Something about Obeah (N.p.: n.p., 1891). 33. For further discussion of Thomas’s display at the Jamaica Exhibition, see Diana Paton, “The Trials of Inspector Thomas: Policing and Ethnography in Jamaica,” in Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, ed. Diana Paton and Maarit Forde (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 174–­80. 34. For a full discussion of the role of botanical gardens in Victorian Jamaica, see the chapter in this volume by Mark Nesbitt. 35. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 47–­48. 36. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-­Century Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 37. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 110.

Object Lessons

121

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica D I A N A PATO N

When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Jamaica was at the center of imperial debates about empire. Its institutions of government were undergoing substantial change, as everyone sought to adapt to the abolition of slavery. Colonial state systems of power in the island and on an imperial scale were directed toward controlling a population that was in the process of establishing itself as free and toward ensuring the continuing extraction of wealth under transformed political and social conditions. If, to frame the problem in Marxist terms, the state is the means by which a ruling class projects its interests as the interests of the whole of society, it is worth noting that at this transitional moment, “society” in Jamaica did not yet include the majority of the population. That majority was held in the transitional state of “apprenticeship”: neither enslaved nor free. The state did not, in either its imperial or its colonial form, claim to embody the interests of the population; rather, the imperial government claimed to protect the interests of people who were as yet unable to represent their own interests. The distinction is small but significant. In the early years after 1837, the political system shifted toward partial inclusion of some former slaves in “society.” During this period, representative bodies spoke for a broader constituency than before. Those included were men who had become property owners or had established the security of rental tenure.1 These men were imagined as embodying the interests of the families they were said to head in a manner analogous to how the state was said to embody the interests of the people as a whole. To a limited extent, their new free status created a space that allowed some freed people to demand that state authorities act in their interests.2 In practice, although electoral campaigns solicited the votes of freed people with the implication that legislators would work on their behalf, legislators had little power to make change in the interests of the newly free. Those possibilities that did exist were largely closed off after the Morant Bay rebellion, in 1865. The rebellion was followed by a shift to direct colonial rule in the form of Crown Colony government, which entailed the abolition of the

elected Jamaican Assembly and its replacement with an unelected Legislative Council. This process of “de-­democratization,” in Mimi Sheller’s terms, was only partially mitigated by the addition of elected members to the Legislative Council in 1884.3 As Thomas Holt argues, by the late nineteenth century it had been established that “for the colonies, the corollary of satisfying economic grievances at the expense of political demands was the renunciation of political self-­rule in return for economic assistance.” 4 In Jamaica, that is, the limited social and economic gains of the poor in the late nineteenth century came in tandem with, and not necessarily in spite of, political disfranchisement. The experience of the postemancipation period was that direct action in the form of rebellion led to a decline in direct political power, but, because it also produced a shift in state policy designed to prevent further violent confrontation, it brought some social gains. By the time Victoria died, in 1901, Jamaica and the wider Caribbean region had become marginal to British debates about empire, which were preoccupied with India and South Africa and with the new colonies acquired in the late nineteenth century. British commentators increasingly understood Jamaica, and the Caribbean more generally, as a drain on imperial resources, rather than as a contributor to imperial wealth. Within the colony, political power was organized on a largely unrepresentative basis. Nevertheless, some state initiatives, such as the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891 and the associated and subsequent promotion of the island as a destination for both tourism and settlement, worked by invoking the interests of the Jamaican people as a whole or as a unit within a wider imperial fraternity. The organizers of the exhibition believed the “interests” of the people to be embodied in the arrival of white settlers, who would be placed above the majority population within Jamaica’s racial hierarchy.5 There had been a substantial change in dominant conceptualizations of the state’s relationship to the “people,” despite overall continuity in the working of the state system. We can identify, then, a long-­term trend in state formation: from a state conceptualized as embodying the interests of a society made up of only a tiny minority of the population to one that claimed to represent the people as a whole. Contrary to interpretations of the period between the end of slavery and the 1930s as one of uniform “neglect,” genuine changes took place during this time.6 Particularly significant, and the focus of this chapter, was the moment immediately after the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. This was the third period of revolutionary violence in Jamaica in a century, preceded by what Vincent Brown calls the “Coromantee War” of 1760 and by the rebellion led by Sam Sharpe in 1831.7 In 1760, 1831, and 1865, popular uprisings were put down by

126

D i a n a Pato n

extreme state violence. The suppression of each rebellion was followed by periods of expansive governmental activity, extending in two apparently contradictory directions: repression and protection. In reality these approaches worked together to enhance the stability of power relations within Jamaica. After each rebellion, steps were taken to develop the state’s capacity to repress opposition: new forms of militia, new police forces, new legal restrictions on enslaved people’s activities, and new or better-organized prisons were put in place. Over a slightly longer period, responses to rebellion involved the development of limited legal protection or social provision for the majority. Such periods were also characterized by intervention by the imperial government and its representatives, the colonial governors, who increasingly assumed the advantages of a more systematized and bureaucratic state, which they pressed local power holders to accept. Thus, the late period of slavery saw the institution of a minimal level of legal protection against abuse by slaveholders, as a response both to pressure from the British imperial government and to rebellions like Tacky’s and the fear of further rebellions. Sharpe’s rebellion helped advance the end of slavery itself. In the period after 1865, Crown Colony government was instituted and measures were taken to extend state activity in many directions, including health provision and limited land reform. Changes to the less directly coercive elements of state activity focused on the provision of education and medical services, some public health measures, and modifications to the regimes regulating land, family law, and taxation. These measures aimed to incorporate the Jamaican majority into society in the hope of creating greater social stability and imperial loyalty. The very establishment of an area of encounter between poor Jamaicans and state practice that was not primarily coercive was significant in itself. The sociologist Philip Abrams argued in 1977 that “the state does not exist”; instead, Abrams claims, we should investigate the “state idea” and “state systems.” 8 A couple of years later and from a different scholarly tradition, Michel Foucault asserted that scholars should not “accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign, and subjects” but instead should investigate the working of these terms as discursive entities.9 Neither Abrams nor Foucault was thinking about colonial contexts, but if anything, in settings like Jamaica “the state” was even more of an ideological projection than it was in the metropolis. Its claims to authority required the imagining of networks of power projected across large blocks of space and backed up by the regular use of violence. Within Jamaica, “the state” was formed through everyday encounters at toll gates, in courtrooms and schoolrooms, in reformatories and prisons, in dispensaries, and on the streets. Such encounters contributed to the racing and

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica

127

gendering of the population, the distribution of resources, and the constitution of power. Perhaps most importantly, though much less visibly, state formation took place through the propagation of norms of property holding and transmission that sustained the concentration of land in a few hands while permitting and at times facilitating the emergence and reproduction of small-­scale landholdings. In examining state formation, then, we need to investigate this linked network of everyday practices and embodied encounters. We must also attend to the limited but significant processes by which some individuals from the Afro-­Jamaican majority, who themselves or whose parents or grandparents had experienced slavery, came to embody elements of the state system, in roles such as police constables, teachers, dispensers (pharmacists), and toll collectors. Accepting these premises means focusing on the production of state systems and state ideas over time.10 State formation in Victorian Jamaica can also be viewed as part of the development of a network of state activity that was concurrently taking place in other colonies and within metropolitan Britain itself. In Britain, this period saw expanding concern about public health and sanitation, increased state intervention to regulate working hours and conditions, greater regulation of sexuality, and the expansion or founding of institutions such as workhouses, prisons, and reformatories. Much of this activity has been interpreted as molding or disciplining subjects in oppressive ways. Nevertheless, with present-­day attacks on all forms of state regulation of business practices in mind, it is worth emphasizing that in metropolitan Britain, increased state regulation of, for instance, workplaces and the food supply was in many cases a response, at least in part, to popular pressure.11 In Jamaica, as a colonial site, this dynamic played out rather differently. As in Britain, state bodies sometimes had to respond to popular pressure even when the people had little or no electoral power. Black Jamaicans were able to put limited pressure on government through popular action such as the antitaxation riots in 1848 and the destruction of toll gates in Westmoreland in 1859.12 But in a colony, the direction of state activity was determined by many more competing pressures, from the metropolis as well as from within the colony. Such external pressures were present in the metropolis but much less dominant. Between the end of slavery and the Morant Bay rebellion, the leitmotif of discussions about the state in Jamaica was anxiety about spending. Repeated crises developed around the alleged need for “retrenchment,” that is, cuts in expenditure — ​­what would today be described as “austerity.” Between 1838 and 1865, these crises were products of the tension between the local elite, as represented by the assembly, and the imperial government, represented by the

128

D i a n a Pato n

governor. At moments of political conflict such as the passage of the imperial West India Prisons Act of 1838 and for several years following the passage of the imperial Sugar Duties Act of 1846, the assembly either refused to pass bills to pay for state spending or drastically cut amounts to be spent.13 Crises over retrenchment took place almost annually in the late 1840s and early 1850s. State spending had to be authorized by annual revenue bills, giving the assembly considerable power to disrupt the smooth functioning of state activity. The Police Act of 1846, for instance, cut the number of people in the police force almost in half, while building work on the new General Penitentiary in Kingston ground to a halt in 1849 as a result of the refusal of the assembly to pass a revenue bill authorizing taxation.14 In 1851 the colony-­wide police force was disbanded in favor of a force organized at the parish level, although an island-­wide force was reestablished the following year.15 State projects that aimed to transform the culture of the Jamaican population, such as the provision of schools, tended to stumble on the desire to limit spending. The Morant Bay rebellion was interpreted in imperial Britain as a sign of the problems caused by the Jamaican elite’s approach to colonial government. Crown Colony government was established, with Sir John Peter Grant appointed as the first new governor after Edward Eyre. Grant’s governorship, from 1866 to 1874, saw significant changes in the scope of the Jamaican state’s imagined powers. Under Grant, there was still a great deal of concern about finance; indeed, after he took over as governor, his early reports emphasized the dire state of Jamaican finances and the need to balance the books.16 However, in contrast to his predecessors, Grant’s approach was to expand state revenues through duties and taxation rather than to cut expenditure. These additional revenues were raised largely by measures that disproportionately affected the poor, such as increased duties on rum and the extension of a house tax to all except resident estate laborers.17 Grant made only relatively small cuts in spending, notably by disestablishing the Church of England. In other ways, too, Grant and his immediate successors extended state expenditure, in a period during which, Roy Augier wrote sixty years ago, “the administrative apparatus of a modern state” was established.18 Grant’s reforms were a direct response to the Morant Bay rebellion and, in particular, to a series of problems that were perceived as its causes: conflict over land, lack of trust in the courts, disaffection with local elites. But they were also part of a wider pattern of reformulation of state policy that was taking place throughout the British Empire and within Britain itself. Across the empire, colonies were establishing new police forces, implementing new systems of health care and taking public health measures, funding schools for young children,

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica

129

Fig. 1 . 1   George Frederic Watts, Sir John Peter Grant, after 1873. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London, npg 1127.

changing laws regarding land tenure so as to stimulate capitalist agriculture, and revising taxation to ensure greater funds for state projects. Metropolitan Britain also saw a significant growth in state institutions and authority in this period, despite official ideologies of laissez-­faire.19 In some of these measures, Jamaica in the 1860s led the way; in some, Jamaica followed other colonies, notably Ireland and India. The Crown Colony system fostered the growth of state activity while leaving the people without access to the political system. In The Problem of Freedom, Thomas Holt emphasizes the significance of the example of Ireland in stimulating colonial policy toward Jamaica in the late nineteenth century. Holt argued that a series of influential thinkers and politicians understood the “Irish problem” of rural insurgency to be caused by land hunger. The solution proposed for Ireland was the redistribution of small plots of land, but not of political power, on the understanding that this step

130

D i a n a Pato n

would lead to significant reductions in unrest, a form of so-­called beneficent despotism. Holt argues that this Irish policy was adopted in, and to some extent adapted to, late nineteenth-­century Jamaica. Holt is right to draw attention to the connection between Jamaican and Irish colonial policies, but also important is another, equally significant, set of colonial links, discussed only briefly by Holt: those between Jamaica and India.20 Before being appointed as governor of Jamaica, Grant had been lieutenant-­ governor of Bengal from 1859 to 1862, after a longer career in the Indian colonial service. His posting to Jamaica at this critical point in the colony’s history was based on the assumption that his Indian experience made him particularly good for this new role. The conservative Earl of Carnarvon, the colonial secretary, wrote to Grant immediately after his appointment as governor, emphasizing that “the experience of administrative functions which you have obtained during your service in Her Majesty’s Eastern possessions . . . will afford you the best guidance in your new field of duty.” 21 Grant had experience in administering a colony in the aftermath of insurrection, having been at the heart of the British effort to reformulate colonial power in Bengal in the wake of the 1857 rebellion. He was sent from England to Jamaica with instructions to attend to a panoply of concerns: poor relief; education; the judicial system; policing; “the repression of praedial larceny” (the theft of agricultural produce or livestock from an estate or farm); land and its occupation, especially the “problem” of “squatting”; taxation; administrative reform; and “the introduction of capital and labour.” 22 His successor as Jamaican governor, Sir William Grey, was also a former lieutenant-­governor of Bengal. In Bengal, Grant had been involved with new policies regarding land, the judiciary, policing, education, public health, and the administration of the state. In Jamaica, he oversaw similar policies, in particular in relation to land. Grant’s land policy in Bengal had restrained the absolute power of landowners by enforcing commercial laws. The Bengal Rent Act of 1859 also facilitated the increase of rents charged on peasant farmers who held their land under customary agreements.23 His Jamaican policy was similarly oriented toward the promotion of commercial agriculture. Several new laws passed in 1867 combined to enable the Crown to repossess land held by big planters but not used productively. In both India and Jamaica, then, Grant faced hostility from some major landowners, who perceived him as too favorable to the local peasants. Grant’s sympathy was, in reality, for relatively successful peasant landholders along with productive planters, and he accompanied it with attacks on those who made a living through more marginal means. The most dramatic and immediate effect of Grant’s land policy was the eviction of “squatters” — ​­many

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica

131

of whom had substantive legal claims to their lands — ​­which took place on a significant scale in the late 1860s and early 1870s.24 Grant’s governorship also saw a major change in the law of trespass, after a campaign by large landowners who complained of unjustified peasant suits alleging the trespass of livestock on their land. The new law shifted responsibility for fencing land against livestock disturbance from the owner of the animals to the owner of the arable land, preventing such suits and revealing the limits of Grant’s sympathy for peasant farmers.25 Grant’s approach to land policy is illustrated by his intervention in a conflict over landownership between a large landowner and small settlers at the Hartlands estate, near Spanish Town. The case indicates the complexity of relations around land in postemancipation Jamaica. Hartlands had, according to those living there, been sold off in small plots by its owner, Mr. Hart, in the early years after emancipation, but the purchasers had no written title to the land they worked. Some of those resident may well not have paid for the land but still felt entitled to it on the basis of the labor that they had put into it. In the 1860s another Mr. Hart, the son of the original seller, wanted to “resume possession” of what Grant described as an “abandoned” estate. In March 1866, before Grant’s arrival in Jamaica, Hart acquired a court order to enable the land to be surveyed. The residents resisted the surveying party but were forced to accede to it when Acting Governor Storks sent a force of 150 soldiers to back up the police. The settlers backed down but managed to secure a series of meetings between their representatives, Hart, and Storks himself, which (at least according to their later testimony) resulted in a promise to establish a process of independent adjudication. Soon after Grant’s arrival, however, Hart managed to get an eviction order from the regular court. The settlers petitioned Grant, noting their grievances, but his reply ignored the content of their complaints, stating instead that “the petitioners may be quite certain that whatever force of police, and, if necessary, of military, is required to support the law will be employed, and that all who unlawfully resist will be apprehended and punished with the utmost severity of law.” 26 The case echoed the transition that Grant had overseen in India toward enforcing a system of land that required written titles. The Hartlands case illustrates the connections among Grant’s multiple policies. His report on the incident emphasized the need for a stronger police force, a conclusion that was also drawn from the Morant Bay rebellion. Although the Hartlands settlers were successfully repressed, Grant was concerned to discover that very few policemen were available for this suppression. His experience with the Hartlands dispute bolstered his case for his initial focus on security. In 1867 he founded the Jamaica Constabulary Force, a new paramilitary

132

D i a n a Pato n

police force modeled on the Royal Irish Constabulary. The new force required considerable additional resources, costing around £40,000 a year, significantly more than the £25,000 annual expenditure on the old Jamaican police.27 Grant and his successors introduced a series of other security-­focused innovations, many of them concerned with the problem of the so-­called habitual criminal. People identified as such were registered after 1870 and routinely photographed after 1873.28 He also merged some prisons into larger institutions, closing the county jail in Kingston, for instance, and transferring the prisoners there to the equivalent jail in Spanish Town.29 Grant also oversaw changes to the court system, reorganizing the old courts into new district courts and introducing many more salaried judges trained in the United Kingdom. The stated purpose of the new court system was to make the courts more accessible to the population, especially for civil matters, and to remove them from the control of the local plantocratic magistracy.30 These reforms also had the effect of making the judiciary more centralized and more dependent on metropolitan education and experience, a characteristic move of Crown Colony rule. In addition, the boys’ and girls’ reformatories, both of which had been established by private charitable organizations in the 1850s, were expanded under Grant’s governorship.31 Grant’s governorship also saw significant changes in the areas of both curative medicine and public health. In these areas, too, he was influenced by his Indian experience, with public health a major concern in his last years as a civil servant. The Royal Commission into the Sanitary State of the Army in India, known as the Sanitary Commission, sat from 1859 and reported in 1863. Although the commission was primarily concerned with military health and medicine, stemming from security concerns about the prevalence of disease among British troops that had limited their ability to suppress the 1857 rebellion, its recommendations had important consequences for the organization of public health throughout India.32 Grant arrived in Jamaica with similar concerns about the health of the population. He created the Central Board of Health to oversee new parish-­level local boards of health, which were responsible for improving local sanitary systems.33 His government established compulsory vaccination of children for smallpox, following British policy, which had introduced compulsory vaccination in 1853.34 In line with policy around the British Empire at the time, he opened a lock hospital, which treated venereal disease, to confine women said to be prostitutes.35 Grant also established a system in which district medical officers were appointed for regions across Jamaica, an innovation that took place before the equivalent position was created in Britain.36 The district medical officers received a salary, in exchange for

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica

133

which they were responsible for providing free medical care to those deemed to be “indigent.” They could supplement this income with private practice but were required to treat at reduced rates people who could not afford full fees.37 This system was in 1875 organized into the more centralized Island Medical Service. Given their relatively small budgets, the medical services introduced by Grant inevitably reached a relatively small proportion of the population. Furthermore, to the extent that government-­paid doctors did treat poor Jamaican patients, their understanding of that work was framed by interpretations of medical care that were dismissive of or hostile to popular Jamaican treatment practices and explanations for ill-­health.38 Such confrontational rather than cooperative approaches must have made the care that European doctors were able to offer less effective than it might otherwise have been. Yet at the same time, the establishment of the district medical officers made a claim that was largely new: that the state should take responsibility for the health of the population. This view was not simply about preventing suffering; it was infused with a sense of the population as a labor resource that must be safeguarded for the benefit of planters and other potential employers, and, ultimately, for the benefit of the imperial economy. The early period of Crown Colony government also saw significant changes in family law. In 1869 the legislature passed a maintenance law, making parents of “illegitimate” children financially responsible for their children to the same extent as parents of children born to married parents. Although posed as being about parents, this law was in fact directed at fathers. Grant argued that it would remove a counterincentive to marriage, assuming that low rates of marriage derived from men’s reluctance to take responsibility for their children.39 During the tenure of Grant’s successor, Sir William Grey, a good deal of additional family-­related legislation was passed, dealing with marriage, divorce, and the registration of children and their maintenance.40 These shifts in family law, like changes to the system of public health, implicitly asserted the inclusion of poor Jamaicans in “society.” The new legal arrangements recognized the difference between Jamaican and middle-­class British family forms (through the extension of responsibility to the “illegitimate”) but retained the assumption of the superiority of British norms. Historian James Patterson Smith has noted the “racial reasoning” that underlay many of Grant’s policies and in particular his overall assumption that centralized and unelected Crown Colony government was necessary for the Caribbean. Black Jamaicans, Grant claimed, were “ill-­suited” for self-­ government because they possessed “not one Anglo-­Saxon characteristic.” 41 But he also justified Crown Colony rule on the basis of the limitations of the

134

D i a n a Pato n

white planter class. To him, the Morant Bay rebellion demonstrated the failure of their government, just as the 1857 Rebellion in India indicated the failure of Company rule (direct government by the East India Company). In both cases, a more centralized form of government was now necessary. Without autocracy, Grant believed, the reforms necessary to develop colonial societies and secure them against popular discontent could not be implemented. His policies, and those of his successors in Crown Colony government, created significant changes in the nature of the Jamaican state. Even though the shift to Crown Colony government decisively declared that Jamaicans could not represent themselves through electoral politics, the development of new state activities in the second half of the Victorian period, especially medical services and public health provisions, and shifts in family law suggested a different way of conceptualizing the relationship between government and population. A new form of colonial community was in the making.

Notes 1. For analysis of Jamaican electoral politics in this period, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 215–­342, and Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–­1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), parts 2 and 3. 2. Swithin Wilmot, “Race, Electoral Violence and Constitutional Reform in Jamaica, 1830–­1854,” Journal of Caribbean History 17 (1982): 1–­13. 3. Gad Heuman, “The British West Indies,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 486–­87; Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 2000), 6. 4. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 332. 5. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 87–­91. 6. For an example of a work that takes such a perspective, see John Harrison, “The Colonial Legacy and Social Policy in the British Caribbean,” in Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy, ed. James Midgley and David Piachaud (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 59–­60. 7. On the events of 1760, see Maria Alessandra Bollettino, “Slavery, War, and Britain’s Atlantic Empire: Black Soldiers, Sailors, and Rebels in the Seven Years’ War” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009), 195–­234; Vincent Brown, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–­1761: A Cartographic Narrative,” last accessed July 14, 2017, revolt​.axismaps​ .com/​project​.html; Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-­Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica

135

of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 122–­36; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 125–­39. The best account of the 1831 rebellion remains Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–­1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 148–­7 7. 8. Philip Abrams, [1977] “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 58–­89. 9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3. 10. This approach is modeled on Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). See also Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). 11. See, for instance, Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–­ 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12. Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994), 40–­42. 13. The West India Prisons Act of 1838 was intended to transfer responsibility for overseeing West Indian prisons from colonial legislatures to governors, thus reducing the power of the legislature. See Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–­1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), chap. 3. The Sugar Duties Act of 1846 ended preferences in the taxation system for sugar produced within the British Empire. On the regular retrenchment crises, see Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 209–­11. 14. Charles Edward Grey to Earl Grey, no. 5, Jan. 18, 1847, The National Archives (tna), Kew, U.K., co 137/​291; Grey to Grey, no. 41, March 27, 1849, tna co 137/​302. 15. Charles Edward Grey to Earl Grey, no. 29. (no. 46), June 7, 1851, in “Despatches Relative to the Condition of the Sugar-­Growing Colonies, Part II, Jamaica,” Parliamentary Papers (pp) 1852–­1853 (76) LXVII, 66–­70. 16. See, for instance, Grant’s address to the Jamaican Legislative Council, Oct. 16, 1866, enc. in J. Peter Grant to Earl of Carnarvon, no. 7 (no. 31), Oct. 23, 1866, in “Further Correspondence Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica,” pp 1867 [3859] [3909], XLIX, 8–­9. 17. Grant to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, May 9, 1867, no. 28 (no. 90), in “Further Correspondence Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica,” pp 1867 [3859] [3909], XLIX, 58–­62. 18. F. R Augier, “Crown Colony Government in Jamaica 1865–­1884” (PhD diss., University of St Andrews, 1953), 178. 19. See, for instance, Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Routledge, 1999), 110–­46. 20. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 318–­32 (on Ireland), 327, 336–­37 (on India). 21. Earl of Carnarvon to Sir J. Peter Grant, Aug. 1, 1866, no. 3 (no. 32), in “Further Correspondence Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica,” pp 1867 [3859] [3909], XLIX, 88. 22. Earl of Carnarvon to Sir J. Peter Grant, Aug. 1, 1866.

136

D i a n a Pato n

23. Ram Suresh Sharma, Bengal under John Peter Grant (1859–­1862) (Delhi: Capital Publishing House, 1989). 24. Veront M. Satchell, From Plots to Plantations: Land Transactions in Jamaica, 1866–­ 1900 (Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1990), 72–­78. 25. Simon Stevenson, “Open Field or Enclosure? Peasants, Planters’ Agents and Lawyers in Jamaica, 1866–­1875,” Rural History 12, no. 1 (2001): 41–­59. 26. Henry T. Irving (on behalf of John Peter Grant), response to memorial of James McCleod, William Tongue, John Lyon, Joseph Brown, Daniel McFarlane, Archibald Hamilton, and Samuel Lewin, Sept. 25, 1866, enc. in Grant to Carnarvon, Oct. 9, 1866, no. 2, “Further Correspondence,” pp 1867 [3859] [3909], XLIX, 3. For earlier developments, see H. P. Storks to Edward Cardwell, March 16, 1866, no. 10 (no. 62), in “Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica,” pp 1866 [3595] [3749], LI, 66–­67, and Storks to Cardwell, June 30, 1866, no. 2 (no. 139), “Further Correspondence,” pp 1867 [3859] [3903], 2–­3. Veront M. Satchell, From Plots to Plantations: Land Transactions in Jamaica, 1866–­1900 (Mona, Jamaica: Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1990), 77, discusses the earlier stages of the case, noting Storks’s involvement, but not the later events under Grant’s governorship. 27. Jonathan Dalby, “A Cinderella Service: The Organization and Personnel of the Jamaican Police before and after 1865,” unpublished paper, 2008, citing Grant to Buckingham, no. 248, Oct. 24, 1868, tna co 137/​436. 28. Dalby, “Cinderella Service,” citing Law 16 of 1870, “A Law for the More Effectual Prevention of Crime,” also known as “The Habitual Criminals Law,” and Daily Gleaner, April 24 and 28, 1873. 29. Grant to Buckingham, no. 122, July 9, 1867, tna co 137/​425. 30. V. J. Marsala, Sir John Peter Grant, Governor of Jamaica, 1866–­1874: An Administrative History (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1972), 43. 31. See “The Reformatories Law 1869,” in A Supplement to the Digest of the Laws of Jamaica, Containing Those Passed in the Year 1869, William Rastrick Lee, 78–­81 (Kingston: M. de Cordova, 1870). See also Shani Roper’s discussion in chapter 5, this volume. 32. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-­Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mark Harrison, Public Health and Preventive Medicine in British India, 1859–­1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 33. Marsala, Sir John Peter Grant, 48, 104. This central board of health was, in fact, a re-creation. A central board of health had been created as a temporary measure during the cholera epidemic of 1850–­1851; it was disbanded after the epidemic. 34. James C. Riley, Poverty and Life Expectancy: The Jamaican Paradox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50; Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-­Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–­1907 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 35. Darcy Hughes Heuring, “Health and the Politics of ‘Improvement’ in British Colonial Jamaica, 1914–­1945” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2011), 24. For comparison, see Phillippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).

State Formation in Victorian Jamaica

137

36. Riley, Poverty and Life Expectancy. 37. Riley, Poverty and Life Expectancy, 49–­50. 38. Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Modernity, Religion, and Colonialism in the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 253–­56. 39. Grant to Carnarvon, Nov. 8, 1869, no. 262, tna co 137/444. See also Eileen Boxill, “Developments in Family Law since Emancipation,” West Indian Law Journal 9 (1985): 9–­20. 40. Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 122. 41. Grant to the Dissenting Ministers of Falmouth, April 19, 1869, tna co 137/441, quoted in James Patterson Smith, “The Liberals, Race and Political Reform in the British West Indies, 1866–­1974,” Journal of Negro History 79, no. 2 (1994): 140.

138

D i a n a Pato n

CHAPTER 2

Victorian Jamaica The View from the Colonial Office GAD HEUMAN

During the Victorian period, Jamaica occupied an especially significant position in the context of British imperial policy at two crucial junctures: the advent of full freedom on the island, in 1838, and the repression that followed the Morant Bay rebellion, in 1865. In both cases, and throughout much of the Victorian period, the British Colonial Office regarded itself as the protector of the mass of the population. Yet its vision of that population was profoundly negative and shaped by the increasingly racist thinking of the time. Moreover, the Colonial Office maintained that the success of the plantations was essential for the survival of the colony. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this view had begun to change. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, the apprenticeship system in Jamaica was still in force, although it would come to a premature end in 1838. Under the terms of the apprenticeship, enslaved people were freed on August 1, 1834; however, instead of being truly free, they became apprentices and worked for their previous owners for up to forty-­five hours per week without compensation. The legislation distinguished between field slaves and skilled slaves: Apprenticeship was to end for skilled slaves after four years and for field slaves after six.1 There were many problems with the apprenticeship system. Some planters in Jamaica took an exacting approach toward the apprentices and no longer granted them the allowances they had received during slavery. Since most nonagricultural apprentices were to be freed in four years, many planters classified their apprentices as working solely in agriculture, to take advantage of the longer six-­year term of apprenticeship. In addition, the planter-­dominated House of Assembly sought to enact legislation that preserved the trappings of slave society as far as possible. However, all such legislation was reviewed at the Colonial Office in London, where many of these proposed laws were looked at critically by the permanent undersecretary of state for the colonies, James Stephen (fig. 2.1). Stephen was ideally suited to his task. He had begun work

Fig. 2. 1   (Pietro) Carlo Giovanni Battista Marochetti (Baron Marochetti), Sir James Stephen, 1858. Marble bust. © National Portrait Gallery, London, npg 1029.

at the Colonial Office in 1813 as a legal adviser. Through his family as well as his mentor, William Wilberforce, he was closely connected to the abolitionist movement, and in 1833 he was responsible for the drafting of the bill to abolish slavery. Writing about the apprenticeship legislation generally, Stephen noted that the laws provided “indications of the commencement of a System against which, it is impossible that too prompt or too vigilant a Security should be taken. The tendency of West India Legislation, must, for the present, necessarily be to revive, under new forms of speech, the distinctions in Society which the Abolition Act has brought to an apparent close.” 2 Stephen’s vigilance meant that the Crown vetoed more acts during the four years of apprenticeship than in the subsequent quarter century. Yet the failure of the assembly to deal constructively with the problems of apprenticeship should not have been surprising. The planters were unlikely to alter their traditional attitudes toward the formerly enslaved population immediately after emancipation. As Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson noted, “White dominance of the political, economic and social institutions had to be maintained, for the alternative was seen as ‘black barbarism.’ Emancipation, therefore, did not

140

Gad Heuman

F i g . 2 .2   Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir Henry Taylor, 1867. Albumen print. Getty Museum, 84. xm.443.9. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

change their attitude to the black majority. . . . They considered the ex-­slaves an ignorant, potentially vengeful and vicious populace, who had to be kept in their place lest mayhem ensue.” 3 For the Colonial Office, however, the plantocracy’s response to abolition suggested that representative government was incompatible with the welfare of the freedmen.4 The Emancipation Act, which the House of Assembly passed in 1838, was evidence that the whites would continue to enact laws primarily in their own interests. Stephen criticized the measure because several of its provisions violated the principle that “henceforward the Emancipated Class must be subjected to no penalties, restrains, or disabilities, which did not equally affect every other Class of Society.” The diplomatic language used to convey the government’s reservations about the bill could not obscure the differing outlooks of the officials in England and of the planters in Jamaica.5 In response, the assembly complained about the number of disallowed bills as well as about the Crown’s interference in the colony’s affairs. When parliament continued to pass legislation for the island after the end of apprenticeship, the House of Assembly went on strike. Rather than adopt a bill limiting

View from the Colonial Office

141

the island’s control over its prisons, it refused to carry out its duties. According to Diana Paton, members of the Jamaican elite united in opposition to this measure, “which they saw as a fundamental usurpation of the assembly’s authority.” 6 This stance left the British government with two principal choices: accede to the demands of the assembly and allow the planters to determine the fate of the freed people, or alter the system of government and take on more responsibility for the conduct of affairs in Jamaica. Taylor, the senior official in the West India Department of the Colonial Office, drafted an important memorandum on the subject that argued strongly in favor of abolishing the representative system in Jamaica and elsewhere in the West Indies and adopting Crown Colony government. Taylor, who was also a poet, playwright, and political writer, had been the senior clerk for the West Indies since 1824 and was a supporter of emancipation (fig. 2.2). But he was worried about the oligarchic nature of the assemblies in self-­governing colonies such as Jamaica. Taylor attacked the assembly for refusing to deal with the problems of an emancipated population. He found the assembly to be a highly irresponsible body that was “at all times inaccessible to any motives connected even with justice or humanity to the negroes, let alone their advancement in civilization and qualification for civil rights.” In his view, representative government in Jamaica meant a white oligarchy; furthermore, the ignorant black Jamaicans and the only partly educated colored Jamaicans were not positioned to exercise political power, even though they formed the overwhelming majority of the population. Taylor feared that the situation would soon change and that black and brown men might gain control of the House of Assembly. The new delegates would be no less representative of the population and they would “certainly oppress a white minority of the people . . . but not protect the population at large, for no irresponsible oligarchy of any colour will ever do that.” He believed that the Crown should abolish the House before this development made the situation even more difficult for the government.7 Taylor’s proposal met with considerable opposition in the British cabinet. The weak Whig government was not able to enact even a modified version of the plan. As a result, the Jamaican Assembly survived intact, with the planter class remaining in power. The governor, Lionel Smith, was recalled and replaced by Sir Charles Metcalfe, who received instructions to conciliate the planters (fig. 2.3).8 Metcalfe had spent most of his working life in India; he had occupied the highest posts in the East India Company, including briefly that of acting governor-­general (fig. 2.4). Yet Metcalfe’s experience in India was not altogether welcome in Jamaica. The West India Committee, an organization of planters based in London, was concerned that he would try to abolish the con-

142

Gad Heuman

F i g . 2 .3   George Chinnery, Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, 1st Baron Metcalfe, early 1820s. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London, npg 5381.

stitutional apparatus that the planters were seeking to protect. It soon became apparent that the committee had little to worry about. One indication of a shift in favor of the planters can be found in the official attitude toward immigration. While immigration was not significant during Metcalfe’s term as governor, it did raise some difficult problems. The Colonial Office was concerned with safeguarding the rights of immigrants, but the British government faced what appeared to be a choice between the welfare of the freedmen and the survival of the estates. On the one hand, the planters maintained that the lack of continuous labor after emancipation threatened their existence; immigration was therefore necessary, to make up for the loss of enslaved labor. On the other hand, an influx of immigrants would substantially reduce the wages of the emancipated population and possibly threaten their livelihoods.9 Stephen’s successor at the Colonial Office in 1848, Herman Merivale, saw no contradiction between these arguments. Merivale, who was a former professor of political economy at Oxford, was a Liberal and a strong believer in colonial

View from the Colonial Office

143

Fig. 2. 4   Artist unknown, Portrait of Akbar II with Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe and court dignitaries, circa 1825. Opaque watercolor on paper. Victoria and Albert Museum, 289-­1871.

self-­government. His lectures at Oxford were published in his influential book Lectures on Colonization and Colonies. Writing in 1841, Merivale maintained that immigration was necessary to get the blacks back on the estates; otherwise, the plantations could collapse and the emancipated peasantry “sink into the indolence and apathy so natural to their climate and conditions; [and] content themselves with an easily acquired subsistence, and relapse by degrees into the savage state.” 10 The competition from immigrants would not only force the freed people to work harder but also reduce the cost of sugar and help to ensure the success of emancipation. Merivale’s point of view was not universally accepted in the Colonial Office; Stephen, for example, believed that the plantation system could not survive for long after emancipation. In general, however, most officials were prepared to equate plantations with civilization and accept immigration as a necessary evil.11

144

Gad Heuman

Merivale’s book was symptomatic of the shift in official attitudes toward Jamaica. During the late 1830s, the emphasis had been on the emancipated population; as a result, the Colonial Office had closely scrutinized the legislation of the House for measures that were directed against the freed people. The Anti-­Slavery Society and missionary groups had also prodded the department to veto bills that limited the rights of the ex-­slaves. By the early 1840s, there was far less agitation against the assembly; the more crucial concern now appeared to be the survival of the plantations.12 This shift was reflected in 1849 in the publication of Thomas Carlyle’s infamous essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” For Carlyle, emancipation had been a disaster for the colonies, for the planters and for the blacks, who would not work. Although the Colonial Office did not officially endorse this view, there was agreement among many of its officials that Carlyle was fundamentally right. As Catherine Hall has perceptively pointed out: “Henry Taylor at the Colonial Office and Carlyle were close friends; both saw wage labour as a source of social discipline, and both distrusted democracy. Official reports and memos would not use Carlyle’s language: but they reached many of the same conclusions as to the prospects for the sugar islands.” 13 The colonial secretary in the early 1840s, Lord Stanley, embodied this change in policy: He generally responded more favorably to the arguments of the West Indian planters than to the complaints of the abolitionists (fig. 2.5). Stanley, who later inherited the title of 14th Earl of Derby and served as a Conservative prime minister during the 1850s and 1860s, was eager to get along with the Jamaican House of Assembly and was prepared to accept Governor Metcalfe’s view that the planters were not intent on oppressing the freed population. Stephen was also in Metcalfe’s camp: soon after Stanley came into office, Stephen noted that he was willing to support the governor “even at the expense of acquiescing in many bad measures.” Stephen, more conciliatory than Taylor, hoped that conciliation would accomplish more than the previous practice of disallowing or suspending a significant proportion of the assembly’s legislation.14 Lord Stanley was not only more tolerant of the House than many of his predecessors but also favored the planters in a variety of ways. Since West Indian sugar was gradually losing its protected position in the British market, the colonial secretary sought to compensate the plantocracy by increasing the flow of immigrant labor. He permitted the introduction of laborers from West Africa and then from India when the number of Africans did not prove sufficient. Although the Colonial Office sought to make sure that the planters paid most of the cost of importing the immigrants, it was clear that Stanley wanted

View from the Colonial Office

145

Fig. 2. 5   Matthew Noble, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Lord Derby, 1874. Bronze. Facing Parliament Square, London. Courtesy of Victorianweb.org.

to help the planters regain the prosperity they had lost.15 Their recovery was becoming increasingly difficult, particularly in light of the reduction of sugar duties in England. The loss of protection coincided with the appointment of a new colonial secretary, Earl Grey, who was also concerned about the future of the plantations. Earl Grey, formerly Viscount Howick, was the son of the Whig prime minister and known as a reformer and opponent of slavery. Although the Jamaican planters were alarmed at the prospect of competing in the open market for sugar, Earl Grey was convinced that free trade was the only means of salvaging the plantations. For Grey and for liberal economists of the period, free trade meant the end of monopolies and restrictive tariffs, including the protective duties on sugar. Unlike the estate owners, the colonial secretary believed that protection had damaged the industry by artificially raising the price of sugar and the wages of the laborers. In Grey’s view, the abolition

146

Gad Heuman

of the sugar duties would reverse this pattern. He was not alone in thinking along these lines; Merivale, who was now the permanent undersecretary in the Colonial Office, noted that “far from accelerating the downfall of the West India interest, free trade at the worst delayed it, and it may be hoped, averted it.” 16 The survival of the estates therefore remained an important objective for the Colonial Office. Grey regarded them as not only the chief source of wealth in the island but also the main inducement for the white population to remain there. If the production of sugar ceased or became unprofitable, the departure of the European community would provide “an almost fatal check to the civilization of the Negroes.” 17 As a result, Grey sanctioned immigration to the island and was prepared to advance large sums of money for the purpose. In 1851, he proposed that the House take advantage of a £100,000 loan for immigration, though he insisted on legislation that guaranteed repayment through an export tax and cautioned the assembly against creating a new form of slavery.18 Grey’s concern about the plantations did not differentiate him markedly from his predecessor, Lord Stanley; his interest in the welfare of the emancipated population suggested, however, that he was among the more progressive colonial secretaries. Grey strongly believed that postemancipation policy toward the freed population had been mistaken. Instead of making proper use of the labor that was immediately available to them, the planters had wasted their limited resources on immigration. They had also imposed high import duties that had raised the price of food and encouraged the freed people to grow provisions. The consequence had been a shortfall in the labor supply and a demoralized peasantry.19 Grey’s solution to the problem echoed the plans he had formulated while serving as parliamentary undersecretary in the early 1830s. At that point, Grey had proposed that the newly emancipated population be required to make a small weekly contribution for the support of schools, churches, and public dispensaries. These institutions would have contributed to the “moral improvement” of the freedmen, and “the necessity of earning in each week the means of meeting the required payment would have been a wholesome stimulus to industry, and would have supplied that motive for labour which was unhappily wanting.” It was still not too late to take advantage of his suggestions. The legislature could levy a house tax on the people to provide for effective schools, and it could lower the duties on ordinary food to encourage the freed people to work in the cane fields rather than on their provision grounds. Above all, the plantations could be saved and the peasantry improved.20 Although Grey sought to benefit the formerly enslaved population, he was unable to translate most of his ideas into action. In part, this failure was indic-

View from the Colonial Office

147

ative of the position of the Colonial Office: While it could offer advice to the Jamaican Assembly, the government could not force the delegates to accept its recommendations. Grey was also hampered by his own narrow vision of developments away from the plantations. Like nearly all the officials in the Colonial Office, he believed that the freed people would become idle and revert to a lower stage of civilization once they ceased to work on the estates. His was not quite Thomas Carlyle’s vision of emancipated blacks chewing on pumpkins from imaginary trees, but it was not all that far from that very distorted picture of reality. The result was that Grey’s term of office as colonial secretary, which lasted until 1852, did not witness any dramatic legislation affecting the freed population. Reform had to begin at a different level.21 The most obvious target for significant political change was the House of Assembly. Taylor, who had taken on more work in the Colonial Office when Stephen retired, in 1847, continued to regard the legislature as an impediment to the advance of the freed people.22 Taylor had long believed that the failure to suspend the assembly in 1839 had doomed the prospects of the freed people. Although a governor of Jamaica in the 1850s reported on the progress of the peasantry, Taylor did not believe this account. His view was that the freed people were “all in a very low moral and political condition.” 23 The cause, as with so many other problems in Jamaica, was a long dose of self-­government. Taylor consequently attempted to limit the prerogatives of the House.24 This became especially important in the 1860s, when the Colonial Office again began to consider abolishing the House of Assembly. Edward John Eyre, who became lieutenant-­governor of the island in 1862 and then governor in 1864, was in favor of this policy. Initially, Eyre was interested in reducing the already tiny electorate on the island and raising the qualifications for delegates to the House. A year later, in 1864, he suggested more drastic action: he reported that “a large majority of the intelligent and thinking portion of the Community are of the opinion that it would be a blessing to the Colony if the Assembly was to be abolished.” 25 Although there is reason to doubt the extent of this sentiment, Eyre himself was clearly in the vanguard of those who wanted to get rid of the House. The Colonial Office was prepared to consider changes along this line. By 1863, it had decided to exploit party divisions in the assembly that might lead to a reform of the House. Two years later, Taylor noted that differences among the factions in the assembly could result in its abolition. Taylor’s minute on a resolution attacking the House, which was received by the Colonial Office in July 1865, became the basis for a dispatch welcoming any action along these lines. It noted, “If the majority of the Assembly could be induced to pass enactments in

148

Gad Heuman

amendment of its own constitution, HM’s Government would be ready to give those enactments its most attentive and favorable consideration.” 26 Colonial Office policy had come almost full circle since Taylor had drafted his significant memorandum in 1839. In the intervening nearly thirty years, there had also been significant changes in the House of Assembly. Once a wholly white enclave, the House of Assembly had witnessed the election of colored and black members from the early 1830s. Some of these members grouped together to form a faction, the Town Party, which was generally opposed to the views of the plantocracy. In the 1840s, and especially as a result of the 1849 election, they formed a significant minority: in a House of forty-­five members, there were fourteen brown and three black delegates in the early 1850s. The first black member of the House of Assembly was Edward Vickars, who was a Kingston alderman and magistrate. Another black member of the House, Charles Price, was a master carpenter and builder and served on the Kingston Common Council. The third representative who may have been black was Christopher Walters, a cobbler who by 1860 would become the owner of a sugar estate. Several brown members also worked with their hands or owned small businesses: Samuel Q. Bell was a carpenter, John Nunes owned a livery stable, and Robert L. Constantine was the proprietor of a store. The colored representatives also included professionals and officials. But in the 1850s and 1860s, partly because of a more restrictive franchise, fewer blacks and coloreds were able to win election to the assembly. By 1865, this group proved powerless to prevent the abolition of the assembly. Ultimately, the colored delegates had to deal with a strongly entrenched plantocracy that was intent on retaining the political power and social position it had enjoyed during slavery.27 Despite its interest in transforming Jamaica’s constitution, the British government continued to ignore some of the more fundamental problems on the island. In part, this approach reflected the continuing bias of officials in the Colonial Office, who regarded Jamaica as a plantation colony whose future depended on the productivity of the estates. It was felt, therefore, that the emancipated population would best serve their interests by working for the planters rather than by establishing communities in the interior of the island. This attitude ensured that the Colonial Office would do little to aid the freed people.28 The government maintained the same posture, even when conditions in the island became extremely difficult for most of the population. In 1865, a combination of drought, rising food prices, and high taxes adversely affected the peasantry, some of whom organized a petition to Queen Victoria from “certain poor people” living in the parish of St. Ann. The petitioners complained about the lack of work and appealed for land that they could cultivate. Henry Taylor

View from the Colonial Office

149

drafted the government’s response: Known as the “Queen’s Advice,” it demonstrated how little he appreciated the difficulties facing the people in Jamaica.29 Taylor’s suggestion to the people of St. Ann was to work “not uncertainly or capriciously but steadily and continuously.” Since the plantations would then become productive and pay them high wages, Taylor concluded that “it is from their own industry and prudence, in availing themselves of the means of prospering that are before them . . . that they must look for an improvement in their condition.” 30 These words had little meaning in the context of the problems confronting Jamaica. Taylor did not understand that work was often unobtainable and that the plantations simply could not absorb the pool of labor available in the colony. Like much of colonial policy, the document also accepted Carlyle’s view that at the root of the problem was the blacks’ idleness and poor character rather than the lack of capital and comparatively high cost of producing sugar in Jamaica. Although Taylor was concerned about the plight of the freed population, the Queen’s Advice made it clear that he did not comprehend their needs at all. The outbreak of the Morant Bay rebellion highlighted these problems. On October 11, 1865, several hundred blacks marched into the town of Morant Bay, the principal town in the sugar parish of St. Thomas in the East. Led by Paul Bogle, a native Baptist deacon, the crowd attacked the police station before confronting the militia and the parish authorities. Firing erupted. In the subsequent mêlée, the crowd killed eighteen people. Over the next few days, local people killed two planters and attacked many plantations in the parish.31 While there were specific tensions in the parish of St. Thomas in the East, many of the local problems were symptomatic of difficulties across Jamaica in the aftermath of emancipation. The common people were bitter about the continued political, social, and economic domination of the whites. Among other things, white domination meant a lopsided and partial judicial structure; for many blacks, the only credible solution was an alternative legal system that they themselves controlled. Another problem centered on land: the people believed that their provision grounds belonged to them and that they should not have to pay rent for those lands. Access to land was a symbol of freedom, a freedom that some believed might yet be denied them. In addition, there were repeated complaints about the low wages paid on the plantations. The government’s response to the rebellion was swift and brutal. Governor Eyre declared martial law in the eastern part of Jamaica; he dispatched British troops to the parish and also organized the Maroons to deal with the outbreak. The monthlong period of martial law resulted in the deaths of more than four hundred black Jamiacans. Because of the severity of the repression, the case

150

Gad Heuman

became a cause célèbre in England. John Stuart Mill was among a group of radicals and nonconformists who organized a campaign to have the governor tried for his part in the suppression of the rebellion. In response, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens helped to establish an Eyre Defence Committee. Although Eyre was never brought to trial, the controversy surrounding his case raised questions about the nature of colonial rule and governmental accountability. In Jamaica, Eyre made use of the rebellion to push for constitutional change. With the support of the Colonial Office, he convinced a frightened House that they should opt for Crown Colony government. Although there was some opposition to this step within the House of Assembly, the legislators ultimately accepted it. This meant classic Crown Colony government, with a nominated Legislative Council consisting of six officials and three unofficial members, and the abolition of the two-­hundred-­year-­old House of Assembly.32 In this form of Crown Colony rule, there were no elections: All Jamaicans were therefore disenfranchised. Whites in Jamaica and imperial officials shared the view that in light of the rebellion at Morant Bay, the franchise could not be extended to blacks. Moreover, the local whites believed that leadership of the colony had to come from Britain; whites in Jamaica were willing “to surrender their time-­honoured exercise of power because they were terrified by the violence, and were no longer willing to accept full responsibility for governing ‘unruly’ blacks in the wake of the events at Morant Bay.” 33 White Jamaicans also believed that Crown Colony government posed no threat to their continued economic and social power in the island.34 Crown Colony government did have certain advantages. Unlike the system of representative government, with its often fractious assemblies, there was limited scope for serious political divisions in the legislature. Administration was smoother; there was effectively no opposition to the governor. It was therefore possible to inaugurate administrative changes that were long overdue. The governor given the responsibility of administering this new form of government was Sir John Peter Grant (see fig. 1.1). Grant was a retired Indian civil servant whose previous appointment had been as lieutenant-­governor of Bengal. In that capacity, he had initiated several significant reforms, including the abolition of the system of bond labor used in the cultivation of rice. Grant had also dealt with a series of indigo riots in Bengal. During his more than thirty years of service in India, then, Grant confronted problems with Indian labor and with British planters that would prove to be very useful during his tenure in Jamaica. Moreover, he presided over a system in Bengal in which, as in Jamaica, he was the virtual ruler of the province.35

View from the Colonial Office

151

Once in Jamaica, Grant initiated a significant number of administrative reforms, among which were a new system of district courts, the creation of a more modern police force, and the disestablishment of the Church of England in the colony. Grant also encouraged the immigration of East Indian laborers. During his administration, roads were improved, new irrigation schemes developed, and more money devoted to education. Many of these projects had been debated by the House of Assembly but had been shelved because of their high cost or the lack of political will to carry them out.36 But there were also problems with Crown Colony government. Reforms were expensive, and taxes had to be increased. This step was taken without the involvement of the people or their representatives. In theory, the Crown was acting on behalf of the mass of the population until the people became sufficiently educated for the exercise of representative government. In practice, the Colonial Office was not always well placed to act in this capacity. Its knowledge of local conditions was often fragmentary, and its distance from Jamaica frequently led to delays and misunderstandings. Because the Colonial Office was focused on answering dispatches, officials generally reacted to developments in the colonies rather than initiating new policies.37 During the 1870s, hostility to Crown Colony government in Jamaica in­ creased. With the system dominated by expatriate white officials, blacks and people of color felt the loss of political offices that had previously been open to them. Yet local whites also resented Crown Colony government, since it excluded Jamaicans generally. Agitation against the system led to its modification: in 1884, the Legislative Council was altered to consist of an equal number of official and unofficial members. The unofficial members were elected on a restricted franchise determined by regulations like those in place in the 1860s: only males who paid direct taxes worth at least ten shillings or earned a salary of £50 or more per annum could vote. Moreover, the unofficial members could only be outvoted if the governor declared the issue to be of paramount importance. It was this political system that had to deal with the economic crisis of the late nineteenth century.38 The problem was caused primarily by European beet sugar producers increasing their production substantially during the second half of the century. By 1870, they produced nearly one-­third of the total world sugar output. When Germany, the world’s major producer of beet sugar, doubled bounties on its sugar exports in 1883–­1884, the effect on the British market was dramatic, with a massive increase in the amount of beet sugar imported into Britain and, consequently, a collapse in the sugar price. The position of West Indian sugar worsened further when the French and Germans doubled their bounties on

152

Gad Heuman

beet sugar in 1896, leading to a further drop in sugar prices the following year. In Jamaica, the planters claimed that they were threatened with extinction.39 The precarious state of the Jamaican and broader West Indian economies prompted the British government to act. It established a royal commission to examine the situation and appointed Sir Henry Norman as its chairman. Norman had been a governor of Jamaica in the 1880s and had also served as an administrator and military commander in India. While governor of the island, Norman had encouraged policies designed to increase peasant cultivation. For Norman and for his fellow commissioners in 1897, the peasantry represented the future of Jamaica and the wider West Indies.40 The commission’s report made clear that sugar could no longer support the economies of the West Indies. Something else was needed to take its place. Since the commissioners did not envision manufacturing replacing sugar production, they looked instead to the role of peasant proprietors. Their main recommendation turned nineteenth-­century British policy toward the plantations and toward the peasantry on its head: “No reform affords so good a prospect for the permanent welfare in future of the West Indies as the settlement of the labouring population on the land as small peasant proprietors.” 41 The commissioners outlined specific measures to help the peasantry. Crown land in colonies such as Jamaica should be made available to the peasants. Moreover, the peasantry needed both help in improving their cultivation techniques and improved access to markets through the construction of better roads and bridges. In addition, the commission recommended that colonial and imperial governments should encourage the sale of peasant-­grown staples to the North American market. As Richard Lobdell has argued, “this represented a complete abandonment of the established doctrine that social stability and economic progress in the West Indies depended on the production of sugar by plantations.” 42 These proposals were undoubtedly radical. They represented an enormous shift away from the notion that the future of Jamaica depended on sugar and on the plantations. Throughout most of the Victorian period, the Colonial Office had regarded the plantations as essential to maintaining civilization on the island. Without the plantations, whites would flee; without whites, the freed population would descend into barbarism. By the end of the Victorian period, however, this view was no longer tenable. The collapse of the sugar economy in Jamaica made it imperative to think in very different terms. As a result, the critical issue was no longer the survival of the plantations but the growth of the peasantry. Victoria’s reign had witnessed a significant shift in thinking about Jamaica’s future and that of the wider West Indies.

View from the Colonial Office

153

Notes 1. William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–­1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), chap. 5. 2. The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Colonial Office records (hereafter co), 323/​51, Stephen to Grant, April 30, 1835. 3. Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 2. 4. A complete list of acts that the Crown disallowed during this period is available in co 137/​396, “List of Acts disallowed in Jamaica from 1834 to [1865].” 5. co 137/​228, Glenelg to Smith, August 31, 1838, Stephen’s draft. 6. Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–­1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 118. 7. National Archives, Edward Cardwell Papers, 30/48/​7/44, Taylor’s memorandum, January 19, 1839. 8. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 118–­19; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 108–­12. 9. co 138/​55, Stephen to Russell, June 6, 1840. 10. Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies Delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841, and reprinted in 1861 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1861), 320. 11. Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, 331–­32; co 137/​252, Stephen to Smith, December 16, 1840, Inter-­office minute. 12. co 137/​252, Rev. J. H. Tredgold to Russell, July 18, 1840, enclosure: Memorial from the British and Anti-­Slavery Society; co 137/​253, Stephen to Smith, June 20, 1840. 13. [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine, XL (December 1849); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867 (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), 351. 14. co 137/​256, Stephen to Hope, September 15, 1841, Interoffice memorandum. 15. co 323/​61, Stephen to Gladstone, April 7, 1846; co 137/​281, Stanley to Elgin, August 19, 1844. 16. Henry G. Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), 1:58; Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, 339. 17. Grey, Colonial Policy, 1:63. 18. co 137/​310, Earl Grey to Charles Grey, Nov. 12, 1851, no. 453. 19. Grey, Colonial Policy, 1:63; co 137/​307, Earl Grey to Charles Grey, February 15, 1851, no. 398. 20. co 137/​307, Earl Grey to Charles Grey, February 15, 1851, no. 398. 21. co 137/​307, Earl Grey to Charles Grey, February 15, 1851, no. 398; [Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” 671; Grey, Colonial Policy, 1:173.

154

Gad Heuman

22. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Taylor Papers, 1840–­1849, Taylor to Villiers, October 27, 1847, 188–­89. 23. co 137/​322, Barkly to Newcastle, February 21, 1854, no.  24, Taylor’s minute on stipendiary magistrates’ reports, April 16, 1854; co 137/​349, Darling to Newcastle, March 28, 1860, no. 49, Taylor’s minute. 24. co 137/​334, Bell to Labouchere, March 24, 1857, no. 24, enclosure, Taylor’s minute. 25. co 137/​380, Eyre to Newcastle, March 17, 1864, no. 105. 26. co 137/​391, Eyre to Cardwell, June 6, 1865, no. 137, Taylor’s minute. 27. Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–­1865 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981). For a fuller discussion of the colored and black Jamaicans in the House of Assembly, see Heuman, Between Black and White, chap. 5. 28. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 313. 29. Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994), 48–­49, 54. 30. co 137/​390: Eyre to Cardwell, April 25, 1865, no. 115, enclosure and Taylor’s minute; Cardwell to Eyre, June 14, 1865, no. 222. 31. The discussion of the rebellion and its suppression is based on Heuman, “The Killing Time.” 32. Heuman, “The Killing Time,” 190; H. A. Will, Constitutional Change in the British West Indies, 1880–­1903 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 11. 33. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 3. 34. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902 (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991), 12. 35. Vincent John Marsala, Sir John Peter Grant: Governor of Jamaica, 1866–­1874 (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1972), 30–­31. 36. Heuman, “The Killing Time,” 177. 37. Will, Constitutional Change in the British West Indies, 1880–­1903, 3. 38. Heuman, “The Killing Time,” 177–­78; Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 4. 39. Richard A. Lobdell, “Patterns of Investment and Sources of Credit in the British West Indian Sugar Industry, 1838–­1897,” Journal of Caribbean History 4 (1972): 325; R. W. Beachey, The British West Indies Sugar Industry in the Late 19th Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1957), 59, 148–­49. 40. Richard A. Lobdell, “British Officials and the West Indian Peasantry, 1842–­1938,” in Labour in the Caribbean, ed. Malcolm Cross and Gad Heuman (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1988), 199, 203–­4. 41. Lobdell, “British Officials and the West Indian Peasantry, 1842–­1938,” 200. 42. Lobdell, “British Officials and the West Indian Peasantry, 1842–­1938,” 201.

View from the Colonial Office

155

CHAPTER 3

Liberalism, Colonial Power, Subjectivities, and the Technologies of Pastoral Coloniality The Jamaican Case ANTHONY BOGUES

But further, there can be little doubt that the establishment of a governing power consentaneous with the spirit of those laws and fitted to mould the whole state of things . . . is the only remedy for the existing discordancy between old institutions of these colonies and the new rights given to the negroes.

Memorandum on the West Indian Assemblies, Colonial Office, January 19, 1839 How strange is the race of Creole negroes — ​­of negroes, that is, born out of Africa!

Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860) It seems to me that few men in England have done more [than you] to make for that condition of Imperial Unity which is the ideal of all who think seriously of the problems of the mother-­land and her colonies.

John Henderson, letter to Sir Alfred Jones, 1905

The history of liberalism has many narratives. In intellectual history and political thought, the conventional story is most often a smooth account, with outstanding nineteenth-­century thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham engaged in an internalist conversation about rights, liberty, political obligation, and property. John Gray has argued that liberalism is about a “set of distinctive features which . . . marks it off from other modern intellectual traditions and their associated political movements.” 1 Liberalism in all its various guises, Gray notes, is a single tradition. The standard historical examination of liberalism and its various practices of politics often revolves around considerations of the American and French Revolutions. In the past few years, however, there have

been robust attempts to think about nineteenth-­century liberalism in particular and its relationships to various European colonial empires.2 Often the preoccupation of these works, while they seek to restore both discursive and political context, has been with the writings and political ideas of the canonical thinkers of the period. This focus ignores various practices and policies that emerged from other sites, like the British Colonial Office, then a venue for vigorous intellectual debate about colonial power and policy and their implementation.3 It is a strange elision, since nineteenth-­century liberalism was concerned with the terms of representative government and notions of political obligation at the very same time as the British Colonial Office was consistently debating the meanings and practices of what they termed “responsible government.” For the nineteenth-­century colonial official, key questions were how the “native” would adapt to the ways of European civilization and whether this adaptation would eventually lead to self-­government. These matters led to a notion of “trusteeship,” which was formulated by Thomas Babington Macaulay during his involvement with colonial governance and India in the 1830s. Central to the doctrine was the idea that the imperial duty of Britain was like a “trust to be fulfilled.” Yet some of us who attempt to write a counterhistory of liberalism have failed to pay significant attention to these issues and continue to focus on the canonical authors of political thought and philosophy, thereby further consolidating the idea of liberalism as an abstract, normative, and universal political configuration.4 In such cases political thought is reduced to the domain of a few thinkers and thought is cut off from deed. Perhaps the time has come for us to study political thought not only in terms of discourse and ideational systems but also as speech acts in which deeds have meanings and practices give shape to thought. From this stance, liberalism is not simply an ideology or discourse but also a political language that is shaped by practice.5 So, while it is necessary to critique canonical figures, perhaps if we shift our gaze to the policies and practices of colonial power and to those who wrote and thought about such power, we will be able to grapple with how liberal political practice developed technologies of rule that continue to haunt the contemporary liberal project. Moreover, this may allow us to theorize in a fuller way the nineteenth-­century liberal moment. This chapter makes such a shift. Working through one of the early memoranda that outlined the case for the Crown Colony in Jamaica, as well as with the biography of Henry Taylor and the Oxford lectures of Herman Merivale delivered between 1839 and 1841, the discussion sketches some of the ways in which British colonial power attempted to practice a technology of rule in the mid-­nineteenth century in Jamaica, where the political objective was tute-

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

157

lage. It was, however, a contradictory practice, since the “natives” were a black majority and there was a consistent political fear of black majority rule. The dictates of the plantation economy required a specific logic of labor in which black bodies were still subordinated. Such a subordination would complicate any effort to balance planter and ex-­slave in a trusteeship that was tied to a primary objective of rule by tutelage. The practices of tutelage were deployed primarily through education, religion, and the work of missionaries, in a historical process that Catherine Hall calls “civilizing subjects.” 6 But the process was never smooth and was always full of fits and starts, particularly as the colonial power made efforts to create a juridical process for its rule. My core argument here is simple: that in the immediate postemancipation period, a terrain of colonial rule and contestation took shape in Jamaica on which the most important struggle concerned the layered symbolic order brought into being by colonial power. Such a system of power worked through different organs — ​ ­ideological, juridical, and security-­related — ​­and was primarily concerned with subject formation. Enforced by the sword when necessary, nineteenth-­century British colonial power attempted to practice a form of hegemonic rule that can be called “pastoral coloniality.” In deploying this term I am arguing that central to the imperial liberal moment after the ending of slavery in the Caribbean was the attempt to develop forms of rule that created new subjectivities. Michel Foucault once observed that it would be productive to think about power as a technique “that makes individuals subjects.” 7 When thinking about how individuals are made subjects, one typically turns to the rich discussion that surrounds ideology and interpellation.8 However the colonial context was not a liberal one, in which rule was manufactured by consent. Colonial power is of the sword, as conquest is never about persuasion. Thus, there was always a profound tension in colonial attempts to manufacture consent. Second, because colonial power is primarily about forced, not persuaded, hegemony, it must first manufacture new subjectivities. Indeed, colonialism has always involved the creation of a new social category: the native. In the Jamaican case, the abolition of slavery marked the passage for the black body from slave to native. The creation of the native in Jamaica followed a pattern according to which power shifted from absolute coercion to forms of tutelage. Such a shift was embedded within emerging political ideas about representative government and political liberty found in nineteenth-­century liberalism. This shift, or rather the explicit addition of tutelage to the repertoire of colonial rule, in turn created a specific and constant opposition to hegemonic colonial rule that Rex Nettleford has called the “battle for space.” 9 The argument here does not negate the fact that attention should be paid to rebellions, most particularly the Morant Bay rebel-

158

Anthony Bogues

lion. Rather, it suggests that for a brief moment, after the abolition of racial slavery, there was a discernable shift in colonial policy concerning colonial rule as slaves became subjects not property. In this transition one key question for imperial power was how to govern such newly created subjects, who remained in the imperial mind, “320, 000 black people just emancipated still in the depths of ignorance . . . [with] their African temperament highly excitable,” as Henry Taylor’s memorandum of 1839 recorded. When Britain began the colonization of the Caribbean along with the plantation system in the mid-­seventeenth century, first in Barbados and then in Jamaica, the preamble of the parliamentary act that rendered the colonialization and slavery legal stated, “The trade to and from Africa is very advantageous to Great Britain, and necessary for supplying the plantations and colonies, thereunto belonging, with a sufficient number of negroes, at reasonable rates.” As this preamble made clear, early British colonial power understood plantation racial slavery as “an advantageous branch of commerce.” 10 It is notable that after emancipation, commerce was aligned with a civilizing mission, thus making a new ground for the colonial problem of governing the black body. All of this occurred within broader contexts: the beginning of the formal colonization of Africa; a set of discourses about the differences between the “Creole Negro” and the African; colonial anthropology and the importance of notions of customs and traditions; the consequences of the Indian uprising of 1857 and, later, “indirect rule”; and virulent forms of “scientific” racism. It is, I would argue, of importance for us to examine the various parts of the British Empire in comparative terms. One consequence of tutelage was its impact on early twentieth-­century Caribbean anticolonial thinking.11 This form of pastoral colonial rule would lead the Barbadian novelist and poet George Lamming to write evocatively in In the Castle of My Skin (1953),“The queen freed some of us because she made us feel that the empire was bigger than the garden. . . . The empire and the garden. We are to speak of them in the same way.” 12 Racial slavery was a global social system of human domination buttressed by laws, codes, and customs. At the core of the system lay the construction of the African body as a “res,” what the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia calls “property in the person.” 13 As in every social system, formal legal action and the creation of laws and codes were required to govern that body. As a form of absolute rule over, one in which the black body became a “living corpse,” 14 British colonial racial slavery was preoccupied with what the British Government called “acts for governing the Negro” and “acts for protection of the Negro.” For example, an act of 1817 speaks of the need for a Council of Protection, aimed at protecting the interests of the black population, while laws in the late

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

159

seventeenth century had focused on “acts for governing the Negroes.” 15 In the postemancipation period, the ideas of protecting and governing the ex-­slave as forms of regulatory behavior were fused. During the period of slavery, advocates for the protection of black Jamaicans focused their attention on the use of the slave body as an instrument of labor and therefore as an investment that needed to be treated with reason. However, in the postemancipation period, the debate about protection revolved around what came to be known in some Colonial Office circles as the “rights of the Negroes.” So how did the Colonial Office develop a notion of the “rights of the Negroes,” and what did this new conceptual framework mean for colonial rule in the Victorian period in Jamaica, where the colonial authorities also aspired to discipline the body of the black ex-­slave?

The End of Slavery and the New Context The abolition act of 1833 presented the possibility that colonial power could be deployed in a different guise within the British Empire. Just as the loss of the American colonies in the eighteenth century had prompted that British colonial power to review its modalities of rule, so too the end of racial slavery in the British colonies engendered debate and review of forms of colonial domination. These events were framed by broader historical developments. For while British colonial power had lost the American colonies in the late eighteenth century, when other European colonial empires could match British colonial strength, by the mid-­nineteenth century, Britain was well on its way to becoming the premier imperial power. Historians have noted that there were two distinct periods to the growth of the British Empire during the nineteenth century. From 1830 to 1850 there was a marked shift toward free trade. Among the various elements that characterize the subsequent period are two features that are of special importance to this discussion: the attempt to create colonial self-­government in some white-­settler colonies and the idea of Britain as an imperial power in which the unity of the empire was paramount.16 This idea of unity was expressed most clearly in the notion of the colonial power’s civilizing mission. The centrality of this mission meant, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “There are . . . conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of higher civilization.” 17 In the Jamaican case, despotism was understood as a necessary prologue to self-­government, since imperial political thought did not deem the majority black population in the aftermath of slavery ready for representative self-­government. From the colo-

160

Anthony Bogues

nial frame the ex-­slave had now become, in Mill’s words, “her majesty’s loyal subjects.” 18 From 1834 to 1838, the majority of the Jamaican black population lived under apprenticeship. This system, which replaced racial slavery, was onerous. Planter rule over the ex-­slaves was enforced by harsh punishments, with the dreaded treadmill as the exemplar.19 Ex-­slave James Williams recalled, I was a slave belonging to Mr Senior and his sister. . . . I have been very ill treated by Mr. Senior and the magistrates since the new law come in. Apprentices get a great deal more punishment now than they did when they was slaves; the master take spite and do all he can to hurt them before the free come.20 Some white abolitionists were concerned about the dominance of punishment as a vehicle for order and rule in the Jamaican colony. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey traveled throughout the Caribbean region and observed, in their work The West Indies in 1837, “Many of the treadmills, as we have shewn, are instruments not of punishment but of torture. From their construction, they are not capable of their legitimate object, the enforcement of a species of severe labor.” 21 Here we see a collision between local elites and the Colonial Office. Politically defeated and irate about abolition, although they would receive compensation for what then was considered a loss of property, the Jamaican planters failed to understand that the colonial empire desired to shift its forms of rule in the Caribbean. So, on the one hand, planters continued to treat the ex-­slave as an object, a thing, while, on the other hand, with the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office and the makers of British colonial policy were rethinking modes of governing. While there was much agreement between planter and colonial official, areas of disagreement were indicative of subtle shifts in imperial rule. On this point, it is important to note that while within British colonial responses to the slave trade some attention was paid to the humanitarian chords that operated in contemporary liberal thought at the time, this was not the case for the West Indian planters. It is also crucial to note that by the 1850s “explorations” of Africa under David Livingstone and others were also underway. Livingstone had initially thought that his missionary and​ medical work should be done in the Caribbean but was persuaded to go instead to Africa. The antislavery movement in Britain had generated a wave of liberal humanitarianism in which the ideal of the civilizing mission collided oftentimes with the logic of colonial conquest and the sword.22 As Aimé Césaire makes clear, colonialism is not only exploitative but also dehumanizing.23 The vaunted civilizing mission, its objective being the hege-

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

161

monic creation of a specific kind of subject, was often reinforced or even replaced by the sword and might. However, we should not ignore attempts at hegemonic constructions, which often had an afterlife that leaves traces in our present. The formation of a colonial state and of forms of “colonial governmentality” saw interaction between three social forces: the imperial country, the local-­settler ruling circle, and the mass of the population. The construction of hegemony and domination is always contested. So, while colonial policy was generally created with the interests of the planters and the local elite in mind, it was also concerned with governing the African slaves, who were now ex-­slaves.

Her Majesty’s Subjects and Not Yet Citizens: The Native Question

When Herman Merivale, a professor of political economy at Oxford, began to deliver his series of lectures on colonization in 1837, he did so with the clear understanding that there was a line leading from the lectures to colonial policy formulated in Parliament and on to the administration of empire from the Colonial Office. The last lecture was delivered in 1841, and the lectures were published that year.24 By 1847 Merivale had become assistant undersecretary for the colonies, eventually rising to be the permanent undersecretary for India in 1859. His lectures became the grist of much debate, and briefly Merivale’s theories were understood by many in colonial policy circles as a possible new frame for imperial power. For Merivale, the native question was central to colonial rule in the nineteenth century.25 And in his view, “The duties of colonial government towards the natives comprised within the limits of the colony, then seem to arrange themselves under two heads — ​­protection and civilization.” 26 Merivale argued in his lectures that previous forms of colonial conquest had “general features [in which there was] a wide and sweeping destruction of native races by the uncontrolled violence of individuals and colonial authorities.” 27 He felt that the reason for this destruction resided not in colonialism itself but in the execution of policy. For Merivale, colonialism was a necessary historical process that would unite different racial groups through “amalgamation.” He writes, By amalgamation, I mean the union of natives with settlers in the same community, as master and servant, as fellow-­labourers, as fellow citizens and, if possible connected by intermarriage. And I mean by it, not that eventual and distant process to which some appear to look, by which a native community, when educated and civilized, is to be at some future period admitted, en masse to full rights of citizenship.28

162

Anthony Bogues

Notice the way in which hierarchy remains in Merivale’s thought and that there is a passage from subject to citizenship. The distinction in liberal political thought between citizen and subject had been consolidated by the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in which citizenship became a special status wherein rights were bestowed on the subject, thereby effecting a transformation of the individual in the social and political domains. The act of abolition in 1833 and the final ending of slavery in 1838 made the ex-­slaves subjects but not citizens. In other abolition processes, citizenship was immediate: The declaration of 1794 in France, in great part a result of the Haitian Revolution, declared the ex-­slaves of St. Domingue French citizens, although this process of slave emancipation and citizenship was consolidated only in the 1801 constitution of Toussaint L’Ouverture. We should also note that the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804 by Jean-­Jacques Dessalines created a different political language for citizenship. In the United States, the emancipation process included black male suffrage, which was then rolled back after the defeat of Reconstruction. In British imperial liberal thought, however, citizenship could only be bestowed after a period of tutelage. With regard to race, Merivale’s position was similar in many respects to some strands of liberal thought at the time. He understood racism in cultural and civilizational terms, not biological ones, and so for him education and training would make the native capable of becoming a citizen. He differed from liberalism in timing: The civilization process was not some distant future project for Merivale, who suggested that by intermarriage the “native” would quickly enter the kingdom of civilization. Merivale’s position was premised on features central to liberal political thought during the Victorian era, assumptions about character and the possibility of development and progress. Stefan Collini has compellingly argued that the idea of character, understood as “the mental and moral qualities that distinguish an individual or race viewed as a homogenous whole,” was central to Victorian political thought.29 “Character” implied a set of settled dispositions, a certain kind of subjectivity that would mark one as a civilized citizen. It was an ideal form of what it meant to be human at a specific historical time. Character was about matters such as comportment and dress as well as morals; it incorporated duties, virtues, and responsibilities and was linked directly to masculinity or “manliness.” It was also linked to conceptions of progress and development, since it was about constant improvement.30 Since liberalism has individualism at its core, the individual character takes on a special meaning. In a racial world order, the idea of character is understood on racial terms. In a racial context, the idea of improvement was in contestation with a notion advocated by those who

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

163

argued against the abolition of slavery on the grounds that after emancipation the blacks would return to barbarism. In imperial liberal thought, therefore, tutelage and civilization could result in improvement, and the male ex-­slave could become a mirror image of the Englishman. It has been suggested that one of the differences between French and British colonial power can be found in the construction of the “native”: the French mission civilisatrice sought to assimilate the native, while the British wanted to tutor the native on a path of self-­government.31 The difference between these forms of colonial power was not so great. For the French, assimilation implied no need for self-­government, while for British colonial power becoming civilized was a requirement for a form of self-­government. Both colonial projects, then, were about creating new subjectivities. This complex process of subject formation, of civilizing, was clearly articulated for Jamaica in Henry Taylor’s memorandum of 1839.

The Rights of Negroes Sir Henry Taylor entered the service of the Colonial Office in 1824. A poet and a minor person of letters, he had traveled to the West Indies in his youth and had supported the British abolitionist movement. In the late 1830s the Colonial Office was faced with irate planters who had been politically defeated. At issue was how to manage the new situation, in which the majority of the population as former slaves had a historical past that for hundreds of years had been based upon a racial order in which the black body was property. As an “expert” in West Indian affairs, Taylor drafted a memorandum about a possible course of action for the Colonial Office. It is a document that spells out in the clearest manner the ways in which a new hegemony might be constructed within a different institution of rule newly created by Crown Colony. The core of this form of rule was that the imperial government in London directly ruled Jamaica without a locally elected legislative council. Crown Colony was an autocratic form of government, particularly when viewed within the context of the then debates about self-­government or limited forms of representative government for white-­settler colonies. We need here to remind ourselves of the early formation of the Jamaican colonial slave state. When the colony was seized from the Spanish in 1655, the initial form of colonial political order was military. In the later nineteenth century, historian W. J. Gardner recorded that at the time of a mutiny in April 1660, “the men wanted to live no longer as soldiers, but to settle as colonists.” 32 By May 1661, the English crown sent to the island a set of instructions that ordered the white settlers to form a council

164

Anthony Bogues

of twelve to administer the island. But what did it mean to live like colonists, to have the “rights of Englishmen” (later a key concept in the rebellion of the American colonies against the British crown) when African slave servitude determined the order of society? Edward Long in his three-­volume history of the island, published in 1774, confronted this question: In regard to colony administration in general there is scarcely an author on the subject, who has not produced instances of consummate tyranny and injustice practiced in the these remote parts of the British Empire. The subjects here may be compared to the helpless offspring of a planter . . . exiled beyond the reach of fatherly protection. . . . There needs to be, free assemblies of the commons . . . and . . . the planters or owners of slaves in our colonies should be fully supported in the practice of British freedom, to the fullest extent that our constitution will bear.33 For Long and others, African enslaved servitude did not attenuate the need for the “rights of Englishmen” to be recognized or for the Creole white to be treated differently because he or she resided in the colonies. Africans were for Long inherently and by nature inferior and could not be educated. In this view, he was not alone. The government of the colony proceeded on two levels. Internally, white planters and settlers with adequate property qualifications were given the “rights of Englishmen,” but because the colony had to be governed as a slave colony, slave laws were also part of the political order. Externally, the colony was also governed from England as part of the British Empire. These layers of rule at times came into conflict, but the central political question for both the local planters and the Colonial Office during the period of colonial plantation slavery was how to govern the black slave. Understanding that one could not sidestep the history of the internal rule of the colony, Taylor began his memorandum by outlining the history of the Jamaican assembly, which was dominated by the planters. He writes, “The establishment of the assembly appears to have been merely the arrangement which the government of Charles II fixed upon, a year or two after the restoration, as the most convenient.” 34 Here Taylor was suggesting that given the character of such an arrangement, there was no need for the Colonial Office to think of the planter representative system as permanent; it could be disbanded without legal ramifications. Noting that the property qualification for sitting in the assembly was debt-­f ree and extensive landownership, he observes that “the structure of the society [affords] no support to the Crown either from an extended public opinion (which has no existence) or from proprietary connection to the government.” 35 As a result, Taylor argues, “the Queen’s government takes no cogni-

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

165

zance of the manner in which the revenues of Jamaica are expended . . . looking therefore at the Assembly . . . on the side of financial affairs it presents the aspect which might be expected in a body representing no considerable class.” 36 Tellingly, this observation implied that the planter class was not considered to be of any merit. Elements in the British Colonial Office had evidently begun to think of this politically defeated group as a spent force, a consideration driven in part by the perception that a shift in colonial policy was required. But the nub of the memorandum emerges when Taylor makes clear that more important than the point of financial integrity is that of political feeling; and in this respect the Assembly of Jamaica may be said to be the very result and representative of slavery — ​­proud and stubborn and at all times inaccessible to any motives connected even with justice or humanity to the negroes. Let alone their advancement in civilization and qualification for civil rights. 37 For Taylor and others, as “her majesty’s subjects” the ex-­slaves now had rights that the planters and the elite in the local assembly would not respect. Following Merivale, Taylor thought that the objective of colonial polity was protection and civilization. Earlier in the memorandum he had noted, The blacks have neither property nor knowledge and therefore cannot have political power, or communicate it through an exercise of the rights of a constituency. Yet they are the mass of the people, and if there is to be any representation it ought to be in their interests mainly that they are to be represented.38 This new preoccupation by some elements of the Colonial Office, as I suggested above, represented a liberal interpretation of colonial power. For Taylor, the newly emerged Jamaican brown middle class could not be trusted to represent black interests. He writes, The colored class have some property and such a portion of knowledge as may just enable them to possess political influence . . . yet are still worse affected towards the blacks; and standing between two classes . . . they have naturally shewn themselves disposed to make an alliance with the dominant and aristocratic class. . . .The obvious truth is that every attempt at a representative system in such a community must result in an oligarchy.39 Taken to its logical conclusion Taylor’s argument made clear that if the political order was to follow the colonial policy of protection and civilization,

166

Anthony Bogues

then Crown Colony government was required. Stymied by the logic of colonial rule and liberalism that privileged a politics of representation, Taylor could not see any contradiction between his desires for both protection and representation at the same time. But we should not expect him to, and there was more at stake here. For the colonial government to protect most blacks, the ex-­slaves who now had subject rights needed to occupy a new social category — ​­that of the native. Here, one should pause and tease out the modalities of protection and civilization as a form of subject formation and rule. What did it mean now to be a “subject” and not a slave? In this context, it is necessary to dissect the precise meanings of the rights of the subject and the rights of the citizen. The subject is not necessarily allowed to vote, to have a voice in his or her own affairs. As a subject the individual has legal protection and can petition or adopt other forms of protest against a wrong, but it does not reside within the power of the subject to right this wrong. The righting of the wrong is the prerogative of those on high who in law are to protect the subject. The subject has no active agency, which is why the Morant Bay rebellion so frightened colonial circles and the local elites, as many saw the rebellion as an act of citizenship. The boundaries between subjects and citizens were tightly drawn in the British liberal colonial mind, and passage from one to the other flowed through the process of tutelage.

The Creole Black as the Jamaican Native Subject One of the epigraphs to this chapter cites Anthony Trollope’s characterization of the African in Jamaica as a “Creole negro.” Trollope argued that this Creole negro group “had no country and no language of their own and their religion was by adoption.” 40 Trollope ends his observations on the “Creole negro” thus: “These, I think, are the qualities of the negro. Many of them are in their way good; but are they not such as we have generally seen in the lower spheres of life.” 41 Trollope developed this racialized version of the black ex-­slave in part as a polemic against views he believed to be prevalent in England, where the “Creole negro” was now being “praised for his piety.” 42 Another view at the time depicted the creole Jamaican black as a distinctive figure. In The West Indies; Painted by A. S. Forrest; Described by John Henderson, published in 1905, we find the following description of the Jamaican black: In character, the Jamaican negroes are a mixture of good and bad; of Africa and Europe with the vices of both blacks and whites and only

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

167

some virtues of the People of Europe. They are civilized with a sort of quasi-­civilization. . . . In many ways the Jamaican native resembles his coloured brother of the American states.43 The emergence of the black Jamaican as the native was contested. From abolition onward, two main technologies of rule were deployed to construct black subjectivity as the mirror likeness of the respectable colonial native. Religion and education were to mold these new subjects. Before 1865, the vigorous efforts to Christianize the black ex-­slave seem to have foundered as the latter transformed Christianity into Afro-­Jamaican religions. Robert Stewart observes, “The frustrations experienced by the European churches in attempting to implant a system of religious and moral practice among the ex-­slave population . . . did not mean that blacks rejected that culture in preference for a secular and amoral society. On the contrary, the other side of the coin of missionary frustration was the triumph of Afro-­creole religious practices and social norms.” 44 This triumph resulted in the emergence of religions like Myal and Kumina. It is on this terrain, in my view, that the contestation about what the Afro-­Jamaican native would become was sharpest. Since liberalism focused on character and its possibilities, religion became a central terrain of the symbolic order required to civilize as well as discipline the ex-­slaves. The English historian R. G. Collingwood wrote in the introduction to his translation of Guido de Ruggiero’s History of European Liberalism, considered in the early twentieth century to be the seminal book on liberalism, “The aim of liberalism is to assist the individual to discipline himself and achieve his own moral progress.” From such a perspective, religion became a tool for governing. In writing about how symbolic orders function, the Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter notes that a “cultural signifying system” would have been critical for colonial power as it produced natives who were considered less than human. The dehumanization of black slaves meant that resistance would occur often through the reorganization of a cultural signifying system. In a seminal article, Wynter argues that Afro-­Jamaicans developed a cultural history in which they “humanize the landscape by peopling it with gods and spirits, with demons and duppies, with all the rich panoply of man’s imagination.” 45 This humanization on the Afro-­Jamaican’s own terms created a symbolic order that ran counter to the colonial symbolic order. It also meant that culture (dance, music, and religion) existed in contested spaces within the life of the colony. Put another way, the end of slavery in Jamaica and the Caribbean produced a brief moment in the history of liberalism wherein the most important effort in ruling the colony was to produce ways of life. It did not mean that liberalism was no longer

168

Anthony Bogues

concerned with matters of representation or individual property but rather that in its practice of rule, it turned as well to different techniques. Brian Moore and Michele Johnson have written compellingly about how education became central to the nineteenth-­century liberal imperial project. They note that “vital to the renewed efforts to civilize Jamaica and influence the minds of the black majority in the later nineteenth century was the schooling process. Elementary education, so called, was intended to provide the lower classes in particular with the ideological tenets to become civilized, loyal colonial subjects.” 46 While education had a functional economic purpose, religion did not. Each was to reinforce the other, however, to create a new black subject in nineteenth-­century Jamaica. For a brief moment, in the minds of colonial officials like Merivale and Taylor postemancipation Jamaican society was an experiment in liberal imperial rule. We know that Merivale would become disillusioned about his various schemes for amalgamation and that by 1865, Taylor supported Governor Eyre in the aftermath of the Morant Bay rebellion, as Eyre massacred “her majesty’s subjects.” Taylor wrote in his autobiography, “I am satisfied in my own mind that the execution of Gordon was just in itself and needful for the purpose of averting great dangers.” 47 Taylor’s sentiment and support for Eyre demonstrate that liberal imperial politics could not escape the lasso and logic of colonial power, with its originary violence.

Conclusion: Liberalism and Pastoral Coloniality This chapter suggests that liberalism has a profound relationship to the Jamaican colonial project not only through accepted canonical thinkers but also through a series of practices of the colonial power. These practices could be called a form of colonial liberalism enacted by imperial colonial power. But there is another story here that needs to be foregrounded. Recent accounts of liberal power have articulated the idea that during the nineteenth century there was a distinct shift from a sovereign power that controls the body and the individual to a sovereign power with control over “man as a species.” 48 Michel Foucault in lectures given in March 1976 put the matter well when he announced, “It seems to me that one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life. What I mean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being.” 49 I submit that this reworking of liberal power draws in part from colonial practices. For when “man as a species” is a target of power, then an entire population must be trained differently and then governed through a process of that population’s own subjectivities and self–­regulation. When this happens, we have moved beyond conventional notions of ideology.

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

169

The capture of “man as a species” is about constructing new desires and thus new subjects, just as liberal colonial power sought to do in Jamaica during the early Victorian period. By calling this form of rule “pastoral coloniality,” I suggest the following: first, that in the colonial context, because it has to be an interpellant technique, this kind of power works through desire and the imagination, a position that runs counter to that of Foucault, who, in describing the techniques of power of the Christian church, observed that pastoral power aimed at “salvation in the next world”;50 second, that the objective of this kind of power is political, to create a certain kind of loyal colonial subject; and third, that hegemony is constructed through this form of power. All of this suggests that Jamaica and the Caribbean are central to mid-­nineteenth-­century imperial liberal thought, because for a moment the general abolition of slavery opened another field of political practice for both elites and subalterns. Caribbean historian Woodville Marshall notes, “Blacks hoped that emancipation would provide the opportunity for them to take full control of their lives, to lay a completely new base for society.” 51 That hope resided in a series of practices that included creating their own worlds of self and of labor and distinctive conceptions of freedom. The cauterization of these hopes was a primary objective of liberal imperial politics. The contestation that ensued created a trajectory in which “battles for space” became a central feature of Jamaican society.

Notes I want to thank Michael Becker, who sent me the various colonial memoranda on Jamaica while spending time on his own research in the National Archives at Kew. 1. John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xi. 2. See, in particular, Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Uday Metha, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sankar Muthu, ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). There is as well a group of scholars who are not political theorists and have written extensively about liberalism and empire. Frederick Cooper has urged us to consider this issue by asking the question: “Which Liberalism?” See his Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 235. Both he and Ann Laura Stoler have argued in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), that “Europe was made by its imperial projects.” This means that when we think of issues of political thought or a cluster of political ideas in the colonial metropole, we cannot separate them from forms of colonial practice. While agreeing with these authors, I develop a specific argument here around a set of debates within the British Colonial Office that, in my view, were central to practices of liberalism at a critical juncture in British colonial history: the abolition of slavery.

170

Anthony Bogues

3. The history of the British Colonial Office is central to the history of British politics. Its iteration in the 1800s had emerged from a set of boards that had been established to oversee the colonies, perhaps the most important of which was the Board of Trade and Plantations. In 1801 it became the War and Colonial Office and then the Colonial Office in 1854. 4. See, for example, Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter History (London: Verso, 2011). 5. For an extensive discussion of the idea of political thought and its history, see J. P. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–­36. 6. Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–­1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), a remarkable book on this subject. 7. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 331. 8. See Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008). 9. Rex Nettleford, Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean (London: Macmillan, 1993). 10. See James Ridgway, Slave Law of Jamaica (London: J. Ridgway, 1828), 1. 11. It is safe to say that some anticolonial political thought in the Caribbean began with the assumption that the region had been tutored enough and that the mass of the population were now ready for self-­government. See, for example, C. L. R. James, who argued in the 1930s, “Where the people have reached their present level in wealth, education and general culture, the Crown Colony system of government has no place. It was useful in its day, but that day is now over”; C. L. R. James, “The Case for West Indian Self Government,” in The Future in the Present (London: Alllison and Busby, 1977), 40. 12. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin ([1953] Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 71. 13. Elsa Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the Nineteenth Century (Barbados: Caribbean University Press, 1970). 14. For a discussion of the African slave as a “living corpse” and what that meant for the practices of the enslaved both in rebellion and in various humanization processes, see Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire and Freedom (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), chap. 2. 15. The wording of the act is reprinted in Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette, eds., Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105–­13. 16. For a discussion of some of these shifts, see Andrew Porter, ed., The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 17. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in Collected Works, vol. 19 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 453. 18. Cited in Anthony Bogues, “John Stuart Mill and the ‘Negro Question,’ ” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 223. T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

171

19. For a very good account of punishment in Jamaica during this period, see Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–­1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). Paton makes the point about the increase in prisons and the relationship between prisons and slavery. After 1838, the British Colonial Office was also preoccupied with prison reform in Jamaica. 20. James Williams, Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834 (London: J. Rider, 1837), 1. Emphasis mine. 21. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 ([1838] New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 367. 22. For a discussion, see Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Anti-­Slavery and Humanitarianism,” in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Porter. 23. See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 24. Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies: Delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841). 25. There has been much discussion of these lectures, focusing on their political economy content and proposals for emigration as one solution to the perceived labor problem after the ending of slavery. See, for example, Thomas Holt’s remarkable Problem of Freedom (Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 1992), chap. 6. I wish to focus attention on Merivale’s political views. 26. Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, Delivered before the University of Oxford (1842; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2012), 155. 27. Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, 153. 28. Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, 180. 29. Stefan Collini, “The Idea of Character in Victorian Political Thought,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., vol. 35 (1985), 29–­50. 30. For a very good discussion of the question of character in relation to colonial subjects, see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), chap. 3. 31. For a discussion of French colonial power, see, for example, Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 32. W. J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica: From Its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Year 1872 ([1873] London: Frank Cass, 2004), 48. 33. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, vol. 1 (1773, reprinted Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 2002), 5–­6. 34. Henry Taylor, “Memorandum,” 1839, reprinted in Henry Taylor, Autobiography of Henry Taylor, 1800–­1875 (London: Longmans Green, 1885), 1:250–­56. 35. Taylor, “Memorandum.” 36. Taylor, “Memorandum.” 37. Taylor, “Memorandum.” 38. Taylor, “Memorandum.”

172

Anthony Bogues

39. Taylor, “Memorandum.” 40. Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main ([1860] London: Frank Cass, 1968), 55. 41. Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 59. 42. Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 60. 43. John Henderson and A. S. B. Forrest, The West Indies; Painted by A. S. Forrest; Described by John Henderson (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), 46–­47. 44. Robert J. Stewart, Religion and Society in Post-­Emancipation Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 110. 45. Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of the Folk Dance as a Cultural Process,” Jamaica Journal 4, no. 2 ( June 1970): 34–­48. 46. Brian Moore and Michelle Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 205. 47. Henry Taylor, Autobiography of Henry Taylor, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885), 222. 48. For an account of this shift, see the lectures on biopower in Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Picador, 2003). 49. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 239. 50. Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 332–­33. 51. Cited in David Troter, “Riots and Resistance in the Anglophone Caribbean,” in Contesting Freedom, ed. Gad Heuman and David Troter (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2005), 117.

T e c h n o lo g i e s o f Pa sto ra l Co lo n i a l i t y

173

CHAPTER 4

Dirt, Disease, and Difference in Victorian Jamaica The Politics of Sanitary Reform in the Milroy Report of 1852 RIVKE JAFFE

With its rapid urban expansion and advances in medical science, Victorian Britain became increasingly preoccupied with the health hazards associated with overcrowding and pollution. The subsequent rise of the sanitary reform movement was a product as much of an economic interest in a healthy industrial workforce as of concern for the urban poor. As dominant discourses conflated dirt, disease, and degeneracy, cities such as London and Manchester were subjected to infrastructural and legal-­administrative interventions, as well as moral and educational campaigns. Such reforms extended to colonial cities, where fear of epidemics bolstered the consolidation of racialized urban space. Indeed, fears of disease and degeneration in British cities and in the empire were entangled, with the conception of British slums as pathogenic spaces closely linked to colonial constructions of the tropics as an unhealthy “torrid zone.” 1 Very little has been written, however, about how Victorian ideologies of cleanliness were mapped onto Caribbean cities and how they combined with postemancipation hopes and fears. This chapter discusses Victorian-­era sanitary reform in urban Jamaica, with a specific focus on Kingston. Through a critical examination of discourse and policy concerning hygiene and public health, I explore the politics of colonial sanitary reform. Specifically, I focus on the cholera epidemic that ravaged the island in the mid-­nineteenth century, analyzing the public debate and the response of the colonial authorities that followed the epidemic. I understand the various infrastructural, legal, and social interventions that were advocated and sometimes implemented as part of broader attempts at the regulation and self-­regulation of free black bodies in the colonial cityscape. How did racist colonial ideologies that held Afro-­Jamaicans to be inferior to Europeans intersect with the liberal ideal of self-­governance in producing a

particular type of colonial sanitary reform? How was urban space implicated in a civilizing mission aimed at inculcating the formerly enslaved with Victorian norms of social and physical propriety? To what extent did sanitary reforms improve the well-­being of the urban poor, and how did they serve the interests of local elites and the colonial power? I explore how material and cultural pollution were entangled in policies aimed at realizing a specific socioeconomic and urban order, suggesting in conclusion that racialized Victorian narratives of urban pollution and purification inform present-­day Jamaican discussions of the physical and social decay of downtown Kingston.

Sanitizing the Victorian City In the cities of Victorian Britain, a range of preoccupations and anxieties came together in the sanitary reform movement. Industrialization and rapid urbanization had produced slums, where factory laborers and their families suffered in crowded living conditions. Public concern over sanitation, hygiene, and contagious diseases grew with the publication of various reports, including prominent sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick’s The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842). This best-­selling report gave a dramatic rendering of urban living conditions that led to the passing of the first Public Health Act, in 1848. The preoccupation with unsanitary conditions was also evident in artistic representations that ranged from caricature and classicist art to realist novels and included often sensational verbal and visual representations of urban squalor.2 Increasingly, filthy and overcrowded urban environments came to be seen as threats to health rather than as merely inconvenient or aesthetically displeasing. This development corresponded with contemporary disease etiology, which pointed to the role of the environment in spreading disease. Contagionism understood disease as spread through human contact, while so-­called miasmatic theories located the cause of disease in specific unhealthy locations characterized by “foul air.” The focus on environmental aspects helped explain why the poor were hit hardest by diseases such as cholera but reinforced the status quo by eliding structural, political, and economic factors.3 The understanding of disease as transmitted through locale only shifted to a focus on pathogens with the ascendance of microbiology and germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on both contagionism and miasmatic theory, the sanitary reform movement, which sought to improve the living conditions of the urban poor, was driven not only by concern for their well-­being but also by the economic imperative to maintain a healthy workforce. Ideologically, sanitary reform drew

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

175

on the utilitarian philosophy developed in the early nineteenth century by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. These men and their followers, the so-­called Philosophic Radicals, who were at the forefront of the reform movement, were liberal economic thinkers as well as advocates of state intervention based on science and rational thought. Edwin Chadwick, who was Bentham’s secretary, espoused this rational, technocratic approach by the state in addressing urban poverty and lack of sanitation, emphasizing the economic cost of these industrial ills. In addition to being influenced by secular utilitarianism, sanitary reform also reflected the impact of evangelical Christianity, as philanthropic evangelicals sought to improve the plight of industrial laborers by emphasizing the twin concepts of physical hygiene and moral hygiene. This complementary group of reformers also drew on scientific insights but melded them with religious beliefs: in addition to environmental factors, they saw unsanitary and immoral behavior as encouraging ill health.4 The humanitarian and economic impulses that shaped such campaigns, then, were framed by broader Victorian discourses about morality and uplift, with sanitary reformers seeking to instill order and bring civilization to the lives they were saving from disease and poverty. Accordingly, the movement advocated a combination of infrastructural improvements, legal and administrative measures, and moral and educational strategies. Medical and moral discourse also intersected in organic metaphors of the city, with cities conceptualized as bodies and slum areas as their diseased organs. The neighborhoods and homes of the working class (also known as the Great Unwashed) were marked as environments in which poverty, pollution, disease, and sin were mutually reinforcing.5 The “ideologies of cleanliness” 6 that came to characterize the Victorian city reverberated far beyond Britain. While the conflation of race, hygiene, and civilization is readily recognizable as Victorian, the wide geographical spread of similar narratives indicates that this discourse was shared among different imperial spaces. Many colonial cities erected a cordon sanitaire between indigenous and colonial sections of town in attempts to simultaneously curtail epidemics and impose racial delineations. Colonial Indian cities such as Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, for instance, were developed in this more or less dualist fashion, with each divided into a White Town, dominated by colonial elites, and an indigenous Black Town. Sanitary efforts concentrated on protecting the colonial sections from cholera and similar diseases, while the “native” sections were depicted as inherently dirty and diseased.7 Fear of infectious disease, then, not always grounded in medical fact, served as a rationale for the creation and maintenance of racialized urban space.8 As Anthony King notes, “The culture and class-­specific perception of health hazards more than the actual health

176

Rivke Jaffe

hazards themselves was instrumental in determining much colonial, urban-­ planning policy.” 9 Many of the theories and preoccupations that characterized sanitary reform throughout the British Empire were also prevalent in Caribbean cities.10 In the British West Indies, the emancipation of the enslaved population colored many government and charitable interventions. Racial, moral, and sanitary discourses were intertwined as the policies and practices that addressed sanitation adopted and reproduced spatial grids of morality that served to bolster the colonial racial order. Campaigns to eradicate diseases and cleanse cities of filth were often discriminatory and reinforced existing social, racial, and spatial hierarchies and power structures. Imperial sanitarian ideologies, which were also mapped onto Asian and Amerindian bodies, were perhaps most explicit in pervasive nineteenth-­century notions of black abjection. This notion played out on the African continent, but it was also central to the establishment of social and spatial order in the postemancipation Caribbean. The struggles between colonial powers, local elites, and the formerly enslaved were readily evident in Jamaica. While much historical work has focused on the dualism of “the plot” and “the plantation,” 11 the island’s urban areas functioned as important sites for establishing and contesting the parameters of a postemancipation social order. Colin Clarke describes Kingston as having developed from the late seventeenth century as a creole colonial city with a classic European spatial form and a social structure and economic base stratified by color and class.12 In the mid-­nineteenth century, the continuation of this racialized order seemed precarious to both local elites and British observers, and the preoccupation with sanitation and the related domains of morality, civilization, and industry can be seen in light of this perception. As elsewhere, debates on sanitary conditions and interventions became especially heated during and after major epidemics. Below, I take a detailed look at Gavin Milroy’s 1852 report on the mid-­century cholera epidemic, The Report on the Cholera in Jamaica and on the General Sanitary Condition and Wants of the Island.13 I use this document as a starting point from which to understand sanitation as a locus in which anxieties concerning the future of postemancipation Jamaica intersected with advances in medical science and Victorian ideologies of cleanliness.

Race, Space, and Disease: The Milroy Report on Cholera The cholera epidemic of 1850–­1851 ravaged Jamaica and especially its urban areas, resulting in approximately forty to fifty thousand deaths, out of a total

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

177

population of some four hundred thousand. In Kingston, around five thousand people died, out of an estimated population of forty thousand. The death rate and fear of contagion meant that the deceased did not always receive a speedy burial, giving rise to lurid descriptions of “disgusting scenes of mutilated human bodies being dragged by dogs and pigs along the most public thoroughfares.” 14 The severity of the epidemic led the Colonial Office to commission Gavin Milroy, an epidemiological specialist, “to inspect and report on the sanitary condition” of Jamaica.15 Milroy had served as superintendent medical inspector on the General Board of Health during the cholera outbreaks in Britain in the 1840s and early 1850s. In addition, he had previously worked as a medical journalist and as a medical officer in the government’s mail packet service to the West Indies. During his time with the shipping service, he was subject to quarantining, an experience that led him to critique this system (his dislike of it is evident in his report on Jamaica) and take a skeptical stance on the contagionist premise of quarantine. Like Edwin Chadwick, he believed that local conditions rather than contagion explained the incidence of diseases such as cholera and the plague, an approach that fed his conviction that sanitary reform could bring them to a halt.16 The pathogenesis of cholera is now well understood: Transmission occurs mainly through water, with infection following the consumption of contaminated water or food. The transmission route is fecal-­oral, for the disease spreads quickly when water sources are in contact with untreated sewage and become infected with the fecal matter of infected persons. To mid-­nineteenth-­century physicians, who operated without this medical knowledge, the incidence and spread of cholera were still largely a mystery.17 In discussing the general sanitary condition of the island, Milroy notes the presence of foul water, and the lack of drainage or sewers to remove it, but mentions only in passing what must have been the direct cause of cholera transmission in Kingston: “It is no uncommon thing to find wells sunk in the immediate vicinity of huge unbricked privies, whose fluid contents readily permeate the loose soil.” 18 Reflecting the miasmatic theories of his time, Milroy’s disease etiology focuses primarily on “exhalations,” “emanations,” and “effluvia.” Bad air — ​­the literal meaning of “malaria” — ​­is pinpointed as the source of fevers and various other diseases. In a letter of 1851 to the governor of Jamaica, Sir Charles Edward Grey, Milroy admits that the primary cause of the cholera and its transmission is still unclear but asserts that there is universal acknowledgment that “certain local causes or conditions . . . will inevitably favour its development, and give activity and force to its operations.” The most important of these conditions is “an impure or contaminated state of the atmosphere which is breathed.” 19

178

Rivke Jaffe

He signals two sources of atmospheric impurity: effluvia from decomposing organic matter and human respiration. The first source of miasma leads Milroy to fulminate against the piles of decomposing vegetables and animal carcasses that line the streets of Kingston, as well as the dung heaps that are visible and can be smelled throughout town but especially in the lower-­class areas. Milroy suggests that the amount of refuse in public spaces is related to the unpaved state of the streets, which makes refuse collection difficult. In the same vein, the report expresses great concern about the state of the city’s markets and the rotting food that is being sold and consumed. The focus on the bad air emitted by organic matter also leads to anxiety regarding the emanations from swampy marshlands and from burial grounds. The second source of miasma is “the breathing of a multitude of people in confined, ill-­ventilated apartments,” 20 which explains the concern expressed by Milroy and his contemporaries about overcrowding: too many people inhaling and exhaling in a small space without the benefits of good air (for instance, the sea breeze) was bound to lead to disease. With this strong focus on local conditions, the cholera report also demonstrates a strong belief in environmental determinism — ​­the effect of surroundings and specifically housing on character and behavior. Speaking of the “wretched hovels” on the outskirts of Spanish Town, Milroy states, “It is scarcely necessary to add that human beings in these circumstances are not only squalid and diseased, but vicious and depraved. The occupants are the vagrants of the town, living by occasional jobs, when they choose to exert themselves, or by thieving and other forms of crime. The ravages of the cholera here were dreadful.” 21 His description is a neat example of the ways in which a direct causal relationship was assumed to exist between substandard housing, moral deficiency (including a reluctance to exert oneself ), and disease. This causality displays parallels with the environmental determinism of the race theories of the period, which mobilized nature and climate to produce the “fact” of racial difference and innate social hierarchies. According to this hemispheric form of determinism, tropical and temperate climes had contrasting effects on their inhabitants, justifying the imperial endeavors and “civilizing mission” of the “temperate races.” 22 In 1850, while the epidemic was still raging, observers in England were quick to locate its root causes in accordance with racial-­moral “climate theory,” as is evident in the description of the outbreak in the London weekly the Leader: “The tropical climate of Jamaica — ​­the filthy and indolent habits, and the ignorance and superstition of its coloured population — ​­the general poverty, and the unprepared state of the inhabitants for the visitation of a plague, have

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

179

been the causes which have made one of the most beautiful islands in the Caribbean Sea a scene of unutterable desolation.” 23 In comparison to deterministic narratives that saw different climates as shaping deficient character and behavior, explanations linking the habits of persons to urban housing allowed for more possibilities in terms of uplift and improvement. Indeed, in an optimistic moment, Milroy states that “there is nothing in the character of the negro to forbid the hope of, even rapid improvement and social amelioration. . . . There are many points of resemblance to the Irish character about him.” 24 His belief in environmental determinism rather than innate corruption is evident in the emphasis he places on improving “the dwellings of the people.” In calling repeated attention to “the domiciliary condition of the mass of the people in Jamaica [which] is wretched in the extreme,” he makes evident his conviction that “until measures be taken to correct this worst of all the social evils, it will be vain to look for any real or permanent improvement among the negro population. To spend money in efforts to educate or evangelise them, with their present habits, has been tried, and it has proved a failure; and so it will ever be, unless their physical condition be elevated and improved.” 25 Writing to Governor Grey in 1851, Milroy had already noted “that the intellectual and moral condition of the negro population has anything but advanced of late years — ​­[which] is not a little owing to the wretched condition of the houses of the people.” 26 Similarly, the Grand Jury of Kingston had written to the city’s mayor in 1850 about the city’s squalor and filth, entreating him to take action on the “hovels which form the residences of the great mass of our people” given that “we know nothing that tends so much to demoralize the people, and to promote and foster indolence and plunder, as these receptacles of filth and vice.” 27 Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose describe nineteenth-­ century ideas of “a negative spiral of interaction between milieu and character. Poor character, which may be inherited from one’s forbears, led not only to conduct and ways of living that degraded one’s surrounding milieu; it also led one to gravitate towards a certain kind of milieu, which itself has an effect upon character — ​­an effect which, in turn, might be passed down to future generations.” 28 Such conceptions are apparent in Milroy’s report, which moves on several occasions from environmental factors to suggest a link between morality and disease. At several points, Milroy’s report and the correspondence that surrounded it underline a concern about the “acknowledged fact that the bulk of the people are retrograding, both in morals and in enlightenment,” in the words of the report.29 In discussing the mortality rate in Kingston’s General

180

Rivke Jaffe

Penitentiary, Milroy alludes to “the revolting disclosures of horrible vice among the prisoners” — ​­a reference to allegations of homosexual activity30 — ​­only to conclude quickly that “moral and physical pollution very usually go hand in hand.” 31 The link between cholera and immoral behavior also emerges in relation to prostitutes: in the discussion of a house in Harbour Street where nineteen people died within thirty-­six hours, for example, the reports states that “the inmates were chiefly women of bad character.” 32 A similar causality is evident when it is noted that fatalities in Montego Bay were high among “vagrants and prostitutes, among whom there was at the time a great amount of intoxication,” and in Falmouth, where “in a single house, used as a place of low dissipation and vice, eighteen out of twenty-­six inmates were rapidly seized one after the other, and fourteen perished within the next two days.” 33 At several points, Milroy notes that there were few deaths “among the well-­ conditioned whites, and the mortality among the respectable brown population was also very small.” 34 The report consistently ignores structural explanations for the fact that morbidity and mortality were so extremely skewed toward the lower-­class black population but misses few opportunities to blame the victim, pointing to the “excessively filthy habits” and “disgustingly offensive” housing of those who suffered most. He does not focus on malnutrition and its possible effects,35 let alone on the political-­economic structure that resulted in overcrowded, substandard housing. Beyond his concern with environmental factors and immoral sexual behavior, Milroy depicts the black population as unwilling to pay for medical care and too lazy to work for the wages to afford proper treatment. The implication is that Jamaica’s formerly enslaved population willfully chooses to live a life of squalor and poverty.

Reforming Kingston In his report on the cholera outbreak, Milroy made two major recommendations for improving the sanitary condition of the island and specifically its towns. His first recommendation was related to the lack of medical aid during the epidemic, which he blamed in part on the unwillingness of the black population to pay for healthcare. Milroy advocated the establishment of an elaborate system of medical relief for the laboring population, including a medical officer with assistants for each parish, a vaccination system, a sanitary inspector, local boards of health, annual public health reports, and a series of educational measures. Milroy recommended that this system be financed by introducing a direct tax, arguing that this method would prevent the black population from seeing medical relief as charity. He understands their alleged reluctance — ​­he

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

181

does not consider that it might be inability — ​­to pay for a doctor as follows: “The negro . . . had been accustomed during slavery to have the doctor found him at his master’s expense. It is indeed deeply to be regretted that when the Act of Emancipation took place, by which a semi-­barbarous people were hastily released from the care and protection as well as from the oppression and ignominy of servitude, measures were not devised or precautions taken to provide for the changes, which would inevitably ensure in the condition of the people.” 36 He suggests that with a tax the black population would come to see medical relief as an entitlement derived from paying the associated duty. Milroy expected this system of taxation to have beneficial governmental effects: “The habitual exercise of such a feeling will . . . not be without some effect in gradually accustoming the mind of the negro to take juster views of the reciprocal obligations and privileges of civilized life.” 37 Such a tax would have an additional civilizing impact as it would force the allegedly idle population to work harder, especially given the “immense amount of producible labour in the island running to waste . . . from the energies of the people not being called forth by the stimulus of necessity.” 38 Milroy’s second major recommendation was that a Nuisances Removal and Disease Prevention act be passed, to ensure the consistent removal of refuse (and organic matter, in particular) from the city streets as well as to regulate the condition of dwellings. In addition, the act was to address burial practices, regulate the markets, and see to the drainage of swamps near inhabited areas. Having pointed out with some concern that many of Kingston’s lower-­class houses — ​­“nothing can be more filthy or miserable” — ​­were inhabited by petty freeholders who were part of the elective franchise,39 Milroy suggests making the right to vote dependent on possession of not a freehold but rather a dwelling of certain dimensions and with certain amenities. This condition, he suggests, would stimulate the owners to improve their dwellings promptly: “Such a provision in the electoral law would be productive of an immense amount of good, in many different ways . . . as a means of effecting domiciliary amelioration. . . . Moreover, its moral and social bearings are too obvious to stand in need of any comment . . . a stimulus to exertion and industry.” 40 Rather than achieving its somewhat unlikely goal of improving the housing stock, such a measure would likely have had the more immediate and widespread effect of disenfranchising the black urban working-­class population. Milroy proposed an additional, cheap way of implementing the act that, he suggested, would also have civilizing effects: the use of convict labor to remove garbage. Beyond financial savings, the offenders “would be effecting a good for the community;

182

Rivke Jaffe

and be at the same time taught some very profitable industrial lessons, of no small consequence for the working classes to understand.” 41 These recommendations resonate strongly with postemancipation concerns regarding the level of civilization attainable by the black population, these new subjects of the Queen: How to prevent them from being seduced into idleness by the supposed ease of subsistence? How to inculcate an industrious character and an understanding of the virtues of returning to the plantations as wage labor? How to ensure that these newly free black subjects would be capable of self-­regulation, of understanding their proper relationship to the state in terms of rights and responsibilities? The colonial correspondence regarding Milroy’s recommendations shows that administrators did not fail to pick up on this subtext. The British response to the decimation of the population demonstrated a specific concern about the economic effects of the epidemic. This concern must be understood in the light of the existing postemancipation anxiety regarding labor and the viability of the West Indian colony. On top of the existing challenge of retaining the labor of the formerly enslaved, how were the already failing sugar plantations to survive if the cholera epidemic not only diminished the available supply of labor but also drove up its price? Charles Macaulay, assistant secretary to the General Board of Health in Britain, wrote in a letter to Frederick Peel, the undersecretary of state for war and the colonies, two years after the epidemic, “the violence of this dreadful visitation, the loss of life it occasioned, the suffering it inflicted, and the disastrous results to the industrial welfare of the colony which it has left behind, have been unequalled in any other part of Her Majesty’s dominions.” 42 Black labor was still understood in terms familiar from before emancipation; the British Board of Health correspondence compares human labor both to livestock and to crops and focuses primarily on the economic costs of disease. Macaulay notes in his letter that a statistical calculation based on the current state of public health would surely show that “the waste of money value of labour in the West India colonies, from the barbarous habits of the population, and their low sanitary condition, would be enormous” and argues for sanitary interventions on the basis of economic savings, as “this operation would be as economical for a crop of life and labour as it is for a crop of vegetable production.” 43 Sanitary reform, then, is commendable given its likely impact on worker health and the resulting economic benefits. There is a certain inconsistency to this economic logic, as most of the cholera fatalities occurred in towns, yet the industrial production to which Macaulay, Milroy, and others refer was always agricultural and took place outside of the city. Lack of labor within Jamaica’s cities was not an apparent concern for these

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

183

commentators. However, the unlikelihood that the urban masses would return to plantation labor — ​­notwithstanding the “pauperism” they observed in the cities — ​­does not appear to have occurred to them. Both Milroy and Macaulay considered it unlikely that the colonists would address the sanitary conditions satisfactorily, and they argued for active supervision on the part of the Colonial Office. Indeed, the House of Assembly, which was dominated by the planter class, made little effort in this regard (and was constrained by the dire state of the colony’s economy) in the decades that followed. Most important sanitary improvements were realized only under Crown Colony rule, following the Morant Bay uprising, in 1865. After a failed attempt to centralize medical care in the 1850s, new legislation in 1867 created central and local boards of health with significant powers of intervention and was followed by the establishment of a public medical service.44 It would be decades before substantial infrastructural improvements were implemented in Kingston, with the construction of new sewerage and drainage and the upgrading of streets and lanes. In the 1890s, forty-­six miles of sewer pipes were laid out, constructed from cast-iron and glazed fire clay pipes, with sewage flushed out to sea near the mouth of the Hope River by a steam-­driven pumping station. By 1903 a total of 1,710 premises had water closets and were connected to sewage systems. In addition, major street improvement was undertaken, and the main streets of downtown Kingston were paved with bricks, asphalt, and macadam.45 These reforms were legislated through the Kingston Improvements Act of 1890, after the city had called in the help of two international experts, Osbert Chadwick, from the United Kingdom, and Colonel George Waring, from the United States.46 Apparently the effects of this reform were such that in 1897 an American visitor described the city as “well cared for,” and noted, “The streets are kept scrupulously clean, and while the water is flowing all the filth and matter usually found in a city’s streets is swept into the ditches and carried down into the harbor.” 47

Conclusion In her classic work on pollution, Mary Douglas argued that dirt is essentially disorder: “Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-­product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. . . . Our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.” 48 Designating specific people, objects, or forms of behavior as dirty and dangerous helps sustain the social order. Social hierarchies are

184

Rivke Jaffe

bolstered when specific (classed, raced, gendered) bodies that might threaten the urban and social order are associated with specific “dirty” marginal places in which material and symbolic pollution converge. The associations, explanations, and recommendations made in Milroy’s report on cholera and sanitation reflected and attempted to assuage postemancipation anxieties. The persistent connections between sanitation, morality, and civilization can be seen as attempts to maintain racial hierarchies in an era of freedom. The infrastructural, legal, and social interventions endorsed by Milroy’s report and its commentators were part of broader attempts by the colonial government at regulating and inducing the self-­regulation of free black bodies in the cityscape of Kingston. The underlying objective of securing (healthy) labor and with it the economic productivity of the colony is evident. Beyond this, we find a repeated emphasis on enacting fiscal and legal measures that would instill virtues of individual autonomy and responsibility, which would produce social relations that were contractual rather than personal. This endeavor to shape a particular type of self-­interested, self-­improving black subject reflects the liberal political climate of Victorian Britain as well.49 As David Scott notes, herein lies “the story of the relation between race and the rationalities of reforms,” one that reflects a shift toward governmentality, toward a form of rule that “operate[d] upon character through the newly emerging space of the ‘social’ in order to construct a ‘responsibilized’ freedom or a rationalized self-­conduct.” 50 The tensions between an ideal of individual agency and a practice of structural paternalistic interventionism were evident in the cities of Victorian Britain. Such contradictions were intensified in the context of post-­emancipation Jamaica. Here the formerly enslaved were expected to conduct themselves according to a logic of individual rationality and responsibility, yet they were seen as incapable of exercising this agency properly, and their freedom was constrained and counteracted by strict mechanisms of racialized control. These contradictions are more easily understood by focusing on their importance as cheap, healthy plantation labor during the economic crisis exacerbated by the Sugar Duties Act of 1846. As Alison Bashford observes in comparing metropolitan and imperial public health reform, the “view of both the economic significance of the working poor, but their simultaneous incapacity to govern themselves as the bourgeois subject could, explains the seeming paradox of liberal governance in the modern period, both distant and intervening, inclusive in theory, exclusive in practice. In colonial contexts this paradox was intensified.” 51 The hierarchical understandings of social and physical propriety according to which the urban poor were weighed and found wanting linger in present-­ day Kingston. The conflation of people, places, and pollution can be used

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

185

to legitimize the unequal distribution of environmental disadvantages that results from blame-­the-­victim policies, institutionalizing the concentration of material-­symbolic pollution in specific places.52 These political-­ecological strategies were evident in the cities of Victorian Jamaica. The historical association of dirty places with “unclean,” morally deficient people continues to inform environmental and health inequalities in Kingston. Diseases such as gastroenteritis and malaria continue disproportionately to affect the residents of the same districts that Milroy and his contemporaries spoke of so disparagingly.53 The tendency to explain public health through individual behavioral decisions rather than through a combination of socioeconomic, political, and spatial factors indicates that similar processes of responsibilization exist today, informed by moral discourses that conflate downtown Kingston with dirt and deviance, always with a subtext of class and race.

Notes 1. Rod Edmonds, “Returning Fears: Tropical Disease and the Metropolis,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 175–­96. 2. Ellen Handy, “Dust Piles and Damp Pavements: Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature,” in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 111–­33; David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-­Century Art and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Clare Horrocks, “The Personification of ‘Father Thames’ in the ‘Verbal and Visual Campaign’ for Public Health Reform in Punch,” Victorian Periodicals Review 36 (2003): 2–­19; Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). 3. These structural factors did receive attention in Friedrich Engels’s famous report The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). 4. See Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–­1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Routledge, 1999). 5. The term “Great Unwashed” was first used in 1830, in the novel Paul Clifford (vol. 1, xix) by Edward G. E. L. Bulwer-­Lytton, first Baron Lytton. 6. Matthew Gandy, “Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space and the Modern City,” City 8 (2004): 367. 7. Vijay Prashad, “Native Dirt/​Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the Morbid Resolutions of Modernity,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 3 (1994): 243–­60. 8. David Theo Goldberg, “ ‘Polluting the Body Politic’: Racist Discourse and Urban

186

Rivke Jaffe

Location,” in Racism, the City and the State, ed. Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (New York: Routledge, 1993), 48. 9. Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-­Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (New York: Routledge, 1990), 55. 10. On Georgetown, Guyana, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Juanita De Barros, Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889–­1924 (Montreal: McGill-­Q ueens University Press, 2002). On Spanish Caribbean cities, see Teresita Martinez-­Vergne, Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-­Century San Juan, Puerto Rico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), and April J. Mayes, “Tolerating Sex: Prostitution, Gender, and Governance in the Dominican Republic, 1880s–­1924,” in Health and Medicine in the Circum-­Caribbean, 1800–­1968, ed. Juanita De Barros, Steven Palmer, and David Wright (New York: Routledge, 2009), 121–­41. 11. See, for example, Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (1971): 95–­102. 12. Colin G. Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 13. Gavin Milroy, The Report on the Cholera in Jamaica and on the General Sanitary Condition and Wants of the Island, enclosed in Cholera ( Jamaica): Return to an Address of the Honourable the House of Commons, Dated 20 February 1854, — ​­for, a “Copy of the Report Made by Dr. Milroy to the Colonial Office, on the Cholera Epidemic in Jamaica, 1850–­1851, and Copies of Extracts of Despatches Addressed to and Received from the Governor of Jamaica in Relation to the Said Report” ([1852] London: House of Commons, 1854), 4–­109. London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode. 14. G. Arnaboldi, ed., The Tourist’s Guide to the Chief Towns and Villages of the Island of Jamaica: To Which Are Appended Several Scientific Synopses, and Other Valuable Information Connected with the Natural History of the Island, &c. &c. ( Jamaica: s.n., 1852), 22. 15. Quoted in Anonymous, “Obituary, Gavin Milroy, M.D., F.R.C.P.,” British Medical Journal, February 27, 1886, 425. 16. Milroy’s antiquarantine stance sat well with the British government, which saw quarantine as an obstacle to free trade and detrimental to the nation’s commercial interests. Mark Harrison, “Milroy, Gavin (1805–­1886),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition, September 2010. 17. The first person to pinpoint contaminated water as the source of transmission was John Snow, whose cholera maps of London during the 1854 epidemic identified one public water pump as the main source of transmission. 18. Milroy, Report, 41. 19. Letter from Milroy to Governor Charles Edward Grey, March 31, 1851. Included in Cholera ( Jamaica), appendix A, 109. 20. Letter from Milroy to Grey, March 31, 1851, 110. 21. Milroy, Report, 50. 22. See Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003); David N. Livingstone, “Tropical Climate and Moral Hygiene: The

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

187

Anatomy of a Victorian Debate,” British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 1 (1998): 93–­110. 23. Anonymous, “The Cholera in Jamaica,” Leader 1, no. 40 (1850): 940. 24. Milroy, Report, 96. 25. Milroy, Report, 102. 26. Letter from Milroy to Grey, March 31, 1851, 114. 27. Quoted in Milroy, Report, 42. 28. Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17, no. 6 (1999): 743. 29. Milroy, Report, 102. The correspondence referred to is found in the appendices of the report and includes letters between Milroy and various British and colonial officials such as Governor Grey. 30. For more on this “epidemic of sexual deviance” and the associated moral panic in relation to the cholera epidemic, see Jonathan Dalby, “ ‘Luxurious Resting Places for the Idle and Vicious’? The Rise and Fall of Penal Reform in Jamaica in the 1840s,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 15 (2011): 147–­63. 31. Milroy, Report, 45. 32. Milroy, Report, 46. 33. Milroy, Report, 60, 55. 34. Milroy, Report, 62. This skew was corroborated by John Parkin, Statistical Report of the Epidemic Cholera of Jamaica (London: William H. Allen, 1852). 35. For more on the explanation for the disproportionate morbidity and mortality among the black population, see Kenneth F. Kiple, “Cholera and Race in the Caribbean,” Journal of Latin American Studies 17, no. 1 (1985): 157–­7 7. 36. Milroy, Report, 93. 37. Letter from Milroy to Grey, March 31, 1851, 115. 38. Milroy, Report, 94. 39. Milroy, Report, 41. 40. Milroy, Report, 102. 41. Milroy, Report, 100–­101. 42. Letter from Macaulay to Peel, March 1, 1853. Included in Cholera ( Jamaica), appendix H, 133. Emphasis added. 43. Letter from Macaulay to Peel, March 1, 1853, 136. 44. See “Jamaica — ​­Law 6 of 1867: A Law to Establish Boards of Health,” in The Laws of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 5: From Law 1 of 1866 to Law 37 of 1869, ed. Charles Ribton Curran, rev. ed. ( Jamaica: DeCordova, 1889), 31–­46. 45. The Handbook of Jamaica for 1903, ed. Joseph C. Ford and Acheson A. C. Finlay (Kingston: Government Printing Office, 1903), 440–­41. 46. Chadwick was a British civil engineer employed on several occasions by the Colonial Office for sanitary work, mainly in Crown Colonies, including Hong Kong, Mauritius, and Malta. He was the son of Edwin Chadwick, the famous sanitary reformer mentioned above. Waring was a sanitary engineer who also led major drainage, sewage, and solid waste management reform in New York as well as in Memphis and Cuba.

188

Rivke Jaffe

47. Allen Eric, “Buckra” Land: Two Weeks in Jamaica. Details of a Voyage to the West Indies, Day by Day, and a Tour of Jamaica, Step by Step, with Appendix (Boston: n.p., 1897), 56–­57. 48. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 45–­46. 49. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1831–­1838 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 50. David Scott, “The Government of Freedom,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, ed. Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 445, 444. 51. Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 9. 52. For more on these issues in twenty-­first-­century Kingston, see Rivke Jaffe, “Unnatural Causes: Green Environmentalism, Urban Pollution and Social Justice in the Caribbean,” in Environmental Management in the Caribbean: Policy and Practice, ed. Elizabeth Thomas Hope (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press), 118–­39. 53. Hugh M. Semple, “Identifying Geographic Clusters and Risk Factors Associated with Gastroenteritis in Kingston, Jamaica.” Paper presented at the conference Global Change and Caribbean Vulnerability: Environment, Economy and Society at Risk, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica, July 24–­28, 2006. Available at http://people.emich.edu/​hsemple/​research/​Gastroenteris_Clusters.pdf, accessed December 29, 2013.

The Politics of Sanitary Reform

189

CHAPTER 5

Creating Good Colonial Citizens Industrial Schools and Reformatories in Victorian Jamaica SHANI ROPER

It is a great problem what the government is to do with children who are without parents or guardians, who can take care of them, and it is desirable [that] they should be trained to be productive members of society.

Daily Gleaner, December 13, 1884

This chapter addresses the development of industrial schools in Jamaica during the late nineteenth century, a history that indicates shifts in the approach of the colonial government of Jamaica in relation to social problems. Three state-­run and two privately operated industrial schools, based in Kingston and St. Andrew, catered to the entire island. At the center of this school circuit was the Government Reformatory and Industrial School in Stony Hill. These institutions, while marginal within the current discourses about postemancipation Jamaican society, were tangible representations of the efforts by the colonial administration to implement an industrial curriculum. They constitute an attempt by the state apparatus to effect social change through educational reform. Industrial schools and reformatories served juvenile delinquents and destitute and orphaned children. An industrial education curriculum emphasized training in vocational skills over the three Rs — ​­reading, writing, and ’rithmetic — ​­and was intended to produce a competent industrial workforce. Unlike children in other Jamaican schools, those in the industrial schools were subjected to a comprehensive industrial education program. Initially, the colonial authorities and wider society did not differentiate between children entering the reformatory as delinquents and those admitted to the industrial school as paupers. They considered all such children to be criminals: those who were admitted were called “inmates.” By 1900, however, perceptions of industrial schoolchildren had evolved, as the system moved away from the use of the word “reformatory” in

favor of the term “industrial school.” This change signified to the public that the colonial state was investing in the education of neglected, orphaned, and destitute children rather than merely incarcerating juvenile delinquents. Early industrial schools emerged out of a perceived need to resocialize Afro-­ Jamaican children who came in direct contact with the judicial arm of the colonial government. Throughout the nineteenth century, reports of homeless boys roaming in gangs in the urban areas appeared alongside complaints of sexual immorality among juveniles in seasonal jobbing gangs in rural areas. Newspaper accounts documented extensive complaints of the indecent behavior of youths in the streets, such as stone throwing, indecent language, drunken behavior, and fighting. Many attributed such behavior to the high level of illegitimacy among the laboring population of the island. Commentators reasoned that illegitimate children were more susceptible to indecent and criminal behavior because their parents were irresponsible and amoral. Public “disgust” at illegitimacy accompanied predictions of economic doom and complaints of inadequate public health services in the island.1 In a commentary about industrial schools and neglected children, the Gleaner argued, “The number of unfortunate children roaming at large in the streets of Kingston are fast becoming candidates for the prisons. . . . Let the [Kingston City] Council energetically grapple with this issue and devise some means of rescuing them.” 2 Jamaica, it was believed, had no hope of being a civilized colony unless its leadership tackled the issue of criminal behavior among Afro-­Jamaican youth. Early reformatories therefore existed as part of a general effort to tackle criminality among Afro-­Jamaican children. Many commentators felt that it was the colonial administration’s responsibility to tackle issues such as juvenile vagrancy. One writer in the Gleaner commented, “Juvenile vagrancy and throwing of stones [are] among the evils which it is very desirable to put down with the strong arm of the law.” 3 The inherent purpose of early reformatories was to provide an alternative to placing juvenile delinquents in prisons. As a result, the early institutions just housed delinquents, rather than engaging in their systematic rehabilitation. These institutions, however, provided a home not just for delinquents but also for destitute, neglected, and orphaned children. As the nineteenth century progressed, school administrators took a more holistic approach to reforming children admitted to industrial schools. Provisions were made for medical care, and extracurricular activities such as drill and band were introduced to build a sense of community within the school and to instill forms of disciplined behavior encountered at their most extreme in the armed forces. A reward system was introduced to encourage good behavior among students. At the end of their tenure, former students received tools and

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

191

equipment related to their areas of trade to facilitate their reintegration into society.4 Administrators hoped that this approach would reinforce the values that the children were taught during their tenure at the institution. Despite these efforts, the public often believed that reformatories were modified prisons and accordingly classified the children as criminals. Many Jamaicans used the terms “industrial schools” and “reformatory” interchangeably to describe state- and ​privately run institutions that catered to children of unfortunate circumstances. Therefore, during the 1870s and 1880s, the public kept referring to boys at the industrial schools as “reformatory boys.” 5 School administrators, however, felt that the term stigmatized destitute and orphaned children, especially girls, who attended industrial schools as children in need of protection rather than as alleged criminals. Industrial schools often served as rescue homes for the abandoned and neglected: “Albertina Higgins and Eliza B Evans aged 9 ½ and 12 years respectively were taken before the Resident Magistrate . . . with a view of being sent to Alpha Cottage Industrial School . . . on the ground of their being orphans and therefore unable to care for themselves.” 6 The confusion between educational and punitive functions was a result of the fact that the island’s most important industrial school, the Government Reformatory and Industrial School (1869), as its name indicates, also served as a reformatory. A single institution responded to poverty and (alleged) criminal behavior. The criminal children and the destitute children received the same access to the resources of the institution. The only difference between the two groups was the identity of their official guardian. Parochial boards assumed financial responsibility for destitute or orphaned children sent to industrial schools; criminal children were sent to the school through the courts and were, therefore, maintained by the colony’s central revenue. Nonetheless, the notion of criminality tainted public attitudes toward all the children living there. Many school administrators, such as the superintendent of the Government Reformatory and Industrial School in Stony Hill, Thomas Mair, felt that such stigmatization undermined the work done with Afro-­Jamaican children.7 By the 1890s, the government had decided to move away from using the term “reformatory.” Instead it emphasized the role of an industrial education in the resocialization of juvenile delinquents. This new attitude was hastened by the opening of the Jamaica Exhibition in 1891, which triggered significant debate about the role of industrial training in improving Jamaica’s economy. Sir Henry Blake, the governor, posited: “The question of Industrial Training for the young people of the Colony is of primary importance. . . . I am by no means satisfied that a literary education to the exclusion of Industrial Training is an unmixed blessing to the inhabitants of this island.” 8

192

Shani Roper

It was within this context of promoting industrial education that the colonial government sanctioned the opening of the Hope Industrial School for Boys (1891) and the Shortwood Industrial School for Girls (1892). They also certified the Roman Catholic Church’s Alpha Cottage Industrial School for Boys and Girls in 1890. To further entrench the status of these new institutions, the newer industrial schools were made part of the portfolio of the Department of Education, while the Director of Prisons supervised the older, more established Government Reformatory and Industrial School. The colonial administration made it clear that the newer industrial schools catered only to destitute and orphaned children. Children from the “respectable” laboring and peasant classes were therefore excluded from accessing an industrial education. Only the disadvantaged could enter the system. At the core of industrial school policy was the notion that Jamaica’s economic survival was dependent on creating productive colonial citizens trained in vocational skills that supported and maintained an agricultural economy. By the 1890s, then, officials had changed their opinion of Afro-­Jamaican children. They no longer considered them criminals in need of reform but rather neglected children who could be molded into productive, law-­abiding colonial citizens. As one writer to the Gleaner stated, “The majority of so called juvenile offenders although guilty of offences are hardly entitled to be called criminals. They commit offences because they have not benefit of kind, careful honest parents [and] the influences of good respectable homes.” 9 The colonial government and school administrators therefore set about trying to create an industrial school curriculum that engendered the values of good citizenship — ​­values that were supposedly absent in the upbringing of the average Afro-­Jamaican child. Good citizenship entailed respect for law and authority, self-­sufficiency, thrift, and productivity, as well as responsibility. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, industrial schools provided a fairly diverse curriculum, especially for boys, in an attempt to ensure that in the long run industrial schools turned out sixteen-­year-­olds capable of integrating into society.

The Early Years of the Reformatory Movement The British reformatory movement emerged as a result of “rapid urbanization and industrialization” that caused severe “social dislocations” among the English working classes.10 Working children who eked out a living in the streets and back alleys of London’s slums were believed to be exposed to “corrupting influences,” and accordingly, to swell the ranks of criminals.11 Reformatories and

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

193

industrial schools provided an institutional space to house and educate juvenile paupers and delinquents whose social misdeeds could not be appropriately addressed in the existing penal, poor relief, and educational institutions, such as the workhouses founded under the terms of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.12 Early reformatories and industrial schools were established in urban areas where “industrialization and urbanization” had undermined the stability of the family. Long hours of work in industrial settings outside the home, poor nutrition, and economic instability made it difficult for parents to uphold their civilizing and socializing purpose in raising their children.13 Both metropolitan and colonial societies identified the family as the foundation of a stable and civilized nation. There was a widespread belief among the middle and upper classes that rampant juvenile vagrancy, pauperism, and delinquency derived from the disintegration of the family. In the case of Jamaica, colonial administrators adopted many British laws on child welfare without making amendments to suit the local conditions. In Jamaica, local officials adopted the idea of industrial schools and reformatories as a constructive alternative to imprisoning criminal children. Early decisions by the colonial government to establish industrial schools and reformatories were part of a desire to regulate the moral and social lives of Afro-­ Jamaicans. Moral reformation through education was believed to be the key not only to solving juvenile vagrancy but also to economic recovery. Accordingly, shortly after the passage of the Industrial Schools Act in 1857, the Ladies Reformatory Association founded the Kingston and St. Andrew Reformatory for Girls. The members of this association felt that the best route to reform was to remove children from “unsavory” surroundings so as to “eradicate” inappropriate value systems inherited from their parents: They are emphatically convinced that in this work, especially, they have to “eradicate before they educate.” They have not only to prepare the ground for the reception of the good seed of moral and religious principles but they have to pull up and clear away, and try to exterminate those roots of bitterness, those weeds and other incumberances [sic] which in the shape of bad habits and wicked dispositions have been allowed to grow unchecked until they have reached maturity.14 The Girl’s Reformatory opened in October 1857 and was housed in the mission house of the St. Andrew Presbyterian Church on East Queens Street. Initially, nine students — ​­four orphans, four abandoned children, and a criminal child — ​ ­lived at the reformatory. A “ragged day school” attached to the reformatory catered to twenty-­eight orphans along with several other very poor children. The term “ragged” referred to the tattered clothes that many homeless and des194

Shani Roper

titute children wore. Their education emphasized religious instruction as well as basic vocational training in the areas of starch-­making, straw-­hat making, weeding, cleaning, and preparing the grounds for a small garden.15 Since emancipation, the Jamaican education system had focused on improving the “moral condition” of freedmen and freedwomen. Members of the public such as the planter classes believed religious instruction would create an amenable, productive population. As such, religious education was extensively incorporated into the school curriculum. All girls received “practical training” to be domestic servants by working in the kitchen and the laundry room. Much of this activity served to reinforce the idea that “women determined the tone of family life” by being a moral and civilizing guide for children.16 Their education reinforced gender and class norms as they evolved in Victorian Jamaica. Industrial training for girls focused on areas considered female work, all of which were focused in service industries. Professions such as that of domestic servant and laundress reflected a sociocultural position as lower-­class women trained to provide services to middle-­class women and their families.17 The school took in laundry from the community to raise funds and received subscriptions from several groups in London, including the Ladies Negro Education Society, and from the Quakers.18 In 1865, the Royal Society for the Arts and Agriculture made a small grant to the reformatory to allow for the purchase of a loom-­spinning machine at the request of the school’s manager, the Reverend James Watson.19 Growing and ginning cotton as well as washing clothes kept the girls busy all year. They attended a day school while taking turns in the duties of housekeeping and cooking. Several girls received training as seamstresses.20 The goal of the institution was to bring forth “a class of servants who have been trained in the principles of the word of God and who are supposed to be worthy of such patronage.” 21 Those who failed to imbibe the moral training of the institutions were refused recommendations by the committee when they applied for work as domestics. By 1864, the girls’ reformatory had begun to experience overcrowding, having attained a high of ninety-­three inhabitants that year. Twenty-­five girls had been admitted under warrants for petty larceny. The institution also housed children from parishes such as St. Mary, Manchester, St. Ann, and St. Elizabeth. The increase in inmates with convictions for praedial larceny (the theft of produce or livestock from a farm or estate) as well as from rural areas occurred within the wider context of an extended drought between 1864 and 1865, which led to poor harvests. In 1865, petitioners from the parish of St. Ann wrote to Governor Eyre, “We the poor people of St. Ann . . . beg to inform our Queen that we are in want from the bad state of our island at the moment.” 22 Dire economic circumCreating Good Colonial Citizens

195

stances may have forced parents to send their children out in search of food. Their perceived depravity, therefore, would have been a result not of immorality but rather of the physical pangs of hunger. In response, Governor Eyre argued that it was the moral condition of the peasantry rather than economic hardship that was the underlying cause of poverty in the island: The utter want of principle or moral sense which pervades the mass of the people, the total absence of all parental control or proper training of the children, the incorrigible indolence, apathy and improvidence of all ages and the degraded and moral existence which they all but universally lead are quite sufficient to account for whatever poverty or crime which may exist amongst the peasantry.23 Such correspondence, however, did not halt the overall increase in criminalized children admitted to the early reformatories. This increase led administrators to separate inmates into two main groups — ​­the destitute and the criminal. Although similar terminology was used in England and throughout the colonies, the sociocultural context of destitution and criminality determined how children were classified in each locality. Those children convicted of various forms of assault, including wounding or larceny, were defined as criminals. Jamaican farmers and government officials saw praedial larceny as a threat to the agricultural economy. As a result, those captured and convicted of this crime were either flogged or imprisoned. The very existence of reformatories provided magistrates with the option of institutionalizing children with the hope of eventual reformation and resocialization. The idea of criminality, however, was not based solely on the fact that the child was convicted but rather on the notion that the child’s future social and economic potential was tainted by inadequate socialization. The authorities were also concerned that bad influences might be present within the reformatory. The managing committee tried to separate older girls, those aged fourteen and fifteen, from younger girls in the institution. They believed that these older girls, “fresh from scenes of vice and crime,” were likely to have a negative impact on the moral training of younger ones.24 The St. George’s Home and Reformatory for Boys was established on July 1, 1858. By its second year of operation, the institution had sixty-­three inmates. The management committee requested permission from the governor to transfer the institution to Admiral’s Pen to expand accommodation to hold approximately two hundred inmates.25 Apparently they were unsuccessful, because further complaints about overcrowding occurred in 1865, when the reformatory housed 164 inmates, of whom eighty-four were destitute and eighty-five were

196

Shani Roper

criminal children. Poor economic conditions in the colony, however, made it unfeasible to make further demands on the “public purse” to expand the institution. Very few details survive concerning boys’ daily activities in the early reformatories. According to the available reports, the boys engaged mostly in agricultural pursuits. By 1865 forty-­eight boys had been apprenticed as domestics or agricultural laborers.26 On his visit to the reformatory in May 1866, Governor Sir Henry Storks praised the general appearance of the boys and their well-­ cultivated garden, which “with industry and exertion, be readily and profitably raised.” 27 Many members of the public thought the reformatory was a useful space in which to introduce “model farms” where the inmates would specialize in growing crops geared toward the improvement of the island economy.28

The Government Reformatory and Industrial School, Stony Hill

The Jamaican colonial authorities assumed responsibility for both the Kingston and St. Andrew Reformatory for Girls and the St. George’s Home and Reformatory for Boys, which were financially insecure. In October and November 1869, the government moved 168 boys and 71 girls to the newly established Government Reformatory and Industrial School, Stony Hill, which was housed in the old military barracks. Before 1885, the girls occupied the south barracks, while the boys lived in the north barracks, which meant that boys and girls operated and lived on opposite ends of the campus. In 1883, however, the girls were removed to a separate institution in Kingston. As the block plan of the Boys’ Reformatory in Stony Hill in 1885 shows, a kitchen, woodshed, smithy shed, and latrine surrounded the south barracks (fig. 5.1). Farther south was the hospital with the dispenser’s outbuildings, on-­site mortuary, and isolation ward. To the north, the offices of the administrative and teaching staff, including Mair’s office, the superintendent’s quarters, and doctor’s office, overlooked the parade where the boys practiced their drills. The bakery and three kitchens as well as food stores and the cells were near the parade grounds. The main workshop was located to the east of the campus near the main gate. Almost immediately after the establishment of the reformatory and industrial school, the institution became shrouded in tales about the disfigurement of inmates and general mismanagement. In the first few years, most of the boys and a few girls suffered from severe ulcers on their outer extremities that resulted in, it was rumored, hundreds of amputations of toes.29 Many of these amputations left the children disfigured and disabled. Governors Sir William Creating Good Colonial Citizens

197

Fig. 5 . 1   Block plan of the Boys’ Reformatory in Stony Hill, 1885. Courtesy of the Jamaica Archives and Record Department, A6/​22.

Grey and Sir Anthony Musgrave convened commissions of inquiry, in 1875 and 1877, respectively, to investigate the administration and infrastructure of the reformatory as well as the health of the inmates. The commission of 1875 found that the government had made very few infrastructural changes in preparation for the children’s arrival at the Old Military Barracks. The buildings had not been properly cleaned and sanitized before the children moved in, despite having been abandoned for several years and having served as an informal goat pen before the occupation of the site as a reformatory.30 Both the south and north barracks lacked proper ventilation and failed to meet contemporary hygiene requirements. The government chemist condemned the water from the well attached to the girl’s dormitories in the south barracks and found impurities in the tank water attached to the north barracks. The rooms in the north barracks where the boys resided had “a dank unpleasant

198

Shani Roper

odor as of decayed and decaying wood and the walls are moss grown” and “infested with fleas, bugs and other insects.” 31 Sharp rocks, metal objects, glass, and other debris littered the institution grounds and inadequate arrangements were made for personal cleanliness and the disposal of human waste. Agricultural pursuits kept the boys outdoors, who as a result were more subject to bruising their toes and feet. Laundry work for the public and the institution kept the girls indoors. Based on the commissions’ findings and recommendations, the governors made changes to the management structure and implemented infrastructural improvements. The inspector of prisons assumed responsibility for the reformatory, which brought the institution under the influence of contemporary ideas of discipline and reform in correctional institutions. Specifically, Mr. Shaw, inspector of prisons, supervised the superintendent of the reformatory to ensure that inmates observed a rigid schedule and were properly attired and taken care of. He streamlined punishment guidelines by banning, at the request of the 1875 commissioners, the shackling of inmates together for months at a time or solitary confinement in damp cells. The commissioners considered these earlier practices to be inhumane and abusive and, moreover, reminiscent of slavery.32 Under Shaw’s new regime, the reprimanding of inmates was limited to lashes and a diet of bread and water. The discipline and punishment enforced at the reformatory were intended to train inmates to respect and obey authority, not to resent it. For the reformers of the 1870s, abuse was counterproductive when the goal was reformation. Governor Musgrave convened another commission in 1877 as the result of complaints lodged by neighbors in the surrounding community about the pillaging of provision grounds and the theft of food from kitchens and homes by reformatory boys. The complainants also noted that the boys were poorly supervised in their daily activities and were often seen purchasing rum and smoking tobacco at nights. Reports also surfaced of “Reformatory boys” suffering from bitter hunger and as a result eating from the pig troughs on the premises.33 Shortly afterward, in 1881, the colonial administration hired Thomas Mair from Scotland to be the superintendent of the government reformatory. Mair had been educated at the Science and Art School, in Kilmarnock, Scotland, and had worked at Paisley Reformatory.34 They also hired master tradesmen in the fields of carpentry, metal work, tailoring, and baking. Conditions at the government reformatory settled into a routine after almost a decade of administrative mismanagement, disease, and public scandal. The boys learned a wide variety of artisan trades, including carpentry, masonry, tailoring, baking, and blacksmithing, as well as agricultural pursuits (fig. 5.2).

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

199

Fig. 5 . 2   Boys working in the workshop of the Reformatory at Stony Hill, circa 1890s. Visual Collection of the Museum of History and Ethnography, Division of the Institute of Jamaica.

200

They received practical training by doing repair work on the grounds of the government reformatory as well as for members of the public. All departments provided services to the public. In 1882, twenty-­eight boys worked with the master tailor and that year made 4,627 new pieces of clothing for the institution, including caps. In addition, they made other items such as cots and mattresses. They also made general repairs to items brought in from the public. Seventeen boys attached to the carpenter’s shop built “a large washing shed 54 ft long by 18 ft wide set on eight stone pillars.” 35 Articles of furniture valuing £50 13s 6d 2d were made and sold to customers.36 The boys from the mason and bricklayers department erected the eight stone pillars on which the carpenter boys constructed the new washing shed. In 1882 a drum and fife band was started and drills introduced in the daily routine of the boys. Mair reported, “These must be considered good movements, as they enliven the children, and cause the restraint necessary to discipline to be but slightly felt by them, while they instil habits of prompt obedience, attention, and order, which are all so essential to the success of such a school as this.” 37 Yearly reports revealed that the educational program for female inmates

Shani Roper

continued to reinforce contemporary gender roles and professions.38 The activities of the girls’ reformatory consisted of sewing and washing. In addition to making, mending, washing, and ironing their own clothes, in 1885 the girls did laundry for the Jamaica Female Training College.39 During this period, they also sewed underclothing for the boys. Administrators hoped to find additional employment off the school compound for girls during the day. The inspector of prisons commented, I am still anxious to find some sort of employment at which some of the girls might be employed outside the walls of the Institution, returning each night to sleep and remaining within reach of discipline. Such work, where the girls would be well looked after is not easy to find, but I feel certain that there would be much greater benefit to the girls from the Institutions were it possible to let them see a little more of the world before they are sent out to work in it.40 A year later, the school installed more modern equipment in the laundry facility to take in more private washing. The Jamaican elite reshaped British normative discourse of the sexual division of labor and the ideology of separate spheres to suit local class and labor divisions. By channeling girls into these professions, industrial schools reinforced gender norms and sustained class divisions between lower-­and middle-­class women on the island.41 In contrast, the pupils at the Boys Industrial School displayed their workmanship at various local events and competitions. In December 1887, they participated in the Cumberland Pen Fifth Annual Show. The school’s exhibit included “2 excellently constructed wheelbarrows, 1 of iron and 1 of wood; some folding chairs with carpet seats, one of oak and one of pitch pine, some bitter cups and puff boxes, the latter of yacca . . . some blacksmith tools, horse shoes, table knives and forks, all most creditably made.” 42 The iron wheelbarrow won first prize and the wood wheelbarrow was highly commended. Special mention was also made of the blacksmith tools, the set of knives and forks, the carpet-­seat chairs, and the two powder cups made of yacca.

Exhibitions and the Industrial Schools in the 1890s The Jamaica Exhibition of 1891 generated significant interest in the expansion of industrial education in the island. Under the leadership of Governor Sir Henry Blake, the administration supported the creation of four industrial schools during the 1890s. Alpha Cottage Industrial School for Girls and Boys (1880), Hope Industrial School for Boys (1891), Shortwood Industrial School

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

201

for Girls (1892), and the Belmont Orphanage and Industrial School (1893) opened in quick succession. Miss Ripoll, who later joined the order of the Sisters of Mercy, had established Alpha Cottage in 1880 as an ordinary school for abandoned children.43 In 1890, the Sisters of Mercy joined Miss Ripoll in running the school as a certified industrial school. All of these women had previous experience working with destitute children. The school was certified for fifty girls under the immediate management of the Right Reverend Bishop Gordon. Industrial activities for the girls consisted of market gardening, sewing and fancy work, straw plaiting, and laundry work. The boys spent most of their time doing agricultural work and by 1893 had thirty acres of land under cultivation. By 1895, Mr. Capper, Inspector of Industrial Schools in the Department of Education, reported that some boys had completed fancy tables in bamboo. That year, inmates also participated in a flower show where they exhibited vegetables, fruits, and flowers, all grown at the school. The exhibit was awarded a prize, and the work of the inmates was highly commended by the press. Boys also had the opportunity to join the drum and fife band.44 The Hope Industrial School for Boys was established in 1891 on the grounds of the Hope Botanical Gardens. Twenty-­five non-­criminal inmates were transferred from the Government Reformatory and Industrial School in Stony Hill to help start the school.45 Their education focused mainly on agriculture, and the school eventually became aligned with the Public Gardens and Plantation Department.46 In doing so, the administrators hoped to provide the inmates “with as thorough an Agricultural training as possible.” 47 Soon after, in 1892, the government started the Shortwood Industrial School for Girls on the grounds of the Jamaica Female Training College at Shortwood. The founders modeled the school curriculum on that used in the Government Reformatory for Girls, which at the time was located across from the Union Poor House in Admiral’s Pen, Kingston.48 The training emphasized house cleaning, baking, and sewing. Eventually, this institution took over from the Girls’ Reformatory the task of washing laundry for the Jamaica Female Training College at Shortwood, for which it also made house linen.49 Additionally, the government certified the Belmont Orphanage in Stony Hill as an industrial school. Archbishop Enos Nuttall established the institution mainly as a home for abandoned and orphaned children. The children attended a day school but also did all the work of the house. This included cooking, washing, bread baking, and gardening. All the inmates learned straw plaiting and needlework and made their own clothing. Mr. Capper opined that “this little Institution is doing excellent work, with, for the most part, very small children. The chances of a successful result are of course much greater

202

Shani Roper

when the children are received so young, but they are never so young as not to suffer some contamination from their surroundings, the results of which it takes much patient care to eradicate.” 50 The government expected all industrial schools to be self-­sufficient. Almost immediately, school administrators supported each other. During the holidays, boys from Hope Industrial School joined the girls at Shortwood or the children at Belmont for an evening of festivities. Treats and special events were held during Christmas and Easter celebrations, especially for the children at Hope and Shortwood. The best-­behaved children of each institution often got the opportunity to attend lantern slide shows, concerts, and public lectures.51 For example, the inmates at the Girls’ Reformatory viewed a magic lantern exhibition by the Reverend Cochrane in 1894 as part of their general education.52 The various trade departments of the Government Industrial School offered services to all the industrial schools. Boys working in the bakery and kitchen baked bread for the Girls’ Industrial School and Belmont Orphanage as well as for religious organizations in the surrounding community.53 The Tailors’ department made clothing and caps for the boys at Hope, fulfilled orders for clients and the Immigration department, and maintained clothing for inmates at the school.54 In 1891, the Carpenters’ department not only built a new isolation ward for the school but also provided furniture for clients, the Hope Industrial School, and the Girls’ Industrial School in Admiral’s Pen. They also built furniture to exhibit at the 1891 exhibition, such as the octagonal stool shown in figure  5.3, which has a marquetry top and four legs with metal tips. This stool was made by the boys of the reformatory at Stony Hill in the late nineteenth century and was presented to Archbishop Enos Nuttall’s wife and his daughter Clare.55 The Belmont Orphanage and Industrial School was located near the reformatory. Clare Nuttall oversaw the running of the Belmont Orphanage and Industrial School until it closed in 1924. Regarding the exhibit of the Carpenters’ department

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

F i g . 5 .3   Stool made by boys at Reformatory at Stony Hill, presented to Mrs. Nuttall and her daughter Clare, 1891. Marquetry top, octagonal, with metal tips on the base of the four legs. Courtesy of National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica.

203

at the Jamaica exhibition, Mr. Mair reported enigmatically to Mr. Knollys, inspector of prisons and industrial schools, “the Exhibits shown at the recent Exhibition speak for themselves, and the work done in this workshop requires no comment from me.” 56 Similarly the blacksmith’s department engaged in shoeing and general smith work for the public and for the exhibition.

Conclusion By the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial government had established a tightly interwoven industrial school system with the Government Reformatory and Industrial School at its center. Before 1890, the public viewed the Government Reformatory and Industrial School as a modified prison, built to house juvenile delinquents. Early scandals associated with the Government School reinforced public stereotypes both of the inmates and of the government’s brutality in dealing with them. Over time, however, the colonial administration instituted rules and regulations modeled along the lines of industrial schools in Britain. Part of this process entailed the promotion of industrial curricula that were thought instrumental to developing Jamaica’s economy. After the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891, the government established and certified four other industrial schools — ​­Alpha Cottage, Hope Industrial, Shortwood Industrial, and Belmont Orphanage and Industrial School. These institutions catered specifically to destitute, neglected, and orphaned children rather than to juvenile delinquents. Each institution played a key role in reforming and educating destitute and abandoned children. The Government Reformatory remained the only institution to house both delinquent and destitute children on the school compound. Boys attached to industrial schools acquired practical knowledge in skills such as tailoring, metal work, and carpentry. The boys in all industrial schools except Belmont maintained the general infrastructure of the institution and sold goods and services to the public. Those attached to the Government Industrial School also provided additional services to other industrial schools, such as building furniture and baking bread. The curriculum for girls was engineered to reinforce cultural perceptions of women’s work and channel girls into service industries that catered to middle-­class women. For lower-­class women, women’s work included various forms of needlework, sewing, washing, and gardening. As such, industrial schools prepared children, in theory, to adhere to gender norms in which boys became fathers and breadwinners, and girls married, became mothers and occasionally worked in industries that kept them close to the home.

204

Shani Roper

By the early twentieth century, the colonial administration had established an industrial school network that not only propagated evolving gender norms but also served as the foundation of child welfare policy in Jamaica.

Notes 1. “Juvenile Vagrancy and Stone Throwing,” Daily Gleaner, June 10, 1878, 3; “Political Prophesying: Jamaica Doomed,” Daily Gleaner, November 8, 1878, 4. 2. “The Waifs and Strays of Kingston,” Daily Gleaner, July 28, 1890. The quote is referring to the Kingston City Council. 3. Daily Gleaner, June 10, 1878, 3. 4. In the 1880s a system of rewards was introduced in the Government Reformatory in an effort to motivate children to be on their best behavior. Under this system, for good behavior the children received a small amount of money, which would be awarded to them at the end of their time at the institution. Bad behavior or destruction of property resulted in deductions from their rewards, in addition to the standard stripes given as punishment. This practice is documented throughout the late nineteenth-­century annual reports on the boys’ reformatory and in reports on industrial schools located in the Blue Books and Departmental Reports of Jamaica (Kingston: Government Printing Office). 5. British National Archives (bna) Colonial Office (co) 137/​485/​65. Governor Musgrave convened a commission of inquiry, which was established in 1877 to investigate accusations that the boys from the Government Reformatory and Industrial School, Stony Hill, were creating mischief in the surrounding community. Throughout, the witness testimonies refer to the children as reformatory boys. 6. “Current Items,” Daily Gleaner, July 9, 1890. 7. Thomas Mair became superintendent of Stony Hill Reformatory in 1881 and stayed for thirty-­five years, until his retirement in 1916. He was succeeded as superintendent by his son James Mair. 8. Daily Gleaner, February 25, 1891, 3. 9. R. A. Walcott, “Juvenile Criminals and the Reformatory,” Daily Gleaner, January 15, 1895. 10. Christina Twomey, “Gender, Welfare and the Colonial State: Victoria’s 1864 Neglected and Criminal Children’s Act,” Labour History 73 (Nov. 1997): 169–­86, 176. Twomey refers specifically to the conditions in London in establishing a broader context for the creation of child welfare and poor relief policy in Australia. 11. Twomey, “Gender, Welfare and the Colonial State,” 175–­76. 12. Mary Barnett, Young Delinquents: A Study of Reformatory and Industrial Schools (London: Methuen, 1913), 1–­2; see also Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1861). 13. Twomey, “Gender, Welfare and the Colonial State,” 176. 14. bna co 137/​337 no.  63, “The Half Yearly Report of the Ladies Reformatory Association.”

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

205

15. bna co 137/​337 no.  63, “The Half Yearly Report of the Ladies Reformatory Association.” 16. Aleric Josephs, “Female Occupation in Jamaica 1844–­1944: Becoming Professional Women” (MPhil thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, 1993), 32, 37. 17. Verene Shepherd, “Gender Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post-­Indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica 1845–­1943,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995) 233–­57, 247–­48; Henrice Altink, Destined for a Life of Service: Defining African–­Jamaican Womanhood, 1865–­1938 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 119–­21. 18. bna co 137/​353/​6, “The Third Annual Report of the Kingston and St. Andrew Reformatory and Industrial Association for Girls, 1861.” 19. National Library of Jamaica (nlj), Minutes of the Royal Society for the Arts and Agriculture, April 4, 1865, to December 1879. 20. bna co 137/​390/​1, Rev. Watson, Kingston, to the Governor and the Executive Committee, Spanish Town, January 19, 1864; “The Girls’ Reformatory,” Daily Gleaner, April 8, 1867. 21. bna co 137/​366/​10, “Fourth Annual Report of the Girl’s Reformatory” (Kingston, Jamaica: M. De Cordova Printers and Company, 1862). 22. bna co 137/​390/​33, “Governor Eyre to the Right Hon. Edward Cardwell, M.P., 25th April 1865.” Enclosed is the petition from members of the peasantry in the parish of St. Ann. 23. bna co 137/​390/​4, “Governor Eyre to the Right Hon. Edward Cardwell, M.P., 19th April 1865.” 24. bna co 137/​390/​1, “Watson to the Governor.” 25. bna co 137/​351/​33 no. 147 folio 198–­211, Second Annual Report of the St. George’s Home and Reformatory for Boys, 1860, 10–­11. 26. bna co 137/​388/​4, “Governor Eyre, King’s House, Jamaica to the Right Honorable Edward Cardwell, M.P., 22nd March 1865.” 27. “Governor Storks visit to Kingston,” Daily Gleaner, May 30, 1866. 28. “W. G. Astwood to the Editor,” Daily Gleaner, February 24, 1869. 29. bna co 137/​485/​63, Hyams to Herbert, June 14, 1877. 30. “Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Stony Hill Reformatory,” in the Minutes of the Legislative Council, 1878 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1879). 31. bna co 137/​482/​16, “Steventon to Colonial Secretary, 17th Nov. 1870.” 32. bna co 140/​179, Minutes of the Legislative Council, 1878, appendix XI, “The Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry upon the Government Reformatory, Stony Hill.” 33. co 137/​485/​65, “Abraham Hyams to Robert Herbert Esq., Under-­Secretary of State for the Colonies, 4th August 1877.” Abraham Hyams gave testimony to the commission of 1875 and lived near to the government reformatory in Stony Hill. 34. Stephen Hill, Who’s Who of Jamaica 1919–­1921, 127–­28 (Kingston: Gleaner Company Ltd., n.d.)

206

Shani Roper

35. “Report of the Government Reformatory and Industrial School for boys for the year ended 30th September 1883,” in the Report of the Blue Books and Departmental Reports for Jamaica for 1883 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1884), 20. 36. “Report of the Government Reformatory and Industrial School for Boys for the Year Ended 30th September 1883.” 37. “Report of the Government Industrial School and Reformatory for Boys for the Year 31st March 1882,” in the Report of the Blue Books and Departmental Report for the Year 1881–1882 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1883), 20. 38. “Report of the Government Industrial School and Reformatory for Girls for the Year Ended 31st of March 1898,” in the Annual Departmental Reports of Jamaica 1898 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1899), 253–­55. 39. “Report of the Government Reformatory and Industrial School for Girls for the Year Ended 30th September 1886,” in the Governor’s Report on the Blue Book and Departmental Reports, 1885–­1886 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Press, 1887), 129. 40. “Report of the Government Reformatory and Industrial School for Girls for the Year Ended 30th September 1888,” in the Governor’s Report on the Blue Book and Departmental Reports, 1887–­1888 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Press, 1889). 41. Altink, Destined for a Life of Service, 124. 42. “Cumberland Pen,” Daily Gleaner, December 9, 1887. 43. Alpha 1880–­2005 (Sisters of Mercy, Jamaica, 2005), commemorative calendar celebrating 125 years. 44. “Report on Industrial Schools for the year ending 31st March 1893,” in Governor’s Report on the Blue Book and Departmental Reports, 1892–­1893 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Establishment, 1894). 45. “Report on Industrial Schools, 1892–­93.” 46. ja 1B/​5 /76/​3 /190, “Enclosure to Message from His Excellency the Governor to the Honorable the Members of the Legislative Council Date 11th February 1909.” Hope Industrial School was closed in 1910 but reopened to become the premier agricultural school in the island. By the mid-­twentieth century, its name had changed to the College of Agricultural Science Education and the institution was moved to the parish of Portland. 47. “Report on Industrial Schools, 1892–­93,” 284. 48. The government moved the female inmates from Stony Hill in 1885, on the recommendation of Thomas Mair, the superintendent. Mair argued that the girls did not receive as much attention as the boys. It was therefore necessary to separate them so that they could receive much more attention and mentoring from a visiting committee of women. They eventually returned to Stony Hill in 1899 and remained there until the institution closed in 1937. 49. “Report on Industrial Schools for the year ended 30th September 1893,” in the Governor’s Report on the Blue Book and Departmental Reports, 1892–­1893 (Kingston, Ja­ maica: Government Printing Office, 1894). 50. “Report of Industrial Schools for the year ended 30th September 1894,” in Governor’s Report on the Blue Books and Departmental Reports, 1893–1894 (Kingston, Jamaica:

Creating Good Colonial Citizens

207

Government Printing Office, 1895). 51. “Report on Industrial Schools 1893–­1894.” 52. “Report on Industrial Schools 1893–­1894.” 53. “Report on Government Industrial School and Reformatory for the Year Ended 31st March 1893,” in Governor’s Report on the Blue Books and Departmental Reports, 1892–­ 1893 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1895). 54. “Report on the Government Industrial School and Reformatory for the Year Ended 31st March 1895,” in Governor’s Report on the Blue Book and Departmental Reports, 1894–­1895 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1896). 55. See chapter 11 for Gillian Forrester’s discussion of the Nuttall family and their social circle. 56. “Report of the Government Industrial School and Reformatory for the Year Ended 31st March 1891,” in Governor’s Report on the Blue Book and Departmental Reports, 1889–­1891 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1892).

208

Shani Roper

CHAPTER 6

Botany in Victorian Jamaica MARK NESBITT

We have no large stores of timber, we have no minerals, we have no manufacturing industries, and we cannot hope to struggle successfully with other countries in the more advanced arts and sciences. We, nevertheless, possess a rich and productive soil, a salubrious climate, abundant springs and a vast extent of uncleared mountain land; and it is mainly on the due utilization of these valuable natural resources that our prosperity must ultimately depend.

Daniel Morris, Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, for 1881

Jamaica’s topography and climate make it home to an extraordinary diversity of plants — ​­wild, naturalized, and cultivated. Since the beginnings of colonial settlement the luxuriant tropical vegetation and landscapes, and the agricultural potential, have deeply impressed visitors to the island. Plants are central to Jamaican history of all periods, whether in the early encounters of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–­1753) and other travelers in the Atlantic world or as a result of the dominance of sugarcane during the era of the plantocracy and slavery. The Victorian period is no exception. As this book demonstrates, the period saw fundamental change in the life of Jamaican people and far more extensive communication with the outside world, through travelers and books and periodicals but also through the transport of plants. Taking into account changes in the island’s economy and government, these six and a half decades of Victoria’s reign give fertile ground for exploring human interactions with plants. The key actors in the island’s botany during the Victorian period were the Jamaican Government’s Botanical Department (under several names) and, in the United Kingdom, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (in this chapter simply referred to as Kew). The flow of advice and plants between the two is well documented in the annual reports of the Botanical Department and in Kew’s archives, both key sources for this chapter, which will also draw on the artifacts and raw materials housed in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection. The Victorian era also marked a transition for Kew, which in 1840 ceased to be a royal garden and became a national botanic garden, funded and managed as part of Britain’s Civil Service. The first three directors, William Hooker (director 1841–­1865), his

son Joseph Hooker (1865–­1885), and William Thiselton-­D yer (1885–­1905), were active in their support of botanic gardens in the colonies, through the supply of plants and requisites such as books, through advocacy for funding, and through recommendations of staff of known ability to fill vacant posts. I will explore the range of motivations and actors involved in Jamaican botany through a series of themes, bearing in mind that Jamaican botany is not just about useful plants: the remarkable diversity of Jamaican ferns attracted more than purely botanical interest, and the plants and landscapes were also important to travelers and to artists such as Marianne North.

Environment In addition to the political and economic factors discussed below, key factors in understanding Jamaican botany are the island’s topography, climate, and vegetation.1 The island is just 146 miles long and 4,244 square miles in area. However, extensive mountains mean that travel times are far longer and access more difficult than this small size might imply. Very little land is flat. Not only is it difficult to collect or disseminate plants, but topography also presented a challenge to the Botanical Department, which, by Victorian times, was spread over up to seven gardens at any one time. In 1877 a staff member, George Samuel Jenman, complained that the Cinchona Plantation was as far from the Hope Garden, in travel time, as Edinburgh’s Botanic Garden is from Kew.2 To the east of Kingston the steep metamorphic rocks of the Blue Mountains rise to 7,402 feet. This area came into cultivation relatively late, from the 1860s onward, for cool-­climate crops such as cinchona and coffee, grown at high altitudes. The rest of the interior of the island is filled with highly dissected limestone plateaus. In parts karstic, highly eroded with shallow stony soils, the plateau also has plains (“poljes”) with deep productive soils. Most agriculture is concentrated in the plains, both in the interior and on the coast. Steep areas were once forested, but deforestation has been of concern since the nineteenth century and was rapid in the twentieth. This varied environment supports a diverse flora of about 3,000 species of flowering plant and conifer, including naturalized species, and 579 species of fern.3 About 27 percent of the flora is endemic, in other words, with a native distribution limited to Jamaica.4 Rain falls all year round but is concentrated in two rainy seasons, April–­June and September–­October, with a hurricane season from June to November. The southern side of the island is markedly drier, and water can be in short supply for agriculture in the dry season. As William Fawcett noted in 1887, “Owners of gardens in Jamaica have many drawbacks to contend with — ​­a burning tropical sun,

210

Mark Nesbitt

which during dry weather necessitates almost continual watering — ​­heavy tropical showers which wash off the surface soil and lay bare the roots of the plants — ​ ­hurricanes which in a few hours destroy the results of years of patient labour.” 5 Examples of this variety included floods in 1879, “unprecedented drought” in 1880, a hurricane in August 1880, and drought in 1881, all of which had a severe impact on agriculture and on the plants and buildings of the botanic gardens.6

F i g . 6.1   On the road to Castleton. Undated photograph showing the dramatic topography of the island. Note the banana trees to the right. Art Collection, Royal Botanic

Before the Victorians

Gardens, Kew. © The

The history of Victorian Jamaica must be seen in the context of the nearly two hundred years of British rule that had already elapsed since the capture of the island from the Spanish in 1655. The earliest initiative to set up a botanic garden was taken by Mr. Hinton East in the 1750s, at Spring Garden near

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

211

Gordon Town. His was not an isolated example of a garden centered on plant introduction: in the early 1770s Matthew Wallen established a garden at “Cold Spring,” and Thomas Thistlewood’s garden at Breadnut Island Pen dates to 1767.7 In 1774 the governor, Sir Basil Keith, set up an official garden nearby, with Dr. Thomas Clarke as superintendent from 1775. That garden was initially situated at Enfield, adjoining Spring Garden, but steep slopes led to the move to Bath in 1779.8 Significant stock came from a French ship captured in 1782, bound from Mauritius to Haiti. In 1788 Dr. Thomas Dancer was appointed superintendent of the Bath Garden and island botanist. In 1792 Spring Garden was also acquired by the government, and both gardens received breadfruit plants from Captain Bligh’s voyage in hms Providence in 1793.9 In 1810, in the years of economic depression following the abolition of the slave trade, the Enfield Garden was sold. The post of island botanist was intermittently held after Dancer’s resignation in 1804. Dr. James MacFadyen (in post ca. 1825) remained active after the resignation, publishing the first volume of a Flora of Jamaica in 1837 and writing to Sir William Hooker at Kew in 1843 to suggest contacts for specimens and promising plants.10 Other island botanists included Thomas Higson, appointed to superintend the Bath Garden in 1828 after MacFadyen’s resignation, and Thomas Wharton, who presided over an annual budget of £300, in 1842. As was often the case in this period, many botanists were medical doctors, although MacFadyen was the last medical doctor to be appointed. With the appointment of Nathaniel Wilson as superintendent of the Botanic Garden in 1846 sustained work really began. Wilson, who had trained as a Kew gardener, was already resident on the island and working for MacFadyen’s coffee plantation and had been in correspondence with Hooker since at least 1844. Numerous plants were introduced to the island in this period, including new varieties of sugarcane from the Pacific, mango, logwood from Honduras, ackee from West Africa, and cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and bamboo from Asia.11 Many of these had become fully integrated into the diet and vegetation of the island.

Politics and Economy in Victorian Jamaica The period from 1837 to 1901 was turbulent and saw many changes in Jamaica. Four of these changes raise questions of special relevance to this chapter. The first, one of the effects of emancipation, was a shift in labor and settlement among the formerly enslaved from plantations to independent smallholdings. In the six years after 1838, twenty thousand new freeholds were registered, in

212

Mark Nesbitt

some cases formed from plantations that were sold and subdivided.12 Drawing on their long experience of cultivation of provision grounds, the smallholders grew crops such as coffee, ginger, and arrowroot, rather than sugar. To what extent did the official botanists of Jamaica respond to this shift from plantation to smallholding by targeting advice, experimental work, and plants at this greatly expanded class of farmers? The second change is closely related to emancipation: the imposition of direct rule from London, with Jamaica as a Crown Colony, in 1866. Did this shift in power, from the local elite to London, lead to any change in botanical provision for Jamaica? The third change in this period had earlier roots: the collapse in the price of sugar on world markets.13 Sugar prices reached a peak in 1805 and again in 1820 and then prices and West Indies sugar production declined until World War I. A number of factors were responsible: post-­emancipation difficulties for plantations in getting labor at the price and time required; the passing of the Sugar Duties Act in 1846, which removed trade barriers from sugar imported into the United Kingdom from countries that still employed enslaved workforces, such as Brazil and Cuba; and competition from European beet sugar. How did official botany in Jamaica respond? Perhaps through advances in sugar production or by enabling diversification into other products? The fourth change comes increasingly to the fore in the last two decades of Victoria’s reign: the ever-­increasing interaction with Jamaica’s near neighbor, the United States of America. The development of the banana industry and the introduction of fast steamship routes to Boston in the 1880s led to a significant reorientation of Jamaica’s trade from Britain to the United States. To what extent was this important trade relationship reflected in the activities of official botanists?

People and Institutions I will begin with a brief history of the Botanical Department of the Jamaican government. While the transitions to new superintendents or directors and locations were not as straightforward as this brief account suggests, it is necessary to have in mind the key personalities and locations. Little has been published on the history of Jamaica’s botanical institutions, but throughout this chapter I have drawn on useful accounts by Eyre, Fawcett, McCracken, Morris, Satchell, and Senior.14 Bath had long proved an unsatisfactory site for a botanical garden: small (two and a half acres), prone to damage by regular floods, and forty miles east

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

213

of Spanish Town, the island’s capital until 1872. In 1856 Nathaniel Wilson wrote to the Board of Directors of the Bath of St. Thomas the Apostle, who presumably managed the garden on behalf of the government. He complained that “the plants must naturally suffer from the over-­crowded state they are in; every acceding year adding to the calamity in proportion as the plants advance in growth. . . . The rapidity and luxuriance of tropical vegetation being so great, as by far to exceed the limits assigned to it for botanical purposes long ago.” 15 Wilson’s plea for extra space was answered by the formation, under his direction, of the twenty-­five-­acre Castleton Botanic Garden in 1863. The Bath Gardens were abandoned in 1867, although from 1879 onward Daniel Morris reinstituted a degree of care, initially on a budget of £20 each year. This work was primarily to safeguard the well-­established trees within the gardens; most of the interesting plants had long since been moved to Castleton. Castleton suffered from similar problems to those of Bath: located nineteen miles north of Kingston and rather further from Spanish Town, it too regularly flooded. It was also too damp for many plants, with ninety-­three inches of rain each year. According to G. S. Jenman, writing in 1873, Castleton had been chosen as the result of the influence of two planters who wished to get a road made across the island.16 Nonetheless, it remained the main botanic garden until the end of the nineteenth century. By 1893 the gardens could be reached by buggy as a day trip from Kingston; a satisfied visitor described “Attalia [sic] palms standing sentinel-­like on each side of the gate, the graceful tree ferns, the gorgeous crotons, the aralias, the roses — ​­we did not know which to admire most.” 17 Robert Thomson, a gardener at Kew, came to Jamaica in 1862, as assistant gardener at Castleton.18 He succeeded Wilson as superintendent of the Botanic Garden in 1867. As well as carrying out a great deal of work at Castleton, Thomson was responsible for choosing land in the Blue Mountains for the site of the Cinchona station, on which work commenced in 1868. The Cinchona Plantation, later known as the Hill Gardens, is at an altitude between 3,300 and 6,500 feet and lies about twenty-­four miles east of Kingston. Further sites were added: the Parade Garden, a pleasure garden in Kingston (with an emphasis on shade plants) and the Palisadoes Plantation (of coconut), both in 1872, and a new garden at the Hope Plantation, four miles north of Kingston, in 1874. The Palisadoes coconut plantations were ultimately unsuccessful, and the land was leased out in 1887. From 1880, the Botanical Department was also responsible for the private gardens and grounds of King’s House, the official residence of the governor. With the increase in the number of gardens, a single superintendent or curator

214

Mark Nesbitt

was not sufficient, and from the 1870s on, superintendents were employed for each garden, for example, G. S. Jenman at Castleton. In 1877 the gardens came under the control of the director of roads and surveys, and in 1878 Thomson retired. He was succeeded by Daniel Morris, who had been assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Ceylon and had strong Kew connections, and was director of Public Gardens and Plantations in Jamaica from 1879 to 1886. He was followed by William Fawcett, from Kew, director of Public Gardens and Plantations, from 1887 to 1908. It was intended that the Hope Gardens would be both for experiment and for amenity, but at first the governor considered the garden to be too far from Kingston for the convenience of its poorer residents.19 The initial planting was thus limited to an experimental ground of sugarcane varieties and plantations of timber trees such as teak and mahogany. In his first year in Jamaica, Daniel Morris was proposing that the gardens should take on a broader role than experimental planting, in view of their convenient location, particularly for

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

F i g . 6.2   Palmetum at Castleton Gardens. Plate 4, W. Fawcett, Guide to the Botanic Gardens, Castleton, Jamaica (Kingston: Hope Gardens, 1904). Library, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

215

the distribution of economic plants. In 1881 a two-­acre nursery was enclosed for propagation of plants for distribution; by 1884 a total of fifteen acres were under cultivation. Ornamental planting, which was to become very extensive, did not start until 1885. Fawcett’s ambitious plan was “to arrange portions of the new Garden that they will represent the vegetation of different regions of the Earth’s surface, and so give practical lessons in the Geographical distribution of plants.” 20 Rainfall at the Hope Gardens was only forty-­six inches each year, and water was periodically in short supply. By 1887 sufficient access to water had been given from the adjacent municipal waterworks and an irrigation system had been installed. In 1898 Hope took over from Castleton as the headquarters of the Department of Botanical Gardens and Plantations, with the move there of the library, herbarium, and head office, and in 1908 it became headquarters of the newly established Department of Agriculture. It has remained Jamaica’s main botanic garden to this day. Although Wilson was in regular touch with Kew, the frequency of communication accelerated with the appointment of Robert Thomson. Thomson, Morris, and Fawcett were beneficiaries of the system by which Kew recommended staff to the satellite botanical gardens from its own ranks.21 The receiving garden gained dependable, well-­trained staff; Kew gained an excellent contact abroad who could supply plants and information. An example of the help received Fig. 6 .3   William Fawcett’s proposed geographical plan for the Hope Gardens, 1887. Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Miscellaneous Reports vol. 234, folio 215). © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

216

Mark Nesbitt

comes in a letter from Wilson to William Hooker, director of Kew, in 1846, acknowledging plants sent from Kew, awaiting a book on microscopy, and asking for help with a subscription to Gardeners’ Chronicle: all part of a delicate exchange of favors between Kew and colonial botanists well-­described by Jim Endersby.22

Plant Transfers One of the most important duties in connection with Botanic Gardens is the exchange of plants and seeds. By this means, rare and new plants can be introduced into a country at a minimum cost, and, therefore, communities which keep up a Botanic Garden possess an immense advantage over others.

William Fawcett, 1888 23

Although some plant collectors came to Jamaica, including William Purdie, who collected mainly ornamental plants such as tree ferns for Kew and the Duke of Northumberland in 1843, plants usually traveled by exchange, through the medium of the Wardian case. This miniature greenhouse, so effective at protecting plants during long sea journeys, had reached Jamaica by 1843. A letter to Kew from Thomas Wharton at Bath gives a long list of plants that did not survive a journey in that year,24 but, in practice, provided the case was not abandoned on arrival at port, most plants survived. Most letters from the Botanical Department to Kew refer to lists of plants required for import or export. An indication of the scale of plant transfer is given by the four hundred species imported in 1869; in 1870, a more typical year, the number was two hundred. In some cases plants were grown at Kew and shipped out; in others, Kew acted as a staging point, for example, for two Wardian cases of mangos from India received in 1868. Plants also came directly from overseas; in 1870, for example, £50 was allowed to the agent-­general for immigration to Jamaica in India, for the transmission of Indian plants to Jamaica on vessels carrying indentured laborers. Plants were also received from the United States: in 1871–­ 1872 a large consignment of seeds came from the United States Department of Agriculture, from which several thousand plants of conifers and fruit trees were raised. Long-­distance transport of plants remained problematic, despite the use of Wardian cases. Of ninety varieties of sugarcane sent from Mauritius, thirty died; of the plants in six cases sent from India, the majority died. Consular sources were also important; for example, “a bag of the famous and scarcely to be obtained Vuelta Abajo tobacco seed” was received from the consul in

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

217

Havana. The cultivation of tobacco became a success in the 1870s owing to the influx of refugees from political troubles in Cuba.25 In 1869 Thomson noted, “Next in importance to the introduction and cultivation of useful exotic species of plants for the purposes of a botanic garden, at least in the tropics, is the office of collecting and cultivating the select and indigenous flora, whether for economic, aesthetic, or scientific purposes. In this island very few of the many important indigenous plants have ever been brought within the pale of cultivation.” 26 This comment is consistent with the content of the annual reports, which stress introduction rather than export, and with the small number of Jamaican useful plants to have entered cultivation elsewhere. The list of plants sent abroad in the Annual Report for 1871–­1872 is typical: five recipients, far shorter than the list of those sent in, and comprising two boxes mainly of ornamental plants (orchids), two boxes of mahogany to India, and mixed economic plants to Queensland and India. Mahogany was the only Jamaican plant to become really important elsewhere. The list of plants available from the department for distribution within the island in 1880 shows varying proportions of West Indian plants among different classes of use. The list offers 95 taxa of timber and shade trees, 52 local (from the West Indies); of 91 fruit trees, 23 are local; of 181 economic and medicinal plants, only 39 are local; of 57 orchids, 24 are local, as are almost all the ferns. The large number of local orchids and ferns available for distribution is not surprising in view of their abundance and strong interest to botanists, especially overseas (fig. 6.4). However, the small proportion of local economic and medicinal plants on the main list is consistent with the wider pattern of plant exchange described above: useful plants come into Jamaica, ornamental plants go out. There were sporadic signs of interest in native plants, such as the list of the economic plants and palms of Jamaica sent by Thomson to Joseph Hooker in 1866, at Hooker’s request. Thomson wrote that the medicinal plants and timber trees were of especial interest, particularly the bark of simaruba, but this led to no special initiative.27

Spreading Plants within the Island Even in the early days of the Victorian gardens, at Bath, Wilson could write of “the never ceasing flow of plants, both into and out of the garden. . . . The average number of plants distributed annually during that period being 2305, exclusive of many cuttings and seeds.” 28 What kinds of plants were being distributed within the island, and why? Wilson writes:

218

Mark Nesbitt

F i g . 6.4   Jamaica Orchids growing on a branch of the Calabash tree. Painted by Marianne North, 1872. Art Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The greatest number of those plants were of a permanent and useful description. . . . The demand for plants is on the increase, and more than can be supplied. . . . In former years a Botanic Garden may be considered a luxury to a few, and the introduction of plants superfluous; now it has become a necessity to the multitude, to make up in some measure for the loss of decaying staples, by the introduction of new ones suitable to the habits and tastes of the people, under the influence of these enlightened times. The distribution of so many plants of late years has awakened much attention, particularly among the small freeholders, and which proves most effectually the importance of the establishment.

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

219

F ig . 6.5   Medicinal plants. Back: box of dried leaves of bitter bush (Kew: ebc 51533). “Bitter Bush. This plant (Eupatorium villosum) common in many waste places in the island has also come into prominence as a substitute for hops. It has an agreeable aroma and posses a bitter principle which has long been recognised by the negroes. A very neat and compact preparation of this plant, made by an enterprising planter into compressed cakes has been exported for experimental purposes, samples of which may be seen at the Museums of the Royal Gardens, Kew” (Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, 1883); left: Cinchona bark. “Howard’s Ledger Bark from Trees below Directors Garden,” sent to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886, and thence to Kew (ebc 52388); right: “Bitter cup as sold in London,” made of the wood of Picrasma excelsa (ebc 63602). This cup could be repeatedly topped up with water and the bitter draught consumed to assist digestion. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Here Wilson refers to emancipation and the need to support the new class of freeholders. Although historians judge that “both British and Jamaican authorities were blind to the economic potential of peasant agriculture,” this was not the case at the botanical garden at this time.29 A later director, Daniel Morris, noted “there is much activity displayed by even the poorest peasants in obtaining and cultivating new plants; and I cannot but hope that, before many years have elapsed, this activity will result in the greater prosperity and wealth of the Island.” 30 In 1881 Morris introduced charges for plants, but the numbers distributed within the island in that year are still very high: 330,000 seedlings and 50,000 plants of cinchona, 40,000 of the main economic plants (Trinidad cacao,

220

Mark Nesbitt

Liberian coffee, oranges, nutmeg, East Indian mangoes, cardamoms, vanilla, clove, cinnamon, pineapple suckers, and sugarcane), and numerous packets of miscellaneous seeds and cuttings. Considerable attention was given to distribution. Plants could be collected from the gardens in Kingston, Hope, Castleton, or Bath; the need to maintain an effective distribution network was cited as a reason for maintaining so many gardens. From 1882 free transport for plants was provided by the railway and by the Atlas Steamship Company to ports on the island; by 1885 they could also be sent by mail free of charge. An indication of the effort involved in raising plants for distribution is given by William Fawcett: “The labour . . . is not always realised. To take Roses, for instance, a bed must in the first place be prepared for them with properly mixed soil, a substantial shading is erected, and the wood is taken carefully from the stock plants for the cuttings. To ensure 1,500 young plants, at least 3,000 cuttings are made. The bed must be carefully watered every day, sometimes twice a day, for eight to ten weeks. Then each plant is potted off and 1,500 names are written on labels.” 31

Fiber Plants The marked interest in fiber plants in Victorian Jamaica must in part have been due to the efforts of Nathaniel Wilson, through his energetic promotion in experimental gardens, publications, and exhibitions.32 There is also evidence, for example, in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection, that this interest in fibers was part of a global phenomenon, until the advent of artificial (cellulose) fibers in the early twentieth century. Soon after Morris arrived in Jamaica, the Jamaica Daily Gleaner (August 25, 1880) noted, “We would like to see also a special report from Mr. Morris on the subject of Jamaica fibres. That we have in this island highly valuable and easily worked fibrous plants and trees is well known to its inhabitants.” The annual reports of the Botanical Department record the introduction of many fiber plants and trials of local and imported species, but numerous references to the necessity of imported machinery to clean fibers suggest that such cleaning remained an obstacle. For example, in 1890 Fawcett asked Morris to follow up on a report in the Times of the use of fiber-­processing machines in London, and he inquired several times about the availability of machines for ramie processing.33 In 1894 the agent of the American inventor of a fiber machine came to Jamaica to persuade people to grow three thousand acres of ramie, a venture that probably never took off.34 The requirements for successful fiber cultivation were succinctly set out by Morris: the possibility of harvesting or cultivating large quantities (which ruled

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

221

F ig . 6.6   Plants as materials. Back: basket made of the leaves of bull thatch palm, Sabal blackburniana (now S. palmetto) (ebc 36309). In 1883 Thiselton-­Dyer saw an article on Sabal in the Gardeners’ Chronicle and wrote to Morris asking for articles made by the natives. Morris duly sent this (dc 211/​789): left, razor strop made from the pith of Agave morrisii; right, fiber and wood of Kydia calycina sent to Kew by Nathaniel Wilson (ebc 65775). The tree is native to India and was doubtless grown experimentally in Jamaica. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

out many wild fibers such as lace-­bark; see object lesson 15); the presence of machines for processing; the means to transport the plants to the machines and to port; and the presence of a convenient market. He pointed out that plants such as cotton or jute were not suitable, as they required the rich soils necessary for sugarcane cultivation.35 In 1884 nine fibers were submitted to brokers for their valuation, including silk grass, pineapple fiber, common pinguin, and ramie. London merchants commented on the poor quality of preparation, which reflected the lack of correct processing machinery.36 A significant fiber industry never developed.

222

Mark Nesbitt

Cinchona Cinchona trees, originally from the Andes, are the source of bark rich in quinine alkaloids, one of the few effective treatments for malaria up to the 1930s. In the 1860s the combination of developments in botany and chemistry that allowed identification of quinine-­rich species, and the urgent requirement for medical treatment of fevers, led European countries to transfer cinchona plants from South America to Asian plantations. Kew was responsible both for collecting many of the Andean seeds and for distributing plants to British colonies such as India, Ceylon, St. Helena, and Jamaica. Cinchona is an unusual case in that the Botanical Department itself established large-­scale plantations to encourage private planters and made significant amounts of money from selling the bark in London. However the rapid decline of Jamaica’s cinchona industry mirrored the problems of market access and prices that also affected many other crops. Robert Thomson was responsible for the establishment of the cinchona plantations, covering some six hundred acres of the Blue Mountains that were cool enough for the tree. Seeds were germinated in 1865, and in September 1868 forty acres were planted with twenty thousand cinchona seedlings. Thomson reported that the take-­up of trees by farmers was slow. Further plantings in 1870–­1872 took the area to two hundred acres. This occasion was not the first introduction: In 1860 Wilson grew four hundred cinchona plants collected by Richard Spruce in Peru that year; however, the saplings were planted too low and on the wrong soil (Wilson’s preferred site had been unavailable owing to legal complications), and most died.37 In 1876, Thomson observed that Cinchona succirubra was by far the fastest-­growing tree and that C. officinalis was the slowest and could be grubbed up. The plantation was also used for the timber tree Eucalyptus globulus, for the medicinal plant jalap, and for coffee. Jalap (Ipomoea purga) was an early failure, with great problems in drying the tuber without it going moldy, and an 1877 report from the Society of Apothecaries in London that “at no previous period has the English Market been so over-­stocked with the article and the prices of it correspondingly low” led Thomson to withdraw from export production.38 The arrival of Daniel Morris as director led to a reevaluation of the cinchona plantations in 1879. Morris had been assistant director of the Botanical Department in Ceylon and had considerable experience with cinchona. The trees were found to be too widely planted and the emphasis on C. succirubra to be a mistake: although C. officialis was slower-growing, it grew well on steep slopes and its bark fetched much higher prices. In 1879, when the trees were eleven years old, cutting began, and in that year C. succirubra red bark was exported to London and sold for £2,100. Bark harvested from trees blown down in the

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

223

hurricane of August 1880 was sold for £2,796. Such income was not retained by the department but instead returned to the Jamaican government. Doubtless owing to this financial success, take-­up of cinchona plants by private planters was high, with fifty thousand saplings distributed in 1880. The aim of the cinchona plantation — ​­to demonstrate the financial viability of the crop — ​­was achieved. In 1881 seeds of C. ledgeriana, the form of cinchona exceptionally rich in the quinine alkaloid, were received from the government of the Dutch East Indies (modern-­day Indonesia) and were planted on. Bark from the Cinchona station was dried on a “temporary barbecue” in the Parade Garden in Kingston, thus avoiding the quality problems so prevalent in other exports. Seventeen thousand pounds of bark shipped to London in 1886 fetched just £542, an average of 7.65d per pound. The cost of freight to London was 3d per pound, leaving a poor return for planters. Looking back on the venture in his 1896 report, Fawcett noted that the lack of roads at high elevations had been the greatest obstacle to planters, in contrast to Ceylon, which had good roads and railways. In addition, as a result of the “extraordinarily large shipments” of bark from Ceylon, by 1889 it could be noted that “the value of this valuable drug has so declined in European markets that at present it is almost unrenumerative as a cultural product.” 39 In 1885, as private plantations began to approach maturity (and London prices were falling), Morris proposed that the government withdraw from cinchona production. In 1888 cultivation stopped, and the Cinchona Garden was renamed the Hill Garden and given an emphasis on European crops.

“Curiosities” Nothing is lost in nature. . . . I would apply this . . . to a small matter, but one which contains in it the germ of a “minor” industry not to be despised, especially by ladies and those who are only able to follow light sedentary occupations. The present age is one in which there is a great demand for curious or quaint natural productions of all kinds. Many of these are capable of being tastefully and cleverly worked up into objects of great delicacy and beauty, and, moreover, into articles eagerly sought for purposes of personal or household decoration. . . . This island is in many senses remarkable for possessing ornamental seeds, nuts, and vegetable productions of a most interesting character.

Daniel Morris, 188440

Morris lists some of these products: lace-­bark, velvet seed, nickars, soap-­berry seed, wild ebony, the “innumerable and matchless” ferns, and many kinds of seed. He proposed to make a display in the Museum of the Institute of Jamaica 224

Mark Nesbitt

F i g . 6.7   Souvenir seller. Wortley 1906: plate III. Numbered items include 1. Palmetto fan; 5. Dagger fan with French cotton fringe; 8. Cashew nut doll; 16. Lace-­ bark puffs; 19. Bamboo vase; 28. Coratoe razor strop.

and gave special mention to the Women’s Self Help Society, founded by Lady Musgrave in 1879. The society sold work on behalf of “industrious women.” The making of objects such as D’Oyleys and fans was also a hobby among the wives of settlers, such as the wife of Charles Campbell, “on behalf of schools and other charities.” 41 While these plants figure most often as curiosities in the context of a souvenir industry that burgeoned with the beginning of tourism in the 1880s, most were initially used in everyday life. Wortley’s Souvenirs of Jamaica (1905, reissued 1906) offers unusually detailed insight into the everyday use of plants in Jamaican homes, a tradition that was to die in the second half of the twentieth century. Uses included baskets, mats and brooms, hats, fans, D’Oyleys, fern work, lace-­bark, dolls, jewelry, walking sticks, the bitter cup, razor strops, carved coconuts and calabashes, water gourds, chewsticks, preserves, and pickles.42 Although timber was no longer exported on a large scale in the Victorian period, it was used for furniture, particularly inlaid work, by makers such as Ralph Turnbull (see chapter 13 in this volume, by John Cross). A wide range of society was reported to be engaged in such manufacture, including inmates at the reformatory, “the peasantry,” and individuals such as “a young wife, struggling to keep soul and body together and, at the same time, to ‘keep up appearances,’ assets being, £100 per annum and love in a mortgaged cottage.” 43 Such plant products were highly visible in markets and on souvenir stalls. A high proportion of surviving souvenirs are labeled, in handwriting

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

225

or in print, with the correctly spelled botanical names of the plant products used, suggesting that sellers had easy access to botanical expertise, presumably through the Botanical Department.

Tropical Botany Wayne Modest argues that the Caribbean has come to be defined primarily through its natural, rather than its cultural, history.44 Modest’s case study focuses on museum collections, but the same pattern can be observed in nineteenth-­ century travel literature. With rare exceptions, these writings display little interest in the culture of Jamaica’s black inhabitants, except in the most patronizing fashion, but devote page after page to encomiums on the lush tropical landscape. Several localities became essential viewing, including the Fern Walk, high in the Blue Mountains and east of the military settlement at Newcastle, and Fern Gully, three miles of lane bordered by ferns just south of Ocho Rios on the north coast; both seem to have acquired these names about 1880. It is surprising to note that until 1972 the standard guide to the plants of Jamaica was August Grisebach’s Flora of the British West Indian Islands, researched in Göttingen, Germany, far from the Caribbean, and published between 1859 and 1864. While successful in building up a herbarium and discovering new plants (albeit named in Kew), the botanical staff in Jamaica had a poor track record of formal publication. MacFadyen, working as an amateur botanist in the last years of his life, published an incomplete flora in 1837, and Fawcett similarly never completed his flora (1910–­1936), which he had begun when he moved to the Natural History Museum. An exception is G. S. Jenman, who published A Hand-­list of the Jamaica Ferns and their Allies (1881) and The Ferns and Fern Allies of the British West Indies and Guiana (1898–1909). It is likely that the sheer volume of work in the Botanical Department did not allow time for purely taxonomic research. There is little evidence of visits by professional botanists from the United Kingdom, but toward the end of the nineteenth century American botanists were keenly interested in the island. In 1893 James Ellis Humphrey of Massachusetts proposed setting up an international laboratory for botany and zoology on the north side of the island, following in 1896–­1897 with plans to set up a laboratory in the West Indies for American botanists; Fawcett was in favor of the idea and envisaged a joint project.45 In 1897 the botanists Douglas Houghton Campbell (Stanford University) and D. T. MacDougal (University of Minnesota) toured the island and commented on the magnificent range of ferns to be found in the Blue Mountains and forests full of ferns, palms, and orchids.46

226

Mark Nesbitt

F ig . 6 . 8   Marianne North, View in the Fernwalk, oil on board, 1872. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “It almost took away my breath with its lovely fairy-­like beauty; the very mist which always seemed to hang among the trees and plants there made it the more lovely and mysterious. There were quantities of tree-­ferns, and every other sort of fern, all growing piled on one another; trees with branches and stems quite covered with them, and with wild bromeliads and orchids, many of the bromeliads with rosy centres and flowers coming out of them. A close waxy pink ivy was running up everything as well as the creeping fern, and many lycopodiums, mosses, and lichens. It was like a scene in a pantomime, too good to be real, the tree-­fern fronds crossing and recrossing each other like network. One saw dozens at one view, their slender stems draped and hidden by other ferns and creeping things.” Marianne North, Recollections of a Happy Life (London: Macmillan, 1892), 89.

Spreading Knowledge The work of the Department initially emphasized the dissemination of plants, but the dissemination of information gained in importance through the Victorian period. Daniel Morris instigated a publication program in 1880, with a printed catalog of plants and a bulletin of practical tips for cultivation. Apprentices (“native workmen”) and unpaid cadets (“gentlemen”) were trained in cinchona cultivation from 1882. In 1891 an industrial school was established in the grounds at Hope, and training was offered to some of the boys; in 1890 two men from Lagos, West Africa, were sent to the gardens for training. By 1896 one of the garden staff, Mr. W. Chadwick, was traveling the island, giving popular lectures and demonstrations on the cultivation and curing of agricultural products. The audience sought were “the small freeholders.” In 1898 Fawcett wrote, “Our chief aim at present is to reach the peasant class, who cannot read well enough to appreciate printed matter, or who cannot get just the kind of information he requires.” 47 All the directors of the department gave public lectures, aimed more at the planters and administrators who might attend a meeting in Kingston. Letters were an immensely important means of communication; the annual report for 1884 notes that 4,021 letters were sent on official business, and “nearly every one of these letters was either drafted or written by the Director [Morris] himself.” 48 The potential of Jamaica’s natural resources was communicated to the wider world through the characteristically Victorian medium of museums and exhibitions. The Museum of the Jamaica Society, viewed by Philip Gosse in 1846, appears to have dissolved shortly afterward, leading Gilbert McNab to send its extensive collection of starches, oils, and spirits to the Museum of Economic Botany at Kew in 1848.49 Over subsequent decades many more specimens were sent to Kew’s Museum. Founded as the first of its type in 1847, it inspired similar museums of useful plants in many countries.50 Economic plants were shown in the Museum of the Institute of Jamaica from 1879. In 1887 Fawcett proposed a display of plant products, “a valuable assistance to those engaged in the culture of minor products . . . prepared in the condition most suitable for home markets.” Kew sent out a case of specimens in 1888 for display at the institute. In 1891, as the Imperial Institute in South Kensington took on a major role in tropical products, Fawcett arranged an exhibit of fruits and spirits in its Jamaica Court.51 Staff of the department were active participants in, and sometimes managers of, the process of assembling exhibits for international exhibitions. Jamaica had only one exhibit at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, but the 1862 London

228

Mark Nesbitt

F ig . 6 . 9   The Jamaica Section at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, 1886. Illustrated London News, September 25, 1886: 340. Yale Center for British Art. “Rum greets one first as a matter of course, though the rum is plainly very fine . . . many delectable specimens of preserved fruits, including mango and whole pepper, on the romantic blue mountain coffee . . . and the medicinal plants and barks sent by the Botanical Department. . . . The charming collection of fern and leaf hats and bonnets amply proves the skill of the fair hands employed by the Ladies’ Self Help Society. . . . Of higher practical value are the specimens of divers woods and fibres.”

Exhibition mustered 195 exhibitors, including Wilson, who showed a collection of plant fibers. Subsequently, botanical staff assembled large displays and made long stays at exhibitions. Thomson stayed for seven months at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, taking an economic collection of about 140 species for the Horticultural Hall.52 Morris visited the 1883 Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam and assisted in arranging the Jamaica Court. Morris had over three months of absence on special duty, as commissioner for Jamaica at the 1884 World’s Exposition in New Orleans, where the display included “useful and fancy woods, dyewoods, spices, ornamental seeds, and various economic and

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

229

medicinal products.” 53 In 1885 he was made chairman of the local organizing committee for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, to be held in London in 1886. The success of the Jamaica Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition led to the Jamaica Exhibition, held in Kingston in 1891.54 While its original purpose, to encourage foreign trade, was not fulfilled, over 302,000 visitors came, from an island population of 650,000. On a smaller and more regular basis, the horticultural shows held in Kingston were also an important domestic showcase for the island’s products.

Forests In 1881 Daniel Morris prepared a report on forest conservation for the governor and the secretary of state for the colonies. He emphasized the importance of forests for standing timber and for their effect on climate and erosion. E. D. M. Hooper, of the Indian Forest Department, visited Jamaica in 1885–­1886. His report of 1886 identified small freeholders’ shifting cultivation of yams in the forests, usually at some distance from their home, as a major cause of deforestation.55 Land was often abandoned after a couple of years and then filled by shrubs that excluded the reestablishment of hardwoods. At the time, forests accounted for about eight hundred thousand acres, or 29 percent of the island’s surface; more than 4 percent of the forest within reach of cultivation was being cut over each year. Hooper considered that the ease of import of timber from North America led to the underestimation of the hardwoods of the island as an economic product, particularly as road and rail communication improved. There were more immediate grounds for forest conservation, for regulation of water supply, and potentially for amelioration of climate. Hooper recommended the establishment of forest preserves in the ridges of the Blue Mountains and more care of existing crown lands in the western half of the island. He emphasized the importance of a gradual approach that encouraged cultivation of existing land and recommended the appointment of a forest officer and of forest guards. Little action followed, despite reminders to the government from Morris and Fawcett. At the same time, forest was regarded as a resource for agricultural land: for example, Morris drew attention to the fact that “on the northern slopes of the Blue Mountains, there are, at the present time, about one hundred thousand acres of land in virgin forest, richer and finer than any now cultivated, admirably adapted for the growth of tea, coffee, and cinchona.” 56 Unlike many other colonies, Jamaica came very late to forest management. In 1924 Sir Arthur Hill, director of Kew, wrote to the Colonial Office regarding his conversation with members of the Legislative Council on forestry and the need for diversity

230

Mark Nesbitt

in agricultural production; he found them “decidedly apathetic and lacking in appreciation of the dangers to which the island . . . was exposed by the policy of neglect of forestry. . . . The prevalent idea seemed to be that bananas were the only crop about which any trouble or interest need be taken.” 57 A Forestry Department was finally established in 1937 and is today responsible for 274,000 acres of forest, or about 10 percent of Jamaica’s land area.

Government The colonial establishment of Jamaica experienced a mounting sense of crisis during the early 1860s. In 1863 Nathaniel Wilson wrote to Joseph Dalton Hooker of Kew, With respect to botanical Science it was always a rare pleasure here and will soon become extinct, and Horticulture is but little better cultivated. I have established a new nursery [Castleton], 19 miles from Kingston, which Mr. Thomson superintends, with but little comfort or pleasure, and as to this old ruinate garden [Bath], it still serves to supply the country with plants and seeds, every obstacle being thrown in the way of progress. . . . Many fine plants have been received from Kew, but this government have not to the best of my knowledge thanked Sir Wm. [Hooker] for them nor indeed appreciate their value aright. This sad picture is only a type of the decadence of the Island. The Sugar Estates are being abandoned fast and the country over-­run by bush.58 Although despair — ​­like disagreements with Thomson — ​­is a constant theme in Wilson’s correspondence, nonetheless it is possible to discern a change in attitude, and eventually in funding, with the introduction of direct rule in 1866. Sir John Grant was the first governor in the new regime. He wrote to Kew in May 1868. After explaining that Wilson’s enforced retirement was necessary as part of wider cost cutting (Wilson earned £300; Thomson £150), he explained, “The want of intelligent enterprise, and power of exertion, among the landed proprietors of this colony is truly surprising. But neither Mr. Wilson nor anyone else could do good to people who would do nothing — ​­and think of nothing — ​­but their wretched squabbles — ​­which they called politics. Imagine our importing castor oil from Europe — ​­the plant growing here more luxuriantly than I ever saw it in India.” Grant drew attention too to cacao, tobacco, and coconut as crops with obvious potential.59 He was evidently keen on gardening too, seeking advice and plants. In 1871 he wrote again, to Sir Joseph Hooker, with a list of plants at Castleton and the Cinchona Plantation:

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

231

“I have always been at Mr Thomson about palms. . . . I am also anxious to have every variety of sugar cane. . . . I want Jamaica to have as complete a collection of sugar canes as exists, and a notable collection of Palms — ​­and a great collection of economic trial plants.” 60 That Grant was in post from 1866 to 1874 was undoubtedly a major factor in the establishment of the cinchona plantations on such a large scale. For example, in 1869 Thomson quoted Grant as urging the purchase of more land for Cinchona plantations.61 Sir Anthony Musgrave (governor 1877–­1883) also took an active interest in the appointment of staff and was strongly in favor of the appointment of Daniel Morris in 1879. On Morris’s arrival in Jamaica, on December 1, 1879, he was invited to stay at the governor’s residence, where he met many of Kingston’s officials at receptions and balls, a sign both of the strong interest from the governor and of the higher social status now accorded the director of the Botanical Department.62 Although, as we shall see, there was still strong opposition to the Botanical Department from some members of the Legislative Council, the direct intervention of governors from 1866 must account for some of the increased activity seen from that time.

Botany versus Agriculture The development of the department as a scientific, rather than a purely horticultural, institution began with the arrival of Daniel Morris, who established a herbarium and library in 1880. Indeed, Morris’s actions in developing the work of the department, in close correspondence with Kew, conform to the recommendations set out in a wide-­ranging review of colonial botany by Thiselton-­D yer, assistant director at Kew.63 The growth of these collections is charted in subsequent reports: the herbarium had reached 2,300 specimens by 1883, with the explicit aim of collecting all the Jamaican flora, not only the economic. Similarly, cultivation within the gardens was not only of economic plants; in 1874–­1875, for example, 230 species of indigenous ferns and 140 species of orchids were brought under cultivation. Morris’s successor, William Fawcett, wrote that “Botanic Gardens should aid in the study of pure science, for science always tells on practice.” 64 Tensions over this approach are hinted at here and there in annual reports but are most clearly expressed in a scathing editorial in the Gleaner in 1903. The writer quotes from the recent Royal Commission and accuses the Botanical Department of being a “sham.” 65 Criticisms of the department often came from sugar interests, who saw investigation of “minor” crops, let alone ornamentals, as a diversion. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, calls for an agri-

232

Mark Nesbitt

cultural department became more frequent, though in 1892 Fawcett pointed out that the several departments of Jamaican government collectively fulfilled that purpose.66 The West India Royal Commission’s report of 1897 emphasized the United Kingdom’s obligation to fund alternatives to a sugar industry on the verge of extinction, particularly in the smaller islands, rather than in Jamaica and Trinidad.67 The commission criticized the representatives of the sugar interest for their lack of interest in the state of “peasant proprietors.” It praised the work of the Jamaica Department and proposed it should form the basis of an imperially funded department that would work in the Leeward and Windward Islands, Barbados, and Tobago, ensuring that the quality of service available in Jamaica and Trinidad was available in the smaller islands. Fawcett pointed out that the Department of Public Gardens and Plantations in Jamaica received £4,695 of public funding in the year 1898–­1899, whereas the commission proposed equivalent facilities for these islands (with a substantially smaller area and population) of £10,400: “The Department is run very cheaply, but the saving effected in this way, cripples its work, and prevents expansion in many directions.” 68

The United Kingdom versus the United States Jamaica lies far closer to the United States than to the United Kingdom, yet in 1865, 79 percent of Jamaica’s exports went to the United Kingdom, which supplied 61 percent of Jamaica’s imports; only 8 percent of Jamaica’s exports went to the United States, whence came 26 percent of her imports. The reasons for restricted trade with the United States are complex but include the effects of the blockades during the American Civil War and quarantines against Jamaican shipments, which were vigorously opposed by Morris.69 The Botanical Department regularly exchanged plants with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and its staff visited the United States, mainly to participate in international exhibitions. However, Jamaica’s Botanical Department had little to do with the major reorientation of Jamaica’s trade in the Victorian period. By 1899 the United States accounted for 59 percent of Jamaica’s exports and 45 percent of her imports; overall, 41 percent of Jamaica’s exports were fruit.70 From about 1882 bananas replaced oranges, coconuts, limes, and pineapples as the major fruit to be exported. Bananas had been grown in the Caribbean since the sixteenth century. In Jamaica they were mainly cultivated in the northeast, on fertile metamorphic soils, by smallholders within easy reach of Port Antonio. Jamaican fruit had been bought by American shippers since the 1860s, but Jamaica’s banana export industry owes its origins to Lorenzo D.

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

233

F ig . 6.1 0   Banana women. James Henry Stark, Stark’s Jamaica Guide (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1902), 98. “Great quantities of bananas are shipped from this port [Morant Bay]. Many people will be met bringing down bunches of bananas on their heads from their little patch of ground on the mountain side. They are put into the storehouse on the wharf in open slat crates or bins, and then transferred to the steamers.”

Baker from Massachusetts, who first visited Jamaica in 1872. Through manipulation of shipping and banana prices, Baker’s Boston Fruit Company (later United Fruit) controlled 42 percent of banana exports by 1886, exported exclusively by steamship. Bananas had to reach retail markets within three weeks of cutting, so effective control of shipping was essential. Baker also established plantations on the island, to give greater control over a substantial portion of the banana supply.71 The banana boats of the Boston Fruit Company — ​­which were steamships by the mid-­1880s — ​­not only created a new market in North America but also brought the first tourists to Jamaica.72 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Boston Fruit Company had sixteen steamers traveling between Jamaica and American ports. In 1901 a fortnightly service of steamers commenced between Jamaica and Bristol, with a subsidy from the imperial and Jamaican governments of £40,000

234

Mark Nesbitt

a year on condition that the owners of the line, Messrs. Elder, Dempster & Co., purchased twenty thousand bunches of bananas for conveyance on each ship.73 The quality problems so often apparent in Jamaican products continued. Thiselton-­D yer wrote to the Colonial Office on March 26, 1901, of an early shipment on this line: “I am extremely disappointed with the result. . . . The bananas were small, hard, green, and immature. The oranges were externally satisfactory in size and colour. But they were full of tough ‘rag’ and though juicy, singularly deficient in flavor.” He made similar comments about grapefruit, mangoes, and pineapple.74 With its lack of expertise in fruit purchases and vulnerability to the aggressive United Fruit Company, Elders and Fyffes, the company responsible for purchasing and shipping the bananas, was soon taken over by United Fruit.

Conclusions Optimism about the agricultural potential of Jamaica has a long history. In 1678 Richard Blome wrote, “If well improved, [it] would soon become the best and richest plantation that ever the English were (or are like to be) masters of.” Two hundred years later, Daniel Morris wrote, “The true wealth of these possessions lies in the characteristics and products of the soil; and, without exception, in this respect they afford means of development and of permanency of prosperity equal to any in the world.” 75 In the same paper, Morris contrasted the stagnation or decay of the West Indies with the success of agricultural development in South Asia. Reading the letters and reports of the staff of the Botanical Department, one can only be impressed by their energy and efficiency under difficult circumstances. They were vulnerable to — ​­and sometimes died from — ​­cholera and yellow fever; they faced difficult terrain on every journey; and above all, they were subject to the vagaries of the island’s government, which was always seeking to reduce expenditure and some of whose members questioned the whole basis of the department. There is evidence, however, that the advent of direct rule brought strong interest from the governor, and in the 1880s he increased funding to consistently around £5,000 a year. Throughout the Victorian period, staff in Jamaica relied heavily on practical support from Kew, in forms ranging from selection of new staff to naming of plants and sending of books. The bulk of international plant exchange was with Kew. At some points four botanical gardens were maintained; each received glowing reports from visitors and proved able to produce large numbers of plants and distribute them around the island.

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

235

The Botanical Department made extensive efforts to adapt to emancipation and the rise in smallholders and to the perils of reliance on a single crop. While research into sugar was maintained — ​­and sugar has continued to be an important crop in Jamaica — ​­most efforts went into crops suitable for smallholders, who were the formerly enslaved, and distribution and agricultural extension efforts were explicitly targeted at this group. The Botanical Department, at least, cannot be accused of ignoring peasant agriculture. It is true that the emphasis was on export crops, but the kitchen gardens and provision grounds had long been recognized as well stocked and expertly gardened; they were a low priority for improvement.76 The lack of sustained interest in the medicinal plants used in Jamaica is more surprising; these had been of keen interest to earlier botanists, at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is when we come to judge the outcomes of the department’s work, rather than its aims, that hard questions must be asked. A very wide range of plants was imported and trialed in the botanic gardens, an approach consistent with Victorian economic botany farther afield, as visible, for example, in the vast collection of the former Museum of Economic Botany (now the Economic Botany Collection) at Kew. Most of the thousands of species in the museum never made the transition to commercial success. The same is true of Jamaica’s botanic gardens in the Victorian period. Cinchona and plant fibers are just two of many examples of crops that failed, because of difficulties in local processing that led to poor quality raw materials, expensive freight costs to the United Kingdom, and, above all, the vagaries of world markets. The much desired diversification never happened. A counterintuitive exception is the “curiosities,” which proved to be less economically marginal than one might expect. As demonstrated by Jamaican lace-­bark, these products were widely sold for a period, from the 1880s to the 1930s, and supported a wide range of makers and sellers.77 Yet the most successful new export crop of the Victorian era was one that the Botanical Department did nothing to promote. In the decades during which it became so important, the banana hardly figures in the annual reports of the Botanical Department. Were the Botanical Department’s close links to Kew in fact a disadvantage, focusing attention on minor crops for export markets in a far distant land rather than on the major fruits desired by the United States nearby? The questions raised by this chapter are not purely academic. To this day, articles in the Gleaner discuss the problems facing the island’s farmers; many of these would have been familiar to their Victorian forebears.

236

Mark Nesbitt

Notes Annual Reports of the Botanical Department are referred to by the year they cover; they were usually published the following year as a supplement to the Jamaica Gazette. I am grateful to the editors and to Caroline Cornish (Kew) and Duncan Taylor (Queen’s University Belfast) for their helpful comments on this chapter; remaining errors are my own. 1. Veront M. Satchell, Hope Transformed: A Historical Sketch of the Hope Landscape, St Andrew, Jamaica, 1660–­1960 (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2012). 2. Kew Directors’ Correspondence, 211/​623. Housed at the Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and henceforth cited as dc, followed by volume and folio number. Also available at http://plants.jstor.org. 3. Charles Dennis Adams, Flowering Plants of Jamaica (Mona: University of the West Indies, 1972); and George R. Proctor, Ferns of Jamaica: A Guide to the Pteridophytes (London: British Museum Natural History, 1985). 4. Adams, Flowering Plants of Jamaica, 22. 5. Annual Report on the Public Gardens and Plantations for 1887. Each annual report, usually published as a supplement to the Jamaica Gazette, is cited here by the last year to which it refers; it was usually published the following year. 6. Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations for 1882. 7. Douglas Hall, “Botanical and Horticultural Enterprise in Eighteenth-­Century Jamaica,” in West Indies Accounts, ed. R. A. McDonald (Kingston: University of the West Indies, 1996), 101–­19; Miles Ogborn, “Talking Plants: Botany and Speech in Eighteenth-­ Century Jamaica,” History of Science 51 (2013): 251–­82. 8. William Fawcett, “The Public Gardens and Plantations of Jamaica,” Botanical Gazette 24 (1897): 345–­69. 9. The plants are listed by Dulcie Powell, “The Voyage of the Plant Nursery, H.M.S. Providence, 1791–­1793,” Economic Botany 31 (1977): 387–­431. 10. dc 69/​173. 11. Daniel Morris, “Botanical Institutions of Jamaica,” Kew Bulletin 3 (1906): 61–­68; Barry W. Higman, Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2008); John H. Rashford, “The Past and Present Uses of Bamboo in Jamaica,” Economic Botany 49 (1995): 395–­405. 12. Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica, 1838–­1865: An Economic History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 13. Gisela Eisner, Jamaica, 1830–­1930: A Study in Economic Growth (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974). 14. Alan Eyre, The Botanic Gardens of Jamaica (London: Deutsch, 1966); Fawcett, “Public Gardens”; Donal P. McCracken, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997); Morris, “Botanical Institutions”; Satchell, Hope Transformed ; and Olive Senior, Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (Kingston: Twin Guinep, 2003).

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

237

15. Botanical Report for 1856. 16. dc 211/​593a. 17. Anon., “A Day at Castleton Gardens,” Gardener’s Monthly 3, no. 10 (1893). 18. M. F. Robinson, A Narrative Introducing Robert Thomson (Published by the author, 2007). 19. Fawcett, “Public Gardens,” 355. 20. Gall’s Newsletter, May 14, 1887. 21. McCracken, Gardens of Empire. 22. dc 70/​405; Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 23. Fawcett, Annual Report on the Public Gardens and Plantations 1887. 24. dc 69/​351. 25. Report on the Condition and Progress of the Botanic Garden, Public Gardens 1873–­74. 26. Condition and Progress of the Botanic Gardens for 1869. 27. dc 211/​981. 28. Botanical Report for 1856. 29. Holt, The Problem of Freedom. 30. Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, 1881. 31. Report of the Director of Public Gardens and Plantations, 1893. 32. Nathaniel Wilson, “On the Useful Vegetable Products, Especially the Fibres, of Jamaica,” Hooker’s Journal of Botany and Kew Garden Miscellany 7 (1855): 335–­40. 33. dc 210/​274. 34. dc 210/​4 22. 35. Daniel Morris, Some Objects of Productive Industry, part 4: Native and Other Fibre Plants (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1884). 36. Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, 1884. 37. dc 65/​407. 38. Report on the Public Plantations, 1877. 39. Anon., “Cinchona in Jamaica,” Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, Royal Gardens, Kew (1889), 244–­47. 40. Daniel Morris, Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, 1884. 41. dc 210/​23. 42. Emily Brennan, Lori-­Ann Harris, and Mark Nesbitt, “Jamaican Lace-­Bark: Its History and Uncertain Future,” Textile History 44 (2013): 235–­53. 43. Edward J. Wortley, Souvenirs of Jamaica (Kingston: Gleaner, 1906), 25. 44. Wayne Modest, “We Have Always Been Modern: Museums, Collections and Modernity in the Caribbean,” Museum Anthropology 35 (2012): 85–­96. 45. dc 210/​462. 46. Douglas H. Campbell, “Botanical Aspects of Jamaica,” American Naturalist 32 (1898): 34–­42. 47. Report of the Director on the Department of Public Gardens and Plantations, 1898. 48. Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, 1884.

238

Mark Nesbitt

49. dc 70/​196. 50. Caroline Cornish and Mark Nesbitt, “Historical Perspectives on Western Ethnobotanical Collections,” in Curating Biocultural Collections: A Handbook, ed. Jan Salick, Katie Konchar, and Mark Nesbitt (Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2014), 271–­93. 51. dc 210/​51. 52. dc 211/​1052. 53. Annual Report of the Public Gardens and Plantations, 1885. 54. John E. Findling and Kimberley D. Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–­1988 (New York: Greenwood, 1990). 55. E. D. M. Hooper, Report on the Forests of Jamaica (London: Waterlow, 1886). 56. Daniel Morris, Planting Enterprise in the West Indies (London: S. W. Silver, 1883). 57. Miscellaneous Reports, Kew Archives, vol. 670. Jamaica. Forestry, 80. 58. dc 211/​1075. 59. dc 210/​499. 60. dc 210/​505. 61. dc 211/​1010. 62. dc 211/​706. 63. William T. Thiselton-­D yer, The Botanical Enterprise of Empire (London: Spottiswoode, 1880). 64. Report of the Director of Public Gardens and Plantations, 1894. 65. Gleaner, November 5, 1903. 66. Report of the Director of Public Gardens and Plantations, 1892. 67. Anon., Report of the West India Royal Commission, with Subsidiary Report by D. Morris (London: hmso, 1897). 68. Annual Report of the Department of Botany, 1898. 69. dc 211/​852. 70. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 348. 71. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 348; John Soluri, “Bananas before Plantations: Smallholders, Shippers, and Colonial Policy in Jamaica, 1870–­1910,” Iberoamericana 23 (2006): 143–­59. 72. Frank Fonda Taylor, To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993); and Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 73. London Times, October 13, 1900. 74. Miscellaneous Reports, Kew Archives, vol. 665. Jamaica. Cultural Products A–­F, 314–­16. 75. Richard Blome, A Description of the Island of Jamaica (London: T. Milbourn, 1678); and Morris, Planting Enterprise in the West Indies. 76. Beth Fowkes Tobin, “ ‘And There Raise Yams’: Slaves’ Gardens in the Writings of West Indian Plantocrats,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 23 (1999): 164–­76. 77. Brennan, Harris, and Nesbitt, “Jamaican Lace-­Bark.”

Botany in Victorian Jamaica

239

CHAPTER 7

Victorian Sport in Jamaica, 1863–­1909 JULIAN CRESSER

Games of various sorts were played in Jamaica during the earlier periods of British colonialism, but the Victorian era saw the transfer to the island of new sporting forms and values. These had been fashioned in a British society responding to the new conditions brought about by the industrial revolution. By the late nineteenth century, certain sporting forms had become intimately woven into the dominant system of values and national symbols in Britain. Furthermore, sport came to serve the needs of the imperial project: In Jamaica, its growth was fostered as part of a conscious effort to engender cultural conformity and loyalty to empire. However, sporting practices and values imposed from the outside had to contend with a Jamaican cultural space that had evolved its own creole values. The different sections of Jamaican society made choices about which Victorian sporting values they would accept or reject and brought their own values into the playing of these sports. Victorian sports were also adapted to new physical environments, resulting in practices that were different in form, if not necessarily in essence. Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Victorian sporting forms were beginning to be creolized in the Jamaican space.

Reformation of Sport in Victorian Britain By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Britain had become a predominantly urban industrial society. Industrialization and commercial development led to the emergence of a powerful and influential middle class and resulted in a rapid and haphazard urbanization that contributed to a number of social problems. Factory owners faced a volatile proletariat protesting austere conditions, stringent disciplinary measures, and restricted leisure time. By the late 1830s, this proletariat had grown into an organized, working-­class movement: The Chartist campaign for manhood suffrage was one manifestation of the working-­class demand for political change. The dominant classes felt threat-

ened by social and political disorder and were increasingly concerned with the need for strong rule and for measures of social control. Sport played a major role in the response to this situation. First, it helped forge a sense of common identity among key elements of the Victorian ruling classes. This process took place to a significant degree within Victorian public schools, which provided a mechanism for boys of bourgeois origin to become assimilated into a patrician elite. Some of the educators in these public schools were particularly concerned with molding the character of their charges and took direction from the increasingly popular ideas of Muscular Christianity, which sought to link Christian virtue to a commitment to physical health and manliness.1 According to Norman Vance, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, who had a tremendous influence on Victorian public-­school education, “proposed a rather austere Christian manliness as his educational objective” and sought “to train Christian gentlemen for a Christianized state.” 2 John Hargreaves adds that Arnold meant for these “Christian gentlemen” to be “disciplined, socially responsible and self-­reliant enough, not only to govern themselves but the lower orders as well.” 3 They would provide a military officer class and the upper echelon of civil servants for the British Empire. Work in commerce and industry was looked down upon.4 The qualities instilled in these public schools were used to validate the elite status of their graduates and to justify the exclusion of the masses from the political process.5 Within the nuanced and stratified world of the Victorian middle classes, an education at a public school was productive of forms of social distinction that would be denied even to a wealthy manufacturer or civic leader in a provincial city. Under the Arnoldian ideology of Muscular Christianity, members of the elite were expected to be benevolent paternalists, looking out for the interests (as they saw them) of the masses: thus, “the concept of gentleman retained its anti-­democratic traditional connotations of honour due and privileged right to rule, but it incorporated a new demanding version of ‘noblesse oblige.’ ” 6 We see these ideas reflected in the work of Tom Hughes, a Victorian author who attended Rugby School under Arnold. In Tom Brown at Oxford, Hughes wrote, “A man’s body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.” 7 This, of course, is a very different set of codes of bourgeois behavior from those associated with the industrial and commercial middle class, whose fictional representatives include Mr. Thornton in North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the character-­molding aims of the public schools were being increasingly met through sport, which began

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

241

to be viewed more and more in terms of its suitability to promote Christian manliness. According to Keith Sandiford, cricket was one of the most popular sports, and clergymen both promoted and practiced sport.8 In the public schools, games were thought to instill in pupils “such qualities as manliness, strength, loyalty, discipline and powers of leadership.” 9 Sport was therefore important in constructing an identity for the elite. As Brailsford puts it, “In organised sports the scions of the ruling classes absorbed a uniquely British ‘bourgeois ideology’ and rehearsed the practices that were necessary in order to integrate successfully into the social order.” 10 The emphasis on manliness speaks to the gender attitudes that existed in Victorian society, attitudes that sought to exclude women from many public roles and spaces and that determined very different expectations for masculine and feminine behavior. This distinction was highly evident in the culture of sport, which was prejudiced against female participation in most sports. Sport also helped to serve the needs of the Victorian dominant classes by engendering working-­class submission and social conformity. Sport was charged with ideology geared toward that end. Cricket, for instance, according to Aviston Downes, “came loaded with a vocabulary which privileged conciliation over contention. Notions such as ‘fair play,’ esprit de corps, keeping a ‘stiff upper lip,’ modesty in victory and graciousness in defeat, meant that the game was seen as a useful vehicle to canalise potential social conflict.”  11 Unquestioning obedience to officials in sport also stood as an important metaphor for respect of real-­world authority figures. Social control was a key motivation behind the encouragement of certain sports among all sections of society. However, this dissemination of sport was not meant to threaten the established hierarchy. Status was a fundamental feature of Victorian mores, and class lines were inflexibly drawn.12 Sports served in many ways to reinforce these divisions — ​­notably in the formation of exclusive clubs. However, while sport was being used in the definition of social identity and status, it was also thought able to bring the different social classes together.13 The challenge for the social elite was to reconcile the motives of social integration and status differentiation. The solution they found was to accommodate the lower classes in subordinate roles, a response perhaps best expressed in the distinction between amateur and professional players. Professionalism had long been a feature of British sport, and persons — ​­frequently, but not exclusively, from the lower classes — ​­earned money as jockeys, prizefighters, and cricketers, for instance. However, amateurism became a cherished principle of Victorian sport. Ostensibly based on the idea that sport should be pursued for its own sake and free from monetary rewards, in practice it meant a division along class lines between bourgeois and

242

Julian Cresser

aristocratic “gentlemen,” who could afford to play the sport for leisure, and professional “players” of the lower orders, who could only devote serious time to sport if they were paid to play. So clearly drawn were the lines of class differentiation that players and gentlemen used different facilities and different pavilions and gates to enter the field and also had separate travel arrangements.14 No real class integration occurred before the late Victorian period, but there was still significant accommodation of, and interaction between, all classes within the sphere of sport. Persons of all backgrounds came out to watch and participate variously at horseracing, for instance, and cricket on the village green would temporarily unite people of different occupations. These factors allowed sport to develop into a national symbol in Britain by the late nineteenth century. Stimulus for this development was provided by growing European nationalism and imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Sandiford argues that the success of Muscular Christianity was part of a climate in which notions of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest were becoming current and were associated with national and imperial success.15 Sport served Britain’s needs by supplying the type of men thought necessary to lead the nation and empire — ​ ­in terms of character as well as in terms of physical qualities. This association was manifest in the military, where formal physical training and organized sport were institutionalized.16 Nationalism and imperialism also intensified the need for self-­definition in relation to other nations and civilizations. The values surrounding sport came to play an important role in shaping British identity and instilling a sense of racial and cultural superiority. Cricket, in particular, played an important role for the British in self-­definition, as it was glorified, according to Sandiford, “as a perfect system of ethics and morals which embodied all that was most noble in the Anglo-­Saxon character.” 17 This sense of self was a significant factor in British imperial efforts and meant that sports were to figure significantly in imperial culture. The officer class and civil servants who were leaders of imperial endeavors comprised public-­school graduates, clergymen, and educators: such men held on dearly to these values as markers of identity and used them to foster a cultural bond with white colonists.18 Furthermore, notions of superiority offered late Victorians validation and motivation for the spread of empire.

Transfer of Victorian Sport to Jamaica The ties between sport and imperialism were very much in evidence in Jamaica in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century.

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

243

Agents of British imperialism believed sport could create closer ties between Britain and whites in the colony. At the time of a visit by an English cricket team to the island in 1902, Jamaican governor Augustus Hemming stated, “It speaks volumes for the love of sport which animates, and I hope always will animate, the men of the British race, that these gentlemen should come so far to meet in friendly rivalry those who, tho’ separated from the Mother Country by so many thousand miles, are as true and loyal subjects of the British Crown as are to be found in any part of the King’s dominions.” 19 The governor went on to censure Rudyard Kipling’s recently published long poem “The Islanders,” which was critical of the prominence of sport in Britain during a time of war: “Poets may rave and talk wild nonsense about “flannelled fools at the wicket,” but we know that the greatness of our Empire, and the success which has attended the Anglo-­Saxon race wherever it has spread, are largely due to the manner in which it has always known how to combine a love of sport with the sterner business of life. . . . The sports and games of Great Britain have, far from doing harm, largely contributed to make our race what it is.” 20 Hemming’s words alluded to the notion of the superiority of the white/​ Anglo-­Saxon “race” and the idea that the success of empire was evidence of white racial superiority. Significantly, Hemming made it clear that sport was an essential component of the British and Anglo-­Saxon identity, and therefore, it was not only a feature of the British Empire but, more significantly, in part responsible for its success. For their part, many Jamaican whites were themselves seeking to strengthen the colonial bond. Indeed, many whites in Jamaica considered themselves to be British and thought of Britain as home. In Jamaica, this attitude was shared by some nonwhite persons who had become a part of the social elite by the late nineteenth century. These members of the social elite looked to Britain for cultural direction and looked on the colonial bureaucrats sent out from England as cultural cynosures. That mindset was evident in a letter to the Daily Gleaner newspaper (from someone describing him or herself as a “strong imperialist”) commenting on the role of British troops in Jamaica: “Apart from fiscal considerations we had the advantage of the association of cultured gentlemen of the army and the navy, where ever recurring visits brought about socially civilising influences and friendly associations that was greatly appreciated. They added to our happiness in sports, [and] in the general recreations.” 21 These attitudes must be understood within the context of Jamaica’s colo-

244

Julian Cresser

nial relationship, which meant that British cultural values were the de facto dominant values in the colony. Their adoption was important in defining social rank, especially as culture played an increasingly important role in the definition of identity and social status in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 For this very reason, embracing Victorian cultural values — ​­including sport — ​­was also important to the aspiring brown and black middle classes. Jeremy MacClancy explains that imperial administrators left Britain with the idea that “those colonised subjects who learnt how to ‘play up, play up and play the game’ were well on their way to becoming the sort of persons upon whom expatriate whites might be able to rely.” 23 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, therefore, the efforts of the agents and agencies of British imperialism were welcomed and aided by members of a local white, colored, and black cultural elite.24 In terms of sport, the spread of Victorian forms was the work of several institutions. The British military, as the “strong imperialist” suggested, was an important agency in the transfer of Victorian sporting practices and helped to light the torch for the growth of sports in the island. Cricket was a popular activity among the military, and troops at Port Royal, Up Park Camp, and Newcastle formed teams and played regularly.25 Military teams were also among the first to play soccer and rugby on the island.26 The elite churches, such as the Church of England, Church of Scotland, and the Roman Catholic Church, and the nonconformist denominations such as the Moravians, Baptists, and Methodists that catered to the colored and black middle class, were also prominent in the effort to spread sports among the social elite. Many churches formed teams and encouraged the playing of sports. The small but expanding number of secondary schools that catered to the upper and middle classes also fostered the connection between the island’s elite and sport. Many of these schools were church run, and members of the clergy and graduates of universities and public schools dominated their administrations. The teachers for secondary schools were mostly young Englishmen. 27 The curricula of these schools were largely based on the English school system: for instance, the stated purpose of York Castle High School, a Wesleyan school, was to supply “such an education and moral training as would obviate all necessity of sending boys to any English or European School.” 28 Sports were naturally integral to school life, with schools not only offering instruction but also organizing their own sports clubs. Soccer was introduced at Kings­ton Grammar School by the Rev. M. C. Clare, who was curate of the Kingston Parish Church.29 The Church of England and Collegiate School in Kingston

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

245

Fig. 7 . 1   Collegiate school team, 1897. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​2884.

had a cricket team that was often captained by the Rev. Boyce, the principal, and included other masters of the school (fig.  7.1).30 The York Castle High School in St. Ann, the Montego Bay Secondary School in St. James, and the Wolmer’s School in Kingston all formed cricket clubs.31

Elite Sport Clubs By the late nineteenth century, the increasing popularity of sports was manifested by the formation of a number of sporting clubs. The most common of these were cricket clubs, some of which engaged in other sporting activities as well. Many such cricket clubs were formed in rural areas, though the title Cricket Club (C.C.) might cover an informal social association with neither grounds and permanent headquarters nor regularly scheduled activities. Rather, the elite “gentlemen” of an area would form a team from among themselves to play matches whenever the opportunity arose. The predominantly white social elite of Kingston found a home in the Kings-

246

Julian Cresser

ton Cricket Club, which by the beginning of the twentieth century was deemed in the newspaper the Daily Gleaner the “island’s premier club” (fig. 7.2).32 The Kingston C.C. had been formed in 1863, at a meeting at the Collegiate School in Kingston, and a number of the club’s early members came from the school.33 The English public-­school experience of some of the Kingston C.C.’s members was a factor in the club’s formation, as “several of [their] youths had returned from English Public Schools, imbued with strong predilections for the fine old English game, and other young countrymen were not slow to catch the contagious sentiment.” 34 The elite Kingston C.C. had close links with the British military, and several high-­ranking officers enjoyed membership of the club.35 Many of the club’s sporting activities in its early days took place against military teams, and the club was integral in helping to spread the sport culture from the British military into civilian Jamaican society. In addition to fostering cricket, the Kingston C.C. also played a role in the start of lawn tennis in the island: the first game was reportedly played on the club’s grounds at Sabina Park in 1883 at the initiative in part of G. H. Pearce, a senior member of the club.36 Pearce’s son Frank did much to encourage the development of the game in the late 1890s and early F i g . 7 .2   Kingston Cricket Club, 1902, from H. G. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club (1938). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

247

1900s, including helping to found the Jamaica Lawn Tennis Association and serving as its first president. Kingston C.C. members were also among the first outside of the military to form a soccer team.37 By the late nineteenth century, cricket clubs were also being formed among the members of the white and colored upper middle class. The Kensington Cricket Club, founded in 1879, and the Melbourne Cricket Club, founded in 1892, were two of the most prominent clubs among this section of the population. We again see the impact of the secondary schools: Kensington C.C. started out as a youth club, originally called St. Andrew Juniors C.C., whose founding members were pupils of the St. George’s and Marie Villa Colleges.38 In 1882, when the club moved to a ground adjacent to the Collegiate School, there was an influx of boys from that school into the club.39 Kensington C.C. had a predominantly white membership, while Melbourne C.C. was predominantly brown — ​­reinforcing the important role of color in defining social identities in the period. However, that a single color predominated but was not exclusive indicates that color did not alone define social identity and determine social interaction. Clubs were also being formed in other sports by the early twentieth century. In 1885 the Jamaica Yacht Club (later the Royal Jamaica Yacht Club) was formed; by the beginning of the 1890s it was reported to have over two hundred members.40 By the end of the century, it had been joined by the Kingston Yacht Club, which was formed “for the encouragement of yachting, boating, and all acquatic [sic] sports.” 41 A number of soccer clubs had also been formed in the late nineteenth century. Brian Moore and Michele Johnson point out that by 1895, the soccer clubs in the island included Kingston, Winchester, Collegiate School, Kingston Grammar School, York Castle, Port Royal, Spanish Town, Up Park Camp, and additional rural clubs.42 Little of the sporting activity of these clubs in the latter half of the nineteenth century could be described as serious and competitive sport. It is not until the very end of the nineteenth century that we see the formation of the first organized competitions in many sports. The Jamaica Cricket Challenge Cup — ​ ­commonly referred to as the Senior Cup — ​­was established in 1897.43 A Jamaica Association Football League was formed in 1898, and it began an annual competition for the Challenge Shield.44 In 1899, the Jamaica Lawn Tennis Association was established, and the organization instituted an interclub Challenge Cup.45 Before and outside of these competitions, sport was often leisurely and geared toward social interaction. Patrick Bryan comments that the cricket in this period “seemed more an occasion for elite social gatherings, than for the professional exercise of art.” 46 This character was reflected in poor standards

248

Julian Cresser

of play: Team scores of a hundred runs were extremely rare, and individual scores in double figures were often highly regarded. At their club awards in 1881, Kingston C.C. presented a match bat as a prize for the highest batting average to L. R. Fyfe, for an average of 8.88 runs.47 Many of these contests were leisurely matches between informal teams arranged for the occasion. At Clowns and Gowns cricket matches, for example, players dressed up in costumes and women’s garb.48 These social meetings were settings in which participants could socialize, and sitting down to have meals or drinks was just as important a part of the day as the cricket itself, as is evident from a report of a match held in 1892 between an Asylum team (staff, not patients) and a team of Englishmen: “The match was not distinguished by, nor was it expected that there would be, any brilliant playing. It was simply a friendly match entered into by either side, not so much with the object of winning as with the intention of passing a pleasant time.” 49 The primary function of the club here is as an instrument of social interaction.50 A broad range of social and recreational activities augmented sports at the clubs. Their social aspect was like that of British club life, as there were regular garden parties, dramatic entertainments, and smoking concerts.51 Bands played at many sporting occasions: It was common for cricket matches of the garrison at Up Park Camp to be accompanied by the West India Regiment bands in the afternoons.52 The social activities of elite sporting clubs — ​­the very formation of the clubs themselves — ​­were geared toward identifying their members as persons of high social rank. These elite clubs also contributed to the articulation of the power network in Jamaican colonial society, helping to cement alliances between different sections of the social elite. Elite sporting clubs were loci in the creation of an exclusive network of amity — ​­a web of primary relationships through which the elite collaborated informally. For this reason, access to these sporting clubs and their activities was restricted. The most obvious manifestation of this character was that these clubs had exclusive memberships: persons from a lower social station were unwelcome. One way in which this restriction was achieved was by charging high membership fees. In 1886, the Kingston C.C. charged an entrance fee of ten shillings and a yearly subscription of £1 16s.53 A decade later, the entrance fee had reached 21s, and subscriptions were £2 8s per annum.54 In the mid-­1880s and 1890s, the Jamaica Yacht Club had an annual subscription of one guinea — ​ ­payable in advance.55 These rates would have excluded most persons outside the social elite — ​­white, colored, or black — ​­indicating that class, not just color, was important in determining the membership of elite sporting clubs.

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

249

Women were also excluded from membership. Women’s participation in clubs identified as sporting institutions was restricted, because gender ideologies maintained that women were unsuited for “manly” sports — ​­on the basis of supposed mental and physical deficiencies. The argument can be made that as these elite clubs played an important role in the articulation of the power network in society, women were also barred because of prejudices that sought to exclude them from power and certain areas of the public sphere. Nonetheless, women were not totally excluded from the activities of these clubs. Women could play sports considered to be suitable: at the Kingston C.C., for instance, women played in tennis matches.56 It was also common for large numbers of women to attend social events, as well as to be in the crowds at sporting events themselves.57 The physical space occupied by clubs was also a restricted area. In a letter to the Daily Gleaner, Joseph C. Ford, president of the St. Andrew Club, a private social club, said that while he granted the use of the club for a tennis championship held in 1906, he did not want the admission of the public, arguing that “for a private social club like ours to allow its premises to be turned into a place of public entertainment, would be an indignity and would most seriously interfere with the rights and comforts of Members during the continuance of the tournament, besides being a breach of the rules.” 58 There was also a reluctance to play against teams from the lower classes. F. G. M. Lynch, one of the early captains of the Kingston C.C. stated, “It was difficult to overcome what I considered a most stupid prejudice against games with other local clubs which had sprung up.” 59 Lynch’s words reveal that not everyone in the club shared his attitude.

Sport and the Civilizing Mission Despite the social prejudices that may have existed among the imperial and creole elite, many were invested in the spread of Victorian sporting values to the predominantly black masses in Jamaica. The ruling class was committed to popularizing its worldview as a means of maintaining control. While dominance was ultimately guaranteed by force, this ruling class realized that maintenance of the status quo could come about only if the values of the ruling class were widely accepted.60 They were supported in their attempts by the wider cultural elite, who were concerned about the morals and behavior of the Jamaican people — ​­white, colored, and black. There was special concern over the behavior of lower-­class Jamaicans, with Afro-­centric religious practices being a particular target.61 Sport, in partnership with other important social institutions like church and school, became an element of this “civilizing” mission. One value of

250

Julian Cresser

sport was that it was fun and thus likely to be voluntarily accepted, which was particularly important in the case of the children, who were primary targets of the mission: sports were especially suited to the transmission of moral messages to the younger community. One way in which sport advanced the mission was in the popularization of images of the empire and monarchy. In the early 1890s, the Royal Jamaica Yacht Club held its annual regatta on the Queen’s birthday.62 There was a cricket match to celebrate the Queen’s birthday in 1882, and schoolchildren in St. Eliza­ beth played cricket as a part of the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1897.63 These displays complemented similar efforts to promote a commitment to the British Empire. The Daily Gleaner newspaper, for instance, had a Christmas competition in 1905 in which schoolchildren (another instance in which the civilizing mission targeted Jamaican youths) were offered a prize of ten shillings for the best essay on the theme “Empire Day: why we should joyfully celebrate it.” The competition also offered a prize of one pound for the “best original poem or ode typical of the vast British Empire and the place occupied therein by the island of Jamaica.” 64 The use of sport in the proselytizing effort was also embraced by some members of the Jamaica Union of Teachers ( jut). Founded in 1894, the union was an organization of black schoolmasters who considered teaching to be an appropriate profession for respectable black people. They felt that they had to take the initiative for mass education and were dedicated to the civilizing mission.65 According to Arnold Bertram, it was Thomas Burchell Stephenson, one of the founders of jut, who brought cricket to Kingston’s elementary schools.66 Cricket especially complemented the efforts of the church and school because it expressed ideas and ideologies that supported the status quo. If, as Ruby King suggests in her study of elementary schooling, the education system was intended to produce a passive workforce and instill “obedience to persons in authority, love of country, patriotism, the duties of the citizen, fidelity to official trust, industry, temperance, honesty and gentleness,” 67 then sport, with its notions of fair play, obedience to officials, stiff upper lips, and esprit de corps, was a most suitable instrument. There was much support for these Victorian sporting ethics among the cultural elite in Jamaica. In a letter to the editor of the Daily Gleaner, E. Stanley McAdam, a schoolteacher, wrote that he taught children sports because of a belief “in the moral worth which incidentall [sic] is attached to the proper carrying out of organised games.” 68 In 1905, the writer of a newspaper sports column launched a scathing criticism of batsmen who showed dissent at umpires’ decisions, describing such men as “on a level with other objectionable

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

251

characters” and arguing that “he who is guilty of these things is no sportsman, and he who is no sportsman is not only a nuisance wherever he is, but is not fit to associate with real cricketers.” 69

Mass Participation The black majority was thus exposed to Victorian sporting forms and encouraged to play; however, entry into formal sporting activities and the formation of their own clubs would require them to overcome several obstacles. First, there were great practical costs associated with playing organized sports. In 1895, tennis racquets were being sold for between 12s 6d and 22s.70 An advertisement in 1901 offered cricket bats at prices ranging between 22s 6d and 25s.71 In 1899, the cost of a bicycle was between eight and fifteen pounds.72 These costs would have been considerable to a wage laborer who in 1903 was being offered 1s per day for road work by the government and 1s 3d per day for field or estate work by planters.73 There was also the challenge of accessing appropriate facilities — ​ ­large, relatively flat, open spaces were needed for football, rugby, and cricket. As a result, among the black majority early experiences of these sports were generally informal. Improvised versions of cricket were very popular among black Jamaica children and were commonly referred to as “Ball-­play.” 74 Isabel Cranstoun Maclean, a British visitor to the island in the early twentieth century, gave this account of the after-­school activities of rural Jamaican children: “Sometimes they play cricket. The bat is not quite correct. We can imagine a school-­boy in this country [Britain] treating the rough slab of wood with great scorn. And the ball is — ​­what do you think? — ​­often a green mango, or a lemon. Judging from the shouts of merry laughter, and the eagerness of the players, a slab of wood and a mango bring as much pleasure to those boys as a complete and correct outfit of bat and ball does to our own boys.” 75 Some blacks gained exposure to sport in a more formal setting, at elementary schools. At the Calabar Elementary School, where T. B. Stephenson was headmaster, a cricket club was organized for pupils to play cricket after school. This school club provided an important introduction into a formal cricket structure for these lower-­class blacks, many of whom “had used only coconut bats and knitted balls before they joined the club.” 76 However, especially in rural areas, sport in some of these schools was only a slight step up from the most basic improvised forms of the game. One account of life in rural Jamaica at the beginning of the twentieth century relates, “As youngsters we were starved for sports and amusements of a public nature. We played cricket at school on dirt or unprepared grass pitches, with cloth balls

252

Julian Cresser

corded tightly, wooden or bamboo bats, sticks for wickets, no bales [sic], no umpires, frequent fights. . . . Inter-­school matches were sometimes played. . . . Gears were [crude].” 77 By the early twentieth century, rural district teams were increasing in number and, as a result, a strong interdistrict rivalry developed.78 As with the elementary school teams, their matches were informal contests, often played on any available — ​­though not necessarily highly suitable — ​­space.79 Entry into secondary schools provided an avenue into organized sport for a few upwardly mobile blacks. For instance, by the early twentieth century, blacks attended the Wolmer’s School, and black boys numbered among the members of Wolmer’s cricket teams.80 Some members of the rising black middle class attended the Mico College, a teacher-­training college in Kingston, and were afforded the opportunity to play sport there, as all the men were urged to take part in school athletics.81 One of the most significant developments in terms of the entry of the black majority into organized sport in Jamaica was the formation of the Lucas Cricket Club, a Kingston-­based club founded by Dave Ellington, a busman, or hackney carriage driver. Writing in the early twentieth century, Garveyite J. Coleman Beecher claimed that “the birth of the Lucas C.C. [was] the most important event in the history of the development of the island game.” 82 The Lucas C.C. helped to increase the popularity of cricket among the black majority in Jamaica. Eustace Smith, the captain of the club for the 1906 season, noted, “Day after day the attendance of the public at popular cricket matches grows larger and larger . . . and its fascination is growing stronger and stronger with all classes.” 83 The club drew its membership from the black working and lower-­middle classes of Kingston. The introduction of cricket into the elementary schools of Kingston provided the foundation for the growth of the club, as in these early years the Lucas C.C. drew heavily on these schools for its membership.84 The Calabar Elementary School in particular provided many of the early Lucas cricketers.85 Many benefactors came to the aid of the club in its formative years. The club owes its name to one of them — ​­R. Slade Lucas, a cricketer who led an English team to the island in 1895 and donated equipment to the club.86 A few members of elite cricket clubs helped Lucas C.C. through sponsorships and patronage.87 The club also received the patronage of the imperial elite, as in 1906, when Governor Swettenham contributed to a public subscription that was set up to enable the club to obtain a permanent ground.88 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of other black and brown middle-­class and lower-­class cricket clubs had been formed, as well as competitions that accommodated them: the Primrose Cricket Club,

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

253

Fig. 7 . 3   Primrose Cricket Club — ​ ­Martinez Cup champions, from the Daily Gleaner (November 6, 1911).

for example, was successful in the Martinez Cup (fig. 7.3). The cup was donated by F. N. Martinez, and the significance of the competition, which began in 1905, was captured during the presentation ceremony at the end of the first season, where it was commented that “it was a wonderfully good thing that all sport was not confined to any class.” 89 Martinez also sponsored a soccer competition for civilian teams, as a counter to the Challenge Shield, which was inaugurated by the Jamaica Association Football League (founded in 1898) and dominated by British military teams.90 Martinez, who also sponsored a competition in Barbados associated with a milk-­based food product popular with the working class, was described in Barbados Cricketer’s Annual as a “low-­status commercial man” and was known throughout the Caribbean as the “prince of Commercial Travellers.” 91 It is therefore not surprising that the competitions he sponsored were open to the wider sporting public. In rural Jamaica, a push was given to the organization of cricket by Samuel Hart, a businessman and member of the parochial board of St. James. Hart sponsored a cup scheme in St. James, Westmoreland, and Trelawny through his company, Samuel Hart and Sons. The Hart Shield afforded rural district teams the opportunity to play in formal competition: in 1909, thirty-­four clubs took

254

Julian Cresser

part in the cup.92 Not coincidentally, Samuel Hart and Sons was one of the most prominent retailers of sporting goods in Jamaica at the time and was an agent for Duke and Sons, English manufacturers of cricket goods.93 The examples of Martinez and Hart indicate that the encouragement of sport in Jamaica was not solely for the purposes of cultural proselytism and social control.

Creolization of Sport The growth of Victorian sports in Jamaica is suggestive of a degree of acceptance of and assimilation into imperial ideals on the part of all classes of Jamaicans. However, Victorian sport — ​­in form and essence — ​­was not unaffected by the Jamaican context: It was creolized. The improvisations described earlier — ​­an adaptation to the local material environment — ​­was one element of this. There were also behavioral modifications, as different groupings of Jamaicans chose in their own ways what aspects of Victorian ideals they would accept and which of their own creole values they would impart. This adaptation was evident in the behavior of spectators at cricket matches. In 1912 Algeron Aspinall noted, “The black spectators at cricket matches are very demonstrative, and it is not unusual to see many of them rush out on to the ground and leap and roll from sheer excitement.” 94 The Daily Gleaner was critical of some Lucas C.C. supporters who used “every means short of actual assault or interference . . . to intimidate and fluster players on an opposing side: yelling, waving of hats, and all kinds of pantomime gestures are indulged in when a catch is about to be made with the hope of distracting the player’s attention and frequently the language used is of such a character that were the “barracker” heard in the public thoroughfare, he would be arrested, taken before a Justice of the Peace and fined.” 95 The cultural elite may have frowned upon these cultural modifications, but this is not to suggest that this behavior was limited to the black masses: Jamaicans of all colors and classes were products and producers of a creole society. The elite sporting sphere was not without incidents of drinking, gambling, and fighting.96 Barracking of officials was not limited to the masses, with one account, from 1905, complaining that “several persons who should have known better and who ought to have set a better example, were the worse offenders in this respect.” 97 In the rural districts of Jamaica, the creolization of sport — ​­in this instance, its infusion with elements of Afro-­creole folk culture — ​­was very evident. Sports were absorbed into the culture of rural life: District matches were big affairs — ​­reflective of the communal nature of villages — ​­and the day would be

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

255

filled with food, song, and dance. As the following account indicates, it was also not unusual for young girls to play sports and games alongside young boys: The villagers vied with each other at games especially cricket. Each village had more than one team. There was that with the big men, one for the teenagers and one for the school boys. Cricket on the village green or out on the level crusted salt plains always provided a day of amusement. There was always a trophy to be played for. In the case of the men, it was a “Shawl” one for each team. The opposing team and the home team stuck up their flags on opposite side [sic] of the field where they fluttered in the wind. There was the superstition that the flag which fluttered most would be that of the winning side. The teenagers played for flags. These matches presented much fun and the girls usually played an important part in this game. As soon as they saw that their team was likely to lose they quickly got hold of their flag and away they went on nimble feet.98 Another account related, Inter-­school matches were sometimes played. With buns, cakes and lemonade for lunch, we felt that they were too few and far between. Travelling from village to village, singing, standard-­bearer in front, our elders had their say. Gears were so [crude] that if a batsman played with a cane bat, you would hear: “Yo gwine play wid gentleman ting, mind rat cut you han’ tonight!” Often players donned Sunday tweeds, hence this remark of a captain to his long-­stop: “Das right, dutty you tweed an tap de ball.” A large and tasty “corn pone” was often the winners’ prize. We would sit up late at night listening for the victory song floating over the hills and heralding the approach of “Uncle Sonny” to bring us our share of the “corn pone.” 99 Direct resistance to certain imperial values — ​­most notably the notions of race and class superiority that came with sport — ​­was a very important element of the creolization of sport in Jamaica. A statement from Dave Ellington of Lucas C.C., in reaction to the opposition that his club faced, captures the way, perhaps ambivalent, many black Jamaicans confronted imperial cultural values. According to a Daily Gleaner report, at a ceremony following one of his club’s matches, Ellington stated, “He had watched all the English gentlemen who had come here and played cricket, and he had tried to patronise their cricket, and their gentlemanly manner of playing, and he had urged upon the members of his club the necessity to play good cricket, and play it in a gentlemanly way.

256

Julian Cresser

But there was one thing he would not tolerate, and that was any attempt to take advantage of his club.” 100 One of the most effective ways in which the black majority resisted was through performance on the field when they were allowed to compete with elite groups. In this regard, the success of Lucas C.C. in cricket stands out: admitted into the Senior Cup for the first time in the 1901 season, they were runners-­up in 1903 and then won three consecutive titles, from 1904 to 1906. In so doing, they helped to shatter the myth of white superiority. As a result, when a Jamaican cricket team was selected to play a visiting team from Philadelphia in 1909, it included several nonwhite players — ​­a big departure from the all-­ white elite teams of the late nineteenth century.

Conclusion Thus, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Victorian sporting forms were becoming firmly established in Jamaica. Sport was important in the island’s churches and schools; clubs, associations, and competitions had been formed; and Victorian sport values had penetrated and gained acceptance to

F i g . 7 .4   Jamaica Team, 1896, from H. G. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club (1938). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

257

some degree in all classes of the population. However, class, color, and gender biases were manifest and served to create tensions and divisions in the sporting sphere. Other inequities also meant that the different social classes had varying experiences of sport in Jamaica. As a result, there was no significant social integration within the sphere of sport. All classes did contribute, however, in varying degrees, to the creolization of these sporting forms, which were adapted to the socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural contexts of Jamaican society and were infused with creole values and expressions. Although no single shared sporting value system and sporting space emerged, there was common ground that could serve as the basis for future integration.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Norman Vance, Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–­3. 2. Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 71, 76. 3. John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), 39. 4. See Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 5. Harold Perkin, “Teaching the Nations How to Play: Sport and Society in the British Empire and Commonwealth,” International Journal of the History of Sport 6, no. 2 (Sept. 1989): 146. 6. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 39. See also J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). 7. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford: A Sequel to School Days at Rugby (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 170. 8. Keith A. P. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians (Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1994), 36. 9. Dennis Brailsford, British Sport: A Social History (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1992), 97. 10. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 43. 11. Aviston Downes, “ ‘Flannelled Fools’? Cricket and the Political Economy of the British West Indies c. 1895–­1906,” International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 4 (Dec. 2000): 70. 12. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians, 81. 13. Hargreaves (Sport, Power and Culture, 46) has noted, “it became widely accepted at this time among the dominant classes that sports could unite classes and heal divisions between them.” 14. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians, 81.

258

Julian Cresser

15. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians, 48. 16. J. D. Campbell, “ ‘Training for Sport in Training for War’: Sport and the Transformation of the British Army, 1860–­1914,” International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 4 (Dec. 2000): 21. 17. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians, 1. See also Jack Williams, Cricket and Race (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 15. 18. See, for instance, J. A. Mangan, “Britain’s Chief Spiritual Export: Imperial Sport as Moral Metaphor, Political Symbol and Cultural Bond,” in The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, ed. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 1–­10. 19. Daily Gleaner, February 10, 1902. 20. Daily Gleaner, February 10, 1902. 21. Daily Gleaner, November 8, 1905. 22. Brian Moore and Michele Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 11–­12. 23. Jeremy MacClancy, “Sport, Identity and Ethnicity,” in Sport, Identity and Ethnicity, ed. MacClancy (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 2. 24. Brian Moore and Michele Johnson, “Challenging the ‘Civilising Mission’: Cricket as a Field of Socio-­cultural Contestation in Jamaica 1865–­1920,” in In the Shadow of the Plantation Caribbean History and Legacy, ed. Alvin Thompson (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002), 352. 25. See Daily Gleaner, March 22, 1880, April 26, 1882, March 13, 1884, and April 7, 1884. 26. Brian Moore and Michele Johnson, “They Do As They Please”: The Jamaican Struggle for Cultural Freedom after Morant Bay (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2011), 267, 271. 27. J. Carter, Education in Jamaica: A Brief Outline 1834–­1968 ( Jamaica Library Service Annual Anniversary of Independence Exhibition, 1968), 31. 28. Handbook of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1892), 401. 29. Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 267. 30. Daily Gleaner, March 3, 1883; March 14, 1883. 31. F. L. Pearce and T. Roxburgh, Jamaica Cricket Annual for 1897 (Kingston: Mortimer De Souza, 1897), 68; Daily Gleaner, February 1, 1909; October 3, 1903. 32. Daily Gleaner, January 27, 1903. 33. Herbert Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club (Kingston: Gleaner Co., 1938), 9–­10. 34. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 19. 35. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 9. 36. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 72–­73. Macdonald cites a letter from Frank Pearce, son of G. H. Pearce, to H. V. Alexander dated March 6, 1926. 37. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 87. 38. J. Coleman-­Beecher, Jamaica Cricket, 1863–­1926 (Kingston: Gleaner Co., 1926), 18–­19.

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

259

39. Coleman-­Beecher, Jamaica Cricket, 1863–­1926, 18–­19. 40. Handbook of Jamaica, 1891–­92 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Establishment, 1891), 508. 41. Handbook of Jamaica, 1900 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1900), 496. 42. Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 267–­68. 43. Daily Gleaner, January 23, 1905. 44. Daily Gleaner, October 5, 1898, cited in Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 269–­70. 45. Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 281 (citing Daily Gleaner, November 21, 1905; and Frank Cundall, “The West Indies Today, 1908,” MST934 (National Library of Jamaica Manuscript Collection), 207. 46. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control ([1991] Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 196. 47. Daily Gleaner, January 28, 1882. 48. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 77. 49. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, February 16, 1892. 50. Bryan, Jamaican People, 72. 51. See, for instance, Daily Gleaner, January 18, 1903; January 1, 1906. 52. Daily Gleaner, June 3, 1880. 53. Handbook of Jamaica, 1886–­87 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Establishment, 1886), 482. Until 1971, British currency operated on the “£sd” system, with 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings, or 240 pence, in a pound. 54. Rules and Regulations of the Kingston C.C. (Kingston: Vendryes, 1896), 6. 55. Handbook of Jamaica, 1885–­86 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Establishment, 1885), 472. 56. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 73. 57. Daily Gleaner, January 27, 1890; Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, January 23, 1888; see also Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 270, 273. 58. Daily Gleaner, January 27, 1906. 59. Macdonald, History of the Kingston Cricket Club, 12. 60. Brian Stoddart, “Cricket and Colonialism in the English-­speaking Caribbean to 1914: Towards a Cultural Analysis,” in Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, ed. Hilary Beckles and Brian Stoddart (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995), 25. 61. See Moore and Johnson, “Neither Led nor Driven.” 62. Handbook of Jamaica, 1891–­2 (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Establishment, 1891), 508. 63. Daily Gleaner, May 24, 1882. All entries for the “Jamaica Memories” competition held by the Daily Gleaner in 1959 were placed in the Jamaica Archives. See Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​210, Jamaica Memories of A. McKay Smith. 64. Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1905. 65. Bryan, Jamaican People, 224–­25. 66. Arnold Bertram, “Jamaica’s First Black Cricketers,” Daily Gleaner, July 17, 2005.

260

Julian Cresser

67. Ruby King, “Elementary Education in Early Twentieth-­Century Jamaica,” Caribbean Journal of Education 16, no. 3 (Sept. 1989): 237. 68. Daily Gleaner, November 9, 1917. 69. Jamaica Archives 7/​154, H. L. Plummer’s Scrapbook, 1905. Plummer was a local cricketer who kept a scrapbook of newspaper and other clippings. 70. Daily Gleaner, December 3, 1895, cited in Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 501n160. 71. Daily Gleaner, January 8, 1901. 72. Daily Gleaner, May 9, 1911, cited in Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 288. 73. Daily Gleaner, October 10, 1903. 74. Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​160, Jamaica Memories of C. G. Bailey. 75. Isabel Cranstoun Maclean, Children of Jamaica (London: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1910), 44–­45. 76. Noel White, George “Atlas” Headley (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1974), 5–­6. 77. Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​168, Jamaica Memories of R. J. Blake. 78. Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​160, Jamaica Memories of C. G. Bailey. 79. Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​188, Jamaica Memories of A. A. Grant. 80. Picture from Wolmer’s Boys School Collection. 81. C.  B. Davenport and Morris Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1929), 10. 82. Coleman-­Beecher, Jamaica Cricket, 38. 83. Daily Gleaner, October 1, 1906. 84. Coleman-­Beecher, Jamaica Cricket, 38. 85. Daily Gleaner, January 15, 1913. 86. Bertram, “Jamaica’s First Black Cricketers.” 87. Other benefactors included C. H. Burton, the white captain of the Kensington Cricket Club, who made efforts to foster the development of the club, J. Van Cuylenberg, who “took a lively interest in the fortunes of the Lucas C.C.,” and Inspector General of Police E. F. Wright, a white member of the Kingston C.C., who “made a magnificent contribution to the game in the sponsorship which he exercised in respect of, among others, Nelson, Snow, Shannon, [who were] Lucasites,” Coleman-­Beecher, Jamaica Cricket, 14–­16. 88. Daily Gleaner, October 13, 1906. 89. Daily Gleaner, October 16, 1905. 90. Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 269–­70. 91. Barbados Cricketer’s Annual 1902–­3, 186; quoted in Stoddart, “Cricket and Colonialism,” 22. 92. Daily Gleaner, January 22, 1909. 93. Daily Gleaner, January 22, 1909. 94. Algeron Aspinall, The British West Indies: Their History, Resources and Progress (London: Sir Issac Pitman and Sons, 1912), 154. 95. Daily Gleaner, April 28, 1905, cited in Moore and Johnson, “Challenging the ‘Civilising Mission,’ ” 364.

Victorian Sport in Jamaica

261

96. Moore and Johnson, “Challenging the ‘Civilising Mission,’ ” 359–­60, 375; Moore and Johnson, “They Do As They Please,” 258–­59. 97. Jamaica Archives 7/​154, H. L. Plummer’s Scrapbook. 98. Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​188, Jamaica Memories of A. A. Grant. 99. Jamaica Archives 7/​12/​168, Jamaica Memories of R. J. Blake. 100. Daily Gleaner, November 3, 1904.

262

Julian Cresser

CHAPTER 8

Rewriting the Past Imperial Histories of the Antislavery Nation C AT H E R I N E H A L L

History has been a troublesome subject for West Indians, because in the nineteenth century history writing was deeply imbricated with the language of imperialism. “There are no people here in the true sense of the word with a character and purpose of their own,” James Antony Froude concluded in 1887, after his journey to the Caribbean. V. S. Naipaul echoed this devastating judgment when quoting from Froude as his epitaph for The Middle Passage. “History is built around achievement and creation,” he wrote, “and nothing was created in the West Indies.” 1 This conception of history, history with a capital H, the stories of great men and their achievements, of monuments and institutions and classic texts, is singularly inappropriate for the Caribbean. “In the Caribbean history is irrelevant,” as Derek Walcott famously wrote, “not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered. What has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention.” 2 In response to this loss, Caribbean writers from Kamau Brathwaite to George Lamming, Erna Brodber, and Paule Marshall have reimagined that history, peopling the past that had been lost in the brutal uprooting from Africa, the Middle Passage, and the centuries of colonial domination.3 They, together with other writers and historians, have challenged that notion of loss, insisting that the history is one of survival and endurance, a history carried not in monuments but in oral culture, in people, in the land, and in “the shadows that the trees, the ancestors cast into the future.” 4 “The Sea is history,” as Walcott put it.5 “The affirmation and recovery of histories,” writes Alison Donnell, “has been a defining and enduring theme in Anglo-­creole writings and a vital means of contesting the colonized subjects’ relegation to invisibility, to the status of chattel, victims, outlaws.” 6 Froude was writing in the decades after emancipation. What sense can be made of his statement and how might it connect to British perceptions of Victorian Jamaica? How did English historians represent Jamaica after abolition and what motivated those representations? This essay argues that once abolition

had been secured, slavery became a subject to be avoided and forgotten, to be ritually denounced and passed over. Jamaica, once the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, then the island most connected with the horrors of slavery, was sidelined — ​­seen as a place that had once mattered to England but now was of little relevance to the future, with its stagnant economy, its dysfunctional political institutions, its peoples locked in a state of childhood. Opposition to slavery was on the grounds that people should not be property; equality between black and white was another matter entirely, and emancipation brought with it a raft of new legitimations for racial inequality. In 1833, four years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, the imperial parliament had abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape. After the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica, in 1831, and the renewed force of an antislavery movement in the metropole demanding immediate abolition, it had been widely recognized that the institution of chattel slavery could not survive. The question became: When would it be abolished and on what terms? The Whig government was lukewarm but under great public pressure. Absentee slave owners were an influential grouping in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and they were able to drive a hard bargain in the negotiations that preceded the passing of the act. The price of their parliamentary support was that twenty million pounds would be paid in compensation to the slave owners for the loss of “their” property, and freed slaves would be required to work as “apprentices” for their former masters for fixed hours of unpaid labor. Full freedom was delayed until 1838. Emancipation, however, was immediately constructed in Britain as an extraordinary demonstration of the generosity and liberality of both the state and the people. Britain was a liberty-­ loving country; it had abolished the slave trade and slavery, both of which were regarded as national sins and which had been expiated by emancipation. Britons could bask in the reputation they created for themselves as the first emancipators: Britain was an antislavery nation. Antislavery became a symbol of national identity, a symbol that crossed party lines and was deeply embedded in national common sense. The British monarchy and the British state had actively fostered both the slave trade and slavery. From the involvement of Elizabeth I in John Hawkins’s first slaving voyages and the involvement of Charles II and James II in the Royal Africa Company, to the active use of the Royal Navy and the Navigation Acts to protect British interests and the deployment of the military in the defense of the British Caribbean islands and the suppression of rebellion, governments had legitimated slavery and welcomed the extensive contributions it made to national wealth. Innumerable Britons had benefitted from the slavery business,

264

Catherine Hall

not just the traders, merchants, and plantation owners. From the ships’ captains and crews to the shipbuilders, the sugar refiners, the traders who supplied the whips, manacles and fetters, foodstuffs, and textiles needed on the islands, the bankers and lawyers who dealt with mortgages and trusts, down to the widows and single women whose annuities were dependent on renting out the labor of enslaved men and women and the households that enjoyed West Indian sugar — ​­all were dependent to a greater or lesser extent on slavery. Yet slavery had become a stain upon the nation, and in abolishing it Britons believed they could wash themselves clean. How then was this history to be told? A pattern was set in 1808, one year after the abolition of the British slave trade. Thomas Clarkson published his celebrated work The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, in which he documented the growth of a white transatlantic abolitionist movement, inspired by Christian and humanitarian sentiment, and its final triumph, in which he played a key part, the “establishment of a Magna Charta for Africa in Britain.” 7 “No evil more monstrous” had ever existed upon earth than the slave trade. The “great event” of abolition should be recounted and the “perusal of the history” should afford lessons for posterity. It had become “a principle in our legislation, that commerce itself shall have its moral boundaries” and “the stain of the blood of Africa” no longer poison the moral wellsprings of the nation.8 This was an account that established a framework for thinking about the slave trade and abolition: the triumph was that a movement had unified white men — ​­there was little mention of the women abolitionists, even less of the enslaved themselves — ​­and by concerted action brought about the ending of the trade.9 The example could inspire for the future. Similarly, the ending of slavery was seen as a demonstration of the liberal and generous spirit of the British, prepared to contribute twenty million pounds of taxpayers’ money to ensure freedom for enslaved Africans. In the biography of their father, William Wilberforce, published in 1838, five years after his death and the passage of emancipation and a year after the accession of Victoria, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce narrated abolition as their father’s triumph. William Wilberforce was represented as a heroic figure, remarkable for “the moral sublimity of his Christian character,” his sincerity and perseverance the embodiment of a certain kind of British philanthropy and identity.10 But more than this, the struggle that was recounted was the struggle to win hearts and minds in Britain, not the struggles or the experience of the enslaved, which remained unrepresented. While the Anti-­Slavery Reporter over years had detailed the horrors of slavery, once slavery was abolished those could be forgotten. The five-­volume account by the Wilberforce brothers of their

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

265

father’s life had little to say about either the trade or the plantations. A “white mythology” had been inaugurated, one that worked hard to “deny the possibility of gaining knowledge of the disaster of the Atlantic Slave Trade” or indeed of slavery itself.11 There was a selective forgetting; only parts of the past were to be remembered. The triumph of abolition would screen the horrors and violence of the Middle Passage and the plantation. It was this memory of abolition that dominated much British thinking about Jamaica in the Victorian period. The island was very much in the mind of Britons during the struggles over slavery and abolition, always figuring as the most significant of the sugar islands of the Caribbean. The end of slavery and apprenticeship, however, followed as it was by the split in the antislavery movement over the retention of protective sugar duties and the decline of the sugar economy, shifted representations of Jamaica. By the 1840s the island was increasingly identified as a problem. The constant reiteration by the erstwhile slave owners of the difficulties with labor that they faced on their estates and their denunciations of the inadequacies, as they saw them, of black workers affected public perceptions. The “great experiment” of the transition from slavery to free labor was increasingly deemed to have failed. There were attempts by missionaries and abolitionists to counter this perception as, for example, in James Mursell Phillippo’s Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, published in 1843. Phillippo, who had been a missionary in Jamaica for twenty years, provided an optimistic account of the wonderful transformation that had been effected since abolition. Christianity and emancipation had together transformed the island; there was light where once darkness had reigned. Slavery had been the curse of the West Indies, and the history of Jamaica was one of oppression, usurpation, crime, misery, and vice. But those days were now over. Phillippo softened the memory of slavery with abolition and identified England with the moment of glory, not with an age of shame.12 His book did relatively well in antislavery and missionary circles. But it could not compete with the success of either Jane Eyre, published five years later, which represented Jamaica as a place of degeneracy and corruption, or Thomas Carlyle’s vitriolic Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, first published in 1849, with its harsh assumptions of the inevitability of racial hierarchy. Humanitarian visions of the beneficial effects of emancipation were swimming against the tide. History writing was one of the sites for the representation and circulation of national and imperial discourses — ​­and history was a favorite subject for Victorians. The discontinuities associated with epochal changes — ​­the American Revolution, the French Revolution, industrial and urban developments — ​­had brought a new historical consciousness into being, an awareness of the contrast

266

Catherine Hall

between past and present. The historical and literary relativism that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, associated particularly with Sir Walter Scott, depicted the past as another country, “a domain distinct in place and time shaped by its own social, cultural, and political stresses.” 13 A huge appetite for history, manifest in the plethora of historical representations of every kind, bore witness to the ways in which historical imaginings could enable audiences to situate themselves more comfortably in the present, mourn the certainties of the past, and engage with the terrors associated with violent and rapid change.14 Histories were written in a variety of forms, but histories of the nation occupied a position of privilege in the canon. They were almost always written by men and adopted an authoritative tone, telling readers the story of themselves and their ancestors, how the nation came to be, who belonged in it and who did not. National histories told stories of origins and myths of progress. They were peopled by heroes and villains and offered frames of identification and belonging, ways of connecting public and private, past and present. They were, and are, critical to the process of nation building that was so central to the European nations of the nineteenth century. They offered their readers identities as members of the nation — ​­an identity that was displacing older forms of belonging. For Carlyle history had become the genre, offering prophecies and providing certainties that once the Bible had secured. Empire figured in varied ways in these national histories; the relationship between nation and empire was hotly debated during the Victorian period. Narratives of imperial benevolence and progress such as those written by the Whig historians were countered by more pessimistic accounts from conservatives of the need for white authority and the exercise of power. But the importance of empire was never in doubt, securing as it did Britain’s global power, prestige, and wealth. “Forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation,” Ernest Renan told his audience at the Sorbonne in 1882, “unity is always effected by means of brutality.” There is much to be forgotten.15 Victorian historians of both nation and empire were active agents in forgetting, rewriting the past in ways that sanitized the realities of conquest and screened memories of colonial terror. As the historian of Haiti Michel-­Rolph Trouillot reminds us, “History is the fruit of power.” That power, however, is not transparent; indeed its invisibility may be its “ultimate mark of power.” The successful uprising of the enslaved in Saint-­Domingue between 1791 and 1804 and their defeat of the French and the British, he suggests, were literally unthinkable in France and Britain. No European had the conceptual frame to grasp that enslaved Africans could envisage freedom, which challenged notions of race, slavery, and colonialism. “What happened in Haiti . . . contradicted most of what the West has told both itself

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

267

and others about itself.” 16 It literally could not be understood, was not recorded as fact or history. Silences and evasions are part of the stuff of history — ​­in terms of what archives exist, what is kept, and how that material is interpreted. The history of empire was potentially a peculiarly difficult history to tell. As Ann Laura Stoler has argued, the colonial histories of the European empires “possess unruly qualities.” Sometimes these qualities are safely sequestered on the fringes of national histories, sometimes they erupt into the heartlands, disturbing stories of unity and progress, and sometimes they are entirely absent, as if empires were simply not there. “Not least,” she suggests, “they raise unsettling questions about what it means to know and not know simultaneously, about what is implicit because it goes without saying, or because it cannot be thought, or because it can be thought and is known but cannot be said.” 17 Disavowal and distantiation, the denial of responsibility, the knowing yet refusing to know, the mechanisms of distancing and disassociation — ​­all were actively deployed in imperial history writing. The most popular history of the nineteenth century was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England, which told of the birth of the modern nation in the late seventeenth century. Read by hundreds of thousands not only in Britain but across the globe, it became the iconic national history, the one that best exemplified the story of progress, how a people were transformed from conditions of barbarism to civilization, how a small island could come to dominate the world in the name of liberty and freedom. It purported to be a universal history, mapping out a path that any nation could follow, showing the only route to modernity. Macaulay had grown up in an antislavery household. His father, Zachary, was a leading abolitionist, an indefatigable researcher, editor, and pamphleteer. The family lived on Clapham Common, alongside the Wilberforces, the Thorntons, and other members of the group known as the Clapham Sect, evangelicals who had set out to transform nation and empire as part of their Christian mission to moralize the world. Zachary Macaulay, after a stint on a Jamaican plantation and as a colonial official in the new colony of Sierra Leone, devoted his life to the struggle for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. His son had rather different priorities. Bored with the endless diet of antislavery, he was hostile to “fanatical” abolitionists and wanted nothing more than to put the Caribbean and its troubles behind him.18 The empire was an essential part of British power in his narrative, but, it was assumed, it was a backdrop to the nation, a necessary part of England’s expanding naval and commercial dominance. Its peoples — ​­the savage Indians of the New World, the enslaved Africans of the Caribbean — ​­marked the outer peripheries, the absent presences of his History. Colonized subjects were indeed

268

Catherine Hall

relegated to invisibility. In Macaulay’s mind, there was nothing significant to be said about the Caribbean. Writing in the late 1840s and 1850s, he, like many Britons, saw the “great experiment” as increasingly problematic. Africans, in his view, were very far from civilized; the Caribbean islands no longer dominated sugar production and were increasingly irrelevant to global economics and politics. There was no story of progress there. Despite his father’s lifelong preoccupation with Africa and the Caribbean, they were banished to the uttermost margins of Macaulay’s volumes. Their peoples and politics were irrelevant to his history, as was the huge flow of wealth from Caribbean slavery and Atlantic trade. Despite the development of the Royal Africa Company under Charles II and James II, there was no discussion of the slave trade or plantation slavery, the subjects that had occupied most of Zachary Macaulay’s waking hours. Sugar and slavery were becoming central to England’s wealth and power by the late seventeenth century. But slavery was a system that Macaulay preferred to forget. It was abolition that should be memorialized; in its wake, he had no time for “impracticable, uncompromising reformers,” who never did good and led “miserable lives,” and he hated “negrophiles” as much as “nigger drivers.” 19 Macaulay had spent four years in India as a very senior colonial official. While there, he had had minimal contact with Britain’s “native subjects,” preferring to govern for them rather than engage with them. He adopted the strategies of the colonizer, learning imperial “dispositions” that concealed rather than revealed.20 Not seeing was infinitely more comfortable than seeing. Although a universalist in theory, believing that all human beings came from one stock, in practice he assumed that the transformation of “native subjects” from barbarism to civilization would be a very slow business. For Macaulay abolition meant that England’s duty was done. Now that history could be put aside. But putting it aside meant deliberately avoiding and forgetting; it meant disavowal. Macaulay was well aware of the extent to which the slave trade and slavery had sustained England’s economy and society. He was a member of the government that negotiated compensation to the slave owners; he knew what the payment of 20 million pounds meant. But he preferred not to know. The West Indies rarely crossed his mind, peopled as they were by “stupid ungrateful” gangs of “negroes.” 21 He paid lip service to the abolitionists, but Africa and the Caribbean were effectively excluded from his history, featured in only one paragraph. “An earthquake of terrible violence laid waste in less than three minutes the flourishing colony of Jamaica,” he wrote. “Whole plantations changed their places. Whole villages were swallowed up. Port Royal, the fairest and wealthiest city which the English had yet built in

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

269

the New World renowned for its quays, for its warehouses, and for its stately streets . . . was turned into a mass of ruins.” 22 In her wonderful essay Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison unearths the racial tremors that disturb the white American canon, marking the underbelly of that American world, the African presence.23 In Macaulay’s text the earthquake is just such a tremor — ​­the mark of the ghosts of slavery, reminding us of the wharves where the slave ships anchored after the Middle Passage, the markets where people were sold, the plantations that were rapidly spreading across the country. These were the stories that could not be told, that were known yet not known; these were the habits of disavowal. Macaulay was the most popular and most successful of the Whig historians, telling a story of England’s progress and improvement that allowed no space for slavery. It was indeed as if the Caribbean had no history. James Anthony Froude told a very different story, but one that once again avoided the realities of slavery. Froude was close to Carlyle and strongly influenced by him. He also had close connections with the West Indies: his brother-­in-­law and very close friend was Charles Kingsley, the well-­known writer and onetime Christian Socialist. Kingsley came from a family of West Indian slave owners who had been in the Caribbean for five generations, and he regarded emancipation as having ruined him. His grandfather, Nathan Lucas, was a judge and slave owner in Barbados and Demerara, and as a boy Kingsley loved his stories. His tale of a major earthquake in St. Vincent that terrified the Barbadians stayed in his grandson’s mind: “His” negroes were in a panic, shrieking in the streets, the whites all busy praying as they had never prayed before while his grandfather remained “rational and self-­possessed” and studied his scientific books.24 White men had rationality, self-­discipline, and self-­control; Africans were like children. What was more, Grandfather Lucas had participated in imperial conquest; he had been on hms Formidable with his friend Admiral Rodney when Rodney won his great victory against the French in 1782 and “saved the British West Indies.” Froude and Kingsley were both deeply influenced by Carlyle’s critique of contemporary society and its loss of direction, and they were horrified by what they saw as the effete nature of Victorian manliness. A new spirit of strength and resolution was urgently needed. Like many conservative thinkers, Froude saw the empire as a central part of England’s strength and wealth, and he shared Carlyle’s contempt both for whingeing abolitionists and for black people. He was deeply alarmed by the events of 1848, when revolutions took place across continental Europe, and England was seen as seriously at risk. While Macaulay was preoccupied with the spread of progress and freedom, Froude was more

270

Catherine Hall

concerned with the power of the state.25 He looked back to what he saw as the heroic days of the sixteenth century, when men had been men and the empire had been established. In the days of Elizabeth I, he maintained, it was the seamen who “went out across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonising.” They laid the channels “through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out over all the world.” These were men who acted; they did not go in for “weak watery talk of ‘protection of aborigines,’ ” as abolitionists and humanitarians were wont to do. England was to become “the England of free thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe.” 26 Froude’s heroes were Richard Hawkins, Francis Drake, and Walter Raleigh, whose buccaneering exploits were a route to a happier future. In the 1850s and 1860s Froude wrote his twelve-­volume History of England, which focused on the sixteenth century. He told how the English race had planted their “saplings” across the globe, had covered the ocean with their merchant fleets, and could flaunt their flag “in easy supremacy among the nations of the earth.” 27 For Froude there was “a brilliant period of past West Indian history,” but it was a white, male, English history that he was memorializing.28 He admitted that Africans had not consented to slavery, but unlike the Indians who pined to death in captivity, “the more tractable negro would domesticate like the horse or the ass, acquiesce in a life of useful bondage, and receive in return the reward of baptism and the promise of eternity.” 29 The year 1588 was a crucial date for him, marking the beginning of England’s rise to greatness: the defeat of the Spanish Armada was a turning point in England’s fortunes, and Hawkins had played a crucial part in mobilizing the navy. This “sea robber, corsair and slave-­hunter” proved that he was an honest Englishman.30 Froude did not defend slavery outright, but in returning to the glory days of the founding of Britain’s Caribbean empire in the sixteenth century, he avoided the substantive history of the slave trade and plantation slavery, evoking a romantic past in his effort to reinvigorate imperial patriotism and aiming to produce a modern epic that would inspire. His political affiliations were not in doubt; he was sympathetic to the Confederates during the American Civil War, arguing that slavery “is a thing to be allowed to gradually wear itself away. You cannot treat an institution as old as mankind as a crime to be put out by force.” 31 He remained publicly neutral in relation to the conduct of Governor Eyre after the Morant Bay rebellion, while his friends Kingsley and Carlyle were closely associated with Eyre’s defense, but he was quite open in later years that “the fault was not in Mr. Eyre.” 32 Froude’s history was of England; as for Macaulay, the Caribbean appeared

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

271

on the sidelines, though now embodying the heroic times of the sixteenth century. W. J. Gardner aimed for something very different when he published his History of Jamaica in 1873. In the preface, he cited the proslavery histories of Edward Long, Bryan Edwards, and George Wilson Bridges as providing the only systematic accounts of the island. He hoped to set the record straight and establish the truth. Having worked as a missionary on the island for twenty-­ four years, he had been able to consult many sources and offered his judgments as statements of fact. Writing in the years after the furor over Morant Bay, when it was clear that public opinion had hardened on questions of race, he aimed for a more sympathetic account of Jamaica and its peoples, but his sales were very modest. Among respectable circles, he claimed, the only differences to be found with the manners and customs of the English were associated with the climate. He was seriously concerned, as Phillippo had been, by the increase in “superstitions” and “heathenism” among Afro-­Jamaicans. His many criticisms were reserved for the planters, but as Elsa Goveia noted, he was quite accepting of the arbitrary power of the imperial government, seeing Crown Colony rule as the best solution for the island.33 For Gardner there was no question that Jamaica’s future rested with the metropole. Ten years later J.  R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England was published, to huge acclaim. It represented another moment in British history-writing about Jamaica and the West Indies. Seeley was convinced of the relevance of history to modern statesmanship. Abandoning Macaulay’s focus on progress, he argued that “the simple obvious fact” of the foundation of Greater Britain, based as it was on expansion, was being ignored, and this was perilous. “We seem, as it were,” he famously wrote, “to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Historians had missed the vital fact that in the eighteenth century “the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia.” 34 The British should wake up to their imperial responsibilities. His conception of empire had no place for conquest, violence, or expropriation; that history of colonialism was sanitized. It was the Britons who had gone overseas and established new colonies that he was interested in. Like Macaulay he saw the West Indies as irrelevant to England’s future. It had been right to abolish slavery, but that was long in the past. The claims of freed black people for citizenship were a matter of slight concern, but he assumed that since the islands were so dispersed this would not present a serious threat. The presence of large nonwhite populations in the empire was a matter of no apparent concern to him. Aboriginal peoples were “so low in the ethnological scale” that they were irrelevant; freed slaves lived on small islands, had no “community of feeling,” and were historically insignificant.35 India did matter, but for the foreseeable

272

Catherine Hall

future it must be ruled by Britain, for “the ruling race in India has a higher and more vigorous civilisation than the native races.” 36 It was “Greater Britain” that he was interested in — ​­the Anglo-­Saxon world — ​­all of which he defined as homogeneous and “English throughout,” “a vast English nation.” 37 He hoped to weld this Greater Britain into a new super state to outface the rivalry of Russia in the East and the United States in the West. Froude, too, hoped to reactivate imperial English identity. In the 1860s, as the editor of a major periodical, he had felt constrained to be cautious in his public utterances on race. By the 1880s he was no longer constrained in this way. He was inspired by his friend Kingsley’s travel journal At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871) to visit the Caribbean, and before his journey he read naval histories and a biography of his hero Rodney.38 Far from being irrelevant, for him the West Indies provided a test case as to whether the English could recover their proper mission — ​­to rule others lesser than themselves. He insisted on the integral connections between metropole and colony: “Colonists are part of ourselves,” he argued, but many subject peoples did not desire liberty and prospered best when they were led and guided.39 Unlike Seeley, who saw no threat in the claims of free black people, for he could not take them seriously, Froude was horrified by the notion of self-­government and frequently evoked the specter of the revolution in Saint-­Domingue, a frightful example of “what negroes are capable of when roused to frenzy.” 40 He resisted any suggestion of the British abandoning the islands, however. They had a responsibility to rule, “for the English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the weak.” 41 At the heart of his vision was Britain’s naval empire and the sea — ​­but not the sea that Walcott knew. This was not the sea of the Middle Passage but the sea of those gallant Elizabethans who had successfully challenged the might of Catholic Spain and established a Protestant empire. Authority, violence, and coercion were essential, he argued, to national and imperial power. The islands were places of romance where manly English valor had triumphed. The Caribbean was part of a great drama of empire. “Adventurers, buccaneers, pirates pass across the stage — ​­the curtain falls on them, and rises on a more glorious scene. Jamaica had become the depot of the trade of England with the Western world, and golden streams had poured into Port Royal.” 42 On arrival in Kingston Harbour he rhapsodized about how “the energy of the Empire once was throbbing.” This could happen again if Englishmen would but recognize their mission, “to govern such races and govern them well.” That “throbbing energy” was thrown into the capture of Africans, their transportation across the Atlantic, and their enslavement on the plantations of the Caribbean to create wealth for others. But none of that was spoken. Some men were strong and could

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

273

govern themselves, while others needed to be compelled, if necessary, to obey. “Slavery is gone,” Froude wrote, “with all that belonged to it,” but “the negroes of the West Indies are children, and yet not disobedient.” “The slave trade was the beginning of their emancipation . . . [and] slavery could not last,” but nor could what had followed.43 Africans “would have been slaves in their own country if they had not been brought to ours, and at the worst had lost nothing by the change.” “Children of darkness,” they came from “another stock,” while “the English race” had “a special capacity as leaders and governors of men.” 44 In refusing to see the realities of life for black people, in failing to speak to them, and in valuing only the evidence of those who were white, Froude, like Macaulay before him, adopted the habits of the colonizer, the “imperial dispositions” that ensured a blind eye. Froude did not go unanswered in the Caribbean, where several authors wrote back, including the Trinidadian autodidact, teacher, and civil servant J. J. Thomas with his scathing Froudacity. Thomas refused Froude’s insistence on perpetual hostility between black and white and pointed to the long tradition of mixing and collaborating across racial lines. He also rejected Froude’s use of Haiti as a standard by which to measure the Caribbean and his ugly stereotypes of black people, insisting on the importance of education as a potential source of mobility.45 Others roundly criticized Froude for his malicious libels, his lack of evidence, his ignorance of history, and his failure to grasp the complex structures of West Indian societies, reducing them instead to a black-white binary. But Froude’s account chimed comfortably with late nineteenth-­century metropolitan visions of race and empire. As Thomas Holt notes, Froude’s travel journal was “almost like a prologue to the reports of the official travellers who came later.” 46 British attachment to the idea of the antislavery nation was still strong, but in the context of the rivalries between European powers over the partition of Africa, it could be utilized, as Richard Huzzey has recently shown, as a justification for new imperialist forays.47 In their refusal to acknowledge British responsibilities for slavery and its legacies, these imperial historians contributed not only to the loss of a proper Caribbean history and the denigration of Caribbean peoples but also to the mystification of their British audiences. “Those English were the biggest obeah men when you considered what they did to our minds,” as one of the characters in Paule Marshall’s magnificent novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People puts it.48 But “those English” also did black magic “at home,” inviting their readers to evade and forget their own history, to remember abolition but never to remember what had gone before.

274

Catherine Hall

Notes 1. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies — ​­British, French, and Dutch — ​­in the West Indies and South America (London: A. Deutsch, 1962), 29. 2. Cited in Edward Baugh, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” (1977), Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 38 ( July 2012): 60. 3. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–­1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London: Michael Joseph, 1953); Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa will Soon Come Home (London: New Beacon Books, 1980); Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969). 4. Baugh, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” 71. 5. Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History,” Collected Poems, 1948–­1984 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 364–­67. 6. Alison Donnell, “All Friends Now? Critical Conversations, West Indian Literature, and the ‘Quarrel with History,’ ” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 38 ( July 2012): 83. 7. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 2:580. On Clarkson’s famous map of the activities of white abolitionists, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–­1865 (Manchester: Routledge, 2000), 1–­6. 8. For citations, Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 1:26–­27; 2:583. 9. David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–­1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 82. 10. Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce: By His Sons Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1838), 5:376. 11. Wood, Blind Memory, 8. 12. James Mursell Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: J. Snow, 1843); on Phillippo, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 13. Chris Brooks, “Introduction: Historicism and the Nineteenth Century,” in The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age, ed. Vanessa Brand (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998), 2. 14. For a discussion of history writing focused on the horrors of the present rather than the “cosy Whig view,” see Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–­1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), xx. 16. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), xix, 107. 17. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 121–­56, citations 121, 122.

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

275

18. For a longer account, see Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012). 19. The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. William Thomas, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 5:188–­89 ( July 8, 1858). 20. “Imperial dispositions” is Stoler’s term; see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). 21. Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas, 4:132 (tbm, Feb. 20, 1854). 22. Macaulay, History of England (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), 3:140. 23. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Vintage, 1993). 24. Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life Edited by His Wife, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1901), 4:5–­6. 25. Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-­Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 26. James Anthony Froude, “England’s Forgotten Worthies,” in Essays in Literature and History (London: n.d.), 37, 47, 43. 27. James Anthony Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 12 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1858–­1870), 8:422. 28. James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), 24. 29. Froude, History of England, 8:468. 30. Froude, History of England, 12:357. 31. Cited in Koditschek, Liberalism, 175. 32. Froude, English in the West Indies, 230. 33. Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1956; Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980). 34. J.  R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; London: Macmillan, 1889), 9–­10. 35. Seeley, The Expansion of England, 56–­57. 36. Seeley, The Expansion of England, 277. 37. Seeley, The Expansion of England, 55, 89. 38. For discussions of Froude, see Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press: 1996); Faith Smith, Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-­Century Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Koditschek, Liberalism. 39. Froude, English in the West Indies, 4. 40. Froude, English in the West Indies, 227. 41. Froude, English in the West Indies, 44. 42. Froude, English in the West Indies, 24. 43. Froude, English in the West Indies, 207–­8, 217.

276

Catherine Hall

44. Froude, English in the West Indies, 42–­43, 86. 45. Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J J Thomas (London: T. F. Unwin, 1889). See Faith Smith, Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late-­Nineteenth-­Century Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Koditschek, Liberalism, 200–­202. 46. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 316. 47. Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-­Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012). 48. Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, 67.

Re w r i t i n g t h e Pa st

277

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 9

Land, Labor, Landscape Views of the Plantation in Victorian Jamaica TIM BARRINGER

Figures in the Jamaican landscape became the subject of intense scrutiny in the opening years of Queen Victoria’s reign. As apprenticeship came to an end in 1838, Jamaica faced profound questions concerning land and labor. Without the brutal system of physical repression that had perpetuated slavery, would the sugar plantations — ​­the dominant element in Jamaica’s economy from the eighteenth century to 1838 — ​­suddenly “fall into a Waste,” as the governor, Sir Lionel Smith, predicted? 1 Like many of the Jamaican planters, Smith imagined the emancipated workforce abandoning the estates to seek alternative forms of life and labor. They might farm smallholdings in the unsettled, mountainous areas of the island beyond the limits of colonial control, move to the free villages founded by missionaries, or seek work in the island’s towns or port cities. Reformers at the Colonial Office, by contrast, predicted a smooth transition from slave to proletarian, with a compliant, Christianized workforce remaining on the plantations and prospering under the conditions of the free market. Missionaries foresaw a new Jamaican peasantry united as a religious community inhabiting a paternalist social structure that would ensure habits of frugality and respectability. Each of these accounts of Jamaica’s possible future was ideologically partial, conditioned by currents in the social and political thought of the early Victorian period. Enslaved Jamaican men and women themselves, through long-­term practices of resistance on the plantations and through concerted actions such as the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, had played a decisive role in bringing about the end of slavery. Yet the ex-­slaves of 1838 had no single collective voice. The former regime had made explicit political organization impossible and the collective identity of the emergent Jamaican working class — ​­the “black public” or “black counterpublic” — ​­had only just begun to take shape, becoming an incipient presence at public meetings, such as those convened by Baptist missionaries.2 This chapter examines visual representations of the Jamaican agricultural landscape, and of the rural laborers who cultivated it, in relation to historical

developments on the land and debates in social and political theory after emancipation. Here, as so often, discourses of labor and representations of landscape are profoundly interwoven.3 From the mid-­eighteenth century until 1838, artists in Jamaica had focused on the production and distribution of sugar and the celebration of those made rich by that process. Paintings, drawings, and prints made by itinerant painters and printmakers for the dominant patron group, the planter elite, utilized the vocabulary of the picturesque to present the island’s agrarian landscapes as elegant and tranquil and its great houses as the epitome of opulence and refinement.4 The Scottish artist Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, commissioned by the Tharp family to paint Good Hope (fig. 9.1), probably in early 1836, provided a valedictory contribution to this genre, which adapted the format of English estate portraits, themselves modeled on the classical landscapes of the seventeenth-­ century French painter Claude Lorrain. Kidd presents the sugar plantation as serene, natural, and unchangeable. The composition is panoramic, encompassing the whole large estate: the great house is seen in the center distance, the works are picked out in sunshine in the middle ground. The human body played a limited role in Jamaican art before emancipation. A small group of celebratory portraits and conversation pieces depicted prosperous white families, but black figures were generally represented as servants or deployed only in the middle distance of agricultural scenes, peacefully at work. In Good Hope, only a few tiny figures are suggested (despite a labor force on the Tharp estates that exceeded two thousand at its peak) and the “negro huts” depicted on maps of the estate are only dimly apparent in the shadowy right foreground. It was axiomatic to the views of the planter elite (both political and visual, before and after emancipation) that their total dominion over the black majority population should appear natural and inevitable. The position of the great house, and its streams of income from the surrounding land, appear unchallengeable and unchangeable. The processes of production at Good Hope are invisible, although its products are ubiquitous. Kidd’s visual rhetoric attempts, in a futile gesture, to shore up the estate against the processes of historical change. William Tharp, who had managed the estate since 1828, declared in 1837 that he planned to see out “this awful experiment” of emancipation.5 But he left Jamaica the following year, and Good Hope seems quickly to have passed out of cultivation. It was overgrown by 1867. The paint was barely dry on Kidd’s culminating work of the Jamaican picturesque before the scene it depicted, and the ideals it promoted, vanished beneath tropical vegetation, swept aside by forces of historical change. The central narrative of this chapter is the transformation of the long-­ established representational tradition of the picturesque as the defining artistic

282

Tim Barringer

F ig . 9 . 1   Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Good Hope, circa 1835–­1836. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Good Hope, Jamaica.

medium of the plantation economy under slavery and the struggle to reformulate it, as the lived reality of Jamaicans in the landscape also underwent drastic change. The period saw a fundamental shift in visual media, from the dominance of oil painting and lithography during the final decades of slavery to an era, after about 1850, when photography and wood engraving won preeminence. Artists and theorists, presented with a new range of representational and reproductive technologies, scanned Jamaica for answers to the questions: What kind of figure would the emancipated Jamaican laborer be? How could this new class be represented, or represent itself, through visual and linguistic forms?

Regimes of Vision, Discourses of Labor In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff suggests, provocatively, that modern re­gimes of looking originated in the Caribbean, under slavery: “The deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering,” he claims, “was decisively shaped by the experience of the plantation.” 6 The establishment of “a new industrial labor discipline” on the sugar plantations, according to Robert Fogel, was “at once their greatest technological achievement, the foundation of their economic success, and the ugliest aspect of their system.” 7 The “panoptic schema” familiar from the work of Michel Foucault provides a significant metaphoric link between the overseer’s role in the factory and the plantation with that of the unseen but all-­seeing guard in the Benthamite prison. The view from the plantation’s great house, as at Good Hope, and the eye of the owner’s surrogate, the plantation overseer, formed a disciplinary regime directly linked to the lash of the whip — ​­a more powerful incentive, even, than the threat of unemployment, destitution, and the workhouse that underpinned the parallel supervisory regime of the Victorian factory in Britain. Although modernity was a more pluralistic condition than Mirzoeff allows, associated with multifarious visual regimes, the welding together of power and vision on the plantation surely formed a significant, dystopian element within it. Despite the severity of the plantation’s regime of punishment, resistance to authority by the enslaved took many forms. Often this opposition involved evasion of the overseer’s lines of sight. Food for subsistence was grown on provision grounds. The land assigned to enslaved laborers for this purpose was often in high terrain many miles from the estate buildings, but its obscure position allowed for a degree of autonomy from the plantation authorities. Indeed, it was a convention of plantation life that planters and their managers would not enter the provision grounds. Visiting artists also seem to have avoided these

284

Tim Barringer

areas, resulting in a paucity of visual representations.8 Throughout the history of slavery, in the evenings, music and dancing would take place under cover of darkness. In Kidd’s Good Hope the huts of the labor force are located in a dark region in the front right, almost invisible to the viewer of the painting. That darkness offered a space for cultural expression and social exchange among enslaved Afro-­Jamaicans. Although profound inequalities persisted after 1838, the days of the slaveholder’s absolute sovereignty over his workforce, and the associated visual regime, were ended. New forms of negotiation between employer and workers gradually developed, initially through the intervention of stipendiary magistrates, who “saw themselves as negotiators or mediators as much as arbitrators of justice.” 9 While there was still an imbalance of power and status, it was now possible for former slaves and masters to meet eye to eye.10 This chapter argues that questions of visuality became paramount in the struggle for control of agricultural production, and with it the colony’s sense of self-­definition, in Jamaica throughout the Victorian decades. The term “visuality” is generally understood now to connote “sight as a social fact,” implying the political, social, and economic significance of sight. Visuality implies a regime of looking that is associated with a dominant ideology, the plantation owner’s view of enslaved laborers being an extreme example.11 A change of underlying ideological, legal, and economic structure, such as the ending of slavery, would determine a shift in visuality. As Mirzoeff notes, the term “visuality” is of Victorian origin, dating precisely from the era of emancipation, when regimes of power, of sight and oversight, on the plantation — ​ ­previously fixed and seemingly immutable — ​­were in flux.12 The word was coined in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, a critic and essayist preoccupied with the condition of Jamaica as well as with the condition of England. Carlyle associated the term “visuality” with the visionary power of heroic, white male individuals. As an active, engaged form of viewing, visuality was, in Carlyle’s formulation, often connected with imperial endeavors and with acts of labor: “Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby.” 13 The association of the act of seeing with the idea of work forms a significant theme in nineteenth-­century thought, both in Britain and throughout the empire, and the emergence of a large population group from slavery to the condition of free laborers brought the British West Indies to the forefront of these debates. Discourses of work in about 1840 fell into two discursive strands, which can be associated with “instrumental” and “expressive” theories of work. The idea of work as “instrumental” is central to political econ-

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

285

omy (which Carlyle decried as the “dismal science” ):14 Work is that which we must do to survive and to prosper.15 Carlyle, by contrast, found work “expressive” of inner character and declared in Past and Present, published in 1843, “There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work.” In this account, labor, morally and psychologically positive, is an end in itself.16 When he turned his attention to the enslaved Africans who had transformed Jamaica from jungle to productive farmland through forced labor, Carlyle found no signs of heroism. In his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” — ​ ­a repulsive but indubitably influential outpouring of racial hatred — ​­Carlyle avowed: “Before the West Indies could grow a pumpkin for any negro, how much European heroism had to spend itself in obscure battle; to sink, in mortal agony, before the jungles, the putrescences and waste savageries could become arable, and the Devils be, in some measure, chained there!” 17 Redemptive labor, expressive of inner character, was limited in his account to white men. Looking at the Jamaican plantation a decade after emancipation, he asserted: “The West Indies, it appears, are short of labor, as, indeed, is very conceivable in those circumstances. Where a black man, by working half an hour a day (such is the calculation), can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work!” 18 This was a caricature of the “instrumental” theory of labor. The problem with figures in the Jamaican landscape of 1849 (as imagined by Carlyle, who never visited the Caribbean) lay in the alleged racial predisposition of Africans to idleness. In Carlyle’s caricature, such men (and there is no mention of women) would work, but only to satisfy their immediate desires. This alleged behavior did not conform to the model of the economically rational actor, who is motivated by a wish to get ahead in the world, to provide for a family and save up for the future, upon whom political economy was predicated. Rather it is held by Carlyle to “express” the inner character of the African. In Carlyle’s vicious analysis, “work” for the freedmen did not extend beyond the act of consuming food: “Far over the sea, we have a few black persons rendered extremely ‘free’ indeed. Sitting yonder, with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder and incisor teeth ready for every new work, and the pumpkins cheap as grass in those rich climates; while the sugar crops rot round them, uncut, because labor cannot be hired, so cheap are the pumpkins.” 19 Effectively espousing a return to slavery, Carlyle saw the experiment of emancipation as a failure. Henry Taylor of the Colonial Office laid out an entirely different account of the possibilities for plantation labor under emancipation. During the period

286

Tim Barringer

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 286

2/27/18 10:10 AM

of apprenticeship, Taylor believed, and “before bondage ceased, he [the slave] would have acquired habits of self-­command and voluntary industry to take with him into freedom, by which habits he would be saved from a life of savage sloth and the planter from ruin.” 20 The laborer is ineluctably transformed into a respectable citizen, inducted into the instrumental theory of work. Baptist missionaries, as we shall see, likewise believed that, freed from the burden of slavery, the Jamaican working class would embrace the culture of respectability: Christianity, prudence, hard work, the observance of “separate spheres” for men and women, the amassing of private property, and saving in provision for future sickness.21 Taylor framed his vision of apprenticeship and freedom in explicitly moral terms: “The operation of the measure would be in accordance with the great moral principle of the government of men, which would call their own powers and virtues into action for their own profit and advantage; and bring home to them the consciousness of a moral agency and responsibility, by making the good and evil of their lives the result of their own conduct.” 22 The figure in the landscape of emancipation, then, was the subject of ideological contest at the metropolitan center. As the ideological ground shifted, methods of visual representation were also undergoing a profound metamorphosis. The following case studies explore the reconfiguration of the visuality that began with emancipation and the place of the laboring body within it.

Slave to Peasant: Kidd’s Proleptic Picturesque The Scottish landscape painter Joseph Bartholomew Kidd resided in Jamaica between October 1835 and November 1836 and again between September 1837 and April 1838. While in Jamaica, Kidd conceived the idea of an ambitious series of prints, which were eventually published in London between 1837 and 1840 as West Indian Scenery: Illustrations of Jamaica. An advertisement in the Jamaica Dispatch and New Courant on September 13, 1837, announced the publication of the first issues.23 The Illustrations of Jamaica thus stand, precariously, at the edge of a precipice in time. They are proleptic images: Based on observations made between 1836 and 1838, they project an image of a future Jamaica after full emancipation, utilizing a traditional visual strategy whose credibility would be sorely challenged by the rapid changes in Jamaican life and labor. Despite Kidd’s relentless attempts to signal that nothing would or could change, the lithographs are shot through with anxiety and reveal insuperable structural instabilities in Jamaican society. The printed inscription on each work, “From Nature & on Stone,” insists on Kidd’s authorship, both of the drawing made in Jamaica and of the lithograph

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

287

F i g . 9.2   Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Montego Bay from Upton Hill, hand-­colored lithograph, from Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns Harbours and Scenery (1840). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, T 686 Folio C.

completed in London — ​­a powerful truth claim. The ten parts of Illustrations of Jamaica were sold at £2 each and were undoubtedly intended to appeal to wealthy planters and absentee proprietors. Purchasers would have been reading regular dispatches in the press about the febrile and unsettled condition of the colony. Kidd, reassuringly, presents an eyewitness account of a Jamaica that appears static and peaceful, and he strains to frame the changing Jamaican landscape within extant picturesque conventions.24 Montego Bay from Upton Hill (fig. 9.2) envisions the second largest port in Jamaica through a compositional trope familiar from the works of J. M. W. Turner. As Gillian Forrester has suggested, James T. Willmore’s engraving after Turner’s Richmond Terrace, Surrey, from Picturesque Views in England and Wales, provides one widely circulated precedent (fig. 9.3). Kidd replaces the elaborate social pageant offered in the foreground of Turner’s Richmond Terrace with two diminutive black figures, apparently enjoying a picnic, possibly included as a tentative emblem of black freedom. Noticeably, these are figures of leisure not of labor. The darkness of

288

Tim Barringer

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 288

2/27/18 10:10 AM

F ig . 9 . 3   James T. Willmore, after Joseph Mallord William Turner, Richmond Terrace, Surrey, 1827–­1838. Line engraving, engraver’s proof (early). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.7125.

F i g . 9.4   Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Montego Bay from Upton Hill [detail], hand-­ colored lithograph, from Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns Harbours and Scenery (1840). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, T 686 Folio C.

their skin is emphasized almost to the point of satire. Indeed, this black Romeo and Juliet, with a wicker basket and a bottle of rum (see detail, fig. 9.4), resemble the caricatural figures in Tregear’s Black Jokes.25 The crude representation of the woman, dressed with a colored apron, suggesting the traditional garb of a house slave (a domestic apprentice in 1837 but a free Jamaican by 1840, when the print was published), denies us insight into her character. Perhaps she gazes at her companion; perhaps, however, she looks longingly toward the city, which offered former slaves an alternative to the life of a wage laborer on a plantation, albeit a highly insecure one. Freedom and riches beckon, but crime and violence were also characteristic of urban life: One Victorian observer, whose words sketch one possible future for Kidd’s foreground figure, was shocked by the Kingston prostitutes, their “tawdry gowns dangling in remnants, and fluttering in the wind, like flags hung out to intimate their trade and occupation, or as signals to emblazon their disgrace.” 26 In the woman’s sideways glance, and in the vista that opens up in dizzying perspective before the two black figures, are enshrined a new range of possibilities, albeit circumscribed by social and economic inequality. In Distant View of the Plains of Westmoreland, Looking towards Savannah la Mar (fig. 9.5), Kidd contrasts the mountainous interior of Jamaica with the fertile, alluvial plains where the most productive plantations were to be found. The center of the panoramic composition is occupied by a ravine, filled with lush tropical vegetation, colored in rich washes of dark turquoise and green. These are the impenetrable regions of barbarism and darkness, a central trope of colonial gothic literature. To the left margin of the composition appears a surprising incursion, a neatly cut and well-­maintained roadway, with six diminutive white figures, suggesting the progress of agriculture and politeness. A small building, perhaps a toll house (a central element in the regime of repression under slavery), guards one leg of the new road system. Toll roads were often built on the routes to markets, with the support of the Jamaica Assembly, as a means of retarding the developing agrarian production on peasant smallholdings, whose success would potentially compromise the profitability of remaining plantations. Kidd emphasizes this structure, which stands defiantly against the inscrutable blackness of the forest immediately behind it. Chiaroscuro here is moral, economic, and political. If darkness reigns in the center foreground, in the forest and the mountains, Kidd bathes the middle distance in bright sunlight, urging the viewer to celebrate the Carlylean heroism of colonial agriculture in clearing fields and laying tracks. Such actions have indeed made the land productive and profitable, but only through the unseen, forced agency of enslaved Africans. In the distance, the full extent

290

Tim Barringer

F ig . 9 . 5   Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Distant View of the Plains of Westmoreland.  Looking towards Savannah la Mar, hand-­colored lithograph, from Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns Harbours and Scenery (1840). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

of distant plantation agriculture can be seen the Westmoreland Plain, with a broad fertile area carved up into geometric units for cultivation, most of them owned by absentee proprietors in Britain. This area, apparently orderly and productive, was in the throes of transformation when Kidd depicted it. To the right of Kidd’s field of view was an estate over two thousand acres in extent, Friendship and Greenwich, which was owned by Henry Richard Vassall Fox, Lord Holland. When the British Quaker Joseph Sturge visited the estate with Thomas Harvey in 1837, the two philanthropists talked with fifty or sixty apprentices. “When free, which they wished might be tomorrow,” these men avowed, “they should be glad to remain on the estate and work for wages, rather than leave their houses and grounds to begin the world again.” The houses, Sturge and Harvey noted, “were of an inferior description, but there were some pleasing evidences of the industry of these people in their gardens and plantain walks.” 27 As Barry Higman has revealed, the succeeding years saw intense negotiations as to the fate of the estates and the future of its labor force. In April 1838 — ​­within months of Kidd’s sketch-

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

291

ing on the estate — ​­Vassall Holland encouraged his attorney, Thomas McNeil, to begin manumitting “some of the best behaved of the Negro Apprentices, offering them on or after manumission a lease of the premises they occupy, for a small rent, either in money or in labor.” 28 But the plan foundered, and soon after apprenticeship ended, there was a shortage of workers on the estates. McNeil noted that “during the time they have withheld so much labor from the estate, they have devoted much labor to improve their cottages and increase the extent of their provision lands.” 29 These grounds, mostly situated in “ruinate” land at higher altitude than the cane fields, perhaps occupied some of the mysterious, dark areas of Kidd’s composition. A provision ground, where enslaved laborers and apprentices were allowed to cultivate their own food, is the subject of Kidd’s plate Mountain Cottage Scene, Cocoa Nut Trees in the Fore Ground (fig. 9.6). Often, they would travel up to fifteen miles on foot to reach these secluded areas, far from the controlling gaze of the plantation overseers. The provision ground has been recognized, as Mimi Sheller notes, as “one of the most important mechanisms through which slaves could build up some degree of autonomous life, community and kinship.” 30 The natural landscape and the social system under slavery and apprenticeship are ostensibly represented as beneficent forces in Kidd’s vignette. The two women pause: one sits by a basket filled with plantains, bananas, and other foodstuffs, natural provender from the lush vegetation seen all around her. Ripe coconuts are poised to fall from the three huge palms that dominate the composition. Are these figures female counterparts of Carlyle’s indolent “Quashee”? 31 The print predates Carlyle’s text and the critic, keenly interested in visual culture, may even have seen it while cogitating his essay. Countering a Carlylean reading, we can see behind the Afro-­Jamaican figures bananas growing in carefully cultivated groves. Among the trees are simple, well-­maintained cottages, suggestive of good husbandry and domestic virtue.32 Described by Thomas Holt as “visible, if incongruous, symbols of possession and autonomy,” such cottages symbolized the aspirations and achievements of the Afro-­Jamaican population, even under conditions of slavery. These plantation grounds are largely invisible in representations of Jamaica under slavery. Just as they were inaccessible to artists, they were invisible in law, as the enslaved were unable to own property. In a shift from the planter’s — ​­and from Carlyle’s — ​­viewpoint, Kidd’s plate, based on sketches made of provision grounds under apprenticeship, envisions a possible utopian future in which Jamaican peasants, supported by the natural fecundity of the island, produce their own food, sell their surpluses at market, and live in their own well-­maintained homes. This vignette enshrines a vision of Afro-­Jamaican life from which the plantation has been erased, making the

292

Tim Barringer

Fig. 9.6 Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, Mountain Cottage Scene, Cocoa Nut Trees in the Fore Ground, hand-­colored lithograph, from Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns Harbours and Scenery (1840). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, T 686 Folio C.

provision ground fully visible and implicitly declaring its legitimacy as a space of Afro-­Jamaican economic and cultural production. With this act of representation, Kidd militates against the panoptic logic of plantation visuality. Some planters argued that these grounds given to slaves for subsistence cultivation should be surrendered after emancipation. The apprentices of the Holland estate declared to the overseer, Thomas McNeil, as McNeil reported it, “that they will not pay any rents whatever until they see ‘the Queen’s Law’ to say they must do so, that their parents before them, had possession of the land and had houses where they are now.” 33 Although the residents held no legal title to these lands, enslaved families had passed them on through processes of inheritance for many generations. Jean Besson has noted that in the free village of Martha Brae in Trelawny, such landholdings were considered “family land,” to be handed down (in the words of a contemporary resident) to “children and children’s children, till every generation dead-­out.” 34 The transition underway was from slave to peasant — ​­as smallholders who produced from their own lands foodstuffs for subsistence and for sale on the open market. By the 1860s, one-­third of the black population would be living in independent villages in the island’s mountainous interior.35 But this was not achieved without acrimony. Attempts by planters to reappropriate the land, which continued for decades, were met with violent resistance. As late as 1859, settlers at Florence Hall in Westmoreland were charged with trespass, and, when they resisted eviction by the police, were arrested. Their supporters, however, broke into the Falmouth jail and freed them in what white residents described as a “riot.” 36 On the part of the planters, there was lingering widespread anxiety that, if sufficiently well provided with food of their own cultivation, free laborers would simply abandon plantation agriculture. Contrary to the idyllic scene envisioned by Kidd, the Jamaica Assembly introduced in 1840 the Ejectment Act, despite resistance from the Colonial Office. This act allowed for the summary eviction of laborers who refused to pay rent on land they had formerly held free of charge — ​­a parallel to the eviction of squatters under the Enclosure Acts that had transformed rural life in England and the Scottish Highland clearances. In some cases, the landowners insisted on high rents to force laborers to work on the plantations. In addition to the machinations of the planters, the bad harvests and harsh weather that afflicted Jamaica in the 1840s took a terrible toll on the peasant-­proprietors and squatters in marginal areas. No one could imagine from Kidd’s bounteous composition that many members of the new Jamaican working class would endure real distress, and even face starvation, in the coming years.

294

Tim Barringer

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 294

2/27/18 10:10 AM

Phillippo’s Landscape of Redemption Baptist missionary enterprise played a powerful role in Victorian Jamaica. The explicit intention of missionaries in the colony was to convert Afro-­Jamaican “heathens” to Christianity, saving their souls. As the Baptist missionary James Mursell Phillippo declared in his publication of 1843, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, Jamaican slaves were “men of the same common origin with ourselves . . . endowed with minds equal in dignity, equal in capacity, and equal in duration of experience, — ​­men of the same social dispositions and affections, and destined to occupy the same rank with ourselves in the great family of man.” 37 This position ran counter to ideas that differences between races were essential and immutable — ​­ideas considered axiomatic by the planters and fundamental to justifications for slavery. Carlyle, naturally, deplored the missionaries’ “Exeter Hall monstrosities.” 38 Where Carlyle identified redemptive labor with the white colonist, and idleness with the emancipated slave, the missionary account suggested the reverse, inverting the social hierarchy. Salvation beckoned for the ex-­slaves, damnation for their masters. It was a socially radical vision. Established in Jamaica from 1823 and active as a minister in his own church in Spanish Town from 1827, Phillippo was particularly concerned with the conditions of the Jamaican workforce on the plantations. His book demonstrates a considerable practical knowledge of husbandry on the island and offers a damning indictment of the economic inefficiency, as well as the evil, of slavery — ​­a “vicious and defective system of domestic economy.” 39 In reviewing the “monstrous injustice” of the former system, perpetuated in the apprenticeship that followed, Phillippo drew attention to the planters’ attempts to sell off the freedmen’s huts and plantation grounds: The little huts in which they resided, lowly though they were, yet being of their own erecting, the rural spots which they had cultivated around them, and the trees by which they were embosomed, planted by their own hands, and beneath the shade of which they had so often rested from their toils, and especially the circumstance that these spots were hallowed by the tombs of their friends and kindred, would naturally beget attachments of a most powerful, and almost superstitious, character. But from these spots, thus hallowed by affection, thus endeared by all the feelings which constitute home . . . they were likely to be torn away . . . at the caprice of their master, or in execution for his debts — ​­sold to the highest bidder.40

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

295

This powerful image of a pastoral habitation akin to the English village mobilized powerful cultural tropes: the happy peasant family supported by a smallholding, and the sentimental Victorian vision of a home inhabited by a nuclear family with clearly divided gender roles, supported by the labor of a paterfamilias and breadwinner. There is evidence that elements of this domestic ideology were embraced by Afro-­Jamaicans during the Victorian period.41 The missionary ideal of the Christianized village of free laborers — ​­in contrast to the extant “heathen” villages — ​­was a powerful one, and, with admirable practicality, Phillippo set about making a reality of it. As Catherine Hall has noted, Phillippo realized that “freedom could not mean much while the planters controlled both housing and labor.” 42 He set about constructing an alternative, buying marginal land in the mountains not far from his headquarters in Spanish Town. He divided the land into plots and sold them, at modest rates, to ex-­slaves from the neighboring estates.43 The first settlement was named Sligoville, after the Marquess of Sligo, the liberal governor of Jamaica who had presided over emancipation and gained renown — ​­along with the enmity of the planters — ​­as a result of his attempts to protect the interests of the apprentices.44 The central structures in the town were the Mount Zion Chapel and the schoolroom, situated on a raised eminence and owned by the Baptist Missionary Society. Around them grew up a community of small cottages, mostly inhabited by agricultural laborers but also including a group of skilled workmen and a schoolmaster and schoolmistress. Phillippo espoused “the several duties of honesty, industry, economy in domestic expenditure, prudent provision for the exigencies of sickness and old age,” the bourgeois values that achieved normativity in Victorian Britain.45 The physical and social geography of Sligoville gave physical form to this social vision. As Catherine Hall points out in this volume (see object lesson 4) the illustration of Sligoville included in Jamaica: Its Past and Present State is an idealized version of the village. Drawn onto wood by a professional draftsman in London based on verbal description or crude sketches from the missionary and then swiftly cut by a commercial wood engraver, such images were intended for printing on a steam press — ​­a method that was faster, cheaper, and more democratic in reach than the slow and expensive processes of engraving on copper or on the lithographic stone. The engraving replicates tropes of the picturesque familiar from earlier Jamaican print series but overlays them with an unmistakably Victorian ideology.46 This modest image, indeed, makes dramatic claims. The great house and the sugar works are banished from the Jamaican scene as we saw it in Kidd’s Good Hope; the Manichean division between black and white, slave and slaveholder, has been replaced by a communitarian organiza-

296

Tim Barringer

F i g . 9.7   James Mursell Phillippo, Sligoville with Mission Premises, from Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

tion. Each cottage is a capsule of Victorian morality, the pristine white-­painted walls seeming to speak of the saved souls within. This is no English village, with its class hierarchy. Rather, the residences display absolute equality with each other, and the dominant force in the village is religion: Mount Zion Chapel looms much larger in the image than does the surviving modest structure with neo-­Gothic windows (fig. 9.7). This modest wood engraving proclaims faith in the power of religion and labor — ​­together expressive of personal moral worth — ​­to transform ex-­slaves into civilized subjects. A culture of deference to British norms, generated by the Protestant bourgeoisie, replaced the disciplinary regime of the plantation.

Duperly’s Daguerian Excursions

and the Decline of the Plantation The years after 1834 saw plantation agriculture decline in production and profitability, owing to the termination of slave labor and changing macroeconomic circumstances. To take one prominent and paradigmatic example, at Worthy Park, a large and fertile estate on high ground surrounded by the Cockpit Mountains, there was a precipitous reduction in the amount of sugar harvested annually after 1834. The total fell by 15 percent during apprenticeship and by 1840 had fallen by 70 percent from preemancipation levels.47 During the four

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

297

years of apprenticeship, the numbers working on the estate also fell, despite the law’s harsh provisions to prevent this from happening. There were 467 slaves registered in June 1834, but only 224 laborers in 1838, comprising 93 men and 131 women. While manumission may account for some of this decline, it seems likely that many apprentices simply took their chances and left the estate, rightly surmising that the government could not marshal sufficient forces to prevent them.48 A recovery in production was achieved by 1846, facilitated by investment in machinery that went some way toward compensating for the loss of captive manpower. But in that year a change in the tax regime that removed protectionist duties led to a sharp decline in the price of sugar, ensuring that the estate’s profitability was severely compromised until 1866. This example indicates general trends across the whole colony. The visual archive of these decades is relatively sparse. Most significant is Adolphe Duperly’s publication Daguerian Excursions (ca.  1844–­1847), a postpicturesque view of the island. The work of a resident Jamaican photographer, rather than an itinerant artist, the set is a self-­portrait of a colony in transition. Inherent to the new medium of photography was a truth claim more powerful than any before: these compositions were inscribed on the photographic plate by light itself. The use of the camera in Jamaica was part of the shift in visuality after 1838. The invention of photography was announced in 1839, and the introduction of the new medium into Jamaica took place only a few years later. Impressed upon the photographic plate was an image of Jamaica in transition. Yet daguerreotypes were unique objects that could be replicated only by being copied, by the hand of an expert lithographer, onto stone, before being printed. Duperly’s set was lithographed in Paris. Some of the staffage figures in the published lithographs probably derived largely from the imagination of the French printmakers. It is unlikely that figures at work would have remained still for long enough to allow for the making of a photograph, its exposure extending to minutes, without blurring and distortion. The most striking of Duperly’s plates reveal the agro-­industrial aspects of the sugar economy much more vividly than do earlier engraved images by Kidd or, in the 1820s, by James Hakewill.49 Golden Grove Estate, for example, presents a strikingly geometric composition, with a path leading through a gate in the solidly constructed brick wall, which acts brusquely as a barricade to the viewer’s eye, as it might also have done in the early 1830s to potential arsonists or rebels seeking to enter, or slaves or apprentices attempting to leave (fig. 9.8).50 By the mid-­1840s, laborers were legally free to come and go as they pleased. In Duperly’s daguerian portrayal, the mill yard is depopulated, its figures static. A genteel group to the right, probably members of the white managerial

298

Tim Barringer

F ig . 9 . 8   C. Muller after Adolphe Duperly, Golden Grove Estate (St Thomas in the East), lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). Courtesy of the Christopher Issa Collection, Jamaica.

class, converges around the steps of a fine building with decorated portico, the manager’s residence or the countinghouse. Four laboring figures, two men and two women (one carrying a bunch of cane on her head), can be seen near the waterwheel. The original plate might have been smudged with the ghostly impression of other workers going about their business. These laborers, paid by the hour, were employed on the same conditions as the manual workers of British industrial capitalism. The lithographer’s insistent use of ruled parallel lines to depict the rows of bricks in each building, the slats of the wooden blinds, and the tiles of the roof creates a rhythm of mechanized precision. Yet perhaps here the printmaker has tidied up the Jamaican scene: the impression of machine-­made industrial prefabrication is at odds with the likely condition of rural structures raised at least seventy years earlier. Holland Estate (St Thomas in the East) (fig. 9.9) returns to a subject known to Duperly through James Hakewill’s plate of the same buildings, published in 1825 (fig. 9.10).51 Hakewill emphasized the impressive buildings inhabited by

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

299

F ig . 9 . 9   Philippe Benoist, after Adolphe Duperly, Holland Estate (St Thomas in the East), lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). Courtesy of the Christopher Issa Collection, Jamaica.

F ig . 9 . 10   Thomas Sutherland, after James Hakewill, Holland Estate, St Thomas in the East, hand-­colored lithograph, from A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica from Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (1821). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, T683 (Folio A).

F i g . 9.1 1  Alexander R. Catter, Plan of Holland Estate, Works and Buildings, St. Thomas, 1859. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, St. Thomas 15.

the white elite of the plantation: the bookkeeper’s residence and offices on the left, windows shuttered against the heat, and the overseer’s residence on the right. The less elegant structures — ​­mill, trash houses, and refinery — ​­are tucked out of sight to the left. The layout of the buildings is shown in a ground plan by Alexander Carter dated 1859, whose utilitarian visual language strips away the genteel pastoral adornments added by Hakewill and reveals the strictly functional character of the plantation buildings (fig. 9.11). In the plate based on a Duperly daguerreotype, however, we encounter at the Holland estate something unthinkable in Hakewill: a group of laborers, seated, close-­up. Their faces are visible and the character of each legible. An old, bearded cowherd watches cattle in the foreground. Most significant, however, is the group of three black figures in tall hats seated nearby. Two sit with their hands insouciantly resting on the wall; another stands as if telling a tale. A further pair stands chatting in the middle distance next to a cart, which lies idle. Enslaved figures rarely occupied such prominence in plantation imagery, and it is notable that the laborers are seen here in repose rather than at work. While this composition may indicate an acknowledgment on Duperly’s part of the subjective individuality of each of these figures, it is just as likely that he acquiesced in planter opinions on the topic of the work-­shy Jamaican laborer. The plantocracy was united in condemning the freedmen as sullen and idle and in blaming the end of slavery for the drop in productivity on estates like Golden Grove and Holland. In the words of Edward Eyre, governor of Jamaica from 1864 to 1866: “Even when he does work, the Creole laborer requires an amount of direction, supervision and watching unknown in other Countries, and detracting greatly from the value of his services.” 52 Eyre believed, in accord with Carlyle, that indolence was a congenital aspect of the racial identity of the black laborer. Carlyle would later

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

301

support Eyre in the legal controversies after the Morant Bay rebellion. Viewed through the distorting lens of this racial theory, a group of laborers seen at ease, as in Holland Estate, St Thomas in the East, could portend the decline of the sugar business. Duperly’s own opinions are unknown, but in 1834 he prophesied that emancipation would bring “ruin and misery” to the colony.53 In Holland Estate, Duperly incorporates at least three encounters between white and black, each one a test case of social relations in the new, emancipated Jamaica. Clearly there is still a gulf between rich and poor, more profound than a mere lack of social intimacy. This division is epitomized by the white male figure with a parasol in the right middle ground, who stares intently at the group of chatting laborers to the left. The void between them reads as a chasm of misunderstanding; the exchange of glances is inscrutable. It seems unlikely that the gap between white and black, emancipation notwithstanding, will be quickly bridged. In the background the exchanges are of a more familiar kind: A benign proprietor or overseer in a black hat to the right barks instructions to a male and a female laborer, and in the distance, a lady is helped from her coach by her husband while two submissive black men drive and attend to the horses.

The Photographic Print in Jamaica’s Decade of Crisis By the 1860s, the focus of Jamaican rural life had gradually begun to shift from the plantation to the village. Large numbers of freed people had bought smallholdings, and there was a dramatic growth in the number of villages and towns, where markets sprang up for the exchange of goods. Many estates were broken up into small lots, and by 1865, freehold land in the hands of black Jamaicans was valued at £2.5 million. As the plantation entered a period of decline, so did the established media for representing it. The plates we have examined from Duperly’s Daguerian Excursions stand at the end of a tradition, even as they utilize a new technology and bear witness to social change. There was a collapse in demand for costly, handmade print series depicting Jamaica’s landscape and plantations, a direct result of the decline in profits from sugar plantations, and thus of patronage from the planter class, resident and absentee. However, new forms and formats were emerging as new patron groups developed. After the adoption of the albumen print in Jamaica, photographers, again led by the Duperly firm, began to produce views of Jamaica for sale to a largely urban, middle-­class public and to a new category of patron: tourists. Armand Duperly, the son of Adolphe, who died in 1864, replicated the traditional format of sweeping estate views in technically accomplished photographic prints. Moore’s Sugar Estate, for example, views the works from a raised

302

Tim Barringer

vantage point and depicts the great house, the refinery, the trash houses, and other features unchanged from the prints of Hakewill and Kidd (fig.  9.12). Where the earlier plates were fashioned by the hand of draftsman and engraver, however, this image (undated, but made between 1864 and ca. 1880) is unmistakably indexical: The appearance of a specific Jamaican scene at one moment in time is imprinted on paper with minimal human intervention. If the process is relatively unmediated, however, the landscape itself has clearly been manipulated for picturesque effect. The cropping and framing of the composition echoes that of generations of drawn and printed images. More strikingly, in the yard, lines of wage laborers — ​­five women with bundles of cane aloft on their heads, and eight more men and women grouped along a wall — ​­stand motionless, clearly posed for the photographer’s benefit. Their bodily movement is, once again, regulated by an external authority. The photograph carries little of the ideological urgency of the earlier prints produced for the planter market. The scene is curiously bereft of energy, the buildings shabby. There is an air of stasis and decay. As captured on a photographic plate in the 1860s, the plantation picturesque was a shadow of its former self. Among the most significant, though least visually arresting, of albumen prints to represent a plantation is one that depicts Hordley estate in St. Thomas in the East. It was made by J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford, photographers based in

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

F i g . 9.1 2   Adolphe Duperly and Co., Moore’s Sugar Estate, between 1864 and circa 1880. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

303

Fig. 9 .13  J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford, Hordley Estate, 1865. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

304

Falmouth in the early 1860s (fig. 9.13).54 The image is banal enough: a panoramic view of cane fields taken from a raised eminence, with the familiar buildings of a sugar estate nestling among trees in the middle distance. The faded albumen print emphasizes the tonal difference between fields at different stages of cultivation. The hazy impression is of distant, but peaceful and efficient, husbandry, apparently the result of plentiful and well-­managed labor. An inscription dates the photograph to January 1865 and it bears the name of Augustus Hire, attorney for Amity Hall, a neighboring estate, who seems to have received this image “with the Season’s good wishes.” 55 The photograph, a token of regard exchanged between friends and neighbors, is wholly tranquil — ​­indeed, deceptively so. Since at least 1859 there had been signs of increasing hardship among the black workers in this area, exacerbated by a severe drought in 1860 and several seasons of heavy rains, which proved destructive of the cottages and smallholdings of the recently established Jamaican peasantry.56 From 1861, the American Civil War disrupted supplies and caused spiraling prices for imported textiles

Tim Barringer

and foodstuffs. Meanwhile, the rates of pay offered for hourly labor on the surviving sugar estates were extremely low, and employment was unreliable, owing to seasonal changes and to the whim and the cash flow of overseers.57 The hours of labor offered varied widely from day to day and from plantation to plantation: As soon as tasks were completed, the laborers were discharged. Indeed, in 1864, three hundred peasants in the parish of St. David petitioned the governor, Edward Eyre, to take measures to combat the lack of “continuous and remunerating labor” and to counter the “intolerable” prices of food and clothing.58 Meanwhile, tensions grew over the use of abandoned estate land, which the Afro-­Jamaican peasants widely believed should revert automatically to the Crown and thus to public use. Colonial land policy, however, determined that the lands of bankrupt and abandoned estates should remain uncultivated, to force laborers back onto the functioning estates. Discourses of labor were once again paramount in debates about Jamaica. The English Baptist minister Edward Bean Underhill, who had visited the island in 1859–­1860, wrote in 1864 to the colonial secretary, Edward Cardwell, with a damning indictment of British policy in Jamaica regarding land and the rural worker. A heated exchange ensued. Underhill blamed Jamaica’s economic decline on the government’s failure to support peasant agriculture while propping up the declining sugar plantations. The Baptist minister had insisted for years on the value of a class who “instead of being squatters, as they have been represented to be . . . are a peasantry, deserving our admiration and approval.” 59 His letter was duly passed to the new governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, whose enraged response was Carlylean in its recourse to racial essentialism and to an axiomatic assumption of black idleness. Eyre adduced in his support an article by Samuel Oughton in the Jamaica Guardian in which Oughton blamed the dire conditions on “the inveterate habits of idleness and the low state of moral and religious principles which prevail to so fearful an extent in our community.” 60 Black Jamaicans were for Eyre “little better than absolute savages.” 61 Meanwhile, groups of peasants, naively perhaps, despairing of help from the governor, appealed directly in a letter to Queen Victoria herself — ​­who had, after all, presided over emancipation — ​­for support of their plan to set up smallholdings, whose produce might be sold through an appointed agent. The response from London was drafted by Henry Taylor at the Colonial Office. It proffered a homiletic message that was eagerly taken up by Eyre. Fifty thousand copies were circulated, posted, and read in churches across Jamaica: The prosperity of the Laboring Classes [it declared] . . . depends upon their working for Wages, not uncertainly, or capriciously, but steadily and continuously, at the times their labor is wanted. . . . And if they L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

305

would use this industry, and thereby render the Plantations productive, they would enable the Planters to pay them higher Wages. . . . They would [then] be enabled, by adding prudence to industry, to lay by an ample provision for seasons of drought and dearth.62 This text combined the instrumental and expressive theories of work, characterizing the behavior of the laborers as implicitly both irrational and immoral; the “Planters,” however, are assumed to operate with consistent and unquestionable probity and economic rationality. Under circumstances discussed elsewhere in this volume, the tensions in mid-­Victorian Jamaica came to a head on October 11, 1865, at the Morant Bay courthouse in the troubled parish of St. Thomas. A crowd demanding the release of a group of men, including the black preacher Paul Bogle from the town of Stony Gut, in the parish of St. Thomas, engaged in violent conflict with the militia, leaving twenty-­nine dead, including Bogle, who was swiftly elevated to the status of a folk hero, and many more wounded. Although a complex narrative led to this outbreak, the underlying cause was the unsustainable economic and political circumstances of the black laboring class. As the rebellion spread across the surrounding area, sugar workers from the plantations, as well as the peasantry from villages and settlements, rose up against the authorities and occupied estates. Among these estates were Hordley and Amity Hall, where Augustus Hire, recipient of the tranquil photograph of Hordley, was beaten to death.63 This act was one of the “outrages” that led, ultimately, to the death penalty being applied to over 130 “rioters” alleged to have been involved in Hire’s murder. According to the Lord Chief Justice’s later investigation of the Eyre case (contested at the time), the underlying tensions at Amity Hall concerned the issues of land and labor central to this chapter: Land belonging to one or two estates running up into the mountains had been thrown out of cultivation and . . . suffered to run to bush, and the quit-­rent due to the Crown had not been paid for a period of seven years. The negroes were told that if they paid these arrears of quit-­rent, they might cultivate and enjoy the land rent-­f ree, and brought the land into cultivation. Some short time before the outbreak, Mr Hire, the agent of the owner of the estate in question, asserted the right of the owner, who had not been a party to the representation made to the negroes, and sought on behalf of the owner to dispossess and eject the negroes, who, however, resisted and maintained possession by force. Thereupon legal proceedings were instituted against the blacks. . . . This is the motive assigned for the murder of Mr Hire.64

306

Tim Barringer

F i g . 9.1 4   After photograph by J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford, The Hordley Estate, Morant Bay, Jamaica, wood engraving, from The Illustrated London News (November 25, 1865). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Violence had begun earlier in the year, when Hire and a surveyor started charting land known as Rowland’s Field. They were confronted by an armed crowd of more than a hundred black laborers. As Gad Heuman notes, Hire recorded the poignant words of Henry Doyley: “What God Almighty make land for? You have plenty, we have none.” 65 The wages paid at Amity Hall were, moreover, notoriously low. In this context, the photograph of the adjacent Hordley estate likely given to Hire (see fig.  9.13) becomes a more complex document. We are looking from a raised vantage point, with rough land in the foreground akin to the area whose ownership was contested. The black peasants of Amity Hall, believing themselves to have secured the land legally, had nonetheless been attacked, both physically and in law. The tension between foreground and background, peasant and planter, had reached a point of crisis. As news of the rebellion broke in the British media, pictorial publications such as the Illustrated London News (iln) were desperate for imagery to add to their written accounts. On November 25, the paper published an engraving based on the photograph of Hordley (fig. 9.14), wrongly implying in the title that it was at or near Morant Bay (in fact, the two locations are twenty miles apart). The newspaper’s reports had been couched in the most dramatic terms: “The Baron [Ketelhodt]’s fingers,” it disclosed, “were cut off and carried away as trophies by the murderers.” “The whole outrage,” the iln concluded, “could

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

307

only be paralleled by the atrocities of the Indian Mutiny.” The report continued, chillingly, to record that “a large party of defenceless persons remained at the Hordley Estate in a situation of great peril . . . until the arrival of some troops.” 66 The engraver for the iln has dramatized the landscape, adding stormy clouds and heightening the chiaroscuro. Readers were surely encouraged to see in this image the perspective of the approaching rebels and to regard the plantation as vulnerable, its overseer an innocent martyr. The illustrations, the iln remarked, “will be regarded with painful interest in connection with this sad affair.” 67 Once again, conceptions of labor and laborers color perceptions of Jamaican landscape. From a paradisiacal image of the profitable operation of the free market, the photograph had been implicitly transformed into a gothic, Carlylean vision of imminent bloodshed at the hands of black Jamaicans. These concepts would play a central role in the extended debates surrounding the trial of Governor Eyre in the subsequent years.

Man and Machine The Jamaican sugar estates of the late eighteenth century were pioneering endeavors in mass production, utilizing the division of labor and shiftwork — ​­sometimes involving many hundreds, even thousands, of enslaved men and women — ​­to achieve the swift processing of sugarcane in season. Waterwheels and windmills provided motor power for the milling of cane from the colony’s earliest days, and the planters also eagerly embraced steam power. While labor was plentiful under slavery and the demands on the laborer’s body virtually unlimited, there was less need for more complex forms of mechanization, such as were being employed extensively in the British textile and engineering industries.68 By the Victorian era, the Jamaican estates were notorious for the backwardness and inadequacy of their tools and implements, leading to inefficiency. The Kingston lawyer William Wemyss Anderson, speaking in 1850, decried the Jamaican farmers’ “neglect to avail themselves of the improvements making in every department of agricultural industry,” the very improvements that had facilitated the prosperity of the United States.69 “In the sugar mills,” believed the American journalist John Bigelow at the same time, “twenty to thirty men and women will be employed to do what five American operatives would do much better in the same time, with the aid of such labor-­saving agencies as would suggest themselves to an intelligent mind.” 70 Anderson laid the blame for agricultural underproduction on “our neglected rural population.” This group (implicitly including both white planters and black laborers) was “willing to remain a century behind the rest of the world, wedded to [its] old customs and modes of working.” 71

308

Tim Barringer

F ig . 9 . 15   Thomas Harrison, Isometric Drawing of Ellis Caymanas Estate Works, St. Catherine, 1852. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, St. Catherine B.

Although machinery played only a limited role in the sugar industry, the Enlightenment had brought with it new scientific methods of image making, including machine drawings and accurate land surveying, which had a significant impact on the visual representation of Jamaica.72 If the picturesque landscape naturalized slavery and subsumed the brutality of plantation labor into an aesthetic of pleasure, maps and surveys generally laid bare the workings of estates with utilitarian frankness, though human labor was an implicit rather than explicit presence. Although earlier surveys sometimes bore elaborate cartouches or pictorial vignettes, by the nineteenth century precise scientific measurement was paramount. John M. Smith’s plan of the Ellis Caymanas estate works, dated 1846, provides a precise mapping of each structure, with a key explicating its function.73 Elements of the aesthetic crept back in Thomas Harrison’s fine isometric drawing of the same works, dated 1852, which provides a vivid sense of the appearance, as well as the layout and scale, of the working structures (fig. 9.15). Care is lavished on the buildings, which are of high value, while the agrarian landscape is merely hinted at. The men and women required to service the equipment and to plant and reap the harvest are altogether absent. Where slaves had been, in some sense, capital — ​­an integral part of the plant, whose housing and provision grounds would appear on plantation

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

309

F ig . 9.1 6   Interior of a Sugar Factory, from James Henry Stark, Stark’s Jamaica Guide (Illustrated) Containing a Description of Everything Relating to Jamaica of Which the Visitor or Resident May Desire Information, Including Its History, Inhabitants, Government, Resources, and Places of Interest to Travellers (1902). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

plans — ​­the new form of wage labor itself is invisible, flowing in and out of the estate as required but not integral to its structures. A few large estates invested heavily in machinery after 1866, aiming for economies of scale. In addition to steam power, the Albion estate, the largest producer of sugar in late Victorian Jamaica, employed the vacuum pan system of boiling that is still used today, and centrifugal drying.74 The operation of these highly capitalized methods required skilled mechanics as well as complex imported machinery. A photograph dating from circa 1894 that depicts the interior of the sugar factory at the Albion estate and was reproduced in Stark’s Illustrated Jamaica (fig. 9.16) reveals the apparently automated space of production. The choice of a central viewpoint emphasizes the regular recession of the panes of the skylight, and the sheen of the large boilers suggests cleanliness and efficiency. Although labor is evacuated from this image, the processes of sugar production remained reliant on both the physical graft of fieldworkers and the highly skilled and specialized labor inside the refinery. Yet in this unrealistic, but visually compelling, technological utopia, sugar harvests itself, and debates about labor are moot.

310

Tim Barringer

Indigeneity and Indentured Labor: Jamaica Transformed Many solutions were proposed to counter the perceived shortage of labor on Jamaica’s plantations throughout the Victorian period. Reaching back as far as 1807, when the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire ended the practice of replenishing the labor force with new arrivals of enslaved men and women from Africa, there was a major question about the source of future laborers. With increasing urgency after emancipation, planters looked to the importation to Jamaica of workers from overseas as a new source of plantation labor.75 Indenture schemes involved the government subsidizing the cost of transporting to Jamaica laborers who would sign an agreement to work on an estate for a fixed period. By far the largest group came from the British Empire in India and were known in Jamaica as “East Indians,” or by the colloquial and derogatory term “Coolies.” Between 1845 and 1921, more than thirty-­six thousand Indians were transported to Jamaica. Elsewhere in this volume, Anna Arabindan-Kesson examines the representation of East Indians in Jamaican photography, noting the paradox that they are characterized both as “native” and as “exotic,” as resident but also as transient. In addition to the Indians and a smaller group of Chinese workers, more than eleven thousand Africans — ​­the group favored by the planters — ​­also entered indentures, many from Sierra Leone.76 The numbers overall were quite modest, especially in the early Victorian era: Just 25,094 indentured workers entered Jamaica between 1834 and 1865.77 There were attempts to encourage Scottish and German farmworkers to migrate to Jamaica, with the explicit intention of demonstrating a European work ethic. Despite the founding of some small communities, little came of this initiative. Life for the indentured laborer often closely resembled that of the enslaved, with long work hours and the threat of corporal punishment for infraction. One problem with immigration as a solution to the plantation labor crisis was that, as Herman Merivale of the Colonial Office noted in 1847, once their indentures expired, immigrants of whatever origin would want to become settlers and, like the emancipated Jamaicans, would purchase their own smallholdings, abandoning and subsequently competing with, the plantations. Opposition to the program of indentured labor came from the Baptist community, which considered the importation of “uncivilized” non-­Christian laborers to be a threat to the “progress” achieved by the Afro-­Jamaican community toward civilization and respectability. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, Jamaica was in the throes of a transformation from a sugar economy to an economy supported by peasant farming and by the large-­scale growing of fruit, principally bananas, for the

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 311

311

2/27/18 10:10 AM

export market. The banana had replaced sugar as Jamaica’s principal export by 1890.78 A new industry was also dawning: tourism. As Krista Thompson has noted, there was a proliferation of illustrated guidebooks and ephemeral forms of reproduced images such as picture postcards. Thompson has demonstrated that as photographers diversified their practice beyond portraiture, the carte de visite, topographical “views,” and representations of labor and the life of the Jamaican village became a staple for the tourist market. Such images, Thompson notes, also participated in an orchestrated campaign to encourage investment in, and emigration to, Jamaica.79 Photography’s presentation of the laboring population shifted substantially from the picturesque roots of the genre after 1865. Rather than demonstrating the tranquil endeavors of a large workforce, distantly seen on the plantation, village scenes tended to focus on the social structures of village life, with sharply focused studies of individual black Jamaicans occupying the foreground. These images have a double genealogy in European visual culture: they recall the tradition of genre painting, from Thomas Gainsborough’s Cottage Door scenes to Dutch celebrations of the wholesomeness of village life; and yet they also carry the sharp focus and authoritarian gaze of the ethnographer.80 While the overseer’s panoptic gaze no longer defined Jamaican visuality, by the 1890s the means of image production had been taken over by the white ethnographer and the wealthy tourist photographer. It would be a generation or more before the majority of Jamaicans assumed the role of image producers in the era of affordable popular photography. John Cleary’s At Home (ca. 1895) is a record of living conditions — ​­the wattle structure of the huts, the elaborately thatched roofs, and the clothing of the villagers — ​­but it is also the deposit of a social relationship (fig. 9.17). The figures are posed, pinned against the wall, and there is a palpable tension between subjects and photographer. The composition emphasizes the uninhabited distance between the photographer and the laboring family — ​­a social, even a racial, gap that may have seemed insuperable to the Jamaicans of 1895 — ​­generating a sense of tension so menacing that the viewer appreciates the comic relief allowed by the image of a small dog asleep in the foreground. What can we read from the contact between Cleary’s lens and the extended family before us? The strong young woman to the left of the seated figures challenges the viewer, her arms akimbo, a package balanced on her head. The older figures perhaps appear skeptical. The question of labor arises: Why is the older man in the center seated and not at work? Are the younger men at work in the fields? Was the exhausted puppy allowed to remain as a satirical touch, implying the indolence and lassitude of the whole group? The image is deeply ambivalent, for late Victorian photography insists on naturalizing a

312

Tim Barringer

F ig . 9 . 17   John Cleary, At Home, circa 1895. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Fig. 9 .18  A. Duperly and Sons, Banana Carriers, circa 1895. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

314

scene like this into a bourgeois worldview: the title reassures us that this is “home,” the Victorian ideal of domesticity transported to Jamaica — ​­an ideal that was denied to enslaved Jamaicans of previous generations. In At Home the trauma of the Middle Passage and the plantation is simply ignored. Instead we see figures sometimes referred to as “the natives” in their natural habitat.81 This is a colonial fantasy of indigeneity, erasing the fundamental narrative of Jamaican history, yet still defining Jamaicans in terms of labor. Many late Victorian photographic images made for the tourist market celebrate the economic revival of Jamaica through the export of fruit. The Duperly firm’s Banana Carriers, circa 1895, offers an intriguing glimpse of the new economy (fig. 9.18). Five women, large bunches of thirty or forty bananas expertly balanced on their heads, are lined up before us, flanked by two male figures. A breadfruit tree, its shiny leaves and bulbous fruit moving in the breeze, occupies the upper third of the composition, suggesting the bounty of nature. However, a tall brick wall blocking the view reminds us that these figures may have carried

Tim Barringer

the fruits many miles, perhaps to the docks. Each of them engages the camera directly, inviting the viewer to move down the line, as if inspecting each individual, one by one. In contrast to earlier prints and photographs, we are now encouraged to engage with the laboring women as individuals: we can study the facial features, the clothing, the stance of each. The tall, powerful, older woman in the center turns toward us, right hand on hip. Perhaps she has been told to do so, to provide a pivot at the center of the symmetrical composition. Her expression appears to betray resentment at being posed in such a manner, made exotic for the tourist’s pleasure. As Krista Thompson notes, the tourist industry emphasized the imagery of natural fecundity and the island’s allegedly Edenic ability to produce food without labor.82 A postcard produced by Cleary and Elliott between around 1907 and 1914, Jamaica Peasantry, features a group of Afro-­Jamaican laborers eating fruits whose size and color, Thompson observes, have been artificially heightened during the production process (fig. 9.19). This is a striking repurposing of the very image that Carlyle had found so provoking — ​­“Quashee” and the pumpkin, the Afro-­Jamaican body at rest, enjoying natural bounty.83 Yet the critique articulated so vituperatively by Carlyle was notably long-­lived: lecture notes published by the United Fruit Company to accompany lantern slides of Jamaican scenery under the title The Golden Caribbean noted: “The freed Negro, ignorant and long accustomed to hardship and compulsory labor, would not work even for hire . . . yet the wonderful abundance of native fruits permitted him to exist with but little effort.” 84

F i g . 9.1 9   Cleary and Elliott, Jamaica Peasantry, postcard printed in color lithography, circa 1907–­1914. Collection of Krista Thompson.

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

315

Conclusion

Fig. 9 .2 0  J. W. C. Brennan, Constant Spring Hotel, circa 1900. Courtesy of the Caribbean Photo Archive.

316

One final estate view should be considered, an emblem of the ambivalent visuality of Jamaica after emancipation. The Constant Spring Hotel, north of Kingston, was portrayed by J. W. C. Brennan at the end of Victoria’s long reign, in about 1900 (fig. 9.20), in a composition strangely reminiscent of Joseph Bartholomew Kidd’s painting of Good Hope made at the moment of her accession (see fig. 9.1). The comparison yields significant results. In both works, a grandiose building speaking of wealth and privilege dominates the middle distance; around it, nature has been tamed by the hard labor of Afro-­Jamaicans, who have reaped little of the profit. The scene is framed by the natural magnificence and fecundity of Jamaica, with sublime mountains rising behind. For all the similarities, however, a very different Jamaica meets the eye in this photograph made around 1900 from that in the painting of 1836. Sugar cultivation no longer dominates the economy; the planter class is vastly reduced in political and economic importance. Brown and black Jamaicans play a significant role in the governance of the colony and in its elite cultural life. In the foreground there are signs of peasant cultivation, taking us back to the ambiguities of the photograph of the Hordley estate (see fig. 9.14).

Tim Barringer

The process of change begun with the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in 1838 was by no means complete by the time of Victoria’s death, in 1901. The palatial structure in the center of this image, the Constant Spring Hotel, is no plantation: rather, it represents a speculative venture on the part of an American capitalist; the green fields in the middle ground are a nine-­hole golf course. Tourism was vying with sugar as the island’s economic mainstay, but in the new Jamaica portrayed by the photographer, Brennan, the leisure class still controls the landscape and its representations. In The Constant Spring Hotel labor has, once again, been erased from the image, even as its results are obvious through the spotless presentation of the golf links and the pristine white of the building’s walls. Like Kidd, Brennan placed the most significant contemporary technology of representation in service of an economic elite, naturalizing a vista marked by social and political inequality. Jamaicans were employed as waiters, gardeners, cooks, and housemaids, but few could stay in the luxurious chambers of the hotel. Despite the momentous shifts and transformations of the Victorian decades, Jamaican visuality in 1900 remained profoundly inflected by the deeply embedded legacies of slavery.

Notes 1. Sir Lionel Smith, governor of Jamaica, to Charles Grant, Baron Glenelg, Colonial Secretary, December 30, 1836, quoted in Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 134. 2. Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 11. See also Swithin Wilmot, “Political Development in Jamaica in the Post-­Emancipation Period” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1977). 3. See Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labor in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 83–­132. 4. See Geoff Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–­1830, ed. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 106–­28; Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007), 41–­63; Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–­1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). The most sustained and significant discussion of the picturesque in Jamaica after emancipation is Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. 1–­91.

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

317

5. William Tharp, December 25, 1837, quoted in Patrick J. Tennison, Good Hope, Jamaica: A Short History (Kingston: Privately published, 1971), 5. 6. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 48. 7. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 25. 8. See the work of William Berryman in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz (326–­31) for a possible exception; see especially cat. 48, reproduced on 327. 9. Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–­1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 74. 10. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 125–­28. 11. For current usage, see Hal Foster, “Introduction,” Vision and Visuality (New York: New Press, 1999), ix. 12. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “On Visuality,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (April 2006): 53–­79. 13. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843; London: Robson, 1872), 168–­69. 14. The first use of this celebrated term was in [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40 (February 1849): 672. 15. See Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–­1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). 16. Carlyle, Past and Present, 168. 17. Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse,” 675. 18. Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse,” 672. 19. Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse,” 671. 20. Henry Taylor, Autobiography of Henry Taylor, 1800–­1875 (London: Longmans Green, 1885), I: 127–2­8. See also Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 46. 21. F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–­1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–­ 1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 22. Henry Taylor, “Colonial Office, January 1833. Memo. for the Cabinet,” 24–­28, co 884/​1, 75–7­6, quoted Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 46. 23. Jamaica Dispatch and New Courant, September 13, 1837. 24. For earlier series of picturesque views of Jamaica, see Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 276–­84, 343–­51. 25. The series of Tregear’s Black Jokes was published in London, ca.  1830–­1840 by Gabriel Shear Tregear based on drawings by W. Summers. See, for example, Othello, hand-­colored aquatint, London,:Victoria and Albert Museum, S.392-­2009.

318

Tim Barringer

26. Report on the Moral Condition of the City of Kingston, 1865, quoted in Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-­Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 95. 27. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co, 1838), 243–­44. See also B. W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth Centuries (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 107. 28. Vassall Holland to Thomas McNeil, April 1, 1838, quoted in Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 107. 29. Thomas McNeil to Lord Holland, October 16, 1838, quoted in Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 107. 30. Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 24; see also Sidney Mintz, “Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries,” Historical Reflections 6, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 213–­ 42; and Jean Besson, “Symbolic Aspects of Land Tenure in the Caribbean,” in Peasant, Plantations and Rural Communities in the Caribbean, ed. Malcolm Cross and A. Marks (Guildford, U.K.: University of Surrey, 1979), 86–­116. 31. Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse,” 533. 32. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 134. 33. Thomas McNeil to Lord Holland, February 15, 1839, quoted in Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 107. 34. Jean Besson, “Family Land and Caribbean Society: Toward an Ethnography of Afro-­Caribbean Peasantries,” in Perspectives on Caribbean Regional Identity, ed. Elizabeth M. Thomas-­Hope (Liverpool: Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, 1984), 57–­83, quote from 59. 35. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20. 36. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 268. 37. James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: John Snow, 1843), 151–­52. 38. Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse,” 536. Exeter Hall, on the Strand in London, opened in 1831 and was the venue for the meetings of the Anti-­Slavery Society in the early 1830s. 39. Phillippo, Jamaica, 93. 40. Phillippo, Jamaica, 158–­59. 41. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 171; see also Burton, Afro-­Creole, 92. 42. Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 115. 43. For a full account of Phillippo’s activities in Sligoville, see Edward Bean Underhill, Life of James Mursell Phillippo: Missionary in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1881), 180–­91. 44. Sligo and Phillippo met in 1835 and found many points of agreement: “I called upon Mr Phillippo, the principal Baptist Missionary in the Island with whom I had

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

319

been in communication before on the subject of Education, for his opinion in writing to send to your Lordship, specifying two points on which I have strong feelings myself and upon which his views perfectly agree with mine,” Lord Sligo, Spanish Town, Jamaica, to Lord Glenelg, Colonial Office, letter no. 167, October 25, 1835, MS228, 2:258–­59, National Library of Jamaica. 45. Missionary Herald, 1840, quoted in Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 116. 46. On the print series by George Robertson and James Hakewill, see Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 280–­84, 340–­50. 47. Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaica Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–­1970 (London and New York: W. H. Allen, 1970), 208. 48. Craton and Walvin, A Jamaica Plantation, 211. 49. On Hakewill, see Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 342–­50. 50. The earlier history of the Golden Grove estate is discussed in detail in B. W. Higman, Jamaica Plantation, 1750–­1850 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005), 166–­226. 51. For the watercolor, see Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 346, fig. vi. 52. Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 60. Eyre’s use of the term “Creole” here implies Afro-­ Jamaicans born on the island. 53. Jamaica Dispatch and New Courant 711 (October 23, 1834): 2. 54. The photograph is credited in the Illustrated London News to J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford. See David Boxer’s essay in the present volume for a discussion of Thompson, who dissolved the partnership with Tomford in Falmouth in 1865 and moved to Kingston. 55. David Boxer and Edward Lucie-­Smith, Jamaica in Black and White: Photography in Jamaica, c.1845–­c.1920: The David Boxer Collection (Oxford: Macmillan Educational, 2013), 68. Boxer believes that Hire was the sender of the image, but it seems more likely that he was the recipient, as the inscription reads “Augustus Hire Esq,” an honorific more likely to be used for a recipient than by a sender. 56. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 263–­65; see also Heuman, “The Killing Time,” 63–­77. 57. For detailed information on wages in this period, see Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 265. 58. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 272. 59. Jacob Tileston Brown, Emancipation in the West Indies: Two addresses by E.B. Underhill, Esq., and the Rev. J.T. Brown, the deputation from the Baptist Missionary Society to the West Indies, delivered at a public meeting, held at Willis’s rooms, 20th February, 1861 (London, 1861). Slavery and Anti-­Slavery. Gale. Accessed July 26, 2013, 12. 60. Enclosed with Eyre to Cardwell, March 2, 1865, quoted in Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 454n21. This was a particularly effective move as Oughton was himself a Baptist missionary, but one whose ideas were out of line with those of most of his peers. 61. Eyre to Cardwell, September 10, 1864, quoted in Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 273. 62. Minute from Sir Henry Taylor to Sir F. Rogers, June 30, 1865. It came to be

320

Tim Barringer

referred to as “the Queen’s Advice” and was circulated by Governor Eyre. Quoted in Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 278, and see also 455n34. 63. William Francis Finlason, The History of the Jamaica Case, being an account, founded upon official documents, of the Rebellion of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869). 64. The Lord Chef Justice [Sir Alexander Cockburn], quoted in Finlason, The History of the Jamaica Case, 463. 65. Hire to Myers, July 1865, quoted in Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time,” 23. 66. “The Negro Insurrection in Jamaica,” Illustrated London News, November 25, 1865, 518. Illustrated London News. Web. July 26, 2013. 67. “The Negro Insurrection in Jamaica.” Illustrated London News, November 25, 1865, 519. 68. Veront Satchell, Sugar, Slavery and Technological Change: Jamaica, 1760–­1830 (Saar­ brücken: vdm Verlag, 2010). 69. John Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850: Or, the Effects of Sixteen Yeats of Freedom on a Slave Colony (1851; Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 130. See also William Wemyss Anderson, Jamaica and the Americans (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1851). 70. Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850, 129. 71. Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850, 131. 72. Celina Fox, The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). 73. John M. Smith, Plan of Ellis Caymanas Estate Works, St Catherine, 1846. National Library of Jamaica. See Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 153. 74. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 141–­42. 75. See Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–­1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 76. Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 25. 77. Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 200. 78. On the banana industry, see Patrick Bryant, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 7. 79. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 47–­91. 80. See Ann Bermingham, Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and Photography, 1860–­1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). 81. See, for example, H. C. White and Company, “Native Jamaican Fisherman with Their Nets,” reproduced in Boxer, Jamaica in Black and White, 48. 82. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 81–­5. 83. Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse,” 529. 84. The Golden Caribbean (1903), 2, quoted in Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 75–­76.

L a n d , L a b o r, L a n d s c a p e

321

CHAP TER 10

The Duperly Family and Photography in Victorian Jamaica DAVID BOXER

Before the advent of photography, Jamaica — ​­its landscape primarily, its people having been largely reduced to staffage accents in that landscape — ​­was imaged by itinerant artists, most of whom were painters visiting from Europe.1 Most works to have survived from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were produced in engraving or aquatint, time-­honored methods of conveying a draftsman’s or painter’s rendition in multiple prints. George Robertson’s six widely circulated views of Jamaica, produced in about 1770, for instance, are based on oil paintings that were carried back to England and translated by other artists into engravings.2 In lithography, a relatively new technique of printmaking developed around 1800, an image was drawn with a crayon onto a porous limestone block and treated with a mixture of acid and gum arabic to produce a permanent surface from which prints could be made. It was introduced to Jamaica in the 1820s and would become the primary method for producing multiple images in Jamaica for the next three decades. All this was changed by the advent of photography. The first photographs, daguerreotypes, were unique objects, small enough to rest in the palm of the hand. The image lay under glass on a highly polished copper plate treated with a thin layer of photosensitive silver. The daguerreotype, whose invention was announced to the world in 1839, was small and difficult to see and could not be reproduced mechanically, yet it captured an image of unprecedented clarity direct from the motif. A further revolution was caused by the simultaneous development of an efficient chemistry that could produce relatively stable prints on paper. By the end of the nineteenth century, the imaging of Jamaica by photographic means had become commonplace and had virtually replaced all the old printmaking traditions.

Adolphe Duperly: From Lithograph to Photograph This radical change in picturing Jamaica, its land and its people, began when a moderately talented artist, a Frenchman who had chosen to live in Jamaica, marry, and make the island his home, embraced the new technologies of daguerreotypy and, later, print photography and allowed them to mold his vision. The Frenchman, Adolphe Duperly, had traveled to the Caribbean, to Haiti, to teach the latest print technology: lithography. Duperly, who was born in 1801, seems to have spent no more than a couple of years in the former French colony. By 1824 he had arrived in Jamaica and decided to settle in the English colony’s busiest port and town, Kingston. Ten years later he married Louise Desnoes, a young Haitian creole of eastern Caribbean origins. The Duperlys began to raise a family and four sons were born to them. Two of these sons, the eldest, Armand, born in 1834, and the youngest, Henri Louis, born in 1841, would join their father as the pioneering photographers of Jamaica.3 In 1834, Adolphe Duperly announced a grand scheme to produce a series of forty-­eight prints of Jamaican “views” and “occurrences.” A few individual prints were produced, the most important of which can be classified as occurrences, since they record events of the 1831–­1832 Christmas Rebellion, led by Sam Sharpe.4 The series was repeatedly delayed and then abandoned, but the concept was eventually revived a decade later with a new, modern twist: The images were to be photographically conceived. By 1841, Duperly had acquainted himself with the new invention of the daguerreotype and had been involved in the establishment of a daguerreotype studio in Kingston. In October 1841, advertisements were placed in the Jamaican press by Henry Gunter reading: D’Aguereotype or Photographic Portraits The Public are respectfully informed that likenesses after the above novel invention will be taken at 65 Corner of East and Tower Streets on all fine clear days, commencing Thursday the 30th Inst. between the hours of 9 and 2 O’clock. Specimens may be seen at the studio of Mr. A. Duperly, at the store of Mr. Shannon and at the D’Aguereotype Rooms. Applications may be made to Mr. Duperly or at the above address.5 Clearly some form of partnership existed between Gunter and Duperly. In all likelihood, Gunter was the businessman and owner of the daguerreotype cameras and equipment, while Duperly was the practitioner, producing the daguerreotype portraits. No examples of these early daguerreotypes by Duperly

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

323

F ig s . 1 0 .1 – 3  Adolphe Duperly, Henri Louis Duperly, 1846. Daguerreotype. Courtesy of Archivo Familia Duperly Angueira, Bogotá.

F ig . 10. 4   Adolphe Duperly, Cascade of Roaring River, circa 1844–­1847. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Wallace Campbell Collection.

are known today, and while there are a few examples of lithographed portraits based on daguerreotypes, only one true daguerreotype portrait by Adolphe Duperly has surfaced. It may represent the young Henri Duperly and was probably taken around 1848 (fig. 10.3). By about 1845, Duperly would be moving beyond the realm of portraiture and was utilizing his own daguerreotype views to produce what would become his magnum opus, the twenty-­five prints of his Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica. In this magnificent work, one of the earliest cycles of its kind to be produced in the New World, the old hand-­drawn techniques join forces with the new daguerreotype technology to represent Jamaica with newfound clarity and objectivity. The first twenty-­four prints were lithographed in Paris by a variety of different artists (see chapter 9 in this volume, by Tim Barringer), but the twenty-­fifth, an exceedingly rare view of the Roaring River Falls being observed by a lone spectator, was an entirely Jamaican production, printed in Jamaica with Duperly himself producing the lithographic print (fig. 10.4).6

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

325

Early Photographers in Kingston After the creation of the Daguerian Excursions, Adolphe Duperly continued to produce daguerreotypes and lithographs, the latter occasionally based on daguerreotypes. By the end of the 1850s, with his abandonment of the daguerreotype and his full embrace of the wet-­collodion process for the production of albumen prints, he could be described as a full-­fledged photographer. It was around 1860 that he established the firm of A. Duperly and Sons with Armand and Henri. Armand had been working with him, both in daguerreotypy and lithography, since about 1853. In the early 1860s the firm operated from an address on Harbour Street, Kingston. Adolph Duperly was not the only photographer in Kingston. Itinerant American daguerreotypists would occasionally open temporary studios as they made their way through the major ports of the Caribbean and Central and South America. By 1857 a photographer whose identity remains unknown, using the wet-­collodion process to produce paper prints, began to direct his camera at newsworthy events. On June 20, 1857, the Illustrated London News published an article entitled “The Captured Slaver” with five engravings and a lengthy letter giving the circumstances under which the images were made (figs. 10.5, 10.6, 10.7). Four of the images are of Africans, “rescued” by the British authorities in Jamaica from a captured “slaver” on its way to Cuba that had been taken to Kingston’s Fort Augusta. The fifth image is of the vessel itself. The letter, signed with the initials J.S., makes it clear that the photographs are the author’s own: “The captured slaves on their arrival in the Harbour of Kingston were landed in Fort Augusta and every attention paid to their comfort; but several were so completely exhausted during the fearful middle Passage that they have since died. Many sympathizing persons visited the survivors frequently that they might be themselves eyewitnesses of a veritable cargo of human slaves (a sight quite new to many here) just landed in all their degradation and misery. J.S. in letter dated May 11 1857.” 7 These images constitute a remarkable piece of early photojournalism and can now be comfortably attributed to a John Savage, who at the time was an inspector of schools in Kingston. Savage appears to have consistently used his photography for didactic purposes. He was the author of two groups of photographs that were displayed in the Fine Arts section of Jamaica’s exhibition at the International Exhibition of 1862, staged in South Kensington, London. One group cataloged is a collection of thirty-­two species of Jamaican fish.8 The second group was a series of landscape stereoscopic views (twin photographs

326

David Boxer

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 326

2/27/18 10:11 AM

F i g . 1 0 .5   After photograph by John Savage, Slaves Packed Below and on Deck, wood engraving, from the Illustrated London News (June 20, 1857). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

F ig . 10. 6   After photograph by John Savage, Sleeping

F i g . 1 0 .7   After photograph by John Savage, Slaves

Position of Slaves in the Pack, wood engraving, from the

at Fort Augusta, wood engraving, from the Illustrated

Illustrated London News (June 20, 1857). Courtesy of the

London News (June 20, 1857). Courtesy of the Yale

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

taken from slightly different angles that, when viewed through a simple apparatus, produced a dramatic illusion of three-­dimensionality). Savage included detailed descriptions of all the botanical specimens in each view.

Cartemania Although from about 1860 the Duperly firm was building an impressive inventory of full-­plate topographical views of Jamaica, its mainstay during the 1860s was portrait photography. By 1860, no portrait studio could ignore a craze that was sweeping the world: the carte de visite. The Duperlys quickly adapted to the new technologies that could produce these little calling-­card-size pictures. The phenomenon of the rise and immense popularity of the carte de visite, discussed by Gillian Forrester in this volume, began when the French photographer André-­Adolphe-­Eugène Disdéri patented a camera with four lenses that allowed the photographer (in two stages) to take eight exposures on a single plate during one sitting. These sheets were then cut up into eight small photographs (approximately 2 ¼ inches by 3 ½ inches), and each was affixed to a precut manufactured card, the size of a calling card, usually with the photographer’s imprint on the back. The carte de visite brought the price of a photograph within reach of all but the poor. In addition to having his or her own carte de visite made, the Victorian consumer could purchase cartes of famous sitters. In the major cosmopolitan centers, photographers published series of every conceivable photographable subject and of celebrities such as opera stars, artists, writers, composers, scientists, and politicians. Albums became standardized and were familiar in Victorian households, even those of modest means. Queen Victoria is reputed to have possessed by 1860 more than one hundred albums of cartes. All over the world people began collecting images from other parts of the world. The natural curiosity about not only celebrities but also how other people, ordinary people, and people of other races and cultures looked and dressed was satisfied by an endless stream of images from photographers in virtually every part of the globe. Adolphe Duperly’s studio appears to have started producing Jamaican “types,” or character studies, as cartes in the early 1860s, and landscape cartes were also manufactured, but their relative rarity today suggests there was little local demand for them. Most found their way into albums compiled by visitors. Most of the cartes that the studio produced were of everyday people (fig. 10.8). The early 1860s saw several new studios established in Kingston, marking a challenge to the Duperlys’ primacy in the photographic market. The fierce competition, reflected in the energetic advertising campaigns of the day, forced

328

David Boxer

F ig . 10.8   Adolphe Duperly, carte de visite of an unknown man, circa 1860. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

F ig . 1 0 .9   F. A. Freeman, Jamaican Woman, Kingston. Courtesy of the Caribbean Photo Archive.

a more varied approach to carte-­de-­ visite production and a variety of styles. By about 1870 the popular format of a large head and shoulders isolated in an oval was introduced.

Duperly Brothers Adolphe Duperly died on February 14, 1864, and was buried in the Roman Catholic Holy Trinity Church, then located at the corner of Duke and Sutton Streets. He was intestate, so the two sons who had been in business with him, Armand and Henri Louis, petitioned Governor Eyre and received a letter of administration, dated March 15, 1864, allowing them to administer the goods and affairs of their father. The brothers seemed ideally matched. They specialized in what was termed in an advertisement the “respective branches of their art.” 9 Henri appears to have been largely responsible for portraiture, while Armand’s interest was in landscape photography. From about 1860, the firm had begun to build up an inventory of full-­plate views of Jamaica to supplement its portrait photography. After Adolphe’s death, this aspect of its work greatly developed. By early May 1864, the first advertisements informing the public of the change of the firm’s name from A. Duperly and Sons to Duperly Brothers appeared, and by August the two brothers had announced their move to 3 Church Street, which they rented from the American photographer George W. Davis. Davis was known primarily for his cartes, although it is recorded that he did produce stereoscopic views in Jamaica. He had apparently operated his studio in Kingston for a short time before returning to the United States, but he would reclaim the Church Street studio in 1868 and continue operating in the island until the early 1870s. A significant competitor of the Duperly business in the early 1860s was F. A. Freeman, who created sober and respectable portraits for a clientele of middle-­

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

F i g . 1 0 .1 0   John Jabez Edwin Mayall, carte de visite of Queen Victoria, 1861. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

331

Fi g . 1 0 .1 1   Freeman Studio, Frederic Edwin Church, 1865. Tintype (oval format) taken in Kingston, Jamaica. Courtesy of the Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, ol.1992.7.1.

F i g . 1 0 .1 2   Freeman Studio, Isabel Carnes Church, 1865. Tintype (oval format) taken in Kingston, Jamaica. Courtesy of the Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, ol.1992.10.1.

class Jamaicans. He portrayed a young brown Jamaican woman, clad in the heavy dark clothing and half-­dome crinoline made fashionable by Queen Victoria, her left index finger mysteriously extended (fig. 10.9). This photograph may indeed be a response to the famous carte of the queen, made in March 1861, before her bereavement, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall and widely distributed (fig. 10.10). Among the early patrons of Freeman’s Kingston studio to have tintype images made were the visiting artist Frederic Church and his wife, Isabel, who were in Jamaica from early May to early September 1865. The tintypes Freeman produced are in the collection at Olana, Church’s home near Hudson, New York (figs. 10.11 and 10.12). Church appears to have had more than a passing interest in photography. In Jamaica not only did he commission portraits of his wife and himself, but he also acquired from Jamaican photographers several landscape views that served him as aide-­mémoires for his own works.10 On April 19, 1865, the Duperlys produced an advertisement for an improved gallery that was repeatedly published over the next months in the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch. It announced the return of Armand from New York, where, at great expense, he had acquired all the latest photographic novelties. These included equipment for producing the new Gems (small tintypes), which Freeman, a major competitor, had introduced some months before. The Duperlys also announced a cut in their prices to match their competitors and claimed to be selling cases and frames at cost. The boldest move, perhaps, was to appeal to their customers’ “patriotic consideration.” The Duperlys proclaimed themselves to be “native artists,” which they deemed “a superior claim to all others who are true birds of passage,” thereby asserting the unique authenticity of the long-­established Jamaican concern.11

Kingston Photographers of the 1860s Competition remained high in Kingston throughout the 1860s. In addition to Freeman and George W. Davis, J. S. Thompson, who had hitherto operated from Falmouth on the North Coast, was attracted to the city. Another little-­ known North Coast photographer, from Lucea, at the northwestern tip of the island, was P. Sarthou, who had also operated a studio in Haiti. He appears to have specialized in stereographs and also settled in Kingston, in mid-­1865. Also prominent were Russell Brothers and Moncrieff, which also operated a studio in Toronto. The firm established a studio on Harbour Street in December 1865 and sometimes operated under the name the Cosmopolitan Galleries. The first mention of J. S. Thompson is found in the text accompanying an image published in the extensive coverage of the Morant Bay rebellion in the

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

333

F ig . 1 0 .1 3   J. S. Thompson, Schoolgirls, circa 1865. Albumen print. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

F i g . 1 0 .1 4   H. S. Duperly, from an A. Duperly and Sons negative, Country Negroes, circa 1905. Silver gelatin print. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Illustrated London News, late in 1865. The image is an engraving of a landscape showing Hordley estate and was based on a photograph identified as being by the Falmouth firm of Tomford and Thompson (see chapter 9, figures 9.13 and 9.14). Through advertisements in the Kingston papers, we gather that J. S. Thompson was an avid amateur actor and a regular performer in the Kingston Theatre. It was perhaps to be nearer the theater that by 1866 he had dissolved his partnership with J. Tomford and relocated to Kingston. There he set up his own photography studio, known as J. S. Thompson’s Army and Navy Gallery, located at 26 Harbour Street. He took an early interest in character studies and landscapes. His group of four black schoolgirls (fig.  10.13) is a worthy counterpoise to the Duperlys’ far less natural grouping of four young urchins (fig. 10.14). One of his earliest landscape cartes de visite is of Market Street in Falmouth and utilizes a viewpoint that mimics Adolphe Duperly’s plate of Market Street in the Daguerian Excursions (figs. 10.15 and 10.16). In the carte image, two men greet another in the street in front of the Market Street Hotel. Adopting an upright format, Thompson captures the same vista as Duperly but

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

335

pulls back to show something of his ex-­partner’s practice. To the extreme right and partially cropped by the right edge of the carte image is the sign advertising Tomford’s photography studio. It reads: tomfor[ds] photograph[er] cartes views ambrotypes Clearly this photograph had a self-­referential quality, and it is possible that the photographer and his former partner Tomford are among the three middle-­ class male figures standing nonchalantly in the middle of the street.

336

David Boxer

Fi g . 1 0 .1 5   After Adolphe Duperly, Market Street, Falmouth, lithograph, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). © The British Library Board.

F ig . 10. 16   J. S. Thompson, Market Street Falmouth. Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

F ig . 10. 17   T. Sulman, after photographs by Armand Duperly, Ruins of the Fire at Kingston, Jamaica, wood engraving, from the Illustrated London News (January 20, 1883). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Thompson seems to have had a particular interest in the documentation of what Adolphe Duperly had called “occurrences.” A notice in the Gleaner and D’Cordova’s Advertising Sheet in April 1866 records that he had for sale a suite of four images connected with the burning of The European, a vessel moored in Kingston Harbour. Years later it was reported that he was busy photographing the burnt areas of Kingston destroyed in the fire of 1882. In that instance twelve of Armand Duperly’s images of the fire’s damage were chosen for publication in engraved form in the Illustrated London News (fig. 10.17).12 Thompson’s photograph of the damage to the wharves of Kingston after the hurricane of 1880 was engraved and published in the American Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly.13

The Events of 1865 Although no photographer was present at the scene of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, photography was nonetheless significant, as cartes of some of the principal protagonists were produced, largely for Jamaican consumption. The Duperly firm was in an advantageous position, as George William Gordon, who was hanged for his perceived role as a leader of the rebellion, had sat for the firm sometime in the early 1860s. The firm therefore possessed negatives and could produce new cartes of Gordon. The Duperlys’ advertisement published within a few weeks of Gordon’s execution states the availability of “Portraits of the late victims who fell at the Rebellion in St. Thomas ye East. Also portraits of the Baron, Price, Walton, Hire, Hitchens, and other victims of the Rebellion in St. Thomas ye East — ​­also the Arch-­traitor G. W. Gordon.” 14 Modern readers will flinch at the description of Jamaica’s national hero George William Gordon as “the arch-­traitor,” yet this certainly was the view among the establishment and among people of the Duperlys’ class at the time of Gordon’s execution. Subsequent events, including Governor Eyre’s trial, would begin to change that opinion. Today we can only be grateful that the Duperlys’ commercialization of the image of a “traitor” allowed the survival of Gordon’s photographic representation and facilitated the birth of a true national pictorial icon. In March 1866 Duperly Brothers submitted an intriguing advertisement to the Gleaner and to the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch: rebellion. Cartes de visite from life of the two murderers of Messrs Walton and Hire, Robt. Nichols and Alex Taylor. Taken at the Jail Yard. Also views of the Morant Bay rebels For Sale by permission of the authorities. Copyright secured at Duperly Bros. N0.3 Church St. Corner of Water Lane. Cartes de visite reduced to 8s. And 4s. Per dozen.

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

339

I suspect that in this instance the “views of the Morant Bay rebels” refers to photographs of drawings made of the trials and hangings in Morant Bay. Original photographs of three such drawings have recently surfaced in an album now owned by Princeton University and can safely be attributed to the Duperlys. The drawings themselves were done by T. J. Mills, quartermaster of the Aboukir, the navy flagship, and are now lost (fig. 10.18). The Duperlys were clearly responsible for many of the portraits in the Prince­ ton album — ​­notably those of George William Gordon, Maximilian Augustus, Baron von Ketelhodt, and Charles Price as well as two images of “maroons in their war costume,” which appear to have been taken at the Duperlys’ studio at 3 Church Street (fig. 10.19). The album also includes a group of four Duperly carte-­de-­visite character studies of peasant types also taken at that studio, which include an old man seated on a chair, a younger man standing with a basket on his head, a young girl, and a group of four young lads (fig. 10.20). The Princeton “views” include an image of a magnificent cotton tree, with an inscription that states, “The Cotton Tree at the cross Roads near Morant Bay

F ig . 1 0 .1 8   A. Duperly and Sons, photograph of a drawing by T. J. Mills, Execution of Rebels at the Ruins of the Court House, Morant Bay, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

340

David Boxer

F ig . 10. 19   Duperly Bros., Maroons with Col. Fyfe in their “War Costumes,” from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

F ig . 10. 2 0   Duperly Bros., Natives of Jamaica, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

F ig . 10. 2 1   The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads near Morant Bay where the Rebels Assembled immediately before the attack on the Court House, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

where the rebels assembled immediately before the attack on the Court House” (fig. 10.21). The Princeton album views of Morant Bay were probably produced by Russell Bros. and Moncrieff (fig. 10.22). The editorial section of the Gleaner and De Cordova’s Advertising Sheet of March 31, 1866, records, Scenes in St Thos Ye East. We had the other day the opportunity of inspecting a series of pictures taken at Morant Bay and its neighbourhood by Messrs Russell and Moncreiffe [sic] who have just established and opened a photographic gallery in Harbour Street. There are two classes of pictures — ​­one for the “picture frame” another

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

343

F ig . 1 0 .2 2   Attributed to Russell Bros. and Moncreiff, Views of Morant Bay, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

for the “stereoscope.” The views of the ruined courthouse, the Rectory, the Barracks and the market square, the half built church, and the road by which the rebels entered the square on the 11th October are all perfect magnificent pictures. Enterprises of this kind are deserving of encouragement while the admired description of Art exhibited in these pictures and this exquisite effectiveness, speak volumes for the photographic skill of Messrs Russell and Moncrieffe [sic]. We believe there is a large demand for them.15 These poignant images combine Adolphe Duperly’s two categories: “views” and “occurrences.” They record landscapes of association that must have reminded contemporaries vividly of the events of 1865.

“A Very Pretty Adornment to the Drawing Room”: Armand Duperly’s Views of Jamaica

The Duperlys, as we have seen, produced scenic cartes-­de-­visite; they also placed advertisements for stereographs. They clearly concentrated, however, on large format “views,” which became the specialty of the firm and seem to have been the domain of Armand Duperly, the elder brother. In 1865 they advertised a stock of more than nine hundred views of Jamaica and Haiti.16 Given the date of the advertisement we can conjecture that a fair number of the available prints had been produced by the original A. Duperly and Sons firm during the last years of Adolphe Duperly’s life. These prints were offered in gilt frames at eight shillings each, and it was suggested that they would be “very pretty adornments to the drawing room.” 17 Samples were put on display in the offices of the Colonial Standard and at the store of Messrs M. Decordova, McDougal and Co. The photographs mentioned in this advertisement from 1865 would have been albumen prints. Its text hints at the fate of the vast majority of the prints produced in the 1860s. If they were framed and hung as “adornments,” then they would have literally vanished. Albumen prints, especially the early prints of the 1860s and 1870s, were extremely light-sensitive and would have faded away after extended exposure to light. Only those prints that were stored away, usually in albums, and especially those in milder climates like those of England, the northern United States, and Canada have survived. In terms of style and content, form, and subject matter, photographs are on a continuum with earlier traditions of the printed image. Panoramic views of harbors and of towns were approached similarly by printmaker and photographer: the Duperlys’ penchant for elevated street scenes of Kingston, where the roof-

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 345

345

2/27/18 10:11 AM

tops provide the principal motivic keynotes, cannot be viewed without recalling the most striking prints in Joseph Bartholomew Kidd’s four views from the commercial rooms, produced as large hand-­colored lithographs between 1838 and 1840.18 Nor can the Duperlys’ outdoor environmental portraits be seen without the viewer recalling certain images from the very cycle of lithographs that their father had collaborated on with Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character. Although Belisario did not represent a market vendor, we do find a milkmaid whose frontal centralized pose is the prototype of many a Duperly image (figs. 10.23, 10.24). In fact the persistent formal frontality of the majority of Belisario’s prints from Sketches of Character is carried over into the Duperlys’ approach to the environmental portrait right up to the end of the century. Only in later prints from the turn of the century do we start to see a more varied, more asymmetrical, in fact a more truly photographic, compositional approach.

F i g . 1 0 .2 3   Isaac Mendes Belisario, Milkwoman, lithograph with watercolor, from Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (1837). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Folio A 2011 24.

346

David Boxer

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 346

2/27/18 10:11 AM

F ig . 10. 2 4   A. Duperly and Sons, Country Negroes, circa 1890. Albumen print. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Fig. 1 0. 2 5   J. S. Thompson, reprint of a negative made by Henri Duperly, 1870s. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection. The original photograph was probably taken in the studio at 3 Church Street in the 1860s.

F i g . 1 0 .2 6   J. S. Thompson, reprint of a photograph taken by Henri Duperly in the Harbour Street studio circa 1864 or at the Church Street studio using studio furnishings from the Harbour Street Studio, 1870s. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection. This balustrade was a favorite prop in Adolphe Duperly’s Harbour Street studio.

The absence of certain key genres — ​­such as the study of nudes typical of European and especially French photographic practice — ​­may be explained by the absence of a precedent in the print traditions of the Anglophone Caribbean.

The Dissolution of Duperly Brothers The recent discovery of a group of some nine character studies, most of which were clearly taken in the Duperly studio at 3 Church Street, poses a conundrum, for they bear the backstamp of J. S. Thompson (figs. 10.25 and 10.26). These images were almost certainly printed by Thompson from Duperly Brothers’ negatives of the previous decade. Armand and Henri Duperly’s partnership ceased to exist, probably in late 1869, and it seems that Thompson acquired a part of their stock of negatives. We do not know the reason for the split, but after an initial tussle for the name “Duperly Brothers,” Henri by 1871 had his own backstamp of “H.” or, later, “H. L. Duperly.” After the death of his first wife, Eulalia, with whom he had three children, in 1871, Henri became an itinerant photographer, moving around Jamaica and even traveling abroad, including trips to Haiti and Colombia.19 There seems to have been an initial trip to Colombia, probably in the mid-­to late 1870s in the company of J. Tomford of Falmouth, the former partner of J. S. Thompson. They established a studio, Duperly and Tomford, in Cartagena, Colombia. Henri Duperly eventually returned to Jamaica and continued to practice portrait photography based in Falmouth, where he married his second wife, Nellie de Vries, who bore him a further three children. By 1891 Henri had left Jamaica with Nellie and all six of his children and settled permanently in Colombia, where he established, with his eldest son, Ernest, the firm of Duperly and Son. After the dissolution of the partnership with Henri, Armand continued the firm first under the name Duperly Brothers, then under his own name, Armand Duperly (fig. 10.27), and then finally as A. Duperly and Sons; by the late 1880s he had two sons of his own who had probably already joined the firm. With the departure of Henri from Duperly Brothers in 1869, the firm clearly lost ground as a portrait studio not only to Henri’s independent business but also, in succession, to competing studios established by the Cuban exiles Ernesto and Octavo Bavastro, who dominated the portrait trade from around 1875 to 1887, to J. B. Valdes, another Cuban exile, and to John Cleary, Rowland J. McPherson, and J. W. C. Brennan in the 1890s and into the twentieth century. A. Duperly and Sons, however, continued to consolidate its position as the primary producer of views, the range of which was clearly the most extensive in Jamaica. In the late 1880s and early 1890s other view photographers began to chal-

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

349

Fig. 1 0. 2 7 ​ Armand Duperly, By the Rio Cobre, circa 1875. Albumen print. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

350

lenge the Duperly firm’s dominance. In 1887 the gifted American naturalist and photographer V. P. Parkhurst began publishing his views of Jamaica as gravures under the collective title Picturesque Jamaica. But the most significant challenge came from an extensive series of more than one hundred images produced by two photographers of the firm of James Valentine and Son of Aberdeen, Scotland, one of the largest publishers of views in Europe. Valentine’s views of Jamaica became very popular in the 1890s. The photographers came to Jamaica at the invitation of the governor to prepare a series of photographs for exhibition at the World’s Columbian Exposition, held at Chicago in 1893. They produced the expected images of picturesque landscapes and a series of views of market streets in Kingston. More unusual, however, is a group of exquisitely executed portraits of the servants of the Cherry Garden Great House. One image, of a servant boy relaxing on the edge of the ornamental pool at the front of the great house (fig. 10.28), became especially popular after a subtly colorized version was chosen for the cover of an early tourist publication (fig. 10.29).20

David Boxer

F i g . 10. 2 8   J Valentine and Sons, Negro Boy, Jamaica, 1891. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

F ig . 10. 2 9   J Valentine and Sons, Negro Boy, Jamaica, 1901. Colorized photograph. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

F i g . 1 0 .30   Dr. James Johnstone, Jamaica, one-penny stamp featuring Llandovery Falls. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Also significant was the series produced by John Cleary, who was as adept with views as he was with portraits. 21 Dr. James Johnstone, an early promoter of Jamaica as a health resort and an avid student of photography, photographed many of the subjects covered by the Duperlys. An album of his photographs was presented as the official Jamaican gift to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, in 1897. His image The Llandovery Waterfall was selected to grace Jamaica’s first pictorial stamp, issued in 1900 (fig. 10.30).22

Environmental Portraits The market-­vendor image, familiar already in the corpus of types and character studies, seems to have been the first to enter the corpus of photographic environmental portraits. At first these portraits were studio images with painted landscape backdrops, usually representing romanticized European-­type vistas. Sometimes the vendors are accompanied by the ubiquitous beast of burden, the donkey, which has been dragged into the studio. The artifice of such studio images was superseded by the development of true environmental images taken in situ. Most are portraits, usually group portraits, of working-­class Jamaicans, taken outdoors in natural settings that establish something of the context of their labor. Work is effectively glorified while individuality is downplayed. In the Duperlys’ inventory of environmental portraits, the major agricultural and related industries are well represented. Thus a series of sugarcane cutters and cleaners was produced, as were depictions of banana carriers, wood vendors with their mule carts, women sorting cacao pods, and sellers of jackass rope tobacco. Market vendors, in situ on the sidewalks, in the markets, or on the way to market with laden donkeys, were especially popular, as were images such as the family at rest, posed in front of a thatched cottage. Another picturesque image recorded by most of the view photographers is that of groups of women washing clothes by the river, a Jamaicanization of the laundress images common in French Romantic painting and introduced to Caribbean art by Agostino Brunias, who visited Dominica in the 1770s, and by the Trinidadian painter Michel-­Jean Cazabon. The Duperlys and Cleary would update this image with urban variants wherein the laundress uses a washtub. There are few

352

David Boxer

photographs of black Jamaicans at play or at worship, though there are occasional images of indentured East Indian laborers at a Hosay festival, discussed by Anna Arabindan-­Kesson in this volume (see chapter 12).

Occurrences A final category of photograph needs to be mentioned, and that is the type of photograph that grew out of the “occurrence” lithographs proposed by Adolphe Duperly in the 1830s. These documentary photographs record special events. After the Morant Bay rebellion, photographers continued to record notable events, such as the fire of 1882 that destroyed a fair part of Kingston. We know that the Duperlys photographed the damage extensively: as we have seen, a series of photographs submitted to the Illustrated London News along with an account of the fire were published in the journal as engravings in a full-­page montage (see fig. 10.17). J. S. Thompson, who lost his establishment in the fire, also recorded views of the burned-­out districts. Other events continued to be captured by the Duperlys. Certainly, the photograph of the arrival of Prince George, son of the Prince of Wales, at Victoria Pier for the opening of the 1891 Jamaica Exhibition falls into this category (fig. 10.31). So too do the numerous photographs showing the destruction of the city after the 1907 earthquake.23

F i g . 1 0 .31 ​ A. Duperly and Sons, Arrival of Prince George at Victoria Pier for the Opening of the 1891 Exhibition, 1891. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

Tourism and the Demise of the Photographic Print The 1890s seem to have been a golden age for the sale of photographic prints of Jamaican scenery and characters. The inventory of the Duperlys’ and other photographers’ views and environmental portraits greatly increased after 1890, and many may have been specifically tied to the staging of the Jamaica Exhibition, in 1891. The rapid development of the tourist industry in the 1890s further accelerated the production of such images. Thus, a large number of new images depicted Port Antonio, the center of the industry, and its environs. Images of the most visited sites island-­wide were updated or added to the inventory, though the iconography in many cases dated back to the 1820s. Key sites included the Cane River Falls, already imaged by the itinerant British landscape artists James Hakewill and Joseph Bartholomew Kidd; the Roaring River Falls with its famous Emerald Pool; the encampment at Newcastle; Castleton Gardens; Spanish Town, especially the Rodney Memorial and the nearby canals; and perhaps the most photographed site of all, the Rio Cobre Gorge and Flat Bridge crossing the Rio Cobre. By the 1890s, Armand’s sons Armand Jr. and Theophile had become very active members of the firm, possibly along with another Duperly, Henry Sylvester Duperly, whose relationship to Armand has not been determined. Armand Jr. died while on a trip to the United States in 1903, at which time his father, who died in 1909, turned over control of the firm to his younger son Theophile. If a member of the firm, it would probably have been around this time that Henry Sylvester left to establish his own firm of H. S. Duperly. It is clear from the surviving prints produced and published by Henry Sylvester that he owned a considerable number of A. Duperly and Sons negatives. After 1905, H. S. Duperly became very active in the vibrant picture-­postcard industry that from around 1900 to 1914 was the basis of a collector’s craze comparable to that of the cartemania of the 1860s. It is significant that many of the most popular of H. S. Duperly’s postcards are recycled photographs made by A. Duperly and Sons. The views created by A. Duperly and Sons first for local consumption served the burgeoning tourist industry in the last decades of the nineteenth and first years of the twentieth centuries. Duperly views created for sale as original prints were reproduced in halftone after the mid-­1890s in the many tourist guides that were published. By 1905 the first of several editions of the firm’s popular picture book Picturesque Jamaica was published. After a modest initial edition, the several later editions were modeled after the earlier publication of 1903 by James Johnstone, Jamaica: The New Riviera, and shared honors with Johnstone’s book

354

David Boxer

well into the 1920s as the most substantial publication of Jamaican views. After 1900, another financially lucrative outlet for Duperly images opened with the success of picture postcards reproducing “translations” of Duperly photographs (often introducing artificial color to the black-and-white images). The scarcity of Duperly views after 1907 suggests that the firm’s inventories and negatives were destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake. These publications, postcards and view books alike, would popularize many of the Duperly images but would also sound the death knell for the sale and collection of original prints. A view book with scores of full-­scale halftone reproductions cost the equivalent of perhaps two or three original prints, which ended the forty-­year practice of producing prints for collectors and for the albums that travelers compiled. Added to this was the practice among the big cruise ships of having an “official” photographer onboard, who sold small prints of the various destinations in addition to producing photographs of the shipboard and land activities of these early tourists. Another factor that contributed greatly to the demise of the photographic view trade was the spread in the early twentieth century of amateur photography. Increased ease of camera operation, especially after the introduction of the “Kodak” and the ready availability of processing outlets, such as C. N. Whitney’s Jamaica Camera Exchange in Kingston, allowed the average tourist to produce his or her own, personalized, “views.” The age of the photographic print as purchased object was at an end and with it one of the most distinguished moments in the history of Jamaican art.

Notes 1. This essay is based on the introductory text “The Duperlys and Their Contemporaries” written in 2010 and published in David Boxer and Edward Lucie-­Smith, Jamaica in Black and White: Photography in Jamaica c. 1845–­c. 1920: The David Boxer Collection (London: Macmillan, 2013). 2. See Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 280–­82. 3. For a full account, see David Boxer, Duperly: An Exhibition of Works by Adolphe Duperly, His Sons and Grandsons Mounted in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of His Birth (Kingston: National Library of Jamaica, 2001). 4. See Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 351–­57. 5. Royal Gazette and Jamaica Standard, September 28, 1841. 6. Only one copy of this print is known to exist. It is numbered “25” and the inscription makes it clear that the image was taken by Duperly and printed in Jamaica by

Photography in Victorian Jamaica

355

Duperly himself. The rarity of the print suggests that it was a proof for an intended fascicle of the Daguerian Excursions and that an edition was never produced. 7. Illustrated London News, June 20, 1857. 8. The exhibition prints were produced in London by the famed firm of Maull and Polyblank from Savage’s plates. 9. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, February 24, 1865. 10. Elizabeth Kornhauser and Katherine Manthorne, eds., Fern Hunting among These Picturesque Mountains: Frederic Church in Jamaica (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 53. 11. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, April 19, 1865. 12. Illustrated London News, January 20, 1883. 13. “Harbor of Kingston after a Terrible Cyclone,”  Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly,  December 1886, 747–­48. The engraving was originally published on September 25, 1880, in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 53, where it accompanied the article “The Cyclone in Jamaica” (55). In 1880, the caption was “Jamaica. — ​­The Cyclone of July 18th — ​­Appearance of the Wharves at Kingston the Day after the Storm. — ​­From a Photo, by J. S. Thompson.” The cyclone actually struck on August 18, 1880. The engraving of Thompson’s photograph was reused in 1886, when it illustrated a general article about Jamaica: Florine Malcolm, “A Winter in Jamaica,” in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, December 1886, 744–­48. 14. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, November 18, 1865. 15. Gleaner and De Cordova’s Advertising Sheet, March 31, 1866. 16. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, October 6, 1865. 17. Colonial Standard and Jamaica Dispatch, October 6, 1865. 18. Plates 17–­20 of Joseph B. Kidd, West Indian Scenery, Illustrations of Jamaica, in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns, Public Buildings, Estates and the Most Picturesque Scenery of the Island, 1837–­1840 (New Haven, Conn: Yale Center for British Art). 19. His backstamps never give a precise address, but in addition to Jamaican imprints there is a Colombian backstamp. 20. Thomas Rhodes, Jamaica and the Imperial Direct West India Mail Service (London: G. Philip & Son, 1901). 21. Cleary in the late 1870s and into 1880 and 1881 was apprenticed to J. S. Thompson. In September 1881 he opened his own studio in Kingston. In around 1917 his own apprentice John Elliott, who joined him ca. 1906, would be made a full partner, and the highly successful studio of Cleary and Elliott would be established. 22. See Rhodes, Jamaica and the Imperial Direct West India Mail Service. The stamp was first issued as a single colored red stamp in 1900. The following year it was reissued as the red and blue-­black stamp illustrated here. 23. Many photographs of the 1907 earthquake can be found in the collection of the National Library of Jamaica.

356

David Boxer

C H A P T E R 11

Noel B. Livingston’s Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans GILLIAN FORRESTER

In the archives of the National Library of Jamaica is a bound volume on whose spine is inscribed “Livingston Album.” It contains a sequence of studio photographs that depict, for the most part, people who lived on the island of Jamaica during the second half of the nineteenth century. Consisting of a series of pages with precut window openings intended for the easy insertion of cartes de visite and, intermittently, larger-­format cabinet photographs, the album presumably was purchased off-­the-­shelf from a stationer or photographic studio in Kingston. On an initial encounter, it seems an unremarkable object that would have been found in many middle-­class homes in Jamaica during the later nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The amateur pastime of assembling photographic albums and scrapbooks was extremely popular during the Victorian era, and the results were often highly elaborate hybrid montages that combined photographic, printed, and hand-­painted images.1 The compiler, or compilers, of the Livingston Album chose to eschew fanciful conceits, however, focusing exclusively on commercial portraiture and adhering assiduously to the volume’s prescribed format to create an unembellished and austere gallery of portraits (fig. 11.1). In 2005 Geoffrey Batchen noted in his groundbreaking essay “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-­de-­visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” to which this chapter is indebted, that photographic historians had hitherto tended to denigrate carte-­de-­visite portrait photographs as being quotidian, formulaic, and marginal to the master narrative of the development of the medium. Batchen argued, however, that the invention of the carte represented a revolution in photographic practice and that the genre offers rich possibilities for productive reimagining of the “small dreams and anxieties of ordinary life.” 2 Given its unassuming appearance, the apparent lack of aesthetic ambition of its creator(s), and the absence of archival evidence of the circumstances of its compilation, it is perhaps not surprising that the Livingston Album has been overlooked thus far by scholars both of Jamaica and of photography. Close examination, however, reveals the volume to constitute a richly textured and compelling visual archive.

In this chapter I will recuperate the project of the Livingston Album, arguing that it constitutes a significant endeavor to construct a portrait of postemancipation colonial Jamaican society during a transitional period marked by social and political unrest and economic decline: between 1865, the year of the Morant Bay rebellion, and 1901, the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. The function of portraiture as a vehicle for the articulation of both personal and national history has a long historical lineage, but in the second half of the nineteenth century, the genre became more systematically harnessed to the definition of national identity, a project in which the new medium of photography was instrumental.3 Photography, and specifically portrait photography, played a significant, if hitherto unexplored, role in the social formation of Victorian Jamaica, enabling individuals to construct a sense of cohesion and collective memory, albeit fragile if not illusory, in the colony at a time of profound economic and social instability. I will suggest that there is a politics inherent in the act of compilation of what seems on first sight a collection of banal images of mainly forgotten individuals, constituting as it does an endeavor to normalize the life of a colony that had its foundations in slavery, institutionalized brutality, and trauma. While insisting on the local significance of the Livingston Album, I will also situate it in a broader transnational framework, in relation to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in London as well as to the publications of portrait photographs that proliferated in Britain and North America in the late nineteenth century. I discuss the Livingston Album in relation to two further photographic albums, one assembled by Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, the other by William Walker Whitehall Johnston. Both were British army officers and amateur photographers stationed in Jamaica during the Morant Bay rebellion.4 Both albums, in particular Gulland’s, contain some of the most compelling known visual images relating to the traumatic events of 1865, but their inclusion of photographs relating to other colonial sites, including India, situates them as more generic imperial travelogues and underscores the distinctiveness of the Livingston Album as a specifically Jamaican project.

The Album On opening the album the viewer encounters a cabinet photograph of a man clad in clerical garb identified by the caption handwritten underneath: “Archbishop Nuttall taken in 1881” (fig. 11.2). Born in Clitheroe, in the north of England, in 1842, Enos Nuttall developed a precocious zeal for missionary work and traveled to Jamaica under the aegis of the Wesleyan Missionary Society at

358

Gillian Forrester

F ig . 11. 1   Various photographers, top, left to right: R. Mayo, Alexander James Brymer; below, left to right: Flora Livingston and Ross Jameson Livingston, James Sinclair, circa 1860. Albumen cartes de visite, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Fig. 1 1 .2   Samuel Alexander Walker, Enos Nuttall, circa 1890. Albumen cabinet print, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

the age of twenty. In 1866 he was ordained in Kingston as an Anglican priest; he was appointed bishop of Jamaica in 1880, and archbishop of the West Indies in 1897. Nuttall lived in Jamaica until his death in 1916, but the photograph must have been taken in London in the Regent Street studio of Samuel Alexander Walker, as it is very similar to the portrait of Nuttall that appeared in a part of Walker’s serial publication Dignitaries of the Church in 1890 and presumably is another print from the same sitting.5 The photograph seems to encapsulate the complexities and paradoxes of personal, professional, and national identity that lay at the heart of Victorian Jamaica: a man of religion, formerly nonconformist and now eminent representative of the established church, British-­born yet Jamaican, of humble origins yet achieving remarkable upward mobility, a suave official likeness captured in a slick photographic studio in London yet serving as a frontispiece for an inexpensive album assembled in Jamaica and placed in the company of unsophisticated portraits made in the studios of Kingston.6

360

Gillian Forrester

F ig . 11. 3   Unknown photographer, Charles

F i g . 1 1 .4   Unknown photographer, Mrs.

Chapman, circa 1860. Albumen carte de visite

Daughtry, formerly Mrs. Chapman, circa

print, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of

1860. Albumen carte-­de-­visite print, from

the National Library of Jamaica.

the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

F ig . 11. 5   Unknown photographer, Reverend

F i g . 1 1 .6   Unknown photographer,

Dr. Andrew Kessen, circa 1860. Albumen

Reverend C. E. Nuttall, circa 1860.

carte-­de-­visite print, from the Livingston

Albumen carte-­de-­visite print, from

Album. Courtesy of the National Library of

the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the

Jamaica.

National Library of Jamaica.

F ig . 1 1 .7   Unknown photographer,

F i g . 1 1 .8   Unknown photographer,

Reverend Richard Panton, circa 1860.

Sir John Peter Grant, circa 1860. Albumen

Albumen carte-­de-­visite print, from the

carte-­de-­visite print, from the Livingston

Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National

Album. Courtesy of the National Library of

Library of Jamaica.

Jamaica.

Although Nuttall’s portrait is isolated by dint of being the single image on the volume’s right-­hand opening page, he is connected by a web of associations that is woven throughout the album in the form of portraits, which typically are accompanied by manuscript annotations that identify the relationship of their sitters with Nuttall. These signifiers of sentimental and professional relationships include likenesses of the Methodist missionary Andrew Kessen, who acted as Nuttall’s mentor in Britain in the early 1860s and who moved to Jamaica in 1876; Nuttall’s mother-­in-­law (“Mrs Daughtry, formerly Mrs Chapman, mother of Mrs Nuttall & C.W. Chapman”); Nuttall’s brothers-­in-­law Charles Chapman (“Clerk in Civil Service [Treasury] brother-­in-­law of Archbp Nuttall”) and the Rev. Richard Panton (“Archdeacon Panton”); Nuttall’s son, the Rev. C. E. Nuttall; and Sir John Peter Grant (“governor”), the former lieutenant-­governor of Bengal, who was drafted as governor of Jamaica in the wake of Edward Eyre’s removal from the colony in the aftermath of the 1865 rebellion and with whom Nuttall clashed during the reorganization of the established Church of England in Jamaica in the early 1870s (figs. 11.3 through 11.8). Although, as I have suggested above, sentimental relationships are embedded

362

Gillian Forrester

into the fabric of the album, the overarching organizational principle is that of class and occupation. On the pages that follow Nuttall’s portrait, we encounter more clerics of various denominations, as well as army officers, civil servants, a newspaper proprietor, lawyers, merchants, missionaries, physicians, planters, and politicians, all male, the majority white but some brown, mostly Christian but some Jewish. Occasionally wives, sisters, and children are included, either in the same photograph or in single portraits placed on the same page as their male associates, but the central project of the album seems to be to construct a portrait of a homosocial social network. In many cases the sitters’ names, often together with their professions, are inscribed above or below their likenesses, though these textual annotations are not necessarily reliable. Some images were uncaptioned and have eluded identification. The pages of the album, whose worn and brittle state seems to operate as a metaphor for the fragility of its worldview and the mortality of its subjects, contain several empty windows that bear inscriptions, implying that some of the photographs may have been removed after the album was assembled. These absences underscore the fractured nature of the album, an unstable object that can never be fully recuperated, but one rendered both poignant and powerful by the very fact of its survival.

The Carte de Visite and “Men of Mark” In 1854 the French photographer André-­Adophe-­Eugène Disdéri patented the carte-­de-­visite process, which consisted of using a camera with multiple lenses and a moving plate holder that would produce eight images on a single negative plate.7 Albumen paper prints were made from the collodion negatives, and the small images were mounted on cards that typically measured four by two-­and-­a-­half inches, the size of the engraved visiting cards that were used by the aristocracy and upper middle class. While the process was employed to create photographs in a wide range of genres, its most prevalent use was the production of portraits. Exposure times were short, around two seconds, and a well-­organized studio could accommodate as many as two hundred sittings in a day, enabling likenesses to be generated expeditiously, inexpensively, and in multiple quantities. A carte, like a painted miniature, could function as an intimate object that could be held in the hand or carried in a pocket. The capacity for reproducibility and ready availability at retail outlets also encouraged much wider circulation, however, and there need not have been any personal connection between collector and sitter. As Allan Sekula has noted, “The photographic portrait extends, accelerates, popularizes, and degrades a traditional function. . . . Honorific conventions were thus able to proliferate downward.” 8

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

363

Photographic studios proliferated throughout the British Empire, in Australia, India, South Africa, and of most significance for this chapter, Jamaica. The introduction of the carte de visite stimulated enthusiasm for album production among the bourgeoisie. A wide range of albums was available on the market, including a type with precut slots, as exemplified by the Livingston Album, a prescriptive format that provided little scope for imaginative disposition of materials but for the less ambitious functioned as an expedient method for compiling a personal picture gallery. In Britain the creation of albums and extra-­illustrated texts that incorporated prints, drawings, letters, and autographs for the purposes of constructing personal, familial, and national identity had long been traditional for the aristocracy and upper classes, but the practice was codified by the publication in 1769 of A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution: Consisting of Characters disposed in different classes, and adapting to a methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads intended as an Essay towards reducing our Biography to System, and a Help to the knowledge of Portraits by the Rev. James Granger, a cleric, biographer, and print collector. Granger’s thesis was that biography (and by extension, portraiture) should provide the vehicle for the narration of national history. His “system” consisted of a hierarchical structure that organized social groupings into twelve “classes,” ranging in descending order from Class I: “Kings, Queens, Princes, Princesses, &c. Of the Royal Family” to Class XII: “Persons of both Sexes, chiefly of the lowest Order of the People. Remarkable from only one Circumstance in their Lives; namely such as lives to a great Age, deformed Persons, Convicts, &c.” The publication institutionalized the existing practice of extra-­illustration and stimulated the production of engravings of portraits, often made on a miniature scale and sold for modest prices, for the specific purpose of “Grangerisation.” 9 Roger Hargraves has argued persuasively that the role played by portrait photography in the nineteenth century in the construction of social identity in Britain should be considered within the context of Granger’s system, which provided a visual taxonomy against which the radical social realignment taking place during the Victorian era could be calibrated.10 In 1856 the National Portrait Gallery opened in London after persistent lobbying from prominent figures in political and cultural life, including Lord Palmerston and Thomas Carlyle. As Marcia Pointon has noted, George Scharf, the first director, used Granger’s methodology for the formation and organization of the collection,11 and the project was distinctly retardataire, since likenesses of living sitters were ineligible and photography was excluded despite Scharf ’s proven interest in the medium.12 Critics observed that the displays of cartes de visite in the windows of photographers’ galleries provided a more telling index of contemporary soci-

364

Gillian Forrester

ety than the memorial displays of the departed great at the National Portrait Gallery. The British market was flooded with serial publications of portrait photographs, probably inspired by the New York studio photographer Mathew Brady’s popular Gallery of Illustrious Americans (fig. 11.9); these included Living Celebrities (1856–­1859), Men of Eminence (1863–­1867), Men of Mark (1877), Our Celebrities (1889), Men and Women of the Day (1888–­1893), and Representative Men of India (1889) (fig. 11.10).13 There was, however, no Representative Men of Jamaica; that weighty task was assumed by the compiler(s) of the Livingston Album. The chief proponent of photography in Jamaica between the 1840s and early 1860s was Adolphe Duperly, the expatriate Parisian lithographer who had settled in Kingston in 1824.14 Kingston supported a significant number of other photographic studios at various times during the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of which are represented in the Livingston Album. Among this cosmopolitan group of studio proprietors were the American George W. Davis, Ernesto and Octavio Bavastro and J. B. Valdes from Cuba, the Toronto firm of Russell Brothers and Moncrieff operating as the “Cosmopolitan Gallery” (fig. 11.11), the Bermudan photographer W. A. Frith, John Cleary, J. W. C. Brennan, J. S. Thompson, and William Knibb Blomfeld, “formerly of Hastings, England” (and presumably named after the Baptist missionary).

Noel B. Livingston and the “Sketch Pedigree” The album entered the collection of the National Library of Jamaica as part of a larger archive given by Sir Noel Brooks Livingston.15 Born in Jamaica in 1882, Livingston was educated at the Kingston Church of England Grammar School, and after working as an articled clerk for the legal firm of Alfred H. D’Costa, qualified as a solicitor in 1906 and set up his own practice. Livingston traveled to England in 1908 on behalf of Jamaica’s Insurance Companies and Fire Offices Committee in the aftermath of the 1907 earthquake and fire, but he lived in Jamaica throughout his life, and his voluminous archive reveals that he devoted considerable energies to the study of his native island’s history. Livingston’s particular passion was for genealogy, and his extensive researches in the records of the Court of Chancery resulted in a modest volume entitled Sketch Pedigrees of Some of the Early Settlers in Jamaica, published in Kingston in 1909.16 Dedicated to Sir Fielding Clarke, who was chief justice of Jamaica and keeper of the records of the Court of Chancery, Livingston’s volume consists primarily of partial (signaled by the term “sketch,” which was standard terminology in genealogical practice) family trees that were derived from the chancery records,

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

365

F ig . 1 1 .9   Francis D’Avignon, after Mathew Brady, John Caldwell Calhoun, lithograph after daguerreotype, from Gallery of Illustrious Americans, containing the portraits and biographical sketches of twenty-­four of the most eminent citizens of the American republic, since the death of Washington (1850). Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

F i g . 1 1 .1 0   Sorabji Jehangir, The Late Nawab Sir Salar Jung, Woodburytype, from Sorabji Jehangir, Representative men of India; a collection of memoirs, with portraits, of Indian princes, nobles, statesmen, philanthropists, officials, and eminent citizens (1889).

F ig . 11. 11   William Walker Whitehall Johnston, Cosmopolitan Gallery, Kingston, albumen print, circa 1865, from William Walker Whitehall Johnston Photograph Album of Wales, the West Indies, and the 1st West India Regiment (1858–­1865). Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, gen mss 887.

accompanied by transcriptions of documents and compilations of data relating to the early colonial history of Jamaica. It hardly needs to be said that the enslaved and their descendants did not qualify as “early settlers.” Livingston was also a contributor and subscriber to Caribbeana, being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies, a journal edited by the British amateur genealogist and historian Vere Langford Oliver and published by subscription in London between 1910 and 1919.17 Livingston was also deeply engaged in the collection of monumental inscriptions in Jamaica, a project on which he collaborated with Frank Cundall, who had moved to Jamaica from Britain in 1891 to take up the appointment of secretary and librarian of the Institute of Jamaica. Cundall and Livingston published their “Annotations” to James Henry Lawrence-­Archer’s magisterial book Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies, Barbados, and Jamaica in Caribbeana.18 Livingston’s own family did not have the distinction of being “early settlers,” since his great-­grandfather William Henry Livingston had not arrived in Jamaica, from Antigua, until early in the nineteenth century, but his archive

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

367

contains an exhaustively researched “General Pedigree of the ‘Ross Livingstons’ of Jamaica,” prefaced with the assertion “The family of Livingston is one of antiquity and was once of no small distinction in Scotland, many of its sons leaving their mark in the history of Scotland.” His grandfather William Livingston was born in Kingston in 1805, studied law, and was admitted as a solicitor and proctor of the Supreme Court, and later appointed clerk to the Commissariat Department. In 1829 William married Julia Cardonal Brodbelt, and they had five children, including Ross Jameson Livingston, who was born in 1840 and married Ellen Campbell Harris in 1867. Ross started his career as a clerk under his father in the Commissariat Department and then moved to the Post Office, working initially as a clerk but rising through the ranks to the post of chief. He subsequently moved to the Treasury, was appointed chief clerk in the Audit Office in 1868, and acted as auditor general in 1870 and 1874. Although the Livingston family evidently served with distinction in the legislature and civil service, it might seem an overstatement to say that they, like their Scottish forebears, had left their mark on the history of Jamaica; however, the archive and album serve to remind us of the possibility of constructing an alternate history of empire, one in which civil servants, solicitors, and clerks constituted the category of “men of eminence.” The identity of the compiler of the Livingston Album remains a matter for conjecture. Noel Livingston’s archive consists for the most part of documentation of his genealogical researches and a series of scrapbooks of pressing cuttings and does not contain any references to the photographic album. Although his interest in Jamaica seems to have been primarily antiquarian, Noel Livingston’s meticulous account of his father’s professional trajectory in his family pedigree is suggestive of a keen interest in the social structures of bourgeois Jamaica in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is conceivable that his parents assembled the album or at least amassed the carte-­de-­visite photographs that populate it, but several of the photographs bear the annotation “Property of Noel B. Livingston” on their reverses, implying that Noel Livingston played some role in the volume’s construction, even though he was born just a year after the date of the first photograph in the album and was only eighteen at the time of Queen Victoria’s death. The format of the album facilitated the simple insertion and removal of cartes de visite, and it may have had several compositional iterations, but the project is congruent with Noel Livingston’s preoccupations, a contemporary, visual counterpart to his Sketch Pedigrees.19 Livingston may also have been stimulated to work on the album by Frank Cundall, who began to amass a collection of portraits of historical figures for the Institute of Jamaica in 1892, adducing the example of the National Portrait

368

Gillian Forrester

Gallery in London, although, unlike the London institution in its early days, he did include photographic likenesses. In 1914 Cundall published a catalog of his pantheon. It included short biographies of the sitters, which provide revealing insights into his political sympathies.20 While the Livingston Album contains photographs of several well-­known figures that also figure in Cundall’s portrait gallery, the predominant category is that of the Jamaican bourgeoisie. A striking departure from Grangerite taxonomy in the album, with one anomalous exception that I will discuss below, is the absence of any representatives of Granger’s “Class I: Kings, Queens, Princes, Princesses, &c. Of the Royal Family,” even though cartes de visite of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert proliferated in Britain in the 1860s and were circulated in Jamaica (see fig. 10.10 in chapter 10).21 In 1866 the Jamaica House of Assembly had voted with a large majority to cede governance to the British crown, a controversial move that effectively deprived black and brown Jamaicans of participation in Jamaican politics and had also severely weakened the influence of the remaining planters. This lacuna in the Livingston Album may, conceivably, signal tacit disapproval or repudiation of Jamaica’s Crown Colony status. The proliferation of portraits of civil servants and local politicians, physicians, and clerics seems intended to underscore that Jamaica was an autonomously functioning entity rather than a subordinate element of a greater Britain.

The “Home Circle” As I have noted above, the album opens with a single portrait of the high-­profile Anglican cleric Enos Nuttall; this image is succeeded by a series of five cabinet photographs depicting his brother-­in-­law Charles Chapman, a civil servant; Thomas Harrison, the surveyor-­general of Jamaica; Peter Magnan, the former naval storekeeper, and his wife; John Radcliffe, a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Association with the Established Church of Scotland, who served as minister of St. Andrew’s Scots’ Kirk for forty years and was a renowned scholar of Afro-­Jamaican folklore; and Sir Henry Wylie Norman, who was governor of Jamaica between 1883 and 1887 and whose portrait was taken in the fashionable London studio of Fradelle. This introductory gallery of images is followed by alternating suites of sixteen pages of carte-­de-­visite photographs, four to a page, and six pages of cabinet portraits, totaling forty-­eight pages, and concluding with a portrait of James Cochrane, who succeeded John Radcliffe as minister of the Scots’ Kirk, with his wife and son. For the most part, the organization of the album adheres to taxonomic principles, grouping portraits according to their sitters’ occupations and following a broadly Grangerite hier-

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

369

archy of governors, high-­ranking army and naval officers, politicians, clerics, physicians, civil servants, lawyers, journalists, and merchants. Women appear throughout the album, in the earlier sections in their capacities as wives and daughters, and later occasionally as single portraits and clustered in groups, but their role always seems ancillary. While the album at first sight seems to privilege the classes of “great men,” British senior colonial administrators and military personnel whose sojourns in Jamaica were typically temporary and short, a statistical analysis of the album’s composition demonstrates the predominance of sitters who would have identified themselves as Jamaicans. A breakdown of occupational types reveals that clerics by far are the most strongly represented profession in the album, followed by civil servants, doctors, lawyers, politicians, planters, merchants, and journalists, the last three categories sparsely populated.22 In this respect the album seems to propose a radically different social model from that predicated on Grangerite principles: a society fundamentally structured by organized religion and a well-­calibrated civil service, with a supporting cast of politicians, physicians, and members of the legal profession. The limited representation of planters and tradespeople may be of significance, implying a tacit rebuttal of the stereotypical perception of Jamaica as an essentially land-­owning and mercantile culture. The Livingston family is represented only by a blank window toward the end of the album, captioned “N.B.L,” which presumably at one time contained a carte de visite of Noel Brooks Livingston, and by a carte of a young Ross Jameson Livingston accompanied by a young woman and captioned as “clerk in civil service & his sister Flora” (see fig. 11.1). Flanked by single portraits of men identified as “R. Mayo Post,” “A. Brymer (Postmaster),” and “Jas Sinclair Clerk in Civil Service,” Livingston’s photograph faces a page of four cartes de visite of fellow civil servants (fig. 11.12). The presence of his sister notwithstanding, Livingston’s likeness is situated in the context of professional rather than familial relationships and separated from the portrait of his son, Noel, underscoring an impulse to repress the personal in favor of the public dimension and to privilege the masculine, professional, and public spheres over the feminine and domestic, as well as personal merit over hereditary privileges. The album evidences a conscientious attempt to encapsulate a wide range of political and religious affiliations, and the latter category is particularly well represented by ministers and congregational members of Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic denominations (fig. 11.13), as well as Sephardic Jews. A small number of brown Jamaicans are also included, but just two black sitters. Allan Trachtenberg has characterized Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious

370

Gillian Forrester

F ig . 11. 12   Various photographers, top, left to right: Philip Chapman, Samuel Paynter Musson; below, left to right: John Harris, Mr. Saunders, all circa 1860. Albumen carte-­de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

F ig . 11. 13   Various photographers, top, left to right: Reverend Murphy, Reverend Canon F. L. King; below, left to right: Reverend John Radcliffe, Reverend Fletcher, all circa 1860. Albumen carte-­de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Americans as a “figurative domestic circle in which all are familiar and thereby familial,” 23 and this conception also seems to lie at the heart of the project of the Livingston Album. The “home circle” was a trope of evangelical Christianity in the late nineteenth century that had particular significance for those involved in the missionary movement, and the term likely would have resonated with the Livingston family and their contemporaries.24 Despite the apparent desire of the compiler(s) to provide an objective public record, the album ultimately seems to constitute a highly personal, and geographically specific, creation. A number of the inscriptions consist simply of an honorific title and last name (for example, “Dr Gegg,” “Revd Williamson,” “Mrs Daughtry”), occasionally accompanied by an additional signifier of profession, geographical location, or religious denomination (“Rev Fletcher ‘Wesleyan,’ ” “Revd Murphy Spanish Town,” “Dr Oates of Vere”), implying that viewers of the album would have been familiar with these sitters, if not on intimate terms. The close attention paid to the particularities of place in the inscriptions provides a subtle mapping of physical space, thickening the texture of an already rich and multilayered narrative. Several family genealogies are traced via the inscriptions: one page includes a pair of portraits of “Miss Turner Sister of Revd Turner at Port Royal” and “Miss Turner daughter of Revd Turner,” and another page is composed of four photographs of women, three of whom are identified in their inscriptions as Ella, Jessie, and Lena Smith, with the fourth an unidentified photograph of an older woman who may have been their mother. The significance of the Misses Turner and Smith for the Livingstons is unknown, but their inclusion in the album implies that they were participants in their “home circle.” Stuart Hall has observed that the Caribbean “is a place where nobody is, in the obvious sense, ‘at home,’ where everybody is to some extent dislocated.” 25 Despite its insistent assertion of normative social values, the Livingston Album is haunted by a profound sense of unhomeliness. It is jarring and provocative to encounter on the tenth page four strikingly dissonant images: a “Memento of the Great War in 1870–­1,” a photographic reproduction of a page from the London Times that, according to the printed text, was sent by carrier pigeon from Bordeaux to Paris during the Franco-­Prussian war; an image of the Prussian king Wilhelm I kneeling in prayer before smoldering ruins accompanied by humorous doggerel;26 and, below them, carte-­de-­visite photographs of the celebrated dwarfs Francis Joseph Flynn (whose stage persona was “General Mite”) and Milly Edwards, who married in 1884 and performed in public throughout the world (fig.  11.14).27 The images of Flynn and Edwards face off on portraits of Vice-­Admiral Sir Henry Kellett (“Commander afterwards Admiral Kellitt”), who had served as commodore at Jamaica between 1855 and

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

373

F ig . 11. 14   Various photographers, top, left to right: Memento of the Great War of 1870, Wilheim I; below, left to right: General Mite (Francis Joseph Flynn), Milly Edwards, all circa 1860. Albumen carte-­de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

F i g . 1 1 .1 5   Unknown photographer, Dr. James Miranda Barry with his servant, Dantzen or John, and his dog, circa 1860. Albumen carte-­de-­ visite print. Courtesy of Royal Army Medical Corps Muniment Collection, Trustees of the Army Medical Services Museum and Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library/​London, ramc/​801/​ 6/5/​1.

1859, and an unidentified soberly dressed woman who may have been Kellett’s wife. Above Kellett, flanked by an empty slot, is a carte of Brigadier-­General, formerly Colonel, Abercromby Nelson, who led the reprisals against the rebels in the aftermath of the Morant Bay rebellion and presided over George William Gordon’s court-­martial. On his return to England, Nelson was prosecuted at the recommendation of the Jamaica Committee but was acquitted in 1867.28 A similarly transgressive note is struck by the inclusion of a carte, now removed from the album, signaled by the inscription “Dr Barry & attendant.” This wording presumably alludes to Margaret Bulkley or Bulkeley, the remarkable military surgeon who passed as a man under the name James Miranda Barry for her entire career and was posted to Jamaica between 1831 and 1836.29 Barry, who was celebrated both for her extraordinary professional skills and for the truculence she directed at her superiors, was photographed in later life with her black servant, whom she called Dantzen, also known as “John,” and her dog Psyche (fig. 11.15).30 Although the scope of the Livingston Album in terms of occupation, class, religion, and ethnicity is in some respects wide-­ranging, apart from the carte of Charles Price, which I discuss below, Dantzen/​John probably

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

375

would have been the only black figure in the album, even though prosperous black Jamaicans did commission studio photographs in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dantzen/​John was not a member of the professional classes but a domestic servant; black Jamaicans apparently did not qualify for admission into the Livingston “home circle,” a lacuna that speaks eloquently to the racial tensions that culminated in Morant Bay in the autumn of 1865.

The “Victims of the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865” The Morant Bay rebellion was the most momentous and traumatic event of Victorian Jamaica, yet the inscriptions of the Livingston Album are obstinately Fig. 1 1 .16   Various photographers, top, left to right: Lady Darling, Sir Charles Darling; below, left to right: Edward John Eyre, Sir Henry Knight Storks, all circa 1865. Albumen carte-­de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

silent on the subject. The images tell a different story, however; portraits of the protagonists of the revolt appear at intervals throughout the volume, creating a complex and serpentine narrative thread that eloquently testifies to the persistence of the rebellion in Jamaican collective consciousness. The album contains two cartes de visite of Edward John Eyre, positioned on a double-­page spread devoted, with one exception, to former governors of the colony and their spouses (figs. 11.16 and 11.17). The first depicts Eyre in civilian clothes and is placed next to a carte of the colonial administrator Sir Henry Storks, who was dispatched to Jamaica to replace Eyre when he was removed from office and served on the committee that investigated the disgraced governor’s conduct during the rebellion. The photograph was taken in the London studio of Henry F i g . 1 1 .1 7   Various photographers, top, left to right: Sir John Peter Grant, [missing] the Earl of Elgin [? illegible] & son; below, left to right: Edward John Eyre, Captain William Cooper, all circa 1865. Albumen carte-­de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Hering after Eyre’s return to Britain and was sold in Jamaica by Russell Brothers and Moncrieff.31 The second carte of Eyre shows him in military uniform, paired with a portrait of Captain William Cooper, a naval officer who served as the superintendent of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and was an ardent supporter of Eyre’s. Both Cooper and Lewis Quier Bowerbank, a physician and the custos (chief magistrate) of Kingston who notoriously exhorted Eyre to punish George William Gordon with extreme severity, were members of the committee that devised a farewell address to Eyre expressing “our most sincere sympathy with you on your departure from the colony,” which was signed by more than 1,200 subscribers.32 Two identical photographs of Bowerbank appear in another opening that displays portraits of prominent Jamaican physicians, including two (also identical) portraits of his adversary, Alexander Fiddes, the physician and close friend of Gordon’s who testified against Eyre at a hearing in England in 1867.33 A carte of Maximilian Augustus Ketelhodt, the planter and custos of St. Thomas in the East who was killed on the steps of the Morant Bay courthouse on October 11, 1865, posed diffidently against an incongruous decorative backdrop, is placed on a double-­page spread of portraits of magistrates and politicians, along with those of John Salmon, a planter and the custos of St. Elizabeth; Richard Hill, the brown magistrate, politician, educationalist, and natural historian; and Edward Jordon, who like Hill was brown and who held a succession of influential positions, including that of mayor of Kingston, speaker of the House of Assembly, governor’s secretary, and island secretary. On the facing page are photographs of Alexander Barclay, former commissioner of immigration and custos of St. Thomas in the East, and author of an apologia for slavery that was first published in London in 1826; a photograph of Hugh Anthony Whitelocke, the custos of Hanover; and two cartes of William Hosack, a planter who served as custos of St. George and replaced Jordon on the Executive Committee in 1864. A zealous advocate of the interests of Jamaica’s ruling elite, Hosack is depicted in one of the photographs, taken on April 20, 1865, accompanied by his wife and daughter. All three members of the Hosack family wear fashionable riding dress, and, with a subtle subversion of the conventional gender roles represented elsewhere in the album, the women brandish whips, a troubling evocation of the lashings that were brutally administered to the alleged rebels in the aftermath of the Morant Bay rebellion.34 An opening toward the end of the album disrupts the taxonomical schema, displaying a group of portraits apparently selected not on the basis of occupation but, with two apparent exceptions, for their close association with the rebellion (figs. 11.18 and 11.19).35 On the lower register of the right-­hand page is a carte

378

Gillian Forrester

of Charles Price, the black assemblyman and builder who was beaten to death by rebels, paired with a portrait of Gordon Ramsay, inspector of police and provost-­marshall, who played a key role in the suppression of the insurrection and was tried for “willful murder” in England at the instigation of the Jamaica Committee but acquitted.36 In the top register, at far left and right, are two photographs of Brigadier-­General Luke Smythe O’Connor, who commanded the 1st West India Regiment’s troops during the rebellion, both taken in the Kingston studio of Russell Brothers and Moncrieff. One depicts the general with his “staff,” and the other, a single portrait likely taken at an earlier sitting, shows him, unlike most of the other sitters in the album, at ease, even nonchalant, in the photographic studio. O’Connor had opposed the arrest of Gordon on the grounds of its illegality and his fear of reprisals, but Eyre disregarded his objections.37 It may not be fortuitous that the images of O’Connor bookend a pair of cartes de visite depicting George William Gordon and an elderly woman identified in the caption as “Mrs Shannon (Mother of Mrs G. W. Gordon).” The likeness of the smartly attired Gordon, who encountered the camera with a penetrating and confident gaze, had been made in the Kingston studio of A. Duperly and Sons, likely in the early 1860s. The Duperlys were quick to grasp the opportunities civil unrest offered for profiting from their stock of negatives, and a notice appeared in the Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet on October 16, 1865, just five days after the outbreak of the insurrection, offering “Portraits of the late Victims who fell at the Rebellion in St-­Thomas-­ ye-­East. Also Portraits of the Baron, Price, Walton, Hire, Hitchens, and other Victims of the Rebellion in St Thomas yet East — ​­Also the Arch-­Traitor G.W. Gordon,” priced at one shilling each.38 Only three of these sitters, Ketelholdt, Price, and Gordon, are represented in the Livingston Album, as if in mute refusal of the crude binaries of victim and perpetrator articulated in the Duperlys’ opportunistic advertisement, and the inclusion of the photograph of Gordon’s mother-­in-­law is striking. No likenesses of Lucy Shannon, the daughter of an Irish journalist whom Gordon married in 1846, are known to exist.39 The carte of Mrs. Shannon may have been chosen to function as a surrogate in the absence of her daughter’s portrait, but in any case, the allusion to Gordon’s sentimental life may signal a tacit sympathy for his tragic death and the plight of his survivors. A manuscript inscription on the reverse of Gordon’s carte describes him as “the Chief Instigator of/​the Rebellion,” yet the caption on the album page describes him more neutrally as a “politician,” in marked contrast to the Duperlys’ designation, “Arch-­Traitor.” The strategies of memorialization of the Morant Bay rebellion employed by the creator(s) of the Livingston Album differ significantly from those of

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

379

Fig. 1 1 .18   Various photographers, top, left to right: General Luke Smythe O’Connor and his Staff, Mrs Shannon; below, left to right: George Levy, Alexander Berry, all circa 1865. Albumen carte-­ de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

William Walker Whitehall Johnston and Alexander Dudgeon Gulland. The photographs in Johnston’s album consist mainly of group portraits of officers of the 1st West India Regiment (fig. 11.20) and views of Kingston (including a photograph of the Cosmopolitan Gallery, the studio of Russell Brothers and Moncrieff Morant Bay, and Up Park Camp). Johnston did not include images of the civilian “victims” and perpetrators of the rebellion, nor did he attempt to construct a narrative through his placement of images: each page displays a single photograph, and there are no captions. Gulland’s album employs more complex representational strategies: he combined photographs of different

380

Gillian Forrester

F i g . 1 1 .1 9   Various photographers, top, left to right: [missing] George William Gordon (see fig. 11.21), General Luke Smythe O’Connor, below, left to right: Gordon Ramsay, [missing] Charles Price (see fig. 11.23), all circa 1865. Albumen carte-­de-­visite prints, from the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

genres, creating telling juxtapositions, and mediated them with captions, leaving the viewer in no doubt as to his views on the rebellion. Gulland eschewed cartes de visite, evidently preferring to use unmounted photographs that were more suggestive of raw reportage from the field. The complex interplay of images and text in Gulland’s album is exemplified by a page composed of a view of Up Park Camp at the center, flanked by studio portraits of “Mr Levine. Tried by/​Civil Power and Convicted,” “Mr Lindo/​ Special Volunteers,” and “G.W. Gordon/​Hung at Morant Bay/​23rd October 1865” (fig. 11.21). The editor of the Montego Bay County Union newspaper and

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

381

F ig . 1 1 .2 0   William Walker Whitehall Johnston, A group of fourteen non-­commissioned officers in 1st West India Regiment at Up Park Camp, Kingston, Jamaica, circa 1865. Albumen print. From William Walker Whitehall Johnston Photograph Album of Wales, the West Indies, and the 1st West India Regiment (1858–­1865). Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, gen mss 887.

F ig . 11. 2 1   Various photographers, compilation attributed to Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, a view of Up Park Camp placed at the center, flanked by studio portraits of (top left, clockwise): George William Gordon, Sidney Levine, B.D. Lindo, page circa 1860–­1865, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

a harsh critic of Eyre’s, Sidney Levine, was found guilty of seditious libel and imprisoned for a year. B. D. Lindo was an officer of the Kingston No. 2 Company of Volunteers, one of the civilian militia formed to support the suppression of the revolt.40 These small-­scale portraits, representatives of dissent from and obedience to Eyre’s governance, are dominated by the image of Up Park, uncannily devoid of human presence and dominated by the white roads that bisect the empty space, suggesting an inscription of military power on the Jamaican landscape. More than two hundred people who were arrested in and around Kingston in the aftermath of the outbreak of the rebellion were detained at Up Park.41 On a later page, a studio photograph of General O’Connor, Johnston, and Lieutenant-­Colonel John Elkington mimics reportage. Elkington, theatrically scrutinizing a map or document with a black aide in attendance, is surrounded by a series of smaller images: at top right, General O’Connor with his “Jamaica Staff ” (in which Johnston also appears, third from the left), the only photograph that appears in the Livingston, Johnston, and Gulland albums, and below that, a portrait of Walter Steward, “Inspector of Police,” facing a photograph of Gulland (“A.D.G”) with Brigadier-­General Nelson. At the bottom of the page are a pair of images laconically captioned “Colonel Fyfe” and “Maroons” (fig. 11.22). These remarkable photographs, which were unknown until the Firestone Library acquired the album in 2009, commemorate the role played in the suppression of the rebellion by a contingent of Maroons under the direction of Alexander Fyfe, the stipendiary magistrate recruited by Eyre, who was styled “Colonel and Chief of the Maroons.” This troop of “wonderful and loyal people” as the Gleaner newspaper termed them, carried out their commission with notorious brutality. Presumably taken after the rebellion in one of the Kingston studios, likely A. Duperly and Sons, these disquieting but highly compelling images subvert the conventions of genteel studio portrait photography, undermining the model of civilized society proposed by the Livingston Album. On turning the page the viewer is confronted with a gallery of fourteen portraits, headed with the charged title “Victims of the Jamaica Rebellion of 1866,” an elegiac pantheon of individuals who were killed by the rebels and of key protagonists of the suppression of the revolt, including Eyre, Nelson, and Ramsay (fig. 11.23). Each of the dead is identified by name, his or her status designated by a single,stark word, “Murdered.” The one exception is the melancholy portrait of Colonel Thomas Hobbs holding a small child, which bears the chilling caption “Died Mad.” Hobbs, a commissioned army officer who had played a key role in the suppression of the revolt, was afterward declared of “unsound mind” and committed suicide on his voyage back to England in 1866.

384

Gillian Forrester

F ig . 11. 2 2   Various photographers, compilation attributed to Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, at center: General Luke Smythe O’Connor, William Walker Whitehall Johnston, and Lieutenant-­Colonel John Elkington; flanked by studio photographs, from top left, clockwise: Brigadier-General Abercromby Nelson and Alexander Dudgeon Gulland; General Luke Smythe O’Connor and his Staff; Walter Steward, Inspector of Police; Maroons in their “War Costumes”; Colonel Alexander Fyfe and Maroons in their “War Costumes”, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

F ig . 1 1 .2 3   Various photographers, compilation attributed to Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Victims of the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865, albumen prints, circa 1860–­1865, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

The portraits of two widows of the “victims,” Maria Hitchins and Theodosia Herschell, who holds a child on her lap, function as representatives of what the Gleaner on October 21, 1865, memorably termed “The Sufferers . . . widows and orphans of those who fell while defending their country.” These images would have resonated with British viewers, as the violation and suffering of women and children at the hands of insurgents in a colonial context was a dominant trope of reportage of the Indian Uprising of 1857.42

The “Natives of Jamaica” There is no photographic evidence of the executions that took place in the ruins of the courthouse at Morant Bay, but the Duperly brothers sold reproductions of crude drawings made by T. J. Mills, the quartermaster on the hms Aboukir. One of these photographs is included in Gulland’s album, accompanied by two photographs of Morant Bay taken after the revolt, one showing the ghostly outline of the courthouse. Positioned above the image of the executions is a photograph depicting two white men, presumably army officers, one of whom may be Gulland himself, flanked by black servants, a juxtaposition that seems subtly to underscore the rewards of servility vis-­à-­vis the dolorous consequences of civil disobedience. The Duperlys also advertised “cartes de visites [sic] — ​­From Life, of the two Murderers of Messrs. walton & hire, robt. nicholas & alex. taylor, taken at the Jail Yard.” 43 Taylor and Nicholas had been tried and found guilty in Kingston late in February 1866.44 These images do not appear in Gulland’s album, and no examples are known to have survived.45 On another page, however, is a group of four photographs captioned “Natives of Jamaica,” incongruously paired with a view of Corfu (fig. 11.24). These raw and arresting images are very early examples of photographs of Jamaican occupational and racial types that became a stock-­in-­trade for the Duperly studio later in the nineteenth century but lack the slick production values of the later, more commodified, productions.46 This group collectively signals poverty, abjection, and resistance, the last manifested in the remarkable photograph of a young woman who confronts the viewer with a defiant gaze. Above are two photographs, the most memorable and haunting images related to the rebellion, bearing the freighted inscriptions “Grave of eighty Rebels near Morant Bay. Jamaica” and “The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads near Morant Bay, where the rebels assembled immediately before the attack on the Court House.” This suggestive juxtaposition implies that the “Natives” may have been intended by Gulland to act as surrogates for the rebels.47

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

387

F ig . 1 1 .2 4   Various photographers, compilation attributed to Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, top left: Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica; top right: The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads near Morant Bay where the rebels assembled immediately before the attack on the Court House; below, left: Natives of Jamaica; below right: Fort Neuf, Corfu, albumen prints, from Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865), the Indian Northwest Frontier Hazara Campaign (1867–­1870), Views of Malta, Ireland, Guernsey, Spain, and Elsewhere. Graphic Arts Collection, (gax) 2009–­0016E, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

The seated man, wearing a single shoe, likely would have been born enslaved. Slavery in the British colonies was abolished in 1838, the year before photography was invented, and no photographic record of the conditions of life under slavery in Jamaica exists. In America, however, activists of the antislavery movement harnessed the new medium to promote their message: Sojourner Truth famously sold cartes de visite of her portrait that bore the printed inscription “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance” to help finance the campaign.48 As Laura Wexler has noted, the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Doug­ lass passionately believed that photography would act as a powerful engine of progress, a means of rescuing African Americans from the condition of “social death” into which they had been cast by slavery (fig. 11.25).49 In “Pictures and Progress,” a lecture Douglass first delivered in 1861, he noted, “Rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery[,] a grand panorama,” and he F i g . 1 1 .2 5   Unknown photographer, Frederick Douglass, circa 1860. Albumen carte-­de-­visite print. Courtesy Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Call Number jwj mss 54, Randolph Linsly Simpson African-­ American Collection.

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

389

conjured the figure of the “Revenant,” who returns from the dead, rematerialized by being captured by the photographic lens.50 The identities of Gulland’s anonymous and spectral “Natives” can never be recuperated, however, and commissioning a photographic portrait would have been impossible for the majority of the formerly enslaved and their families in Jamaica in 1865. The compiler(s) of the Livingston Album eschewed the inclusion of examples of these crudely stereotypical images, but, as I have noted above, only a single black Jamaican, Charles Price, gained admission to the “family circle.” The album, then, remains a highly selective portrait gallery, rather than a “grand panorama,” of colonial society, but both its absences and presences are eloquent, and it constitutes a remarkable testament to the “small dreams and anxieties of ordinary life” of Victorian Jamaica.

Notes I am very grateful to Tim Barringer, Morna O’Neill, and Wayne Modest, for their insightful comments on this chapter; to Camila Cottani, Lizzie Meyer, and Lisa Thornell, for undertaking invaluable research; and to David Boxer, Winsome Hudson, Yvonne Clarke, and their colleagues at the National Library of Jamaica; Kraig Binkowski, Yale Center for British Art; and Julie Mellby, Firestone Library, Princeton University, for their generous assistance. 1. For the practice of photographic album compilation in the nineteenth century, see Patrizia di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007); Elizabeth Siegel, ed., Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2009); Cheryl Finley, “No More Auction Block for Me!,” in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012): 83–­100; and Lara Perry, “The Carte de Visite in the 1860s and the Serial Dynamic of Photographic Likeness,” Art History 35, no. 4 (2012): 728–­49. Finley’s essay, which focuses on an album of unidentified African American sitters, and Perry’s article, which discusses two albums assembled by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, both provide methodological approaches that have been very helpful to me in thinking about the Livingston Album. 2. Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-­de-­visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Image and Imagination, ed. Martha Langford (Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2005), 63–­74. 3. The subject of portraiture and social construction in eighteenth-­century British visual culture has been explored in Marcia Pointon’s groundbreaking study Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). For the impact of carte-­de-­visite photography on the construction of national identity, see John Plunkett, “Celebrity and Community:

390

Gillian Forrester

the Poetics of the Carte-­de-­Visite,” Journal of Victorian Culture 8, no. 1 (2003): 55–­79; and Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2001). 4. Gulland Album, Firestone Library, Princeton University: call number Oversize 2009–­0016E; Johnston Album, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: call number gen mss 887. Alexander Dudgeon Gulland (ca.  1834–­1924) was a surgeon who had served in the Crimean and Second Opium Wars before his posting to Jamaica; see Mimi Sheller, “Hidden Textures of Race and Historical Memory: The Rediscovery of Photographs Relating to Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 72, no. 2 (winter 2011): 533–­87; and Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 114–­41. William Walker Whitehall Johnston (1835–­1886) was born in Trinidad, where his father held the post of colonial secretary, and served with the 1st West India Regiment throughout his career, in Jamaica, British Honduras, and West Africa during the Ashanti War. For the album, see http://beinecke.library.yale .edu/a​ bout/b ​ logs/​african-­american-­studies-­beinecke-l­ ibrary/2​ 012/1​ 0/3​ 1/e​ nglish-a­ rmys-­ only-­black-­regiment, accessed September 23, 2013. Dudgeon and Johnston assembled the Jamaican sections of their albums using a combination of their own photographs and photographs purchased from studios in Kingston. Not all the images have been securely attributed, however, and the albums require further research. Gulland and Johnston knew each other and may even have swapped prints. 5. National Portrait Gallery, London, Ax38367. 6. For Nuttall, see E. H. Pearce, Rev. H. C. G. Matthew, “Nuttall, Enos (1842–­1916),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed September 24, 2013, http://www .oxforddnb​.com/​view/​article/​35270; and Frank Cundall, The Life of Enos Nuttall: Archbishop of the West Indies (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1922). 7. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). 8. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (winter 1986): 6. 9. For Grangerization, see Pointon, Hanging the Head, 53–­78; Lucy Peltz, “Engraved Portrait Heads and the Rise of Extra-­Illustration: The Eton Correspondence of the Revd James Granger and Richard Bull, 1769–­1774,” Walpole Society 66 (2004): 1–­161. 10. Hamilton and Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned, 21–­24. 11. Pointon, Hanging the Head, 228. 12. Hamilton and Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned, 49–­50. 13. For a comprehensive account of the numerous British portrait series published in the late nineteenth century, see Gertrude M. Prescott, “Fame and Photography: Portrait Publications in Great Britain, 1856–­1900” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1985). 14. See David Boxer, Duperly: An Exhibition of Works by Adolphe Duperly, His Sons and Grandsons Mounted in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of His Birth (Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica, 2001), and Boxer’s essay in the present volume.

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

391

15. National Library of Jamaica, ms 59. For a detailed description of the archive, see K. E. Ingram, Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 469, 470–­71. 16. Sketch Pedigrees of Some of the Early Settlers in Jamaica; Compiled from the Records of the Court of Chancery of the Island with a List of the Inhabitants in 1670 and Other Matter Relative to the Early History of the Same (Kingston: Educational Supply Company, Printers, Publishers, Bookbinders, Booksellers, Stationer, etc., 1909), 139. 17. Caribbeana, 6 vols. and supplement to vol. 4 (London: Mitchell, Hughes and Clarke, 1910–19­19). 18. Caribbeana 1 (1910): 36, 90, 126, 185, 228, 281, 325, 374. 19. Seventy of the captions in the album appear to be in the same hand as the annotations on a document headed “Historical Monuments in Jamaica” in the Livingston archive, which were presumably written by Noel Livingston. 20. Frank Cundall, Catalogue of the Portraits in the Jamaica History Gallery of the Institute of Jamaica (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1914). Seventeen of the identified sitters in the Livingston Album were included in Cundall’s cataloge. 21. See chapter 10 in this volume, by David Boxer. 22. Of the sitters whom I have been able to identify (twelve remain unidentified), representation of occupational groups in the album as it is presently constituted is as follows: ecclesiastics of different denominations, including a single Jewish chazen (twenty-­ three); civil servants and magistrates (twenty-­one); governors (ten); politicians (ten); physicians (ten); representatives of the army and navy, two of whom are members of the volunteer militia recruited to suppress the Morant Bay rebellion (six); lawyers (four); merchants (four); planters (two); and a single journalist. Twenty women are represented, the majority wives, widows, or sisters of male sitters, and just two children. 23. Allen Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History; Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 49. This chapter is indebted to Trachtenberg’s book, particularly the first chapter, “Illustrious Americans,” and had space permitted, a detailed comparison of the Livingston Album with nineteenth-­ century American portrait photography would have been illuminating. 24. Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1750–­1850 (1987; London: Routledge, 2002). 25. Stuart Hall, “The Caribbean: A Quintessentially Modern Zone,” in Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation, ed. Gilane Tawadros (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2004), 297. 26. The verses read, “By will Divine my dear Augusta / We’ve had another awful buster / 10,000 Frenchmen sent below / Praise God from whom all Blessings flow.” 27. As Susan Stewart has noted, there is a long history of exhibiting people with profound physical disabilities as “freaks of nature,” their “anomalous status . . . articulated by the process of spectacle as it distances the viewer, and thereby . . . ‘normalizes’ the viewer as much as it marks the freak as an aberration”; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 109.

392

Gillian Forrester

28. Sarah Winter, “On the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre-­ George William Gordon Controversy, 1865–­70,” in branch: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-­Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, accessed September 24, 2013, http://www.branch​collective​ .org/?ps_articles=sarah-­winter-­on-­the-­morant-­bay-­rebellion-­in-­jamaica-­and-­the-­ governor-­eyre-­george-­william-­gordon-­controversy-­1865-­70. 29. The Duperlys advertised “Portraits of Dr Barry” and “Dr Barry’s Confidential Servant ‘John’ ” in the Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet, October 16, 1865, [p.2], for one shilling each. For Barry, see Sydney Brandon, “Barry, James (ca. 1799–­1865),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb​.com/​view/​article/​1563, accessed September 24, 2013; Isobel Ray, The Strange Story of Dr James Barry: Army Surgeon, Inspector General of Hospitals, Discovered on Death to Be a Woman (London: Longman, Green, 1958); June Rose, The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr James Miranda Barry (London: Hutchinson, 1977); and Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Life and Astonishing Secret of Dr James Barry, Queen Victoria’s Preeminent Military Doctor (London: Viking, 2002). 30. For Dantzen, see Holmes, Scanty Particulars, passim. 31. Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet, July 31, 1866, 3. The image was engraved for the frontispiece of Hamilton Hume’s hagiographic biography of Eyre (The Life of Edward John Eyre: Late Governor of Jamaica [London: Richard Bently, 1867]). Hering had made a remarkable series of photographs of psychiatric patients in the Bethlem Royal Hospital in the mid-­1850s. 32. Hume, Life of Edward John Eyre, 306–­7. 33. Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1867 (London: Rivingtons: 1868), 37. 34. For Hosack, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 254, 273, 288; and Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time”: The Morant Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 60, 13. 35. Alexander Berry was a Kingston cabinetmaker and I can find no evidence of his involvement with the rebellion. George Levy was a Jewish journalist, the founder and proprietor of the Colonial Standard. 36. The photograph is captioned erroneously as “Geo D. Ramsay.” George D. Ramsay was the registrar of the Court of Chancery in Jamaica. An identical, but vignetted, photographic portrait in the Gulland album is captioned as “Provost Marshall Ramsay/​ Tried for murder and acquitted.” 37. Heumann, “The Killing Time,” 46. 38. Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet, October 16, 1865, 2. The Duperlys may have overestimated the level of interest in the cartes and within three days the price had been reduced to six shillings (Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet, October 19, 1865, 2). 39. In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry Gad Heumann erroneously states that Gordon had married Mary Anne Perkins, a widow who had formerly run an

Gallery of Illustrious Jamaicans

393

academy for young women, in the mid-­1840s; see Gad Heuman “Gordon, George William (ca. 1820–­1865),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed September 24, 2013, http://www.oxforddnb​.com/​view/​article/​74415. 40. Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet, October 23, 1865, 2. 41. Sheller, Citizenship from Below, 543. 42. See Pamela Gerrish Nunn, “Broken Blossoms,” in Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting (London: Scolar Press, 1995), 73–­93. 43. Gleaner and Decordova’s Advertising Sheet, March 23, 1866, [p. 3]. 44. The trials of Taylor and Nicholas are documented in Jamaica Disturbances: Papers Laid before the Royal Commission of Inquiry by Governor Eyre. Presented by Both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, June 1866 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1866). 45. The carte de visite of William Gordon is the only photograph of an executed “rebel” that has been securely identified. A tintype of a man thought to have been Paul Bogle, which is now untraced but was photographed, probably does not represent Bogle, as the sitter appears to be a young man and Bogle was in his forties in the mid-­1860s. 46. For a penetrating analysis of the uses of landscape and ethnographic photography in Jamaica in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Krista Thompson, Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 47. These photographs are discussed by Wayne Modest in chapter 17 in this volume. 48. See Augusta Rohrbach, “Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White,” in Wallace and Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress, 83–­100. 49. Laura Wexler, “ ‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation,” in Wallace and Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress, 18–­40. 50. Wexler, “ ‘A More Perfect Likeness,’ ” 19–­20.

394

Gillian Forrester

C H A P T E R 12

Picturing South Asians in Victorian Jamaica A N N A A R A B I N D A N -­K E S S O N

South Asian laborers — ​­East Indians, as they were called by British colonial administrators — ​­first arrived in Jamaica in May 1845, onboard the Blundell Hunter. Upon disembarking, making “the best appearance they could,” Indians were selected by planters and dispatched in carts or schooners or by rail to the estates on which they were to work.1 Between 1845 and 1921, when the practice of indentured labor ended, approximately thirty-­seven thousand Indian laborers were imported to Jamaica, many of them serving out their indentureship in the parishes of St. Andrew, St. Mary, Portland, Clarendon, Westmoreland, St. Catherine, and St. Thomas in the East.2 While Indian laborers had first been brought to Guyana in 1838, to work on sugar plantations, it was not until the 1840s that the practice of using Indian labor became established across the British Caribbean. Jamaica received the smallest number of Indian laborers of any colony within the British West Indies, yet their presence on the island was the subject of much public debate and was described in tourist guides and captured in photographs.3 Carefully staged and taken at close range, the surviving photographs of Indian workers in Jamaica are for the most part arrangements of women, men, and children in various settings on the island. Some show how Indian laborers lived in self-­contained communities (fig. 12.1). Others depict their domestic architecture (figs. 12.2, 12.3), and further images show Indian laborers at work (fig. 12.4) and involved in cultural and religious celebrations (figs. 12.5, 12.6). Taken together, these photographs provide a fragmentary record of a community of immigrants and their settlement into a new society. On one level, they might be seen as straightforwardly documentary, presenting a narrative of colonial labor migration for audiences — ​­tourists, investors, missionary supporters — ​­back in the metropole. However, the photographs also show how Indians strove to maintain connections with their distant home, a connection that travel writers also reported, evocatively describing how in Jamaica, “the

F ig . 1 2 .1   Small village with occupants. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East India Folder, N/​6717, Acc #12399.

F i g . 1 2 .3   Copied by C. Griffiths, East Indian Family, Ram Ram Golden Vale Plantation, Port Antonio, original 1896. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Fig. 1 2 . 2   Rev. W. Baillie, Indian Cooking Outside Her House, 1907. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East India Folder #29857677.

F i g . 1 2 .4 ​ H. Graves, Jamaica, Coolies Working on Banana Plantation, 1898. Stereograph. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

habits of India (at least of its laboring castes) may be studied as well as on the banks of the Ganges or the Indus.” 4 This chapter considers why this connection to an Indian “home” might have been important for readers and viewers when they looked through the tourist guides, postcards, and missionary reports where these images circulated. The question is particularly significant when we consider that these very photographers valued the picturesque. When photographing Afro-­Jamaican workers, for example, this commitment led them to make choices — ​­such as in framing a background and choosing locations — ​­that naturalized and placed black Jamaicans as “natives” belonging to a locale.5 Photographs of South Asians, who by the 1880s and 1890s had gradually become absorbed into Jamaica’s visual and historical landscape, nevertheless establish a clear delineation between the communities of Indians and of Afro-­Jamaicans (rarely are the two groups shown together), with seemingly little attention paid to location. Indians are shown in ways that accentuate their foreign and even exotic status while providing a picturesque sight within the Jamaican landscape. These photographs

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

397

Fig. 1 2 . 5 ​ A. Duperly and Sons, Coolies at Worship. Blackand-white silver gelatin photograph. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

398

embody a paradox: they attempt to position Indians both as permanent members of Jamaican society and as itinerant laborers. These images tell us much about Indian laborers. But this chapter argues that they also document the role of photography in the evocation of a broader imperial history within which we find the specific narrative of a modernizing Victorian Jamaica. I intertwine the story of photographs with the stories of laborers, for the images connect the histories of India and Jamaica, economically, visually, and materially. Such an approach reveals how these images emerged from a colonial ideology wherein the economic mobility of labor provided viewers with material impressions of the connectedness of empire and the modernizing project of commerce. Indian laborers came to Jamaica for mostly economic reasons. Since the 1830s, British industrialization had gradually undermined the Indian domestic market and handicraft industry, throwing millions of people back into the agricultural sector just as it was undergoing its own severe transitions under British

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

taxation and land-­tenure laws. The resulting widespread social displacement and disruption of village life, along with domestic pressures such as famine and traditional debt bondage systems, led to the rise of an increasingly mobile Indian laboring class. Overseas migration was “an extension and overflow of an internal labor fluidity within the colonial Indian economy itself as it adjusted to the British imperial impact. . . . Indian migration was more the product of these ‘push’ factors than ‘pull’ factors.” 6 Thus, this is also a story of how the industrial revolution shaped India’s colonial position as it became a prime importer of British goods and an exporter of products required by the metropolis.7 One of these products was human labor. As Jamaica was a slave-­owning colony, its sugar industry had been the source of large profits for British interests. After emancipation in 1838, this economic investment underpinned the colonies’ continued importance to Britain’s imperial image and policies. However, the labor force required to maintain sugar production in Jamaica was diminishing, and sugar exports fell by 30 percent in the first three years following emancipation.8 Furthermore, since sugar production continued on the slave plantations of Cuba and the United States, West Indian planters faced competition in maintaining their position in the British import market. Plantation managers sought ways of attracting and holding on to workers, but many free black laborers preferred to work their own freeholds rather than stay on

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 399

F i g . 1 2 .6   Nathan and Co. Ltd, Coolie Housay, Sa La Ma (Negril), postcard. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

2/27/18 10:12 AM

the plantations.9 In Jamaica, where many Afro-­Jamaicans remained employed on the sugar plantations, planters complained that their workers were less productive and no longer as easily controlled by coercive tactics.10 The recruitment and shipping of Indian indentured workers was intended to ameliorate the much-­debated “labor problem.” Discussions about indenture began in the 1830s, when attempts were made to import “white Europeans, Blacks from North America and the Caribbean, free Africans from Sierra Leone and Chinese from the mainland.” 11 Indians emerged as the front-­ runners after administrators saw that their importation to Mauritius had been successful. Indians were considered a form of tractable labor. The primary hopes among planters in Jamaica was that Indian immigrants would provide them with a controllable labor force and that regular importation would create a pool of surplus labor, which might in turn lead to a reduction in prevailing wage rates and ultimately restrict and return black laborers to the estates.12 Upon arrival Indians worked on banana and sugar plantations or in livestock pens. They were often put into “gangs,” working alongside Afro-­Jamaicans and supervised by an Indian or Afro-­Jamaican headman or driver. Both groups worked according to a schedule demanded by the plantation or pen. Their specific labors, however, could at times be differentiated by racial stereotypes about physical capacity, such that Afro-­Jamaicans might be given heavier tasks than Indians received. The Indians shipped to Jamaica came from across the subcontinent, including the Northwest Provinces, and Bengal, and some were also recruited from Madras. Most were Hindu and came from the middle to lower castes, but a small minority were Muslim or came from higher castes.13 Originally planned as a form of transient labor for the estates, the Indians who came to Jamaica were expected to move on or to return home, but about 62 percent remained in Jamaica at the expiration of their five-­year contracts.14 Indians were brought across under conditions of servitude and, at least initially, were seen as a stopgap rather than as permanent members of colonial Jamaican society. Yet they became central to the establishment of a new plantation economy that could be controlled and manipulated by planters and owners even after the end of slavery.15 The ocean journey across the kala pani, or “dark water,” was considered a taboo in Hindu culture, signifying danger and an irreversible break with the life-­giving waters of the Ganges essential to the Hindu cycle of reincarnation. It was essential for authorities to convince prospective workers of the benefits that indentureship entailed. Recruiters described the Caribbean as part of the great Raj’s “lands across the sea.” It was “rich and beautiful . . . with the warm sun of Hindustan, where the soil is so fertile that the plantations yield abun-

400

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 400

2/27/18 10:12 AM

dantly to the toil of the labourer whose earnings are trebled.” 16 After agreeing to the move, laborers listened to contracts read out in their own language and were then sent by “forwarding agents” to depots in port towns such as Calcutta. At the depot, they were given medical inspections, their details were entered in government records, and they were given chores to complete. Upon departure, laborers received a new suit of cotton clothing and headgear that seems to have been color-coded to indicate regional origin. While onboard for the long journey of around eleven thousand miles, the Indians often formed family groups, naming each other “shipbrother” or “shipsister.” 17 As many were leaving their families, these new relationships provided Indian workers with support networks and communities that would shape their life on the plantation, too. Tourist guides described the differences between Indians and Afro-­Jamaicans through cultural and physical markers as well as ethnicity: the Indians were artisans, made jewelry, ate differently, lived in fairly enclosed communities, and wore traditional dress.18 While written records of their stories on the island are virtually nonexistent, the photographs discussed here suggest that in maintaining such traditions, the indentured Indian community was able to re-­create aspects of the places they had left behind in the new geography of Jamaica. Photographs are best understood as objects assembled through technological means and formulated according to social constructions. Many scholars have unpacked the complicated relationship between photography and the various registers of British colonialism. They have shown how these mechanically produced images fused together visual and conceptual formations that created tangible connections across an imperial geography in the late nineteenth century.19 Scholars have also made clear that advances in photographic technology intersected in complex ways with networks of commerce in the late nineteenth century within the colonial world. New forms of media, new kinds of travelers, and new kinds of workers were reshaping the ways that local communities and global structures interacted. These interactions were also redefining the colonial landscape, for, as Krista Thompson has pointed out, the intersection of tourism, trade, and photography served to present the island “like a picture” to possible investors and tourists and exerted “a social and spatial control.” 20 Photography provided a systematic way of constructing images that could naturalize and transform observable reality into a readily understood narrative. The invention of celluloid film to replace glass and plates, in 1898, and handheld cameras such as the Brownie greatly facilitated the project of colonial photography and heightened the visual experience of a burgeoning tourist trade by affording greater portability and faster reproduction. In Jamaica, that project was principally invested in creating a tourism industry that would, it

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

401

was hoped, inspire future investment, trade, and settlement of white migrants. Photographs showing well-­kept, orderly tropical scenes in which black Jamaicans are pictured alongside the abundance of the landscape aided this project by highlighting both the picturesque modernity of the island’s subjects and structures and the resonances of scenery and inhabitants.21 Photography thus helped promote, advertise, and in fact shape “a new period of economic prosperity and modernization based on the projected successes of the burgeoning tourism trade.” 22 Indentureship was a powerful, yet also contradictory, symbol of this imperial modernity. On the one hand, it allowed for the creation of a low-­cost, mobile labor force within a pan-­imperial industrial system. On the other, it was a response to what was perceived as a failure in the project to modernize Jamaica through industry. Indentureship presented a colonial hybridity.23 The foreign status of indentured laborers symbolized the British Empire’s interconnected nature, created through commerce and made possible by the mobility of its laboring classes. However, their importation emerged out of serious problems with, and also posed a threat to, this economic modernity. The depiction of Indians’ settlement and adaptation to life in Jamaica made an important contribution to the presentation of this modernizing project, revealing how these laborers could reshape the landscape through visual and material means. 24 While these Indian bodies were positioned within new landscapes, their former cultural identity remained tangible and made a formative contribution to their self-­positioning within the social, and natural, geography of Victorian Jamaica. The central placing of these picturesque South Asian figures in photographs of Jamaica produced meanings that were different from those Thompson has described in relation to Afro-­Jamaican laborers. Indian workers “wore” their connection to the land they left behind in the clothes and jewelry we see adorning their bodies. And Indo-­Caribbean domestic architecture was another powerful materialization of the religious traditions and beliefs Indians brought with them, as archeologists have shown that workers’ homes were often oriented according to Hindu cosmology.25 By contrast, the Middle Passage — ​­the forced transportation of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and beyond — ​ ­involved a process of erasure. Slave traders and plantation owners attempted to force black Jamaicans to abandon their African traditions, although they were never completely successful. In depicting emancipated Afro-­Jamaicans through the trope of the picturesque, photographers naturalized this history of enslavement and erasure by showing black Jamaicans as “native” to the island, like the landscape they were pictured in. The transportation of Indian workers to Jamaica, who brought with them tangible expressions of their own cultural

402

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

identity, told another story, however. These photographs presented a visual narrative that domesticated the ways in which manifestly nonindigenous Indian laborers were reshaping the Jamaican landscape. Figure 12.7 is a carefully crafted study of two young women. Not much larger than a carte de visite, this photograph, titled East Indian Girls Cooking Rice (1890s), is currently attributed to a Wesleyan missionary, the Reverend William Watson Baillie (1863–­1948), who arrived in Jamaica at age twenty-­three. Baillie remained in Jamaica until his death and was known as an expert photographer; his subjects included people, architecture (mostly religious), and landscapes.26 The women crouch decorously, busy with their food preparation. They are outside; scrawling strands of grass cover their toes. The photograph seems to be a silver gelatin print, perhaps washed with sepia, darkening the skin of the girls, brightening the lighter clothes they wear — ​­lahanga (long skirts), choli (blouse), and udhni (small veil or shawl)27 — ​­and making their jewelry glisten. A slight shadow falls underneath them and across the small, round pot that is probably made of clay and cow dung, called a chulha,28 as it cooks on an open-­air wood fire. The photographer must have been standing close, for the women’s bodies, from the strands of hair falling outside their head coverings to the creases in their skin where joints have bent, are artfully clarified. The size of the image

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

F i g . 1 2 .7   William Baillie or H. Atwell, East Indian Women Preparing Rice. Black-and whitesilver gelatin photograph. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

403

Fig. 1 2 . 8 ​ H. Duperly, Imported Indian Coolie Washer Woman, postcard. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East Indian Folder.

404

amplifies the private nature of the scene, already clear in the exclusion of all other signs of human activity. Between the girls and the front edge of the photograph, there is hardly any room. Behind them a corrugated iron fence rises; small bushes and shrubs lean into the blurred space and a large vessel sits on or next to a mound of earth. The distinction between the planes has the effect of firmly pushing the figures into our view, while the space behind them recedes outwards until it is abruptly cropped at the fence. Framed thus, the figures occupy a spatial plane all their own, in which their defined bodies, adorned with bracelets, heavy earrings, necklaces, and voluminous clothes, can both inform and entrance. Tourist guides made a point of describing Indian women in similar ways: “Near him is a coolie woman, who is gorgeously appareled, her small head decorated with gaudy kerchief and ornaments of silver, her lithe body wrapped in parti-­colored garments, broad bracelets of silver and anklets of the same upon her bare arms and brown ankles.” 29 Yet the women in this photograph are also the subject of an ethnographic gaze. Appearing as if out of nowhere, these women occupy a premodern space. Their exotic difference from the presumed viewer — ​­echoed in their accessories and posture — ​­is emphasized by the frontal and profile views and dislocation from the landscape. This visual formula is repeated. Although not as elaborately crafted, other photographs (see figs. 12.2, 12.3, and 12.8) also characterize the female Indian body through accessories (clothing and jewelry) and gendered forms of labor (cooking and washing). In these photographs, an Indian woman, alone or as a central figure within a family or community setting, holds our attention and anchors the photographic composition. The women are also shown in crouching or seated positions and engaged in domestic, rather than industrial, labor, suggesting a relationship between domesticity and difference. Inserted into a rural landscape, they form an exotic feature that poses no threat, rather as a pagoda or a ziggurat might sit unproblematically in a landscape garden. These

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

F ig . 12 . 9   Woman Sitting with Hat. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East Indian Folder #N 10, 915, nd.

photographs, like tourist guides of the same period, use the Indian female body as a picturesque trope. Her jewelry, physical features, and clothes, characteristics of her immigrant status, also form the visual elements of her picturesque quality. These photographs also evoke certain painterly conventions of sentimental genre and landscape painting that emphasized the rustic qualities of peasants by framing them within natural or domestic surroundings, often as an antidote to social and industrial change.30 Here, the framing emphasizes the pictorial qualities of the Indian female body through her charm and her exotic difference. Earlier forms of these ethnographic views can also be found in genre paintings like those by Arthur William Devis (1762–­1822). The small painting Grinding Corn (1792–­1795) was part of a series Devis created to enable British viewers to identify typologies of Indian occupations that presented a preindustrial society through the language of the picturesque. Devis’s work helped formulate a series of colonial genre conventions that would remain important to British modes of representing Indian bodies well into the nineteenth century. He emphasized rustic poses of labor within idyllic picturesque settings that provided nostalgic, anachronistic visions of India, just as industrialization was reconfiguring labor relations and regional landscapes across Britain and across the empire.31 Figure 12.9 is a photograph taken at close range in the style of a studio portrait, although set outside. It is one of the few surviving images of Jamaican East Indians that is neither a familial, laboring, nor village scene. This woman stares back at us, dignified in a dark, ruffled high-­collared dress. Yet her framing is unsettling. She emerges out of the field, close to the front edge of the photograph. She seems literally captured within the photographic frame and flattened by this composition into an ornamental arrangement so that her body provides a backdrop for the pieces of jewelry she wears. As a study of a well-­dressed Indian woman, this photograph incorporates the material markers of an orientalist gaze to present her for visual consumption. Turning this gaze on the Indian female body, photographers showed how Indians brought their homeland with them, evoking their domestication to simultaneously incorporate it as a picturesque addition to the Jamaican landscape.32 This process of incorporation also articulates deeper anxieties. Concerns over the economic impact of indentureship on relations between Indians and black Jamaicans were matched by a concern about the moral and religious influence the immigrants might assert over the newly freed black population. The gendered imbalance of Indian communities — ​­more men were brought across than women — ​­and their non-­Christian religious and cultural affiliations were another source of concern.33 The Baptist Union was one of the main opponents of Indian indentured labor, arguing that the religious culture of Indians

406

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 406

2/27/18 10:12 AM

would be most injurious to the moral and religious improvement of the black Jamaican population.34 Indentured laborers were closely regulated by their employers, local police forces, and the office of the Protector of Immigrants. They were forced to live on plantation estates and given very little freedom. They could not travel without passes and were penalized harshly for infringements and paid little. Fears about their morality and pagan religious beliefs also meant that their living quarters were often carefully segregated from those of Afro-­Jamaicans on the plantations, even though they did work together.35 The scenes shown in the photographs emphasize the separateness of the Indian community and their domesticated and docile nature, while positioning them as premodern inhabitants of a modernizing social world. This temporal positioning is significant, I would argue, for it serves to manage and incorporate Indian laborers within a social order that ultimately provided a justification for the system of indenture itself. While figure 12.4 shows a work gang of Indians performing industrial labor, their bodies, unlike in similar scenes of Afro-­Jamaican laborers (see, for example, fig. 12.10), are almost

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 407

F i g . 1 2 .1 0 ​ A. Duperly and Sons, Sugar Cane Cutters, postcard, 1890–­1900. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

407

2/27/18 10:12 AM

Fig. 1 2 . 11   Coolies Preparing Rice, Jamaica. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

Fi g . 1 2 .1 2   Sugar Cane Juice Press, postcard. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

miniaturized amid the banana trees.36 They are shown at work, incorporated into the plantation landscape, but the photograph also highlights the difference between their style of laboring and that typical of Afro-­Jamaican workers. Other images that depict Indians at work (figs. 12.11, 12.12)37 in plantation settings emphasize various bodily poses (e.g., squatting, crouching) and forms of labor (e.g., grinding rice or pressing sugarcane) that evoke a preindustrial or artisanal world. In their focus on these bodily postures, these photographs may be referencing another visual trope: “the spectacle of craft labor.” 38 Saloni Mathur and Tim Barringer have shown that by 1886 the figure of the Indian artisan and Indian village scenes presented an embedded critique of British industrialization and a desire for the preservation of Indian arts and crafts that was in tension with colonial narratives of progress.39 Despite the inherently industrialized nature of indentured labor, these images promote Indian labor as simplistic, traditional, and picturesque. This construction is echoed in other group compositions. In postcards and photographs probably taken by the Duperly family firm, such as figure 12.13, men and women are shown at close range, in clothing — ​­turbans, lungis, or a simple loincloth — ​­that emphasizes their foreign status. In figure 12.14, the juxtaposition of Indians with Afro-­Jamaicans makes explicit the different temporal spaces inhabited by these laborers: while the Afro-­Jamaican women are shown dressed for market, the semidressed and traditionally garbed bodies of the Indian family provide a scene of domesticity redolent of primitive times. While other domestic and familial scenes (figs. 12.1, 12.9, 12.15) show that Indian laborers did dress in more European types of clothing, most of the images are composed like first-­contact scenes. Framed by natural settings — ​­washing in the river or standing in front of thatched cottages — ​­the figures stare back at the camera with almost no expression. Through the figures’ positions, the careful spacing of their bodies, and their distance from the camera, a sense of immediacy is created. It is as if the photographer has just walked into an unknown village, and inhabitants have emerged from their huts, or stopped their work, to look back at him. This composition cleverly serves to construct the photographer, and thus the viewer, as a figure of modernity, with the technology of the modern gaze. Indians bring with them their traditional ways, but these habits and customs are carefully contained on the plantation. In meeting the gaze of the photographer, these Indians — ​­idealized as preindustrial in a rural setting that, in reality, drove the island’s industrial production — ​­are shown as if just entering modernity. The rustic bodies of Indian peasants, and of Indian women in particular, also figure in paintings by the Trinidadian artist Michel-­Jean Cazabon (1813–­1888).

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

409

Fig. 1 2 . 13 ​ A. Duperly and Sons, East Indians in Jamaica: Family in Front of Palm Trees. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East India folder, neg #6913.

F i g . 1 2 .1 4  A. Duperly and Sons, Greetings from Jamaica, Coolies, postcard. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East India folder, #6913.

Cazabon created a series of scenes depicting “coolies” in Trinidad — ​­“Coolie Group” and “Coolie Woman” (1880). Now owned by V. S. Naipaul, these paintings were displayed at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London in 1886.40 Thematizing the transplantation of bodies from one colonial space to another, Cazabon’s composition is a genre scene set on a plantation. Framed by vernacular architecture and the landscape, these bodies are incorporated into a Caribbean locale as domesticated subjects tied to the plantation. In Jamaica, these village scenes do not suggest an alternative to, or a critique of, the social order (unlike similar scenes in Britain itself and in other parts of the British Empire) but rather are presented as spaces — ​­and individuals — ​­that can be seamlessly incorporated into the industrial modernity of the island.41 Thus these views, while highlighting the ethnic difference of Indians and their culture, ultimately present them as consonant with the culture of industrializing Jamaica. It is worth noting here that these photographs also reference what Saloni Mathur has termed “native views.” 42 Native views — ​­produced in India and circulated as postcards in Europe and America by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — ​­drew on both anthropological photography of India and picturesque conventions that revolved around the body of the Indian peasant and artisan. These Jamaican images also draw on the ethnographical conventions of works such as J. Forbes Watson’s The People of India (1875), created to satisfy British interest in the Indian caste system and its organization and F i g . 1 2 .1 5 ​ A. Duperly and Sons, Group of East Indians in a village, Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, East India folder, #7680.

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

411

ethnic variety. In Watson’s project, the Indian body and material objects were tied ontologically, as archival evidence of the characteristics of those on view.43 Such depictions provided a way of quantifying and categorizing Indian society into scientific certainty.44 They signified a form of pictorial modernity, making the inscrutable mysteries of India accessible. Seeing India in Jamaica was to see images of malleable, docile, and domesticated Indian laborers. Although Indians did find ways to rebel against economic exploitation, they were controlled through a harsh system of penalties designed to maximize profits. Their presence was regulated, with the aim of raising the profitability of Afro-­Jamaican labor through the pressure of market forces.45 Their incorporation into the Jamaican landscape highlighted the modernity and effectiveness of colonial economics. Yet contemporary readings of the representation of Indians in Jamaica also reveal the tenuous nature of the modern imperial project, for the empire’s very structure was shaped by those it sought to shape. Indian laborers could draw on this hybrid positioning to reformulate, if even for a short time, the system that incorporated them into the economic landscape of Jamaica. In figure 12.5, Coolies at Worship, we are shown a group of Indians arranged around a Tadjah, Taziya, or Hussay float. Hussay — ​­also known as Muharram — ​­is a ritual commemoration and mourning of the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandsons. Traditionally a Shia Muslim festival, transplanted to the Caribbean it became a cultural festival that was celebrated by Indian laborers regardless of their religion. In this sense, we might think of it as creolized: “a distinctive product of a meeting and interpenetration of diverse meanings and elements, new and old, on Jamaican soil.” 46 The frozen tableau of Coolies at Worship, in which docile bodies perform their religious affiliation, is offset by the frenzied activity of the postcard titled Coolie Housay (fig.  12.6). This photograph evokes what many contemporaneous written descriptions of Hussay, from across India and the British Caribbean, tended to emphasize: the chaotic nature of the procession, the disorientating noise, and the violent gesticulations of the worshipers.47 As well as being a religious commemoration, Hussay emerged as an expression of workers’ Indian heritage and their connection to a land elsewhere. Its celebration is continued by twenty-­first-­century Indo-­Jamaicans for whom India remains an important, imagined, homeland. It is also intriguing that representations of Hussay worshipers are included in this photographic archive, for this aspect of Indian culture unsettled colonial administrators. While in layout and composition these photographs seem to function ethnographically, categorizing and explaining, they also evoke something of the way Indian workers consciously made use of, and performed, their hybrid status. For it is

412

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 412

2/27/18 10:12 AM

not labor or even recreation that is being depicted here but rather a form of ritual expression: a performance. Religion provided these workers with a tangible and spectacular mode of expression. In Jamaica, initially Hussay was banned from entering the towns near the estates for fear that it might cause a disturbance. While as a result Hussay was abandoned on many estates, it did continue in modified form on others, and reports on the festival in Jamaica emphasize the disruptions that followed in its wake.48 Hussay involved worshipers following the large, ornate Tadjah toward a river or body of water. Along the way, worshipers engaged in ritual expressions that included drumming and fighting. The latter served as a form of physical remembrance of the warriors being commemorated. Accounts of Hussay from India and the Caribbean often focused on this aspect of the procession, for it was loud and disorderly and could become violent. Once the Tadjah reached a body of water, it was thrown in, signifying a burial of sorts for the effigies of the Prophet’s grandsons held within it. Through its performative structure the Hussay festival offered Indians a way to make their mark on the Jamaican landscape. Indians created a specific geography as they celebrated around the Tadjah, their bodies marking the ground with footsteps, sweat, and sometimes even blood. Moreover their presence was voluble, spectacular, and sometimes oppositional. Their ritual became a reconstruction of the new spaces they found themselves in, even as it was an expression of self-­identity and community. There are similarities here with the Afro-­Caribbean festival of Jonkonnu, in terms of the spectacular processional nature of both festivals and their symbolic commemoration of a cultural or religious history.49 In creating a performative physical geography, these worshipers also invoked a cosmology that strengthened their bond with a faraway homeland even as it confirmed their place within the landscape of this new world. Furthermore, while initially Afro-­Jamaicans were banned from joining in, they too became regular participants in the festival, and so Hussay became, and remains, a space for the intersection of Indian and Afro-­Jamaican communities and their musical expressions.50 The importance of religion to various communities living and working in Jamaica during this period is a theme that runs throughout this volume. And these photographs of Hussay provide a fitting conclusion to the narrative I have plotted here, for they suggest how religion gave these workers a way to maintain and perform their identities that was derived from their own experiences of transplantation. Photographers were able to portray indentured Indians as “transient” laborers, incorporating them into a colonial system of industry. But this narrative — ​­one that drew on Indians’ foreign status as much as on their amenability to becoming domesticated New World laborers — ​­could also facil-

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

413

itate another positioning. For indentured Indians, as for the Afro-­Jamaican community, religion provided a tangible connection to the past and a mode of refiguring the present. Through rituals and acts of worship, through architecture and fashion, in the articulation of deeply held epistemologies concerning time, space, and identity, these women and men created a sensorial religious experience that gave meaning to, and drew power from, the physical conditions of their position in this new world. The visual culture of South Asians in Jamaica remains an important, and understudied, component of Jamaica’s history. While further explicating the story of the country’s industrial economic system at the turn of the century, it also leaves us with a much larger picture of the colonial commercial networks that connected a modernizing Jamaica with other parts of the British Empire. Finally, then, it leaves us with a visual testimony of the tangible ways in which women and men — ​­shaped by these circuits of labor, movement, and industry — ​­made their mark in the social and economic landscape of Victorian Jamaica.

Notes 1. Swinton (Captain) and Mrs. Swinton, Journal of a Voyage with Coolie Emigrants, from Calcutta to Trinidad (London: A. W. Bennett, 1859), 15. 2. Verene Shepherd, Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845–­ 1950 (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994), 53. “East Indians” was a term used to differentiate these laborers from the West Indian inhabitants of the Caribbean. “Coolie” was a derogatory term for Indians within the British Empire. 3. Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–­1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Chinese indentured laborers were also brought across to the Caribbean but in much smaller numbers, and I have found very little visual representation of them in nineteenth-­century Jamaican photography. 4. Edgar Mayhew Bacon and Eugene Murray Aaron, The New Jamaica (New York: Walbridge and Co., 1890), 99. This work is one of a series of tourist guides in circulation on the island and in Britain during the late nineteenth century, and I have yet to find any more information about its authors. According to The Royal Scottish Geographical Magazine (1892, 229), “Evidently written as a guide to visitors to the Jamaica Exhibition, this little work contains more, and more varied, information than its purpose would lead one to expect. . . . They have managed to produce an eminently readable geographical account of one of our oldest and most interesting colonies.” 5. See further Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 6. Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 26. See also Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); Morris T.

414

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Morris, “The Growth of Large-­scale Industry to 1947,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c. 1751–­c. 1970, ed. Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 551–­676; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–­1920 (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1974). 7. Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 24. See also David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996). 8. Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 40. 9. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–­1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 55–­80, 115–­42. 10. Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 22–­39. 11. For discussion of this debate, see Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 22–­30. The quote appears on 26. 12. Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 66. 13. Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 43–­84. 14. Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 91. 15. As it was conceived, the system purported to allow Indian laborers liberty outside their working hours and protect them from ill usage, harsh penalties, and the withholding of wages. However, at its inception the Anti-­Slavery Society expressed its opposition to the indentureship program for the “immorality attending the system, the inducements resorted to and the heavy mortality” (“Coolies in British Colonies,” Anti-­Slavery Reporter 357 [ Jan.–­Feb. 1907]: 13). 16. Anonymous, “The Coolie Emigrant,” in Chambers’ Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts series 6, 8 (March 11, 1905): 225–­27, quoted in Brij V. Lal, “Bound for the Colonies: A View of Indian Indentured Emigration in 1905,” Journal of Pacific History 34, no. 3 (1999): 308. See also Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Picador, 2009). 17. Dabydeen and Samaroo, Across the Dark Waters, 5. 18. See Edgar Mayhew Bacon and Eugene Murray-­Aaron, The New Jamaica: Describing the Island, Explaining Its Conditions of Life and Growth and Discussing Its Mercantile Relations and Potential Importance (New York: Walbridge, 1890). Accounts of Trinidad and Guiana include similar descriptions. For a detailed study, see Amar Wahab, “Mapping West Indian Orientalism: Race, Gender and Representations of Indentured Coolies in the Nineteenth-­Century British West Indies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 283–­311; Patricia Mohammed, “The Asian Other in the Caribbean,” Small Axe 29 ( July 2009): 57–­7 1. 19. See, for example, Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–­1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1992); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher Burghard Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Thompson,

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

415

An Eye for the Tropics; Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Christine Barthe, “Models and Norms: The Relationship Between Ethnographic Photographs and Sculpture,” in Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–­1905), Ethnographic Sculptor, ed. Laure de Margerie and Edouard Papet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 93–­113; Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, eds., Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009); Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004); James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Judith Mara Gutman, Through Indian Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Laure de Margerie and Edouard Papet, eds., Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–­1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). 20. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 17. 21. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 47. 22. On the materiality of the photograph, its portability, and the collecting of photographs in albums, see Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 29. 23. Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1, 1985): 144–­65. I am drawing on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as a problematic of colonial representation, one that presents, or allows, another kind of knowledge to enter the dominant discourse. 24. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 81–­85. 25. Douglas Armstrong and Mark W. Hauser, “An East Indian Laborers’ Household in Nineteenth-­Century Jamaica: A Case for Understanding Cultural Diversity through Space, Chronology, and Material Analysis,” Historical Archaeology 38, no. 2 ( January 1, 2004): 9–­21. 26. Laxmi Mansingh and Ajai Mansingh, Home Away from Home: 150 Years of Indian Presence in Jamaica 1845–­1995 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999); and Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 151–­81. Missionary societies took an active interest in East Indians. It seems unlikely, however, that Baillie took this photograph. From conversations with Wayne Modest, former director of museums, Institute of Jamaica, and David Boxer, former chief curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica, it seems possible that this photograph was taken by another photographer, Henry Atwell, although this hypothesis is unverified. This photograph is housed in a private album, and the history of the album requires further research. Many of Baillie’s photographs are held in the Methodist Missionary Society archive at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London, and some were reproduced as postcards. 27. These may also be Western-­style skirts and headdresses, or variants of Western-­ style and Indian clothing, as Indians were issued with, and forced to change into, Western working clothes — ​­trousers, longs skirts, and head cloths — ​­before they disembarked; see Mansingh and Mansingh, Home Away from Home, 54.

416

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

28. Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2007), 93. The pattern of daily meals based on these rations was as follows: breakfast: black tea, roti with fried or curried vegetables or a chokha (roasted eggplant); midday meal: boiled rice with dhal and bhaji (vegetables); evening meal: roti and tarcari (curry) with black tea. Weekly food rations given to East Indian indentured laborers working on plantations across the Caribbean were made up of rice, dhal, sugar, tea, dried fish, atta (flour), salt, oil, and 250 grams of mutton at weekends. While lunch (roti and vegetables) was usually carried from home, when this meal was cooked on the worksite (as may be the case with this photograph), it generally consisted of rice and vegetables. Mansingh and Mansingh (Home Away from Home, 62) notes, “Using ginger, tamarind and turmeric already growing in Jamaica, these East Indian indentured laborers introduced other vegetables and herbs such as cloves.” Metal pots and cooking utensils were also used at this time; nonetheless, the photograph suggests that cooking outside was not an uncommon practice among East Indians, although it was also done in a rasoi, a shed adjoining their living quarters; see Mansingh and Mansingh, Home Away from Home, 61. 29. Mansingh and Mansingh, Home Away from Home, 58. 30. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–­1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–­1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989). 31. Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture: 1770–­1825 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1979), 246–­58. Onboard the Antelope on his way to China, Devis was shipwrecked. Marooned for a short time on Oroolong, one of the Pelew Islands, east of Borneo, he sketched images for the king, Abba Thule, and one of the king’s wives, Ludee. Archer asserts that Devis’s brief shipwreck and stay on the Pelew Islands perhaps influenced his interest in the lives of Indian craftspeople and village life: “He was greatly liked for his easy manners, frankness, generosity and good humor. His style of paintings had for many of the British a humane charm and relaxed elegance that made some of them prefer him even to Zoffany. . . . [He was fairly successful] for he was a more accomplished and imaginative portraitist than either Hickey or Smith; and he charged less for his work than Zoffany.” His portraits “subtly exploit[ed] his already favorite idioms for trees, figures and backgrounds”; Neil Alexander, “The Economy of Human Life: Arthur William Devis and the Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures of Bengal,” Connoisseur (October 1979): 120–­21. It is unclear exactly why Devis painted these scenes. Presumably he felt there was an interest in Indian village scenes, an interest that Indian newspaper reports on the project seem to support. However, once in London, the series did not seem to meet with the success he hoped for. Only a few of the twenty-­six paintings were ever realized as engravings, although Devis exhibited three paintings at Royal Academy exhibitions. 32. For more on the idea of “incorporation,” see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–­1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

417

33. The “Indian Woman” question was of particular concern in Trinidad and Tobago, where the gender imbalance was more pronounced. See Noor Kumar Mahabir, East Indian Women of Trinidad and Tobago: An Annotated Bibliography with Photographs and Ephemera (San Juan, Trinidad: Chakra, 1992); Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 34. Verene Shepherd, “The Dynamics of Afro-­Jamaican–East Indian Relations in Jamaica, 1845–­1945: A Preliminary Analysis,” Caribbean Quarterly 32, nos. 3–​4 (Sept.–­ Dec. 1986): 15. See also Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 65–­78. 35. As they moved off the estates from the 1880s, this racial separation was gradually eroded; see Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 19. 36. This image was part of a series of stereographs produced by the Universal Photo Art Company, accessed September 13, 2011, http://yellowstonestereoviews​.com/​­publishers/​ uphotoart​.html. The Universal Photo Art Company was one of several business titles under which photographer Carlton Harlow Graves sold his photographs late in his career. He was the son of Jesse Albert Graves, an important early photographer who was based in the Delaware Water Gap area of Pennsylvania from around 1860 to 1880 and produced some five hundred generally fine scenic views of the western part of the state. Carlton learned the photographic art from his father and moved to Philadelphia to begin producing on his own in about 1880. In his early years, he seems to have taken all the views that he published, but he soon began to buy or pirate images from others. Stereoviews issued under his own name are extremely rare. At its peak, the Universal Photo Art Company seems to have been a rather substantial outfit. In addition to the headquarters and production facilities in Philadelphia, there was a western branch in Naperville, Illinois, where F. A. Messerschmidt was general manager. By the late 1890s, C. H. Graves’s company had become a major publisher, offering “Art Nouveau Stereographs” on light-­gray curved mounts. His trade list offered excellent views of hunting scenes, Jamaica, Japan, Java, New York City, Palestine, and other subjects. To compete with low-­priced lithographs and copies, Graves offered his “Universal Series” or “Universal Views” on black mounts with no credit to himself. The number and the title are in the negative and the images were sold at a lower price than the regular “Art Nouveau” issues. Graves also offered boxed sets, but they were not sold in the quantities achieved by the Keystone View Company and H. C. White. The company seems to have been active until about 1910, when its stock of negatives was sold to Underwood & Underwood and presumably went from there to the Keystone View Company with the rest of the Underwood photos. 37. These images were probably taken by the Duperly family firm (for more information on this firm, see David Boxer, Duperly: An Exhibition of Works by Adolphe Duperly, His Sons and Grandsons Mounted in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of His Birth [Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica, 2001]) and may have been reproduced as postcards presenting “views” of Jamaica for travelers. 38. Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

418

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

39. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 27–­51; Barringer, Men at Work, 243–­98. 40. Wahab, “Mapping West Indian Orientalism,” 284. 41. Barringer, Men at Work, 243–­98. 42. Saloni Mathur, India by Design, 27–­51. 43. For more on this relationship, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (winter 1986): 7; see also Pinney, Camera Indica. 44. Christopher Pinney, “Underneath the Banyan Tree: William Crooke and Photographic Depictions of Caste,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–­1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). 45. Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 43–­85. 46. Kenneth Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye: African-­Jamaican Festivities in the Time of Belisario,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007), 122. For more on the creolization process see especially Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Richard D. E. Burton, Afro–­Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 47. Guha Shankar, “Imagining India(ns): Cultural Performance and Diaspora Politics in Jamaica” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2003), 51–­71; Dabydeen and Samaroo, Across the Dark Waters; Rebecca M. Brown, “Abject to Object: Colonialism Preserved through the Imagery of Muharram,” res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (April 1, 2003): 203–­17. 48. Shankar, “Imagining India(ns),” 51–­7 1. 49. For more on the ritual and the reconfiguration of space, see Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). For more on Jonkonnu, see Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye,” 121–­37. 50. Shankar, “Imagining India(ns),” 124. Shankar also argues that Hussay allowed Indo-­Jamaicans a certain mobility to produce and contest local identities within their own community, rather than only in opposition to the colonial authorities.

South Asians in Victorian Jamaica

419

C H A P T E R 13

Victorian Furniture in Jamaica JOHN M. CROSS

In 1834 the Marquess of Sligo, governor of Jamaica, commissioned the cabinetmaker Ralph Turnbull to make him a games table, which he would take back to his family seat in Westport, Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland. This commission marked the high point in the fortunes of the Turnbull family as furniture makers. Such recognition by the most senior colonial official on the island offered confirmation that their furniture, and Jamaican furniture in general, had reached a point of technical, decorative, and stylistic maturity: it was fit for a governor’s residence. Jamaica’s furniture history is closely bound up with the history of furniture making in Britain. To trace this history is to reveal the complex entanglement of metropole and colony, to uncover the movement of styles, materials, expertise, and ideas that flowed across the British Empire. As early as the 1720s, for example, Jamaica commenced exporting mahogany to Britain. The discovery and utilization of this material for furniture making, its properties, its abundance, and the low cost of its import would revolutionize the furniture trade both in Britain and in Jamaica.1 By the late eighteenth century, Jamaica’s exports of mahogany had significantly diminished, but there remained sufficient mahogany and other types of indigenous timber to support the local trade, and this use of indigenous timber was a key feature of Jamaican furniture throughout the nineteenth century.2 Similarly, from the late seventeenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was a steady influx into Jamaica of furniture makers, first from London and then from across the British Isles. These makers had been apprenticed to some of Britain’s finest workshops, and their relocation to Jamaica had a marked influence on the quality and design of Jamaican furniture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.3 British furniture makers were complemented by German Moravians who headed to Jamaica throughout much of the eighteenth century for new opportunities. Later, at the end of the century, French furniture makers joined the mix, fleeing after the revolution in Saint Domingue (which declared independence as the Republic of Haiti in 1804). While French influence is identifiable in the forms of Jamaican nineteenth-­ century furniture, the dominant stylistic influence remained British.

Furniture makers relocated from the metropole to the island in search of wealthy clients with a taste for high-­quality furniture and the resources to purchase it. So style-conscious were the colonial elite in Jamaica at the time that the first recorded copy found outside of Britain of the source book The Gentleman and Cabinet-­Maker’s Director, published in 1754 by the celebrated English furniture maker and designer Thomas Chippendale, had appeared in Jamaica by 1757.4 The colonial elite consumer demanded, and was supplied with, the latest fashions and trends in furniture design, which heightened the need for talented furniture makers and encouraged the rapid transfer of design from London to the colony. Among these talented furniture makers were not only immigrants from the metropole but also highly skilled enslaved and free black craftsmen, who, at the time, were the predominant workforce on the island. In this chapter I discuss the ways in which the complex entanglement of Jamaica and Britain, within a colonial regime, and the intricacies of the power relationships between furniture makers of different racial and political subjectivities, shaped the emergence of a distinctively Jamaican style of furniture during the Victorian period. This chapter will demonstrate that by the beginning of Victoria’s reign, furniture makers on the island had begun to develop and adapt their own “Jamaican style.” This style utilized, and was inspired by, the natural resources of the island. Moreover, I will argue, it incorporated elements of African visual culture through the involvement of craftsmen of African descent in furniture making. Furniture produced on the island during the Victorian period, then, is a celebration of the complex sociocultural montage that is Jamaica.

Named Furniture Makers The furniture trade developed slowly, and in industrialized countries it did not adopt mechanization speedily. The trade in nineteenth-­century Jamaica was no different, and evidence of the large-­scale use of wood machines is scant. Workshops tended to be relatively small; their owners, and the consumers of their products, were white, but their workforce was multiethnic. Judging by the identical turnings and standard sizes of components visible on a range of furniture, some workshops appear to have been large enough to have had a division of labor. These companies probably made furniture in small batches. However, it is also apparent that most of the furniture makers of Jamaica were small concerns, employing two or three craftsmen who used techniques that had not altered much in generations. Despite its economic vibrancy, especially during a time of economic uncertainty and anxiety about the decline of empire, the Jamaican

Victorian Furniture in Jamaica

421

furniture trade during the nineteenth century was never going to produce the kind of revenue generated by the cash crops of the past, and neither was it going to offer the colony economic salvation for the future. However, the rich history of furniture making on the island, equal to any in the British Empire, constitutes a significant economic and cultural contribution. The Turnbull family, with several brothers who worked in the furniture trade, came to the island from either north-­east England or south-­east Scotland in the early years of the nineteenth century.5 The exact date of Ralph Turnbull’s arrival in Jamaica is unknown, but an advertisement that appeared in the Colonial Standard on February 28, 1850, refers to “Ralph Turnbull & Sons established 35 years,” suggesting that Turnbull had arrived in Kingston in around 1815. Ralph may have arrived in Jamaica with his brothers Thomas and Cuthbert, who were possibly his partners in the early 1820s. By 1823 Cuthbert, Thomas, and Ralph had established separate cabinetmaking workshops, with each brother advertising that he worked independently.6 Ralph Turnbull is known today because, unlike his brothers, he marked his furniture (fig. 13.1). Extant Turnbull furniture includes boxes, games tables, and a sideboard, items that are typically veneered with an array of tropical woods on the top surface. On the more elaborate pieces, this decoration extends to the interior and is occasionally accompanied by an illustrated key identifying the veneers that is usually written and signed in Ralph Turnbull’s own hand (fig. 13.2). Such pieces indicate that Turnbull had a keen interest in the timbers he was working with. Indeed, in one of his advertisements, he discusses the use of local timbers and appeals for “any new or unnamed specimens of wood, the leaf, flower, and fruit of the tree,” noting that he “has now an excellent opportunity (by the assistance of a scientific Gentlemen) of ascertaining its real botanical name.” 7 All the furniture that bears the Ralph Turnbull label has various specimen timbers veneered on the top surface. Turnbull attempted to create a distinctly and self-­consciously Jamaican furniture, made specific by the use of local material. The localization of furniture styles and patterns is a key theme throughout this chapter. Among Ralph Turnbull’s main competitors were William and James Pitkin. The Pitkin brothers may have had a business relationship with Cuthbert Turnbull, Ralph Turnbull’s brother. Even if the Pitkins and Turnbulls were not related by trade, they certainly were though marriage — ​­in 1837 Cuthbert Turnbull’s son John married William Pitkin’s daughter Mary — ​­indicative of the close web of trade and kinship involving Kingston artisan families. While little is known of the Pitkin brothers, it is clear that these two cabinetmakers were excellent craftsmen and produced quality work that matched

422

John m. Cross

F ig . 13 . 1   Ralph Turnbull’s trade label found on a small yacca wood box. Note the final line that states Ralph Turnbull is not connected to any other establishment. This alludes to the fact he and his two brothers, Thomas and Cuthbert, were no longer working together but rather as three separate workshops.

F ig . 13 . 2   Handwritten label for Ralph Turnbull specimen table. Photograph courtesy of Robert Barker.

Fig. 1 3 . 3 ​ Handwritten key for a writing box by Ralph Turnbull identifying the different specimen timbers used. Reproduced with kind permission of Robert Barker.

424

and even surpassed that of Ralph and Thomas Turnbull. Only a handful of objects that have the Pitkin label have been discovered (fig. 13.4). The marriage of John Turnbull to William Pitkin’s daughter in 1837 suggests that the Pitkin firm had been in operation for some years before that date and therefore would have been in direct competition with Ralph and Thomas Turnbull. The labeled Pitkin objects are fine examples of the cabinetmaker’s craft, again with the use of specimen woods as veneers, which illustrates an excellent knowledge of timbers and veneering techniques as well as the fashionable interest at the time in localizing furniture. The Pitkins’ work surpasses that of Ralph Turnbull in the execution of carvings and moldings, which are sharp and crisp in their definition. The Pitkin brothers’ objects are indicative of the superb workmanship that was available in Jamaica. In addition to surviving labeled examples from the Pitkin workshops, other unlabeled pieces, probably from the Turnbull or Pitkin workshop, also suggest that high-­quality, locally produced furniture was available to the Jamaican elite in the 1830s (fig. 13.5).

John m. Cross

F i g . 1 3.4   William and James Pitkin, cabinet and label, circa 1840. Private collection. William and James Pitkin were contemporaries of the Turnbulls, and their work, while rarer, is labeled, too.

F i g . 1 3.5   The spectacular specimen wood circular table is thought to be by the Pitkin brothers, as it carries many of the features that appear on labeled objects attributed to them.

Fig. 1 3 . 6   Broken rail with Henry Page’s stamp. Private collection.

In addition to Ralph Turnbull and William and James Pitkin, one other name is synonymous with nineteenth-­century Jamaican furniture: Henry Page. While Turnbull and the Pitkins worked in Kingston, Page lived and worked on the other side of the island, in Falmouth. His work can be recognized because, like Turnbull and Pitkin, he labeled his furniture. In fact, unlike other furniture makers who used a paper label to identify their furniture, Page developed a way of imprinting his name into the surface of the furniture, as if he wanted to ensure that this form of identification could not be erased. Page is also of interest in that he was a cabinetmaker who, it has been suggested, was formerly enslaved. But Page remains a remarkably elusive character. A speculative account by Ray Fremmer appeared in the Jamaican newspaper the Sunday Gleaner in 1967, but no evidence can be found to corroborate its claims.8 While documentary evidence is lacking, however, we do have a handful of objects stamped or labeled H. Page (fig. 13.6).9 We can establish from church records that Henry Page lived in Falmouth, probably on Trelawny Street, near other members of his family.10 Even Page’s date of birth is uncertain. Fremmer states Page was enslaved until 1838. However, there are no manumission records or indeed any other records bearing his name. It is more likely that he was born in the 1830s. He seems to have died around 1871.11 The known pieces, stamped by Page, consist of a bed, several sideboards or washstands and commodes, tilt-­top tables, and a bureau. Page’s furniture broadly follows an eclectic Victorian style and employs mainly mahogany. Significantly, however, Page’s work is strongly inflected with a distinctive Jamaican repertoire of motifs and decoration. Two side tables bear his stamp: one is a washstand and the other a sideboard. Both have turned feet that support a platform and two turned columns, upon which sits a constructed carcass with five drawers, two at either end and one larger central drawer (fig. 13.7). The drawers at either end have turned handles and cock beading to frame the drawers. The middle section

426

John m. Cross

F i g . 1 3.7  ​Washstand with fretted decoration in the center section, circa 1860s. Courtesy of National ­Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of ­Jamaica.

F i g . 1 3.8   Bed, stamped by Henry Page, circa 1860. It has the characteristic Victorian Solomonic diminishing columns and high relief C scrolls applied to the paneled headboard. Reproduced with the kind permission of a Jamaican private collector.

is a deeper drawer with no handle and is surrounded by a complicated shaped and applied surround. This scalloped decoration and type of work appear to have been typical of the Falmouth area. These items illustrate that Page’s furniture was sophisticated: he turned, carved, veneered, and inlaid his furniture, and these skills would have required training. No records have been uncovered to date that indicate where he learned his trade. The turned bed that is stamped and attributed to Page illustrates again this diverse range of furniture-­making skills (fig. 13.8). The turned posts are diminishing Solomonic columns and the veneered headboard has carved C scrolls instead of a simple fretted shaped apron, as in the sideboards. It bears a broken swan-­neck pediment with foliage and turned discs that collectively demonstrate the virtuosity of their maker. While we acknowledge that there is only fragmentary evidence to suggest that Henry Page was black, it is important to account for this possibility. Very little is known about black craftsmen, or their products, either in pre-­or postemancipation Jamaica. Unless further evidence emerges, the identification of Page as black must remain speculative; the possibility of a black Jamaican occupying such a prominent place in the landscape of Jamaican furniture production makes us reexamine the history of skilled craftsmanship in Victorian Jamaica. In what follows I want to suggest ways in which a close reading of surviving objects might open up a way of thinking about a distinctly Jamaican tradition in furniture making and the important role that black craftsmanship played in this tradition.

The Creolization of Furniture Several other pieces of furniture have been found with the maker’s label attached. Names such as Soulette and Williams have been identified from these labels, but other than their names little else can be ascertained. In these early Victorian objects, as in the work of Page, Pitkin, and Turnbull, can be seen a Jamaican creolization of styles, combined with the persistence of European forms. In the furniture of the mid-­nineteenth century, we begin to see a more profound creolization that represents not only American and European traditions but also the cultures of the formerly enslaved. A distinct style emerges, and the further into the nineteenth century we move, the more Jamaican and the less European it becomes. This later nineteenth-­century furniture carried on the tradition of using local materials, generally following Western forms of object but adding ornamentation that was as distinctive as the flora and fauna of Jamaica. The most distinctive feature of Jamaican nineteenth-­century furniture is the overwhelming dominance of mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) as the primary

428

John m. Cross

F i g . 1 3.9   Victorian Windsor chair. With its relatively narrow seat, the Windsor chair was always made from mahogany, and in the nineteenth century it tended to be high-­back (shown here) or comb-­back. The low-­back, so-­called horseshoe, version tends to be from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reproduced with kind permission of Brett Ashmeade-­Hawkins.

and secondary material. Other woods such as mahoe, the very dense greenwood, or the highly figured and yellow yacca, sometimes referred to as West Indian satinwood, were also used, but these are exceptional. Furniture was generally constructed of mahogany, and decorative features such as turned legs and carved posts were part of this structure. Jamaican furniture makers were and remain today lucky enough to be able to use mahogany timber, which is sufficiently stable to allow construction of the most complicated pieces of design, turns, and carves to the wish of the craftsman, and, finally, gives great color and depth to the object. Turning and carving were regular features of Jamaican chairs, tables, and beds in the nineteenth century. The vernacular Windsor chair that was a fixed item in the Victorian household, with its turned legs and arm and back supports, was a staple for the Jamaican furniture maker (fig. 13.9).12 More sophisticated craftsmen would use this turning skill in the making of substantial four-­poster beds. These beds are monuments to the manual dexterity of their makers, readily demonstrated in the double Solomonic turnings that are found

Victorian Furniture in Jamaica

429

F i g . 1 3.1 0   A four-­poster bed with double-­turned Solomonic columns to the bed posts and head and foot board that demonstrates the extraordinary skill of the Jamaican turner and carver. Mahogany, circa 1870s. Private collection.

F ig . 13 . 11   A four-­poster bed with diminishing Solomonic columns and drum turnings. Note the highly carved headboard with its floral design. Reproduced with kind permission of Prospect Plantation.

F ig . 13 . 12   This headboard (at Greenwood House) made in mahogany is typical of its type, with its central leaves splaying outward on the top edge. Other designs include large flower heads that are crosshatched. The spirals on this headboard are a feature that occurs in many headboards but rarely on other genres of furniture. This motif has been linked with a Maasai symbol, from the eunoto ceremony. Its position signifies that a young man has earned the right to become an elder and therefore to be heard in his community, and consequently is able to get married. Courtesy of Greenwood Great House.

on the headboard and footboard and occasionally also on the posts (fig. 13.10). In no other Caribbean island were beds made using such large sections of wood or turned and carved to such extremes. The four posts are usually identical, and the finest examples have turned Solomonic columns, some of which diminish in diameter as the viewer’s gaze ascends the column. Other designs can include drum turnings, wherein the carved foliage wraps around the turned mahogany and then splays outward, and the very finest are extraordinary testaments to the furniture maker’s craft (fig. 13.11). The headboards are usually horizontal mahogany planks in construction, although in some examples, such as the Henry Page bed, the headboard is constrained in a mortise and tenon frame with panels. The plank-­constructed headboards were usually decorated with incised or low-­relief carvings that illustrate the flora and fauna of the island. The carved designs were always big and bold, with large leaves commonly featured, and occasionally this depiction was accompanied by a central flower motif created with cross-­hatching (fig. 13.12). Although most Victorian furniture in Jamaica was European in form, some items were uniquely Jamaican in their design. The Jamaican sideboard raised on two and occasionally one turned column is a good example. Sometimes these pieces of furniture, generally 4 feet high, are as much as 10 feet long (fig. 13.13). The decoration on the front apron typically has a simple reeded molding along its full length. A peculiarly Jamaican feature is the positioning of the drawers on the sides of the apron, rather than on the front.

Victorian Furniture in Jamaica

431

F ig . 1 3.1 3   Enormous sideboards, this one nearly nine feet in length, with reeded moulded decoration stand on either one or two columns. Typically they are placed in the dining room; they usually have drawers on one or both ends but rarely on the front apron. Circa 1850s, courtesy of Greenwood Great House.

F ig . 1 3.1 4   The central decoration seen on the backboard of this sofa is typically found in the Falmouth area, often on sofas and headboards. Mahogany, circa 1870s. Courtesy of the late Hon. Maurice William Facey and Mrs. Valerie Facey.

Afro-­Jamaican Motifs The form of Jamaican furniture generally followed Western models, and it is usually the decoration that is a Jamaican creolization. Extensive field research has identified one motif that variously appears incised, veneered, or carved on numerous types of furniture, from sofas to side tables from the north of the island, around Falmouth, and illustrates a rare regional variation in decoration (fig. 13.14). The motif comes in several variations but generally is symmetrical with scrolls at either end that terminate in turned roundels. The central panel is often veneered with a different timber from the rest of the object and is arched at the top and sweeps under the scrolls at either end. It is unclear what this design represents, but it is distinct from pieces of furniture from this parish. Many such motifs in the decoration of Jamaican furniture cannot be explained

F i g . 1 3.1 6   Detail of circular motif between drawers on simple cupboard.

F ig . 13 . 15   This simple cupboard, with its gothic arched doors, also has an X carved into the drawer fronts, a common motif in Congolese artifacts. Between the two drawers is a circular motif that has sections of intertwining circles; this is an Adrinka symbol used by the Ashanti in Ghana and represents pride and greatness. Both motifs can be found on a variety of furniture in Jamaica. Courtesy of the National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica.

F ig . 1 3.1 7  ​Congolese religious artifact with X incised decoration, a motif that can be seen on several pieces of furniture in Jamaica. From Musée du Congo, Notes Analytiques sur les Collections Ethnographiques vol. 1 (Bruxelles, 1906). Courtesy of New York Public Library, Schomburg Center Research and Reference Division.

by researching and examining European and American sources. I propose that instead of referring to Western motifs, we look to African stylistic traditions. In a hybrid relationship with European forms and styles, such influences create a more distinctive Jamaican decorative motif.13 Early catalogs of the products of African craftsmanship illustrate work from distinct geographical regions.14 For example, incised carved decoration can be found in wooden objects produced by Congolese and other western and central African societies.15 Congolese objects and a cupboard found in Jamaica (figs.  13.15 and 13.16) have similar incised decoration. The cupboard, with its European gothic arched doors, includes an X motif on the left and right drawers. The same motif appears on the Congolese woodwork (fig. 13.17). A similar motif appears on artifacts found in former slave archaeological sites in South Carolina. Both might refer to Congolese cosmological signs that Robert Farris Thompson has described as being different aspects of the spirit — ​­birth, life, death, and rebirth.16 On the same Jamaican cupboard, we find between the drawers a circular incised design that is also found on several other pieces of furniture, including buffets, seats, and sewing tables. The several intertwining circles needed to produce this motif require geometric planning. The result is a common African motif — ​­an Adrinka symbol used by the Ashanti in Ghana to represent pride and greatness.17 A rare example of an object wherein symbolism is executed that manifestly alters the form of the object is a sofa or daybed that has scrolling arms at either end (fig. 13.18). The sofa displays a very high relief version of a Vitruvian scroll. It could have been made by craftsmen who had, or whose ancestors had, endured the plight of having to lie on a ship next to the waves.18 The tranquility of resting or sleeping on the sofa juxtaposed with the traumatic ordeal of being transferred from one world to another makes for a fascinating object. Many examples seem to record this coming together of cultures in the form and decoration of furniture found on the island. Comparison between a Congolese religious artifact (see fig. 13.19) and the posts of a Jamaican-­made four-­poster bed demonstrates that the divided Solomonic (or “barley sugar”) and drum turnings on the bed, while typically thought to be Western in origin, can also be considered an African form of decoration (see fig. 13.11). The inlaid motif on a side table (fig. 13.20) probably dating from the 1870s or 1880s has

434

John m. Cross

Fi g . 1 3.1 8   Sofas and daybeds are often stylized in Jamaica, usually following American and European models of design. This daybed is an extraordinary example, and its carved Vitruvian scroll, or waves, on the back could be a highly evocative symbol of an ocean journey, traveling from one life to another. Mahogany, circa 1880s. Private collection.

F ig . 13 . 19   This religious artifact with drum turnings is similar in detail to what we find on Jamaican four-­poster beds. From Musée du Congo, Notes Analytiques sur les Collections Ethnographiques, vol. 1 (Bruxelles, 1906). Courtesy of New York Public Library, Schomburg Center Research and Reference Division.

Fi g . 1 3.2 0   This unusual inlay comes from the drawer front of a sideboard with a carved backboard. It could be Adrinka and the moon, with the smaller stars representing loyalty, mercy, and trust and the larger star denoting that we are all God’s children. Probably 1870s or 1880s.

the symbol of the moon and stars, with a large star in the center seemingly following the ghost marks of a handle and an escutcheon. This pattern of inlay appears to combine two Adinkra symbols.19 In Adinkra cosmology, the moon and the smaller stars were symbolic of loyalty, mercy, and trust, and the larger star denoted that all are God’s children. The decoration on this piece of furniture was clearly executed by a craftsman of African descent, and its message may be one of compassion or hope. Furniture made in Victorian Jamaica bears the imprint of a wide range of external influences.20 However, to say that Victorian Jamaican furniture is merely an eclectic montage of other cultures is to deny the Jamaicanism of the furniture produced in this period. The greatest influence on the developing Jamaican style was not only the complex mixture of peoples and traditions but also the island itself. The beauty of the nature that surrounds everyday life, the flora and fauna, whether plants, trees, birds, or other wildlife, were all depicted in the furniture, for they were and remain a constant source of inspiration.

Notes Without the support of several individuals and institutions, the research undertaken for this chapter would not have been so rich or so complete. I would particularly like to thank the Furniture History Society’s Tom Ingram Fund and the Faculty of Architecture, Art, and Design at the London Metropolitan University for their financial support. Particular thanks are due to those who have allowed their objects to be included in this chapter and to the many others who have allowed me access to their furniture during the course of my research. Also to be heartily thanked are Robert Barker, Peter Carson, Sean Cemm, Brett Ashmeade-­Hawkins, the late Maurice Facey, Valerie Facey, Wayne Modest, and Steve Solomon. 1. John Cross, “The Changing of the Timber Merchant in Eighteenth Century London,” Furniture History 30 (1994): 57–­64. 2. Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinet Dictionary (London: W. Smith, 1803). 3. K. E. Ingram, “Furniture and the Plantation: Further Light on the West Indian Trade of an English Furniture Firm in the Eighteenth Century,” Furniture History 28 (1992): 42–­97; John Cross, “Furniture of Colonial Jamaica, 1700–­1836” (PhD diss., Royal College of Art, 2003). 4. Robert B. Barker, “Chippendale’s ‘Director’ in Mid Eighteenth Century Jamaica” (lecture resume), Chippendale Society Newsletter 100 (April 2005), http://www​.­thechippen​ dalesociety.co.uk/​newsletters/​NL100​.htm. 5. John Cross, “Ralph, Cuthbert and Thomas Turnbull: A Nineteenth-­Century Jamaican Cabinet-­Making Family,” Furniture History 39 (2003): 109–­20. 6. The subsequent history of the family and the workshop is complex. By 1839 Ralph Turnbull had employed his brother Thomas, and it would appear from the lack of any

436

John m. Cross

further advertisements from the 1830s onward that his other brother, Cuthbert, had died. This left Ralph senior and Thomas supervising the workshop with the help of Ralph’s two sons. The workshop also employed a substantial number of other furniture makers. Ralph’s wife died in 1838, his eldest son, Ralph junior, died in 1844 (see Donald Lindo, Time Tells Our Story: The History of the Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society, 1844–­1994 [ Jamaica, Ian Randle, 1997], 63), and six months later his other son, Robert, died at age twenty-­one. Ralph was left with only his brother Thomas and his last surviving child, Isabella, who married a William Lee the following year. Little is known about William Lee, but he was certainly a cabinetmaker and probably worked in his father-­in-­law’s workshop before his marriage to Isabella. William Lee eventually became a business partner and probably took over the company on Ralph Turnbull’s death, in 1863. For Turnbull advertisements, see Kingston Chronicle, January 8 and April 12, 1825. Thomas Turnbull advertised independently, stating he now resided at the corner of Harbour Street and Peter’s Lane, as opposed to Ralph Turnbull, who at the time was located in Port Royal Street Another of the Turnbull brothers, Cuthbert, advertised that he was “re-­moved” to premises situated on Port Royal and Church Street Cuthbert Turnbull’s advertisement insisted that he had “no connection with any other house.” Kingston Chronicle, November 20, 1824. 7. The Watchman, co 142/​2, July 30, 1836. National Archives, Kew. 8. Ray Fremmer, Sunday Gleaner, July 23, 1967. 9. The stamps are always found on the tops of rails or the top of drawer fronts. The paper labels were sometimes stuck onto pieces that he worked on but may not have made, such as Mr. Fairchild’s toilet commode that was “repaired.” See Fremmer, n.p. 10. Falmouth Baptist Church, Register of Baptisms, October 4, 1832, Constantine Henry Page; September 24, 1837, Henry Page. Accessed at Family History Center, Kensington Gore, London, United Kingdom, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints. 11. Fremmer states that Page had a partner and that she was well provided for, with home and land, but he does not give her name, nor does he tell us how the date 1871 for Page’s death was ascertained. 12. John Cross, “The Transference of Skills and Styles from American to Jamaican Furniture Trade during the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 30, no. 2 (2004): 49–­73. 13. Patricia Stamford, “The Archaeology of African-­American Slavery and Material Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 ( Jan. 1996): 87–­114. 14. The objects discussed were located in Congolese and Angolan museums and are illustrated in catalogs of these museums: Musée du Congo, Notes analytiques sur les collections ethnographiques du Musée du Congo, vol. 1 (Brussels: Musée du Congo, 1902–­1906); Marie-­Louise Bastin, Subsidios Para a Historia, Arqueologia e Etnografia dos Povos da Lunda (Lisbon: Diamang, 1961). 15. Musée du Congo, Notes analytiques, 297, and plates lvi and lvii. 16. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-­American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 108–­16.

Victorian Furniture in Jamaica

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 437

437

2/27/18 10:12 AM

17. Heike Owusu, African Symbols (New York: Sterling, 2000), 66–­67. 18. Stamford, “Archaeology,” 101–­2. 19. Owusu, African Symbols, 210. 20. John Cross, “Defining Vernacular Furniture in Colonial Jamaica,” in Vernacular Furniture: Context, Form, Analysis, ed. Miko Vasques Dias (Amsterdam: Stichting Ebenist, 2009), 148–­56.

438

John m. Cross

C H A P T E R 14

Jamaica’s Victorian Architectures, 1834–­1907 JAMES ROBERTSON

Nikolaus Pevsner characterizes the buildings of Queen Victoria’s reign as “the most visible memorials of the most prosperous century of Britain.” 1 Architectural fashions shifted in the years between the Queen’s accession in 1837 and her death in 1901; even if late Georgian classicism proved remarkably resilient, it was challenged by passionate revivals of various medieval styles formulae, while by the end of her reign, further echoes of Renaissance Italy and then the Arts and Crafts movements had inspired revivals, too (fig. 14.1). Despite all the Victorians’ furious arguments over styles and structural techniques, the period’s major buildings embodied the wealth and ambition of the world’s foremost industrial and imperial power. By contrast, in impoverished Jamaica most new buildings erected during Victoria’s reign remained overshadowed by the architecture of sugar’s heyday. “Victorian” still proved a distinct phase in the history of building production in Jamaica, with the Queen’s long reign spanning several key transitions.2 At her accession in 1837, the cash that local slaveholders had received in 1834 as compensation for their emancipated slaves was funding a small building boom, while six years after her death, the Kingston earthquake of 1907 prompted substantial revisions to the island’s building code that would replace rigid brick structures with flexible wood-­f ramed, single-­story residential buildings.3 Between these chronological bookends, changes in the Jamaican economy helped reshape what was erected, who commissioned buildings, and what materials were used. Individuals who commissioned, planned, and erected ambitious buildings in Jamaica then responded to the successive stylistic orthodoxies and technological innovations that continued to shape discussions of architecture in Britain. Even if few secular buildings displayed all the architectural vocabularies then current in Britain, plenty of Jamaican builders adopted some of these elements and used several of the new construction materials that metropolitan builders developed. The major buildings undertaken across this period reflected wider economic and political trends. The economic constraints were immediate, as the island’s

F ig . 1 4 .1   Tower Street before 1907. Ballie Album, courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. As one of Georgian Jamaica’s persistent legacies, the neoclassical Wesleyan Chapel of 1823, built as “the noblest place of worship in the British West Indies,” continued to overshadow the brick Victorian Wesleyan School.

downturn from the mid-­1840s through to the mid-­1860s saw few major buildings proposed or undertaken. The gap appears particularly abrupt, as the fires that swept through Kingston’s business section in 1843, 1862, 1882, and 1907 erased a significant proportion of the most visible new construction undertaken in mid-­nineteenth-­century Jamaica. In such contexts, what official projects were there proved very visible and often had more riding on them than simply getting the job done. Until 1865 the Assembly of Jamaica, the plantocracy’s established vehicle for advancing projects, retained considerable initiative, making substantial building grants to churches and chapels through the 1830s and 1840s and voting though the new Jamaica Railway Company, while hindering governor-­ supported efforts to build a model penitentiary in the 1840s and early 1850s and blocking a scandalously poorly planned tramway in the early 1860s.4 Under Crown Colony government, governors faced fewer constraints in initiating public works projects. That said, furious complaints in 1870 about the mishandling of

440

James Robertson

Governor John Peter Grant’s ambitious Rio Cobre Dam and irrigation scheme prompted some of the most articulate critiques of the newly established Crown Colony system, while in the late 1880s local enthusiasm for the expansion of the Jamaica Railway successfully overrode the then governor’s caution about its proposers’ rosy funding estimates.5 Across the whole of Victoria’s long reign, choices about what and when to build highlighted changes for Jamaican society. This chapter examines factors that influenced building styles and practices between 1834 and 1907 to consider how architecture developed in Victorian-­ era Jamaica. Eighteenth-­century Jamaica had imported building craftsmen, building ideas, building materials, and even some prefabricated buildings from Britain and North America. All these practices continued under Victoria, but even with the continued presence of a cadre of professionally trained British engineers among the garrison’s Royal Engineer contingent, the balance still shifted. Fewer European artisans immigrated, while the types and sources of many imported building materials altered, too.6 In the 1830s, ships coming out to Jamaica from Britain to pick up cargoes of sugar provided direct contacts, carrying as ballast the London-­made yellow stock bricks that in 1830 were used to construct the Presbyterian St. Andrew’s Kirk in Falmouth and in 1837 to rebuild the Anglican parish church at Black River on the other side of the island.7 Earlier transshipments had included the components for the pioneering prefabricated cast-­iron bridge across the Rio Cobre at Spanish Town, built in 1803, the iron-­framed Old Naval Hospital, erected in Port Royal in 1817, and the suspension bridge over the Yallahs River at Easington, constructed in 1826.8 They also carried marble monuments extolling deceased landowners and merchants. The abrupt fall in sugar prices in Britain during the 1840s not only hammered incomes in a sugar-­growing island but also left skippers less willing to offer low outbound shipping rates to secure a return cargo. These changes were pervasive: from the late 1840s the size of the imported memorials lining Jamaican church walls shrank. The gulf widened. In Britain hope persisted that Jamaica would offer a market for prefabricated structures, demonstrated by a report in the Illustrated London News in 1844 of an “Iron Church for Jamaica,” with cast-­iron pillars, a wrought-­iron roof frame, and an exterior of corrugated iron (fig. 14.2.)9 By the time these came into production, the collapse of sugar prices meant a £1,000 price tag was too high for Jamaican congregations. Occasional individuals still imported display items, such as the 1887 fountain with a decorated cast-­iron dome that stands in front of the Savanna-­la-­Mar court house, but direct transfers from Britain were no longer as central to private builders as during King Sugar’s eighteenth-­century heyday.10

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

441

Fig. 1 4 . 2   Engraver unknown, Iron Church for Jamaica, from Illustrated London News (September 28, 1844). Yale Center for British Art, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Artisans and Architects, Contractors and Engineers From the mid-­1840s onward, British innovations reached the island at a strikingly slower rate than in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.11 In earlier centuries individual planters had constructed classical showpieces while a stream of British-­trained artisans — ​­masons, bricklayers, carpenters — ​ ­migrated to Jamaica. The three Williams brothers, stonemasons from Wales, took indentures in 1778 and 1785, married Jamaicans, and between 1790 and 1801 constructed the elaborate arcade that houses John Bacon’s statue of Admiral Rodney in Spanish Town’s main square.12 The immigration of trained craftsmen and imports of materials continued from the 1790s into the 1830s, with new public buildings dutifully canonical. Shop and house plans, on the other hand, increasingly “broke British design rules” to adapt to the island’s climate and society.13 After emancipation, estates laid off their expensive white artisans, whose employment no longer reduced the property’s liability for a deficiency tax calculated on the ratio of white staff to enslaved Africans.14 Ambitious skilled building workers leaving Britain went elsewhere. Individual artisans continued to immigrate to Jamaica, including the Englishman recruited to operate the Public Works Department’s new brick-­making machine in 1872, and William Eloin Sant (1851–­1912), an English builder from suburban Fulham who relocated to Jamaica for his health in 1875 and in 1884 designed the “small but handsome” German Synagogue in downtown Kingston, whose prominent

442

James Robertson

decorative brickwork paralleled the Queen Anne–­style buildings current in London. Such migrants could still thrive — ​­Sant subsequently went into partnership with a Jamaican civil engineer, establishing a successful firm of building contractors — ​­but they were far less common than half a century before.15 Most building craftsmen trained locally. In 1872 a description of a skilled stone­ mason employed on a bridge-­building project at Jericho in St. Ann’s noted he had worked with a master builder in Spanish Town in the 1840s, suggesting the importance of gaining experience in regional centers.16 By the 1870s the newly established government industrial schools began training carpenters and masons, providing an alternative start for the next generation.17 Three architects from Britain were recruited to Victorian Jamaica. In the 1830s, faced with crowds of five hundred would-­be worshipers overflowing their church, the Anglican rector and churchwardens of Titchfield in the north coast parish of Portland could not “effect a contract with any builder on the island” and so “engaged the services of Annesley Voysey, esquire, a gentleman of superior scientific attainments,” to superintend the building of a new parish church, Christ Church, at Port Antonio (fig. 14.3). Voysey (ca. 1794–­1839) designed an impressive brick church with a prominent tower to stand on a hill overlooking the harbor. Its walls featured yellow cut-­stone corner quoins, tall window arches,

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 443

F i g . 1 4.3   Annesley Voysey, S. W. View of Christ Church, Port Antonio, Jamaica, 1840. Lithograph by Day and Haghe, 1843. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, P/​99/II H.

2/27/18 10:12 AM

and stone doorframes, all invoking English rural precedents and contrasting with the white cut-­stone with classical detailing that had been employed for most of the island’s eighteenth-­century parish churches. He began to develop a local practice, designing further public works and churches, preparing plans for bridges, a chapel, a court house, and a jail for the parish of Portland, and completing another commission for the neighboring parish of St. George, along with a chapel at Belle Castle for a local clergyman and two more chapels for the Church Missionary Society, one at the nearby Moore Town Maroon community and a second for Rural Hill. Voysey, an architect and surveyor who had practiced in London, died of fever before seeing the new church’s interior completed or these other projects — ​­for which he had yet to be paid — ​­begun or, indeed, establishing a wider practice and taking pupils.18 Twenty years later, in April 1859, after a Jamaican law was passed in 1857 to pay off individual parishes’ accumulated debts and a supplementary act in 1858 gave the governor authority to devote any remaining funds “for the expense of parochial works . . . and for such purposes to procure specifications, plans and estimates from the Colonial Engineer and Architect,” an engineer and architect disembarked at Kingston. Robert Barlow Gardiner (1818–­1859) was an associate of Britain’s Institution of Civil Engineers who had already worked for railway companies in England, Brazil, and Portugal. He showed considerable initiative in setting up an office — ​­he improvised drawing tables from packing cases — ​­but tight budgets limited his options. He was dead by the middle of June.19 This office never developed into the central planning department that had shaped building design in other British colonies.20 Thirty years later, in 1890, the civil staff of the garrison’s Royal Engineer contingent included three assistant surveyors; one of them, Edward James Bridges (1861–­1936), was a recently elected associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and also undertook some civilian work.21 None of these direct transplants of metropolitan expertise was sufficient to transfer current British architectural practices to Jamaica. Instead, local practices prevailed as Jamaican-­born contractors undertook most commissions. Some, like Daniel Saa (1784–­1842), were free people of color, in his case the son of a white bricklayer and a free mulatto woman. In the 1820s Saa followed his father as he repaired public buildings in his native Spanish Town and elsewhere across the island and subsequently secured larger tenders. Saa flourished, as his election as a churchwarden for St. Catherine’s in 1832 testifies.22 Construction remained a potentially profitable sector, even during the prolonged economic downturn of the 1850s and early 1860s. Charles Price (ca. 1815–­1865), an African Jamaican master carpenter from Kingston, became a building contractor based in Morant Bay, served as an assemblyman in 1849,

444

James Robertson

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 444

2/27/18 10:12 AM

1854, and 1860, before losing his seat in the backlash against the tramway scandal, was a Kingston common councillor in 1854, and sat as a vestryman in St. Thomas in the East. Low bids won Price commissions in Kingston to repair the public hospital and lunatic asylum, along with the court house in Port Royal, and to build a bridge in St. Thomas. Price’s tardy payments to his employees contributed to a personal unpopularity that in 1865 made him one of the few nonwhites killed by the angry crowd that attacked a vestry meeting in Morant Bay.23 The early 1860s, when Jamaica’s trading partners in the United States were enmeshed in civil war, were harsh for the island’s poor.24 However, the wartime absence of imported supplies, along with another major fire in downtown Kingston in 1862, provided the context for the decision by Charles P. Lazarus (1836–­1917), a Jamaica-­born engineer, to establish his West End Foundry Company in Kingston in 1863. Lazarus was the contractor for several nongovernment building projects in late nineteenth-­century Kingston, while his foundry’s prosperity sustained a political career that culminated with his becoming mayor of Kingston. Over in Spanish Town, an engineering apprenticeship followed by a stint running a local construction company provided a start for another local politician, though as an African Jamaican, Joseph Milward Gordon (1853–­ 1893) faced contention and his early death at the age of forty cut short his career.25 In a later Victorian generation, Braham T. Judah (1871–­1954) followed a colonial professional’s career path that led from Beckford and Smith’s, the grammar school in Spanish Town, to a two-­year pupilage with the assistant superintendent of the Public Works Department, after which he moved to Kingston, in 1894, to work for the city’s engineers. He studied engineering through a Pennsylvania correspondence college and passed his associate exams from Britain’s Institution of Civil Engineers in 1905. After the 1907 earthquake Judah designed replacement buildings for St. George’s College, the Jesuit high school in downtown Kingston.26

A Boom in Constructing Religious Buildings: 1830s–­1840s The colony’s financial problems in the opening years of Queen Victoria’s reign would not have been immediately apparent in the island’s public buildings. Jamaica already possessed a wide range of civic structures, funded by bumper exports during the Napoleonic wars. There were some domestic projects, primarily town houses but also some at Marlie Mount, northeast of Old Harbour, where Anthony Bravo, an ambitious assemblyman, employed apprentices from his estates and local materials to construct “one of the most handsome and substantial mansions in the island” to demonstrate the prosperity that free labor

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 445

445

2/27/18 10:12 AM

Fig. 1 4 . 4   Marlie Mount, circa 1837, demolished. 1998; photograph courtesy of Jamaica National Heritage Trust.

446

would bring to the island (fig. 14.4). By 1847, with drought parching his estate, he faced ruin.27 The major sphere for new building was ecclesiastical. Hoping to convert the ex-­slaves, the Jamaica Assembly lavished money on churches and chapels. The island’s fast-­growing nonconformist congregations needed to replace the thirteen chapels that vengeful white mobs had destroyed after the so-­called Baptist War, or Christmas Rebellion, of 1831–­1832 and to construct additional chapels to house the new congregations springing up after emancipation. Initially these buildings resembled the burned-­out chapels they replaced: brick preaching boxes with some neoclassical detailing in a format English nonconformist chapels had employed for a century — ​­though in rural cases the “brick” might well be Spanish Wall, or wood-­f ramed panels of burned stone, brick, and rubble.28 During the 1830s most denominations in Britain and many in North America adopted medievalizing Gothic idioms for the new churches and chapels they constructed (fig. 14.5).29 Local builders in Jamaica followed this trend, with even moderately ambitious chapels like the New Broughton Presbyterian Church in rural Manchester, erected in 1834, incorporating neo-­ medieval round-­arched windows to add a properly sacred look.30 Anglicans’ desire to compete with the nonconformists in evangelizing the

James Robertson

F ig . 14 . 5   Brown’s Town Chapel, Jamaica, 1835–­36, from Five Views of Baptist Chapels &c in Jamaica (1840). National Gallery of Jamaica. In this engraving the building appears to be brick but was constructed of so-­called Spanish Wall, with rubble filling wooden frames. This light structure meant that tree-­trunk wooden pillars could support the second-­story chapel over the large open-­sided Sunday school on the ground floor.

F ig . 14 . 6   Holy Trinity, Montego Bay, 1849, from “Views of Churches, Rectories and other Diocesan Buildings, 1931,” f. 49. The Holy Trinity was built to ease the pressure for space at the town’s eighteenth-­century Anglican parish church. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

F ig . 14 . 7   Free Methodist Chapel, Claremont, St. Ann, 1894. 2011 photograph courtesy of Denice O. Ramharrack. This shows the reuse of an assortment of architectural features in this nog-­ built chapel.

448

newly freed slaves prompted the construction of additional churches, too. Individual Anglican chapels built during the 1820s had already incorporated the fairly superficial Gothic detailing already current in England.31 However, within twenty years, the lightly medievalized buildings of the 1820s and 1830s appeared outdated to metropolitan visitors, who increasingly assumed that properly neo-­ Gothic structures were the only suitable setting for worship. Gothic became normative during the 1830s and 1840s, shaping such new constructions as the ambitious Wesleyan Coke Chapel, erected in Kingston in 1838 (see object lesson 5), and the more stylistically correct brick Holy Trinity Church, built in 1849 as a second Anglican chapel in Montego Bay (fig. 14.6). Within twenty years, not only the older eighteenth-­century neoclassical parish churches but even the lightly medievalized chapels from the 1820s and 1830s appeared unsuitable — ​­and not just because, as the visiting Anthony Trollope grumbled in 1859, the pews in Kingston’s mid-­eighteenth-­century parish church left him insufficient space to genuflect but also because their plastered and mahogany paneled interiors no longer appeared “improving.” 32 For both Anglicans and nonconformists, the acceptable styles for church building remained tied to shifting metropolitan orthodoxies. Jamaica’s early Victorian churches and chapels provided new landmarks, reshaping transforming local skylines as impoverished plantations fell into ruin. In 1854, when the colony’s governor undertook a tour of the island, he noted both newly erected chapels and abandoned estates with toppling factory chimneys.33 The church and chapel building projects of the 1830s and 1840s provided employment for local artisans and offered models to neighboring congregations. In 1890, when the Anglican congregation in rural Highgate in St. Mary planned to replace their wooden chapel with a new stone building, the example they selected was the Anglican church at Brown’s Town, while the Free Methodist chapel at Claremont, St. Ann, built in 1894 of nog (a wood-­f ramed

James Robertson

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 448

2/27/18 10:12 AM

lime and clay mix), drew on established visual vocabularies to incorporate pointed windows typical of the 1830s and 1840s along with the prominent quoins from older neoclassical churches (fig. 14.7).34 Local worshipers appreciated individual design elements but were not constrained by British stylistic orthodoxies.

Secular Buildings, 1830s–­1850s: Alternative Trajectories The church-­building boom during the first decade of Victoria’s reign paralleled several ambitious civil engineering projects. In 1833, a Royal Engineer officer’s design for a new barracks at Lucea used imported ironwork but looked to current West Indian practices for its gallery and jalousie blinds. The project’s contractor was Jamaican, and so were its bricks.35 More extensive technological innovations demanded more substantial imports. Erecting a 115-­foot-­high cast-­iron lighthouse at Morant Point in 1841–­1842 cost £11,608, nearly three times the initial estimate of £4,600, and required a supervising engineer to be shipped in from Britain, along with all the prefabricated components.36 The mid-­1840s saw the island’s assembly promoting internal improvements to revive a struggling economy. The Jamaica Railway Company was this policy’s most substantial beneficiary. This joint-­stock company, floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1843 at the height of the decade’s railway boom, constructed a line from Kingston to Spanish Town and then north to Angels before it ran through its capital. Its initial buildings included brick stations in West Kingston and Spanish Town and a bridge across the Rio Cobre, which were comparable to provincial construction during Britain’s own railway-­building boom in the 1830s and 1840s.37 When the global economic bubble burst in 1845, Jamaica proved particularly vulnerable, as sugar had just lost its protective tariffs. Afterward, governors and assemblymen still fantasized about ambitious industrial projects that would jump-­start the island’s economy, but cash remained scarce. Further industrial architecture was stunted after efforts to mine copper prompted the construction of substantial mining complexes into the early 1850s, which then failed to pay, leaving further ruins in the bush.38 There were few public building commissions between 1850 and 1865, apart from two innovative suspension bridges, whose erection near Falmouth in 1851 was supervised by their English designer, James Dredge (1794–­1863), some upgrades to the cross-­island Junction Road, and a new lighthouse at Plumb Point, built in 1853 to help define the approaches to Kingston Harbour.39 The St. Catherine parish vestry’s attempt to build a massive Anglican cathedral in Spanish Town, which did continue into the early 1850s, proved an exception that demonstrated why

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

449

F ig . 1 4 .8   John Calvert, incomplete reconstruction of the eighteenth-­ century St. Catherine Parish Church as a properly Gothic cathedral, 1850s. Photograph by James Robertson. The juncture of the new gothic chancel and the eighteenth-­century nave reverses standard practice, as the chancel stands taller than the nave, suggesting the ambitious scale of this “restoration.” Both sections were in brick, but the new chancel incorporates gothic-­style arches and decorative stone pillars, too. The ends of the chancel brickwork were left projecting, ready for further walls to be keyed in when the old nave was demolished, but the money ran out and work never recommenced. Unfinished work of this type is unusual in a Victorian-­era cathedral, though it appears to be the most authentically “medieval” feature of the whole project.

F i g . 1 4.9   Port Royal Street, Kingston, in 1859, from Edward Bean Underhill, The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition (1862). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

no other major construction schemes were undertaken. The plan was initiated at the tail end of the church-­building movement, with ground broken in 1848 despite limited funds and cholera in the town. A proposal to stabilize the chancel presented an opportunity to try to rebuild the whole eighteenth-­century parish church as a far larger and properly Gothic cathedral (fig.  14.8). John Calvert, the organist, drew up the plans, constructed a wooden model, and oversaw construction. He and the Spanish Town–­based contractors handled the building work effectively. Once the project overran its overoptimistic initial estimates, however, the parish vestry and then the Jamaica Assembly found paying the bills hard as the colony’s revenues collapsed. Plans to continue the project and rebuild the tower and nave went no further.40 It was always easy for visitors to dismiss colonial construction. Tropical building designs were functional for residents but failed to impress outsiders. Recalling Kingston in the mid-­1850s, a former deputy postmaster-­general commented that “the wooden houses with their shingled roofs and seedy looking verandahs, could never have worn an air of smartness,” downgrading the practical advantages of wooden roofing shingles and verandahs alike. Another transient, the Baptist Missionary Society’s secretary Edward Bean Underhill, complained in 1859 that Kingston’s dilapidated houses “gave an aspect of desolation to the town” (fig. 14.9).41 Official buildings were constructed on shoestring budgets, prompting opinionated visitors like Anthony Trollope to criticize their “ugliness,” protesting “that it is singular that any man who would put bricks and stones and timber together should put them together in such hideous forms as those which are to be seen here.” He did not specify what he disliked, but

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

451

Fig. 1 4 . 10 ​ Nineteenth-­century window “coolers” from Spanish Town. Photograph courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, Georgian Society. These are not depicted in sketches and engravings of Jamaica in the 1830s but begin to be illustrated from the early 1860s.

creole buildings, with their lime-­washed yellow façades dominated by balconies and jalousie blinds, appeared unfamiliar — ​­and were therefore wrong. By the mid-­nineteenth century the increasing use of Demerara coolers (cool boxes), protruding box-­shades that sheltered windows from the sun’s glare, demonstrated the island’s openness to regional innovations, but the distinctive profile they added to Jamaican façades heightened contrasts with Europe (fig. 14.10).42

Later Victorian Developments, 1866–­1907 The transition to Crown Colony government in 1866 and the stabilization of government funds from 1869 permitted the Public Works Department to undertake a succession of infrastructure projects.43 It recruited a local staff who drafted plans for updating the island’s infrastructure, designing local police stations and prisons alongside parish court houses, post offices, local hospitals, and dispensaries, which were then erected by local contractors.44 The 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s also saw the erection of iron-­framed public markets and a number of elaborate market clocks across Jamaica. These buildings provided foci for local pride, with a later generation praising their gabled roofs and towers as “Linstead Gothic.” In 1872, however, when the director of public works

452

James Robertson

described a project as “the erection of a Market Shed at Morant Bay,” he hardly considered such modest structures to be “architecture” at all.45 Public works never adopted a single style, so the revenue office in Port Antonio built in 1885 could return to older forms, wrapping neo-­Regency iron balconies around a Georgian-­proportioned brick building (fig. 14.11).46 With the removal of the colony’s capital from Spanish Town to Kingston in 1872, many new public commissions were in Kingston. Some, like the gas works of 1877, flaunted Gothic details in an attempt at stylistic flair. Meanwhile, disestablishment left the Anglican Church prepared to sell property: the Bishop’s Lodge, four miles outside Kingston, was purchased by the government in 1872 and between 1874 and 1876 transformed into the governor’s official residence, with a swimming pool and new upper story, while a dining-­ hall-­cum-­ballroom replaced the chapel.47 Unlike the mid-­eighteenth-­century King’s House in Spanish Town, this commission aimed neither to impress nor to set new building trends: according to an American visitor in 1906, it was “simply a big, comfortable West Indian house, of wide spreading verandahs, with one side buried in shrubbery.” 48 An English visitor’s description of this

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

F i g . 1 4.1 1   Plan of a new revenue office in Port Antonio, 1885. The Jamaica Archives and Record Department, G14/​47. A Regency façade for a late Victorian resort town.

453

King’s House stressed its conformity to local usages: “It as well as all the large houses in Jamaica resembles those in Barbados, being generally square, built of stone, standing on blocks, hollow underneath for circulation of air, & with . . . round opening[s] into long airy darkened verandahs or balconies closed in by green blinds which can be shut either completely or partially, the object being to keep out the sun & let in the wind. The floors are black smooth & polished & covered over with loose mats.” 49 Private enterprise could display considerably more flair. In 1879, after the parish of St. Andrew had sold its eighteenth-­century rectory to George Stiebel, a self-­made millionaire, Stiebel commissioned Charles Lazarus to tear down the old residence and build a two-­story mansion, Devon House, completed in 1881.50 This Italianate brick and wood suburban showpiece rode out the earthquake of 1907 (fig. 14.12). Starting in the 1870s, substantial private building commissions were erected in Kingston, whose downtown, rebuilt after a fire in December 1882, housed several ambitious stores. New urban landmarks included the Colonial Bank, the Institute of Jamaica, and the Myrtle Bank Hotel.51 In 1890 the Italianate additions sketched for the Myrtle Bank Hotel by the British-­trained Edward Bridges, the project’s superintending architect, cited nearby parallels, with the

F ig . 1 4 .1 2   Charles Lazarus, Devon House, 1881. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, Concannon Collection. Italianate splendor in St. Andrews parish.

454

James Robertson

F ig . 14 . 13   Constant Spring Hotel, St. Andrews, 1890, from Mary F. Bradford, Side Trips in Jamaica (1902). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. An eclectic mixture of styles for a new hotel purpose-­built “just out of Kingston” for the tourist trade. The rectangular windows framed by strips of jalousie blinds on the right of the picture offer an unexpected foreshadowing of façades from the 1970s.

procedures for waterproofing its flat roofs following those of the Royal Jamaican Yacht Club’s new clubhouse.52 In the suburbs the new Constant Spring Hotel’s five-­story main building would have fitted in alongside contemporary British or North American hotels (fig. 5.13). Both these projects benefited from Jamaica’s Hotel Law of 1890, which sought to encourage hotel building in preparation for the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891 by offering hoteliers discounts on the taxes levied on imported building materials (figs. 5.14 and 5.15). Alongside these secular buildings an energetic Roman Catholic bishop raised money to build a cathedral and several new parish churches.53 As in Britain at this juncture, there was no single style employed for new public buildings. In 1882, the recently relocated Jamaica High School (from 1902, Jamaica College) in suburban St. Andrew was planned by a Kingston firm of engineers, W. H. Climie and Company, who employed a stripped-­down Gothic style comparable to that of contemporary English schools and colleges (fig.  14.16); in 1889, a modernized tropical style with a deep colonnade was used for the new University College of Jamaica building erected on the same campus.54 Stylistic models ranged wider. When George Messiter designed an ambitious brick pile for the town’s United Synagogue, rebuilt after the 1882

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

455

F ig . 1 4 .1 4   Edward Bridges, courtyard façade for a new reception block at Kingston’s Myrtle Bank Hotel, September 1890 (destroyed in the 1907 earthquake). Watercolor on tracing paper. The Jamaica Archives and Record Department, 1B/​76/​4/22. The proposed external color scheme, with the basic woodwork in white and the prominent jalousie windows picked out in gray, green, or bronze, would highlight the ornamental details of this façade.

F ig . 1 4 .1 5   Edward Bridges, cross section of the new opulent reception block for the Myrtle Bank Hotel, September 1890. Watercolor on tracing paper. The Jamaica Archives and Record Department, 1B/​76/​4/22. This new entrance block added swagger to the existing brick hotel. It incorporated a dining room on the ground floor, alongside a central staircase and a porter’s lodge, with a drawing room on the first floor and additional bedrooms on the top floor. Edward Bridges, a newly qualified architect and Royal Engineer, undertook this commission while he was posted in Jamaica. It remains uncertain how far his design harked back to English hotels or looked toward local examples of wooden construction like Devon House.

F ig . 14 . 16   Jamaica College’s Simms Building, 1885. Measured Drawing Surveys, 2001, by students of the Caribbean School of Architecture, University of Technology, Jamaica. A late Victorian school transplanted to the fields outside Kingston.

fire, he adopted a mélange described as “Moorish.” His choice followed an orientalized stylistic vocabulary for designing new synagogues developed in central Europe from the mid-­1830s and adopted in North America from the mid-­1860s as a substitute for the Christians’ “Gothic,” in this case producing a substantial brick building with stubby towers flanking a tall central hall with prominent windows (fig. 14.17).55 Such exotic architectural details were appreciated elsewhere, too; the officers’ quarters at the naval base at Port Royal drew on the Moorish mosaic tiles and arches of Spain’s Alhambra Palace for their “colour and variety,” besides incorporating Arab and Japanese elements.56 In 1890 Messiter reused his Moorish style for the Jamaica Exhibition’s temporary halls, this time including the minarets and central dome that his more straightforward synagogue design had omitted. Despite local pessimism, Messiter was able to recruit local contractors to construct an elaborate exhibition complex rather than import prefabricated buildings.57 Rural Jamaica sustained some ambitious commissions, too. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw further local churches and chapels erected as congregations replaced wooden chapels erected fifty years earlier. The

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

457

F i g . 1 4.1 7   George Messiter, United Synagogue, Duke Street, Kingston, after 1882. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. A Moorish style synagogue for downtown Kingston.

F i g . 1 4 .1 8  Rev. Charles and Mrs. Emma Barron, Annotto Bay Baptist Church, entrance front, detail, 1894. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, Concannon Collection.

Fig. 14.19  DeMonetevin Lodge, Port Antonio, 1881. 2010 photograph courtesy of Linda Sturtz.

exuberant brick façade of the Baptist church built in 1894 at Annotto Bay, which replaced a chapel built in 1835, was a locally executed project in a prospering banana district (fig. 14.18).58 The St. Luke’s Anglican church erected in 1897 at Balaclava in Manchester was a compromise between tradition and the potential offered by local materials: the new building retained a Gothic vocabulary, with a gabled roof and round-­arched medieval windows in its end wall, testifying to parishioners’ views of what a church should look like, while its ambitious wooden steeple appears to be influenced more by industrial construction.59 New markets for Jamaican logwood and bananas allowed some secondary ports, particularly Black River and Port Antonio, to prosper and be rebuilt, though in the latter case the scale of the rebuilding increased after a fire in 1883 destroyed its business district. In Port Antonio, the three-­story splendor of the DeMontevin Lodge, built in 1881 with imported bricks and wrought iron for the parish’s custos, or senior magistrate, had already shown how much could be expended on domestic construction in a thriving port (fig. 14.19). The lodge was then dwarfed by the nearby 150-­room hilltop Titchfield Hotel, reconstructed in 1904 by Lorenzo Dow Baker, the founder of the banana-­shipping Boston Fruit Company (from 1899, United Fruit Company), who proudly described the hotel as a “stately mansion.” 60

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

459

Fig. 1 4 . 2 0   Spring Park, Black River, St. Elizabeth, 1890s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, Concannon Collection. One of several splendid 1890s merchants’ houses in the town, funded by its logwood exports.

460

New Materials If British styles along with financial cycles and legislation all prompted changes during Victoria’s reign, new materials dictated further shifts that then impacted village-­level construction. By the early twentieth century, contemporaries claimed it was cheaper for planters to buy a load of machine-­cut American softwood than to fell and saw a tree on a Jamaican estate.61 Standardized precut lumber encouraged the use of balloon-­style wooden frames for new official buildings, like the ward for females at the Morant Bay General Hospital, erected by the Public Works Department in 1884, where earlier generations might well have expected brick or stone.62 Companies based in the United States, including the United Fruit Company and the West India Improvement Company, which purchased the Jamaica Government Railway in 1889 and then extended its lines across the island to reach the north coast, used both imported lumber and iron-­based construction extensively. These adaptations

James Robertson

cut two ways. When the United Fruit Company transferred staff from Jamaica to Cuba, the transferees continued to erect the wooden buildings they knew, rather than hire local stonemasons; when Jamaican builders used precut lumber, as in several showpiece wooden merchant mansions in Black River in the 1890s (fig. 14.20) or at Port Antonio’s railway station built in 1896, they incorporated North American–­style details.63 Building technology helped to reshape new construction. From the 1880s local builders accessed imports of North American timber and water-­resistant Portland cement. New buildings not only employed machine-­sawn lumber but also incorporated cast-­iron pillars and concrete foundations, while small-­town shops had iron columns supporting their balconies. The introduction of such technological innovations into Jamaican construction practices paralleled their metropolitan adoption.64 On official projects, with no assemblymen to lobby for local suppliers, imports supplanted local materials. The 150 new bridges built over eight years by the Public Works Department, which then-­governor Sir Henry Blake boasted of in 1887 during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, were mostly wrought iron and had been prefabricated in Britain.65 A celebratory

F ig . 14 .2 1   Swift River Bridge, Portland, 1891, from Sir Henry Arthur Blake K.C.M.G., Governor, Jamaica Photographs of the Principal Bridges Erected in the Island from 1890 to 1895 (1896). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. An engineering solution rather than architecture: three seventy-­six-­foot-­long cast-iron troughs take the coastal road across at the river’s mouth.

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 461

461

2/27/18 10:12 AM

F ig . 1 4 .2 2   The one-­hundred-­and-­fifty-­one foot Yallas River Bridge, Easington, St. Thomas, 1894, from Sir Henry Arthur Blake K.C.M.G., governor, Jamaica Photographs of the Principal Bridges Erected in the Island from 1890 to 1895 (1896). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. This photograph also shows the 1826 suspension bridge upstream.

album displaying bridges completed in the early 1890s shows a handful of stone structures, but none with spans of more than twenty feet (fig. 14.21). Most of the longer bridges were simply cast-­iron troughs resting on concrete abutments and pillars, though when the main span extended beyond sixty feet, iron girders could be employed.66 Bridge building became imported civil engineering rather than local architecture (fig. 14.22). Individual projects blended old and new. In 1890 a three-­story extension for the cut-­rate Queen’s Hotel in downtown Kingston recycled bricks from an old wall, certainly traditional, while employing a precut imported pine frame, cement floors, and a galvanized iron roof (fig. 14.23).67 Local construction practices also developed, with sand thrown onto exterior paint before it dried to deter termites and diffuse the tropical sun.68 Demonstrating the divergent skills of local laborers, builders in late Victorian Kingston used brick for the ground floors of shops and houses that supported wooden upper stories, while rural masons still employed local freestone embedded in mortar. After the earthquake of 1907, the contractors rebuilding Kingston found recruiting bricklayers difficult, “as those employed in building in other parts of the island were only used to working in stones and could not lay bricks.” 69

462

James Robertson

F ig . 14 . 2 3   Cross section of proposed extension for Queen’s Hotel, No. 8 Heywood Street, Kingston, 1890 (destroyed in 1907 earthquake). The Jamaica Archives and Record Department, 1B/​5/76/​4/21. This new wing, added to an existing structure, offered a utilitarian expansion for a cheap hotel. The drawing is part of one of the first applications of subsidy money from the 1890 Hotel Act.

Victorian Architectures? Although the splendid Jamaica Exhibition building was demolished after the exhibition closed, ambitious buildings were constructed in Jamaica at both ends of Queen Victoria’s reign. Over seventy years, the island’s building trades developed local techniques and stylistic repertoires. As surviving examples show, these structures could be impressive even if they proved vulnerable to earthquakes and fires. When the earthquake of 1907 shook the Myrtle Bank Hotel, “all four sides of the brick building fell out,” killing people who had run outside (figs. 14.24 and 14.25).70 In the short term, established usages persisted, so when the Public Works Department rebuilt its Kingston office, the collapsed brick end walls were simply reerected, though the upper floor was “stiffened against earthquake shock.” 71 Such practices might not have been particularly prudent, but they produced familiar results.

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

463

F ig . 1 4 .2 4   Dr. Lockett’s house on Duke Street. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. Earthquake damage in 1907 demonstrates contrasting building practices in Kingston and rural St. Andrew. “Dr. Lockett’s house” shows the fate of a town house with a brick-­built ground floor and wooden upper story. The Rev. Lockett’s daughter was killed when this Methodist manse collapsed.

Professional architects among the crowds of tourists who disembarked at the turn of the twentieth century would have recognized recent construction in Jamaica but would probably have shared the dismissive assessment of an English tourist who declared, “There are various public buildings but nothing of a very striking character.” 72 In the aftermath of the earthquake, the gap between metropolitan criteria and local practice was reaffirmed. The island’s major replacement public buildings were designed abroad. The recent expiration of several patents permitted experiments with reinforced concrete.73 In Britain, these new plans, which included spacious verandahs and colonnades, reinforced concrete foundations, and flat roofs intended to reduce drag during hurricanes, were praised as being suitable for building in tropical climates, but they did not draw on local building practices. The heavily buttressed King’s House, built in 1911, along with the stylish reinforced-­concrete post office, trea-

464

James Robertson

sury, and supreme court group, erected in 1913 to provide the focus for Kingston’s reconstructed King Street, were all planned by two London architects, Sir Charles Nicholson, Bart. (1867–­1949), the incoming governor’s brother-­in-­law, and Hubert Corlette (1869–­1956), and a specialist firm of French construction engineers handled the reinforced concrete. The island’s American-­born Roman Catholic bishop commissioned an experienced American architect, Raymond F. Almirall (1869–­1939), to build a new Holy Trinity Cathedral downtown, and Almirall adopted a buttressed Byzantine-­revival style to help ride out future quakes.74 The local contractors engaged for these public projects then employed the concrete-­laying skills they had learned while working to rebuild Kingston’s commercial downtown. The colony’s new postearthquake building code

F ig . 14 . 2 5   Earthquake damage to the Wesleyan Manse at Gordon Town. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. Earthquake damage to the Wesleyan Manse at Gordon Town shows different patterns of damage. Gordon Town is not very distant in a direct line from either Kingston or the fault line, but its rural builders had used freestone laid in mortar to build the ground floor. In this instance, the wooden upper story remains intact resting on its wooden beams. The external stairs shook free while much of the ground floor crumbled. The unmortared garden wall rode out the quake.

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

465

did reflect local experience, drawing instead on existing vernacular building practices. Across Jamaica local builders constructed variants on the post-­1907 bungalow design up to the depression of the 1930s.75 Such survivals encouraged later generations of Jamaican builders and architects to continue to draw on traditions from the island’s own Victorian architectures.

Notes Versions of this chapter were presented to the Archaeological Society of Jamaica’s tenth symposium, “Heritage Preservation on the Eve of ‘Jamaica 50,’ ” the Faculty/​Postgraduate Seminar of the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, the Jamaican Historical Society, and the Georgian Society of Jamaica, and benefited from questions posed by each audience. David Buisseret, Barry Higman, Emilie Johnson, Elizabeth Pigou, Veront Satchell, and Linda Sturtz kindly read and commented on drafts. John Aarons, Audine Brookes, Ivor Conolley, Debbie Francis, Suzanne Francis Brown, Gad Heuman, Andrew Smith, Holly Snyder, Racquel Stratchan, Pauline Symonds, and Swithin Wilmot all contributed information. 1. Lynne Walker, “ ‘The Greatest Century’: Pevsner, Victorian Architecture and the Lay Public,” in Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. Peter Draper (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004), 129–­47, at 129–­30. 2. Henry-­Russell Hitchcock, “Building Production,” Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 1: viii. 3. The West Indian slaveholders who received compensation appear as “residents” in Nicholas Draper’s analysis of the absentees living in Britain who obtained just over half (51–­55 percent) of the payments made by Britain’s Slave Compensation Commission; see Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-­Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); on the local cash inflow and uptick, see Kathleen Mary Butler, The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica and Barbados, 1823–­1843 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 123–­33; on a subsequent rise in building costs, see London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Jamaica, Correspondence, Box 46, File 1838, item 91, J. Randerson to General Secretary, October 10, 1838; on Jamaican architecture after 1907, see Pat Green, “The Development of a Jamaican Architectural Style, 1907–­1951,” Jamaica Journal 18, no. 3 (1985): 2–­12. 4. James Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory! Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–­2000 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005), 169, 186–­88; on the General Penitentiary, see Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–­ 1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 127–­38; on the tramway, see George Price, Jamaica and the Colonial Office: Who Caused the Crisis? (London: Samson, Low, 1866), 1–­48; Sydney Haldane Olivier, Lord Olivier, The Myth of Governor Eyre (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), 58–­88. 5. Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory!, 233–­35.

466

James Robertson

6. John Weiler, “Colonial Connections: Royal Engineers and Building Technology Transfer in the Nineteenth Century,” Construction History 12 (1996): 3–­18. Royal Engineer officers posted to Victorian Jamaica also included Colonel James Robert Mann (ca. 1823–­1915), director of Public Works from 1866 to 1886. On building materials, in particular on how the continued use of imported Welsh roof slates demonstrates how selective these adaptions were, see Anthony R. D. Porter, Bricks and Stones from the Past: Jamaica’s Geological Heritage (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 8–­12, 24–­25, 28–­32, 39, 43–­44. 7. Alan Cox, “A Vital Component: Stock Bricks in Georgian London,” Construction History 13 (1997): 57–­66; Georgian Society of Jamaica, Falmouth 1791–­1970 (Kingston: Society, 1970), 26; St. John the Evangelist, Black River, Porter, Bricks and Stones, 19, 23. 8. Suzanne Francis Brown and Peter Francis, The Old Iron Bridge, Spanish Town, Jamaica (Kingston: Caribbean School of Architecture, 2005); Jean and Oliver Cox, The Naval Hospitals of Port Royal, Jamaica (Kingston: Caribbean School of Architecture, 1999), 15–­31; Easington, Historic St. Thomas: A List of Monuments in St. Thomas Protected by the Jamaica National Trust Commission (Kingston: Jamaica National Trust Commission, 1978), 8. 9. “Iron Church for Jamaica,” Illustrated London News, September 28, 1844, discussed in Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, 1:516. The sample consigned to Jamaica in 1844 may have become St. Matthew’s Anglican Church in Claremont, St. Ann, whose cornerstone was laid in 1845 and which “was an iron structure, consisting of Nave and Chancel [that] was completed shortly thereafter.” That church was demolished in 1908. See Kingston, National Library of Jamaica (henceforth nlj), H/​N “Anglican Churches Jamaica, Buildings, M – ​­Z, St. Matthew’s,” “Consecration of a church at Claremont,” clipping dated June 29, 1909. 10. Marguerite R. Curtin, The Story of Westmorland: A Jamaican Parish (Kingston: For the author, 2010), 201. The donor was an absentee, living in England. 11. On these transfers, see James Robertson, “Jamaican Architectures before Georgian,” Winterthur Portfolio 36, nos. 2–​3 (2001): 73–­95, and Sophie Drinkall, “The Jamaican Plantation House: Scottish Influence,” in Scottish Architects Abroad, ed. Deborah Howard, Architectural Heritage 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991): 56–­68. 12. Clare Taylor, “The Williams Brothers: Welsh Stone Masons in Jamaica,” Jamaican Historical Society 8, no. 1 (1981): 10–­12. The brothers later branched out into coffee planting and acquired more than two hundred slaves; see Andrew Davies, “ ‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance,” in A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 293–­313. 13. Edward A. Chappell and Louis P. Nelson, “Falmouth, Jamaica: Early Housing in a Caribbean Town,” Vernacular Architecture Forum 2011 Annual Conference: Falmouth, Jamaica, Field Guide, ed. Louis P. Nelson and Emilie Johnson, 2 vols. (Falmouth: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2011), 1:2–­35, 26. 14. On the deficiency tax, see Neville A. T. Hall, “Some Aspects of the ‘Deficiency’ Question in Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century,” Caribbean Studies 15, no. 1 (1975): 1–­19.

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

467

At Hope Estate, just outside Kingston, the dismissal of the white estate carpenter in 1835 saved his £150 annual salary, besides £100 for food and pasturing his livestock; see Veront M. Satchell, Hope Transformed: A Historical Sketch of the Hope Landscape, St. Andrew, Jamaica, 1660–­1960 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2012), 185. 15. Fragment of first Public Works Department letter book, unfoliated, Colonel J. R. Mann to Acting Colonial Secretary, November 4, 1872, Jamaica Archives (henceforth ja) 1B/​16; “William Eloin Sant,” Handbook of Jamaica for 1913 (Kingston: Government Printing Office, 1913), 622; Jacob A. P. M. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica from the English Conquest to the Present Time (Kingston: Jamaica Times, 1941), 70; for his 1893 partnership with Charles L. S. Mais (1858–­1918), Mais and Sant, see “Passing Away of Mr. William Eloin Sant,” Daily Gleaner, September 20, 1912, 6, and “75th Anniversary of Jamaica’s Oldest Construction Company,” Gleaner, September 26, 1970, 21. On the “Queen Anne” style, see Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860–­1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 16. Oxford, Regents Park College, Angus Library, Baptist Missionary Society Papers, Langton Collection, box 17, John Clarke to Louis I. Mackinnon (draft), March 13, 1872. 17. See chapter 5 in this volume, by Shani Roper. 18. At Voysey’s death, the church’s interior lacked only “the floor, gallery, pulpit, communion table, pews, and benches,” all of which were “in progress”; Howard Colvin, A Biographical Directory of British Architects, 1600–­1840, 4th ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 1077. On the fever, see Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 12 (1839): 667. For quotations, see Votes of the Assembly, 22 October, 1839–­5 April, 1840 (St. Jago de la Vega: William John Pearson, 1840), 73, for November 1, 1839; his unreimbursed commissions are listed in ja 1B/​11/​3/154, f. 101v, Inventory of Annesly Voysey, January 7, 1840. Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–­1941) was Voysey’s grandson. 19. 21 Victoria, cap. 44, “An act to provide for payment of the debts of parishes, and awarding compensation to collectors of taxes whose offices are abolished” (1857), and 22 Victoria, cap. 24, “An act to authorize the payment of six per cent per annum interest on the loan under the twenty-­first Victoria, chapter forty-­four, and to provide for certain parochial works and repairs” (1858), Laws of Jamaica Passed in the 20th to 25th Years of the Reign of Queen Victoria (Spanish Town: Jordon and Osborn, 1859), 1002–­6, 1193; “Robert Barlow Gardiner,” Institution of Civil Engineers Memoirs (1859), 188; for Gardiner’s Jamaican experiences, see ja 1B/​5/7/​1, Jamaica Executive Committee, Board of Works, department minutes, January 1855–­April 1861, (unfoliated), April–­July 1859, passim. 20. On the Government Architect’s contribution to the Public Works Department in New Zealand, see Lewis E. Martin, Built for Us: The Work of Government and Colonial Architects, 1860s to 1960s (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2004). 21. London, Royal Institute of British Architects, (henceforth riba), Nomination Papers, 10, f. 18, Bridges’s statement as associate, approved January 30, 1888; Handbook of Jamaica for 1890–­91 (Kingston: Government Printing Establishment, 1890), 529. 22. nlj, Ms. 1857, Feurtado Ms. Sa–Sc, unfoliated; Sheila Dunker, “The Free Coloured and Their Fight for Civil Rights in Jamaica, 1800–­1830” (master’s thesis, London University for ucwi, 1960), 94–­100. Chappell and Nelson (“Falmouth, Jamaica,” 1:7) also

468

James Robertson

note several free people of color constructing and commissioning houses and shops in preemancipation Falmouth. 23. Gad Heuman, “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 9–­10; Glory Robertson, Members of the Assembly of Jamaica: From the General Election of 1830 to the Final Session, January 1866 (Kingston: West India Reference Library, 1965), 14–­15; Price represented St. John’s parish, nlj, Ms. 1857, Pi–­Q u; on his involvement in the tramway scheme defeating his reelection, see Price, Jamaica and the Colonial Office, 33; for his Kingston contracts, ja 1B/​5/7/​1, Board of Works minutes (unfoliated), June 9, 1856; Port Royal and the bridge, April 19, 1860. 24. Mary E. Thomas, “Jamaica and the U.S. Civil War,” Americas 24, no. 1 (1972): 25–­32; for additional local factors, including low sugar prices and a drought, see Heuman, “The Killing Time,” 44–­55. 25. “Charles P. Lazarus” (obituary), in Who’s Who in Jamaica, 1919–­1920, ed. Stephen H. Hill (Kingston: Gleaner, [1919]), 361; Joy Lumsden, “A Forgotten Generation: Black Politicians in Jamaica, 1884–­1914,” in Before and after 1865: Education, Politics and Regionalism in the Caribbean, ed. Brian L. Moore and Swithin R. Wilmot (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1998), 117. 26. London, Institution of Civil Engineers, Associate Statements 1905, 11–­12, Braham Taylor Judah, March 16, 1905; Judah had studied with the Scranton International Correspondence Schools. For an illustration of Judah’s O’Hare Building at St. George’s, erected in 1913, see Jamaican Heritage in Architecture (London: Commonwealth Institute, 1990), 74. 27. Describing a surviving house from the 1840s in suburban Kingston, David Brown and Racquel Stratchan, “Oakton House: An Architectural and Historical Gem,” Jamaica Journal 31, nos. 1–­2 (2008): 90–­94; On Bravo and Marlie Mount, Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1838), 194, February 17, 1837; see also Anton V. Long, “Anthony Bravo,” Jamaican Historical Society 1, no. 4 (1953): 42–­44, and Long, Jamaica and the New Order, 1827–­1847 (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1956), 16. 28. On the rebuilding of the Browns Town Baptist chapel, see George E. Henderson, Goodness and Mercy: A Tale of a Hundred Years (Kingston: Gleaner, 1931), 156; on Spanish Walling, see Ann Hodges, “Lime and Earth: Jamaican Traditional Building Materials and Techniques, 2,” Jamaica Journal 20, no. 1 (1987): 2–­9. 29. The trend was pervasive. From the 1840s even Britain’s Unitarians, among the least medieval of nonconformist denominations, began commissioning Gothic designs; see Walter H. Burgess, “Unitarians and the Gothic Revival: Church Building 1837–­ 99,” Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 17 (1980): 81–­87. On these stylistic shifts, see Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, 1:56–­161; Viki Bennett, Sacred Space and Structural Style: The Embodiment of Socio-­Religious Ideology (Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 1997); Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Carl R. Loundsbury, Essays in Early American Architectural History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 177–­94.

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

469

30. Kingston, University of Technology, Caribbean School of Architecture Library, Pilot Study: Inventory of Jamaican Heritage Structures, (henceforth csa): Manchester, no. 34, New Broughton United Church. 31. In 1828 one plan for a new Anglican church at Guy’s Hill in Portland incorporated pointed windows; other drafts show rectangular windows; see London, National Archives, co137/​268, f. 172. I owe this reference to Linda Sturtz. The building remained unfinished in November 1840, Votes of Assembly 27 October 1840–­22 December 1840 (St. Jago de la Vega: William John Pearson, 1841), 105, for November 4, 1840. For Barbados comparisons, see Barbara Hill, “The Coleridge Chapels of Ease,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 36, no. 1 (1979): 16–­27. 32. Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860; New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999), 27; dismissing an eighteenth-­century showpiece as of “no improving effect,” nlj Ms. 112, E. R. W. Winfield-­Yates, Journal, vol. I. f. 177, December 12, 1841. 33. Sir Henry Barkly to Henry Pelham-­Clinton, fifth Duke of Newcastle, May 26, 1854, in Adjustments to Emancipation, ed. Swithin R. Wilmot (Kingston: Social History Project, 1988), 21–­22. 34. Samuel Augustus Swaby, revised by G. Goffe and Alvin Sine, “The Banana Church”: The Story of St. Cyprian’s Church, Highgate, St. Mary ([Kingston: Golding Printing Service], 1972), 8; on Claremont’s building culture, see Elizabeth Pigou-­Dennis, “Creole Architecture in Victorian Jamaica,” chapter 15, below. 35. Captain [George] West’s plan, W[illiam Thomas] D[enison], “Description of Barracks at Lucea, in Jamaica,” Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers, 1st ser., 2 (1838): 247; also Weiler, “Colonial Connections,” 14–­15; on the contractor and the bricks, JA 1B/​5 /83/​1, J. G. V[idal]’s Attorney’s Letter Book, November 21, 1831–­April 28, 1838, f. 21, January 16, 1833, to George Atkinson. 36. Alexander Gordon, Reports on the Intended Light-­House at Morant Point, Jamaica (Kingston: Jordon and Osborn, 1841); JA 1B/​16/​H16/​23, “Morant Point Light-­House” designed, A. Douglas, erected 1842; Percy M. Young, George Grove, 1820–­1900: A Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), 34–­35; David Buisseret, Historic Architecture of the Caribbean (London: Heineman, 1980), 80. 37. A. John Dickenson, “The Jamaica Railway, 1845 to 1915: An Economic History” (MSc diss., University of the West Indies, Mona, 1969); Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory!, 186. 38. On the Bellas Gate mine, see Simon Mitchell, “Jamaican Copper Mines of the mid-­Nineteenth Century,” paper given at the Archaeological Society of Jamaica’s eighth symposium, April 2010; on copper’s economic failure, see Satchell, Hope Transformed, 240–­44; Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica 1838–­1865: An Economic History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 152. 39. “New Iron Bridge in Jamaica,” Illustrated London News, November 8, 1851, 564; and Don McQuillan, “From Brewer to Bridge Builder: Reflections on the Life and Work of James Dredge,” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Civil Engineering 102, no. 1 (1994): 32–­42, quote at 39; on the Junction Road, see Mona Macmillan, Sir Henry

470

James Robertson

Barkly: Mediator and Moderator, 1815–­1898 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1970), 70–­72; on Plumb Point, see Buisseret, Historic Architecture, 80. 40. James Robertson, “Victorian ‘Restorations’: Reconfiguring the Cathedral in Spanish Town,” Jamaica Journal 33, no. 3 (2011): 36–­43. 41. M. O’Connor Morris, Memini: Or a Mingled Yarn (London: Harrison and Sons, 1892), 73; Edward Bean Underhill, The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition (London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1862), 186. On verandahs’ utility, see Brian J. Hudson, “Lady Nugent and Tom Cringle on the Veranda: Early Nineteenth-­Century Observations on a Caribbean Architectural Feature,” Journal of Caribbean History 38, no. 1 (2004): 35–­48. 42. Trollope, West Indies, 16–­17; For invoking Trollope while applying these criticisms, see Robert T. Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico: With the Other Islands of the West Indies (New York: Century, 1898), 220; Tom Concanon, “The Jamaican Heritage: Traditional ‘Window Coolers,’ ” Jamaica Architect 2, no. 1 (1968): 55. 43. “Public Works: Public Buildings,” in Handbook of Jamaica 1882 (Kingston: Government Printing Establishment, 1882), 210. 44. On such buildings as local manifestations of the colonial state, see Diana Paton, “State Formation in Victorian Jamaica,” chapter 1, above. The completion of the Jamaica Archives’ conservation and recataloging of the Public Works Department’s extensive plan collection offers opportunities for research on both the “what” of projects planned and the “who” of draftsmen and contractors. 45. On Linstead Gothic, [Vic Reid], Buildings of Jamaica (Kingston: Jamaica Information Service, 1970), 40; ja 1B/​16, Mann to Richard Chamberlain, chairman of the Municipal Board, St. Thomas, November 4, 1872. The building was described as “an iron shed covering an area of about 84 feet by 54 feet.” 46. ja G14/​47, Revenue Office, Port Antonio, October 26, 1885, plans signed J. W. G. Brennan, contractor, J. A. McKenzie; see also Geoffrey de Sola Pinto and Anghelen Arrington Phillips, Jamaican Houses: A Vanishing Legacy (1982, Kingston: Ian Randle, 2008), 20–­21. This was not Public Works’ only neo-­Georgian design. For the Cedar Valley Court House built in 1894 in St. Thomas, see Jamaica Heritage in Architecture, 49. 47. Jackie Ranston, Behind the Scenes at King’s House, 1873–­2010 (Kingston: Jamaica National Building Society, 2011), 7–­9, 14. 48. E. Quincy Smith, Travels at Home and Abroad, 2 vols. (New York: Neale, 1911), 2:30, January 1906. Contemporary photographs reaffirm these comments; see David Boxer and Edward Lucie-­Smith, Jamaica in Black and White: Photography in Jamaica c.1845–­c.1920; The David Boxer Collection (Oxford: Macmillan, 2013), 125. 49. Norwich, Norfolk Records Office, (henceforth nro), MC57/​10, Cruise to West Indies, 1896, f. 17. 50. Enid Sheilds, Devon House Families (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1991), 17, 26–­28. 51. On the fire and rebuilding, see Christienna D. Fryar, “The Measure of Empire: Crisis and Responsibility in Post-­Emancipation Jamaica” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 164–­68, 178–­95; see also Michael Ayre, The Caribbean in Sepia: A History in

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

471

Photographs, 1840–­1900 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2012), 107–­12, 116–­17; the 1885 Colonial Bank, Boxer, Jamaica in Black and White, 85; plans for the new Institute, ja1B/​16/​G4/​ 22, 1894. 52. ja 1B/​76/​4/22, December 5, 1890, Myrtle Bank Hotel, Plans, Specifications and Estimates; Riba Nomination Papers, no. 1649, April 10, 1919, Edward Bridges’s fellow’s statement. 53. Francis J. Osborne, History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988), 320. 54. Satchell, Hope Transformed, 282–­88; see also Jamaica Heritage in Architecture, 68–­ 69, for Simms Hall (1885) and University College’s Scotland Building (1889). 55. Charles Lazarus was Messiter’s contractor, Daily Gleaner, June 10, 1885, 2; Jacob Andrade’s account of this building names Charles Renwick, a district engineer in the Public Works Department, as joint architect; Andrade, Record of the Jews of Jamaica, 81–­82; Renwick’s post, Daily Gleaner, October 4, 1899, 7. 56. M. M[artin], R. P. K., St. L. M., F. McI. R., Port Royal and Its Harbour: With Short Notes on the History, Legends, Sports, Pastimes and Avocations (Kingston: Aston W. Gardner, 1893), 18. 57. On a dome and minarets, see Boxer, Jamaica in Black and White, 185–­87; and Ayre, Caribbean in Sepia, 113; Edward Bridges was “one of the consulting architects” on this public commission. riba Nomination Papers, no.  1649, Bridges’s fellow’s statement; “The Exhibition — ​­Progress of the Work,” Daily Gleaner, October 2, 1890, 4; on the exhibition’s content and contexts, see chapter 17 in this volume, by Wayne Modest; Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 30–­32, 87–­91; Joy Lumsden, “Jamaica’s International Exhibition, 1891,” Jamaican Historical Society, Bulletin 10, nos. 3 and 4 (1991): 16–­21; and Karen Booth, “When Jamaica Welcomed the World: The Great Exhibition of 1891,” Jamaica Journal 18, no. 3 (1985): 39–­51. 58. Donald S. Lawrence and J. C. Lawrence, “A History of the Annotto Bay Baptist Church,” Jamaica Historical Society, Bulletin 8, no. 12 (1983): 271–­73. 59. csa, Manchester, St Luke’s Anglican, Balaclava, 1897. 60. The fire, “Destruction of Port Antonio, Jamaica,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, November 30, 1883, 188, clippings in nlj H/​N “Portland, Parish of — ​­1969”; on the Lodge, see Pinto and Phillips, Jamaican Houses, 16–­17; on the Hotel Titchfield, see Frank Fonda Taylor, To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 46–4­7; on Baker’s phrase, see “Representative Jamaicans Do Honour to Captain Baker,” March 16, 1905, 6, in nlj B/​N “Baker, Lorenzo Dow (Capt.).” 61. nlj Ms. 934, Frank Cundall, “The West Indies Today,” f. 200. When Cundall, the secretary of the Institute of Jamaica, repeated this claim, it had a greater potential local resonance, given the contemporary efforts to revive Jamaican hardwoods as an economic resource; see chapter 6 in this volume, by Mark Nesbitt. 62. ja G13/​27, July 23, 1884, Public General Hospital — ​­Morant Bay — ​­Ward for Females.

472

James Robertson

63. On Cuba, see Felipe J. Préstamo, “The Architecture of American Sugar Mills: The United Fruit Company,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 22 (1996): 63–­81; on Black River’s Invercauld, built in 1894, see Edward E. Crain, Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 77; on the station, Pinto and Phillips, Jamaican Houses, 19. 64. For the English chronologies, see R. J. M. Sutherland, “The Introduction of Iron into Traditional Building,” in Good and Proper Materials: The Fabric of London since the Great Fire, ed. Hermione Hobhouse and Ann Saunders (London: London Topographical Society, 1989), 48–­58. 65. “Speech by the Governor,” Daily Gleaner, June 30, 1887, 5–­6. 66. Jamaica Photographs of the Principal Bridges Erected in the Island from 1890 to 1895, Sir Henry Arthur Blake K.C.M.G., Governor (Kingston: Government Printing Office, 1896). 67. ja 1B/​5/76/​4/21, August 1, 1890, Hotel at No. 8 Heywood Street, Kingston, Plan, Specification and Estimates. 68. A. W. Acworth, Treasure in the Caribbean: A First Study of Georgian Buildings in the British West Indies (London: Pleiades, 1949), 12. 69. nlj Ms. 934, Cundall, “West Indies Today,” f. 197. 70. Charles Foster Batchelder Jr., Tropic Gold: The Story of the Banana Pioneer Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker (mimeograph, 1951), 94. 71. “Public Works Annual Report, 31 March 1908,” Departmental Reports, Jamaica, 1908 (Kingston: Government Printer, 1909), 172. 72. nro MC57/​10, f. 17, 1896. 73. Andrew Saint, Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 229. 74. Ranston, Behind the Scenes at King’s House, 107–­15; on being admirably suited, see “New Public Buildings at Kingston, Jamaica,” Concrete and Constructional Engineering 6, no. 2 (1911): 85–­91; on the result, see Elizabeth Pigou-­Dennis, “Jamaica’s ‘Broadway’: Urbanity, Glamour and Dysfunction on Early 20th Century King Street, Jamaica,” Jamaican Historical Review 24 (2009), 32–­41, 71–­72; on the cathedral, see Crain, Historic Architecture, 183. 75. Green, “Development of a Jamaican Architectural Style,” 2–­12; on the rebuilt downtown, see Boxer, Jamaica in Black and White, 266–­69, 273–­84; Elizabeth Pigou-­ Dennis, “The Jamaican Bungalow: Whose Language?” in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, ed. Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 179–­93.

J a m a i c a’s V i c to r i a n A rc h i t e c t u re s

473

C H A P T E R 15

Creole Architecture in Victorian Jamaica E L I Z A B E T H P I G O U -­D E N N I S

This chapter examines the architecture of domestic structures built by Afro-­ Jamaicans in the period after emancipation. Throughout the chapter I deploy the descriptive term “creole” to describe these buildings, thus highlighting the fact that they were created out of a range of traditions, from conical African structures to the Georgian brick-­built farms and houses of southern England, and were forged in a distinctive climatic and social context, using local materials and responding to the needs of labor and family life for the new Jamaican rural working class. Such a study faces considerable problems of evidence. The written archive is patchy in its representation of the humble buildings created by laborers in the rural villages of Jamaica. The names of craftsmen and artisans — ​­the masons and experts in plastering or thatch — ​­are generally lost. Although there is some visual evidence of huts, houses, and farm buildings from the nineteenth century, many images, such as the illustrations in missionary publications, conform to the ideology of their creators and offer only a partial account of conditions on the ground. The first half of this chapter examines what such written and visual sources can yield in relation to the creole architecture of the Jamaican village and the working-­class areas of Kingston. Further, it examines the ideological commitments of Baptist missionaries and social reformers, who provide our major textual sources of evidence. Here, I offer readings of these sources against the grain, contesting their ideological commitments while acknowledging their evidential value in understanding the architectural and social life of Jamaican villages in the early Victorian era. The second half of this chapter turns to the other major form of evidence for the study of architectural history: surviving buildings themselves. It is important to acknowledge the low rate of survival of buildings connected with the black Jamaican working class of the nineteenth century. Because of the highly bio­degradable nature of wattle and daub, simple hut structures or small nineteenth-­century houses have rarely survived above the ground, although

archaeological remains such as post holes and decayed materials offer the potential for further exploration. Timber, a mainstay of construction, is highly vulnerable to termite infestation and decay, but a few extant examples of small nineteenth-­century farmer and peasant dwellings show a range of building materials and some variants in typology. The chapter takes as a case study a group of villages in the parish of St. Ann, where a number of structures from the nineteenth century can still be observed. These buildings reveal much about the variety and richness of creole architecture in Victorian Jamaica. The very nature of creole Jamaican culture, characterized by what I will argue constitutes the creative, sometimes subversive, responses of the Jamaican population to the hegemonic claims of European culture and aesthetics, creates a distinctive set of questions regarding architectural form, function, and material. Creolization occurred across the architectural spectrum. Thus, even precincts that at first glance seem to conform to Georgian orthodoxy, such as the public buildings in the main square of Spanish Town or the town of Falmouth, betray features in response to local climate and materials. Georgian elements such as symmetrical façades, triangular pediments, classical columns, and porticoes are easily identified. Victorian elements, which could include turrets, asymmetrically designed façades, porches, and gables framed with ornate fretwork or ornamental ironwork, are also recognizable in many Jamaican structures. Nineteenth-­ century Jamaican buildings incorporated segmented hip roofs, cooler boxes, louvres, and carved transoms or fanlights, as well as wraparound verandahs. It is widely recognized that European architectural forms were adapted to tropical environments. The question of whether features derived from traditions of African architecture can be recognized in Jamaica, and whether and how they were modified, is rather more difficult. There are, however, many elements of Afro-­Jamaican building forms that may derive from building practices found in Africa: the articulation of the steep pitched roof, the verandah as semicovered space, the yard as outdoor living space, and materials of earth and fiber. Mindful of the problem of evidence, this chapter interrogates the possible sources for the study of Jamaican vernacular architecture, an understudied field, and proposes a hybrid approach, melding the methods of textual and visual analysis of documentary sources with the study of existing structures and the archaeological examination of ruins and fragments. The resulting view of Jamaican architecture suggests a more complex account than any binary analysis of “African” and “European” influences could produce, acknowledging a distinctive creole architectural aesthetic that responded to local conditions and materials with a degree of creative exuberance.

C r e o l e A r c h i t e c t u r e i n V i c t o r i a n J a m a i ca

475

Plantation to Village: The Social Life

and Built Environment of the Rural Poor The mode of dwelling occupied by the majority of Jamaica’s population on the eve of emancipation was the wattle-­and-­daub, thatched-­roofed house on a plantation or in a rural village. The Baptist missionary James Phillippo provides two intriguing drawings of slave huts, one in the background of a funeral ritual (fig. 15.1) and the other in the context of a visit by missionaries (fig. 15.2).1 The structures depicted in these sketches betray marked associations with specific West African, and African diaspora, prototypes, while differing profoundly from the architecture of the English village.2 The ensemble in figure 15.1 is laid out in a cluster: at left is an oblong structure with a small covered area over the entrance, with two windows on either side of the centered doorway; at right, detailing of the wattled wall in one hut is evident. At least one of the smaller structures appears to be circular and has a conical roof, while the oblong structures have large hip roofs of thatch. The entire ensemble is framed with trees and shrubs. Circular structures are also shown in figure 15.2. These buildings had conical thatched roofs and wattle-­and-­daub walls. While the details are not entirely clear, it appears that at least some of the conical houses had a window opening and a recessed entrance. Traditional West African building typologies included mud plastering and roof thatching, as well as square, rectangular, and circular plans, with the dominant characteristic being a steeply pitched roof.3 According to Phillippo, “the negro villages were, in general, situated amongst groves and fruit trees.” He considered them to be “very unsightly” and “far from healthy” and remarked that “the houses are thrown together without any pretence to order or arrangement; and with few exceptions, were wretched habitations.” In terms of construction methodology, Phillippo observed that “they consisted of posts put into the ground at the distance of about two feet asunder; the intermediate space being closed up with wattle, daubed over on the inside with mud.” Most enslaved families lived in single-­room dwellings, although some buildings contained two or three apartments. Each dwelling had a hearth at the center and there were, as might be expected, minimal personal possessions. Each house had a garden plot, and the entire village was connected by “narrow, straggling and dirty lanes.” 4 The domestic life of the slave village was closely associated in the missionary’s mind with promiscuity and polygamy. It should be noted that while Phillippo was not impressed by the clustering of the buildings in the slave village, his opinion may have been shaped by his greater familiarity with urban grids. The lack of grid structures may represent an adherence to formulations of urban space and environment related to African precedents, which gave rise to

476

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

F ig . 15. 1   James Mursell Phillippo, Heathen Practices at Funerals, from Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

F ig . 15. 2   James Mursell Phillippo, Visit of a Missionary and Wife to a Plantation Village, from Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

Fig. 1 5. 3 ​ Attributed to Isaac Mendes Belisario, Highgate, Jamaica, circa 1840. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Jamaica.

the “yard” as an important aspect of Jamaican towns and cities. Recent theorists such as Barry Chevannes have drawn attention to the “yard” as a crucial element in Afro-­Jamaican social and cultural life (fig. 15.3).5 In Phillippo’s estimation, in the immediate postemancipation period there was “not generally so great an improvement in the size, structure and interior arrangement of the cottages upon estates as might be expected, but in those which form the new villages that have been established throughout the island . . . the difference is striking.” 6 He considered the free village dwellings to be equal, and in some cases superior, to the dwellings of laborers in rural England. They varied in dimension from twenty to thirty feet in length and from fourteen to sixteen feet in breadth. The size corresponded to the number of persons in the household. They are either neatly thatched or shingled with pieces of hard wood hewn somewhat in the shape of slates. Some are built of stone or wood; but the generality are an improvement on those on the estates, being plastered also on the outside and whitewashed. Many are ornamented with a portico in front to screen the sitting apartment from the sun and

478

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

rain. While, for the admission of light and air, as well as to add to their appearance, all of them exhibit either shutters or jealousies, painted green, or small glass windows. There is usually a sleeping apartment at each end, and a sitting room in the centre. The floors are in most instances terraced, although boarded ones for sleeping-­rooms are becoming common. Many of the latter contain good mahogany bedsteads, a washing stand, a looking glass, and chairs. . . . The middle apartment is usually furnished with a sideboard, displaying sundry items of crockery-­ware, [and] some decent looking chairs.7 Cooking was done in smaller outbuildings. With regard to village layout, Phillippo drew attention to the regular order of the lots and streets of Sligoville and Clarkson Town in St. Ann. Cottages were set in the middle of oblong lots, with vegetable gardens to the rear and flower gardens at front, in the “style of a European garden” 8 (fig. 15.4). He estimated that there were, by 1848, between one hundred and two hundred free villages on the island, encompassing one hundred thousand acres of land and with ten thousand heads of household and three thousand cottages.9 Cottages were given names such as Comfort Castle, Happy Hut, Content, Victoria, Albert, You No Come I No Go, Save Rent, and A Little of My Own — ​­names that tended to be sentimental and often had a touch of humor. Village names included Victoria, Brougham, Buxton, Sturge, Clarkson, Sligoville, and Wilberforce, themed after missionaries of the emancipation movement, as well as after Victoria herself.10

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 479

F i g . 1 5 .4   James Mursell Phillippo, Clarkson Town, from Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

2/27/18 10:12 AM

While Phillippo was committed to the Christianizing mission and shared many of the assumptions about race typical of evangelical thought of the period, his observations do provide useful evidence. His text enshrines a particular set of views on planning, hygiene, and family structure that typifies the dominant values of Victorian Britain while providing evidence of black life in the immediate postemancipation period in Jamaica. Kelly Elliott has explored the contradictions within Baptist missionary endeavors on the island, which included the planning of the first Free Villages. Drawing on commentary of contemporaries, she outlines the ideals by which the settlements were laid out — ​­as orderly, African, Christian communities of smallholders who also maintained part-­time ties with the plantations. Elliott credits the Baptists with sincerity and the empowerment of Afro-­Jamaicans, even while they attempted to enforce biblical morality and Victorian ideals of family.11 Catherine Hall, by contrast, interprets all their activities as manifestations of British imperialism.12 These two interpretations are, however, not incompatible: the Baptists believed that empire could be the agent of improvement, providing better living conditions as well as spreading the gospel. J. H. Buchner’s account of the Moravians in Jamaica, published in 1854, also noted with satisfaction the changes in housing since emancipation: “The social condition of the people has greatly changed since 1838. Before that time they lived together on the plantations, generally in poor, wretched huts, which they were too careless to repair, as they were not their own property; but now, with few exceptions, everyone lives in his own house, and on his own acre of ground. The land around the Churches has been eagerly purchased and largely paid for, and villages have sprung up here and there. The houses which they have erected are at least equal to those which they inhabited before emancipation, and generally superior.” 13 Buchner’s focus was on the villages that emerged around the Moravian mission stations. Each station featured a modest church, schoolhouse, and missionary residence: “Around the missionary stations, the members of the congregation generally live scattered within a circle of about ten miles diameter. Here and there are Negro villages, built without any order or regularity; the houses point in every direction, and form confused lines, every house being surrounded by a garden for the growth of vegetables or of the cotton tree, and generally shaded, or even hid, under the large foliage of the plantain.” 14 The smaller houses were eighteen feet by twelve feet and were divided into two apartments, with earth floors. The walls were plastered with mortar, and the roof material was thatch. Buchner thought that the majority of houses were larger — ​­their three apartments were “decently floored with boards and cov-

480

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

ered with shingles; the rooms are generally well furnished, and kept clean and neat.” 15 The key concepts in Buchner’s text — ​­decency, cleanliness, neatness — ​ ­tell of a hierarchy of values promoted by missionary endeavors and were seen to contrast with the innate disorder and uncleanness of “native” life. Missionary writers detected signs of economic and, as they saw it, moral progress in postemancipation villages. The peasant economy of the new villages was supported by the cultivation of sugarcane, coffee, vegetables, plantain, corn, breadfruit, tobacco, and cotton, as well as the rearing of cattle, pigs, and poultry. The more successful small farmers were able to construct “well arranged dwelling houses.” 16 With this economic development, the missionaries believed, came the spread of Christian religion and morality. Buchner noted the disappearance of obeah fetishes in the years following emancipation, and he documented the Christianization of the peasantry, although rum shops, concubinage, obeah, and dancing were still present and constituted threats to the moral order, in his view. In a lecture delivered to the Royal Colonial Institute in London in 1880, Sir Anthony Musgrave noted similar, if not increasing, upward mobility for the black rural population. He highlighted the comparable if not superior quality of black peasant dwellings in Jamaica in comparison to those of the poor in Great Britain, and especially in Ireland.17 The quality of dwellings was certainly considered to be a sign of economic success, but it was also a sign of conformity with the “education, morality, social rules . . . [and] ordinary customs of civilized life.” 18 The parishes of Trelawny, Westmoreland, Manchester, and St. Elizabeth were singled out as locations in which successful small farmers cultivated coffee and vegetables. The most spacious cottages were two stories high and twenty-­five feet by fifteen feet in dimension. There were sleeping rooms on both floors, with storage space for provisions on the ground floor. The upper floor also contained a dining hall, and there was a front portico or verandah.19 While these sources do privilege European, and characteristically Victorian, ideals concerning moral and decent living standards, they nonetheless provide useful information on the architecture of Afro-­Jamaicans in the years after emancipation. Despite Musgrave’s more optimistic view, in general there was an unevenness in the quality of peasant housing across the island after emancipation. A journalistic tour by the leading newspaper, the Gleaner, of much of the island in 1890 confirms this picture. In Clarendon, for example, the paper reported, “the people are in some few instances building better homes in Vere district, but these cases are exceptions and usually their huts are of a very poor quality. The house tax acts as a barrier to the people building better houses.” 20 While

C r e o l e A r c h i t e c t u r e i n V i c t o r i a n J a m a i ca

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 481

481

2/27/18 10:12 AM

the majority of the peasant population was of African descent, it also included settlers from India who had entered the island as indentured laborers after emancipation. “There are a great many Coolies in the district and they usually live in ‘quarters,’ a collection of poorly built huts, huddled side by side in a line, in front of which they do their cooking, washing and general housework.” 21 In Manchester, the paper recorded, “the people are building better homes generally throughout the parish, flooring and shingling their houses, and what is a far greater improvement than all others, they are building larger houses with proper accommodation for their families.” 22 This improvement in accommodation was accompanied by changes in material culture and, from the perspective of the reporter, an improved moral order, as evidenced in church attendance and participation: “The people are wearing much better clothes, and clothing themselves better in every way, both during the week and on Sunday. They are also eating a much better class of food. In the matter of education, church work, and all improvements in the condition of the people great strides are being made.” 23 While Manchester was viewed as being “encouraging” in terms of overall material and social progress, St. James provided a contrast. Outside of Montego Bay, conditions remained much the same as they had been at the time of emancipation. “All over St. James . . . were the poorest houses we had yet seen. Simply wattled mud huts, four or six yards square, mostly made of rough branches of trees, or cocoanut palms, plastered over with mud floors, and roofed with . . . grass, and most anything that comes handy. Most of them were very dilapidated and wretched, even for mud huts.” 24 As in missionary accounts, this journalist recounts a rural Jamaica whose architecture was changing significantly in the aftermath of emancipation, influenced by the newly gained power of the recently freed to construct the kinds of homes that they felt were suited to their needs. The Gleaner revealed the shifting demography of working-­class Jamaica at the time, inflected by the recent arrival of indentured laborers from India, for example. All this was taking place within a time and space where Victorian values of decency, respectability, and cleanliness were being propagated by the church, and indeed by the colonial government, and where such values were being adapted to suit the specific conditions of an emerging postemancipation, creole society.

Architecture of the Urban Poor after Emancipation The social and economic conditions in Jamaica after emancipation were very challenging. Contemporary accounts cataloged droughts, hurricanes, cholera outbreaks, fires, extensive poverty, and pervasive slums in the capital of Kings-

482

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

ton. Migration from the rural areas into west Kingston swelled the population of some of the most notorious slums, Smith Village and Hannah Town, which were early suburban expansions of the original city grid.25 Here, the predominant mode of habitation was the tenement yard — ​­a phenomenon that aroused the attention of intrepid reporters who were anxious to lay bare the serious problems of substandard living conditions and infrastructure. On Last Lane and Wellington Street, for example, “the majority of the houses are without kitchen[s], and cooking operations are carried out in the yards adjoining the huts. . . . Again, very few of the houses are provided with sanitary accommodation and the result is that filth and dirt of every description [are] simply thrown into the street.” Slum dwellers were nevertheless burdened with heavy taxes. “It was stated that the inhabitants of [Smith’s Village] pay taxes the same as in the more wealthy parts of the city,” notwithstanding their “structures . . . can hardly be called houses.” Throughout west Kingston, and in other areas such as Allman Town, living conditions were deplorable, wages were low, and public amenities such as garbage collection, street lighting, water supply, and sewerage were all woeful. Conditions in the urban slums were even worse than in the poor rural villages owing to the density of the population: “People . . . are compelled to herd together in . . . district[s] lacking, to a great extent, the commonest decencies of civilization.” In the vicinities of Luke Lane and West Street, conditions were also appalling: The houses which are upon the refuse ground proper are mere shanties . . . in one instance . . . built of pieces of wood nailed together, a space of about two inches between each bar and the greater part of the roof had gone altogether. In another part of the ground was a yard which formed the residence of some eight or nine families, and in the whole there was not one house which could be called rainproof. At least half a dozen of them were built of the remains of old biscuit boxes and pieces of tin carelessly nailed together. None were more than eight feet in height and a tall man could not enter without stooping. In some of these wretched dens three or four grown up persons and a number of children sleep every night — ​­and yet our legislators wonder how it is that the illegitimacy returns show no signs of decreasing. A number of the more modern tenements had zinc corrugated roofs . . . [and] should in future be known as “the tin-­pan tenements.” The slum settlement in Kingston Penn was considered “quite a little town in itself,” inhabited by “Creoles, Chinese, [and] Coolies” who paid between nine pence and one shilling a week to rent a plot of land on which they built

C r e o l e A r c h i t e c t u r e i n V i c t o r i a n J a m a i ca

483

their houses. “The result is that there is no regular form of architecture, each man erecting according to the dictates of his fancy or according to his ability to work. Every conceivable material has been used in the construction of these tenements.” One house was “composed entirely of straw,” another was of “clay throughout with a bamboo roof.” The report noted, “several have been erected entirely from grass woven in shape in a skillful manner and most airy and cool in the hot, dry months.” 26 Government reports, as well as journalistic exposés, documented numerous instances of overcrowding inside makeshift houses, overcrowded yards, extreme poverty, and ill-­health. The overall picture of the environment black Jamaicans constructed and occupied offered by contemporary commentators was of considerable rural poverty, intense squalor in the capital city, and some significant oases of improvement and innovation inhabited by the upwardly mobile small-­ farmer class. Reforms were enacted in infrastructure and public architecture under Crown Colony government after 1865, but poverty remained a reality for the majority of black Jamaicans.27 Little of this architecture of the urban slums remains, and therefore there is sparse physical evidence for understanding how urban blacks lived after emancipation. As we have seen, written accounts provide a partial yet indubitably vivid picture of the ways in which blacks lived. Yet there is a further, unwritten history that lies beyond the bounds of traditional written sources. Such a history, alluded to by Barry Chevannes in his work on the yard as a key site of cultural formation, would allow the inadequate architecture of the Kingston yards to be understood as a shared space for social cohesion. Such a reading would allow the chaotic and insanitary yards of Jamaica’s cities and towns to signify as a key space for the emergence of a modern black Jamaican culture.

Material Survivals: A Case Study in the Parish of St. Ann This chapter has so far relied on written and pictorial sources. In the second half, I offer a case study of surviving nineteenth-­century architecture conducted in the eastern part of the parish of St. Ann. Despite their vulnerability and therefore the limited survival of these structures, as well as their modification over time, I suggest that they constitute important sources for a history of architecture of the peasant classes in Victorian Jamaica. Indeed, it is in the materiality of these structures, their form, spatial divisions, and distribution, as well as the changes to the fabric of these buildings over time, that we find traces of an architectural history, including a history of how people lived in Victorian Jamaica.

484

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

Most vernacular buildings of the late nineteenth century were constructed with timber frameworks. Walling materials included timber siding and timber siding with sand dash, as well as brick, stone, or concrete nog (a technique using infill material between the timber members of wood frame construction), rendered with pebbledash. Whitewash or white paint was often used. Some more ambitious houses had verandahs, often with ornate timber elements such as fretwork on the gables, and transoms. Houses were raised off the ground on stones or dry stone foundations, with steps leading up to the verandah. Glazed sash windows and hip roofs or double-­gable roofs completed the picture. Variations in materials across the island related to the local occurrence of resources: thus in Manchester there was a preponderance of mortar and Spanish walling, which was a traditional construction method using stone to infill timber-­f ramed construction, with lime mortar; in Portland, stone nog, and timber; in St. Ann, stone and timber; and in Kingston, brick nog. Local hardwoods were used in many rural communities, but imported lumber, usually pine, was used in Kingston.28 Turning now to the case study in the parish of St. Ann, I want to discuss buildings positioned in a corridor along the road from Bensonton in the south through Concord, Alderton, Beechamville, Claremont, and other small villages to the north, on the edge of St. Ann’s Bay, the parish capital. This will show how the availability of material, economic activity, and topography determined the architectural character of the region. It was as a result of these local conditions that a specific creole form of architecture emerged.29 These districts, villages, and the town of Claremont are located in the hilly interior of the parish, surrounded by a gently rolling landscape. Claremont, which began as a village, had become a central market town by the late nineteenth century and lay on a main route connecting St. Ann’s Bay and interior districts. (See fig.  15.5.) The small farming sector was described in 1890 as producing coffee, citrus, and bananas.30 According to the report, the land was suitable for cattle, but in 1890 they had not yet been introduced. It was noted that the extension of the railway to Ewarton had led to increased activity in the village of Moneague, and it can be conjectured that the railway had an impact in Claremont as well. Given the extent of the surviving buildings in Claremont dating to the nineteenth century, it seems that the town was a very significant node in the distribution network for agricultural produce in the interior of the island. The town retains its nineteenth-­century character, although many of its older structures are in serious disrepair. The Y-­shaped configuration of the town is dominated by the Anglican church, which sits on a hill above the town, in the fork. The post office, clock, police station, and several other old houses and renovated

C r e o l e A r c h i t e c t u r e i n V i c t o r i a n J a m a i ca

485

Fig. 1 5. 5   Photographer unknown, Claremont, St. Ann, postcard, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Collection of Elizabeth Pigou-­Dennis.

486

commercial buildings make up the core of the town, while picturesque cottages lie just on its outskirts. Alderton is a much smaller village, lying a few kilometers south of Claremont. This smaller node is a linear strip dominated by the Barnes shop and the Methodist church. Coffee, tea, and yams were the main crops in this area.31 Forty-­seven buildings surviving from the Victorian and Edwardian periods were surveyed, dating from after emancipation to about 1910. Most of these were dwelling houses, ranging from the humble homes of small holders to those of the rural middle classes. Great houses, churches, schools, and other public buildings were excluded from the analysis, as the emphasis is on the development of houses for the general population. Eight of the buildings were shop houses or shops; most seemed to combine dwelling with commerce, with the living quarters on the upper floor. With two exceptions, the structures were made from stone nog. Virtually all were raised off the ground on a plinth of stones with lime mortar. All were timber framed, and 42 percent had hip roofs, while the remainder had gable roofs or segmented roofs. This was a local variant of typologies that evolved in English and French colonies, in response to climate. The latter were constructed so that each separate module of the house had an individual roof segment. About a quarter of the structures were of two stories; the majority were single-­story dwellings.

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

F ig . 15. 6   Fern Court, Beechamville, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Drawing by student Denise Gray in Sketch Book of 1994 Pilot Inventory of Jamaican Heritage Sites by the Caribbean School of Architecture, University of Technology, Jamaica, in association with the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica.

F ig . 15. 7   Faith Glade, Beechamville, 1909. Drawing by student Denise Gray in Sketch Book of 1994 Pilot Inventory of Jamaican Heritage Sites by the Caribbean School of Architecture, University of Technology, Jamaica, in association with the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica.

Fig. 1 5. 8   Alderton Pink House, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Photo: Denice Ramharrack.

F i g . 1 5 .9   House at Claremont, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Photo: Donnette Zacca.

Although a verandah and fretwork decoration are widely considered to be crucial elements of tropical and Caribbean architecture, these features are relatively rare in this part of St. Ann.32 Only a quarter of the structures had verandahs; four of the two-­ story structures had upper-­floor galleries; and only four buildings in the survey had fretwork (figs. 15.6, 15.7).33 The typical house was cabin-­like in appearance, with stone nog walls, and was raised on a plinth, with a short flight of steps leading directly up to a front door, and topped by a gable or hip roof (see figs. 15.8–­15.10). The plan was generally rectangular, and there appear to have been no strict modular rules in terms of scale. Houses were variable in size, ranging from 9'10" × 13'2" to 73'10" × 44'3". There were two surviving fragments of wattle and daub and one of thatch. It is not possible to identify precisely who built these structures. In 1878, seven men in Claremont were listed with the occupation of carpenter and builder: Joseph S. Barnes, Charles Brown, William Brown, Henry Guest, John Guest, Jacob Smith, and James H. Smith, a substantial group of craftsmen. One Lancelot Smith was listed as a house and sign painter. The repeating surnames suggest that it is probable these trades ran in families.34 Given the fact that black artisans were an important social group on the island, it seems reasonable to assume that the men listed were not white.35 The houses show some diversity with regard to function and social class. The smaller cabins with one or two rooms very likely belonged to laborers or farmers of quite small plots. The larger houses in Beechamville certainly must have belonged either to more prosperous landholders or to members of the small, rural middle class of artisans. The 1878 directory for Claremont lists four shopkeepers, one blacksmith, five boot- and shoemakers, four dressmakers, five tailors, twelve shopkeepers (including meat dealers and bakers), one doctor, one dispenser, three teachers, three ministers of religion, two overseers, and ten proprietors of estates or pens. Along with the carpenters and builders, a total of fifty-­nine persons were listed with artisan, professional, mercantile, and landowning occupations, indicating a thriving middle class in Claremont. The surviving Victorian buildings in the parish of St. Ann provide a vivid testimony to black Jamaicans’ creative response to the challenges presented by postemancipation social and economic conditions and by the exigencies of climate and

C r e o l e A r c h i t e c t u r e i n V i c t o r i a n J a m a i ca

F i g . 1 5 .1 0   Detail of transom over front entrance, Fern Court, Beechamville, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Photo: Denice Ramharrack.

489

available materials. The surviving buildings display not only structural and practical ingenuity but also a distinctive visual flare, which is a defining feature of Jamaican creole architecture.

Conclusion What conclusions can be drawn about Jamaica’s Victorian vernacular architecture? Written sources and the material evidence concur that the verandahless cabin was the most elementary of the building typologies, providing essential shelter with few decorative features. The predominance of the single-­volume cabin raises various possibilities. Its conceptual minimalism, inherited from a vernacular tied to the huts of the slave village, may have been born of the general impoverishment of the inhabitants. These houses were tropically creole in that they were forged in a distinctive climatic context that favored steep pitched roofs and allowed for open-­air activities, as well as for the more nuanced gradations of interior and exterior afforded by verandahs and galleries. The material was predominantly local, although imported shingles and sawn boards apparently figured in some cases. The design and detailing shows exposure to Georgian proportions and detailing, as well as to European–American Victorian and African carpentry. Jay D. Edwards has argued persuasively that the verandah “is but one of the numerous unheralded architectural contributions made by Africans and African Americans” to the architecture of the American South and the Caribbean.36 Victorian Jamaica produced a wide range of vernacular architecture. It is valid to ask what is most “African” of these dwellings constructed and used by Afro-­ Jamaicans. Roof shape, verandah, and wattle-­and-­daub material may relate most closely to African architecture, but the predominance of modular stone nog cabins in St. Ann suggests local roots. Indeed, the verandahless modular vernacular dwelling appears quite frequently throughout the Caribbean — ​­a fact that does not preclude its African origins.37 This type of cabin can also be found in St. Barts, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Grenada. Interior spatial divisions ranged from a single room to three small spaces with no intervening corridors. Jamaican vernacular architecture was profoundly affected by postemancipation planning of free villages, which sought an ethos modeled on orthogonal planning and English-­styled gardens. But tropical realities, extended family holdings, and, possibly, African spatial memory created clustered yards, a vital element in the emergence of modern Jamaican culture, and favored a predominance of fruit trees and shrubbery over built fabric. These are the distinctive characteristics of the creole architecture of Victorian Jamaica.

490

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 490

2/27/18 10:12 AM

Notes 1. James Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (Philadelphia: James Campbell and Co., 1843), 88, 373. 2. Susan Denyer, African Traditional Architecture (London: Heinemann, 1980), 134, 138. 3. For a discussion and images of variants of African forms, see Denyer, African Traditional Architecture. For African forms in the Americas, see, for example, Jonn Ethan Hankins and Steven Maklansky, eds., Raised to the Trade: Creole Building in New Orleans (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2002); Jack Berthelot and Martine Gaume, Kaz Antiye: jan moun ka rete: Caribbean Popular Dwelling, trans. Karen Bowie (English) and Robert Fontes, Jean-­Pierre, and Juliette Sainton (Creole) (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1982); B.  W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–­1912 (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 1998). 4. Phillippo, Jamaica, 84. 5. See the discussion of yards in Barry Chevannes, Learning to Be a Man: Culture, Socialization and Gender in Five Caribbean Communities (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2001). See also Jean Besson, “Maroons, Free Villages and ‘Squatters’ in the Development of Independent Jamaica,” paper presented at the conference Fifty Years of Jamaican Independence, University of London, 2012. 6. Phillippo, Jamaica, 85. 7. Phillippo, Jamaica, 85–­86. 8. Phillippo, Jamaica, 86. 9. Phillippo, Jamaica, 88. 10. Phillippo, Jamaica, 89. See B. W. Higman and B. J. Hudson, Jamaican Place Names (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2009). 11. Kelly Rebecca Elliott, “Baptist Missions in the British Empire: Jamaica and Serampore in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century” (master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2007). 12. Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 13. J. H. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica: History of the Mission of the United Brethren Church’s Mission to the Negroes in the Island of Jamaica (London: Longman, Brown, 1854), 146. 14. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica, 157. 15. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica, 169. 16. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica. 17. Sir Anthony Musgrave, Jamaica: Now and Fifteen Years Since, A Paper Read before the Royal Colonial Institute (London: Unwin Brothers, 1880). 18. Rev. Panton, quoted in Musgrave, Jamaica, 13. See Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (London: Macmillan Education, 1991), 218. 19. Musgrave, Jamaica, 13.

C r e o l e A r c h i t e c t u r e i n V i c t o r i a n J a m a i ca

491

20. This Daily Gleaner series is reproduced and edited in Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, eds., The Land We Live In: Jamaica in 1890 (Kingston: Social History Project, Department of History, University of the West Indies, Mona, 2000), 121. 21. Moore and Johnson, The Land We Live In, 121. 22. Moore and Johnson, The Land We Live In, 93. 23. Moore and Johnson, The Land We Live In. 24. Moore and Johnson, The Land We Live In, 59. 25. C. G. Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 26. All quotations from Moore and Johnson, The Land We Live In, 26. 27. See Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Colonial Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). 28. Patricia E. Green, “The Evolution of Jamaican Architecture 1494–­1938” (MSc thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1988), accessed September 1, 2012, www.OpenLibrary .org. Also, Patricia E. Green, “ ‘Small Settler’ Houses in Chapleton,” Jamaica Journal 17, no. 3 (1984): 39–­45; and Patricia E. Green, “The ‘Jamaican Vernacular’ Architectural Style,” Daily Gleaner, May 13, 1991, 10–­11. 29. Data for this section are extracted from the Pilot Heritage Inventory carried out by the Caribbean School of Architecture for the Jamaica National Heritage Trust in 1994. The sample forty-­seven buildings used here range between sequence numbers 117 and ­260 of the field inventory sheets. The drawings are ink on paper. 30. See description of St. Ann in the Daily Gleaner report reprinted in Moore and Johnson, The Land We Live In, 14–­42. See also Handbook of Jamaica (Kingston: Government Printing Office, 1890), 280–­82; and Jamaica Almanac (Kingston, 1840), 67–­70. 31. Mrs. Carter-­Kinghorn, Alderton, in discussion with the author, November 2011. 32. See, for example, Brian Hudson, “The Caribbean Verandah: A Study of Its Functions in Literature,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 23, no. 2 (2006): 147–­59. Jay D. Edwards asserted that the “gallery/​veranda/​piazza” was a significant architectural contribution of Africans and African Americans, which became “intertwined and interwoven” with European practices (“In Praise of the Gallery,” in Hankins and Malansky, eds., Raised to the Trade, 88, 90). In this context, it is very interesting how frequently the verandahless cabin shows up in St. Ann’s historic fabric. 33. Natalie Butler’s research paper on Jamaican fretwork (unpublished, Edna Manley School of Visual Arts, ca. 1993) investigated the effect of English and West African decorative patterns on Jamaican fretwork, as well as local innovation in design. Her numerous drawn examples show many commonalities between the geometric and natural motifs of English, West African, and Jamaican examples. 34. Directory of Jamaica (Kingston, 1878). 35. Bryan, Jamaican People, 227–­33. 36. Edwards, “In Praise of the Gallery,” 90. 37. Suzanne Slesin, Stafford Cliff, Jack Berthelot, Martine Gaume, and Daniel Rosensztroch, Caribbean Style (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 280–­84; also, Berthelot and Gaume, Kaz Antiye: jan moun ka rete.

492

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis

C H A P T E R 16

“Keeping Alive Before the People’s Eyes This Great Event” Kingston’s Queen Victoria Monument PETRINA DACRES

The statue of Queen Victoria by Edward Geflowski, erected in Kingston in 1897, is perhaps the most important example in Jamaica of the use of monuments in the service of colonial administration (see fig. 16.1). It recognized the power of a monarchy that demanded loyalty and obedience from the local population. The statue was an important symbolic assertion of empire, particularly given the challenge to colonial rule signified by the Morant Bay peasant rebellion in 1865. Yet with changing historical contexts, the meanings generated by this sculpture have been unstable. Queen Victoria is the most commemorated of all British monarchs, with numerous statues and memorials throughout the world. While some statues of the Queen are cherished, others have been the focus of anti-­ imperial violence in the twentieth century, or have been removed from public sites, or have been left to decay. Kingston’s Queen Victoria, now located in St. William Grant Park, has suffered its own indignities: the left arm is damaged, as is part of the scepter in the Queen’s right hand; a piece of gum is stuck in the left nostril (see fig. 16.2). Victoria’s statue was also broken by a Rastafari elder in 1966, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s visit.1 Interpreted in a Rastafari visionary narrative, the statue was subject to violence “to unmask in a powerful and dramatic way the false image of the Queen as a ‘mother’ figure and the Crown as ‘protector.’ ” 2 In striking the monument on the grand state occasion, the Rastafari elder was also linking the body of the Queen to contemporary concerns over the divisive political strategies of the Jamaican political elite after independence. As many scholars have argued, the meanings of memorials and commemorations are always intertwined with present-­day concerns and our multiple and shifting subject positions. In this chapter, I offer some insights into the conditions under which the Queen Victoria statue came into existence in Jamaica. The chapter connects that statue iconographically to the body of Queen Victoria statues throughout the

F ig . 1 6.1   Photographer unknown, Edward Geflowski’s Queen Victoria, Kingston, circa 1910. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

British Empire and contextualizes it within the artist’s life and practice. I also consider the statue in relation to other Victorian statues in Jamaica and motivations for and responses to its birth. Created for the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, the sculpture was perceived — ​­in the words of Legislative Council member Philip Stern — ​­to be an important object in “keeping alive before the people’s eyes” the momentous occasion.3

Statues in the Garden There are relatively few full-­size, freestanding Jamaican colonial statues. The earliest to survive is a commemorative statue designed to honor Admiral George Rodney, victor of the Battle of the Saintes in 1782 against the French.4 The esteemed English sculptor John Bacon portrayed Rodney in Roman dress, and the figure is mounted on a pedestal with decorative allegorical reliefs (see figs. 16.3 and 16.4). Although completed in 1789, it was unveiled in Jamaica only in 1792, under a newly built temple of arches topped by a cupola and supported by Corinthian columns. It is connected by a colonnade to an impressive ensemble of government buildings that was also constructed at the time of the unveiling. The Rodney memorial project, situated on the north side of the Spanish Town square in the old capital, reportedly cost more than £30,000, with the carving, shipment, and erection of the statue costing about £5,200.5 Its grandeur would remain unrivaled by any later colonial monument in Jamaica. Several nineteenth-­century statues, less opulent in presentation, are now mostly housed in St. William Grant Park, formerly known as Victoria Park, and before that as Parade Gardens, and originally as the Parade. The town of Kingston was designed in 1692, north of a harbor with a Spanish-­style square. In the northwest corner were military barracks and in the south was an empty space used as a parade ground for the soldiers. As the town developed, churches, markets, and municipal buildings as well as a theater were erected around the parade field. In 1870 the field was transformed into Parade Gardens, divided by a north–south road in the middle. Parade Gardens quickly became home to five marble portrait statues that were created in the nineteenth century.6 As Frank Cundall reports, the first statue to be positioned in Parade Gardens was a memorial of 1845 to the former governor of Jamaica Charles Metcalfe by Edward Hodges Baily, R.A. (see fig. 16.5).7 The statue of Metcalfe

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

F i g . 1 6.2   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, 1897. Photo: Jonathan Greenland.

495

F i g . 1 6.3   John Bacon, Admiral George Rodney, 1789, unveiled 1792. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

F i g . 1 6.4   Edward Hodges Baily, Charles Metcalfe, circa 1844. Photo: Jonathan Greenland.

F ig . 16 . 5   Statue of Charles Metcalfe at Parade Gardens, Kingston, as seen in A View from the Clock Tower of the Kingston Anglican Parish Church, circa 1880. Collection of Brett Ashmeade-­Hawkins.

had been housed in the square of Spanish Town until it was removed to the south entrance of Parade Gardens when the capital was transferred to Kingston in 1872 (see fig. 16.6). The Rodney statue was also moved to the Kingston waterfront. After much pressure from the people of Spanish Town, the statue was finally returned to its original location in 1889.8 Thirty years after the Metcalfe statue had been unveiled, the first statue of a nonwhite public personality was erected in Parade Gardens. The memorial to the brown Jamaican politician Edward Jordon, by R. G. Miller, R.A., was offered to the city of Kingston in 1875 by a “Committee of Gentlemen,” and the municipal authorities positioned it on the eastern side of the garden (see fig. 16.7).9 Jordon was a former member of the assembly and Legislative Council, mayor of Kingston, and cofounder of the newspaper the Jamaica Watchman and the venerable insurance company Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society (1844–­1998). In 1881, another statue to a local politician, Dr. Lewis Quier Bowerbank, was also positioned in the garden, on the northeast side. As with the sculpture of Jordon, this memorial to the medical practitioner, public healthcare advocate, and former powerful member of the House of Assembly and custos of Kingston was commissioned by the subject’s friends and gifted to the island.10

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

F i g . 1 6.6   R. G. Miller, Edward Jordon, 1875. Photo: Jonathan Greenland.

497

Fig. 1 6 . 7 ​ A. Duperly and Sons, Statue of Governor Metcalfe at the Landing Pier, Kingston Harbour, 1900. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​100, 122. The statue faces King Street and the Victoria Market on the right.

498

Two more statues were added to the park in the 1890s. Through a public subscription, a memorial to the French-­born Catholic priest Father Joseph Dupont, on behalf of his work with the poor, was erected and placed in the north of the garden in 1892.11 The last statue to be erected in the nineteenth century was that of Queen Victoria, which was commissioned by the government to mark the Diamond Jubilee, in 1897. Together the statues in the garden formed a symbolic landscape of political, moral, and social power. In their review of public sculpture in England, Terry Wyke and Harry Cocks note that the designing of civic spaces, with portrait statues as key constitutive elements, was an essential aspect of the construction of the Victorian city. Such statues, they argue, not only were honorific memorials and decorative objects but also imbricated in ideological, cultural, and aesthetic processes.12 After the Queen Victoria statue was unveiled, there were renewed calls in Spanish Town for the repatriation of the Metcalfe statue to the old capital, but this was never to be.13 Instead, it was moved to the foot of King Street, at the harbor, and placed on a base that had been designed for the Rodney memorial when it was in Kingston (see fig. 16.8).14 There it stood, with its back to the harbor, facing the town and the Queen Victoria statue that replaced it. This position commanded the main axis of the city. King Street runs south to

Petrina Dacres

north and crosses Queen Street at the Parade. The shifting positions of the Rodney and Metcalfe statues illustrate the important role sculpture played in local political culture during the nineteenth century. Both Spanish Town and Kingston saw these public sculptures as integral to the perception of their power within the island. The Metcalfe statue remained at the harbor until the 1970s, when it was repositioned again. Today it stands in William Grant Park, as a vexed object of a bygone era. Public statues of British luminaries such as Rodney, Metcalfe, and Queen Victoria were important to local definition of Jamaica as part of the British Empire and served to bolster colonial authority.15 Moreover, the statuary system crystallized the power of the Jamaican white and colored leadership that had grown in confidence through increased access to the political process by the mid-­nineteenth century.16 The rise of Jamaican public statues in this era should be understood in relation to the growing number of monuments found across Europe in the nineteenth century. Monuments were no longer limited to the celebration of monarchial power but now also paid private homage to bourgeois political culture. Heroic political monuments were promoted for their emotive and symbolic power as icons of national virtues and to justify political authority.17

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 499

F i g . 1 6.8  G. R. Lambert and Co., Group Photograph with Statue of Queen Victoria in Government House, Singapore, 1888– 1889. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015.

499

2/27/18 10:12 AM

Statues embodied national history — ​­often including very recent events — ​ a­ nd their ideological charge can be considered in relation to other sites through which the past was imagined.18 John Aaron notes, for example, that when the Jamaican Code of Education was revised in 1893, history was finally singled out in the syllabus, with English and Jamaican history to be taught, and particular focus directed to six individuals — ​­Alfred the Great, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Rodney, Nelson, and Wellington — ​­and to events in the life of Queen Victoria.19 Like elementary education, which was strictly supervised by the Colonial Office, statues served as linked sites to institute a historical consciousness that was oriented to Britain. The statuomania in many nineteenth-­century European societies developed alongside other techniques of display such as fairs, arcades, and international exhibitions. This network of displays formed what Tony Bennett describes as an “exhibitionary complex,” which organized power and knowledge for governments to transform the populace into disciplined citizens. Through the provision of object lessons in power — ​­the power to command and arrange things and bodies for public display — ​­they [governments] sought to allow the people, and en masse rather than individually, to know rather than be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge. Yet, ideally, they sought also to allow the people to know and hence to regulate themselves; to become, in seeing themselves from the inside of power, both the subjects and the objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-­surveillance and, hence, self-­regulation.20 Such forms of spectacle shifted bodies and objects from the private domains in which they had hitherto been viewed into an increasingly public zone “where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power.” 21 There are approximately 161 statues of Queen Victoria across the world: Jenny Powell lists 86 in Great Britain and 75 in the rest of the empire.22 The process of gazing upon the body of Queen Victoria and “interiorizing its gaze” (in Bennett’s phrase) was complex. The Queen famously entered a self-­imposed exile from public life after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1862. In her rare public appearances thereafter, and in official photographs, she appeared muted in body and dress, embracing an exaggerated self-­fashioning of eternal mourning. The sculpture’s task was therefore to give body to an absent subjec-

500

Petrina Dacres

tivity, one that had all but physically and symbolically vanished. In the face of the Queen’s public invisibility, Catharine Stimpson argues, the multiple images of the Queen in art and literature “offered up fantasy substitutes for Victoria.” 23 The reproduction and wide circulation of Queen Victoria statues can be viewed as a strategy of bodily insistence around which a sense of a shared belonging to empire could be built and sustained. The bodily presence of the Queen was perhaps even more important in the geographically distant lands of the empire where challenges to British rule, such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857–­1858, had become evident by the middle of the century.24 Nineteenth-­century sculpture was still governed by the idealizing or classicizing of the human form, and public sculpture was intended to represent a stable, heroic, and idealized subjectivity. Queen Victoria generated, however, multiple and paradoxical imagery or meanings, as mother and as queen, for instance.25 Moreover, according to normative beliefs concerning gender, women did not embody the nation but, rather, would give birth to, and nurture, heroes of the nation.26 Queen Victoria, then, was far from the typical subject of heroic imperial sculpture. What were the implications of her special status — ​­as wife, mother, grandmother, queen, empress — ​­for the spectatorial process in which the viewer is constituted as a member of empire?

Planning for the Diamond Jubilee The first statues of Victoria appeared in the years following her accession to the throne, in 1837; after her wedding to Albert, in 1840, commissions favored statues of the pair. Such sculptures were often erected to commemorate a visit by Victoria to a town in Great Britain.27 Jubilees brought forth a profusion of statues of the Queen. The Golden Jubilee of 1887 afforded a revival of the Queen’s public image, which had been badly damaged by her refusal to appear in public after the death of Albert. Helen Rappaport describes the Golden Jubilee as “a spectacular public relations exercise in nation building” that honored the Queen and celebrated “the years of stability since the end of the Crimean War in 1856 which had stimulated the expansion of the empire (now covering one quarter of the earth’s land surface).” 28 In Great Britain, fourteen new statues were erected for the Golden Jubilee of 1887, while the rest of the empire hosted seven new statues. For the Diamond Jubilee, ten years later, another fourteen were added in Britain while the imperial territories commissioned seventeen.29 On September 22, 1896, Queen Victoria became the longest reigning monarch in British history. The following year she would mark another milestone — ​ ­her Diamond Jubilee (sixty years on the throne), an event that celebrated the

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 501

501

2/27/18 10:12 AM

massive expansion of the British Empire over which she ruled as much as her unmatched longevity on the British throne. Compared to her Golden Jubilee ten years earlier, the dependencies and colonies played a more central role in the Diamond Jubilee celebration in London, sending their representatives to attend the commemorative festivities. The colonial presence in the military parade on June 22 provided a visual feast of diverse cultures and costumes. Victoria would write in her diary that she was “much moved and gratified” by the large crowd of well-­wishers on the streets with their “deafening” cheers and faces of “real joy.” 30 In Jamaica, plans for the celebration began to take shape only when the governor, Sir Henry Arthur Blake (1889–­1898), called a formal meeting on February 11, 1897, attended by the custodes of the island, members of the Legislative Council, and other prominent men, to organize a course of action for the celebration of the jubilee.31 Blake proposed the establishment of a Central Committee consisting of the custodes of the parishes, members of the Legislative Council, the mayor of Kingston, and the chairmen of the parochial boards, who would serve as a nucleus and could invite other members as they saw fit. He nominated Major-­General Hallowes, the commander of the forces, to be president of the Central Committee and also suggested Parochial Committees be formed to organize local district celebrations. These proposals were taken up in the meeting, and over the next several months the Parochial Committees began to take shape, comprising members of the parochial boards of each district and prominent members of each community, usually including ministers of religion, schoolmasters, and justices of the peace. There were also subcommittees of ladies.32 It was hoped that the network of committee members would arouse interest in the celebrations, gauge public opinion, and invite people to the public meetings, which were also announced in the newspapers. The Parochial Committees were also tasked with raising subscriptions to supplement the meager funds given by the Legislative Council to help with the cost of their local celebrations and to contribute to a lasting memorial. At the meeting of February 11, 1897, the well-­known Jewish lawyer and mayor of Kingston Philip Stern revealed that he had already called a meeting to consider proposals to best celebrate the Queen’s reign and noted the popular suggestions for a statue or a charitable institution, such as the Jubilee Hospital, which had been erected on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee. Stern declared his support for a statue, arguing that the upkeep of an institution would be too costly. Samuel Constantine Burke, custos of St. Andrew, agreed with the idea of a statue, stating that only one other island in the West Indies had a statue and Jamaica ought to have its own. His remarks suggest the statue’s importance in connecting the various landscapes of the empire and in solidifying Jamai-

502

Petrina Dacres

ca’s place in the imperial scheme. Other attendees at the meeting, however, disagreed. The Rev. Gillies, for example, called for a technical institution that would teach the industrial arts. These debates continued in the newspapers, in the central and local parochial meetings, and in the legislature. The most popular “charitable” proposal was the creation of a water scheme of tanks and wells named after the Queen that would help in dealing with the severe drought faced by many rural communities at the time.33 Some countered that such a scheme was not sufficiently philanthropic and that it was the Parochial Boards’ responsibility to address the water situation in the districts irrespective of the jubilee.34 These debates vividly reveal the fractious aspects of Jamaica’s political culture at the end of the century, the tensions between the governor and the nominated and elected members of the legislature, and anxieties over the finances of the colony. Within a month, the Jubilee Central Committee recommended an expenditure of £800 for the erection of a statue and £700 to enable local festivities. Ratification of the proposal occurred at a particularly contentious meeting on March 29, 1897, at which a decision was also made concerning the expenditure of £900 to enable a detachment of two officers and forty men of the Kingston Militia and Artillery to participate in the jubilee celebration in London. The meeting highlighted the precarious position of the nominated members of the Legislative Council under Crown Colony rule. Incensed by the perceived dictatorial behavior of the governor and other members of the council in the ratification process, at the meeting some councilmen, including Philip Stern, admonished the “Crown Colony stamp” of the proceedings, while affirming their loyalty to the British Empire.35 The Gleaner reported Stern had declared that “he should have much preferred that this colony had not been treated as a Crown Colony pure and simple.” The report continued with Stern’s view that Jamaica “was for an interregnum of a more or less lengthy period a Crown Colony but of recent years they [the Jamaican people] had had a measure of self-­government tending onwards he believed to that happy time when they should again see Kingston’s fully represented and representative Council. He was sorry that the mode in which they were to express their outward loyalty to our beloved Queen, should stamp them as being wholly a Crown Colony.” 36 Eventually the motion for the expenditure of £900 to enable the detachment to participate in the special competitions and parade in the London jubilee celebrations was approved. At the meeting, Philip Stern threw his support behind a statue, noting its smaller cost relative to the expense of sending troops to participate in the jubilee celebration in London. Highlighting the special significance of sculpture to the

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

503

state’s historical project, he argued the statue, “rather than cheap photographs,” according to the newspaper record, would act in a tutelary role: “An object lesson to the people it would be a great and enormous value. A statue would be a very important and valuable means of keeping alive before the people’s eyes this great event.” 37 Stern’s comment interestingly highlights the competing status of sculpture and photography in the late nineteenth century. Queen Victoria often sat for official photographic portraits and readily engaged with this very modern means of circulating her image. But it was often assumed that figurative sculpture more vividly pronounced the presence of the body than did other media, and its special affective power is related to its nature as a tangible and sensorial symbol. Samuel Burke, who believed that statues were important symbols of civic landscapes, pointed to the many towns in England that had their own statues of the Queen. Jamaica “of all the colonies,” he asserted, should have a statue. Statues of the Queen were exceptionally significant in projecting the importance of one’s location in the network of imperial sites. Stern emphatically declared that the absence of a statue of the Queen was “monstrous”: this lack of a physical embodiment of monarchy had struck him upon his return to Jamaica after living in England for several years.38 In strong contrast to Stern’s position, the idea that Jamaica would be participating in a global statuary system solidified the resolve against the statue on the part of David S. Gideon, council representative from Portland,39 and David Aurelis Corinaldi, from St James. Gideon argued that £800 would provide Jamaica with an inferior statue relative to the others that it already hosted. The report recorded that he had asked whether it would “reflect credit on this country to have a statue of the Queen comparing unfavourably with that of Rodney, or Bowerbank or Metcalfe and other statues; if they were to have a statue at all they must have something worthy of the Queen and not a miserable thing that £800 would provide.” 40 He was not willing, however, to suggest a higher sum when challenged by Stern; ultimately he did not seem to believe in the statue’s benefit to the vast majority of Jamaicans. Rather, he supported the “Victoria Wells and Tanks” scheme. The debates also revealed tensions within the colony between rural and urban interests. The Rev. Graham, in a letter to the Daily Gleaner, argued that most people from the rural parish of St. Elizabeth would not contribute to a fund for a statue. “Let Kingston have its statue if it likes and pay for it, but let this poor country at large have something of which it can permanently feel the beneficial effects and this something should not be hard to find.” 41 Another impassioned Jamaican, Mr. E. J. Barry, wrote in support of a proper water supply throughout the island:

504

Petrina Dacres

The Queen said “Do something for my poor: give them bread to eat.” The collective wisdom of Kingston, Jamaica (let it go forth to the world) says: “Oh! Confound your poor, we will give them stone to look at, and in doing so we will glorify ourselves alone, however it may astonish Your Majesty and your poor. Hang your poor!” A few hundred inhabitants of the model city of Kingston will know what the inanimate dust-­covered thing standing in some obscure place means; but the three quarters of a million other people in the Island will never cast an eye upon. Or if any of them ever do, it will be to ask, “what is it?” and what ever it is, it wants washing.42 Such views presented a challenge to Philip Stern’s idea of the statue as object lesson. Rejecting the popular notion that the physicality and literalness of figurative sculpture activated particular kinds of bodily engagement, Barry suggested instead that the statue — ​­its physical presence and position in the landscape — ​­would generate unintended meanings. The debates over the statue of the Queen provide telling glimpses into social and political concerns, but they also reveal attitudes toward sculptural representation. Eventually, the motion approving the budget for a statue and the jubilee celebrations did pass, with twelve in favor and four against.43

Edward Geflowski’s Queen Victoria The commissioned sculpture participated in a strategy of spectacular power. Sculptural monuments allow us to view the complicated and violent character of the cross-­cultural entanglements of empire. Geflowski’s sculpture of the Queen, in particular, created initially for Asia and circulated across the world to the Caribbean, broadens our understanding of the networks through which art and material objects flowed within imperial culture. In his description of the Colonial Office in London during Joseph Chamberlain’s period as colonial secretary (1895–­1906), Frederick Dolman noted a statue of the Queen by Emmanuel Edward Geflowski (1834–­1898) housed in its central hall.44 According to Dolman, the sculpture had been commissioned in 1887 by the governor of the Straits Settlements, who presented it to the Colonial Office in London, no doubt in relation to the Golden Jubilee celebration of that year.45 The Colonial Office statue is also replicated in the 1888 Queen Victoria statue by Geflowski commissioned by the “Chinese Community of Singapore” for Government House and received by the governor Cecil Smith (see fig.  16.9).46 The six-­foot-­high Sicilian marble statue was praised as the most lifelike statuary representation of the Queen. In May 1897, an K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 505

505

2/27/18 10:12 AM

F i g . 1 6.9   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria statue on the presidential grounds of the Istana, Singapore, 1888. Photo: Char Lee.

F ig . 16 . 10   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, detail, 1897. Photo: Jonathan Greenland.

official announcement was made that Edward Geflowski had been commissioned, through the Colonial Office, to create for Jamaica a replica of the marble statue of the Queen that he had made for Singapore (see fig. 16.10).47 Emanuel Edward Geflowski was born in Warsaw, soon after the November Uprising, against Russia, of 1830–18­31. After spending his childhood in a world of political turmoil, like many thousands of Poles he participated in what has been described as the Great Emigration. By the time Geflowski moved to Great Britain in the 1850s, there were about one thousand Poles

506

Petrina Dacres

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 506

2/27/18 10:12 AM

living in England.48 Although he became a British subject in 1864, Geflowski maintained his cultural roots, becoming a prominent member in the Polish National Lodge, which had been founded in England in 1847 by participants in the 1830–­1831 uprising.49 His early years in England were spent in Liverpool, where he mainly produced work in the Gothic Revival style for church commissions. Over time the artist produced a number of portrait sculptures of noted personalities, such as a bust of Field Marshall Lord Frederick Roberts (1885).50 While he never achieved the eminence of Alfred Gilbert or Sir Thomas Brock, by the late 1870s his recognition as a sculptor was rising. Geflowski participated in the Empire of India Exhibition of 1895, contributing a small group of busts of Indian sitters including the Right Hon. Dadabhai Naorojee, the Indian political leader and first Asian member of the British parliament.51 Among several of his works commissioned for the Indian Empire was a bust of Major-­General Daniel George Robinson, R.E., director-­general of Indian Telegraphs. The choice of Geflowski for the Jamaica commission followed discussions in which other sculptors were considered. In a meeting on February 12, 1897, Governor Blake had suggested that if there was interest in a statue, he could telegraph for three or four photographs of statues of the Queen that already existed in England and the prices for reproductions; he also professed a liking for the work of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, R.A. (1834–­1890), the preeminent public sculptor of the era, whose work was, however, probably too expensive for the colony. Marble had higher status and was actually cheaper than bronze, but the preference for the material was also ideological. When Boehm created his celebrated bronze statue of the Queen for Windsor in 1887, the dark color of the material may have stood in conflict with racialized ideas of Britishness and power. Powell cites a newspaper review of another 1887 bronze statue of Victoria, by Alfred Gilbert, a former studio assistant to Boehm: “Bronze is not a material to command, like marble, immediate admiration, especially from those unaccustomed to see English faces represented in its mulatto-­like hue.” 52 Bronze did become much more commonplace by the end of the century, and after 1897 it was used for the majority of the statues of the Queen in Great Britain and Ireland. According to John Sankey, “the increase in the use of bronze simply reflected the fact that the metal, particularly in Britain, was less subject to the ravages of fog and grime than marble.” 53 But, according to Powell, the shift to bronze was not a popular practice in the rest of the empire. Indeed, she notes that at the 1905 unveiling ceremony for a Queen Victoria statue in the Bahamas, the Speaker from the House of Assembly, F. A. Holmes, “emphasised the purity

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 507

507

2/27/18 10:12 AM

of Victoria’s character which, he implies is signified through the white marble standing in the tropical sunshine ‘forever free from blemish or reproach.’ ” 54 There was no demand for originality among patrons of Victoria statues. The artists often made casts or replicas. For example, Alfred Gilbert’s celebrated statue of the Queen commissioned for Winchester in 1887 was reproduced in Rajkot, India, in 1900, in Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne in 1903, and in Bangkok in 1905. Versions of a statue would often differ in detail: changes could be made to the placement of the figure’s arms and royal accouterments, the treatment of the dress and headdress, any allegorical attachments, or the design of the architectural setting and of the pedestals.55 A number of statues in the empire included more literal signifiers of imperial power in reliefs on the pedestals or design details on the dress and throne of the figures.56 In Geflowski’s marble statue of the Queen in Kingston, the standing figure is holding an orb in her left hand and a scepter in her right. Her arms protrude from the cape sleeves of a gown that bears incised and carved three-­ dimensional patterns to suggest embroidery (see fig.  16.10). Her arms are adorned with tiered bracelets and she is further accessorized with a necklace, the Order of the Garter Star and Riband, and a small crown over a veil that extends to the center of her back (see fig. 16.12). The veil echoes that worn in Victoria’s official Diamond Jubilee photographs. After her husband’s death, official portraits had often imaged the Queen with her veil and accouterments associated with the Prince Consort, such as a framed photograph of Albert in her hand or a bracelet with a miniature photo of her husband. Geflowski’s sculpture does not depart from the iconography of Victoria statues today found throughout the Commonwealth. Victoria is often figured seated on her throne or standing with the royal insignia of authority in her hands. Except on rare occasions, like the youthful figures of the Queen in Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia, she was sculpted as rotund and middle-­aged with a serious countenance. Where many statues of Victoria adopt classicizing elements of dress, Geflowski’s statue is insistently modern. Her fitted, corseted bodice fans out in a full skirt typical of the period.57 Geflowski’s rendering of the folds in the fabric of the skirt provides the viewer with a sensuous engagement while drawing attention to the heaviness of the sculpted stone material. On Geflowski’s pedestal are roundels inset with silhouetted relief busts of Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, Edward VII, and his wife, Alexandra, on the right and left sides. The busts add a dynastic dimension to the monument and lay out the future of the monarchy for the colonies. While in Jamaica the pedestal and roundels are both carved from marble (see figs. 16.11 and 16.12), the

508

Petrina Dacres

F i g . 1 6.1 1   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, Kingston, detail with roundel on left side of pedestal featuring Princess Alexandra, wife of Prince Edward VII, the future king, 1897. Photo: Jonathan Greenland.

F i g . 1 6.1 2   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria, Kingston, detail of roundel of Prince Edward VII, the eldest son of the Queen, 1897. Photo: Jonathan Greenland.

F ig . 16 . 13   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria statue on the presidential grounds of the Istana, Singapore, 1888, detail of roundel of Princess Alexandra (bronzed). Photo: Char Lee.

F i g . 1 6.1 4   Edward Geflowski, Queen Victoria statue on the presidential grounds of the Istana, Singapore, 1888, detail of roundel of Prince Edward VII (bronzed). Photo: Char Lee.

roundels in the Singaporean version are distinctive in bronze (see figs. 16.13 and 16.14). The pedestals of colonial statues typically have minimal decoration, and the addition of the roundels therefore provides an unusual gesture. The engraved text on the front of the pedestal reads “Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Empress of India and of Jamaica Supreme Lady 1837 1897.” The text is unique to Jamaica since “Supreme Lady” was a title used only in the colony. Jamaica was captured from the Spanish in 1655 during the period when Oliver Cromwell governed the Commonwealth as the Lord Protector (1653–­1658). Jamaica adopted Cromwell’s arms and the original title he assumed, “Supreme Lord of Jamaica.” This Cromwellian title continued to be used officially in the colony until the era of Victoria, when she was styled Supreme Lady. 58 Many sculptors of monuments created limited edition statuettes, which allowed the artists to secure sales by providing a more affordable and portable option for the domestic market. Geflowski created twenty-­centimeter-­high statuettes of the Queen in bisque porcelain for the Golden Jubilee. His miniature versions reveal the consumerist values that worked in tandem with her power and, more broadly, with the imperial project.59 Miniatures of Victoria demonstrate one way in which the Queen’s authority was singled out for veneration as part of an imperial strategy of establishing or reasserting sovereignty. As Natasha Eaton writes, Queen Victoria often gifted “her miniature likeness to Indian rulers whose lands the British ruthlessly annexed.” 60 Eaton reminds us that as much as these mimetic objects are formative agents that activate social bonds, they are also part of a disintegrative process based on antagonism and violence.61

The Jubilee Celebrations The week-­long jubilee celebrations in June 1897 followed a shared pattern across the island. They began with special religious services on the morning of Sunday, June 21, which, as the Gleaner observed, included “sermons patriotic in spirit and exhorting the people to loyalty, exhibiting Her Majesty as an example and a pattern to maidens and to womanhood.” 62 These services were followed by some type of a procession in the street, including a parade of schoolchildren who sang patriotic songs such as “God Save the Queen” and “Rule Britannia” while carrying flags or banners. Some locations included a carnival-­like parade with music bands and, in some cases, community members in costumes. The parades ended in an entertainment ground where the community gathered to listen to speeches, punctuated by patriotic songs. The children received medals or badges and light refreshments. In some districts, organizers distributed food to the poor, while other districts provided entertainment with games, donkey

510

Petrina Dacres

races, dances, and sports. In a few locations, the day was capped off by a small fireworks display, to the delight of some who had not seen such a thing before. The consistency in the parochial events demonstrates the importance of universality as a conceptual frame for the jubilee celebrations. The common features, in which thousands of people across the country would partake at roughly the same time, allowed for the imagination of a shared colonial identity centered around the Queen.63 This construction of identity was both local and global in scope, linking Jamaicans to others in the empire, as the Daily Gleaner had recorded two months earlier: “If any part of the Empire fails to recognise the importance and significance of the forthcoming celebration and to manifest its loyalty on the occasion the commemoration will not be complete. The impressiveness of the thanksgiving festival is its universality — ​­the fact that in every corner of the vast Empire an expression of gratitude is being made for the blessings of the long and peaceful reign of Her Majesty and from millions of throats without exception there is issuing the heart-­felt prayer, ‘God save the Queen.’ ” 64 To underscore this relationship, a suggestion was made in the newspaper to set a timed chain of bonfires on the hills that would be modeled on proposals for bonfires in the United Kingdom;65 St. Catherine would eventually set these bonfires on Beacon Hill.66 The unveiling of a Queen Victoria statue in Kingston as in so many other locales throughout the world undoubtedly conformed to this pattern, linking Jamaica to the time and space of empire. The commemoration of the Diamond Jubilee also invoked specific local concerns. For example, Alexander Dixon, a businessman, an activist for black political participation, and a member of the Parochial Board of St. Elizabeth who later, in 1899, would become the first black person to be elected to the legislature, supported the commemoration of the Queen since slavery ended under her rule: “Had it not been for Her Majesty the Queen,” he was reported to have declared at one of the organizational meetings, “he would not have been in his proper place that Day [as a member of the Parochial Board] . . . had not slavery been abolished and his forefathers freed he would not be able to claim that right. If any man should be ‘loyal’ he thought he was that man.” 67 The meaning of the commemoration was intertwined with his own political ambitions and racial experience. Although he opposed the statue, he threw his support behind a water-­supply memorial that would benefit the southeastern district and plans for local festivities. The Savanna-­la-­Mar celebrations allow a glimpse of the interplay of repetition and difference in the commemorative ceremonies. Its procession echoed the militaristic character of the London parade through the presence of a naval

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

511

brigade consisting of fifty men. But costumed cyclists and other participants such as musicians on decorated bicycles, donkey carriages, and oxen carts also peopled the parade. And, in the spirit of the Caribbean carnivalesque tradition of mimicry and mockery, the Daily Gleaner reported, a Mr. H. M. Davis entered the parade as the “Lord Mayor of London,” “who graciously acknowledged the salutations of the crowd as he passed.” Further, the newspaper described an “Indian contingent,” presumably indentured laborers and their families of South Asian origin, dressed in yellow costumes in a cattle wagon covered in flowers and muslin and topped by a canopy “under which sat half reclining on a sort of throne with all the languid grace of her tribe, an Indian girl of marked beauty, representing some Princess of her nation . . . undoubtedly a great feature of the procession.” 68 The very creole enunciations of the jubilee celebrations in Savanna-­la-­Mar, as in the London parade, allow us to think through the limits of the pan-­imperial aspirations of the organizers. In Kingston, the Diamond Jubilee celebration was much more elaborate, with events occurring from June 21 to June 27. People from the rural parishes could travel by train to the capital at reduced cost, and adjusted motor vehicle laws accommodated the numerous events across the city, including church services and the fireworks on the Kingston Race Course (now National Heroes Park). The rural visitors would have been visually delighted by the “profusely decorated” façades of many of the Kingston houses and private businesses.69 Each day saw different spectacular events, including the illumination on the evening of June 21 of various sites in the city, such as the Victoria and Jubilee markets, the Kingston Post Office, the offices of the colonial secretary, the treasury, and the city council, the Theatre Royal (now the Ward Theatre), the Sailor’s Home, and the Royal Jamaica. On Wednesday, there were two races at the racecourse, a procession of the Friendly Societies to Coke Chapel, and a grand procession of the various lodges of Kingston. Thursday, June 24, added a cycle procession, a carnival procession, and a band performance in Parade Gardens in the evening.70 There was also a children’s demonstration at Half-­ Way Tree, where young voices piqued the ears of passersby with patriotic songs. By far the most important day of the week was Tuesday, June 22, which was declared a public holiday throughout the empire. More than two thousand passengers traveled by train, according to the railroad, on Monday night, the largest passenger list of the week, to see the events the following day.71 Kingstonians were awakened by joyful bells, which rang out throughout the city for fifteen minutes. The governor held a levee in the afternoon, where he received jubilee addresses from local dignitaries (See figs. 16.15 and 16.16), and the day was closed with a large fireworks display.

512

Petrina Dacres

F ig s . 16 . 15 a nd 1 6.1 6   A. M. Croal, Diamond Jubilee Address of the Jamaica’s Teachers Union [detail, front and back cover], 1897. The National Archives, United Kingdom, pp 1/​649. The full text references education and emancipation: “One of the first acts of your beneficent power was to give effect to the Emancipation Act, whereby more than 250,000 people of Jamaica were made free citizens of your dominions. They have ever held your name in affectionate remembrance and their children cherish you for your majesty’s sentiments of grateful and devoted loyalty. . . . We rejoice in the great privilege we possess in being your subjects and as teachers we are encouraged to pursue our work because we know that under the protection of your laws our people will be secured in their rights and helped forward in the path of progress.”

A high point of that festive Tuesday morning was the unveiling ceremony of Kingston’s Queen Victoria statue in Parade Gardens. We are fortunate to have a photograph of the unveiling ceremony, by Duperly and Son, the Kingston photography studio (see fig.  16.17).72 The photograph features hundreds of onlookers in the foreground and the statue punctuating the middle of the composition and framed by the darkness of the towering trees behind it. The picture provides documentation of the large crowd at the unveiling ceremony at the top of King Street, immediately in front of Parade Gardens. The ceremony was presided over by the governor, Sir Arthur Blake, accompanied by his wife, Lady Blake, who did the unveiling honors. In the photograph, the governor

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

513

Fig. 1 6 . 17 ​ A. Duperly and Son, Kingston on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Statue of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, 1897. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, n/​8492. Sir Henry Blake accompanied by Lady Blake addresses the crowd.

514

and his wife are seen on a raised platform immediately below the statue. On the large platform, surrounding the two figures and spilling into the shaded garden behind them, are figures we can presume were other dignitaries, members of the Legislative Council, the Parochial Boards, and the Kingston elite. Below them, on the street, three rows of the West India Regiment create a barrier between the “eager crowd” of Jamaicans and the statue of Queen Victoria. The crisp-­white pith helmets of the military men form a real and aesthetic guard between the people of the colony and their “Supreme Lady.” Although the repoussoir trees at either end of the platform draw our eyes toward the gleaming white statue, its miniaturized size in the wide shot provides us with little sculptural detail. But the mass of attendees in the foreground, dressed in their fineries and accessorized with woven straw jipijapa hats and umbrellas to shield them from the sun, provides us with some evidence of the importance of the occasion in Jamaica.73 In the photograph, parts of the foreground are blurred because of their moving bodies, and their heads are turned in every direction, serving as a visual counterpoint to the ordered

Petrina Dacres

rows of the military helmets. The scene provides a sense of energy to the composition that alludes to the excitement of the day’s event. The roads leading to the gardens are packed with onlookers; thirty thousand people were reportedly in attendance that day.74 Commemoration allowed for emotional and political expressions of loyalty and belief in the project of empire. For the political elite, spectacular commemoration was part of a political language. Their position dictated their participation, which was fraught, however, with tensions and anxieties over power and identity. The commemoration also had an entertainment value, providing an occasion for people to take a break from the quotidian, to dress up and play, to listen to music and sing, and to participate in the visual spectacle. For some, like Dixon, the commemoration of Victoria was deeply connected to what it meant to be black at the end of the century. There were indeed multiple reasons for being at Parade Gardens on the morning of June 22. The visual dissonance in the mass of spectators in Duperly’s photograph captures the entanglements of feelings toward the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee and the marvelous white figure before them. Indeed, the photograph’s rendering of the instability of the crowd pronounces our multiple and ambivalent relationship with such images. In her work on the colonial art of India, Eaton provides us with another perspective on the limitations of identification with the body of the Queen: “The conventions of visibility and recognition are . . . undermined by the volatile and violent conditions of the colony. The transactions that took place between the metropole and the colony did not result in the desired replication of culture and authority; rather they produced undesired resemblances that, being partial, expose not only similarity but also difference.” 75 Duperly’s photograph captures the instability of colonial identification at the moment of the statue’s unveiling.

“All Right Enough”: The Supreme Lady in Marble On the day of the unveiling, the statue was not complete and instead a plaster version of the figure took its place. The replica stood on the base of the Metcalfe statue, which was taken down and placed in storage. The gleaming white figure must have been a most dramatic sight for onlookers unaccustomed to sculptural images of the Queen and was a departure from her official photographic portrait, with lace veil and dark dress, by the studio photographers W. and D. Downey, which appeared in the Daily Gleaner supplement of that day (see fig. 16.18).76 The plaster statue was initially put in place on June 18 and a Daily Gleaner reporter, having had a preview, bemoaned, “it is a pity the actual

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 515

515

2/27/18 10:13 AM

F ig . 1 6.1 8   W. and D. Downey, Queen Victoria, Diamond Jubilee official portrait, 1893.

statue itself should not have been on hand, since the appearance of the substitute may cause disappointment.” 77 Surprisingly, very little was written in the Daily Gleaner on the immediate reactions to the statue, given the intensity of its jubilee reportage in the months leading up to the commemoration. A few days after the unveiling, one observer described the sculpture as “all right enough,” even while sarcastically pointing to the statue’s position as an expression of the government’s attitude toward the country: “Was it not looking down upon the city and turning its back upon the country?” 78 On January 6, 1898, the marble statue arrived in Jamaica from London in the Royal Mail cargo boat Avon.79 It was controversially placed in storage with the Metcalfe statue in the Public Works Department while the legislature awaited a decision from Chamberlain on whether funds would be granted for the erection of new public buildings on the Parade.80 The hope was to rival the grand architectural setting in Spanish Town, creating a new civic center that would be unveiled along with the statue. Geflowski’s Queen Victoria would anchor the new government buildings as the Rodney statue had done a century before in the old capital. The plaster statue remained in position for more than a year, until a final decision was reached. Despite this unsatisfactory arrangement, in his address during the annual session of the Church of England Synod, the archbishop of the West Indies, Rev. Enos Nuttall, acknowledged the importance of the arrival of the statue: “The Jubilee celebration by the public generally, was effective and significant of the deep loyalty of the colony; and that in the statue of Her Majesty we have secured an abiding memorial of this great event.” 81 A Parochial Board request from Spanish Town that the plaster version of the sculpture be transferred to the old capital draws attention to a problem with the statue, for it describes “a dwarf statue of her most Gracious Majesty the Queen.” 82 The issue of the statue’s height led to a suggestion published in the newspaper that the new statue should be housed indoors, in the main hall of the future government buildings on a base proportional to its size, rather than having the “whole beauty of the figure and its artistic proportions lost by the towering buildings behind.” 83 The critique also acknowledged the problem of using the tall base of the more robust Metcalfe statue. The request for funds for new government buildings was eventually denied by the Colonial Office, however, and the old base remained in place under the marble version of Geflowski’s work. By the summer of 1899, an announcement was made that the Victoria and Metcalfe statues were to be finally mounted. Yet on October 11, 1899, when the marble statue of Victoria was placed in position at the front of Parade Gardens, there was little fanfare. After Victoria’s death two years later, a letter

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

517

to the Daily Gleaner proposed the revival of the Victoria Water Tank scheme as a fitting memorial to her passing, dismissing Geflowski’s work as “a not very wonderful statue in the park.” 84 Despite the jamboree of 1897, the statue’s effect was ultimately one of bathos. Indeed, for all the lavish ceremonial, the last years of Victoria’s reign were marked by a sense that history had moved on. The military difficulties of the British Empire in the South African War (1899–­1902) seemed only to emphasize the point. Alfred Havighurst suggests that despite the impress of power that characterized the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in England, Victoria’s reign had, in many ways, come to an end by that time: “Long before her death, the world of affairs and of ideas had left her behind.” He describes the years between the two jubilees as a transitional period within British history, citing G. M. Young’s portrayal of the late Victorian era as an “epilog to one age, or the prehistory to another.” 85 Even as the monument insisted on recognition of the power of the monarchy, its meanings were not stable either in the Jamaican context or in the imperial context. The colony was undergoing its own political and economic transition that would soon see the birth of the trade union movement and the galvanization of black political actors, asserting a new body for monumental identification. Victoria’s journey from the center of Kingston to its margins had already begun.

Notes 1. John Homiak, “The Mystic Revelation of Rasta Far-­Eye: Visionary Communication in a Prophetic Movement,” in Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 236–­42. 2. Homiak, “The Mystic Revelation of Rasta Far-­Eye,” 239. 3. “The Hon Legislative Council — ​­Report on Meeting on Monday 29 of March,” Daily Gleaner, March 30, 1897, 8. 4. The Battle of the Saintes, which took place on April 12, 1782, was a decisive victory that secured British naval ascendancy in the Caribbean during the American Revolutionary War. 5. Lesley Lewis, “English Commemorative Sculpture in Jamaica,” Jamaican Historical Review 9 (1972): 17–­22; Frank Cundall, Historic Jamaica: With Fifty-­Two Illustrations (London: Published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West India Committee, 1915), 119–­23. 6. See S. P. Musson and T. L. Roxburgh, The Handbook of Jamaica for 1897: Published by Authority Comprising Historical, Statistical and General Information Concerning the Island (Kingston: Jamaica Government Printing Office, 1897). 7. Cundall, Historic Jamaica, 186–­95. 8. Reportedly the citizens of Spanish Town towed the Rodney statue back to the town reciting this poem:

518

Petrina Dacres

Yes, of this ancient statue St Catherine’s folk are proud When even the faithful Cannons Would gladly boom around Oh we are all elated, Our joys you can’t restrain With a row and a tow, And a row and a tow Our Rodney comes again See the Jamaica Conservation and Development of Sites and Monuments (Kingston: Jamaica National Trust Commission, s.d.). 9. Daily Gleaner, February 23, 1875; see also Daily Gleaner, May 11, 1877. 10. The statue toppled over during the 1907 earthquake and was badly damaged, but a new statue was unveiled in 1927, again the product of a public subscription. The statue was eventually removed from Parade Gardens and is now at Bellevue Hospital. For more on Bowerbank and the statue, see John Golding, Ascent to Mona as Illustrated by a Short History of Jamaican Medical Care (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 1994), 38–­44. 11. The 1907 earthquake also damaged the statue of Father Dupont. For more on its restoration, see Francis Delany, History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica, B.W.I., 1494 to 1929 (New York: Jesuit Mission Press, 1930), 256, cited in Dorothy Kew, “Father Joseph Dupont’s Statue,” My Jamaican Family Blogspot, May 3, 2008, http://myjamaican​­family​ .blogspot​.com/​2008/​05/​father-­joseph-­duponts-­statue​.html. 12. Terry Wyke and Harry Cocks, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), x–­xi. 13. See, for instance, “Lord Metcalfe Statue,” Daily Gleaner, July 3, 1897, 7, and “Parochial Board, St Catherine,” Daily Gleaner, July 23, 1987, 4. 14. As reported in the Daily Gleaner (“The Metcalfe Statue, Proposal to Return It to Its Old Site,” August 17, 1897, 4), the decision to move the Metcalfe statue to King Street with the Rodney base was not widely approved. 15. Barry Higman, Writing West Indian Histories (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1999), 213. 16. Gordon Lewis, The Birth of the Modern West Indies (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2004), 171. 17. Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–­1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 18. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 132. 19. John Aarons, “The Cultural Policy of the Jamaica Government since Independence,” Jamaican Historical Review 20 (1998): 40; Trevor Turner, “The Socialization Intent in Colonial Jamaican Education 1867–­1911,” Caribbean Journal of Education 14, nos. 1–­2 (1987): 69. 20. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 63.

K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

519

21. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 60–­61. 22. Jenny Powell, “The Dissemination of Commemorative Statues of Queen Victoria,” in Modern British Sculpture, ed. Penelope Curtis and Keith Williams (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011), 283. 23. Catharine Stimpson, “Foreword,” in Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–­1876, by Margaret Homans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiv. 24. Mary Ann Steggles, “Set in Stone: Victoria’s Monuments in India,” History Today 51, no. 2 (2001): 44–­49. 25. See Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Adrienne Munich, “Queen Victoria, Empire and Excess,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6, no. 2 (autumn 1987): 265–­81; Homans, Royal Representations. 26. See Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 12–­47. 27. Geoff Archer, Public Sculpture in Britain: A History (Norfolk: Frontier, 2013), 25–­56. 28. Helen Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, Calif.: abc-­clio, 2003), 166; see also Thomas Richards, “The Image of Victoria in the Years of the Jubilee,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 1 (autumn 1987): 7–­32. 29. Powell, “Dissemination.” 30. Cited in Alfred Havighurst, Britain in Transition: The Twentieth Century ([1962] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3. 31. Constitutional reform in 1883 and 1895 allowed for greater local participation by the wealthy elite. 32. “The Queen’s Reign: Meeting in Kingston, a Committee Formed,” Daily Gleaner, February 12, 1897, 7. 33. Water access was a major issue facing a number of districts, and a water diviner would arrive on the island during these months of jubilee preparation to help with the problem. The memorial water scheme was particularly strongly supported in the jubilee parochial meetings in the south-­central parishes of Manchester, Clarendon, and St. Catherine. 34. “Tanks and Wells,” letter from Henry Clarke Jr., Daily Gleaner, April 8, 1897. 35. See council debates in “The Hon Legislative Council — ​­Report on Meeting on Monday 29 of March,” Daily Gleaner, March 30, 1897, 5–­8. 36. “The Hon Legislative Council — ​­Report on Meeting on Monday 29 of March,” 5. 37. “The Hon Legislative Council — ​­Report on Meeting on Monday 29 of March,” 8. 38. “The Hon Legislative Council — ​­Report on Meeting on Monday 29 of March,” 8. 39. David Gideon (1862–­1924) was a merchant and one of the founders of the United Fruit Company. He became a representative in the Legislative Council in 1896 and resigned in 1900 as a protest during the government’s constitutional crisis, returning as a nominated member in 1913. See Frank Hill, “D. S. Gideon and Self-­government,” Jamaica Historical Society Bulletin 2 ( June 1957): 29–­30; and F.  S. Casserly, “Crown Colony Crisis: The Hemming-­Gideon Correspondence,” Jamaica Historical Review 3 (March 1957): 39–­78. 40. “Hon Legislative Council,” 8.

520

Petrina Dacres

41. “The Queen’s Reign: The Statue, to the Editor of the Gleaner,” Daily Gleaner, March 3, 1897, 3. 42. “The Queen’s Reign: The Statue, to the Editor of the Gleaner.” 43. The twelve “yes” votes were from H. Stern, P. Stern, Burke, Whiting, Cork, Colonel Ward, Dr. Mosse, Mr. Capper, the collector general, the director of Public Works, the attorney general, the colonial secretary, and the commander of forces; the four “no” votes were from Clarke, Leyden, Gideon, and Corinaldi. See the legislative council minutes and “Hon Legislative Council,” Daily Gleaner, March 30, 1897, 8. 44. Frederick Dolman, “The Colonial Office,” Windsor Magazine 13 (1901): 689–­94, at 690; the article was reprinted in the Brisbane Courier for July 6, 1901. 45. The Straits Settlements, established in 1826 by the British East India Company, were a group of British-­controlled territories in South East Asia. The settlements became a Crown Colony in 1867 and were dissolved in 1947. The colony consisted of Singapore with Christmas Island and the Cocos Island and settlements that now form parts of Malaysia–­Penang, Dinding, Malacca, and later, from 1907, the island of Labuan. 46. The nose of the statue in Singapore was knocked off in a nationalist demonstration in the 1950s or 1960s, and the statue was restored in 1995. It had been moved to various locations, including storage in the National Museum, before its restoration. The Singaporean Queen Victoria statue is now housed in the Istana, the official residence of the president of Singapore. 47. “Current Items,” Daily Gleaner, June 5, 1897, 2. 48. George J. Lerski, Historical Dictionary of Poland, 966–­1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 177. 49. Maria Danilewicz, “Anglo Polish Masonica,” Polish Review 15, no. 2 (spring 1970): 27. 50. The Westminster Budget, July 19, 1895, 27. 51. Official Catalogue of the Empire of Indian Exhibition: Earl’s Court, London, S.W. (London: J. J. Keliher, 1895), 257–­61. 52. Powell, “Dissemination,” 285. 53. John Sankey, “Review of Penelope Curtis and Keith Williams, Modern British Sculpture,” The Victorian Web http://www.victorianweb.org/​sculpture/​reviews/​curtis​ .html. 54. Powell, “Dissemination,” 287. 55. Archer, Public Sculpture in Britain, 44–­56. 56. Powell, “Dissemination,” 287. 57. Powell, “Dissemination,” 284. 58. “Supreme Lord, Not King,” Brisbane Courier, June 22, 1929, 16. 59. Meike Hölscher, “Performances, Souvenirs and Music: The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, 1897,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erl and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 173–­86. 60. Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765–­1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 193. 61. Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, 9. 62. “The Past Fortnight,” Daily Gleaner, July 5, 1897, 7. K i n g s to n ’s Q u e e n V i c to r i a M o n u m e n t

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 521

521

2/27/18 10:13 AM

63. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ([1983] New York: Verso, 1991). 64. “A Good Example,” Daily Gleaner, April 28, 1897, 4. 65. “Diamond Jubilee Bonfires,” Daily Gleaner, March 29, 1897, 7. 66. “A Good Example.” 67. “The Queen’s Reign, Public Meeting in Black River,” Daily Gleaner, May 3, 1897, 7. 68. “The Jubilee Celebrations: Sav La Mar,” Daily Gleaner, June 30, 1897, 6. 69. Diamond Jubilee Celebration Program (Kingston: Mortimor C. De Souza, 1897). 70. “Are Our Young Men Degenerate?,” Daily Gleaner, July 3, 1897, 7. 71. “Jubilee Gleanings,” Daily Gleaner, June 25, 1897. 72. On photography of the jubilee, see “Current Items,” Daily Gleaner, July 3, 1897, 2. The article reported the photographs of the ceremony were very popular and had been selling well. Taking the picture had been a difficult process, however: “There were numerous photographers and all tried the instantaneous process, but it is stated the light was so bad that the negatives were blurred and fogged. The only one we have heard of so far as being successful is Mr Duperly who gave a quarter second exposure, after trying five instantaneous views which afterwards proved abortive.” See also “Jubilee Photographs,” Daily Gleaner, July 14, 1897, 2. 73. The jipijapa is a straw hat traditionally made from the fronds of the jipijapa palm tree in a style similar to that of the panama hat. 74. T. L. Roxburgh and Jos C. Ford, The Handbook of Jamaica for 1898: Comprising Historical, Statistical and General Information Concerning the Island (Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office, 1898), 86. 75. Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, 10. 76. The twelve-­page supplement included an illustrated record of different aspects of Queen Victoria’s reign. 77. “The Celebration,” Daily Gleaner, June 21, 1897, 2. 78. “Her Majesty’s Statue, after the Inauguration, Can the Statue Speak,” Daily Gleaner, June 25, 1897. 79. “Arrival of the Queen’s Statue,” Daily Gleaner, January 10, 1898, 3. 80. See Magistrate Moses Bravo’s complaints in “Correspondence, the Queen’s Statue, the Editor of the Gleaner,” Daily Gleaner, June 1, 1899, 4; see also “Her Majesty’s Statue,” Daily Gleaner, June 20, 1899, 4. 81. “Church of England Synod, the Archbishop’s Address,” Daily Gleaner, February 16, 1898, 7. My emphasis. 82. “Parochial Boards of St Catherine,” Daily Gleaner, Saturday Supplement, March 19, 1898, 11. 83. “The Metcalfe Statue, Proposal to Return It to Its Old Site,” Daily Gleaner, August 17, 1897, 4. 84. “Victorian Memorial and Our Water Supply, the Editor of the Gleaner,” Daily Gleaner, May 7, 1901, 7. 85. G. M. Young, Victorian England Portrait of an Age ([1936] London: Oxford University Press Paperbacks, 1964), 148, in Havighurst, Britain in Transition, 3.

522

Petrina Dacres

C H A P T E R 17

“A Period of Exhibitions” World’s Fairs, Museums, and the Laboring Black Body in Jamaica WAY N E M O D E S T

This is essentially a period of exhibitions, and those countries which wish to keep pace with the progress of modern commercial and social intercourse must perforce take part in them.

Journal of the Institute of Jamaica, 1893

In this chapter I explore Jamaica’s participation in and staging of international exhibitions, as well as the emergence of museums in Jamaica during what is described in the epigraph as the “period of exhibitions.” The quotation is taken from a letter sent by the Institute of Jamaica to possible investors and exhibitors for Jamaica’s participation in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. I will show that, although the connection is not always apparent, these exhibitionary practices emerged in relation to ideas of the social order and control over black people in Jamaica. I demonstrate that their development cannot be understood other than in the shadow of slavery and colonialism. To explore the emergence of these exhibitionary practices in Jamaica, I take my cue from Tony Bennett’s seminal study of what he describes as “the exhibitionary complex.” Bennett argued that by the middle of the nineteenth century, institutions such as museums, international exhibitions, and trade fairs, among others, had come to form part of a complex system of “disciplinary and power relations” that was intrinsic to the development of the modern (Western) state and was utilized as a governmental apparatus to regulate social behavior.1 Here, however, I want to broaden the scope of inquiry beyond Bennett’s examination of the metropole or settler colony, by thinking about how these institutions developed in, and the impact they had on, colonies such as Jamaica, arguably at the periphery of empire by 1893. I make a distinction between Jamaica’s participation in world’s fairs and international exhibitions outside of the island, within metropolitan centers such as London and Amsterdam, and those exhibitionary

practices that occurred in Jamaica itself, which had different goals and effects. In light of this exploration of both internal developments and practices on the global stage, I can conclude by suggesting, in opposition to Bennett’s argument, that the actual function of exhibitionary institutions in colonies such as Jamaica was entirely different from that envisaged by their organizers: the exhibitions can be seen, in practice, to have contradicted their rhetorical framing.

Imperial Representations of Normalcy and Fecundity By the beginning of the twentieth century Jamaica had participated in numerous colonial exhibitions, world’s fairs, and trade exhibitions across the globe. From Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands to Australia, the United States, and Canada, the island was variously represented by its products, its minerals, and its photographic views. The bulk of the exhibits sent to represent the island were manufactured goods and examples of raw natural materials. Typically, Jamaica was presented as part of the British (West Indian) colonies. Often attempts were made by the local organizers to distinguish Jamaica from other colonies, primarily through descriptive catalogs, which were often sent for sale to viewers.2 Later, other publications, such as the Handbook of Jamaica, were produced, giving statistics about the island’s productivity.3 At stake in Jamaica’s participation in these international exhibitions, then, was the representation of the island as a productive part of the British Empire, with goods available for international consumption. Moreover, I will suggest, the island was being represented as a safe place to which persons from the metropole could emigrate, or in whose industries and agricultural operations they could invest. In the immediate postemancipation period, with continued local and imperial anxieties over the deleterious economic and political consequences of emancipation, it was especially important to present a colony that was still productive, part of an empire that still worked. It was with these anxieties in mind that Jamaica participated in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851, as well as other colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs staged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The need to represent normalcy and fecundity was present, however, even earlier. British economic enterprise in the Americas had been in distress long before emancipation. It has been argued that from as early as the late eighteenth century, there was a decline in the productivity of the plantations in the remaining colonies in the Americas, due in part to American independence, which affected markets as well as supplies for the West Indian plantations.4 Another factor was the growth in global sugar production in other parts of

524

Wayne Modest

the world: there was competition from Cuba and Brazil, for example, countries that maintained the trade in slaves after the British had abolished the slave trade in their empire in 1807, which meant that they maintained access to available enslaved labor. These factors, and others, caused the London price of Muscovado sugar to decrease by as much as 60 percent over the sixteen-­year period between 1815 and 1831. Such competition from nations where slavery kept production costs low made Jamaican sugar uncompetitive. There was a sharp decrease in Jamaican sugar production during apprenticeship, from 1834 to 1838, and after emancipation.5 As discussions about emancipation raged between those who supported freeing the slaves and those on the side of the planters, one of the chief questions was how to maintain the island’s productivity without enslaved labor.6 For the planters, it was important that their productive base not be disrupted during the transition, especially since many were already suffering significant indebtedness.7 On the side of the abolitionists and colonial government, it was important both to represent the interests of the slaves and to ensure that emancipation would not disrupt the productivity, and thus the overall wealth, of the colony. Supporters of emancipation needed to show the continued success of empire to local and imperial naysayers and skeptics as well as to empires that had not emancipated their own slaves. At stake in representing the colonies within the context of “great” exhibitions was the credibility of claims that social order had been maintained and that productivity was unaffected. A successful colony was a productive colony. The Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 would undo any gains made through international representations of postemancipation Jamaica as tranquil and productive. Of interest here are the ways in which the rebellion was portrayed internationally, and especially in Britain. The portrayals, I suggest, generated an urgent need for a counter representation of effective social control and productivity within the colony, which was the responsibility of the colonial government and planter class alike, who had their economic investments to protect. Opinions about the rebellion presented in the international press oscillated around two positions — ​­one in support of black Jamaicans and one in support of Governor Eyre. In addition to popular lobbies on either side in Britain, two official committees were formed. Those in support of the blacks, while they recognized the need to quell the rebellion, thought that Governor Eyre had gone too far to achieve this end and advocated that he be reprimanded. Some even pushed for him to be tried for murder. Members of this Jamaica Committee, as it was called, included John Bright, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hughes, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill.

“A Period of Exhibitions”

525

Supporters of Governor Eyre included Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and other erudite Victorians who thought that Eyre had done what was expected of him to maintain order and control. Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Victorian essayist and historian, wrote: “If they do condemn [Eyre] to censure . . . I shall never forgive them. . . . If Eyre had shot the whole Nigger population, and flung them into the sea, would it probably have been much harm even to them, not to speak of us?” 8 These discussions were widely reported. Between October 1865 and the middle of 1866, the proestablishment Illustrated London News, for example, reported on the event numerous times, with implicit support for Governor Eyre.9 The event was also caricatured in the satirical magazine Punch. In Punch’s own pithy style, the issue of January 13, 1866, poked fun at the “Methodist and Baptist denominations who at the Hall of Exeter have uplifted your voices in judgement against governor eyre.” The Punch article continues: “How warmly must your affectionate sympathies be enlisted in favour of those interesting creatures whose acts of playful abandonment10 are those described in a letter which appeared the other day in the Daily Telegraph on ‘The Jamaica Insurrection.’ ” The rather playful sketch was written to deride the decision by religious supporters of blacks to send legal representation to Jamaica in support of those accused of insurrection. Reports such as this were available in popular news­ papers far into 1866. Governor Eyre was twice charged with murder, but neither case proceeded and there was no conviction. Within learned circles, the insurrection also served to define ideas about blacks and Jamaica as well as the ill results of emancipation. In the preface to a paper presented before the Anthropological Society of London on February 1, 1866, Royal Navy Commander Bedford Pim wrote: “When the news of the Jamaica rebellion arrived in this country I felt that at last my countrymen, whether they liked it or not were brought face to face with the negro, and that a clear view of his peculiarities should be laid before them, so as to assist in properly handling this most important subject, whether politically or religiously, in such a manner as to aid in settling the question.” 11 These discussions would not have bolstered impressions of the success of emancipation and the continued success of the British Empire, especially in the West Indies. In fact, with emancipation in Jamaica many blacks took to working small plots of arable and semiarable land as peasant farmers, rather than work as paid labor on the plantations. As a result, the productive economy of plantations had diminished in the immediate postemancipation period, fueling the anxieties of local plantation owners and within the empire more broadly

526

Wayne Modest

about the decision to free the slaves. These anxieties about the productivity of the island were heightened after the 1865 rebellion. Within the minds of the colonial government and local elites alike, it became even more urgent that the island be represented as a productive colony in highly visible forums such as international exhibitions.

The Colonial Government, Colonial Elites, and the International Staging of Representation

From the time of Jamaica’s first involvement at international exhibitions, numerous individuals, organizations, and societies managed its participation. In all cases, however, they served the interests of the colonial government and the elite classes within the colony. The elected commissioners responsible for the planning of the exhibits always included the current governor of the island, who, like the colonial elites, sought to stake a claim in how the island was represented internationally. Other members of the exhibition commission were drawn from the island’s elite and included lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and members of the plantocracy. The Royal Society of Arts, Jamaica, organized Jamaica’s exhibits at the international exhibition in London in 1862, and the Society of Industry, Hanover, Jamaica, assisted the Royal Society in the planning of Jamaica’s contribution to this event. Both societies comprised prominent members of the population, including wealthy planters. The commission included the highly experienced colonial official and former military officer Sir Charles Henry Darling, who had been secretary to the governor of Jamaica from 1843 to 1847 and who served as governor from 1857 to 1863. The agents, responsible for any business interests or inquiries, were Edward Chitty, a London-­trained barrister who had moved to Jamaica in 1840, and London-­based emigration agent Alexander F. Ridgeway. The local chapter of the Royal Society of Arts had been established in the early nineteenth century, although its activities on the island started much earlier. Formally titled the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the Society had been established in London in 1754 and was seen as a source of information about agricultural and other concerns relating to the British colonies. Among its main objects was the encouragement of the introduction or growth of particular crops. In a letter to the society in 1792, Dr. Dancer, a Jamaican botanist whom the society consulted, had written: “It gives me sensible pleasure to find the opinion of the Society respecting our cinnamon confirmed by commercial gentlemen engaged in the branch of trade; this will have more influence in the minds of people in the colony, in “A Period of Exhibitions”

527

F ig . 1 7 .1   Henry Vizetelly, Colonial Produce, hand-­colored chromolithograph, from Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, from the Originals Painted for H. R. H. Prince Albert by Messrs. Nash, Haghe, and Roberts, R. A. (1854). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Folio B T 2.

exerting their attention to so important an object, than the decision of the men of science to which they pay little difference.” 12 Here Dancer highlights the conjoining of the society’s research with its commercial interests, as evidenced in their seeking the advice of men of trade. Indeed, the society also supplied the colonies with customers.13 By 1864 the local chapter of the society had changed its name to the Royal Society of Arts and Agriculture. The staging of Jamaica’s participation in international exhibitions could therefore be seen as the society fulfilling its mandate to encourage the economic productivity of the island and secure markets internationally. Other contributors to the 1862 exhibition included the island botanist and the island geologist — ​­holders of government appointments — ​­as well as numerous doctors, attorneys, and other members of the Jamaican elite. Together they decided on how and through what products the island would be represented at these international exhibitions. Needless to say, their own interests, rather than those of the majority of the population, were to be served.

Colonial Exhibitions, Agro-­Industrial Goods, and

Products of Black Labor

Between 1851 and 1921 the items sent to represent Jamaica at colonial exhibitions comprised mainly natural products and manufactured goods from plantations across the island, such as rum, sugar, pimento, coffee, and cocoa (see fig. 17.1).14 Over the seventy-­year period, Jamaica’s exhibits followed very similar lines within relatively fixed categories. If from one exhibition to the next a distinct category was excluded, overlapping categories were broad enough to include items from the missing category. For example, in 1862, Fine Art was a distinct category. In 1885 and 1886 this category was no longer included, yet similar items were sent under the broad rubric of Views, Photographs, Plans, and Botanical Specimens Mounted in Frames.15 Table 17.1 shows the types of products exhibited and the frequency with which they were sent to represent the island. The categories that occur with highest frequency are Sugar, Rum, Liqueurs and Cordials, Coffee, Pimento, Fancy and Furniture Woods, Meals and Starches, Fibres and Fibrous Materials, Oils, and Essential Oils and Perfumes. Other categories that appear relatively frequently were Cocoa, Dye Woods, and Medicinal Substances. Even where handcrafted objects were included — ​­often described as fancy articles or ornamental work — ​­these products were eclipsed by raw materials.16 For example, in the very few instances when fine furniture was sent for “A Period of Exhibitions”

02 Jamaica 4PP_pt2_p278-550.indd 529

529

2/27/18 10:13 AM

TA B L E 1 7 . 1  

Jamaican Products Shown at Colonial Exhibitions, 1851–1924

Ca t e g o r i e s

1851

1855

1862

Animated nature

•

Minerals

•

Pottery

•

Manures

•

Botanical specimens

•

Basts, bark, cotton

•

•

1865

1876

1883

1885

1886

1891

1913

1924

•

•

•

downs, etc.

Wax models

•

Seeds

•

Sugar

•

Chemical preparations,

•

of fruits, etc.

perfumes, soaps, wax,

•

•

•

•

•

honey, chocolate,

pickles, and preserves Ligneous refuse

•

of meals called “Quaquas”

•

•

(Ladies’) ornamental

•

•

•

Fine art

•

Rum

•

•

•

•

•

•

Liqueurs, cordials

•

•

•

•

Tropical fruits

•

•

Economic products of

•

•

Manufactures

for household and other purposes work

• •

•

the coconut palm Coffee

•

•

•

•

•

•

Pimento

•

•

•

•

•

•

1851

1855

1862

1865

1876

Cacao •

Ginger

1885

1886

•

•

•

1891

1913

1924

•

•

• •

Tobacco and cigars

1883

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Medicinal substances

•

•

•

Cinchona bark

•

Miscellaneous

•

Annatto Fancy and

•

•

•

furniture woods Spices and

condiments •

Meals, starches Dye woods Fibres and fibrous materials

Gums and resins Oils, essential oils,

•

perfumes

• •

•

articles

Mineral waters

•

Books, reports,

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

of Jamaica maps, etc.

Views, photographs,

•

plans, and botanical

specimens mounted in frames

Fancy articles and

•

ornamental work

Bamboos, walking sticks

•

•

•

•

exhibit — ​­such as furniture made by Turnbull and Mudon, eminent Jamaican cabinetmakers of the nineteenth century — ​­these furniture exhibits were insignificant compared to those presenting the raw material for furniture making, the wood itself.17 The category described as Fancy and Furniture Woods contained more products than the category that contained furniture, appeared more frequently, and represented more exhibitors. Jamaica was portrayed at these exhibitions as rich in raw material and productive in agricultural and agro-­industrial products — ​­as an economically viable colony. The emphasis on the productive economy of the colony is also evident in the categories of exhibited objects such as cinchona bark or medicinal substances that appear less frequently. To be productive, a colony required a workforce, and in Jamaica that workforce was composed of black labor. By emphasizing productivity, the organizers were therefore telling of productive black labor, which many critics of emancipation at the time had insisted would disappear without the coercive force of slavery. However, while the natural, agricultural, or agro-­industrial products at world’s fairs and colonial exhibitions were produced by the hands of black people, only in very few instances was black labor identified. I have shown elsewhere that as institutions of the exhibitionary complex, such as public museums, developed in metropolitan centers and in the colonies, there was little interest in collecting objects from the black majority population of the Caribbean, which, I argued, was a result of the ambiguous relationship between new Victorian sciences, such as anthropology, and New World blacks.18 Still, a close look at some of the categories of products and the persons responsible for these exhibits brings to light the presence of black labor. Black labor is referred to explicitly several times in the Descriptive Catalogue of Articles Exhibited by the Royal Society of Arts, Jamaica at the International Exhibition 1862.19 One of the most significant individual donors for this exhibition was Dr. Q. Bowerbank, who was a white medical doctor, and custos of Kingston at the time of the exhibition. While Bowerbank is the named donor, many of the products that he donated are identified as “made by E. B. Edwards.” 20 In almost all instances, the items being exhibited were local food items such as candies, chocolate cakes, and dried green banana. Under meals, E. B. Edwards presented “meals from Negro Yam, Sweet Potato, and Breadfruit” and from other tubers and fruits. While no documentation survives to substantiate this claim, I believe that E. B. Edwards was the black helper of Bowerbank. Under Manufactures for Household and Other Purposes, item 156 is listed as Calabash Ornaments (Crescentia cujete and C. cucurbitina) by “Edward Edwards, an untaught native Negro.” 21 Could this Edwards be the E. B. Ed­

532

Wayne Modest

wards named previously? It is the only instance where a black laborer is named. Other instances of black labor or of goods manufactured or used by blacks are identified in the same catalog, but no individuals are named. Also under the heading of Manufactures is “Bamboo Bucket, used by Negroes.” 22 Similarly, under Manufactures sent for exhibit by the Society for Industry, Hanover, the following items stand out: Item 1191 “Four small Baskets, of Bamboo, made by an African” Item 1192 “Three small Hand Baskets, with covers, of Bamboo, made by an African” Item 1193 “One small round Work Basket, of Bamboo, made by an African” It is interesting to see the fluctuation between the use of the term “Negro” and the term “African.” The choice of wording may suggest a difference between a black person born in Jamaica (Negro) and a black person born in Africa. The African, then, might have been one of the Bakongo or Yoruba persons who arrived in Jamaica after emancipation, coming from Africa as indentured laborers. One of extremely few references to enslaved craftsmanship in Jamaica is found in item 1205, Eboe or African Wooden Locks, used by the Negroes to fasten their doors in days of slavery, opened by raising the wooden key, from Dr. Potts.23 Although the designation “made by an African (or Negroes)” appeared in the labeling of some products, the designation is lost among the long listing of industrially produced goods and the numerous named exhibitors. For example, agricultural and agro-­industrial products were exhibited most frequently, and their provenance was always designated by reference to a manager-​attorney or owner, or by a plantation name. Although there were Indian and Chinese indentured laborers on plantations across the island, blacks composed the majority of the workforce, and it was blacks who undertook most of the unacknowledged labor whose results were exhibited in the exhibition. Despite the lacunae in the labels and accompanying texts, when viewed at the distance in metropolitan centers across the world, these exhibits nonetheless must have produced an image of a black productive workforce in the colonies, and so challenged the idea of dwindling productivity. As represented at international exhibitions, the black labor force therefore appeared well regulated and productive. The colony and its plantations had not fallen into chaos and abeyance after emancipation, as had been predicted.

“A Period of Exhibitions”

533

The desired and real effect, then, of Jamaica’s participation in late nineteenth-­ century exhibitions overseas was to portray the island as part of the empire for an international audience. Very few Jamaicans had the opportunity to experience these international exhibitions, so the ordering of bodies and training of national citizenry described by Bennett could not be drawn from an analysis of contemporary Jamaica or any other part of the Caribbean.24 Yet these exhibitions aimed to demonstrate to their audience of metropolitan investors and lay visitors in London, Paris, or Chicago that the British Empire in the Caribbean was still productive, despite emancipation. Moreover, they served to show that while widespread rhetoric told of black laziness and uncontrolled savagery, especially after the rebellion of 1865, free Jamaican blacks were controlled and productive.

The Institute of Jamaica, the Jamaica Exhibition, and the Internal Power Effects of the Exhibitionary Complex

For the remainder of this chapter, I turn to the internal or “national” power effects of the institutions of the exhibitionary complex as they developed within the West Indian colony of Jamaica.25 My focus will be the Institute of Jamaica, established in 1879, and the staging of the Jamaica Exhibition in 1891. I will start with a brief examination of the emergence of museums within the Caribbean and within Jamaica more specifically, followed by a discussion of the intended effects of these institutions on the Jamaican social body. The first museum to be established in Jamaica, in 1843, was the work of the Jamaica Society. Later, in 1866, the Royal Society of Arts and Agriculture also opened a museum. Very little is known about either of these institutions.26 Another attempt at establishing a museum in Jamaica occurred also in 1866, when a geological museum was established in Spanish Town with the samples collected during the Jamaica mineralogical survey of 1859.27 Thirty-­six years elapsed between the opening of the first museum in Jamaica and the establishment of the Institute of Jamaica (ioj) in 1879, initially at Date Tree Hall (see fig. 17.2). Part of its initial collection came from the defunct geological museum of Spanish Town, which had closed in the 1870s. Like its counterparts in other parts of the Caribbean, the institute was established late in the nineteenth century within a narrative of imperial expansion and the related quest for (natural) scientific knowledge.28 As an institution in the service of the empire, many of its early practices were fashioned after similar institutions in Britain. Among its stated aims at the time of its establishment was to “develop a representative

534

Wayne Modest

F i g . 1 7 .2   Date Tree Hall, circa 1906. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. This is the original building of the Institute of Jamaica.

natural history and anthropology collections, to host lectures and exhibitions, and to hold examinations in science, literature and the arts.” 29 The bland characterization of these aims belies, I propose, the urgency to present and produce controlled normalcy as well as to participate in the uplift of the population and especially of blacks. Even the most cursory glance at the institute’s early acquisition records will reveal its emphasis on natural history. Barry Higman has noted that it was a full four years after its establishment before the institute began to collect “artefacts more truly representative of Jamaican History.” Higman refers to a set of objects described in the annual report of 1882–­1883 as an “interesting historic relic, a branding iron used formerly for branding slaves” (see fig. 17.3).30 In the following year, the museum received “a shackle used to secure slaves at night on the sugar estate in Vere.” 31 No comprehensive record exists of the early collections of the institute. Yet, early acquisitions registers, annual reports, and curators’ books reveal that the museum’s collections comprised botanical, geological, and zoological specimens from across Jamaica, with a potpourri of miscellaneous objects, from eastern weapons and a Battle of Waterloo sword32 to curiosities such as the preserved remains of a dog with six legs, shards, and other objects collected during road works.33 There was even an umbrella associated with Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

“A Period of Exhibitions”

535

Fig. 1 7. 3   Branding iron. Courtesy of National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica. Fig. 1 7. 4   Shackles. Courtesy of National Museum of Jamaica, the Institute of Jamaica.

536

but the label for this object went missing. At the end of the nineteenth century, the museum started to acquire archaeological collections and dedicated much effort to procuring artifacts from the indigenous inhabitants of Jamaica, the Tainos (known in colonial parlance as the Arawak). While natural history dominated the museum’s collections and displays, there was also a history gallery, where archeological and other historical materials were on display. A portrait gallery was later established as part of the history gallery. The archaeological and natural history collections were, however, the most important, commanding significant interest from museums and other learned institutions and societies across Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.34 Alissandra Cummins has identified several factors in the development of museums in the (Anglophone) Caribbean.35 First, she cites the “philanthropic ideals” of colonial administrators such as Lieutenant Colonel William Reid, under whose leadership as governor of several Caribbean islands museums were established in Bermuda (1843), St. Lucia, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Grenada (1847–­1848). Second, she draws attention to the establishment of local scientific societies in the “far reaches of the empire that encourage the search for scientific knowledge in the quest for industrialisation.” Third, Cummins lists the popularity of international exhibitions, and finally, encouragement by colonial governments for the “collection and exhibition of scientific specimens and ethnographical artefacts, usually under the auspices of local agricultural and commercial societies.” 36 From the time of its establishment, the Institute of Jamaica helped with the planning of the colony’s participation in international exhibitions. For example, in 1893 the governors of the institute were charged by the governor of the island with raising additional funding for the representation of the island at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. These funds would supplement

Wayne Modest

the £2,000 voted by the Legislative Council to support this effort. In correspondence aimed primarily at merchants and planters, the Institute of Jamaica suggested the benefits of participation: first, the advertisement of goods that would lead to an increase in exports to the United States, where the exhibition was being held, and second, the promotional value of a series of views of Jamaica (scenery, vegetation, etc.) would increase tourism.37 Networks of individuals also linked the Institute of Jamaica and the international exhibitions. In many instances, members of the board of governors of the Institute of Jamaica as well as its secretary were also commissioners for Jamaica’s participation in international exhibitions. Duplicate objects collected for these exhibitions were acquired for the collection of the institute. Frank Cundall, secretary of the institute from 1890 until just before his death, in 1937, had served as one of the commissioners for Jamaica for several exhibitions and as a commissioner at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London in 1886, before his appointment at the Institute of Jamaica.38 The expertise Cundall gained from this earlier position surely recommended him for the job at the institute and qualified him to be a commissioner for Jamaica.39 Between 1890 and 1937, Cundall was one of the most important cultural figures of Jamaica’s elite and unquestionably the leading writer on things Jamaican. The Institute of Jamaica developed and maintained strong contacts with important scientific institutions, especially natural history museums, across the world and was involved in the collection and study of natural history specimens from across Jamaica. In this regard, it can be seen as a node in the colonial networks that provided objects for imperial centers in the gathering of anthropological and natural knowledge.40 Several of the curators of the museum also served as island botanists and in other government positions as scientists. Some would later work within institutions in England, such as at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in the United States, and even in South Africa.41 While there is a great deal to be gained from looking at the role of West Indian colonies in the development of European ways of (scientific) knowing, such a focus elides the quotidian experiences of people within the colonies, especially those of black people.42 What were the power effects of the museum and the “international” exhibition held in Jamaica in 1891 over the (national) social body? The relatively small size of the institute, and of the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891, and the small number of people that it could reach may render any grand idea of significant influence over the social body too optimistic.43 Throughout its nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century existence, the institute mostly ignored the majority of the population and directed its efforts toward the nonblack middle-­class and upper-­class reading populations of the island.

“A Period of Exhibitions”

537

Viewed in light of other governmental institutions established in Jamaica in the middle of the nineteenth century that sought order and control over the social body, the museum can be seen as the fulfillment of a Victorian dream of social uplift for the masses. The museum, like libraries and schools, including reformatory schools and societies such as the Women’s Self Help Society, was to function as a place to inculcate “proper” middle-­class norms of refinement, deportment, and normative attitudes to labor, class, and gender relations. The museum introduced the arts and culture, as well as science, into the project of social control and improvement. Another example of this trend of combining uplift with productivity could be found in the Industrial Schools Act, enacted in 1857 to facilitate the development of private industrial schools across Kingston. Government industrial schools followed later in the century. According to Shani Roper, private industrial schools were intended to “separate destitute children from criminal children who were considered a bad influence and would plunge them further into the ‘abyss of immorality’ and to re-­socialise children according to class and gender lines.” 44 These ideas are contemporaneous with similar rhetoric in England. In addition to basic literacy and mathematics, these schools taught skills such as joinery. Among the industrial schools that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the boys from the industrial school at Stony Hill seem to have been especially productive and were represented at international exhibitions across Europe and North America with furniture and other craft items as well as sample “fancy and furniture woods” (see chapter 6 in this volume, by Mark Nesbitt). Similar trends can be seen in the prison system, which was formalized in the middle of the century, when ideas of productive labor as important to reform were circulating. Items produced by the inmates at the penitentiary were also on display at several international exhibitions. The museum therefore can be seen to have participated in the Benthamite ideal of reform through labor. The colonial government, through its agent the Institute of Jamaica, constructed and participated in reformist narratives.

The Caribbean Exhibitionary Complex and the Industrial Education of Blacks

In 1880, less than one year after the Institute of Jamaica’s establishment, Sir Anthony Musgrave, the governor of Jamaica and founder of the institute, presented a lecture in London before the Royal Colonial Institute and in

538

Wayne Modest

the presence of the Duke of Manchester entitled “Jamaica Now and 15 Years Since.” Musgrave explicitly compared contemporary Jamaica with the Jamaica of 1865 — ​­the year of the Morant Bay rebellion. He presented a passionate plea in support of blacks. Responding to the negative image that the rebellion had left in the imagination of the British, Musgrave stated: I am the more anxious to place before you the impressions which have been made upon my mind, because I have found that those which are generally prevalent, especially in England are exceedingly inaccurate, and are certainly inconsistent with some indisputable facts. I think I am not far wrong in my belief that Jamaica is now generally regarded as a hopelessly ruined community, which was once prosperous, but has become a wreck of its former self; that the negro population are an idle, thriftless vagabond people, refusing to work and fast lapsing into heathenish savagery, and that if only the civilising influence of the cultivation of the chief staple, which is the sugar cane, should altogether cease or be very much diminished, then nothing can save this once magnificent Colony from utter degradation, and the bulk of her people from the condition of their African forefathers. It probably will very much surprise a great many to be assured that the whole of this is an erroneous view.45 He goes further by comparing blacks in Jamaica with the Irish, who according to Musgrave were also “within the empire” but despite their location in the “centre” were not as successful as blacks in the distant Caribbean colony. Musgrave’s text reinforces my claim for the colonial government’s need to represent a normal, productive, and even prosperous (black) Jamaica within the empire. But I also suggest that Musgrave intended to demonstrate that institutions such as the Institute of Jamaica, which he himself had established, exerted power effects over the social body at home. Many of the early public programs of the Institute of Jamaica were intended to instill ideals of industry, social uplift, and good social graces — ​­key components of what have retrospectively been identified as “Victorian values.” In 1891, it instituted a public lecture series. I quote here somewhat extensively from the 1891 Journal of the Institute of Jamaica, which describes a rationale behind these lectures as well as the format that they would take: All the advantage that can be procured goes to show the great advantages that have arisen in England from the establishment of the courses of lectures which are now known as “University Extension

“A Period of Exhibitions”

539

Teaching.” They were commenced by the Universities as “Lectures to Ladies” at a time when women could not obtain the advantage of instruction at the Universities: but it was soon found that large numbers of young men engaged in business and other occupations, who were not members of any university, were anxious not to be shut out from the means of extending their education and gaining culture; and the lectures under a changed name were thrown open to both sexes. The rapid increase both in number and size of the classes showed that the offer by the universities to extend the boundary of their teaching met the real and widely felt need on the part of people of all classes from the highest down to the artisans. . . . The Governors of the Institute of Jamaica, considering that the time has come when similar educational opportunities should be offered to the public of Jamaica, have made arrangements for the delivery of courses of lectures by competent lecturers. Each course will consist of thirteen lectures (delivered one a week), which will be definite instruction on the subject with which it deals. The instruction will include an indication of the text books which should be studied by the class, considering the needs of those who only wish to gain general acquaintance with the subject, and of those who desire to study it more deeply.46 The institute adopted a model that was successful in Britain at the time, aiming at the social uplift of the “public in Jamaica” in response to a time that “had come.” Among the earliest lectures were those on Elizabethan Literature, Hygiene, and Great Composers (including Beethoven and Mozart). In describing the first lecture the writer continues: The First lecture series was “Elizabethan Literature” and was held on Sept 17 [1891]. The 12 lectures would cost 6 shillings for non-­members and 3 shillings for members. In introducing the lecture and lecturer Rev. Gillies noted that “those who attended regularly and followed the instruction given would see, in many cases at least that it was the beginning of the new era in English Literature, one second to none in the world” [and] he hoped that the lecture would “spread its influence widely over schools and colleges and throughout the whole of Jamaica.” 47 The very cost of the lectures — ​­6 shillings for nonmembers and 3 shillings for members (who also had to pay an annual membership fee) — ​­would have prohibited the attendance of most of the population, especially blacks. Never540

Wayne Modest

theless, these events are evidence of the narrative of uplift associated with the early programs of the institute. In his introduction to the competitive art and craft exhibition, launched by the Institute of Jamaica in 1891, Frank Cundall quoted what he identifies as a Dutch proverb: “Peace begets art: art ennobles the people.” 48 While discounting the credibility of the first part of the phrase, Cundall went on to elaborate on the truth of the second part. He wrote: The power which art possesses over the minds of even the most unread and unthinking is remarkable. The constant association of beautiful objects — ​­statuary, paintings, ceramics, tapestries, gold and silversmith’s work and the like — ​­is in itself an education. He would have a curiously constituted mind who could live among such things and not be influenced by them. There is no man with intellect so undeveloped as to be able to spend an hour in an art museum or a picture gallery without gaining the power to carry home with him if he wishes food for reflection for many a day. Of the Fine Arts, painting appeals more forcibly to the majority of laymen than do the other sister arts, Architecture and Sculpture . . . Unfortunately, examples of all three arts are very scarce in Jamaica — ​ ­a country than which no other shows fewer traces of aboriginal art.49 With these words the institute justified its Arts and Crafts Competitive Exhibitions. Photography was included with painting, “for though it can never be ranked as one of the fine Arts, yet art enters almost as much as science into its inception and development.” 50 The history of the Arts and Crafts Competitive Exhibitions remains to be written. We can identify, however, some of the persons who participated, including Mrs. Lionel Lee, who won first prize for painting in three categories during the 1892 competitive exhibitions. Her painting Fatima or A Creole Girl, described by Erica James in this volume, had been on display in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. Cundall believed in not only the redemptive powers of art but also the possible effects of those powers over the “man with intellect so underdeveloped,” or what he described as the layman. This man “so underdeveloped” recalls mid-­V ictorian ideas about black people, especially at the time of the Morant Bay rebellion.51 If we view the bemoaning of the dearth of such art in Jamaica alongside the establishment of the competitive art exhibition, then we see a belief in the powers of such exhibitions staged at the institute to exert a redemptive power over the entire population. The institute therefore was seen to improve even the most “underdeveloped” man.

“A Period of Exhibitions”

541

Fig. 1 7. 5  ​A. Duperly and Sons, Visitors Arriving by Carriage and Horse-Drawn Tram at the Exhibition Building, 1891. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

542

It was also under Cundall’s watch as secretary that the institute’s portrait gallery was established. Here was pictured imperial power in the portraits of worthies such as colonial governors of the island and “great men of the empire,” such as Robert Penn and Sir William Venables, who captured the island for the British in 1655. A portrait of the Rev. James Mursell Phillippo was also included. According to the entry in the portrait gallery’s catalog, Phillippo was “a good friend to the Negroes both before and after emancipation.” 52 In 1912 there were 168 portraits in the portrait gallery and by 1930 there were, according to Higman, “614 portraits of governors and other worthy celebrated in the history of the island.” 53 Visitors to the institute, then, could be uplifted not only by the lectures and the art and craft but also by looking at the celebrated men of imperial history. A similar language of uplift accompanied the staging of the Jamaica Exhibition, which opened on January 27, 1891, at the Kingston Race Course. Staged in

Wayne Modest

a prefabricated building reminiscent of Captain Francis Fowke’s 1862 London international exhibitions — ​­albeit also referencing Islamic architecture — ​­the exhibition was opened to much fanfare by Prince George and joined with a narrative of encouraging productive economies and improving tourism in Jamaica (see fig. 17.5). Krista Thompson writes that the exhibition was intended to encourage tourism and to “bolster the trade of new agricultural products (especially banana) that the island offered for sale.” 54 Thompson continues, “The exhibition’s organisers also aimed to inspire the island’s majority black population in the ways of industry and enterprise and ‘open their eyes to the fact of their backward condition.’ ” 55 The Daily Gleaner at the time encapsulated this very point: “It has been found that an Exhibition of the resources of a country is not only the best advertisement for business purposes, but is the most valuable industrial education for the people.” 56 This improvement of the population, inspiring them into the ways of industry, would be gained through viewing the exhibition. During the just over three months that the exhibition was open, it received more than three hundred thousand visitors. Sir Henry Blake, governor of Jamaica at the time of the staging of the Jamaican Exhibition, was one of the chief proponents of these ideals (see fig. 17.6). In two articles published in the North American Review, Blake assessed the importance of the exhibition and its benefits to black Jamaicans. The first article, written as the exhibition was being prepared, was published in February 1891, a month after it opened.57 Here Blake summarizes the rationale behind the exhibition, how it was to be funded, and the historical and geopolitical circumstances that made it necessary. His opening paragraph unveils the intent of the exhibition: “The 27th of January, 1891, has been decided upon as the day on which will be opened the Jamaica Exhibition; an event of very great importance for the West Indies generally, and one that must have a singular interest for the United States, with its many millions of colored citizens.” The exhibition, therefore, had black people in mind, even within an international black perspective. Blake continues,

F i g . 1 7 .6   Sir Henry Arthur Blake, gcmg, dl, jp. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

For the means by which this exhibition is being carried out are different from those by which any exhibition hitherto held has run its course to failure or success. Heretofore the exhibitions held in various parts of the world have been guaranteed by government, or started by large capitalists, filled by manufacturers, and supported by the restless and

“A Period of Exhibitions”

543

inquiring millions of the Caucasian races. Here in Jamaica, with its population of 620,000, of whom but 14,000 are white . . . the enterprise [the exhibition] came about in this way. In September 1889, it was considered advisable to assist the intellectual development of the black population. Fifty years ago the conscience of England conferred upon them their freedom . . . Remembering that the primary purpose of the exhibition was an educational object lesson showing what might be accomplished by the intelligent cooperation of all classes, we asked for no government guarantee.58 The idea of “intelligent cooperation of all classes” I believe refers to Bennett’s view that the purpose of the institutions of the exhibitionary complex, by bringing people together in public places, was to achieve improvement for some. Blake continued by recounting a story that for him demonstrated the exhibition’s support among its intended audience, black people in Jamaica: One day as we drove from a meeting in a distant part of the country, we were overtaken by a bright-­looking black boy on horseback, who cantered beside the carriage, eyeing me rather wistfully. I spoke to him, and he then found courage to ask me if I would like to see what he was doing for the exhibition. I said, “Certainly,” when, giving rein to his pony, he darted forward at a wild gallop. At a turn in the road we found him standing, bareheaded, and in his hands a box containing a number of rude carvings of horses, cows, sheep, etc., some of which showed the germs of real merit. His father, a respectable-­looking shoemaker, stood behind with an approving smile at his son’s achievement. The boy, about thirteen or fourteen years of age, was an exceedingly bright and intelligent lad, and the conflict between modest shyness and anxiety to submit his efforts for my approval was very apparent. Every evening after his labor in the fields was over he had devoted himself to carving these figures in the soft cretaceous limestone of the district. His joy was extreme when we saw some of his work.59 From these extracts from Blake’s papers, it is very evident that the exhibition was to serve as an object lesson in industry and productivity for the majority population. Blake’s anecdote of the “bright-­looking black boy” who was inspired to industry and productivity showed that the exhibition had achieved in some ways one of its intended aims — ​­to ensure the social uplift of the island’s black population. In his second article, published in December 1892 and titled “Opportunities 544

Wayne Modest

for Young Men in Jamaica,” Blake continued to expound on the successes of the exhibition as well as the progressive uplift of black Jamaicans since emancipation. At the end of this article Blake summarizes thus: It is necessary to emphasize the fact that the people [black Jamaicans] are singularly law-­abiding, and that there is an entire absence of the reported crimes that, if true, disgrace the Southern States of America, for there is a tendency of many writers to jump to general conclusions as to the negroes, from limited observations. I find the following passage in a book by Philip A. Bruce on “The Plantation Negro as a Freeman,” published in New York. Having spoken of the reverting of the Haytian negro to African tribal customs, he says: “Jamaica has sunk to an equally hopeless condition. One of the fairest parts of the globe, a part upon which nature has lavished without stint her greatest treasures and beauties, has declined to a tropical wilderness far more wretched, with its evidence of former prosperity, than when the foot of Columbus first touched the shores of San Salvador.” Now I can only say that this is ridiculously untrue. The aggregate amount of land in cultivation has been steadily increasing since the date of emancipation, and is still increasing. In 1870 there were 1,832,386 acres in cultivation. In 1890 there were 1,896,290, and, while there is still ample room for improvement there is much reason for satisfaction with the social advance of the people. They are fulfilling their duties as citizens quietly and well, and there are no grounds for apprehension that they will retrograde from their present position. Jamaica, beautiful, healthy, and fertile, with a law-­abiding population, and a good supply of labor, offers opportunities for investment that only require to be known to secure an influx of industrious capitalists whose advent must accelerate her material progress.60 Blake’s plea recalls Musgrave’s London lecture of 1880. For Blake, this improvement occasioned by the institutions set up to encourage progressive uplift and social control over blacks had been achieved. Among these institutions were the museum (here, the Institute of Jamaica) and exhibitions such as the Jamaica Exhibition. Now blacks were citizens, according to Blake, and could practice this new role “quietly and well.” 61 Such a hopeful note, while continuing the portrayal of the island as productive and welcoming for investment, a practice started almost half a century earlier, in 1851, seems to elide the fact that even at the end of the nineteenth century, black Jamaicans were unequal citizens. Whether these exhibitions effected any progress toward the result their organizers sought — ​­the creation of a quiet and industrious citizenry — ​­remains

“A Period of Exhibitions”

545

uncertain. Cundall hoped to create pliant citizens through the viewing of art at the Institute of Jamaica; Blake, through a visit to the Jamaica Exhibition. Rhetoric aside, however, they could not control how the visiting public received these exhibitions. But the public’s views were never recorded. We have approximate numbers for the visitors to the Jamaica exhibition, and we know that many of them were black. Many black people, however, also stayed away from the exhibition, fearing that “it was a plot to re-­enslave them.” 62 It is unclear whether many blacks visited the Institute of Jamaica at the end of the nineteenth century. The likely small number of visitors would diminish any possible effect of the institute’s displays on the black population. Early exhibitionary institutions in Jamaica were less successful at effecting control over the social body and more successful in representing the social body as controlled.

Notes 1. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 59. 2. See, for example, Edward Chitty, Descriptive Catalogue of Articles Exhibited by the Royal Society of Arts, Jamaica (Assisted by the Society of Industry, Hanover, Jamaica) at the International Exhibition 1862 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1862), which was the earliest descriptive catalog that I could find, or Charles Washington Eves, Jamaica at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London 1886 (London: Spottiswood and Co., 1886). 3. Handbooks of Jamaica were produced from 1890 until the early twentieth century and were prepared and published by the Institute of Jamaica. 4. Richard B. Sheridan, “The West India Sugar Crisis and British Slave Emancipation, 1830–­1833,” Journal of Economic History 21, no. 4 (1961): 539–­51. 5. Sheridan, “The West India Sugar Crisis and British Slave Emancipation, 1830–­ 1833,” 540. 6. Christopher Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 273–­306. 7. Sheridan, “West India Sugar Crisis,” 540. 8. See Thomas Carlyle to his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, 1866, quoted in Gillian Workman, “Thomas Carlyle and the Governor Eyre Controversy: An Account with Some New Material,” Victorian Studies 18, no. 1 (Sept. 1974): 91. 9. See, for example, Illustrated London News, November 25, 1865; December 2, 1865; December 9, 1865; June 23, 1866. 10. Here “playful abandonment” refers to an account of blacks entering a pub during the rebellion and after getting drunk and talking playfully about the quality of the alcohol among other things. 11. Bedford Pim, The Negro and Jamaica (London: Truebner and Company, 1866), iii. Pim’s presentation was not the only one addressing “the black question” that was pre-

546

Wayne Modest

sented before the society in the wake of the rebellion. For example, the president of the society, Dr. James Hunt, also presented a paper, which was also published by the society, titled “On the Negro’s Place in Nature.” According to Pim’s own account these presentations were well received. 12. See Anon., Transactions of the Society of Arts 11 (London: T. Silbury and Son, 1793), 204. 13. Derek Hudson and Kenneth Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, 1754–­1954 (London: John Murray, 1954), 151. 14. Although I have not been able to identify a discrete catalog for Jamaica’s participation in 1851, I draw on the general group of items exhibited under the broad category of West Indian Colonies. Also, I have not been able to see all the catalogs for all the years during this period. I am confident, however, that the broad categories I suggest present a good picture of the categories under which Jamaica exhibited throughout these years. The exhibitions that I examined were staged in Britain and the United States, and in a few instances, in France, the Netherlands, and Canada. 15. A category broadly construed as visual representation was also employed relatively frequently, although the title of the category changed over the years, and included Fine Art and Views, Photographs, and so on. However, while the category that I have called “visual representation” was present for several years, in all instances it contained only a very small percentage of the items that were on display. 16. Under craft items, there was disproportionate representation of products made by women, for example, by members of the Women’s Self Help Society, Kingston. A potentially productive field for analysis, this feature lies outside the scope of this project. 17. Furniture and fancy woods from Turnbull were represented at international exhibitions in 1862 (London), 1886 (London), and 1893 (Chicago). For more information about reformatory schools in Jamaica, see chapter 5 in this volume, by Shani Roper. See also chapter 13 in this volume, by John Cross, for an overview of furniture in Jamaica during the Victorian period. 18. Wayne Modest, “We Have Always Been Modern: Museums, Collections and Modernity,” Museum Anthropology 35, no. 1 (2012): 85–­96. 19. Chitty, Descriptive Catalogue. 20. Chitty, Descriptive Catalogue, 15. 21. Chitty, Descriptive Catalogue. 22. Chitty, Descriptive Catalogue. 23. Chitty, Descriptive Catalogue, 16. 24. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995). 25. I use the word “national” with caution to invoke a bounded geography. In so doing I recognize that the application of the term “nation” to Jamaica before the middle of the twentieth century might be seen as problematic. However, even within the institute at the end of the nineteenth century, there were discussions about the character of what could be called “Jamaican” art, as distinct from the art of the empire. These discussions could be framed within a notion of proto-­nationalism.

“A Period of Exhibitions”

547

26. Barry W. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories (London: Macmillan, 1999), 37. 27. See Jamaica Executive Committee, Board of Works, Department Minutes, January 1855–­April 1861, National Archives of Jamaica 1B/​5/7/​1. 28. The National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad was established in 1892 as the Royal Victoria Institute. Similarly, the Guyana National Museum was established in 1868. Both institutions had mandates similar to that of the Institute of Jamaica. 29. Alissandra Cummins, “The ‘Caribbeanization’ of the West Indies: The Museum’s Role in the Development of National Identity,” in Museums and the Making of Ourselves: The Role of Objects in National Identity, ed. Flora Kaplan (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), 197. I have not seen any iteration of the early functions of the Institute of Jamaica that includes anthropology. While anthropological and more specifically archaeological collections became important to the institute in later years, to my knowledge this was not one of its earliest stated aims. 30. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 38. 31. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 38. 32. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 38. 33. See National Library of Jamaica MS20 and MS21. 34. There was significant scientific interest in the extinct Arawaks, and objects from the Tainos were sent abroad for study. Eminent British anthropologist Prof. A. C. Haddon was to write the preface to a publication by Dr. Duerden, curator of the Institute of Jamaica, titled Aboriginal Indians of Jamaica. 35. Cummins, “ ‘Caribbeanization’ of the West Indies,” 192–­221. 36. Cummins, “ ‘Caribbeanization’ of the West Indies,” 196. 37. Quoted in Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 1 (1891). This quotation also supports my earlier argument about the need for and use of the external-international power effect of the exhibitionary complex in representing the colony. While I have chosen not to take up the cue about tourism, Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), and Frank Fonda Taylor, To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), are two excellent studies that adequately cover this aspect of the exhibitions. 38. Cundall was a coauthor, with Thomas Riley, of Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1886). 39. The letters of reference that I have seen for Cundall when he was to be appointed to his post in Jamaica mention his earlier work and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. See National Library of Jamaica, H/​N Cundall. 40. For a discussion of early collecting networks and the formation of museum knowledge, see H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). See also Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–­1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), for what he describes as “object based epistemology” that may also be applicable here for the institute’s work within the empire. 41. J. E. Duerden, for example, also worked in Ireland and the United States. After

548

Wayne Modest

leaving the ioj he became a professor of zoology at the Rhodes University in South Africa. 42. I am mindful of recent works such as Susan Scott Parrish’s brilliant study American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), where she shows that “colonial subjects in America were not mere collectors for the knowledge makers in the metropole” (8) but active participants in the construction of European ways of knowing. See also Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 43. Other scholars who have expressed concerns about Bennett’s ideas include Tim Barringer (“Victorian Culture and the Museum: Before and after the White Cube,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 1 [2006]: 133–­45), Steven Conn (Museums and American Intellectual Life), and Lara Kriegel (“After the Exhibitionary Complex: Museum Histories and the Future of the Victorian Past,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 [2006]: 681–­704). 44. Shani Roper, “Visibility of Children in Jamaica 1925–­1938” (master’s thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona, 2006), 39–­40. See also Roper’s chapter in this volume. I am grateful to Shani Roper for the opportunity to discuss this topic with her. 45. Anthony Musgrave, Jamaica: Now and Fifteen Years Since; A Paper Read before the Royal Colonial Institute on April 20, 1880 (London: Unwin Bros., 1880). 46. Anon., Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 1, no. 1 (1892). 47. Anon., Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 1, no. 1 (1892). 48. Frank Cundall, “Competitive Art Exhibition,” Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 1, no. 1 (1892). It is perhaps telling that Cundall also wrote a book on Dutch painters, The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland: Ruisdael, Hobbema, Cuijp, Potter (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1891), before his appointment as secretary at the Institute of Jamaica. 49. Frank Cundall, “Competitive Art Exhibition” (1892). 50. Frank Cundall, “Competitive Art Exhibition” (1892). 51. For a discussion of issues related to race and development during the Victorian period, see George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). 52. Frank Cundall, Biographical Annals of Jamaica: A Brief History of the Colony, Arranged as a Guide to the Jamaica Portrait Gallery: With Chronological Outlines of Jamaica History (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1904). 53. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 39. 54. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 28. Banana was a newer industrial export crop than sugarcane and did not figure prominently in earlier exhibitions in which Jamaica took part. 55. See Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 31; original quotation from Jamaica Post, February 12, 1891. 56. Daily Gleaner, February 12, 1891. 57. Henry Blake, “The Jamaica Exhibition of 1891,” North American Review 152, no. 411 (1891): 182–­93. 58. Blake, “The Jamaica Exhibition of 1891,” 182.

“A Period of Exhibitions”

549

59. Blake, “The Jamaica Exhibition of 1891,” 186. 60. Henry Blake, “Opportunities for Young Men in Jamaica,” North American Review 155, no. 433 (1892): 665–­66. My emphasis. 61. Blake, “Opportunities for Young Men in Jamaica,” 666. 62. Daily Gleaner, November 7, 1890. See also Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 58.

550

Wayne Modest

CH A P T ER 18

“Most Intensely Jamaican” The Rise of Brown Identity in Jamaica BELINDA EDMONDSON

In the 1828 Jamaican novel Marly, the Jamaican slaves declare, “You brown man hab no country, only de neger and de buckra [whites] hab country.” 1 This sentiment neatly summarizes the then-­common view of the mulatto as a nationless  — ​­and therefore ethnicity-­less  — ​­aberration. Initially known as “coloreds” or “mulattos,” by the nineteenth century Jamaicans of mixed African and European heritage increasingly had become identified by the colloquial term “brown,” as attested by local sources as well as fictional accounts like Marly and various travel narratives. Contrary to the sentiments expressed in Marly, the switch to the colloquial term “brown” suggested the emergence of not simply a new racial category but also a new cultural identity in Jamaican society, one distinctly at odds with the original status of “colored” as no more than a barrier class. At the close of the Victorian era, for good or ill, browns were thought to embody an essentially nationalist identity. In an all-­black-­authored volume on Queen Victoria’s jubilee published in 1888, the black nationalist Jamaican author J. H. Reid wrote that, far from being marginalized, brown Jamaicans were actually “the most intensely Jamaican of the whole population.” 2 Twelve years later, the white Jamaican journalist William Livingstone observed that “the coloured members of the population . . . are, as a rule, hostile to the British official system, their motto being, ‘Jamaica for the Jamaicans,’ by whom they mean themselves.” 3 A mere fifty years after emancipation, then, brown Jamaicans had gone from a cultural anomaly to a cultural mainstay. By the end of the nineteenth century, not only was “brown” the common term for mixed-­race Jamaicans but brown culture, if one can call it that, was also linked increasingly with urban life and ferocious levels of social aspiration, a shifting blend of desires and limitations reflected in the contemptuous traditional Jamaican proverb: “Brown man wife nyam cockroach a corner, fe save money fe buy silk dress.” 4 Brown culture of the Victorian era was arguably the first manifestation of Jamaican middle-­class culture: rampantly consumerist, socially ambitious, insular yet outward looking.

This version of middle-­class culture was also decidedly urban. Whereas rural Jamaica is typically regarded as a stronghold of African-­centered culture (in the Victorian era as now), in urban Jamaica European cultural influence predominated. Brown people’s heightened visibility in urban settings is typically viewed as a manifestation of this European presence. Seen another way, however, the cities — ​­particularly Kingston — ​­did not represent a “whitening” effect on browns so much as a browning of the European spaces of colonialism, a movement that would lead inexorably to the understanding of the Jamaican city today as a hyper-­black space. Was brownness, then, less of a cultural force and more of a social weather vane, indicating the future direction and massive social divisions of Jamaican society? Critic Kenneth Ramchand concludes that Victorian browns were an abortive creole nationalist group, as they “did not quite manage to take political control in the nineteenth century, nor did they fill the gap left by the Whites and assume the role of cultural pace-­setters.” 5 In a more recent essay on Jamaican nationalism, Anthony Bogues describes the political dominance of what he calls the discourse of brown creole political nationalism or, interchangeably, middle-­class nationalism in twentieth-­century Jamaica. This discourse, Bogues argues, denigrated black Jamaican culture and upheld European standards as the norm even as it described a Jamaica that was neither African nor European. By contrast, the tradition of black nationalism is linked to the cultural practices of black Jamaicans and by implication transformative political discourse is linked to cultural power.6 Read this way, brown political achievement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a kind of evolutionary dead end, lacking cultural power other than that derived from colonial imitation and delinked from the kind of true cultural power that leads to real independence. A different picture emerges, however, if we consider the contemporary consequences of Victorian brown aspirations. The rise of brown influence in the Victorian period did, in fact, result in a “browned” cultural foundation of sorts for modern, or twentieth-­ century, middle-­class Jamaican identity, as brown people increasingly became the face of genteel nonwhite Jamaica. Brown political aspirations and victories were indissociable from brown social power and, I would argue, cultural influence. That brown cultural power was raced and classed in ways that are anathema to contemporary views of authentic Jamaican cultural practice makes it no less culturally significant; that it appropriated cultural ideas from all sides does not make it less authentic as a social formation. Nor should we assume that race and class affiliations always combined seamlessly to produce a unified worldview. Black people did not necessarily

554

Belinda Edmundson

live their lives “blackly,” if blackness is always to be associated with a black nationalist worldview. Nor, as we shall see, did brown people always behave “brownly.” As Ramchand puts it, “There is more than an element of nonsense in speaking about a Coloured class,” because brown people were of every class.7 At the close of the Victorian period, observers would probably not have been able to distinguish between the habits, consumptive patterns, and speech of the black and brown members of the middle class — ​­or working class, for that matter — ​­so consolidated were their interests and desires.

The Emergence of Brown Society Initially known throughout the Anglophone Caribbean as “free coloreds,” a term that also encompassed free blacks, by the late eighteenth century brown people were an ideological as well as a practical problem for the plantocracy.8 Whites were decreasing in number while browns were increasing.9 The solution was to conceive of brown people as an intermediate class, providing a strategic barrier between the minority white elite and the black enslaved majority. In 1774 British administrator and historian Edward Long envisioned that the emancipation of Jamaican mulattos “would . . . form the centre of connexion between the two extremes, producing a regular establishment of three ranks of men, dependent on each other, and rising in proper climax of subordination, in which the Whites would hold the highest place,” and therefore brown people “would naturally attach themselves to the white race as the most honourable relations, and so become a barrier against the designs of the Blacks.” 10 Thinking along these same lines, the Jamaican Assembly passed legislation that overnight produced more whites to shore up their portion of the racial balance sheet, for it allowed browns with just a small fraction of black blood to be counted as white.11 With acts of containment such as this, brown people had an incentive to identify “whitely,” and they certainly tried. Yet the result of these policies was not the maintenance of the status quo so much as a browning and creolization of the Jamaican elite into the twentieth century. The brown population of Jamaica continued to expand tremendously during the nineteenth century even as the white population, despite regular injections of brown people, continued to diminish, and with the expansion of the brown population came rising economic and social influence. Outstripping the white population in number as early as 1820, the brown population, by the time of the first Jamaica census, taken in 1844, had risen to 69,000, or 20 percent of the population, second only to blacks.12 Browns now constituted a sizable segment of Jamaican society and would continue to do so until well into the twentieth

Brown Identity in Jamaica

555

century.13 As brown people reproduced themselves, they were seen, and saw themselves, as a distinct ethnic and social group. Initially shunned by whites in the early nineteenth century but still rejecting the society of blacks, brown people created their own sense of cultural distinctiveness by arranging their own entertainments and social organizations. This cultural distinctiveness was aided by emerging brown dominance in key aspirational professions. Early on there were signs of an emergent, primarily urban, brown economic power, centered around the cities of Kingston, Falmouth, and Montego Bay. Brown men operated several newspapers as early as the 1830s, among which were the Watchman, the Jamaica Free Press, the Falmouth Post, the Struggler, and, by the 1850s, the Kingston Free Press, owned by George William Gordon.14 Such a proliferation of brown newspapers suggests a certain economic autonomy but, more significantly, tells of a constituent community that desired to hear its own voice and see its own reflection in those pages. Like black Jamaicans, brown Jamaicans were eager to be educated, but the latter were given greater access to education by sympathetic religious groups like the Methodists, who founded many of the early secondary schools. By 1822, only seven years after the first brown student had been admitted, brown students formed the majority of the student body at Wolmer’s High School in Kingston. Consequently, by the end of the nineteenth century the skilled professions were disproportionately brown, from salaried workers, such as lawyers, teachers, clerics, and civil servants, to tradespeople, such as tavern keepers, mechanics, carpenters, and clerks. Brown Jamaicans also followed European literary and cultural developments, perhaps more than did white creoles, and established various educational societies.15 Educational opportunity translated into increased political power; by the mid-­nineteenth century there were several brown and black men in the assembly. Of the brown candidates, more than one-­third were lawyers, while the rest were officials, editors, and merchants. Even more to the point, as historian Gad Heuman notes, nearly all the brown representatives shared an urban orientation, and not one of them was solely a planter. The political party most feared by whites was the one associated with browns and Jews; it was called, significantly, the Town Party.16 By the end of the nineteenth century, the industrial labor force had become predominantly female, as depressed economic conditions facilitated a decline in male-­dominated crafts. The relatively genteel trade of dressmaking — ​­genteel because it could be carried out at home, not in a factory — ​­accounted for the single largest portion of the industrial labor force.17 Brown women could be found making dresses or running boarding houses out of their homes. Less

556

Belinda Edmundson

genteelly, they could also be found running taverns and inns, and a few even became wealthy this way. Brown women eventually also gravitated toward health care, tending sick travelers and strangers.18 Given that nursing and healthcare would provide the great leg up into the middle class for a generation of twentieth-­century black and brown Jamaican women, this earlier generation of nineteenth-­century brown women workers who operated in the narrowly confined space of genteel labor may have provided the template for that process. The increasing urbanization of Jamaican society at the end of the nineteenth century led to an increase of nonwhite women in the labor force, to the point where, in 1899, the Daily Gleaner, Kingston’s premier newspaper, offered for debate such topics as “Should Women Work outside the Home?” (the consensus response: only if they have to).19 Questions such as this clearly reflect the anxieties of the financially insecure middle class who aspired to achieve the status of the leisured class but lacked the funds to do so. The issue of what constituted a genteel profession for aspiring or genteel nonwhite women would shape attitudes about work and culture through the twentieth-­century Caribbean.

Brown Stereotypes and Realities Despite their ascent into middle-­class professions, in postemancipation Jamaica, most brown people were identifiably poor — ​­even if not as poor as the black majority.20 Still, especially during the latter half of the nineteenth century, brown people could be found at almost every level of the Jamaican class system. The sheer variety of the brown Jamaican experience, from abject poverty to the rarefied world of the leisure class, ensures that representations of brown Jamaicans reveal a variety of contradictory assumptions about who and what they were. Images of brown people during the Victorian era were an ambivalent, often bizarrely contradictory, mix of positive and negative perceptions. On the one hand, we find the mostly favorable observations of white European and American travel writers. Visiting Kingston in 1850, American John Bigelow noted that all the best boarding houses were kept by brown people. He observed: “Intermarriages are constantly occurring between the white and colored people, their families associate together . . . and public opinion does not recognize any social distinctions based exclusively upon color. . . . The wife of the present Mayor of Kingston is a “brown” woman — ​­that is the name given to all the intermediate shades between a decided white and decided black complexion — ​­so also is the wife of the Receiver General himself, an English gentleman, and one of the most exalted public functionaries upon the island.” 21 Echoing Bigelow, in 1859 English writer Anthony Trollope marveled at the

Brown Identity in Jamaica

557

growing influence of brown people: “Let any stranger go through the shops and stores of Kingston, and see how many of them are either owned or worked by men of colour. How large a portion of the public service is carried on by them; how well they thrive.” 22 On the other hand, browns were generally regarded with suspicion by both blacks and local whites, particularly in terms of their political allegiances. This attitude probably arose because browns did not have uniform allegiances and changed their positions unexpectedly to ally with whites or blacks. One white legislator said of his brown colleagues in 1865, “There are so few of the mixed race who are not of a treacherous disposition that they are naturally mistrusted as a rule.” 23 Despite his earlier admiring observations of the “skill, industry and thrift” of a brown Haitian refugee planter whom he had visited, Bigelow evidently felt the same (or felt compelled to reproduce the endemic stereotype). He goes on to say of the brown Haitians that they “are very generally cunning and false, they are oppressive upon the blacks when they have power, and are universally more indisposed than the blacks to any productive labor.” 24 Even as late as 1900 William Livingstone held the same view: “The coloured members are more uncertain factors of the population. . . . Belonging to neither race, incapable of the racial independence and dignity that come naturally alike to white and black, with an unstable and elusive nature, it is difficult to know what turn their relations will take.” 25 In a volatile political climate, these stereotypes of brown treachery and instability were particularly aimed at brown men, who had, by then, gained a measure of political influence and, in a racially stratified society, were the axis upon which the balance of political power would depend. The view of browns by English bookkeeper J. B. Moreton, writing more than a generation earlier in 1793, are here instructive: All mongrels, male and female, have a vast share of pride and vanity, baseness and ingratitude in their composition. . . . The men, if born to estates or properties (as many are) . . . when they are not kept at a proper distance and under due subjection, are often very insolent and impudent. When those spurious cubs, having no trades, squander what their infatuated parents bequeathed them, they turn out the most thieving pilfering vagrants; for never having practiced any industry, but beggared themselves by their profligacy and dissipation, Creole fashion, they are quite ignorant ever after of the ways and means to earn their livelihoods industriously and honestly. If a gentleman wished his Mongrel son to do well, he should do nothing more for him than to give him a smattering of reading, writing and arithmetic, to procure his freedom, and bind 558

Belinda Edmundson

him at an early age to a trade, during which time to stint him in both money and cloaths, and to convince him that he might never expect any other favours; in such case, he might labour for a livelihood and come to some good.26 From Moreton’s emphatically critical assessment we can glean that, well into the nineteenth century, stereotypes of brown men as cunning, treacherous, and lazy endured. The thriving nature of browns in the professions might be taken, then, by some as evidence of Moreton’s assessment that it was because of deprivation, not despite it, that brown men had “come to some good.” Thus, while there were negative stereotypes about browns that pertained to both men and women, there were also key distinctions made between the two, because of the era’s distinctive sociopolitical calculi. Just as brown men’s flexible politics affirmed stereotypes of their supposed treachery, brown women’s enduring status as mistresses of white men made them the flashpoint for debates about race and morality in the colony. As the proverb cited above implies, brown women in particular were associated with conspicuous consumption and a corresponding lack of moral virtue. “As for Mongrel women,” opined Moreton, “though the daughters of rich men, and though possessed of slaves and estates, they never think of marriage; for they are extremely proud, vain and ignorant, that they despise men of their own colour; and though they have their amorous desires abundantly gratified by them and black men secretly, they will not avow these connections.” 27 European travel writers of the period make constant references to the ostentatious dress of brown women across the Caribbean. Absurd in her splashy nouveau riche dresses and paraphernalia, Kitty Swartz, the West Indian (and, significantly, half-­Jewish) mulatto heiress of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–18­48), is indicative of the general white perception of vulgar brown materialism in the early Victorian period. Hopelessly stupid and over-­dressed, Kitty indolently lolls about “in her favourite amber-­coloured satin, with turquoise-­bracelets, countless rings, flowers, feathers, and all sorts of tags and gimcracks, about as elegantly decorated as a she chimney-­sweep on May day.” Kitty is also given to torturous pronunciations of English, furthering a common English perception that even the wealthiest brown West Indians were little more than dressed-­up savages.28 Thackeray’s own illustrations for his novel appeared alongside successive episodes of the text in Punch, the favorite satirical periodical of the British middle class (fig. 18.1). “Miss Swartz Rehearsing for the Drawing Room” emphasizes not just the brown pigmentation of Kitty Swartz’s skin but also her vanity and preoccupation with material finery. Such excessive materialism was taken to be a manifestation of an excessive and innate brown female (not male) sexuality. Victorian perceptions of brown Brown Identity in Jamaica

559

F ig . 1 8.1   Wood engraving after William Makepeace Thackeray, Miss Swartz Rehearsing for the Drawing Room, from W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1849).

women were significantly shaped by this pervasive view, and this sexuality was thought to contribute to the moral laxity of Jamaican society at large. Bigelow, for all his approving comments about the entente cordiale between local whites and browns, observed that brown people “generally prefer that their daughters should live with a white person upon any terms, than be married to a negro. Few will need to be told that where such is the condition of public sentiment in a class, the standard of female virtue among them cannot be very high.” 29 Even as late as 1900, decrying the large number of illegitimate children and the resultant rise of juvenile delinquency in Jamaican cities, white Jamaican journalist William Livingstone laid the problem squarely at the door of excessively sexual brown women: The colour of the juvenile population indicates that a large proportion of the illegitimate increment in the chief centres is due to classes higher than the blacks. It is among these that vice, in its proper sense, prevails to the greatest extent. . . . The fairer-­skinned women . . . are more passionate than the pure black and less faithful and stable, and the result in the end is to increase the social corruption. Large numbers of these women also live in illegitimate relation with whites of every class.30 Livingstone’s critique, expressed with subjective intensity, has some basis in fact. As mistresses of economically stable white men, poor brown women could hope for greater financial rewards for themselves and their children than would be possible if they were married to brown or black men of their own social status. Many brown women acted in accord with these economic incentives. However, not everyone reaped the hoped-­for rewards for their children, many of whom ended up abandoned on the streets of Kingston. In 1879, twenty years before Livingstone’s assessment, it was noted that the poor juvenile population of Kingston was disproportionately brown, an observation seemingly borne out by surviving photographs of poor children of the period.31 Several brown children are noticeable in a stereoscopic photograph of 1899 of barefooted black schoolchildren in Mandeville (fig. 18.2) and figure prominently in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century photographs of the children of the Belmont Orphanage (fig. 18.3). The 1899 stereograph of Jamaican schoolchildren in Mandeville reflects the communal spaces where black and brown peasant and working-­class children studied and played together in rural Jamaica. At first glance the children seem indistinguishable save for the phenotypical features of the few brown children interspersed among them: clearly working class, they are barefoot, modestly dressed, and have an air of familiarity and intimacy with each other as they

Brown Identity in Jamaica

561

F ig . 1 8.2   C. H. Graves, Universal Art Co., Philadelphia, Schoolchildren, Mandeville, Jamaica, gelatin silver stereocard, from Jamaica Through the Stereoscope (1899). Courtesy of New York Public Library, Stereograph collection, Image id: 1648287. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

F i g . 1 8.3   Residents of Belmont Orphanage, Stony Hill, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

lean up against each other’s shoulders, sitting outside on the grass. On closer inspection, the viewer notices that the brown boy to the left has on boots and a spiffy sailor suit, suggesting that while there may have been some economic distinctions between them, these did not seem to preclude the kind of social intimacy conveyed by the general posture of the group. The Belmont Orphanage photograph presents a quite different image. The Belmont children are formally dressed in nearly identical outfits and matching hats, a sign of respectability. Yet these are orphans, children who almost certainly came from poverty-­stricken or less-­than-­respectable backgrounds. Further, the presence of very light-­skinned children among them reminds the viewer that the two images are not so far removed as they appear, that brown people were also poor and abandoned and did not form a de facto middle class. So it was that as the brown population rose in social prominence during the Victorian era, it also swelled the ranks of the urban poor. The stories of these poor brown people are mostly lost to us now, subsumed within the dominant contemporary narratives of, on the one hand, the accommodationist brown middle class of the nineteenth century and, on the other, the rise of black independent Jamaica in the twentieth. In the Victorian era, Jamaican whites and blacks were more likely to comment in print or popular sayings such as we have already seen on the character and culture of brown people than were brown people themselves, and their commentaries were not especially flattering. Historian Patrick Bryan notes that the relative paucity of information on brown society of the period exists in part because colonial authorities were leery of specifying race in official communiqués given the racial sensibilities of the society, particularly those of brown people.32 It is no great leap to imagine that brown people themselves did not care to highlight their racial status in an official context, even as they created social institutions that catered almost exclusively to them. Still, local literature by brown authors of the era offers us some tantalizing hints of these other, more ordinary, brown lives. Brown Sammy in Search of a Wife, a dialect story published in 1874, is a comic account of a poor, illiterate brown or black man looking for love. The first recorded example of the celebrated “dialect literature” of Jamaica, it was authored by a highly educated brown man, Henry Garland Murray, who afterward successfully toured the United States and whose performance was favorably viewed by African American author William Wells Brown as an example of the rising black elite of the diaspora.33 In the preface Murray claims that a “coloured man, more than a white or black man will successfully delineate the character of the uneducated negro” because “standing between two minds, he knows, by experience, what are the peculiarities of both.” This statement is unusual for two

Brown Identity in Jamaica

563

reasons: first, a brown author is highlighting his own racial status and not simply that of his characters, and second, a brown author tells a humorous story of an illiterate character who can be read as either brown or black. (Although Murray refers to him as “negro” in the preface, Brown Sammy’s racial status may also be predicated on his class status, as I shall argue later.) As it was usually whites — ​ ­often foreign — ​­who produced narratives on Jamaican culture and often used humor to affirm the inferiority of nonwhites, Murray’s declaration may be read as a desire to supplant the dominant narrative with what he clearly sees as a more authentic account, from the pen of an educated brown man who will not be mistaken for his protagonist. More broadly, Murray’s echoing yet inverting of the traditional view of browns as a barrier class suggests that educated brown people may have viewed themselves as uniquely positioned to be cultural interpreters of the larger Jamaican population. The storyline rehearses a theme common to the Jamaican variant of Anancy folktales:34 the hero is an illiterate who desires to appear educated, with predictably hilarious results. At one point Brown Sammy recalls his childhood upbringing “up at Gully” — ​­clearly a poor peasant area — ​­alongside a “whitey whitey” Sammy and a “black guinea boy” also named Sammy. The humor revolves around the divergent ways in which the three Sammys are called home: “So sometime you hear de white head boy moder da call like a young puss; ‘Sammie,’ den we say white Sammy da you, an him go; den tay bambye you hear fe me moder da bawl, tell you tink him neck tring da go bruck ‘Sammee!’ den we da Brown Sammy — ​­an I go; den tay bambye you hear ola massa Pulies call out ‘Where’s dat fella Sammy!’ Black Sammy go.” 35 The public demeanors of white and nonwhite women are distinguished here: the white mother calls out to her son “like a young puss” (kitten), or in more delicate tones than the nonwhite mother, who strenuously “bawls” out until her “neck strings” look as if they are about to break. Thus far the distinction between white and brown or ​black behavior confirms stereotypes about white and black women: the former are genteel while the latter are loud and unladylike. This interpretation would suggest that “Brown” Sammy is, at the very least, culturally speaking a “negro,” or black. Yet the black boy is called home not by his black mother but rather by his presumably white employer (suggested by the titles “Missa” and “Massa” Pulies) calling him back to work. Black Sammy, unlike Brown Sammy, is linked to servant or ​slave status, and the adjective “guinea” (meaning African) is added to his racial description as black. This description raises the intriguing possibility that in the Victorian era the term “brown” had already gained a certain elasticity, used similarly to the earlier term “free colored,” which encompassed free blacks as well as browns, to denote class

564

Belinda Edmundson

as much as color.36 Black Sammy’s blackness is connected to Africaneity, to servitude or even slavery (this is, after all, a story about “the manners and customs of the country a generation ago”). By contrast, although Brown Sammy may be poor and even black, he still has a mother who calls him home, and he is no servant-​slave — ​­hence the use of the term “brown,” to denote Brown Sammy’s more “civilized,” or less African, form of blackness. There are two possibilities here: either Murray is assigning blackness to poor brown people based on their lower social status than their phenotype suggests, or he is assigning brownness to black people based on their not-­African, or creolized, form of blackness. “Black” was clearly a pejorative descriptive term in the Victorian era, as it continued to be in the twentieth century. The indeterminate nature of brownness found here, both in the brown author’s positioning of himself as a cultural interlocutor between blacks and whites, and in the murky nature of Brown Sammy’s brownness (or blackness), points to an emerging formulation of creolization in Murray’s story. That this working-­class manifestation of brown culture in the nineteenth century takes the cultural form of dialect literature, a genre associated with black Jamaica today, suggests that even as brownness was associated with social mobility and aspirational whiteness, so too did it provide a foundation for what is now identified as a specifically black Jamaican cultural practice. Murray’s acceptance of dialect culture as part of his own society illustrates another response of educated brown men to the “problem” of culture. In 1859 brown author Richard Hill wrote that in the preemancipation era, brown men like himself who had been educated in England, “looked upon themselves as blasted trees, — ​­‘barkless, branchless, and blighted trunks upon a cursed root,’” because of their indeterminate social and political status on the island (fig. 18.4).37 By contrast the locally educated Murray clearly felt that his erudition, far from alienating him from local society, actually gave him an advantage in parsing it. By so doing, Murray anticipated the twentieth-­century reification of dialect to a nationalist symbol by middle-­ class dialect authors such as Louise Bennett. Creole culture was manifested in more everyday instances as well: as historian Steeve Buckridge points out, European clothing fashions were “cre-

Brown Identity in Jamaica

F i g . 1 8 .4   The Honorable Richard Hill, carte-­de-­visite photograph, the Livingston Album, Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

565

Fig. 1 8. 5 ​ Attributed to Adolphe Duperly, “Negro Woman,” Lydia Ann, circa 1864–­1865. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​10503.

olized” by peasant and lower-status women in nineteenth-­century Jamaica, as found in Adolphe Duperly’s photograph, taken in about 1864, of the “Negro Woman” Lydia Ann, who is clearly brown (fig. 18.5; see also chapter 19 in this volume, by Steeve Buckridge).38 The majority of brown people of the era socialized with black people in myriad spaces where, if peasants or otherwise poor, they might have been officially identified as “negro,” or black, by those who outranked them. These interactions are absent from official narratives. Knowing this, we may be sure that a whole world of social, cultural, and linguistic complexity lies beneath the stories of Brown Sammy and Lydia Ann.

The “Browning” of Jamaica’s Elite As a result of white parental funding for the education and commercial ventures of their mulatto offspring, a significant number of brown men and women of the Victorian era were able to enter high society by the acquisition of wealth, either through success in their profession or by “marrying up” (fig. 18.6). As illustrated by Thackeray’s heiress Kitty Swartz, many extramarital brown chil-

566

Belinda Edmundson

F ig . 18. 6   Dr Oates of Vere, the Livingston Album. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

dren of well-­off whites were launched into elite society through their white fathers’ munificence. Among these offspring were the locally famous naturalist, author, and stipendiary magistrate Richard Hill, who received an English university education financed by his white father; the publisher and politician Robert Osborn, son of a black slave and a Scottish planter; and perhaps most notably, “Jamaica’s first black millionaire,” George Stiebel. Stiebel’s mother was the black “housekeeper,” or mistress, of his German-­ Jewish merchant father. Like many teenage brown children of white men, young George started out in the modest trade of carpentry, but then the elder Steibel provided the start-­up capital for his son to buy his own ship. After that, Stiebel made his fortune through ships, gold mines, and gunrunning in Cuba. He returned to Jamaica and moved quickly into Kingston’s elite circles. After marrying the white daughter of a missionary, Stiebel joined the Victoria Institute and went yachting as a member of Kingston’s Yacht Club. He also gave legendarily sumptuous parties at Devon House, the showy mansion at the corner of Hope and Trafalgar Roads, in the area of Kingston then known as Millionaires’ Corner. In a telling Kingston legend, Lady Musgrave demanded of her husband, Governor Anthony Musgrave, that he create the major thoroughfare Lady Musgrave Road just so that she did not have to drive by the upstart brown man’s mansion.39 Millionaires’ Corner may have been the richest address in Jamaica in the 1880s, but it already showed signs of brown infiltration. Aside from the prominent half-­Jewish brown master builder and city councilman Charles Lazarus, who had built Devon House, Stiebel’s neighbors included the planter-­merchant Louis and his half-­Jewish wife, Eliza Jane (née Lazarus). The Verleys clearly functioned socially as elite whites, yet Louis Verley’s mother may have been a brown woman from Saint-­Domingue and Eliza Jane’s grandmother was a quadroon, which means Eliza Jane would probably have been considered a brown woman herself.40 Although there is no explicit information on Eliza Jane’s racial status — ​­as noted earlier, upper-­crust skittishness about racial origins meant that even if she had been brown, this would not have been noted on any official document — ​­it would not have been uncommon for a prosperous Jew to have married a well-­to-­do brown woman. The real-­life analogue of the garish Kitty Swartz of Thackeray’s imagination may have looked much like Eliza Jane Verley (fig. 18.7). Merchant Jews and socially prominent brown people increasingly made social as well as political alliances as the Victorian era progressed, resulting in an even more economically forceful brown community. John Bigelow’s commentary on brown-­Jewish unions suggests that whites may have been threatened by them,

568

Belinda Edmundson

F i g . 1 8 .7   Eliza Jane Verley, mother of Miss Daisy Verley, date unknown. Carte-­de-­ visite photograph. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

since economic superiority was the whites’ strongest suit for maintaining social dominance. Bigelow makes a distinction between brown people descended from gentile whites and those descended from Jews. He describes Kingston Jews “as a class [who] incline to indemnify themselves for their exclusion from the society of the whites by striking an alliance with the people of color” and also observes, with some revulsion (and not a little anti-­Semitism): The proportion of Jews of all colors is fearfully great. I had never seen a black Jew before. . . . My imagination could never have combined the sharp and cunning features of Isaac with the thick lipped, careless, unthinking countenance of Cudjo; but nature has done it perfectly, if that can be called a combination in which the negro furnishes the color and the Jew all the rest of the expression. What will be the ultimate consequence of this corruption of the African blood, is a question over which the wise men of Jamaica are already beginning to scratch their heads.41 Brown Identity in Jamaica

569

A story published in the brown-­leaning Jamaica Times in 1899 reveals the increasingly commonplace nature of prosperous brown-­Jewish unions. “Carvalho” by Carlisle Fonseca (most likely himself brown-­Jewish) concerns a well-­ heeled brown hero of Jewish extraction who seeks, and wins, the affections of a white creole woman. Still, the white woman’s mother inveighs against the brown man’s parents; his mother kept a school for brown girls and had the gall to marry a Jew in church. As the heroine observes, “Poor mamma always made it a subject of reproach against respectable brown folk that they tried to live more decently and properly than their ancestors used to do in slavery times.” 42 The story draws on familiar social prejudices of the elite: notwithstanding his extraordinary wealth, George Stiebel’s white wife’s family was apparently opposed to their union.43

“Englishness” and the Rise of Leisure Culture With the exception of national hero George William Gordon and a few others who made common cause with black Jamaicans, brown Jamaicans of the Victorian period have largely been painted as imitators of English attitudes and culture, an imitation that seems to have been more acute toward the end of the nineteenth century, when, as historians have noted, there were more overt manifestations of Victorian English culture in everyday life.44 These heightened manifestations of Englishness are taken to be a consequence of the post–­Morant Bay reassertion of empire by the colonial administration and elite white interests, who felt threatened by both the creeping specter of black political power and the increasingly unstable economic climate of postemancipation Jamaica. In this view, the role of brown Jamaicans as a barrier class, first envisioned almost a century earlier, became more significant as a result of the aggressive promotion of English culture to the solidly brown Jamaican middle class. But the creolized manifestation of English culture that operated so forcefully in the colonies of Great Britain had no real existence in the home culture. We are therefore referring to a consumer ideology of Englishness, expressed through dress and possessions, that substituted for actual English culture and actual English people. “English” culture was promoted most effectively through schooling, although even there the purpose of education was not necessarily to teach “English culture” so much as to promote acquiescence in the social order for those who were not elite.45 It was also concomitantly promoted by an alliance of merchants, civic leaders, and Christian missionaries through leisure and consumer activities originating in urban middle-­class groups. These

570

Belinda Edmundson

undertakings included the rise of cricket and the founding of the venerable Melbourne Cricket Club (still in existence); the importation of English-­style Christmas celebrations complete with caroling, trees, and gift-­giving; and the dramatic proliferation of paying entertainments such as charity bazaars, garden parties, concerts, organized sporting events, and excursions to Port Antonio and other rustic attractions for the leisured urban middle class.46 Even as these respectable — ​­and costly — ​­activities were promoted, the old-­ time Christmas traditions of the black working class were clearly under fire. In December 1865, just months after the Morant Bay rebellion, the authorities required that all Jonkonnu revelers first obtain a special license before going into the streets; the blowing of instruments or beating of drums in public was otherwise banned.47 Clearly African-­derived peasant traditions like Jonkonnu, a street festival during the Christmas season featuring masqueraders who move through the towns, dancing and occasionally rushing at onlookers, were considered a threat to institutional interests, particularly in 1865. But perhaps there is more to this story of affirmations of English affiliation than fear of black cultural power. What if these heightened displays of Victoriana became not merely negations of power but also assertions of cultural power on the part of brown Jamaicans as the era progressed? Consumer power was a relatively new phenomenon, particularly for nonwhites, and the idea that one could out-­English the English must have had its own attractions.48 There is evidence to suggest that Jamaicans were also becoming avid consumers of American leisure products.49 Middle-­class culture was clearly ascendant in Jamaica during the late nineteenth century, as it was in England and the United States. As the main attributes of middle-­class identity were more education, more leisure time, and more money to spend, the heightened sensibility of Englishness is really the story of the rise of a consumer-­oriented Jamaican leisure culture. Given that the brown population was associated with inchoate middle-­class status, this heightened and paradoxical Englishness is associated with that population, too. The rise of the middle class is not just a brown story but also a black one. In the 1820s and early 1830s, a common position of both black and brown Jamaicans was to be pro-­England and abolitionist, as opposed to the white planters’ nationalist, anti-­England, pro-­slavery stand. Declarations of loyalty to England and a general pro-­England stance taken by later generations of nineteenth-­century brown and black middle-­class populations can be understood, therefore, not simply as a symptom of the colonized mind but also as a sign of opposition to local whites, who consistently set themselves against black

Brown Identity in Jamaica

571

and brown interests. This reading does not render blacks or browns merely imitative. Even if it is nonsense to speak of a “colored class,” the story of brown identity will always be tangled in the story of class in Jamaica.

Epilogue In the landmark 1913 Jamaican novel Jane’s Career, Herbert G. de Lisser penned a damning satirical portrait of the tyrannical brown Kingstonian mistress who terrorizes her black female servants. De Lisser (himself a brown man passing for white) reserves most of his contempt for Mrs. Mason, whose pretensions to gentility are continually undermined. While Mrs. Mason has the economic trappings of gentility, her use of dialect-­inflected syntax gives her away as culturally no better than her servants, at least in the estimation of de Lisser. Mrs. Mason heralds the transition of the nineteenth-­century problem of brownness and cultural representation into the twentieth; for her fatal flaw, like Brown Sammy’s and Kitty Swartz’s before her, is her “bad” grammar. These brown characters speak dialect, the foundation for what we now call authentic Jamaican culture, and that culture is understood as black. But dialect, a hybrid of African and European languages, was not always an endemically black feature — ​­just an uneducated one. In these stories, dialect is the last hurdle to be jumped before brown people can arrive at gentility. But a strange thing happened: dialect was not excised from the genteel body politic. The middle class of Jamaica made creative use of the creole continuum, in Gordon Rohlehr’s phrase, which allowed them great flexibility in accessing varying dosages of dialect and standard grammar for their various roles.50 And arguably it is now the middle class that has the greatest stake in maintaining its connection to this marker of Jamaicanness. Mrs. Mason’s story suggests that the rise of brown society is the rise of the middle class, insofar as the cultural and political genesis of today’s overwhelmingly black middle class lies in the ambitions and habits of this earlier constellation. It is also the story of the move toward a more homogeneous Jamaican national identity. The white elite was certainly a little “browned” by the close of the nineteenth century, the black majority undoubtedly more so. Just as dialect speech was not solely a feature of the black working classes, neither was “Englishness” the sole preserve of brown people. Englishness, like dialect, was used as a form of self-­fashioning for an emergent Jamaican identity across the color spectrum. The disseminating of creole culture across class and color lines may, in the end, be the lasting legacy of the brown Victorians of Jamaica.

572

Belinda Edmundson

Notes I wish to thank Patrick Bryan and Steeve Buckridge, for their helpful advice in researching this essay, and Tim Barringer, for his extremely useful editorial comments. 1. Anonymous, Marly, or The Life of a Planter in Jamaica (Glasgow: Richard Griffin, 1828), 35. 2. J. H. Reid, “The People of Jamaica Described,” in Jamaica’s Jubilee: Or What We Are and What We Hope to Be (London: Partridge and Co., 1888), 88, quoted in Bryan, The Jamaican People: Race, Class and Social Control (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 81. 3. See William Livingstone, Black Jamaica: A Study in Evolution (London: S. Low, Marston and Co., 1900), 281. 4. Carolyn Cooper notes another traditional proverb linking status consciousness and brown women: “Hard push make mulatto woman keep saddler shop.” The reference to “saddler shop” reminds us that these are almost certainly pre-­twentieth-­century views of brown women. See Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 204. 5. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 39. 6. Anthony Bogues, “Nationalism and Jamaican Political Thought,” in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, ed. Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 363–­87. 7. Ramchand, The West Indian Novel, 39. 8. Although it seems clear from contemporary accounts by English travelers to Jamaica in the late eighteenth century that the term “free colored” was used in Jamaica by legislators and other officials to describe the free mixed-­race population, “free colored” was not necessarily the popular term, since only a few decades later the blacks in the 1828 novel Marly refer to the so-­called coloreds as “brown.” 9. Although whites still outnumbered the free coloreds in 1789 (18,000 to 10,000), only forty-­five years later, in 1834, the free colored population was twice the size of the white population (31,000 to 16,000). See Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–­1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 7. 10. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 1:233–­35. 11. Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Jamaica, 1769, 2 vols. (London: Alexander Aikman, 1787), 1:179, quoted in Sara Salih, Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2011), 2. 12. Quoted in Ramchand, The West Indian Novel, 39. 13. See Glen Richards, “Race, Class and Labour Politics in Colonial Jamaica, 1900–­ 1934,” in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom, ed. Monteith and Richards, 341. 14. Heuman, Between Black and White, 9. 15. Heuman, Between Black and White, 9, 12, 14; Richards, “Race, Class and Labour Politics,” 341.

Brown Identity in Jamaica

573

16. Heuman, Between Black and White, 14. 17. Richards, “Race, Class and Labour Politics,” 343. 18. Paulette Kerr, “Jamaican Female Lodging House Keepers in the Nineteenth Century,” Jamaica Historical Review 18 (1993): 7; and James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: J. Snow, 1843), 150; both quoted in Steeve Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1750–­1890 (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 114. 19. “Should Women Work Outside the Home?” Daily Gleaner, December 23, 1899, 8. 20. It was estimated that in 1825 the overwhelming majority of brown people were “absolutely poor.” See Heuman, Between Black and White, 10. 21. John Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850: Or, the Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony (London: George Putnam, 1851), 12, 20–­21. 22. Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859; repr. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1985), 78. 23. From a letter written by legislator George Solomon on November 21, 1865, quoted in Heuman, Between Black and White, 76–­77. 24. John Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850, 28. 25. William Livingstone, Black Jamaica, 281. 26. J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (London: J. Parsons, W. Richardson, H. Gardner, and J. Walter, 1793), 123–­4. 27. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 125. 28. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–­1848; repr. Boston: Riverside, 1963), 199, 201. 29. Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850, 25. 30. William Pringle Livingstone, Black Jamaica: A Study in Evolution (London: S. Low, Marston and Co., 1900), 215, 217. Emphasis mine. 31. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 80–­81. 32. Patrick Bryan, e-­mail to author, March 5, 2012. 33. William Wells Brown, The Rising Son: The Antecedents and Advancements of the Colored Race (Boston: A. G. Brown and Co., 1874), 548–­49. 34. Anancy “stories” are popular Jamaican folktales (of Ghanaian heritage) chronicling the exploits of Anancy the spider, who despite his tiny size and weakness manages to outsmart the bigger animals. Anancy is a trickster figure who is viewed in Jamaican society as a symbol of a Jamaican national character, embodying traits such as wiliness and the ability to survive no matter the conditions. 35. “So sometimes you’d hear the white boy’s mother call him like a young cat: ‘Sammie.’ Then we’d say white Sammy that’s you, and he’d leave; then by and by you’d hear my mother bawl out until you’d think her neck string would break, ‘Sammee!’ Then we’d say that’s Brown Sammy — ​­and I’d leave; then by and by you’d hear old Mister Pulies call out ‘Where’s that fellow Sammy!’ Black Sammy would leave.” Henry G. Murray, Manners and Customs of the Country a Generation Ago: Brown Sammy in Search of a Wife (Kingston: R. Jordon, 1874), 7.

574

Belinda Edmundson

36. Apparently “backra” (or “buckra”), the creole term for a white person, had a similar elasticity to “brown,” suggesting that class status was almost as important as color in determining one’s racial status. According to the Jamaican author of the landmark 1868 publication The Etymology of Jamaica Grammar, “the name backra is not use[d] exclusively in referring to the white man, a brown or black gentleman is also called so in acknowledgment of his gentility, or genteel appearance; but this little ‘privilege’(?) is only given him with his good morning or good evening, or when he is asked a favour, otherwise he is only ‘gentleman’ or ‘smart fella.’ Should he however, by his education and position, or money, move much in the upper class society, then he is said to turn ‘pure-­ pure backra.’” Thomas Russell, The Etymology of Jamaica Grammar by a Young Gentleman (Kingston: De Cordova, 1868), 15. 37. See Richard Hill, Lights and Shadows of Jamaica History: Being Three Lectures Delivered in Aid of the Mission Schools of the Colony (Kingston: Ford and Gall, 1859), 104. 38. Buckridge, Language of Dress, 144. 39. Many versions of this story are to be found online. For an account of the origins of Lady Musgrave Road, see the local Jamaican website Go Local Jamaica, accessed May 17, 2005, www.go-­localjamaica​.com. 40. According to the Verley descendants, birth records show that Eliza Jane’s grandmother Thomasina Freeman was a free quadroon. They also believe that Louis Verley himself may have had mixed-­race antecedents on his mother’s side; birth and baptismal records for one Louis François Verly of Kingston, born March 14, 1816, list him as the “illegitimate” son of Albert Verly of Jamaica and Marguerite Leboeuf of Saint-­ Domingue. Clarissa Vickery, e-­mail correspondence with the author, August 29 and 30, 2012. My thanks to Clarissa Vickery, Douglas Verley, and Andrew Fleming. 41. Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850, 21, 15. 42. Carlisle Fonseca, “Carvalho,” Jamaica Times, May 6, 1899, 13. Fonseca was a common Jewish name in Jamaica. 43. “George met and fell in love with Jamaican Magdalen Baker, the daughter of a Moravian missionary. Aware that . . . his mixed parentage made him a less than attractive prospect for a son-­in-­law, the young couple waited until after Magdalen’s parents died to be married.” See Rebecca Tortello, “Devon House,” Jamaica Gleaner (special online edition), http://jamaica-­gleaner​.com. 44. See Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, “Celebrating Christmas in Jamaica, 1865–­1920: From Creole Carnival to ‘Civilized’ Convention,” in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom, ed. Monteith and Richards, 169. 45. Scholarly accounts of the colonial education system in nineteenth-­century Jamaica reinforce this view. For example, see Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, “Schooling for God and Empire: the Ideology of Colonial Education,” in Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 205–­44; also, Kenneth Ramchand, “Popular Education in the West Indies,” 19–­31, in The West Indian Novel and Its Background. 46. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 164–­65.

Brown Identity in Jamaica

575

47. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 158. 48. Homi Bhabha, more concisely and comprehensively than I can do here, argues for the dual nature of colonial mimicry in his groundbreaking essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 121–­31. 49. See Belinda Edmondson, Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 35–­37. 50. See Gordon Rohlehr, “The Problem of the Problem of Form: The Idea of an Aesthetic Continuum and Aesthetic Code-­Switching in West Indian Literature,” Caribbean Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1985): 1–­52.

576

Belinda Edmundson

C H A P T E R 19

“Black Skin, White Mask?” Race, Class, and the Politics of Dress

in Victorian Jamaican Society, 1837–­1901 STEE VE O. BUCKRIDGE

In response to a profound desire, they sought to change, to evolve. This right was denied to them. At any rate, it was challenged.1

Frantz Fanon

As Queen Victoria’s reign unfolded, the democratization of fashion took shape. These decades were also marked by important technological advances as diverse as the development of photography as a visual record and the invention of the sewing machine. These innovations were to have a significant impact on dress customs and transformed the styles of clothing throughout the empire, including in Jamaica. In 1838, Queen Victoria’s coronation year, emancipation gave rise to a transformed social order in Jamaica that created new challenges for ex-­slaves but still based its priorities on white supremacy. Large numbers of colonial subjects in Jamaica realized that a significant way to escape their subordinate status and prosper in the new social structure was to conform to Victorian metropolitan conventions of beauty and dress, just as members of the Victorian working class in England also did in pursuit of “self-­help” and upward social mobility.2 Afro-­Jamaicans who did not observe these new standards were relegated by the normative taste of the period to the realm of the “uncivilized.” In this study, I examine dress in Jamaica during the Victorian period and its role as a visual representation and conveyer of class, status, and identity.3 I explore cultures of difference and the politics of representation within the colonial context. My aim is to develop some understanding of how dress functioned in the Victorian era in Jamaica, how conventions of dress were contested and appropriated in relation to cultural space, and how the clothed body was refashioned to reflect transformation and cultural expression. There are several questions central to this study. How did dress in Jamaica

between 1838 and 1901 mirror the highly structured and racialized society? What were the successes and failures of accommodation — ​­the process by which Jamaicans negotiated with and partially adopted conventions of dress and deportment dominant in the imperial center? I argue that in Victorian Jamaica, accommodation was more than an art of mimicry. Rather, it was part of a complex survival process that ultimately failed as a strategy for social mobility. Furthermore, while the elite donned Victorian dress, vast numbers of the lower classes refused to conform. The limiting binary of Victorian versus Jamaican was challenged by those who appropriated Victorian dress to fashion new and highly creative trends that contested the social norms of colonial society. The principal subjects of this study, then, are Afro-­Jamaicans, or freed persons of African descent in Jamaica, during the period 1837 to 1901. Frantz Fanon’s interrogation of colonial mentalities and the visuality of blackness in Black Skin, White Masks captures the essence of the phenomenon of accommodation and provides a useful frame for this discussion of Victorian dress in Jamaica.4 Fanon argued that colonized people of African descent had to wear a “white mask” to achieve distinction within the white-­dominated society.5 In nineteenth-­century Jamaican society, Victorian dress among some freed people was symbolic of a white mask that reflected both the desire to advance and some level of individual achievement within the new social order. In this chapter, I employ the concept of symbolic interaction to show how the use of Victorian dress as a white mask revealed class differences. Symbolic interactionism is important because individuals acquire identities through social interactions in various social and physical settings.6 I take “Victorian fashion” to refer to the changing style of dress and appearance that emerged during the sixty-­three-­year reign of Queen Victoria, while “style” refers to the actual construction that distinguishes the same types of dress from each other. “Dress” is not limited to mere garments but includes many forms of adornment: hair styles, headdresses, earrings as well as jewelry, accessories, and other items added to the body.7

Victorian Dress in Imperial Britain Victorian dress was an amalgam of social expectations and exemplified the manners and social habits of the time. Fashion and etiquette were inseparable.8 Owing largely to the influence of Evangelical religion, respectability became a keynote of Victorian dress and deportment, in contrast to the elegance and flamboyance of earlier periods. Dress during this period reflected propriety and even prudery. Victorian ladies were expected to abide by the cult of respectabil-

578

Steeve O. Buckridge

ity, to be genteel, and to avoid boisterous behavior. Social standing was affirmed through a woman’s good taste in fashion, fastidious neatness, and how well she upheld high moral standards as prescribed by religion and polite society.9 Fashionable dress exemplified a very restrictive conception of women’s roles. Consequently, dress styles at the time of Queen Victoria’s coronation (simple silhouettes with few trimmings) developed through a period in which the crinoline was dominant and eventually transformed into the elaborate bustles of the 1880s (with numerous layers and tight lacing that required assistance for dressing and undressing). The vast difference in comfort and elaborate ornamentation between men’s and women’s clothes reflected an ideology that emphasized the separation of male and female roles during the Victorian period. While the urban working-­class man would wear overalls at work and perhaps a jacket and tie for “Sunday best,” the dark business suit was the expected attire of office clerks. Meanwhile, the new class of female factory laborers and lower-­ class housewives could wear functional clothing suitable for household chores but could also afford colorful calico prints. Victorian clothes among upper-­ and middle-­class women in Britain became display pieces, like works of art, intended to reflect wealth and social standing. Dresses required heavy skirting and corseting that fostered an image of fragility and dependence.10 In Victorian Britain, while the day dress of a respectable man was a sober and standardized outfit and evening wear was formal and stiff, middle-­and upper-­class women were expected to be fully prepared and fashionably dressed for every occasion and a full day of activities. There were gowns for the morning and afternoons at home, for visiting, dinners, church services, mourning balls, and weddings. Women’s fashion, which required many hours of careful fittings, changed more rapidly than men’s throughout this period. Moreover, no Victorian dress was considered complete without a full complement of accessories. There were hair ornaments along with an array of hats, the occasional purse, handheld fans, artistic jewelry, parasols, handkerchiefs, gloves, and muffs to harmonize outfits.11 Not all upper-­and middle-­class Victorian women embraced orthodox fashion. One style that deserves mention is the “alternative dress,” which originated in France and became a feature among a few women in Victorian England, particularly in clothing worn for sports. This form of dress suggests some acceptance of an alternative image of women. Queen Victoria occasionally embraced this style, and during her coronation year she donned a masculine military cap and a blue military coat to review her troops at Windsor. The alternative style consisted of a set of dress items borrowed from men’s clothing and worn separately or together that subtly changed the appearance of a woman’s dress. The most

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

579

common item was the man’s tie. While for Victorian men the tie often signaled club affiliation, for women it evoked a sense of independence. Other alternative items included a man’s jacket and hat. Alternative dress became a regular feature among professional and college women in the late ­Victorian period.12

The Circulation of Victorian Dress As fashion was changing in Britain during Victoria’s reign, it was introduced to the colonies and circulated by various means. Magazines, cartes de visite and portrait photography, postcards, and paintings depicted the latest manifestations of Victorian dress and helped popularize them. Some of the most detailed and fascinating depictions of Victorian dress in colonial Jamaica can be seen in the prints and lithographs of Adolphe Duperly. In a series of lithographs based on early photographs, Daguerian Excursions, from around 1844 to 1847, Duperly captured the essence of Victorian Jamaica, with its busy urban centers, bustling carriages, strolling pedestrians, and gentlemen dressed in their finery on horseback, as in any Victorian town in Britain (fig. 19.1). The missionary movement, which carried across the globe normative ideas and behaviors rooted in the ideologies of the British Protestant middle class, facilitated the spread of Victorian cultural norms, including those of dress. Freed people, deemed culturally inferior and spiritually weak, were expected to embrace the garments of civility. The civilizing mission emphasized external forms, rules, and conventions and an outward show of propriety. However, members of the upper classes in the colonies, including in Jamaica, also fell short of civilized Victorian standards. Lack of respectability and displays of crass and rowdy behavior could leave them indistinguishable from their allegedly coarse lower-­class counterparts. The civilizing mission was presented by civil servants and politicians influenced by the evangelical movement as a justification for empire: it claimed to offer an ethical validation of British hegemony.13 British missionaries established schools in Jamaica, such as Trelawney Girls’ School, which promoted British education including needlework and dressmaking. Other missionary schools, like St. Catherine’s Ragged School, distributed to poor children secondhand clothes that conformed to Victorian ideals of respectable dress. A few elite white women saw the uplifting of the colonized population as their charitable duty and developed “centers” or “societies” that promoted Victorian concepts of womanly conduct as part of the policy of Europeanization.14 In 1879, Lady Musgrave, wife of the governor of Jamaica, established the Women’s Self-­Help Society, a leisure activity for elite white women to instruct Afro-­Jamaican women in needlework crafts and dressmak-

580

Steeve O. Buckridge

F ig . 19 . 1   Philippe Benoist, after Adolphe Duperly, A View of The Kingston Church, lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). © The British Library Board.

ing skills, as well as in Victorian manners and decorum. Such societies helped to circulate Victorian dress codes and provided some freedwomen with the skills necessary for employment as seamstresses.15 Visitors, travelers, and colonists from Britain introduced new fashions to Jamaica, where they were adapted to local weather and circumstances. Dress styles were copied and reproductions circulated by local seamstresses and tailors for their customers. Visiting European royalty stimulated fashion awareness, while fashion advertisements in local newspapers like the Falmouth Post, the Daily Gleaner, and the Royal Gazette enticed their readers to conform to Victorian dress. Several newspapers devoted special pages to fashion and eventually

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

581

included wood-­engraved and ultimately photolithographic illustrations of the latest fashion in London. As the democratization of fashion continued during the second part of the Victorian era, magazines that were aimed at the growing middle class in Britain and the colonies proliferated, disseminating Victorian styles more widely.16 Mass manufacturing in Britain increased the supply of clothing for distribution throughout the empire, while in the later part of Victoria’s reign, mail-­ order and department stores ensured easy access to ready-­made garments. In the Atlantic trading network, clothing was a staple commodity. Sailors and army regiments stationed in faraway ports routinely arranged for shipments of clothing from English suppliers. Likewise, popular women’s periodicals provided information on dress styles and extensive advice on proper etiquette and decorum. The information on appropriate dress and behavior was important to many Victorians, since the garments they wore reflected deeply held views about their place in society. Periodicals were lavishly designed and included beautifully illustrated hand-­colored fashion plates of the period. A few of the more famous periodicals available in Jamaica were the American Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–­1878) and Harper’s Bazaar (founded in 1867), the British Beeton’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–­1879) and the French Journal des Demoiselles (published in 1833).17 In addition, greater circulation and the increasing popularity of the Victorian fashion doll played a key role in popularizing Victorian dress. Fashion dolls were carefully dressed miniature figures rather than playthings, beautifully detailed with human hair and clothed in elaborate costume consisting of long flowing skirts with bustles and bodices encased in colorful silks or satins and lace embellishments. The dolls were advertisements for the latest fashions and fabrics, and were carried throughout the British realm to demonstrate fashion trends in London. Seamstresses and milliners acquired the latest dolls to promote their wares and enticed local customers to purchase new styles. Meanwhile, the establishment of numerous dress shops in Jamaica also contributed to new levels of material consumption among the elite and emerging middle class, who desired these luxuries.18

Victorian Dress and Class in Jamaica Before emancipation, few enslaved men and women had access to European dress, and most lived off what was provided to them by their enslavers. Often they made their own clothes from rations of fabric, chiefly Osnaburg disbursed on the plantation. After slavery, many freed persons for the first time had access

582

Steeve O. Buckridge

to European dress, through retail channels and the secondhand-­clothing trade. Some white commentators disapprovingly suggested that dress had become “their chief social passion.” 19 However, Afro-­Jamaicans’ fascination with clothing was more complex. Some middle-­class men in urban centers who donned exquisitely fashionable attire sought to reimage themselves to gain influence in the new society. Fancy clothes became an outward sign of accomplishment. Ostentatious dress was not merely a display of excess but also a form of sartorial elegance that was embodied in black dandyism.20 For many freed persons new raiments enabled them to participate in social activities in urban centers that required appropriate attire, such as visits to the theater or promenades in the park. Meanwhile, the availability of affordable ready-­made garments provided more choices for the meticulous consumer who saw Victorian clothing as a means of uplift and a sign of respectability. Ready-­made clothing such as outerwear, corsets, and petticoats became more readily available, through mail order and the new retail format. For the elite and for the new middle class, the establishment of retail stores such as Alfred Pawsey and Metropolitan House in urban centers like Kingston enabled them to browse and shop for specialty items under one roof, thus elevating shopping to a leisure activity and a reflection of income and social status.21 At the top of the new social order in postemancipation Jamaica was a white elite consisting of the old planter families, merchants, and professionals. This group still owned most of the land and was accustomed to controlling the Jamaican economy. As the social elite, many members adopted Victorian metropolitan fashion trends in dress and beauty.22 A second group was the large “brown” population who made up the majority of the emerging middle class in Jamaica.23 This group was not a homogeneous body and was divided by profession, education, and culture. The occupations of its members were similar to the occupations of whites of equal social status. Brown Jamaicans continued to see themselves as a separate and distinct group and therefore disassociated themselves from the lower classes of Jamaicans. Their dress reflected this distinction (fig. 19.2).24 A third group comprised the majority of Afro-­Jamaicans, who were differentiated along class lines and were often viewed through the lens of negative racial stereotyping carried over from slavery. A few were able to make significant social progress through access to education, others engaged in peasant production, and some moved to urban centers, where they ended up in slums and suffering poor living conditions. The vast majority of Afro-­Jamaicans were forced to provide for themselves without the advantages of property or adequate skills and education. Some managed to acquire land through the assistance

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

583

Fig. 1 9 . 2   A Brown Girl, circa 1900–­ 1905. Courtesy of Onyx: The David Boxer Collection.

584

of missionaries who created “Free Villages,” and they obtained wages from seasonal work.25 They became members of the peasant and laboring class.26 Moreover, not everyone was involved in agricultural labor.27 By the end of the nineteenth century, a few educated members of this group were able to break down some barriers of race and color that characterized colonial Jamaica. For this class, Victorian dress was not easily affordable and most members continued to wear dress styles popular during slavery. A few appropriated Victorian dress to create new fashions and make themselves presentable. Yet while large numbers of the middle class emulated the white colonizers and conformed, vast numbers of the lower classes either appropriated only selected aspects of Victorian dress or rejected it. The plates of Adolphe Duperly’s Daguerian Excursions, lithographs drawn and printed in Paris based on daguerreotype photographs made in Jamaica, provide tantalizing evidence of dress in Jamaica during the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. The lithographs reveal diverse styles, with some men and women dressed in the finest European attire. Duperly portrays elite and middle-­class men of the 1840s dressed in calf-­length frock coats and vests, while formal wear consisted of a cutaway morning coat and light trousers during the day and a dark tailcoat and trousers in the evening.

Steeve O. Buckridge

F ig . 19 . 3   Philippe Benoist, after Adolphe Duperly, A View of The Kingston Theatre, lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). © The British Library Board.

Typical of the period, shirts were made of linen or cotton, and low collars were accessorized with cravats or neckties. Duperly’s A View of The Kingston Church (fig. 19.1) depicts men in top hats and frock coats as were popular in Britain, while elite and middle-­class women can be seen dressed in period styles, which featured a full skirt long enough to hide their ankles and held out by numerous layers of petticoats.28 Bonnets with veils attached to the back and covering the neck were now common in Jamaica among the upper classes; large oblong shawls concealed the shoulders when outdoors, and gloves covered the hands. Small and fashionable parasols were widely used to keep off the sun.29 Dress in Jamaica was diverse, as Duperly emphasizes in A View of The Kingston Theatre (fig. 19.3), with a visual display of styles found in the sparsely filled theater square. One of the most intriguing depictions is of the couple in the

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

585

F i g . 1 9.4   Philippe Benoist, after Adolphe Duperly, A View of King Street, lithograph with watercolor, from Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Being a Collection of Views of the Most Striking Scenery, Public Buildings and Other Interesting Objects, Taken on the Spot with the Daguerreotype and Lithographed in Paris by A. Duperly (1850). © The British Library Board.

middle ground dressed in European attire. The woman’s dress is partially covered by her large shawl, and her face is shaded by her bonnet. She is accompanied by a gentleman dressed in tailcoat and light-­colored trousers. The couple’s dress distinguishes them from the other people in the square and suggests their elite social standing. In the captivating illustration “View of King Street,” Duperly memorializes daily life, revealing a complex society — a colonial hybridity shaped by the commingling of African and European influences (fig. 19.4). Unlike the European men in the illustration, who are dressed in orthodox fashions of the period, the Afro-­Jamaicans in the foreground have appropriated aspects of Victorian styles to suit their needs and personal taste. The Afro-­Jamaican man dons a top hat and carries a cane, while the woman accessorizes her Victorian dress with a scarf worn over her shoulders in a triangular shape called a fichu, which was of

586

Steeve O. Buckridge

F i g . 1 9.5   Isaac Mendes Belisario, Lovey, lithograph with watercolor, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (1837). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Folio A 2011 24.

French origin and popular in Europe at the time. Her outfit is complemented by an African-­inspired head wrap. Duperly’s characters seem vividly alive as they make communicative gestures, and the artist’s manipulation of space and juxtaposition of the characters alludes to a divided society. Accommodation of Victorian customs in dress was not always possible. Victorian fashions in London were often too cumbersome and made from fabrics that were unsuitable for the warm Jamaican climate. Fashionable Victorian ladies had no choice other than to modify their fashion sensibilities and resort to Victorian summer dresses all year round. English women traveling to Jamaica in 1903 were advised, “You cannot bring out too many smart gowns, or too much flummery in the shape of millinery, for the heat soon takes the freshness off your airiest confections. Let the gowns, however, be such as you would wear in the hottest summer in England.” 30 Dresses made from cotton and muslin were preferable, along with soft kid boots reaching high up the leg to protect the ankles from insects, especially mosquitos.31 Many among the lower classes could not afford Victorian clothing. Isaac Mendes Belisario’s Sketches of Character (fig. 19.5) provides visual analysis of the urban poor and their dress

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

587

at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign.32 Belisario’s male characters are depicted in worn and faded clothing, perhaps made from coarse cotton, while the women in his paintings wear brightly colored cotton skirts. Shoes were scarce, often saved for special occasions. The representations of the urban poor and their dress in Belisario’s sketches, like that of the character “Lovey,” contrast sharply with the elite and middle-­class subjects in Duperly’s lithographs, reminding viewers that vast numbers of freed people lived in a world that was extremely oppressive. Visual information about Victorian dress became more abundant after the 1840s, as people flocked to portrait photography studios. Photographs from Jamaica in the 1850s reveal that upper-­class and middle-­class clothing on the island continued to mirror the summer styles in Britain and that in the mid-­ 1860s separates and the popular hoop skirt became fashionable in Jamaica (see fig. 18.7 in chapter 18). Dress styles now included a low-­cut neckline, a very tight corset, and a wide, bell-­shaped skirt silhouette, held out by a crinoline underneath. By 1840 the crinoline, which was made of horsehair warp and wool weft and used for making stiff under-­petticoats, functioned primarily to expand skirts. The textile originally known as crinoline became synonymous with the petticoat, and in 1856 the crinoline or cage petticoat appeared with whalebone hoops added. In 1857, the whalebone was replaced by watch-­spring hoops. By 1866, the front had become flat and the back made to protrude, becoming what was called the crinolette petticoat with half-­circle steel hoops. Bonnets and hats were small, and dresses were trimmed with lavish lace.33 Many elite and middle-­class women increasingly wore black clothing (fig.  19.6), which was ideally suited to hide the dirt from coal-­burning stoves and the dust from crowed busy streets in city centers. Black was also easily adapted for mourning dress and was the color of choice of Queen Victoria, who wore black for forty years, from the death of her husband, in 1861, until her own death, in 1901.34 The 1870s and 1880s saw elaborate hairstyles festooned with ornaments and false hairpieces (see fig. 19.6), while hats grew impressive in both shape and decoration, and jewelry was bold and opulent. Dress designs meanwhile became flatter in the front and fuller in the back (fig. 19.7). The photograph of Mrs. M. Davis in her elaborate dress exemplifies the style of this period. Evening dresses were pure confections, lavishly trimmed with artificial flowers and ribbons. Meanwhile, tight corseting and lacing distorted the body and at times accentuated soft curves, while extra yardage of skirting was pulled back, causing bunching at the sides and back that produced a huge bustle and a cumbersome train laden with trimmings of ruffles, ribbons, and lace. The huge rear extension, or bustle, hardly increased mobility. Some dresses weighed more

588

Steeve O. Buckridge

Fig. 1 9 . 6   Mrs. Tom Ellis of Vere, circa 1870s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​1366, the Livingston Album. A member of the Jamaican elite in fashionable black dress trimmed with lace and ruffles for extra flounce. Hairstyle festooned with ornaments and false hairpieces.

F i g . 1 9.7   Mrs. M. Davis, circa 1870s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, the Livingston Album. A member of the Jamaican elite in elaborate afternoon dress with extra yardage of skirting for bustle and train.

F ig . 1 9.8   Lady Blake, wife of the governor of Jamaica, 1889–­1898. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

than ten pounds, reducing walking to mere mincing steps. Even though Victorian dresses in Jamaica were made from lighter and airier fabrics, they were no less layered.35 In the mid-­1880s privileged women in Jamaica continued to set the fashion trends on the island. The governor’s wife, for instance, established the sartorial tone for glittering nightlife in Victorian Jamaica, and her fashionable style was copied by women of the upper classes. The famous portrait by an unknown photographer of Lady Edith Blake, wife of Sir Henry Blake, governor of Jamaica from 1889 to 1898, depicts her in an extravagant evening dress of the late 1890s. The dress is designed with draping fabric stitched diagonally across the bodice and fitted tightly to delineate a bustline. The falling fabric is gathered and stitched to create a delicate skirt of natural cascading folds lavishly embossed with foliage embroidery. The dress is accessorized with elegant jewelry, while her coiffure is adorned with a tiara made with pearls (fig. 19.8). Lady Blake’s dress, especially her tiara, announced to observers that she was a lady of importance and a member of Victorian elite society. Her dress in all its glory not only reflected her distinction and rank in the colonial society but was also a constant reminder of the rule of order and appropriateness and told of British dominance. Her dress was symbolic of ritual, pomp, and pageantry, through which the white elite kept their connection alive with Victorian Britain. Over the next decade dress styles changed, and by the late nineteenth century the leg of mutton sleeve had become a major feature. Sleeves became so large that they began to fold over (fig. 19.9).36 As in Victorian Britain, in Jamaica alternative dress was adopted by some elite and middle-­class women who rejected aspects of mainstream Victorian dress. The man’s tie became popular among the youth and a regular feature in uniforms for college and school girls in Jamaica.37 Freed Jamaicans, especially those of the middle class, realized that progress and social mobility required accommodation to clothing in the European style. Those who conformed were sometimes viewed by whites as “improved.” 38 However, we may be sure that not all freed people wore Victorian dress for the same reasons. Some perhaps wanted to be seen as “civilized” and therefore equal to their white colonizers. Others were doubtless enticed by the thought of wearing Victorian muslin and silk dresses. Accommo-

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

F i g . 1 9.9   J. W. Cleary, lady dressed for sport, circa 1890s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica. A member of the elite dressed in “separates” with leg of mutton sleeves. The image captures the changing roles of women in society.

591

F i g . 1 9.1 0  Mr. Aguilar, circa 1860s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​1358, the Livingston Album. A member of the middle class and a man of influence dressed in European attire.

dation provided a means of raising an individual’s social status and permitting him or her to attain a privileged status in a society that had long marginalized and exploited black and brown people. Furthermore, accommodation was not merely an attempt by freed persons to elevate their Africanness by wearing a white mask, as Fanon claimed; rather, it also gave freed persons the opportunity to show that they too could be elegant and beautiful. The fascination many middle-­class Jamaican women had for fashion was related to a profound desire to take up a more prominent social role. Their adoption of Victorian dress was part of the long tradition of masking, which enabled people of African descent to subtly confront their colonial oppressors and contest their marginalization while pretending to conform to European culture. Accommodation was an act of defiance. It was a survival strategy and political act to resist misrepresentation and caricature.39 Middle-­class men in Jamaica also sought self-­representation and recognition. As a result, they, too, emulated the appearance of the white elite and embraced Victorian standards in dress.40 The studio portrait photograph of a Mr. Aguilar provides some evidence of middle-­class Afro-­Jamaican men’s

592

Steeve O. Buckridge

dress in the mid-­nineteenth century. Similar to his anonymous European counterpart, Mr. Aguilar is dressed in a frock coat shortened to knee length and worn over loosely fitted pants and a white shirt with a stand-­up collar accessorized with a bow tie (figs. 19.10, 19.11). Aguilar’s imposing frame, marked by his posture and European-­ style clothes, identifies him as a man of some influence in Jamaican society. Eventually, in the late 1870s, this style of men’s dress was eclipsed by the three-­piece suit with patterned fabric. In the 1850s, full hairstyles were widespread for men, with a clean-­shaven chin flanked by substantial beards and sideburns, sometimes known as “dundrearies,” after they were popularized by the character Lord Dundreary in the London play Our American Cousin (1858), by Tom Taylor. Hair was straightened or slicked back with macassar oil. The custom of greasing one’s hair gave rise to the need for antimacassars, the linen scarves and drapes placed over the backs of upholstered chairs to prevent the oil from staining the chair. Victorian dress among middle-­class men in the 1880s remained the dark tailcoat, trousers with waistcoat, and the tuxedo or dinner jacket. By the end of the Victorian era, dress styles for both elite and middle-­class men and women had changed significantly, and in 1900 the sack suit and short jacket for men had become popular and women’s hats became more lavish, with plumes. Women’s dresses consisted of carefully fitted skirts to reveal the curves of the hips and more fullness in the bodice, with a small restricted waist to create an hourglass silhouette. Sleeves were inflated like balloons at the shoulders but graceful and nearly tight-fitting along the arms. The dress styles from the late 1890s were unlike anything before and coincided with the changing roles of women in society (fig. 19.12).41 In general, while middle-­class and elite women’s dresses reflected a lifestyle of leisure and emphasized appropriate attire according to Victorian dress norms, dress among Afro-­Jamaicans of the lower classes functioned in other ways. The members of this class were not as preoccupied with obtaining Victorian clothing, since they were limited by cost. Their desire for clothing that was functional and suited to their active lives did not diminish their appreciation for “dress-­up clothes” or “fancy dress,”

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

F i g . 1 9.1 1  A member of the elite dressed in frock coat, circa 1860s. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, the Livingston Album.

593

Fig. 1 9 . 12   After A. S. Forrest, A Coloured Lady on a Race-­Course, color lithograph, from John Henderson, Jamaica (1906). Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​5644.

and they made a distinction between working clothes and Sunday best. They appropriated Victorian styles of dress on their own terms, to reflect their own aesthetic sensibilities.42

The Jamaicanization of Victorian Dress Lower-­class men and women appropriated Victorian dress to create styles that were uniquely Jamaican. Some women examined the styles of the trendsetters and used their creative skills to improvise and “make fashion” and craft new sophisticated designs that both rivaled the dresses of the upper classes and challenged the social order of Victorian society. By the mid-­nineteenth century, laboring women in urban areas wore simple and less cumbersome but stylish outfits that accentuated the waist and hips. The missionary James Phillippo

594

Steeve O. Buckridge

suggested that this style was appealing to the masculine gaze. He stated that women “tie a handkerchief round their hips, and draw their skirts through it thus forming a furbelow round their waists . . . and they step out in a style which would gladden the heart of the most exacting drill-­sergeant.” 43 Phillippo’s statement raises questions about dress and femininity and simultaneously highlights the connection between dress and the body. The body, in this case, is a performance space that is both manipulated and celebrated. The class of laboring women have created their own style, which produces a wardrobe of oppositionality and a liberating couture that rejects Victorian customs in fashion and piety. In an era popularly associated with the values of social and sexual restraint, the fashionable elite would have considered this type of dress inappropriate. For many of these women, clothing became a symbol that contested and transgressed the social conventions of dress and sexuality. The women’s attempt to accentuate and eroticize the body was their way of signaling that they too could be feminine and beautiful. As we saw earlier in Duperly’s illustrations, several lower-­class women combined African customs in dress as during slavery, such as the African woman’s head wrap, popular among women in several West African cultures, including the Yoruba, Dahomey, and Igbo, with Victorian influences to create a “Creole dress.” A fine example of this style is depicted in the photograph of Lydia Ann, dressed presumably in her Sunday best. Lydia Ann is wearing a Victorian-­ inspired dress of the 1860s with a wide skirt framed by numerous petticoats underneath. The dress is simple in design and lacks the usual fussy trimmings typical of the period. Her two-­toned striped dress is accessorized with a parasol and handkerchief and complemented by a small round straw hat perched on her African bandana head wrap. The style of her dress suggests she sought to play with fashion and was adept at improvisation. Lydia Ann’s dress is the embodiment of the complex process of creolization, not merely as a continuous fusion of African and European influences but also as a form of negotiating and battling for cultural space within the colonized society. Her dress reflects the level of sophisticated appropriation with which freed people sought to preserve their African heritage while creating a space for themselves in the dominant colonial society. The contrast between rural and urban dress was vast. In rural areas and on the few surviving estates, unlike in the urban areas, Osnaburgh clothing, the most common form of dress for enslaved laborers, was retained in some places for work clothes. In other areas, it was replaced with cotton, but the “pull skirt” and the African woman’s head wrap continued as the popular dress of peasant-­class women.44 A fascinating study of the pull skirt can be seen in

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

595

F ig . 1 9.1 3   Attributed to Adolphe Duperly, Nineteenth Century Negro Girl, Celia, circa 1864–­1865. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica, N/​10502. Celia is dressed in the peasant pull ­skirt and is barefoot.

the portrait photograph from the 1860s of a Jamaican peasant woman named Celia (fig. 19.13). Celia’s ankle-­length dress is made from a light, printed cotton fabric. A string or very narrow belt is tied around her skirt above the thighs, creating a bulging effect in the material. Her African-­inspired head wrap is stylized with some flare, and her outfit is accessorized with a beaded necklace. The pull skirt was practical in that it enabled a peasant woman to quickly pull up her skirt over the string to facilitate freedom of movement in the fields or prevent the skirt from getting wet while she crossed a river. The photograph tells an unscripted story about identity and raises questions about Celia’s role and position in Victorian Jamaica. Her headdress reflects her commitment to her African heritage, and the absence of shoes on her feet signals her low status within the larger Victorian society. Celia’s dress identifies her as someone who does not belong to elite Victorian society. Like poor women in urban centers, peasant women such as Celia reserved their best dress, usually a white frock, and shoes if available for Sunday church services and special events.45

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

F i g . 1 9.1 4   On the Way to Market, circa 1900. Onyx: The David Boxer Collection. Peasant women and traders on the way to market, dressed in pull ­skirt and carrying baskets of produce.

597

Peasant women who worked as market traders also wore the pull skirt and African head wrap. During harvests, peasant women walked for miles or traveled by donkey to the nearest market to sell their produce. Goods and produce for sale were packed in a “hampa” basket and carried as a headload, balanced with the aid of a head wrap and a piece of cloth or dried banana leaves rolled in a circle called a “cotta” (fig. 19.14). Market traders harmonized their head wrap and pull skirt with a “bib,” or long apron with two pockets for holding coins during trading, while paper currency was placed either in the woman’s head wrap or in a small money bag called a “tred bag” and then tucked into the trader’s bosom.46 After the 1860s, the African woman’s head wrap worn by peasant women and traders in Victorian Jamaica became increasingly unified in style. It was called the bandana head wrap, made from the popular red check cotton fabric called Madras cloth from India, and popularized by indentured Indian laborers in Jamaica.47 Freed people of the lower class sought to imitate their white and middle-­ class “superiors.” They appropriated Victorian styles when feasible to increase their social standing among their class. In the 1890s, visitor W. P. Livingstone observed lower-­class women who “imitated the ladies of the upper classes.” He continued, “During the Christmas season gayer costumes are common,” and he noted that “more money is spent on the adornment of the person than in the gratification of the appetite.” 48 Peasants saw appropriation as a means to reimage themselves and have some fun while — ​­at least temporarily — ​­escaping their poverty and subordinate status. There are parallels here with the adoption of European styles in Jonkonnu masquerades during the Christmas period under slavery.

Conclusion: Victorian Dress and Social Mobility Photography and other forms of visual representation provide insights into the language of dress in Victorian Jamaica. They also reveal the ideological contradictions of Victorian society. Afro-­Jamaican men and women who adopted Victorian dress because it made them feel good or because they desired to uplift themselves in the colonial society soon realized that they could never overcome the restrictions implicit in the social and racial hierarchy. Livingstone, for instance, remarked that Afro-­Jamaicans had “arrayed themselves in costumes which excited the ridicule of the whites, and earned for the fashion the contemptuous designation of ‘monkey style.’” 49 The colonial elite set the styles purposefully, to differentiate themselves from those they saw as their inferiors. According to this logic, Afro-­Jamaicans, by

598

Steeve O. Buckridge

virtue of their race, could never catch up, and nor could the working-­class white population. Freed people who sought to integrate themselves into the dominant society to demonstrate their essential humanity soon realized that full induction into Victorian society was not guaranteed. While dress may be an indicator of advancement, skin color prevented that development. The fashionably dressed Afro-­Jamaican became a threat to white dominance, by dressing beyond imposed boundaries. According to sociologists Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang, “where custom rules, and the society is clearly stratified, people learn how to dress, express themselves, behave, and think as befits their station.” 50 Obviously, some Afro-­Jamaicans chose not to behave in the ways that colonial opinion believed to befit their station. Many peasants and laborers appropriated Victorian dress sense on their own terms to create a unique style that was a visual interrogation of the dominant aesthetic. Afro-­Jamaicans were subjects of Queen Victoria who lived in a society that promoted Victorian culture and Europeanization, yet they could never fully be Victorians, because of the color of their skin.

Notes 1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 59. 2. Harry C. Bredemeier and Jackson Toby, “Ideals of Beauty,’ in Dress, Adornment, and the Social Order, ed. Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne B. Eicher (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 34. 3. Mary Ellen Roach-­Higgins, Joanne B. Eicher, and Kim Johnson, eds., Dress and Identity (New York: Fairchild, 1995), 6–­10. 4. See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 5. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 18. 6. Roach-­Higgins, Eicher, and Johnson, eds., Dress and Identity, 12, 19, 134–­35. 7. Roach-­Higgins, Eicher, and Johnson, eds., Dress and Identity, 11. 8. Joanne Olian, ed., Victorian and Edward Fashions from La Mode Illustrée (New York: Dover Publications, 1998), iv. 9. Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, eds., The Fashion Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Berg, 2011), 69–­83. 10. Welters and Lillethun, eds., The Fashion Reader; see also Kathryn Weibel, Mirror Mirror: Images of Women Reflected in Popular Culture (New York: Anchor, 1977), 176–­77; and Geyle Strege, “Historicism in Fashionable Dress,” in Fashioning the Future: Our Future from Our Past (N.p.: College of Human Ecology, Ohio State University, 1997), 12–­24. 11. Stella Blum, ed., Victorian Fashions and Costumes from Harper’s Bazar, 1867–­1898 (New York: Dover Publications, 1974), v–­viii. See also Steeve O. Buckridge, The Lan-

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

599

guage of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–­1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 117–­23. 12. Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 102. 13. Brian L. Moore and Michelle A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 1–­14. 14. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 94–­95. 15. “Women’s Self-­help Society,” Daily Gleaner, January 13, 1886. 16. For the spread of knowledge of fashion in Jamaica, see in particular Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 125–­35; Cynthia Cooper, “Victorian and Edwardian Eras: 1860–­ 1910,” in The Fashion Reader, ed. Welters and Lillethun, 69–­81. 17. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 125–­35. 18. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 125–­35; see also Valerie Cumming, C. W. Cunnington, and P.  E. Cunnington, The Dictionary of Fashion History (New York: Berg, 2010), 79. 19. W. P. Livingstone, Black Jamaica: A Study in Evolution (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1899), 190. 20. Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 1–­25. 21. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 131–­33. 22. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 67–­91; see also Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 1–­14; and Katrin Norris, Jamaica: The Search for an Identity (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 9–­13. 23. See the essay by Belinda Edmundson in this volume. 24. See also Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 113–­15. 25. J. H. Parry, Phillip Sherlock, and Anthony Mingot, A Short History of the West Indies, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1987), 169–­70. See also the works of Swithin Wilmot such as, with Claus Stolberg, Plantation Economy, Land Reform and the Peasantry in a Historical Perspective: Jamaica 1838–­1980 (Kingston: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1992). 26. Wilmot and Stolberg, Plantation Economy, Land Reform and the Peasantry in a Historical Perspective, 9–­13. 27. Sheena Boa, “Urban Free Black and Coloured Women: Jamaica 1760–­1834,” Jamaica Historical Review 18 (1993): 4. 28. Adolf Duperly, Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica, Kingston (Kingston: N.p., 1844). Duperly’s shots were taken on the spot with the daguerreotype and then lithographed under his direction by the most eminent artists in Paris. 29. James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London: J. Snow, 1843), 111–­22. 30. B. Pullen-­Burry, Jamaica As It Is, 1903 (London: T. Fisher, 1903), 48–­49. 31. Pullen-­Burry, Jamaica As It Is, 1903, 48–­49.

600

Steeve O. Buckridge

32. Isaac Mendes Belisario, Lovey, from Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, 1837–­1838. Paul Mellon collection, Yale Center for British Art. 33. Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, eds., The Fashion Reader (New York: Berg, 2007), 36–­45. See also Cumming, Cunnington, and Cunnington, Dictionary of Fashion History, 59. 34. Welters and Lillethun, The Fashion Reader, 36–­45. 35. Phillippo, Jamaica, 151; Cooper, The Victorian and Edwardian Eras, 72–­79. 36. Welters and Lillethun, The Fashion Reader, 36–­45. 37. See Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 139, for an image of young middle-­class Jamaicans. A few of the women are wearing ties. Today, the tie is a permanent feature in many school uniforms for girls across Jamaica. 38. Phillippo, Jamaica, 150. 39. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Giver, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1990), 27. 40. Livingstone, Black Jamaica, 190. 41. Olian, ed., Victorian and Edwardian Fashions, vii–­ix. 42. Phillippo, Jamaica, 231. 43. Quoted in Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–­1902: Race, Class and Social Control (London: Macmillan, 1991), 85. 44. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 162–­65. 45. S. U. Hastings and B. L. Macleavy, Seed Time and Harvest: A Brief History of the Moravian Church in Jamaica, 1754–­1979 (Bridgetown, Barbados: Cedar Press, 1979), 55. 46. Dr. Olive Lewin, in discussion with the author, Kingston, August 12, 1997. 47. Buckridge, The Language of Dress. 48. Livingstone, Black Jamaica, 190–­91. 49. Livingstone, Black Jamaica, 53. 50. Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang, “Fashion: Identification and Differentiation in the Mass Society,” in Dress, Adornment and the Social Order, ed. Mary Ellen Roach-­Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 339.

R a c e , C l a s s , a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f Dr e s s

601

CHAPTER 20

Kumina A Spiritual Vocabulary of Nationhood in Victorian Jamaica

DIANNE M. STEWART

Tange lange Jeni di gal eva

Dance tall Jenny gal

Wang lang mama o

Walk tall mama o

De le kuwidi pange le

The dead come to greet you

So-­so lange widi gal

Water long like the dead, gal

So-­so lange mama o

Water long, mama o

Owet kuqelaa zembi di gal elek

Look how the spirits look on the gal there

O widi pange le

O the dead greet her

Gal emet widi pange lange e

The gal who greets the dead

Di le konakunda pange lange e

They all come tall to greet her

De le wete widingga le

The black ancestors from the water

Menuke di le kuwidi pange le.

Manuka of the spirits greets her.1

Perhaps first recorded in American anthropologist Joseph Moore’s 1950 fieldnotes, “Tange Lange Jeni” could easily have come to life from the collective tongue of Central African indentured laborers in eastern Jamaica sometime during Queen Victoria’s sixty-­four-­year reign over the British Empire. The salience of water to the Kumina communities2 — ​­who knew all too well the prayers that Jeni’s naked steps scripted on the “mother clay” 3  — ​­demands attention. Timed by the rhythms of nkuyu (ancestors) they revered and summoned ceremonially, Kumina mediums like Jeni honored the Kongo belief that “water is our first medicine.” 4 They invited Central African ancestors like Manuka Vola from the water to visit them during their rituals and often danced with vases or glasses of water effortlessly balanced on their heads.5 Such demonstrations of stillness in the midst of movement, of poise and perfection while under pressure, underscore the aesthetic mode of religious apprehension at work in Kumina and other African spiritual grammars that, according to Zora Neale Hurston, “associate the rhythm of sound and motion

with religion.” 6 Could it also be that the encased water symbolizes both the tomb and the womb of the Atlantic Ocean that received and delivered black souls into a new death and a new life? I suspect that the ritual water-­jar dances, while serving to enchant audiences with extraordinary feats, display a microcosm of the Atlantic and dramatize the trauma of the tomb-­womb experience for Africans who endured the extended Middle Passage.7 Dancing with still waters that run deep signals to all the nkuyu residing there within that they are in the care of their devoted descendants, whose rituals of remembrance reconstitute kinship bonds across time and memory. The Africans who transmitted humanity and heritage to Jeni and other Kumina adherents in Jamaica encountered the British naval squadrons at some point in their circuitous journeys across the Atlantic. Britain’s patrolling fleets “liberated” them from miserable “floating tombs,” the characteristic “imperial spacial formation” in the rise of the modern West.8 Although involuntarily taken aboard vessels as commodities for slave markets in the Americas and the Caribbean, their extended Middle Passage would land them in Jamaica as indentured laborers between 1841 and 1867.9 Through the experience of movement across land and water, in the trek to the coastal dungeons, and in the holding spaces on the slave ships, the African captives knew themselves to be human in the midst of an experience that compelled another knowing of themselves as simultaneously movable property. Under the weight of this kind of “anthropological impoverishment,” 10 Ku­mina endowed them and their descendants with sacred tools for addressing what phenomenologist Charles Long would describe as their traumatic “second creation.” 11 Specifically, Kumina elaborated a spiritual lexicon of family and nationhood that resignified confining colonial identifiers into flexible and desirable identities. Nation and its related word forms, nationhood, national, and so on, are italicized in this essay to indicate an Africana lexical definition rather than concepts of the nation-­state. The terms nation (an Africana category for designating a shared social, political, and cultural identity and allegiance) and “nation” (geopolitical state formations whether Western, African, or other) belong to different semantic worlds whose cultural and political vocabularies elaborate distinct options for human social organization and understandings of social belonging.12 Kumina constitutes one of many such Africana nation vocabularies in the African diaspora. Authorized by revelatory experiences different from those offered by British and white American Christian missionaries, Kumina has provided diaspora-­ed Central Africans and other black Jamaicans resources to re-­create the world with old and new centers of orientation, narratives of creation, nationhood and heritage, and avenues to power and possibilities.13

Kumina

603

This chapter situates Kumina as a generative site of African Jamaican religiosity and African diaspora nation formation during the Victorian era. The period from 1837 to 1901 registers a rich landscape of the African religious imagination at work — ​­in some respects, responding to the empty promises of emancipation and the extended project of British imperialism and, in other respects, inexorably conveying a people’s “world-­sense.” This world-­sense — ​­their perception of the universe and cosmological orientation — ​­was infused with pan-­Africanized and neo-­African sensibilities, framed by their common condition as similarly situated ex-­enslaved persons or indentured laborers.14 Kumina religious culture did not emerge among postemancipation Central African communities in isolation from the wider social, economic, and political environments in which old and new religious traditions appeared in stratified, parallel, and interactive configurations. With this in mind, the chapter theorizes Kumina as an iteration of a larger project of African Jamaican re-­creation and rehumanization. Undoubtedly, African Jamaicans made negotiations and compromises with the white planter and missionary classes, colonial bureaucrats, and governing structures. However, by the very nature of their flexible approach to religious pluralism, they were able to circumvent totalizing dimensions of the colony’s Euro-­Christian Victorian ethos by absorbing and modifying aspects of it to suit their needs. Although more often somatic, ritualistic, and performative than discursive, the vernacular theologies evident in Kumina and other African religious expressions suggest an emic sacred discourse (one that is locally generated, determined by custom) on kinship and nationhood. This chapter seeks to examine that discourse and its symbolic culture as a robust site of African Jamaican nation formation and “anthropological enrichment” during the Victorian era.15

“Some of Us Are Members in the Church and

Cannot Attend Worship of God for Want of Clothing for Our Self and Family”

The role of European and white American missionaries in Jamaica during much of the Victorian period deserves comment.16 Through their philanthropic endeavors, missionaries occasionally cushioned the blow to African Jamaican independence and autonomy unleashed by brutal legislation and customary practices surrounding labor, tenancy and land acquisition, political representation, and education. At the same time, through their civilizing and Christianizing agendas, white missionaries participated in a culture insistent upon the subordination of African Jamaicans. 604

Dianne M. Stewart

With the establishment of denominations like Church of Christ in Jamaica (1858), Congregational Union (1876), Society of Friends (Quakers) (1882), Salvation Army (1887), and Seventh-­Day Adventists (1894) also came a repertoire of African religious cultures such as Revivalism, Zionism, Poco, and, as noted above, Kumina. Adding to the already colorful religious expression ensuing from Myal, Obeah, Native Baptists, and other traditions of the slave era, these overlapping religious cultures remained firmly rooted in a pan-­African spiritual heritage while in dialogue with influential Christian missionary establishments across the colony. Custodians of the Revival-­Zion-­Poco complex stood in the tradition of the Native Baptists who were said to blend Jamaica’s older pan-­Africanized Myal religion of the eighteenth century with elements of the Baptist faith they encountered under the tutelage of African American missionaries beginning during the 1780s. Their approaches to biblical revelation and Christian conversion accentuated African religious ideas and practices such as: (1) divination, and healing and spiritual care; (2) veneration of a community of spirits and divinities; (3) ritual feasting and thanksgiving (food offerings and animal sacrifice); (4) spirit manifestation and mediumship, and spiritual travel; (5) a fundamental belief in neutral mystical power and its availability to humans; (6) ancestral veneration; (7) the revelatory power of dreams and visions; (8) ideographic writing; and (9) sensorimotor behavior, especially some iteration of a counterclockwise ring dance. The story of African Christian conversion in Jamaica envelops not only the work of foreign missionaries but also the efforts among African descendants to absorb and interpret the symbols of Christianity within contexts of African ritual performance and through African aesthetic sensibilities. Scholars of the period concur that nonconformist missionaries, especially from the Jamaica Baptist Union, provided mediating structures that allowed the ex-­enslaved populations to air their grievances and voice their collective dissent as free persons who were still barred from the social privileges and personal rights that they were due.17 Missionary advocates, however, launched agendas for the complete social, cultural, and spiritual reformation of Jamaica’s new black subjects of the British crown. They aimed to manufacture, in the words of Monica Schuler, “sober, working-­class Victorians — ​­industriously laboring on European plantations on weekdays and Saturdays; spending the better part of Sundays in church-­going and Bible-­reading; sanctifying their marital unions before the parson; and sending their children to trade schools for agricultural and industrial skills so that they could become more productive plantation workers than their parents.” 18 Negotiating wages and rent fees became one of the most tensive issues driving a deep wedge between the ex-­ enslaved and the proprietors for whom they worked, especially during the late Kumina

605

1830s. Relentless in their attempts to squeeze as much sweat and toil out of their newly freed apprentices, the planters launched endless schemes to extort excess money from the laborers to compensate for their losses during a time of socioeconomic fluctuation and periodic vulnerability. On the whole, the missionaries sought to circumvent the kind of instability African Jamaicans faced when subjected to low wages and exorbitant rents. They gave concrete form to their paternalistic humanitarian vision, augmenting the independence and resources of ex-­enslaved persons by accumulating large tracks of land for resale at more affordable prices to their African Jamaican parishioners. Beginning with the Baptist-­inspired Sligoville in 1840,19 free villages erected from this endeavor would situate African Jamaicans on autonomous ground beyond the parameters of their former owners’ estates and deceptive tactics to chain them to labor and living arrangements redolent of the slave period. Speaking in unison, members of Thomas Burchell’s Baptist congregations in Montego Bay described a circumstance of flagrant exploitation: “We have been fully and painfully taught our dependence, by notices to quit; by enormous demands of rent from husband, wife, and every child, though residing in one house; from the anomalous and unjust demand to pay additional rent for every day we, or any portion of our family, may be absent from work, whether occasioned by sickness or any other cause; from the summary ejectments which have been inflicted upon some of us, and utter destruction of provision grounds, which others of us have had to endure.” 20 Perhaps the planters relied too heavily upon the Baptist missionary Thomas Abbott’s speculation that “the attachment of the labourers to the places of their birth, and to the burial-­places of their ancestors or offspring, is so strong that they would rather make any sacrifice than leave them.” 21 The entire colony would discover soon enough that this prediction proved faulty in the face of the psychologically dehumanizing and physically brutalizing conditions apprentices were forced to navigate.22 Yet, as the ex-­ enslaved populations seized upon landownership opportunities made possible by Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, they inevitably offered themselves to be socially, culturally, and spiritually remolded according to the Victorian values that their missionary sympathizers cherished and promoted as the way forward for African Jamaicans. Such practices were not restricted to the British missionary presence in Jamaica. After the mid-­1830s the American Missionary Association (ama) also emphasized landownership for its African Jamaican converts, because the precarious nature of wage labor and tenancy disrupted social patterns such that ama missionaries found it nearly impossible to attract and retain converts. More than anything, ama missionaries, along with others in Jamaica at the

606

Dianne M. Stewart

time, remained vexed over the African Jamaicans’ kinship arrangements and indifference to gender as a marker of social location, civil rights, and mobility. The ex-­enslaved population’s customary approach to cohabitation and landownership did not complement the missionaries’ normative Victorian model, which privileged nuclear family households headed by a married, property-­ owning, economically self-­sufficient and tithe-­paying Christian male. Their village community project on the Richmond estate in Metcalfe retained all the institutional trappings of the ideal Christian Victorian culture they endeavored to promote among their residential converts of African descent. At Richmond, ama evangelists were eager to concretize their idealized vision of a black Jamaican population fenced in by foreign white missionary zeal. In fact, Mary Dean, ama-­affiliated missionary educator, worked at the estate and lamented that the built environment did not provide sufficient physical structures to adequately control her pupils. “I am daily more assured that my labor is almost in vain for want of fences,” 23 she wrote, giving no consideration to the indigenous customs and values her students maintained vis-­à-­vis the environment, land, and family.24 Under the ama and other missionaries’ careful inspection and tutoring in church, in school, and at work, some converts would embody and celebrate Victorian cultural assumptions and approaches to social organization with boundless appreciation for the freedoms experienced as members of Jamaica’s newly constituted Christian landscapes. However, missionary attempts to transform African Jamaicans into industrious, law-­abiding British subjects would not succeed in obliterating their fundamental African heritage customs within and beyond the immediate reaches of the free villages. Many persons of African descent retained perspectives on health and medicine, spiritual care and power, death and the afterlife, revelation, communal worship, and family responsibilities that contravened the standard missionary curriculum. The fact that a number of converts maintained links to African religious cultures among the Myal and Myal-­based Native Baptist communions — ​­the latter of which were increasingly public during the early decades of the Victorian period — ​­is not readily detectible in most missionary records. Nevertheless, their collective letters and reports indicate the significant influence of the indigenous African religious cultures over the vernacular religiosity of a wide segment of the African Jamaican population, whether those affected styled themselves Christians or not.25 The impact of the more than eight thousand “liberated” and “recaptive” Africans upon the revitalization of old and the formation of new African religious cultures was likewise disruptive to the postemancipation missionary project of converting and preserving African Jamaican souls.

Kumina

607

Concurrent with the entry of approximately thirty-­two thousand liberated Africans into the wider British Caribbean and G ​ uyana during the mid-­1800s,26 Christian churches in Jamaica and the other British colonies underwent significant transition in cutting ties with their parent headquarters in London and establishing regional headquarters across the colonies. Transforming Jamaica’s colonial missions into autonomous ecclesial establishments involved local bureaucracies, yet local African Jamaicans were excluded from the process. During this same historical period, nonconformist denominations experienced a noticeable decline in African membership. For example, between 1845 and 1860, the Baptist Church across the British Caribbean suffered losses into the thousands.27 Authoritarian paternalism and benign racism were two obvious factors impacting black disaffection with white missionary establishments. Discrimination accompanied every effort to equip the ex-­enslaved populations with the tools and skills for a circumscribed degree of success within Jamaica’s stratified social spheres, placing blacks at a disadvantage in every arena, even within the structures of the church. When various denominations established schools for the training of black male ministers throughout the 1840s, they also enhanced the reach of pan-­African missionary efforts by sending African Jamaican men to serve at mission stations in West Africa.28 At the same time, missionaries in charge of black ministerial leadership in Jamaica were totally unwilling to share power on-­site with the students they trained. In their eyes, African Jamai­cans were not fit for leadership over their own communities in Jamaica, and they would maintain subordinate positions in the educational and pastoral leadership structures of the church throughout the Victorian period and into the twentieth century.29 A certain irony obtained throughout much of the Victorian period concerning African Jamaicans’ encounters with Christianity. Despite the Eurocentric Christianizing and civilizing mission that was a hallmark of the era, the power of the African religious heritage endured, especially because the African communities innovatively appropriated “proper” religion and the structures with which it was most associated. One such structure was land and ​landownership. Evangelicals connected to the ama and other missions understood landownership as the foundational element in securing African allegiance to Christian customs and kinship arrangements. Ownership of land, however, placed new African arrivants and those from previous generations in a position to preserve potent kinship bonds with ancestors interred within their reach. They could dance their prayers and present their offerings in the vicinity of their departed family members and thus transform farming zones into healing cen-

608

Dianne M. Stewart

ters, connecting nourishment to medicine and spiritual care. Land provided room for the (balm) yard30 to emerge as a private yet public space, and in spite of the missionary gaze, many persons of African heritage would inevitably orient themselves to the land and develop their outdoor spaces utilizing the cultural resources of their parents and grandparents. Missionaries such as Mary Dean longed for a fence to reinforce the property boundaries so significant for Victorian culture to flourish in the free village communities. Yet, such figures never imagined that when Kumina Africans held christening ceremonies, “the ancestral spirits . . . c[a]me in great numbers to these occasions . . . but typically st[oo]d around and ‘line[d] the yard,’” 31 insulating the newborn and her or his family from potentially disruptive external forces. Nor were they aware that Kumina, Revival, and Poco ceremonial leaders perform ritual sealings of the four corners of the earth, erecting a different kind of fence — ​­a protective barrier to secure their “primordial public” arenas against imposing Victorian sensibilities in “civic public” spaces.32

“You Have to Play the Drum [so] That

You Get All the Old African Dead to Come”

Written records from the period of Queen Victoria’s reign yield virtually nothing specific about the Kumina tradition.33 Still, interjecting voices whose youth and memories overlap the latter decades of the Queen’s governance counter the archives’ silence and power to conceal the significance of this postemancipation Jamaican religious culture to the Central African descendants claiming a connection to Kumina.34 Kumina is fundamentally a family-­bonding and nation-­building religious culture whose drumming, singing, and dancing rituals revolve around facilitating sustained kinship connections across the visible and invisible world domains.35 Kumina’s ritual and ceremonial life has encompassed rites of passage, divination and healing, ancestral memorials, and thanksgivings, and there is oral evidence that these social practices were widely known as nation-­formation practices among nineteenth-­century Central African settlers in eastern Jamaica. Moreover, the Kumina constellation of Central African nations in Jamaica has its counterparts in other diaspora spaces such as Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candomblé. Olabiyi Yai theorizes the specific nation practices of African descendants in Western diasporas, offering a promising foundation for future studies of “Africana” culture and consciousness. His conclusion is that “in the Americas, Africans had to invent new institutions within which they could cultivate their customs and perpetuate the memory of

Kumina

609

Africa, and thus live a meaningful life. Cabildos de nación in Cuba, which were associations of Africans based on cultural affinities, Afro-­Catholic lay brotherhoods and sisterhoods in Brazil, and more importantly religious institutions such as Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba, Kumina in Jamaica, and the African American church in the United States, are prominent instances of such invented institutions.” 36 Yai is on point when he includes Kumina in his thesis because, mirroring social organizational patterns of their kin in the visible world, “the african gods are from tribes and nations.” This unnamed informant went on to explain to anthropologist Joseph Moore the significance of Manuka Vola and the definitive nations comprising the Kumina community: “Take Manuka Vola, he is a great ancestral [spirit] who now is so strong he become a strong earthbound god of the whole Congo nation. There are five divisions or groups in the Congo nation. We got moyenge who Manuka Vola serves since he is the head of this group; we got machunde; we got kongo; we got mondogo; we got mumbaka.” 37 Honored as “a tribal head” and renowned for his rainmaking abilities, Manuka Vola (or Manoka Mvula) hailed from Morant Bay. He was established in Johns­ton, an area near Duhaney Pen, when he died in 1928, around the age of eighty. This celebrated ritual specialist most likely assumed a leading role in Kumina ceremonies among later generations of “liberated” Central Africans who took up residence in postemancipation Jamaica, for Vola is remembered as “a very old African, born in Africa.” 38 The names of ancestors such as Manuka Vola, Sophie Bailey, Margaret Miller, and Obi Beckford emblematize the various Kumina nations.39 However, Vola’s elevation from his purported natal tie with the Moyenge nation to his stature as ancestor of “the whole Congo nation” suggests that Kumina nation formation was a complex and ever-­evolving process that accommodated micronations within a macronational structure in which Kongo identification became prominent. It might be more accurate to suggest that Kumina’s national structure encompassed the kind of plurinational affiliations Olabiyi Yai describes as common among continental Africans during the nineteenth century.40 Kongo’s dual position as both micronation and macronation indexes the plurinational dynamics undergirding Kumina’s internal identity politics. The Moyenge, Machunde, Mondogo, and Mumbaka subnations, for instance, adopted plurinational affiliations when they assumed identification with a Kongo element that, at some point in time, took on meta-­national significance for the entire Kumina nation. Within this nation-­building tradition, it is no surprise that the most respected Moyenge ancestor, Manuka Vola, returns regularly from the invisible world as “a strong earthbound god of the whole Congo nation.”

610

Dianne M. Stewart

An ironic juxtaposition existed between the British Empire’s politics of sovereignty and that of the Kumina nation. While the ever-­expanding Victorian British Empire sought to absorb African nations into its colonial polities under various arrangements in the late nineteenth century, Central Africans in Jamaica (and other African exiles in the Caribbean and the Americas) did not abandon their own nation politics. They engaged in nation-­building practices that held currency for them as enslaved and colonial subjects, discovering their potential to self-­govern even while toiling under British imperial governance. These nation practices included holding native judiciary courts, hosting coronation pageants, and assuming royal titles.41 Certainly Queen Victoria died without ever knowing the names and power of the late nineteenth-­century Kumina queens. These women, their names now lost, were predecessors of figures like Queeny Espute, who reigned in the mid-­twentieth century over the Central African–­Jamaican linguistically related nations of Moyenge, Machunde, Kongo, Modongo, and Mumbaka. In 1946, like far too many of her overworked and underrewarded compatriots, forty-­seven-­year-­old Queeny Espute prematurely crossed the kalunga — ​­the watery boundary dividing the worlds of the living and the dead in Kongo cosmology. Whether conceived as the Atlantic Ocean or as other bodies of water, kalunga in Kumina culture signifies the point of entry to mpemba (the lower world of the invisible powers — ​­ancestors and deities) and immediately glosses the concepts of immensity and immeasurability. Taking her first breath (1899) just months before Queen Victoria’s last (1901), Queeny Espute defies death time and again, returning to Kumina ceremonies in St. Thomas to dance life’s circular path with her descendants.42 The Kongo cosmogram (Dikenga Kongo) allows us to map aspects of Kumina devotees’ foundational sense of the cosmos, family, and nation. In Africa and Jamaica, Kongo people’s perception of the world might be described as cyclical and spiral.43 Their understanding of life and the human being’s (muntu) life journey is informed by reflection on the nature of the cosmos (deities, power, and planetary formation). The human being is also conceived as a microcosm of the entire cosmos, and the spirit-­medicines (minkisi) available to humans for managing life are manufactured from the energies of fundamental planetary life forms (animal and plant, human and mineral). Thought to develop across four life stages (musoni, kala, tukula, and luvemba), whose essential significances are mapped in symmetry with four moments of the sun’s station across time, in each stage, the human being takes a different shape, completing a life cycle by the end of the fourth stage.44 When diagrammed, the Dikenga Kongo is a spherical image divided evenly into four quadrants by vertical and horizontal axes. Distinguished by symbolic

Kumina

611

Fig. 20. 1   Diagram

TUKULA

of Dikenga Kongo by Dianne M. Stewart. KU NSEKE

LUVEMBA

KALUNGA

KALA

KU MPEMBA

MUSONI

colors, each quadrant represents one of life’s four principal stages: unbornhood (lower right: yellow), childhood (upper right: black), adulthood (upper left: red), and ancestorhood (lower left: white). It follows then that in addition to healing practices, “birth, marriage, and death,” the customary rites of passage, “are all dignified by ceremonial behavior” within Kumina families.45 Pursuing the (counterclockwise) path of the rising and setting sun, during Kumina ceremonies devotees dance this perceived spherical circumference, while twisting and turning their bodies in spiraling patterns. As they make their way around the circle, they travel through the four stages of life. The image of the Dikenga Kongo is a “visual vocabulary” 46 of Kumina devotees’ and other Kongo peoples’ orientation to life, ontogeny, and a universe populated by diverse beings and creative powers. The graphic portrait of Kongo cosmology conveys the idea that death is a doorway to continued life in the invisible lower world where two phases of the life cycle unfold as the human being takes her or his ancestral and unborn shapes. A normative expectation then is that one will reenter the life cycle and travel the nseke (upper physical world) path of transmitting one’s debt to humanity, for which a plethora of initiating institutions prepares each muntu (fig. 20.1). This focus on Kongo cosmology introduces the significance of reincarnation as a repeating yet uneven temporal process. Ancestors reincarnate within their genealogical lineages. They also reincarnate temporarily in the bodies of their descendants at ritual ceremonies. The center of the cosmogram, where the horizontal and vertical axes cross, symbolizes the unity of muntu and nkuyu messengers of Nzambi Mpungu (the Kongo High God)— ​­the devotees’ invisible family members and national leaders. As Joseph Moore observed during the 1950s: “In Cumina, the key [power source] is either a black cloth with a white cross on

612

Dianne M. Stewart

it, or the center post of the dancing booth around which a ring which signifies the area of ‘power’ is drawn.” 47 The unity between invisible and visible members of the Kumina nation is known to be real and efficacious through what Kumina custodians call myal spirit manifestation, a multisensory phenomenon of cohabitation and communicative acts intended to nourish, heal, and sustain the entire Kumina nation and others seeking its guidance and holistic health resources. Although graphic representations of the Kongo cosmogram, often drawn with white chalk, are a common feature across African-­heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and Americas, this ideograph is inscribed more conventionally through the collective circumambulatory and exaggerated spiraling dances Kumina devotees perform during their ceremonies. In Jamaica, the Kumina nation did not become accustomed so much to drawing or etching the Dikenga Kongo, for instead nation dances configured this corporeal cosmogram at every ceremony. Beyond cultivating family bonding and nation-­ building practices, Kumina emerged in Jamaica as a ritual site of kinesthetic philosophical inscription.

“Island Deh, Sali Water. . . . The Water Do Me So” When they disembarked on Jamaica’s soil, “liberated” Central Africans entered a landscape where African spirituality had not fully succumbed to the “civilizing” project of missionary Christianity.48 Extensive was the theological and aesthetic chasm between African and Euro-­Christian religious embodiment, as captured in the Moravian missionary John Lang’s 1816 account of an experience he had while conducting a church service: “During the sermon, a heathen woman began to twist her body about, and make all manner of Grimaces. I bore it all for sometime till she disturbed the congregation, when I desired one of the assistants to lead her out, thinking she was in pain. When the service was over, I inquired what ailed her, and was told, that it was a usual thing with the negroes on M. estate, and called by them Conviction.” 49 This “usual thing with the negroes,” while suppressed in the mission churches, was the nucleus of Kumina ceremonial life and the core ritual vocabulary of Jamaica’s other African heritage spiritual traditions, including the Native Baptists, Revivalists, and Zionists. It is indeed suitable that Kumina’s ritual process of spirit manifestation and mediumship became known as “myal,” for this term connected the Kumina tradition to the Myal religion of eighteenth-­century Jamaica, which incorporated analogous ritual behaviors of trance and spiritual travel. Nearly half a century after Queen Victoria’s death, Kumina groups in Morant Bay alone were attracting between one hundred and six hundred persons to

Kumina

613

Friday-­evening ceremonial gatherings.50 The colony’s Night Noises Prevention Law of 1911 seemed to fail to limit the frequency with which Kumina ceremonies defined the nightlife of many St. Thomas residents, including Baptist and Revival/​Zion adherents. In 1950, for example, one resident reported having attended sixty-­seven ceremonies between January and August.51 Rituals had to remain. As long as babies were born and elders passed on, the Kumina nation would continue to plant its white flag of African ritual expertise at yard gates across eastern Jamaica.52 Having maintained a ceremonial life in dialogue with other African heritage religious traditions (especially Native Baptist and Revival Zion) for nearly two centuries, the Kumina nation participates in sustaining a wider African spiritual grammar in Jamaican culture even today. This grammar nurtures a multivalent understanding of nation identities that accommodates the saliency of ethnic and pan-­African affiliations. Kumina devotees, for instance, feel a strong bond with Baptists and Revivalists because “they baptize in the river and are close to the river gods, and african gods come around a great deal to protect them.” 53 Baptists and Revivalists undoubtedly understand the power of water as a conveyor of spiritual and medicinal power. However, the Kumina nation also establishes contact with healing spirits and medicinal technologies through the earth, which is why members dance barefoot and perform so many rituals at gravesites. These sensibilities notwithstanding, it was, paradoxically, the water (“sali water”) and the earth (“island”) that secured their exile, far away from their Central African continental homelands. The first generation of Kumina nation-­builders suffered, in particular, the tangible disruption of diaspora-­ed distance from an Africa whose rivers and terrains they intimately knew. Hence their declaration, “island deh, sali water . . . the water do me so!” There is no gainsaying this collective judgment: the land and saltwater between eastern Jamaica and Central Africa did indeed “do them so.” 54 Singing, drumming, dancing, and feasting through the pain and powerlessness of the extended Middle Passage and the conditions of exile, Kumina adherents rebuilt their nations on colonized Jamaican soil while preserving their yearning for home.

“Oh, Where We Were Born, There Let Us Go — ​­Kongo . . . Oh, Go to See, Go to See Kongo!”

“Oku Twawutshilwa Kwawu Kwenda Kongo . . . O yenda mona, mona eKongo” is what devotees utter in ritual settings, singing in the Jamaican-­Kikongo or country language of the Kumina nation.55 Kumina religious culture — ​­not unlike

614

Dianne M. Stewart

other African-­heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas — ​ ­is, if nothing else, a vocabulary of nationhood. It registers a human project of nostalgic desire for the original nation while constructing a new nation in a British imperial space. Thus, national ideas and enactments of nationalism have been staple features of this African Atlantic tradition since its inception in Victorian Jamaica. Providing an alternative model of spiritual “work” arguably no less demanding of the physical body than the Victorian era’s “gospel of work” formula, Kumina ritualized a politics of sovereignty that strengthened the nation’s most foundational unit — ​­family lineage — ​­while elaborating a vernacular strategy of internal governance, solidarity, belonging, and ethnic-​national group affiliation. The vulnerabilities experienced through ritualized relationships with nkuyu (ancestors) offered new Central African arrivants sacred spaces to re-create self, family, and a nation composed of subnations. Across Kumina yards, this spiritual vocabulary invented ritual maps that collapsed time and space between Jamaica and Africa. Such was “the miracle of Kumina” among those lacking the power to fly back to Kongo (Africa). When they found themselves singing Oh, wan’ gw’home, oh . . . Me wan’ gw’home, oh . . . Me can’t go back a’ me country Me wan’ gw’home, oh Please to tell the king and queen that Me say me wan’ gw’home, eh . . . 56 they often did so in ritual arenas, confirming that their nation’s queens were the only monarchs prepared to transport them as close to home as they would ever come.

Notes 1. Edward Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–­1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 224–­25. Kenneth Bilby and Fu-­Kiau Bunseki offer the spelling “Manoka Mvula” for this eminent Kumina ancestor. See their text Kumina, a Kongo-­based Tradition in the New World (Brussels: Centre d’étude et de documentation africaines, 1983), 6. 2. Kumina, an African heritage religious culture, was established in Jamaica by Central African indentured laborers who settled primarily in the eastern parish of St. Thomas between the 1840s and 1860s. Kumina rituals encompass a universe of customs pertaining to divination, healing, kinship responsibilities, rites of passage, and so on. Most pivotal for ritual efficacy are the Kumina dances, music, and songs that establish

Kumina

615

the proper environment for communion with the ancestors, who manifest in the bodies of their descendants during formal ceremonies. 3. Imogene Kennedy, interview with author, St. Catherine, Jamaica, October 18, 1996. 4. Fu-­Kiau Bunseki, telephone interview with author, May 19, 2004. Also see Ras Michael Brown, African-­Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), where he discusses how a powerful Kongo Simbi (nature spirit-​god), Mpulu Bunzi, “provided the ‘power to cure diseases and support the people,’ typically through minkisi (consecrated objects), the first of which he composed ‘in the water,’ thus establishing the original bisimbi line of minkisi” (114). 5. Joseph G. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes: A Study of Afro-­Jamaican Acculturation (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1953); Madeline Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica (London: Collins, 1963); Maureen Warner Lewis, The Nkuyu: Spirit Messengers of the Kumina (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1977); Imogene Kennedy, interview with author, St. Catherine, Jamaica, October 18, 1996; Bernice Henry, interview with author, Port Morant, St. Thomas, November 10, 1996. There is evidence that this practice might be shared widely among African and African diaspora communities. See, for example, Melville Herskovits Papers, box 15, folder 83A, “Trinidad Field Trip Diary,” 109, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York. While attending a Shango (Orisha) ceremony in Laventil hills, Herskovits observed and took detailed notes on the ritual behavior of a Shango medium: “Her performance was one of the most remarkable I have ever seen, for she placed this filled jar on the top of her hed [sic], without any pad under it, and danced for almost 35 minutes, violently, without spilling a drop except once when a little came out.” Also see Marcus Harvey’s discussion of a comparable Yoruba performance undertaken annually by female mediums during the Yemo.ja festival in the southwestern Nigerian town of Ayede in “‘Life Is War’: African Grammars of Knowing and the Interpretation of Black Religious Experience” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2012). 6. Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (New York: Marlowe, 1997), 103. 7. Dianne M. Stewart, “Indigenous Wisdom at Work in Jamaica: The Power of Kumina,” in Indigenous Peoples’ Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge Through Narratives, ed. Julian E. Kunnie and Nomalungelo I. Goduka (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006). Kumina devotees have identified the Atlantic Ocean as a kalunga boundary between the visible and invisible world domains. This concept will be discussed later in the essay. Also see Brown’s insightful discussion on this theme in African-­Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry, 97. 8. The Portuguese called slave ships tumbeiros, a term that Joseph Miller translates as “floating tombs”; see his Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–­1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 314. See also Nelson Maldonado Torres, “The Topology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” City 8, no. 1 (April 2004): 3. 9. Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–­1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 1–­8. 10. Engelbert Mveng, “Third World Theology—What Theology? What Third World?

616

Dianne M. Stewart

Evaluation by an African Delegate,” in Irruption of the Third World: Challenge to Theology; Papers from the Fifth International Conference of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, August 17–­29, 1981, New Delhi, India, ed. Virginia Fabella and Sergio Torres (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983), 220. According to Mveng, “anthropological poverty . . . consists in despoiling human beings not only of what they have, but of everything that constitutes their being and essence — ​­their identity, history, ethnic roots, language, culture, faith, creativity, dignity, pride, ambitions, right to speak. . . . We could go on indefinitely.” 11. Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 120–­21, 180, 184. 12. The Africana concept of nationhood will be explored more carefully later in this essay. 13. For the concept of “diaspora-­ed,” see Tracey E. Hucks, Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012). 14. Oyèrónke Ó.yěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). I concur with Oyěwùmí that the concept of “world-­sense” is much more comprehensive than the widely used term “worldview,” because it indicates that all of the senses (not solely the ocular) are engaged in determining how persons in a given culture come to perceive the universe, its logic, its constituents, its operations, and their place within it. We can speak of a pan-­Africanized world-­sense because the conditions of enslavement in Jamaica and other African diasporas required diverse African peoples to merge their perceptions and beliefs about the cosmos, power, temporality, ancestors, deities, spirits, the unborn, life, death, reincarnation, flora and fauna, minerals, elements, rivers, forests, and other aspects of the visible-­invisible world. 15. In effect, Kumina addresses the condition Mveng aptly theorizes as “anthropological poverty.” See note 9 above. 16. The source of this heading text is Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 98. This statement is extracted from a May 1865 petition that some thirty-­four “undersigned African labourers” sent to Governor Edward John Eyre during their seventeenth year of residence in Jamaica. Most, if not all, of these laborers would have been of Central African descent. 17. Mimi B. Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Rebellion in Postemancipation Haiti and Jamaica (New York: New School for Social Research, 1996); Gale Kenny, “Reconstructing a Different South: The American Missionary Association and Jamaica, 1834–­65,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3 (September 2009): 445–­66; Keith Hunte, “Protestantism and Slavery in the British Caribbean,” in Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History, ed. Armando Lampe (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 86–­125; Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo.” 18. Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 31. 19. Catherine Hall, “White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica,” History Workshop 36 (October 1, 1993): 105. 20. Hall, “White Visions, Black Lives,” 107.

Kumina

617

21. Hall, “White Visions, Black Lives.” Abbott had been stationed at St. Ann’s Bay since 1831. 22. See Diana Paton, ed., A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 23. Kenny, “Reconstructing a Different South,” 460. 24. Traditional customs arguably could have ranged from cooperative farming practices to alternative mating patterns, from matricentric households and extended family structures to African-­centered spiritual approaches to the natural world. As Gale Kenny explains, “To these recently freed [African Jamaican] men and women land offered autonomy for the family, not the individual, and it promised them the ability to control their own affairs, something not promised in landownership at Richmond,” the America Missionary Association (ama) estate. Kenny also notes that ama missionaries maintained inflexible patriarchal ideas about the remedial purpose of landownership for African Jamaicans. See Kenny, “Reconstructing a Different South,” 459–­60. Clearly, within the confines of their estate, ama missionaries could best monitor and control their pupils’ work habits and broader social customs. 25. Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 91–­137. 26. Approximately sixteen thousand additional liberated Africans settled in the French West Indies. See Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 2. 27. Hunte, “Protestantism and Slavery in the British Caribbean,” 115–­21. 28. Calabar College, established in Jamaica for training local ministers, opened in 1843 at Rio Bueno and then transferred to Kingston in 1869. In 1845, Presbyterians opened an academy in Montego Bay that provided secondary education for potential ministers and others with the means to afford the tuition. Both institutions (along with Codrington College in Barbados [1830]) trained ministers preparing to serve as missionaries in Africa. By 1842, Baptists from Jamaica were serving in missions at Fernando Poo and East Cameroon. The Baptist Missionary Society of London had established both of these African stations. Beginning in 1846 under the direction of Hope Waddell, the Scottish Missionary Society led a mission in Calabar (Nigeria) that involved Jamaican missionaries. See Hunte, “Protestantism and Slavery in the British Caribbean,” 113. 29. Horace O. Russell, The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church: Jamaican Baptist Missions to West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 30. The balm yard is an established tradition among African Jamaicans and perhaps dates back in some iterations to the days of enslavement. Balm yards are healing centers where ritualists skilled in herbal medicine and equipped with spiritual gifts work with clients to cure diseases and overcome personal and social afflictions. Healers can draw from a range of spiritual, mystical, and pharmacopoeic traditions for their curative powers and procedures, including Obeah, Myal, Christianity, the Bible, and dream interpretation. They typically operate within the confines of their personal residences, making use of outdoor gardens and spaces to secure medicines and construct basic housing for patients. 31. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 154.

618

Dianne M. Stewart

32. See Peter Ekeh’s discussion of primordial versus civic publics in “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 1 ( January 1975): 91–­112. 33. The source of this heading text is Imogene Kennedy (Miss Queenie) interviewed by Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 76. 34. Most of these interjecting voices are from the mid twentieth-­century research of scholars like Joseph Moore (discussed above) and Madeline Kerr. Moore conducted research on Kumina, Revival, and other African religious cultures in St. Thomas, Jamaica, in 1950. Kerr conducted her research across varied regions of Jamaica from 1947 to 1949. See her Personality and Conflict in Jamaica. 35. Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), explores similar nation practices among Candomblé, Vodou, and Yoruba devotees in Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba. 36. Olabiyi Yai, “African Diaspora Concepts and Practice of the Nation and Their Implications in the Modern World,” in African Roots/​American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, ed. Sheila S. Walker (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 248. 37. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 27–­28. Kenneth Bilby and Fu-­Kiau Bunseki’s 1983 study of Kumina includes the following analysis of the Kumina subnations they encountered in St. Thomas in 1978: “The centrality of the Kongo tribe in Kumina tradition is not fortuitous. Of the four most important tribes . . . Kongo is considered by most devotees to be the ‘highest’ or ‘strongest.’ The other three names are all derived from either actual sub-­groups of Bakongo peoples or from closely related neighboring groups. ‘Muyanji’ refers to Bayanzi (Kwango and Kwilu) people, ‘Muchundi’ to Basundi, and ‘Mumbaka’ to Bambata/​Ambata of Angola. All of these peoples speak either dialects of the Kikongo language, or very close related Bantu languages. It is not at all surprising, then, that the ‘African Country’ language used by Kumina people, the language of the ancestors, is almost completely Kikongo-­derived.” The “Ba” prefix denotes a plural form of some words in Kikongo while the “Mu” prefix denotes the singular. One Kongo person is a MuKongo and two or more Kongo people are BaKongo. See Bilby and Bunseki, “Kumina: A Kongo-­Based Tradition in the New World,” 9. Bilby and Fu-­Kiau do not offer an explanation for the Mondogo subnation that Moore’s informants mentioned in 1950. They likely descended from the Northern Mbundu (Ambundu) kingdom of Ndongo, which was situated in modern-­day Angola. A less likely heritage identity also might be the Ndogo of northeastern Congo. 38. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 123, 245. Also see “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 76, 180, where Schuler identifies the genealogical nation group of Manoka Mvula (same as Manuka Vola) as Bobangi (Bayanzi). The spelling “Manoka Mvula” is perhaps a more accurate approximation of this ancestor’s title as a rainmaker, since it seems to be derived from Kikongo phrases related to falling rain. In an e-­mail to the author on April 16, 2013, Ina Mwanda, a MuKongo (Manianga) linguist, offered the following context for the linguistic construct manoka mvula:

Kumina

619

This phrase appears to be from the Kikongo family. The primary meaning is the “rain is falling.” The morphology of Kikongo words are generally: prefix + stem. The first thought that crossed my mind was the form used: Manoka = ma + noka. ma→ this is generally a plural prefix and is used for living organisms, body parts and liquids. So it is a little peculiar that “ma” would be used with a verb “noka.” noka→ pertains to something falling, but mostly used for falling rain mvula→ rain In Kikongo (Kimanianga) we often say→ “mvula yeti noka” (progressive form) or “it is raining.” In Kituba we can say→ mvula ke na kunoka (progressive form). What’s interesting about “Manoka Mvula” is the prefix used for a plural marker “ma” with “noka” which gives the meaning→ “has fallen (a lot) rain” to possibly mean something “pours the rain.” 39. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 245–­48. 40. See Olabiyi Yai’s discussion of plurinationalism among Yorubas and Dahomeans in “African Diaspora Concepts and Practice of the Nation,” 248. 41. Jeffrey R. Kerr-­Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Linda Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”; Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey. 42. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 247. 43. Brown, African-­Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry, 90–­111. 44. For more information on aspects of Kongo cosmogram and world-­sense, see Fu-­ Kiau Bunseki, African Cosmology of the Bantu-­Kongo: Tying the Spiritual Knot, Principles of Life and Living (Brooklyn: Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001); John Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-­American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984); Bárbaro Martínez-­Ruiz, Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey; Jason Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); and Brown, African-­Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry. 45. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 30. 46. Wyatt MacGaffey, “Complexity, Astonishment and Power: The Visual Vocabulary of Kongo Minkisi,” Journal of Southern African Studies 14, no. 2 ( January 1, 1988): 188–­203. 47. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 60. I am particularly grateful for the assistance of Emory University’s Center for Interactive Teaching, whose staff member Jonathan Potter created the above digital diagram of the Dikenga Kongo. Potter is also a student in the Graduate Division of Religion’s New Testament course of study.

620

Dianne M. Stewart

48. The source of this heading text is Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 95. “Sali” should be translated as “salt” and “deh” as “there.” 49. John Lang’s Diary (Moravian), Periodical Accounts 6 (1816): 364, cited by Ed­ward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–­1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 220. 50. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 49. 51. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 114. 52. In Jamaica, those with expertise in Obeah or African-­heritage spiritual systems often post white flags at the front of their homes and ritual centers. 53. Moore, Religion of Jamaican Negroes, 115. 54. Beyond the obvious reference to the Atlantic Ocean, Kumina adherents believe that the ingestion of salt counteracts spiritual energy and particularly prevents a person from accessing the power to fly back to Africa. As also in other African heritage religious cultures, the spirits’ foods are never cooked with salt in the Kumina tradition. See Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 93–­96. 55. Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 74. 56. Schuler (“Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 96) maintains that “through the miracle of Kumina they tried to find Africa and themselves.” This Bailo ( Jamaican Creole) translation of what likely was a Kikongo song during the early period of “liberated” Central African settlement in Jamaica might be the only extant version that later generations of Kumina devotees were able to preserve. See “Alas, Alas, Kongo,” 94, for the cited song, and 93–­96 for a discussion of flying narratives in Kumina orature and collective memory.

Kumina

621

CHAPTER 21

Jamaican Performance in the Age of Emancipation NADIA ELLIS

The second half of Saidiya Hartman’s classic monograph on American slavery and spectatorship, Scenes of Subjection, is a meditation on the ambivalences of emancipation. Through recourse to Freedmen’s Bureau documents, Hartman argues that the bequest of “freedom” to U.S. slaves in the late nineteenth century was tantamount to the bequest of responsibility, which is to say, guilt. “The free(d) individual was nothing if not burdened, responsible, and obligated,” Hartman writes.1 “Responsibility entailed accounting for one’s actions, dutiful suppliance, contractual obligation, and calculated reciprocity. Fundamentally, to be responsible was to be blameworthy.” 2 I begin my chapter on Victorian Jamaican performance with this bracing acknowledgment that slavery’s end was inherently mixed in with constraint for two reasons. First, Hartman’s work is surprisingly apposite to a consideration of performance in nineteenth-­ century Jamaica, because her reading of American Freedmen’s Bureau documents is really an unfolding of the performative aspects of African freedom in the Americas: the iterative quality of acts of freedom; the spectacle of white anxiety around the free black body; and the parodic speculations by freed slaves on the shifts in role and order in the aftermath of emancipation. Second, the historical period traced by the designation of this volume, “Victorian Jamaica,” beginning a quarter-century before the period discussed by Hartman, coincides with the era of emancipation in the British Empire and was marked by similar ambivalences. Performance, performativity, and freedom are intertwined in this milieu in ways that connect preemancipation Afro-­Jamaican performance traditions (which were often complex forms of creolized religion and masquerade profoundly connected to expressions of black agency) with new forms of black embodied practice and white spectatorship directly connected to the monumental transformation from slave to capitalist colony. In this essay I will describe key features of the performance scene in Jamaica between 1838 and 1901, endeavoring to be capacious enough to include the theatrical and the performative in their varied incarnations. My argument benefits

from the illuminating insights of critics like Hartman into the ambivalences of freedom. Victorian Jamaican performance in one way or another encapsulates the ambivalences of freedom being enacted in “the everyday” of emancipation’s wake. Slavery’s abolition imbued freed Jamaican blacks with an agency that was multiple, contradictory, and spectacularly embodied in performance. It was an agency at once threatening, subversive, enlivening, anodyne, and sometimes even illegible as such. The continuing fascination of the era is that performative acts can be read in this multifarious and ambivalent way, and from both sides, as it were. For black performers operating within traditions with a long history of anticolonial resistance, performances after 1838 rendered emancipation ironic precisely because performances of freedom continued to be necessary. Visual representations made by white observers during the Victorian era evince a layered and contradictory relationship to the agentive movement of the black body in the aftermath of abolition.

Emancipation as Performance The mutual imbrication of performance and emancipation during this period of Jamaican history has no clearer iteration than in that first and most curious of emancipation performances in Jamaica — ​­the legal Act of Abolition of Slavery itself. What does it mean to think about the performative legal gesture of the Act of Abolition alongside the embodied performances slaves used to enact freedom on their own terms? For one thing, the legal documents were protracted and equivocating papers of freedom. Even setting aside the question of how freedom might be granted from one human being to another, this legal utterance was sent from abroad, written down, and had limited translatability to slaves, the majority of whose culture was oral. The document presents a mode of freedom with constrained and ambivalent accessibility to slaves. Its “act,” the performative work of its linguistic construction to “free slaves,” can be seen to have failed in the classic Austinian way: that is, like the majority of the situations that make up J. L. Austin’s classic rendering of speech acts, How to Do Things with Words, the British Act of Abolition misfires in its relay from legal pronouncement to accomplished act. It fails at the most fundamental level because the translation from the written word to the oral involves inherent gaps and ruptures. But its very documentation embeds ambivalences and contradictions that make its performativity visible as performativity. Reading this document is to be confronted with what Ian Baucom describes in another context as “the minutiae of imperial management . . . the submemorable chatter of sovereignty by committee.” 3 For a text associated with the conceptual

Jamaican Performance

623

Fig. 21. 1   Thomas Picken, Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica, 1838. Lithograph. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

grandeur of freedom, it is remarkably bureaucratic and recondite, laced through with language about the management of laboring black bodies (for instance its preamble contains the note that “it is also expedient that Provision should be made for promoting the Industry and securing the good Conduct of the Persons so to be manumitted”).4 All this ambivalence is before considering that the Act of Abolition did not in fact grant immediate and literal freedom of movement, let alone wage labor, to the slaves. The conditions of emancipation were that several years of “apprenticeship” would be completed on the very same plantations on which slaves had been laboring before — ​­first proposed at six years, later cut down to four. Legal freedom was a complicated thing: Be it therefore enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That from and after the first Day of August One thousand eight hundred and thirty-­four all Persons who in conformity with the Laws now in force in the said Colonies respectively shall on or before the first Day of August One thousand eight hundred and thirty-­four have been duly registered as Slaves in any such Colony, and who on

624

Nadia Ellis

the said first Day of August One thousand eight hundred and thirty-­ four shall be actually within any such Colony, and who shall by such Registries appear to be on the said first Day of August One thousand eight hundred and thirty-­four of the full Age of Six Years or upwards, shall by force and virtue of this Act, and without the previous Execution of any Indenture of Apprenticeship, or other Deed or Instrument for that Purpose, become and be apprenticed Labourers.5 This ambivalence in the Act of Abolition — ​­the enunciative gesture of nomination from “slave” to “apprenticed Labourer” — ​­can be read as well in the most famous visual depictions of the document’s celebrations, the reproduction and circulation of which were themselves iterations of colonial freedom. For instance, Thomas Picken’s lithograph Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica, 1838 (fig. 21.1) depicts Jubilee festivities held in the grand central square of Spanish Town, and one is overwhelmed by an almost claustrophobic sense of order: an obsessive linearity is the predominant aesthetic, with rows upon rows of faceless black revelers (they are presumably reveling; there is no sense of movement in the piece) hemmed in by the gates of the square. A few finely turned out blacks emerge at the left foreground of the image — ​­a woman dressed in white surrounded by her three children; another cluster of women in white just to her left, chatting; a clutch of men and women holding umbrellas. But the sharpest and most dominant foreground depiction is that of a grand horse-­ drawn carriage — ​­a symbol of high-­hatted white wealth that presides over the affair, spectral Union Jack waving above it.6 The inscription to the piece reads in part, “Procession of the Baptist Church and Congregation in Spanish Town under the Pastoral Care of the Revd. J. M. Phillippo and about 2000 Children of their Schools and Their teachers,” emphasizing not the jubilation of black liberation but the efficacy of Protestant abolitionism and the perpetuation of orderly church mores.7 And as Tim Barringer notes, Picken’s lithograph, produced between 1838 and 1853, was likely the model for another widely circulated image of emancipation celebrations, the engraving “Emancipation, 1st August 1834” that was published in Phillippo’s book Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843) (fig. 21.2).8 A fascinating warping takes place. The engraving itself appears as if Picken’s image were enlarged and bent slightly, introducing a certain rotundity and circularity to the image that is entirely missing in the emphatic linearity of its progenitor. But there is a time-­warp effect as well: as Barringer notes, the image purports to represent the first abortive celebrations of freedom four years previous. It is in fact an image of celebrations occurring four years hence. As with the text of the Act of Abolition that it occasions,

Jamaican Performance

625

freedom must repeat. It is never accomplished once and for all, and its public commemoration somehow manages, at the time and in its reproduction, to reintroduce freedom’s limitations. Commemorations of emancipation become powerful embodied memorials of freedom; they also signify the necessity of freedom’s remembrance — ​­a necessity borne, in part, of its limits.9 Those limits emerge quite clearly in visual representations of jubilee celebrations, images in which racial codes and hierarchies are strikingly depicted and the black body continues to be visible either as labor, as a potentially explosive threat, or as a menacing or absurd mimicry of white colonial prestige. In R. A. Leighton’s lithograph Celebration of the 1st of August 1838 at Dawkins Caymanas (fig. 21.3), a banquet table, lavishly set, dominates the centerline of the image, appearing to go on infinitely into a receding horizon.10 This is a feast of apparently unfathomable abundance, then, keying slavery’s abolition to the continuance of colony’s prodigious productivity and even, potentially, the continuation of creole excess. Appearing to continue as well are the rigid racial divisions that defined the era of slavery, the passing of which is putatively being celebrated. For on closer inspection, there is a break in that long table — ​­there are in fact two tables — ​­and black subjects are relegated to the back, white subjects dominate the front. In addition, disturbing that long centerline are distracting figures rendered in kinetic angles — ​­black servers dressed formally and busily fetching food and drink for the diners. Even in the most exuberant of the colonial visual representations of the 1838 emancipation, Adolphe Duperly’s explosive lithograph titled Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery in Jamaica, on the First August 1838 (1838) (see introduction, fig I.1), the jubilant effect of former slaves depicted in gold-­tinged crowds, with a few black dandies pointedly reclining in leisure in the foreground, is rather undercut by the anxiety introduced by the smoking bonfire hovering over two-­thirds of the image.11 A portent of things to come, perhaps, but also clear evidence of predominant attitudes about the implications of black freedom. If visual representations of orderly procession give us one sense of how emancipation was performed, then these must be set against remarkable performance modes that former slaves developed for themselves, often by grafting and melding religious and masking traditions from the plantation onto celebrations of their new legal situation. One of the earliest forms of postemancipation black performance in Jamaica is Bruckins, or Bruckins Party, an emancipation-­era celebration that involved music, dance, procession, and reenactment. B. W. Higman’s thorough account of the history of Emancipation Day celebrations in Jamaica notes that the dancing, singing, and drumming of Bruckins would have emerged out of slavery-­era crop-­over celebrations, with which the August 1 date

626

Nadia Ellis

F ig . 2 1. 2   James Mursell Phillippo, after Thomas Picken, Emancipation, 1st August, 1834, from Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

F ig . 2 1. 3   R. A. Leighton, after William Ramsay, Celebration of the 1st August 1838 at Dawkins Caymanas near Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1838. Lithograph with watercolor. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica.

of emancipation coincided.12 As slaves had ritually celebrated the moment in the plantation calendar when there was a brief reprieve from unrelenting labor, now the formerly enslaved could celebrate a passage off the plantation altogether. (Or at least so it would have seemed in principle.) And though sectors of the white dominant class would attempt to co-­opt or curtail the celebrations — ​­Higman describes church services in 1838 aimed at preaching diligence to the former slaves and a parish magistrate in 1847 condemning the “illegal revelry” that had been going on for ten days — ​­black Jamaicans continued to celebrate Bruckins Party in their own ways.13 For instance Errol Hill describes Bruckins as the culminating dance element of the August 1 emancipation commemorations that occurred for decades, beginning that first “Augus’ Mawning” of 1834: “[The] commemoration coincided roughly with the old Crop-­over festivities on sugar estates, but for the ex-­slaves it was more meaningful, signifying for them the new liberty to observe their day of freedom as they wished, without restrictions from their masters. Thus ‘drumming, fifing, dancing and john-­canooing in the demi-­savage spirit of olden time’ characterized the August holiday, which could stretch into a two-­week respite from plantation labor.” 14 The editorializing description about the “demi-­savage spirit” of the celebrations (as well as the common conflation of Bruckins with the earlier Jamaican masquerade form Jonkonnu) comes from an article published in the Falmouth Post on August 6, 1847, which Hill cites to give a sense of the conflicting perspectives surrounding these embodied performances of freedom on the island. What was for blacks an ecstatic exercise of movement, agency, and theater was for colonial authorities a nuisance, or even a threat, to be curtailed and for missionaries a wasteful, potentially licentious tradition that needed to be groomed into decorous, church-­based tea parties. Ultimately, former slaves managed to make of Bruckins Party all of those things and more. It became a way to bring together traditions from the era of slavery, including Jonkonnu, Anancy stories, songs, and dance, into complex enactments of autonomy. Newspapers describe elaborate, formal presentations in which bureaucratic administrations were invented, positions assigned, and speeches given, all in ritualized mimicry of the very forms of colonial power that had long held blacks in slavery and continued to oppress them. Mimicry, particularly in the context of masquerade, is always a complex co-­optation of power. Hill quotes from Gall’s Newsletter to describe one jubilee that took place on an estate in Vere parish in 1874. The celebrants cleaned out one of the Estate’s buildings, decorated it with tropical flowers and fruit, and a variety of flags designed and executed themselves. One had a rough-­drawn picture of the Great House on the Estate, 628

Nadia Ellis

another had a picture representing “the Busha” (Mr. John Macgregor), a third had “Papa Grant” (Sir John Grant), others had mottoes. On each of these flags were letters for the “Busha,” the Overseer, the Bookkeeper, and the Rector of the Parish, who had seats of honor provided for them at the head of the table which was bountifully supplied with fruit, cakes, ale, porter, lemonade, and old rum. A procession was formed, and the whole Estate’s labourers marched passed the Attorney and his Assistants with these flags singing.15 The use of flags and a lavishly set table suggests that unbeknownst to the reporter, this celebration might have been in the mode of Revival Zion, an Afro-­Jamaican religious tradition that emerged out of the Christian evangelical “Great Revival” of 1860–­1861 and in which altars of fruit and vegetable are set to sacralize space.16 To be sure, descriptions of Revivalist settings usually refer to one flagpole centering the ceremony, not several in procession.17 However, perhaps the jubilee was syncretized, offering a subversive masquerade of colonial power alongside an Africanist celebration that appeared like (or was even designed to appear like) respect for colonial power. Either way, the attention to form, roles, and ceremony had a paradoxical effect. The “President and Presidentriss, Vice and Vicetriss, Controller and Controllist, Sheriff and Sheriffistress, and Founder” listed in the jubilee program have titles no less grandiose than European monarchy.18 Meantime, Queen Victoria herself is venerated as the comparatively humble-­sounding “Missis Queen” and her colonial surrogates on the estate are rendered “Busha” (a term for “white” with potentially derogatory overtones that the newspaper does not appear to register) and “Papa,” a localizing term if ever there was one. That “Busha” and “Papa” are both flagged by quotation marks and both refer to white subjects with usually unimpeachable authority draws attention to the paradoxes of the carnivalesque that is in the play here. Things are topsy-­turvy, yes. Black subjects are elevated through extravagant honorifics and whites apparently diminished through titles that are creole diminutives. Yet, a certain paternalism remains embedded in both terms for white authority that gestures to the long-­lingering effects of colonial hierarchy to which former slaves would be subject for generations. The Jonkonnu masquerade is one of the oldest Jamaican expressions of the carnivalesque, and its incorporation into Victorian-­era performances of freedom is both striking and conceptually resonant. Since much has already been written about this very rich form, and since its origins predate the period under consideration by a century or more, I will limit my comments here, focusing on the fact that even though it began during the period of slavery, Jonkonnu had a long and varied career after emancipation, with several flashpoints surJamaican Performance

629

rounding its persistence occurring during the nineteenth century.19 Some of the most vivid images of postemancipation Jamaican cultural life we have are those produced by Isaac Mendes Belisario of Jonkunnu players. These images, now widely circulated after modern reproductions appeared after independence, establish the tradition’s lavish dimensions of costume and adornment and its clear connection to West African forms. Belisario’s lithographic series Sketches of Character in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (1837–­1838) includes elaborate, hand-­colored images of Jonkonnu characters such as Actor Boy and the player he calls “Jaw Bone or John Canoe,” which depict a stripe-­suited young man with long white wig and elaborate miniature house on his head (fig. 21.4).20 These elements of costuming, parade, competing bands, and dance found a place within August 1 and Bruckins celebrations, at which Jonkunnu players began appearing in the nineteenth century. With slaveholders’ patronage gone and with emancipation providing a potent analogue to the expressions of freedom and power that Jonkonnu symbolized, the masquerade took on another ritual context. Indeed, as Swithin Wilmot shows, Jonkonnu has also been associated with outright rebellion. When in 1841 the mayor of Kingston banned the Christmas Jonkonnu festival, revelers took to the streets anyway and clashed with police.21 After paraders and their supporters refused to disperse even once the Riot Act was read, police opened fire, killing two men and injuring many others.22 Jonkonnu had become a performed rite of freedom, and the mayor’s attempt to curb it was read specifically by the revelers as an affront to the principle of emancipation: one reveler was reported as saying “they were free and would not be made slaves of ” by having their celebration taken away.23 Jonkonnu’s association with Jamaican creole religion was also clear, and this association transformed over time. The masquerade had clear influences from the Yoruba Egungun cult, whose masks and performances were associated with ancestral veneration.24 But as new forms of Jamaican creole religion developed, Jonkonnu practitioners also became associated with these. In the early 1920s Martha Beckwith interviewed a Maroon Myal practitioner who was also a Jonkonnu performer in St. Elizabeth. He said that “before ‘building’ the house-­shaped structure worn in the dance, a feast must be given consisting of goat’s meat boiled without salt, together with plenty of rum” and that “the night before [the house] is brought out in public, it is taken to the cemetery, and there the songs and dances are rehearsed in order to ‘catch the spirit of the dead,’ which henceforth accompanies the dancer.” 25 Similarly, Kenneth Bilby’s research on a rich, present-­day survival of Jonkonnu in the St. Elizabeth parish of Jamaica shows its overlap with spiritual traditions of ancestral veneration, including

630

Nadia Ellis

F ig . 2 1. 4   Isaac Mendes Belisario, Jaw-­Bone, or House John-­Canoe, lithograph with watercolor, from Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (1837). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Folio A 2011 24.

that of Gumbay Play, a connection exemplified not least by the presence of the characteristic square Gumbay drum.26 It is not surprising that an elaborate performance practice such as Jonkunnu should have some contextual association with Myal, a Jamaican religion with its own aesthetic principles and performance practices. “Myal” had circulated as a term since the eighteenth century, sometimes aligned with obeah (the better known term for the complex of slave-​creole religions colonial observers encountered) and most often opposed to it, described as obeah’s “good” sister. (See, for instance, Gardener, who, writing in 1873, says, “Of late years Myalism has generally been regarded as an art by which that of the Obeah man could be counteracted.”) 27 Dianne Stewart’s study of Jamaican religion, Three Eyes for the Journey, convincingly dismantles that binary.28 Along with several other scholars of religion, Stewart also provides a compelling account of the way nineteenth-­century Myal practice continued to develop in relation to later Jamaican religious movements, particularly Revival and Kumina. Myal’s complex incorporation of belief in spiritual powers, visions, and healing also involved a significant component of dance, singing, and spiritual possession — ​ ­elements, that is, of ritual performance. To Gardner’s vague evocation of a “Myal dance” performed during healing rites, one might add the missionary Hope Masterton Waddell’s journal entries about experiences with his church members’ Myal practice.29 Writing both about his parishioners’ visits to Myalmen for healing — ​­at these moments his language is a curious suspension between derision and intense curiosity — ​­and about group rituals he observed, Waddell’s descriptions are an example of the colonial view into practices of black religion, spirituality, and healing. They are, that is, biased but evocative, compromised but paradoxically compelling, as they constitute some of the very few records we have. For instance, writing about an “outbreak” in Myal practice among his church members, Waddell records a visit to instruct the people in ways to avoid these supposedly corrupting practices. In the midst, he happens upon a Myal ceremony, the very description of which overwhelms his attempts at restoring order. Myal, he begins, was the strangest combination of Christianity and heathenism ever seen. After these fanatics had spent several days extracting the supposed pernicious substances from the houses and gardens of their own class, with singing, and dancing, and various peculiar rites, and had declared their purpose to enter and search every house in the village, my people were alarmed, and reported the matter to me, desiring advice on how they were to act. Of course, I told them by no means to open their doors

632

Nadia Ellis

to them, nor to follow them elsewhere; and if violence were offered to force an entrance, they should go to the overseer and the attorney for protection. It seemed needful I should visit the place, and have a special meeting with the people; and the following Sabbath evening I went, accompanied by a few trusty elders and members of our church. We used to meet in the old “great house,” but on this occasion were attracted to the village by the noise of the Myal proceedings. There we found them in full force and employment, forming a ring, around which were a multitude of onlookers. Inside the circle some females performed a mystic dance, sailing round and round, and wheeling in the centre with outspread arms, and wild looks and gestures. Other hummed, or whistled a low monotonous tune, to which the performers kept time, as did the people around also, by hand and feet and the swaying of their bodies. A man, who seemed to direct the performance, stood at one side, with folded arms, quietly watching their evolutions.30 If Waddell attempts to undermine the veracity of the ceremony by referring to the Myalman as the director of a performance, he succeeds only in confirming the ritual power of the aesthetic aspects of Myal practice. And his descriptions of circular dance, even his use of the term “wheeling,” conforms with descriptions of Revival and Kumina ceremonies in much later accounts, providing evidence for the connections that would be forged between these traditions. Further, Beckwith’s chapter on Myal in Black Roadways and Kenneth Bilby’s late twentieth-­century research on Kumina both reveal the emphasis in this tradition on elements of dancing and drumming.31 The spiritual and healing power ascribed to Myal men and women was not easily distinguishable from their movement and song. Indeed, it is still difficult to distinguish between Myal as a discrete religion and myal as a state of possession or dance within other Jamaican religions. This is a powerful example of the relationship between embodied performance and black Jamaican spirituality. Another Jamaican creole religion, Kumina, is a dense form that conjoins many of the issues with which my essay has so far been concerned. As Monica Schuler’s work first showed, Kumina developed in the wake of arrivals by Central African indentured laborers in the 1840s and is therefore a truly postemancipation Jamaican tradition.32 Its principal archive is the oral testimony and practice of modern-­day practitioners. Kumina, then, emphasizes the embodied repertoire over the written colonial archive, to use Diana Taylor’s powerful theorization.33 In scholarship on this tradition, we encounter interviews with practitioners such

Jamaican Performance

633

Fig. 21. 5   Maria LaYacona, photographer, Pocomania [National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica], 1963, from Rex M. Nettleford, Dance Jamaica: Renewal and Continuity (2009). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

as the late Kumina priestess Imogen “Queenie” Kennedy, and we are compelled to understand historical mediation in a different way than when confronted with written colonial sources.34 Instead of working through the racist biases that testify to a text’s displacement in time, with scholars such as Schuler, Dianne Stewart, Olive Lewin, Maureen Warner-­Lewis, Kenneth Bilby, and Fu-­Kiau Bunseki we are compelled to rethink the archival status of memory. Might a twentieth-­century practitioner’s memories of her grandparent’s experience be used as evidence for conditions of nineteenth-­century indenture? The work of these scholars suggests that they might. And can a practitioner’s memories of her initiation into Kumina be used as ethnographic support for the retention of Central African language in Jamaica? This is one implication of Queenie’s claims for her knowledge of what in Kumina is called “country” language.35 Kumina also provides one of the most powerful hinges between performance traditions in the nineteenth century and theatrical ones in the twentieth, since its forms have famously been transformed on the stage. Dance theatre in Jamaica is currently one of the most prominent of the national artistic forms, and the most prominent of dance companies, the National Dance Theatre Company (ndtc), has been responsible for introducing many modern audiences to the

634

Nadia Ellis

aesthetics of Kumina. The scholar, choreographer, and dancer Rex Nettleford, the ndtc’s longtime director, attended Kumina ceremonies with his dancers and studied the movements and forms of their worship for his 1963 work Pocomania (fig. 21.5).36 Nettleford insisted on the distinction between representations on the stage of ritual performance and those embodied practices in ritual space, bristling particularly at charges that his dances are not “authentic.” 37 But several have pointed out that it was not until the ndtc staged Pocomania that many middle-­class Kingston-­dwellers learned about the beauty of Africanist religious practices and formed an appreciation for them. This is by no means an uncomplicated affair. It has been argued that staged performances coopt sacred practices, particularly egregious when communities of practitioners continue to be economically and politically disenfranchised. But even given this legitimate charge, the question of mediated access to these traditions suggests something of the dynamism of the relationship between religious practice and performance. It also reintroduces the question of the archive. Throughout this essay I have been suggesting the ways in which embodied practice created spiritual tradition. For some in the twentieth century, these traditions were experienced as abstracted, decontextualized, and — ​­for audience members — ​­embodied in only the most limited way. But spiritual ideas were still, in some sense, being carried through performance. Many Jamaicans have come to “know” Kumina through Kumina, Rex Nettleford’s other famous religiously inflected dance. Modern, middle-­class impressions of Jamaican religious folk practices have been informed, to a significant degree, by aesthetic presentations such as the ndtc’s, which has created a body of knowledge that informs popular opinion of Africanist religion. It may appear curious that in an essay on performance I have yet to discuss theater per se. As will have become clear, however, a rich culture of performance existed among the majority black population in Jamaica, most of whom did not have access to the stages that had been developed throughout the colonial era. Jamaican theater during the nineteenth century was primarily occupied by visiting troupes from the United States and by a small minority of performers who were locally based.38 The story here is fascinating, too, particularly the history of its telling. But formal theater composes only a small segment of the larger performance culture of Jamaica. This is notable in comparison with the United States, where the stage demonstrated complex engagement with matters of race, persistently theatricalizing its dramas of slavery and abolition. One need think only of the multiple stagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, at the beginnings of modern U.S. theater, to make the connection between race, slavery, and staged performance in the U.S. context. No such sustained, obses-

Jamaican Performance

635

sive working out of race in Jamaica occurred on its grandest stages — ​­though it is interesting to note that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that hardy text of America’s racial guilt, did make its way to Jamaica at least three times in the late nineteenth century.39 Displacement is one of the procedures of the theatrical: working through local racial dynamics with recourse to those in the United States is one of the effects this staging would have accomplished. However, lest I appear to be suggesting too strong a breach between theater and performance, it is Belisario himself, our source exemplar of vernacular black performance in Jamaica, who indicates how black creole performers emerged in more formal, theatrical settings in the nineteenth century. In Sketches Belisario describes the transition of Jonkonnu bandleaders from community heavyweights to professional reciters, as the older tradition began to wane: “Of late years, this class of John Canoe has found but little inducement for the exercise of his talent, wanting that grand stimulant to energy — ​­Competition — ​ ­candidates for Dramatic fame among his brethren having gradually decreased in numbers, leaving the field open to a few only of these heroes of the Sock and Buskin who, from having once figured prominently in the higher walks of their art, now descend from their pedestals, and content themselves annually with the public exhibition of their finery, and the performance of certain unmeaning pantomimic actions, which are also repeated at private dwellings.” 40 These “pantomimes,” according to Belisario, often took the form of recitation of classical theater works, including Shakespeare. “‘Richard the Third’ was a favorite tragedy with them,” he writes, “but selections only were made from it, without paying the slightest regard to the order in which the Bard of Avon chose to arrange his subject.” 41 Belisario means this as critique, but given the theme of ambivalence and agency I have been exploring throughout, I find in his commentary enabling possibilities for reading against the grain. As black creole performers transitioned to European practices of textual recitation, they surely disordered these practices in the process. Nothing seems more in keeping with the carnivalesque origins of Jamaican vernacular performance than the satirical edge introduced by turning European artifacts against themselves. And nothing is more consistent in the colonial reporting of the free, performing black body than an absence of awareness of irony. It bears noting that the paratext of Errol Hill’s foundational work on Jamaican theater presents precisely the duality of its performance traditions as well as the complications of the archive. On the dedication page in large text is the following dedication: “To the ancestral spirits.” Below, in smaller text, is the following epigraph from a colonial newspaper in 1889: “Indisputably, the love of drama abounds to an extent which we venture to assert is unequalled

636

Nadia Ellis

in this quarter of the globe.” At the very opening of Hill’s work on Jamaican drama, then, is an acknowledgment of the spiritual practices that so profoundly inform it. Hill, too, references the colonial viewfinders that are inevitable in any research into historical performance — ​­that essentialism that is both ill-­ informed and putatively all-­knowing. Finally, by including the newspaper quotation at all, Hill offers a winking acknowledgment that there is indeed something to the claim of the Jamaicans’ deep attraction to drama. For reasons related to slavery’s injunctions and emancipation’s ironies, a rich tradition of performance suffuses the cultural landscape of this complex Caribbean nation.

Notes 1. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­ Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125. 2. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. 3. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 5. 4. An Act For the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves. 28th August 1833. The Debates in Parliament, Session 1833, on the Resolutions and Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies. With a Copy of the Act of Parliament. (London: Piccadilly, 1834), 929. Ebook. Accessed via Google Books July 17, 2017. 5. An Act For the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies, 930. 6. Thomas Picken, Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica, 1838 (1838–­1853), National Library of Jamaica. Reproduced in Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­ Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 507. 7. Picken, Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica. 8. Tim Barringer, “James M. Phillippo (1795–­1875), Jamaica: Its Past and Present State,” in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Emancipation in Jamaica, 366. 9. Emancipation reenactments and celebrations continue to this day, and Emancipation Day is once again a national holiday in Jamaica. Notable among the celebrations are the commemorative events spearheaded by the novelist and historical sociologist Erna Brodber in the village of Woodside, St. Mary. 10. R. A. Leighton, Celebration of the 1st August 1838 at Dawkins Caymanas near Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1838, lithograph. 11. Adolphe Duperly, Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery in Jamaica, on the First August 1838 (1838), National Library of Jamaica. Reproduced in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 509. 12. B.  W. Higman, “Slavery Remembered: The Celebration of Emancipation in Jamaica,” Journal of Caribbean History 12 (1979): 55–­74.

Jamaican Performance

637

13. Higman, “Slavery Remembered,” 57, 59. 14. Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–­1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 253. 15. Galls Newsletter, August 10, 1874, quoted in Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 254. 16. There are ample sources on Revival Zion, including most recently and prominently Dianne Stewart’s Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), especially chapter 4, 106–­30. For accounts of the 1960–­1961 Revival — ​­its complex theological context in the European and American movements and their relationship to the African-­based Jamaican religions with which they dynamically interacted — ​­see Diane Austin-­Broos, Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 17. In his early and influential study on Revival, Edward Seaga notes, “A tall pole usually marks a Zion or Pukkumina ground. It flies a flag which is intended both to attract passing spirits and at the same time identifies the place as a Revival ground.” Seaga, “Revival Cults in Jamaica: Notes Towards a Sociology of Religion,” Jamaica Journal, June 1969, 6. Similarly, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell writes that “Zionists showcase a red flag” on a “tall conspicuous flag pole at the ‘meeting house.’ ” See Murrell, Afro-­ Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 271. 18. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 254. 19. A Christmastime celebration that took root on plantations, Jonkunnu involved slaves dressing in costumes, marching to drums and fifes to the very heart of the great House, singing songs (which sometimes satirically mocked the masters), and demanding payment for the spectacle offered. The extravagance of these proceedings clearly fascinated colonial observers, who found the impunity of the slaves during these masquerades and the clear influence of African ritual forms both impressive and terrifying. Silently quoting from uncited eighteenth-­century accounts, W. J. Gardner’s History of Jamaica (1873) describes a Christmastime revel in which “crowds of men dressed up in a fantastic manner, with cows’ horns on their heads, horrid masks and boars’ tusks on their faces, and followed by numbers of excited women, danced through the streets and lanes, yelling at every door — ​­‘John Connu, John Connu! ’ ” See Gardner, A History of Jamaica from Its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Year 1872 (1873; London: Frank Cass and Co., 1971), 184. Colonial speculation and scholarly research into its origins have produced multiple accounts, a diversity of opinion that is reflected in the variety of renderings of its name. One sees most often John Canoe — ​­possibly a back formation based on the boat mask that is one of its most prominent features. For a survey of the historical sources on Jonkunnu, see Michael Craton, “Decoding Pitchy Patchy: The Roots, Branches, and Essence of Junkanoo,” Slavery and Abolition 16, no. 1 (1995): 14–­44; and Judith Bettelheim, “Jonkunno and Other Christmas Masquerades,” Caribbean Festival Arts, ed. John Nunley and Judith Bettelheim (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 39–­84. That essay collection, published as an accompaniment to the exhibition Caribbean Festival Arts at the St. Louis Art Museum, is itself a useful reference work on Caribbean performance, lavishly illustrated.

638

Nadia Ellis

03 Jamaica 4PP_pt3-bm_p551-724.indd 638

2/27/18 10:10 AM

20. Originally published in Kingston and circulated by subscription, the entire series is reproduced in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz. 21. Swithin Wilmot, “The Politics of Protest in Free Jamaica: The Kingston John Canoe Christmas Riots, 1840 and 1841,” Caribbean Quarterly 36, nos. 3–­4 (1990): 65–­76. 22. Wilmot, “The Politics of Protest in Free Jamaica,” 72–­73. 23. C.O. 137/​256, Elgin to Stanley, No. 59, December 16, 1842, quoted in Wilmot, “The Politics of Protest,” 73. 24. See, for example, Robert Farris Thompson’s amply illustrated essay on Nigerian analogues and ​antecedents to Jamaican Jonkonnu “Charters for the Spirit: Afro-­ Jamaican Music and Art,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, 89–­101. 25. Martha Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 151. Although the interview took place in the early 1920s, White’s memory would have reflected Victorian-­era practice. During the 1920s, Beckwith also acquired a house Jonkonnu, which is now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. 26. Kenneth Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye: African-­Jamaican Festivities in the Time of Belisario,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, 121–­35. 27. Gardner, A History of Jamaica, 191. 28. Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 29. “The Obeah men introduced a dance called the Myal dance, and formed a secret society, the members of which were to be made invulnerable, or if they died, life was to be restored. . . . After [a rum mixture] had been administered to some one chosen for the purpose, the Myal dance began, and presently the victim staggered and fell, to all appearance dead,” in Gardner, A History of Jamaica, 191. 30. Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-­Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1863), 189–­90. 31. Beckwith, Black Roadways, 142–­56; Kenneth Bilby, “Gumbay, Myal, and the Great House: New Evidence on the Religious Background of Jonkunnu,” acij Research Review 4 (1999): 47–­70, quoted in Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 51–­53. 32. Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–­1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 33. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 34. Maureeen Warner-­Lewis’s pioneering essay, which includes a priceless interview with Kennedy, is The Nkuyu, Spirit Messengers of the Kumina (Kingston: Savacou, 1977). The Jamaican musicologist Olive Lewin also includes Kennedy’s own words about her spiritual call, initiation, and endowment with a language specific to Kumina practice, as well as her continued converse with and service of the spirits. See Lewin, Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000).

Jamaican Performance

639

Monica Schuler’s history of Kumina and its birth in the wake of nineteenth-­century migration to Jamaica by African indentured labor, includes important oral sources. See her Alas, Alas Kongo: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–­1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Kenneth Bilby and Fu-­ Kiau Bunseki’s foundational research into Kumina relied on extensive interviews with communities of practioners in Jamaica. See their Kumina: A Kongo-­Based Tradition in the New World (Brussels: Centre d’étude et de documentation africaines, 1983). See also Dianne Stewart’s Three Eyes for the Journey (2005) for her detailed and compelling research on Kumina, which includes interviews with contemporary practicioners. 35. See especially Warner-­Lewis, The Nkuyu; and Lewin, Rock It Come Over. 36. Rex Nettleford, “Pocomania in Dance-­Theatre,” Jamaica Journal 3, no. 2 (1969): 21–­24. 37. “Folk dancing is for participating and not as theatre dancing is, for viewing. Nowhere are these [folk forms] translated wholesale on the stage.” Rex Nettleford quoted in Sabine Sorgel, Dancing Postcolonialism: The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007), 130. Sorgel also notes that young dancers learning movements for the remounting of Pocomania forty years after its premiere had to “carefully train not to ‘catch the spirit,’” Dancing Postcolonialism, 123. 38. For histories of visiting theater troupes and the building and development of theaters in Jamaica, see Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica: 1682–­1838 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1937); and Hill, The Jamaican Stage. 39. Hill, The Jamaican Stage. 40. Belisario, Sketches of Character (1838); reprinted in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz. 41. Belisario, Sketches of Character.

640

Nadia Ellis

CHAPTER 22

Black Jamaica and the Victorian Musical Imaginary D A N I E L T. N E E LY

In the Victorian period, Jamaican society changed dramatically as a grim new picture of freedom unfolded. After “full free” in 1838, a societal and economic inequality emerged on the estates between the newly freed slaves, who had cultivated their lands for generations, felt deep ancestral links with them, and considered them their own, and the estate owners, who wanted to charge them exorbitant rents to remain. Despite this untenable land situation, many free blacks stayed. But by the 1840s, tens of thousands had relocated to the so-­called free villages, estate subdivisions offered for sale by white Baptist ministers in protest of what they felt was a continuation of the plantation system’s abuses. Once established there, however, the newly freed slaves found an alternate system of domination, one that promised increased status through individual salvation, private morality, and education but ultimately promoted white superiority, fostered dependency, and discouraged critical thinking. In both communities, freedom and autonomy were achieved only in service of others.1 This reality had enormous implications for music. African traditions that had earlier provided cultural space that contributed to a sense of community and continuity were at risk. Certain instruments and songs were considered suspect by planters and the colonial authorities. For many former slaves, it was a challenge to find an expressive voice suited to a new colonial circumstance — ​ ­one that could survive in the Victorian moment. Perhaps this meant dancing the forms popular with the authorities or singing gospel songs in a way that resonated with both missionary and free-­black sensibilities. Masking might now take place in plain sight, through forms and institutions familiar to those whose message was being resisted. As the century unfolded, often in the face of economic hardship, creolized music became increasingly heterogeneous. Through the cracks of Jamaican society, new musical forms emerged independent of and ultimately indifferent to late nineteenth-­century public discourse about how Jamaican music should sound.

Jonkonnu Today, Jonkonnu is known as a traditional secular Christmastime street festival that includes masquerading and music. Contemporary Jonkonnu groups often comprise the characters King, Queen, Horsehead, Cowhead, Pitchy-­Patchy, Devil, Actor Boy, Belly Woman, and Wild Indian, each of which has a unique identifying dance. Musical accompaniment is marked by short, repetitive, melismatic melodies played on fife and drumming played by one or more snare-­like side drums and a bass drum but may also include tambourines, conch shells, cow horns, and metal graters. However, Jonkonnu has a much longer and more complicated history that influenced what music in Victorian Jamaica looked and sounded like. Jonkonnu was a medium that allowed practitioners to engage in a process of self-­definition and dramatized Africa’s relationship to power. That its African legacy predates the slave trade helped it flourish in many iterations in the New World, sometimes with an overt ancestral spiritual element. Kenneth Bilby has linked contemporary Jonkonnu in some parts of Jamaica to remnants of an African-­based religion called Gumbay Play.2 A similarly spiritual dimension has been documented in African-­based masquerade traditions elsewhere in the Caribbean, including rara in Haiti and wanáragua in Belize, and to a lesser degree in junkanoo in the Bahamas, gombey in Bermuda, and masquerade in St. Kitts and Nevis. A further, likely related Afro-­creole tradition in Jamaica is Buru, a Christmastime religious observance that includes a masquerade festival and is accompanied by a distinct set of three drums — ​­the bass, funde, and repeater — ​­later incorporated into the Rastafarian nyabinghi style of drumming. Details of Jonkonnu, whose existence was first noted by Hans Sloane in 1687–­1688, were not more fully elaborated until Edward Long’s sketch in 1774, in which the festival was named and some of its practices described.3 Subsequent accounts portray, in often disdainful terms, a dynamic, malleable festival that permitted slaves a certain degree of free expression at the end of the sugarcane planting seasons in late December and at the harvest around the beginning of August, or “crop-­over.” Preemancipation descriptions emphasize the practice’s African elements and describe music played on homemade instruments accompanied by some measure of group singing. Modern and early nineteenth-­century sources show that Jonkonnu was just one of several coexisting masquerades that shared time in Jamaica’s public spaces during slavery. For example, the Actor Boys and the Set Girls variously included the wearing of martial colors, theatrical recitation, and musical accompaniment based on a British fife and drum model, clearly representing

642

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

a Euro-­creole approach. The Actor Boys appear in literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the writing of Lady Nugent (1801), Monk Lewis (1816), Alexander Barclay (1823), and H. T. De La Beche (1824), but the exact timing of its emergence is unclear.4 In each of these sources, the practice consists of costumed actors (whom the authors assumed to be slaves) acting out scenes from popular European plays in a way reminiscent of the mummers and wren-­boy traditions of England. The Set Girls developed at roughly the same time. This masquerade, in which women divide into groups or “sets” associated with a color (most often red and blue) and compete against each other for crowd favor, was first described by William Beckford, in 1790, in the context of mulatto Christmastime fetes.5 Later writers, notably Alexander Barclay in 1826, shed considerable light on their appearance and activities: The young girls of a plantation, or occasionally of two neighboring plantations leagued, form what is called “a sett.” They dress exactly in uniform, with gowns of some neat patterns of printed cotton, and take the name of Blue Girls, Yellow Girls, etc. according to the dress and the ribbon they have chosen. They have always with them in their excursions a fiddle, drum and tambourine, frequently boys playing fifes, a distinguishing flag which is waved on a pole, and generally some fantastical figure, or toy, such as a castle or tower surrounded with mirrors. A matron attends who possesses some degree of authority, and is called Queen of the Sett. . . . Thus equipped, and generally accompanied by some friends, they proceed to the neighboring plantation villages, and always visit the master’s or manager’s house, into which they enter without ceremony, and where they are joined by the white people in a dance. . . . A party of forty or fifty young girls thus attired with their hair braided over their brows, beads round their necks, and gold ear-­rings, present a very interesting and amusing sight, as they approach a house dancing, with their music playing and Joncanoe-­men capering and playing.6 Every element of the Set Girls presentation — ​­from the participants’ behavior to their colors, which Matthew Gregory Lewis suggested were borrowed from British military fashion — ​­seems to demonstrate a clear European influence.7 Accounts and descriptions of these forms suggest that each was part of a creolized masquerade complex. However, visual representations like Isaac Mendes Belisario’s engravings (fig. 22.1) and the lithographic cover of A Set, or a Christmas Scene in Kingston, Jamaica, published by F. Egan around 1840 (fig.  22.2),

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

643

F ig . 2 2 .1   Isaac Mendes Belisario, Red Set-­Girls and Jack-­in-­the-­Green, lithograph with watercolor, from Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica (1837). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Folio A 2011 24.

show that practitioners each had different ways of articulating with power while simultaneously honoring ancestral ties.8 Kenneth Bilby has argued that a “bifurcation” between, on the one hand, an “Afro creole” tradition that likely centered on the construction of house headdress and Gumbay music and, on the other hand, several “Euro creole” practices, including the Actor Boys and Set Girls, both of which could be called “Jonkonnu,” existed in the 1830s.9 Ultimately, the surface appearance of these forms told a great deal about the attitudes and values of race relations in the preemancipation era and foreshadowed how this bifurcation affected performance traditions moving forward into the Victorian era. With emancipation, estate-­based patronage disappeared. By 1839, for example, the Christmastime Jonkonnu was no longer reported on rural estates.10 Then, in 1840 and 1841, confrontations in Kingston between revelers and authorities led to rioting and loss of life and to an eventual decree from the governor, Lord Elgin, that stated that Jonkonnu festivals would be tolerated only if limited in scope and scale. Further, missionary work buttressed colonial morality and had a deleterious effect on expressive forms like Jonkonnu that appeared

644

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

F ig . 2 2 . 2   A Set, or A Christmas Scene in King Street, Kingston, Jamaica, lithograph, circa 1840, from Egan’s Fourth Set of Creole Airs, Arranged for the Piano Forte. Courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

“African” and were antithetical to the civilizing mission that attempted to bring Afro-­Jamaican culture into line with Anglo-­Protestant norms. As Bilby has suggested, this societal pressure forced masqueraders to either adopt a secular façade or move underground to survive.11 When masquerades made something of a comeback in the 1850s, the Falmouth Post reported in August 1855 on “an attempted revival of John Canooism” that was “entirely confined to the vagabond portion of the community.” In 1858, well-­to-­do residents in Montego Bay tried to revive the old Set Girl tradition. “The old time rivalry,” one newspaper wrote, “is gaining fast upon them and we understand that the splendor of bygone days will be revived in a most generous rivalry between the two colors.” 12

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

645

Bruckins The extent to which postemancipation festivals reflected an Afro-­creole Jon­ konnu is unclear. These revival efforts do show that broad support for masquerades had become generally more limited. Some effort, it seems, was being made to adapt them anew in search of expressive freedom. One Victorian-­era example is Bruckins, or the “Bruckins party,” an annual celebration of emancipation that featured dancing and music that borrowed familiar Euro-­creole elements from Jonkonnu’s past and adapted them to the new social reality. The earliest known printed use of the term “Bruckins,” or “breakings,” was in the issue of the Falmouth Post for March 3, 1857, which reported that “in Kingston ‘shameful dances’ called ‘Breakings‘ were common” and described them as “heathenish orgies” where “blacks meet together, night after night, howling like fiends, and stamping like furies.” 13 The description and timing of these “breakings” (a nineteenth-­century transliteration of the word “Bruckins”) suggests they may have been an antecedent of today’s more secular “dancehall,” but period sources are silent on the subject of masquerade.14 The origins of the term “Bruckins” remain shrouded in mystery. One recent study claims that the Bruckins tradition began in St. James in 1834; another suggests the date was 1839.15 Unfortunately, period descriptions of emancipation-­season festivities simply call black masquerades “Jonkonnu,” and only in the later nineteenth century do accounts of Bruckins come close to its form today. Modern accounts of Bruckins (which are the best we have) describe a largely Euro-­creole festival of skill and endurance starting at nightfall on July 31 and continuing until dawn on August 1 that includes a group of masquerade characters. The King, the Queen, and their various courtiers (some of whom carry swords and strike exaggerated poses) are familiar from Jonkonnu, as are the costumed sets of Reds and Blues that vie for the affections of the celebrants in the style of the Set Girls. Sources typically describe the dancing as strict but stately, with characteristic dipping and gliding motions. The music that accompanies Bruckins includes drums, graters, cymbals, and piccolo and, like modern Jonkonnu, appears to skew toward British fife and drum traditions, which suggests a symbolic engagement with — ​­if not an outright parody of — ​ ­the martial aspects of the British colonial authority. Bruckins is distinguished from the other Jonkonnu masquerades, however, by its songs, which often not only include explicit reference to Queen Victoria but also credit her accession in 1837 as the intervention that ultimately delivered emancipation finally and completely:16

646

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

Jubalee, jubalee This is the year of jubalee Augus’ morning’ come again [×3] This is the year of jubalee Queen Victoria give we free [×2]  ——— ​­ God bless the noble Queen Victoria Who set Jamaica free You no heari weh me say You no heari ban’ a play Deestant marching round the bood ——— ​­ De Queen a come in [×3] Oh yes, a beautiful sight. Red Queen a come in [×3] Oh yes, a beautiful sight. Blue Queen come in [×3] It is notable that so much agency is given to an eighteen-­year-­old woman aligned so strongly with white colonial power. But in this example, we can see Bruckins as one way of adapting the Jonkonnu complex to postemancipation society. A later development that supports this idea was its incorporation of the tea meeting. Likely introduced by Baptist and Methodist churches in the mid-­nineteenth century to combat “the traditional festive revelries of which the churches disapproved,” tea meetings were held in churches and intended as sedate fund-­raising events in which light refreshment accompanied moralistic orations from a minister or an invited guest, pleasant conversation, and hymn and anthem singing.17 In time, the tea meeting was incorporated into and became a part of the Bruckins party, where it developed as a joyous, performance-­based event during the Christmas or mid-­summer holiday season that included band music, games, elaborately presented food, and dramatic farces and competitions, promoted by sponsorship and funded by admission. By transforming a quasi-­religious practice into an occasion for free expression, the tea meeting took on new local meaning in relatively full view of religious authority.18

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

647

Missionary Musics Religion had an enormous influence on Jamaica’s development during the Victorian period, and especially on its musical life. Music can be a means to express the human’s relationship with spiritual power, and nonconformist missionaries considered it to be an important tool in Christianizing a population typically considered “primitive.” It is not clear what religious music sounded like or exactly how it changed throughout the Victorian era. It is likely that earlier in the period the practice of “lining out” melodies — ​­a form of call-­and-­ response singing in which one line is intoned at a time — ​­was widespread. It derived from books like English hymn writer Isaac Watts’s Psalms and Hymns (which appealed to Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran denominations) and the English Baptist minister James Rippon’s A Selection of Hymns. However, the religious revivals in 1831, 1840, 1860, 1861, 1865, 1883, and 1890, which were occasions for cathartic religious experience and sometimes led to the formation of local creolized Afro-­Christian religious sects that crossed ritual ancestral worship with biblical belief like Pocomania (and, to a lesser degree, Zion), likely also forced certain singing styles underground in favor of new ones. Having been several times asked the number of the Hymns, marked down by this Arch-­rebel, we can give them through no easier channel than our Columns. The Book is, “The Psalms of David, with the supplementary Hymns, by the Revd. Isaac Watts, D.D.” The Psalms marked are: — ​­3rd, Verses 4, 5, 8; 11th; 50th; “the last Judegement.” (pause Second); 115th, 2nd version; 121st, 2nd version; 139, 3rd version and 143rd.
 Hymns: 44th, 46th, 136th, 140th. Book 2nd; — ​­4th, 57th, 89th, 97th, 107th. Book 3rd:  — ​­23rd. For example, while the upper echelons of Jamaican society were contemptuous and fearful of Afro-­Jamaican religious expression, they were never more so than after the Morant Bay rebellion, in 1865, when revolution was linked to that year’s religious revival. Paul Bogle, for example, the rebellion’s leader, owned and worked from a copy of Isaac Watts’s Psalms of David. Afro-­creole musical forms played a powerful symbolic role during the rebellion, with “drums, fifes, conch shells, and horns [providing] a continuous obbligato to the action in progress, suggesting once more a continuity between forms of sociopolitical

648

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

protest and ceremonial rituals such as jonkonnu.” 19 However, it was subsequent religious gospel expression that may have been most strongly affected, with the colonial state working in concert with mainstream denominational churches to curb lower-­class religious excesses — ​­and perhaps even their singing styles — ​ ­shortly thereafter. In the second half of the century, missionaries introduced gospel music more fully. We have some sense of what this music sounded like, because many period publications included printed music and reflected a degree of stylistic consistency. Today, songs from this repertory are generically referred to as Sankeys — ​­a reference to Ira Sankey (1840–­1908), the American gospel composer who worked closely with evangelist and publisher Dwight Moody. However, Sankey and Moody did not start publishing until the 1870s and, judging by the amount of coverage their work was given in local newspapers, do not seem to have been a factor in Jamaican religious life until 1875.20 Although Sankey is given the lion’s share of credit for the music of the time, there were likely others in that era who were just as important, if not more so.21 Increased missionary work in the later nineteenth century helped make hymnbooks much more widely available and contributed to a heterogeneous but more tightly controlled religious musical climate. This is perhaps best seen in Songs of Grace and Truth, a locally produced collection of hymns published by the Rev. Dr. James Johnston, a Scotsman who was a longtime member of Jamaica’s Legislative Council, one of the fathers of Jamaican tourism, and widely considered the most successful missionary in Jamaica of his day. Arriving in Jamaica in 1874, he spent years “civilizing and Christianizing” black people in and around Brown’s Town, St. Ann, through the Evangelistic and Medical Mission, and by the 1890s he had organized “nine congregations, aggregating 7,000 members, each of which had its commodious house of worship, erected mainly by the free labor of the people.” 22 An estimated four thousand of these people were literate.23 Johnston published Songs of Grace and Truth in 1889 with the intention of “gather[ing] into one volume the universal favorites of this class now scattered throughout hundreds of collections, and to issue them in a form sufficiently cheap to reach them all.” 24 With this publication, we are provided with a tantalizing glimpse into Victorian Jamaica’s gospel tastes. The collection includes work from a wide array of American and English hymnodists, including Ira Sankey, but many others, such as Charles Gabriel, James McGranahan, George Stebbins, and Daniel Towner, are just as well represented. If this collection is an indication of the tastes of Johnston’s various congregations, then this constellation of composers suggests a fairly cosmopolitan musical outlook.

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

649

We also learn about how the hymns were intended to be used, as they are grouped by section “for all circumstance of a believer’s life, worship, work and warfare; [the hymns] present in striking form Man’s ruin by the Fall, redemption by the Blood, regeneration by the Spirit, and the hope of the Church ever in the coming of our lord Jesus Christ.” 25 That both call-­and-­response and verse-­chorus musical forms are heavily present also points to a musical preference in worship for participatory forms. Unfortunately, the collection lacks musical notation, so we cannot know how these hymns sounded. The absence of notation may have been a practical concession to basic musical illiteracy, but it leaves open the possibility that local congregations  — ​­especially Afro-­creole developments like Pocomania  — ​­could have adapted religious verse in publications such as this to local folk melody, as has happened elsewhere, most notably in the United States.26

Dance Music Another performance practice that black communities adapted and transformed during the Victorian era was dance, most notably the dances of the European ballroom, which included round dances such as the polka, mazurka, polka-­mazurka, varsovienne, two-step, and gallop; circle dances such as maypole; longways dances such as the contradance and country dance; solo dances such as jigs and clogs; and square dances such as the cotillion, quadrille, and lancers. Many of the steps in these dances could be adapted to music as needed, but others, like longways and square dances, acted as self-­contained suites that included as few as four — ​­but often more — ​­individual “figures.” 27 Before emancipation, continental and African dance choreographies seem to have had a degree of mutual exchange. John Stewart, for example, noticed in 1823 that “the Creole Negroes . . . show a decided preference for European music. Its instruments, its turns, its dances, are now pretty generally adopted by the young Creoles, who, indeed, sedulously copy their masters and mistresses in everything.” We see further progress in this choreographic direction in Henry De La Beche’s account of 1825, in which an “old school” of “goombay and African dances” coexisted with a “new school” consisting of “fiddles, reels, &c.” 28 Mutual exchange is also evident in the sheet music of that period. In Jamaica before 1834, there existed four editions of so-­called creole airs arranged for piano, as well as several local quadrilles, all of which made material borrowed from the creole and African communities a selling point.29 However, this begins to change around 1836, with the release of the fifth and final edition of creole airs (ca. 1834–­1838) and with the publication of a quadrille called The Creoles. Ded-

650

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

icated to Jamaican governor Sir Lionel Smith (whose policies largely favored white interests), it eschews any reference to Jamaica’s Africanness and instead includes two named figures — ​­“Creoles” and “Newcomes” — ​­that in context seem to reference local white identities. Then, around 1840, we see The Gleanings, the last “Jamaican” quadrille published in the era. Stylistically consistent with Continental tastes, it makes no overt reference to a local identity at all. When other European ballroom forms came into vogue in the 1860s, the quadrille lost favor with upper-­class whites. However, it remained very popular with lower-­class blacks, and it and other ballroom forms became an opportunity to resignify the elements of the colonial ballroom for local consumption. It appears that in nineteenth-­century Jamaica, the quadrille developed a local choreography that diverged fairly radically from European models. (In the later twentieth century, it was named the “camp” style.) In other parts of the Caribbean, there is even some evidence that the structural elements of European set dancing — ​­the lines and the circles — ​­“provided a curtain of secular (European-­ identified) respectability behind which to conceal or mask sacred (African-­ identified) ceremonial practices,” but whether this happened in Jamaica to any extent is not known.30 Ancient Order of Foresters Court Hinds, No, 4188 murray’s readings at St George’s School Room. By Permission of the Revd. E. Nuttal. mr. andrew c. murray, of St. Ann’s begs to inform the inhabitants of Kingston, that since he last appeared at Wallack’s Gallery with “Puss Twenga,” he has just returned and will present himself on behalf of the above Court at St George’s School Room, on Monday evening, May 12th, with the subject, “Some man does ded befo dem time.” To be concluded with “Timbo” the Quadrille Instructor, whose unrivalled grimaces through the ‘set’ has never failed to excite roars of laughter in various parts of the island. Tickets of admission — ​­One Shilling. An efficient band in attendance — ​­Doors open at 7 o’clock. Readings at 8.

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

651

However, the association between the quadrille and the black population became so entrenched that in 1879 Andrew C. Murray, a comedian who specialized in so-­called negro character sketches, was performing “Timbo, the Quadrille Instructor” to great acclaim, Murray’s “unrivaled grimace throughout the set [never failing] to excite roars of laughter in various parts of the island.” 31 By the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, quadrille and other social dances took place in organized social events called “practice” dances. There, ballroom styles were taught in what for participants was likely a gesture toward respectability. However, many practice dances were also focused on revelry and foreshadowed the spirit of contemporary dancehall.32 An October 1897 account in the Daily Gleaner, for example, describes an exuberant but fairly controlled dance in which indulging in “the light fantastic toe” is revealed as a “popular pastime with ‘young Jamaica.’” 33 A letter to the Daily Gleaner in 1900 sheds further light by calling “attention of the police to a nuisance which occurs nightly at Luke Lane, where a ‘practice dance’ is being carried on, to the annoyance of the respectable inhabitants of locality, and where the most abominable language, and fighting, goes on.” 34 Accounts of the music at these dances describe a raw sound comprising fiddles, accordions, and drums. While some of the repertory was local, much of it was adapted from foreign sources. Mento, Jamaica’s first autochthonous popular music and dance form, seems to have emerged from these practice dances. Although Herbert G. de Lisser makes explicit in 1910 the link between mento and practice dances, when precisely this association began is not known.35 Some historians date mento to the 1880s, but these claims are entirely anecdotal. The word does not appear in print until 1900, where it is characterized as a “purely African” dance. Then, in 1901, a Daily Gleaner article describes it in some detail as the name of a dance suite; there, mento “is negro for ‘lancers,’ which is patois for ‘a set of lancers.’” 36 The article goes on to include a list of songs associated with each figure.

A Mento

Called by the vulgar:—A Scrape-up. Fuss Figger . . . “Gimme me razor.” Secun " . . . “Nancy Brown.” T’uod " . . . “Cock-a-doodle.” Fourt’ " . . . “Any weh you see dem gal.” Fiff " . . . “Wake Mudder Bunns.” Sixt " . . . “Mek me party.”

652

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

However, it is likely that mento music and dance existed by name well before these printed Victorian-­era examples. How common the term was remains unclear. It is reasonable to suggest that the form existed under a variety of names before a single terminology became widespread. This pattern is suggested in the above-­cited Gleaner article of 1901, which states that “scrape up,” a term no longer found in oral tradition, was how the “vulgar” referred to a mento dance. It is also hinted at in Walter Jekyll’s seminal 1907 study, Jamaica Song and Story, the most comprehensive account of lower-­class Jamaican music and lore of the day, where mento is very clearly described but from which the word itself is conspicuously absent. In contrast, Jamaica’s Euro-­creole music in the late Victorian period more fully embraced British parlor tastes. Richard Turnbull’s two waltzes for the International Exhibition in 1891, La Belle Jamaïque and Queen of the Antilles, both dedicated to Prince George, seem to have inspired Jamaican composers to depict Jamaica through music, most popularly through the waltz form. Formulaic in structure, these new compositions included the titles Sunshine Waltz by Georgina Dunn and Pleasant Hours Waltz by Laura Murphy, both of which were dedicated to Henry Blake, the Jamaican governor at the time they were written. The close of the Victorian era saw a public assessment of Jamaica’s musical abilities set in racial terms. Modern discourse about the character and comparative value of so-­called native music began in 1894 in a Kingston-­based music periodical called Winkler’s Musical Monthly. Edited by Jamaican-­born, middle-­ class polyaesthete Astley Clerk, each issue included several selections of sheet music as well as several articles and editorials, virtually all of which advocated the dire need for musical development. In the periodical’s very first issue, a letter called “Musical or Not Musical” from a person who claimed to be living in Kent, England, questioned the musicality of “the Jamaican” and whether the colony itself was a “peculiar home of melody.” 37 Over the next several issues, “Englishman” made polemical, racially motivated assertions promoting the idea that black Jamaicans lacked original musical ability. In the wake of this debate, Jamaica’s musical intelligentsia started to think more seriously about the question of music and race. Many found ways to read new meaning into so-­called Negro music, often focusing on melody, to discover what, if anything, was peculiar about it. Opinion was divided. On the one hand, there were those like British-­born music maven Clara De Montagnac, who used the lens of comparative musicology to justify racial prejudice. On the other, there were those like the music critic George Henriques, who argued that the “crude monodies” of the African were the evolutionary predecessor of

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

653

the European classical tradition and insisted that the “plaintive” quality of these melodies was a musical expression of the suffering experienced during slavery.38 During Queen Victoria’s reign, the sound of black Jamaica and the role of this sound in society changed dramatically. Before emancipation, practitioners were able to establish a tenable, if uneasy, voice in relation to colonial power. However, after 1838, they found a dynamic existential circumstance that called for idiosyncratic cultural alliances and inventive expressive adaptation. Traditional customs like festival revelry, religious practice, and secular entertainment, some of which I have described above, found revised and often new meanings. These new meanings emerged as received symbolic forms and ideas articulated with the era’s new sense of authority and subordination, as well as with the material and ideological traces of increasing foreign influence. While the musical practices of Jamaica’s early Victorian era had mirrored colonial power somewhat passively, the multifarious forms that had emerged by era’s end inspired a largely white, ethnologically driven, and poorly considered public discourse about black music and indicated a Jamaica divided widely along racial and cultural lines. The reasons and necessity for black Jamaica’s ready embrace of post-­V ictorian modernity and change became increasingly manifest at the turn of the twentieth century. One need only look to the lyrics of the dance tunes Walter Jekyll published in 1907, many of which express a sense of ambivalence and compromise with respect to authority, for basic evidence of this. The deepening embrace of modernity is further apparent in Martha Beckwith’s 1922 observation that “the song and dialogue games of the past are being abandoned for field sports and the latest dance steps; and the special festivals at which they provided entertainment are looked upon as foolish and old-­fashioned by the more ambitious young people.” 39 Such passages illustrate the direction Jamaica had taken in the early twentieth century and are indelible reminders of how heavily the Victorian era weighed upon the progress of black Jamaica’s musical development.

Notes 1. See Richard D. E. Burton, Afro Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 95; Deborah Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 38–­41. 2. See Kenneth Bilby, “Gumbay, Myal, and the Great House: New Evidence on the Religious Background of Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” ACIJ Research Review, no. 4 (1999): 47–­70. 3. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and

654

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

Jamaica, 2 vols. (London, 1707), 1:xlviii–­xlix; Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 2:424. 4. See Frank Cundall, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1939), 66; Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West-­India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (London: John Murray, 1834), 50–­59; Alexander Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies (London: Smith, Edler and Co., 1826), 9–­14; H. T. De La Beche, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: T. Cadell, 1825), 42. 5. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (London: T. and J. Egerton, 1790), 387–­92. 6. Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies, 11–­12. 7. Lewis, Journal of a West-­India Proprietor, 53. 8. F. Egan is listed among the officers of the city of Kingston, as “Organ Regulator” in the Civil List, contained in the 1840 Jamaica Almanac, reproduced at http://www​ .jamaicanfamilysearch​.com/​Samples/​1840civl​.htm. See A Set, or A Christmas Scene in King Street, Kingston, Jamaica, Egan’s fourth Set of Creole Airs, arranged for the Piano Forte (Kingston, Jamaica: F. Egan, undated, ca. 1840). The unsigned lithographic illustration on the cover may well be the work of Adolphe Duperly. 9. Kenneth Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye: African-­Jamaican Festivities in the Time of Belisario,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 121–­35. Pointing to Belisario’s lithographs as evidence, Bilby also emphasizes that both traditions were, in fact, creole traditions that included significant crossover; the distinction he is making is based on which cultural heritage the practice in question seemed to favor. 10. Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655–­1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 248–­53. 11. Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye,” 129. 12. Falmouth Post, August 7, 1855, quoted in B. W. Higman, “Slavery Remembered: The Celebration of Emancipation in Jamaica,” Journal of Caribbean History 12 (1979): 71; Daily Advertiser, December 30, 1858, quoted in Hill, Jamaican Stage, 250. 13. Quoted in Higman, “Slavery Remembered,” 61. 14. See Normal Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). Also, Donna Hope, Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006). 15. Sabine Sörgel, Dancing Postcolonialism: The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2007). Olive Lewin’s informants suggest that Bruckins started on August 1, 1839; see her Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 114. 16. Lewin, Rock It Come Over, 113–­18. See also Olive Lewin, “Emancipation Songs and Festivities,” Jamaica Journal 17, no.  3 (1984): 18–­23; and Adina Henry, “Bruckins Party,” Jamaica Journal 17, no. 3 (1984): 25. 17. Hill, Jamaican Stage, 257.

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

655

18. Martha Beckwith, Folk-­games of Jamaica (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College, 1922), 6–­7. 19. Burton, Afro Creole, 109. 20. No mention of Moody and Sankey was made in Jamaican newspapers in 1874. However, this situation changed in 1875 with an item that stated, “It is with much pleasure that we have to announce that meetings, similar to those now being held in England by Messrs Moody & Sankey, are being held every Sunday evening at the East Queen St Baptist Chapel. . . . These meetings are very well attended we are informed, and good results are expected,” Daily Gleaner and DeCordova’s Advertising Sheet, May 15, 1875, 3. After 1875, newspaper notices about Moody and Sankey and advertising for their books become much more common. 21. At this time, numerous collections were advertised as available, including collections of Wesley’s hymns, hymnbooks of the Church of Scotland, Watts selections, and William Henry Monk’s Hymns Ancient and Modern, with Accompanying Tunes. 22. Some accounts put the number of his congregations at ten thousand. “Dr. James Johnson,” Record of Christian Work 13, no. 2 (February 1894): 38. 23. Wolfred Nelson, “Jamaica Vistas,” Daily Gleaner, April 11, 1892, 8. 24. James Johnston, Songs of Grace and Truth, for the Use of the Church, Gospel Services, Prayer Meetings and the Home Circle (Brown’s Town, Jamaica: Evangelistic and Medical Mission, n.d. [1889]), ii. 25. Johnston, Songs of Grace and Truth, iii. 26. The adaptation of secular melodies to sacred texts was common in early American tune books and popular in rural evangelical contexts. For more on the use of secular “folk” melodies in sacred contexts in the United States, see John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 2–­6. 27. A more complete analysis of set dance traditions in the Anglophone Caribbean can be found in Kenneth M. Bilby and Daniel T. Neely, “The English-­Speaking Caribbean: Re-­embodying the Colonial Ballroom,” in Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean, ed. Peter Manuel (Temple University Press, 2009), 231–­70. 28. John Stewart, View of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1823); and Henry T. De La Beche, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1825). 29. Other elements of Jamaica’s music culture at this time are covered by Stephen Banfield, “Anglophone Musical Culture in Jamaica,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, ed. Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, 137–­49. 30. Bilby and Neely, “English-­Speaking Caribbean,” 246. There, Bilby and I point to the heterogeneity of quadrille’s functions and meanings throughout the Anglophone Caribbean that suggest this possibility. 31. Advertisement for “Murray’s Reading at St George’s School Room,” in Daily Gleaner and DeCordova’s Advertising Sheet, May 7, 1879, 6. 32. John Henderson and A. S. Forrest, Jamaica (London: A. and C. Black, 1906), 58. 33. “‘The Light Fantastic Toe’: How Our People Learn Dancing,” Daily Gleaner,

656

D a n i e l T . N e e ly

October 6, 1897, 1. Incidentally, the description of the dance in this article bears striking similarity to the band Walter Jekyll described in Jamaica Song and Story (1907; New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 216–­17. 34. “Correspondence,” Daily Gleaner and DeCordova’s Advertising Sheet, June 11, 1900, 1. 35. Herbert G. de Lisser, In Jamaica and Cuba (Kingston: Gleaner Company, 1910), 109. 36. “The Other Side of Beyond: A Day in the Bush,” Daily Gleaner, November 21, 1901, 7. 37. Englishman, “Musical or Not Musical,” Winkler’s Musical Monthly 1, no. 1 (1894). 38. Clara De Montagnac, “A Jamaica Negro Melody of the Seventeenth Century, with Notes by Mrs. De Montagnac,” Journal of the Institute of Jamaica 2, no. 6 (1899): 632–­35; George A. Henriques, “An Impression: A Musical Note,” Jamaica Times, February 24, 1900, 14. 39. Jekyll, Jamaica Song and Story, esp. 216–­7 7; Beckwith, Folk Games of Jamaica, 5.

V i c t o r i a n M u s i c a l Im a g i n a r y

657

CHAPTER 23

“A Mysterious Murder” Considering Jamaican Victorianism FAITH SMITH

To put “Jamaican” and “Victorian” into the same conversation is to recognize that both have shaped each other profoundly, though this insight does not negate the political salience of demonstrating how they are distinct from each other. The affirmation of regional Caribbean or national sovereignty by challenging European and U.S. hegemony might require a distinction to be made between what is “Caribbean” and what is “English.” National anxieties render “rowdy Jamaicans” distinguishable from “well-­behaved English,” even when both groups are born in the same place: we saw this in the August 2011 demonstrations in England. On the one hand, notions of a self-­contained “national” or “English” identity have been widely questioned: think of analyses of English missionaries’ shock at the performance of corrupt whiteness by the Jamaican planter class, or of the curriculum of English canonical texts that was first conceived in India and other colonial spaces and then imported into England.1 On the other hand, Jamaicans, and Caribbean people more generally, have been theorized as being shaped, and not merely dominated, by the colonial experience. Nigel Bolland cautions us to see England as not simply external to but also constitutive of Creole cultural formation.2 Brian Moore and Michelle Johnson show us nineteenth-­century Jamaicans who reveled in their relationship to the British Empire but, crucially, whose very obliviousness to that relationship helps to account for colonial authorities’ demand that colonial subjects perform their recognition of it.3 Discussions of schoolteachers, journalists, novelists, and others of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrate that even the most anticolonial, Afro-­and Indo-­Caribbean affirmations can sometimes be read as being powerfully shaped by discourses of Englishness.4 Resisting or not resisting Englishness, then, becomes both insufficient — ​­there is so much trafficking back and forth that the tracks leading from one space to another are muddied — ​­and understandable, since the very claims to the purity, integrity, and distinctiveness of each zone can be a reaction to the blurriness of boundaries or to the inequities that structure these relationships.

In the discussion that follows I explore the insight that Jamaica and the British Empire have “mutually constituted” each other, to use Catherine Hall’s phrase, by considering the extent to which it is still “worth saying that B is constitutive of C.” 5 To consider Jamaican Victorianism is to take seriously sensibilities that may well exceed either a period rigidly defined or Victorian England’s geographical and cultural relationship to colonial Jamaica per se. In considering how colonial Jamaicans shared anxieties about modernity with others in the Americas, I will step out of a strictly Jamaican/​Victorian or even Jamaican/​English frame to show how other contexts add texture to our conceptions of each. Victorianists bristle when modern writers invoke the sense of, and a feeling for, their period but leave unspecified the historical period from which they are looking back: “What we popularly define as Victorian is frequently coterminous neither with the life of its monarch, nor even with the beginning and end of her century; it designates an aesthetic, rather than a precisely historical, concept. Contemporary cultural allusions to the Victorians sweep generously if inaccurately from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Romantics and Jane Austen therefore included) right up to the outbreak of the Great War (the death of Victoria herself thereby ignored).” 6 Jennifer Green-­Lewis’s observations here are part of a collection of essays that analyze how films, novels, plays, and photography exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s demonstrate how a “groundless postmodern imagination projects a ‘Victorian feel’ into Regency and high-­modern texts alike.” 7 For Caribbean or Jamaican versions of this perspective, we can turn to the way that antique furniture or quaint policemen’s uniforms become folded into tourism campaigns that both evoke and willfully ignore crucial aspects of the past. Is the smiling and graciously dressed butler who serves me the delicious rum punch on my tour of the beautiful great house reenacting an eighteenth-­ century scenario? And if he is therefore enslaved, what does that make me? Jamaicans can still be named to the Victorian Order by the present queen of the United Kingdom (who remains Jamaica’s head of state), as were two officers of the Jamaican Defence Force and the secretary to the governor-­general in February 2002. They were so honored, conveniently enough, for planning the Queen’s trips to Jamaica in connection with the Golden Jubilee celebrations. Victoria Jubilee Hospital and Victoria Mutual Building Society are enunciated endlessly, signs of that era’s traces in the texture of everyday life in our present, while the 1861 Offences Against Persons Act, which in Jamaica continues to render sodomy a crime, is a Victorian-­era norm that is resolutely affirmed as thoroughly “Jamaican” and necessary to the nation’s moral health and sovereignty in the present.

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

659

But it must surely be possible to be both historically sensitive and attentive to how the sensibility of a period exceeds spatial and temporal borders. Consider how the following meditation on a Jamaican living room teases out the relationship between identities that are sometimes imagined as separate and tries to capture the sensibility of a historical period too rigidly defined by showing how “Victorian” both regulates and fails to contain memory, respectability, and boundaries of geography and culture: Every corner of my grandmother’s front room was loaded with photographs of family, friends and relations. I remember a centre table covered with lace crochet that she had made, but you couldn’t put a glass down on the table because it was crammed with these photographs, frame after frame, of formal self-­representations of older relatives, of young people getting married and first born babies. There was something very “Victorian” about all this, which is mainly about packing out a space with objects. That in turn had probably been influenced by Britain’s role as the market place of the world, connected by trade to the far flung corners of its colonial world, the centre of this cornucopia of commodities and goods which somehow also circulated from one colony to another; and with the Victorian period as the high water-­mark of the practice of collecting things and cramming them together in a display space  — ​­the aesthetics of bric-­á-­brac . . . Somehow everything seemed to find [its] way into, and to find a place in, the front room: for instance the antimacassars embroidered by my grandmother and passed on to her daughters which decorated the backs of chairs was designed to produce, visually, an image (and a physical feeling) of respectability which was itself a very Victorian phenomenon. We’re talking, then, about an authentic West Indian tradition of respectability — ​­one both forged indigenously and borrowed from elsewhere — ​­which therefore, strictly speaking, had no “authenticity” about it. To what could it be “authentic” when so much of Caribbean culture is precisely this amalgam of traditions, modifications, borrow­ings, adaptations, resistances, transcriptions, translations, and appropriations, locked in an unequal relationship? The front room represents precisely a creative cultural act or form of that doubly inscribed, hybrid, or creolized kind.8

660

Fa i t h S m i t h

Retrospective Victorianism We will return later to Stuart Hall’s allusion here to the photograph’s power to place subjects in a network of relations and to call them out of time, as well as to photography’s complicity with regimes of disclosure such as criminology, but for now we can note his description of his grandmother’s negotiation with Victorianism in terms of imposition, translation, and appropriation — ​­terms that reveal it to be creolized. Her investment in “respectability” both defied the colonial assumption that she and her ancestors were inherently unworthy of respect and, ironically, endorsed the colonial project’s faith in its own moral perfection — ​­a perfection that positioned her and hers as always already imperfect. Her faith in respectability, for instance, would conceivably have led her also to designate as “uncivilized” and “undeserving” those citizens so earmarked by the colonial and postcolonial state in Jamaica and across the Caribbean. For M. Jacqui Alexander and other commentators, for instance, such anxieties about civilization and modernity explain Caribbean governments’ punitive sexual statutes in our contemporary moment.9 On the English side, too, an investment in the rightness of what “we” bequeathed to “them” (parliamentary democracy, afternoon tea, cricket) conflicts with, endorses, cancels out, or complicates considerations of the horrors attendant upon such magnanimity. Paul Gilroy describes how postcolonial melancholy produces willed amnesia, national shame about colonial atrocities such as the torture of Kenyans during the struggle for independence, and also disturbing eruptions of what has been repressed, while Sara Ahmed examines the ways in which melancholic immigrants are enjoined to dispense with the pain of memories of racist exclusion attached to, say, playing cricket, in order to achieve the happiness that is “promised in return for becoming British.” 10 There is amnesia and nostalgia at work here, then, in English as well as in Caribbean contexts. Shame, amnesia, melancholy, respectability — ​­all might be said to be constitutive of the Victorianism that has been invoked and critiqued so forcefully in the novels, poetry, memoirs, and film that have been such key components of nationalist, feminist, and anticolonial self-­fashioning across the Caribbean. George Lamming’s schoolchildren lining up for Empire Day and considering the Queen’s head on a penny in In the Castle of My Skin (1970), Richard Fung and his classmates lining up to wave to the royal family in My Mother’s Place (1990), Honor Ford Smith and her classmates in Lionheart Gal objecting to Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 representation of a Jamaican madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre at a Kingston high school in the 1970s (“It’s not fair, Miss!”),

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

661

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) giving the same character a complex life, Michelle Cliff ’s narrator invoking “the whitest woman in the world[,] Elizabeth II, great-­granddaughter of Victoria,” in Abeng (1984).11 It is no accident that late twentieth-­century fictional Caribbean characters are often reading texts written in the Victorian period, or the histories, travelogues, and plays of an earlier period that were newly canonized by the Victorians. These Caribbean novels and films show us the classroom as a key theater of inculcation, where a way of seeing the world was imposed, contested, and absorbed. It is sometimes difficult to pin down time with any accuracy in these fictional scenes: Are we in 1890, 1905, 1950? Which queen is being invoked? Besides indicating that the precise period may be irrelevant, this deliberate blurring captures the dreamlike existence of colonized, gendered, and raced subjects before they figure out their abjection; time slows down for them, or they exist in a state of being that is out of time. Beyond the young characters sitting in the classroom or the schoolyard, we find that the colony has been drugged into somnolence. Who cuts cane, who gets to be a manager, who is addressed by a first name, who can marry whom, all demonstrate that the social relations and effects of another age live on long after their time should have passed. In turn, a certain way of life is kept current, alive, and palpable, and acquires the patina of a golden age, not unlike the Merchant Ivory films that continue to seduce us. So, if my invocations here are temporally messy, it is because Victorianism, as a particular aspect of Englishness, exceeds 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, in its effects. Indeed, Empire Day was instituted as a school holiday after Queen Victoria’s death, as a way of extending the long-­standing celebration of her birthday (Victoria Day) and self-­consciously inculcating respect for empire in Jamaican schoolchildren.12 While Anglophone Caribbean texts slow down or step out of time in their rendering of colonial temporality, so too do Francophone Caribbean texts, perhaps most vividly in Euzhan Palcy’s cinematic rendering of Joseph Zobel’s Rue Cases-­Nègres (1983). As we sit with José in his Martinican classroom reciting the names of French cities, we see and hear that in this Francophone space, the assumptions about civilizing a supposedly “uncultured” populace mirror Anglophone contexts. When Médouze tells José that the rebellion that brought enslavement to an end ultimately proved that “freedom” meant nothing more than escaping the plantation, only to discover that the slave master had become the boss, he signals that poor black people have been prevented from stepping into a new political and economic time. Crucially, the credits at the beginning of the film accompany postcard scenes of respectably dressed brown-­skinned folks of yesteryear and of machete-­wielders in fields of cane who, in coming

662

Fa i t h S m i t h

to life as actual cane cutters residing in Rue Cases-­Nègres, permit the film to begin. They are the subjects of the film that will follow, a film that will give us the backstory of the respectably clothed ones, that will show how the ancestors of the black Martinicans watching the film in the late twentieth century transformed themselves from rural, impoverished respectability to urban, middle-­class respectability. These postcards, like cherished family photographs, bring to life scenes from the past, even as they arrest the film’s chronology. Like photographs, the postcards produce nostalgia that appeases past wounds while romanticizing the past. This capacity of films, novels, and other narratives to slow down or arrest time, to keep a certain past current in order to critique it, arguably has the effect of fostering the sort of celebration and consecration that undercuts critique and traffics in the pleasures of nostalgia.

“The Mysterious Murder” and Double Consciousness An 1898 short story titled “The Mysterious Murder,” an artifact of the literary culture of Victorian Jamaica, fashions “Jamaican-­ness” in terms of hybrid taxonomies of race, science, medicine, anthropology, biology, and criminology. Its narrator and cast of characters are on intimate terms with the natural landscape, and such intimacy requires the ability to distinguish between what is indigenous, natural, and native, and what is borrowed, grafted, foreign, poisonous, and threatening. What did it mean to enact Jamaicanness in the Victorian age, within and outside of Jamaica? Decades before this short story appeared, Mary Seacole, the Kingston-­based “doctress,” battled cholera and fed soldiers and gold prospectors in Jamaica and Central America before famously brushing off Florence Nightingale’s snub to establish a hostel at the Crimean warfront in the 1850s. Her medical expertise, matronly professionalism, and dark skin charmed English consumers of wartime journalism and both challenged and affirmed notions of Victorian femininity, entrepreneurship, and medical professionalism.13 If Mrs. Seacole’s extravagant bonnets or unorthodox medical experiments on animals threatened to undermine her performance of dignified respectability, her memoir’s first-­person narration — ​­garrulous, coy, and feisty — ​­was clear about its commitment to imperial “civilizing” values, even as it critiqued the seat of empire for not always living up to them. By the end of the century, “The Mysterious Murder,” as we will see, suggested that the enactment of Creole Jamaican identities was more likely to produce anxiety about the sinister registers of modernity, with dire consequences for the colony’s reputation abroad. As the century ended, Jamaicans joined other Caribbean people in following Mrs. Seacole’s earlier journeys of self-­fashioning in Panama, Costa Rica, and

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

663

elsewhere, even as political exiles entered Jamaica from Cuba and Haiti.14 At this moment, too, Jamaicans fashioned themselves self-­consciously and artificially as “tropical.” They planted palm trees, installed potted palms in hotel interiors, and photographed Afro-­Jamaicans and Indo-­Jamaicans on donkeys, to represent the colonies as quaintly premodern, and thus to earn revenue from white North American and European visitors that could in turn be used to modernize the colony’s infrastructure.15 Genealogies of Jamaica’s origins and projections for its future were traced in poetry, short stories, novels, and historical fiction published in newspapers or elsewhere at the turn of the century.16 On December 17, 1898, the Jamaica Times ran part one of “The Mysterious Murder,” by “A. James MacGregor of Kingston,” as part of an ongoing competition to promote Jamaican topics. Competitors were instructed: “The story must treat of Jamaican subjects or its scenes must be in Jamaica.” While the story itself does not explicitly invoke exiled Cubans and Haitians residing in Jamaica or black people sacrificing animals in the name of science, I do want such external contexts to hover, to thicken the texture of anxieties, of contradictions, that must be engaged in the staging and restaging of “Jamaican” identities. Such contexts are as important as those locatable on a Jamaican/​British axis. The Drs. Shalton-­Armont, “descended respectively from the ancient and aristocratic plantocracy [which term includes the class of planter-­princes of the time] of the island of Jamaica,” are brilliant as well as wealthy and have resettled in Jamaica after studying in Europe — ​­she after earning a doctorate in music in Leipzig, he after earning a medical degree in Edinburgh. Their palatial home is just outside of Kingston, close to both the Long Mountain hills and the Palisadoes-­bordered shoreline, where their boat is docked. Cabbage palm trees, “dildo” and “prickly pear” cacti, and other exotic varieties of plants both indigenous to Jamaica and “obtained from botanical gardens in various parts of the tropics” grow on the property. Many of these are poisonous, and the husband experiments with them, as well as “with occult phenomena now recognized as a branch of medical science,” such as mesmerism and catalepsy, in addition to his conventional practice as a physician. Pursuit of their respective careers in Jamaica earns them fame in Europe, he for his original experiments and she for her original compositions. The morning after he stays up late reading a medical paper on sleepwalking, he notices that his surgical instruments are missing, and he later learns that the body of his “negro” gardener, James “Barracouta Jim” Joson, has been recovered from the water with his heart removed. The shrewd “coloured” Detective Linxie eventually discovers the missing surgical instruments in the doctor’s boat, and

664

Fa i t h S m i t h

Joson’s heart in a chemical formula in a stone jar in the doctor’s laboratory. The gardener, we infer, has paid a terrible price for his employer’s experimentation. As Leah Rosenberg proposes, if “even a highly trained and accomplished doctor remains susceptible to ‘going native,’” then “Jamaica’s progress toward modernity” is at risk, because of the powerful and dangerous hold of the folk’s obsession with the African-­associated spiritual practices in Jamaica and Haiti that so interested European travel writers.17 Rosenberg also points out the controversy when Herbert Theodore Thomas attempted to include Obeah para­ phernalia in the 1891 Jamaica Exhibit.18 A few months before “A Mysterious Murder” appeared, in a piece called “The Black Art,” the Jamaica Times disclosed the potent combination of lizards, teeth, skulls, rum, and “unintelligible words” used by Obeah practitioners.19 All that decade, in fact, the Jamaican reading public was treated to police logs and court cases covered by the newspapers, and sensational pamphlets purporting to contain the true confessions of alleged practitioners and the lurid acts perpetrated on their victims. The fact that such tracts were best sellers caused consternation. In 1898 the Obeah Law (No. 5) banned their publication and circulation and also changed the definition of Obeah and refined earlier penalties for practicing it. Flogging for women and for children under ten was eliminated, for example, but the penalty for consulting practitioners was increased to a fine of fifty pounds or a year’s imprisonment and for practicing obeah to flogging and a year’s imprisonment with hard labor.20 Almost a decade earlier a “West Indian sonnet” by “D.M.P.” appearing in the ( Jamaican) Victorian Quarterly, titled “The Obeah Man,” which described a cave-­dwelling “black worker of black arts” who terrifies even the “blood-­ christened Johncrows,” made at the very least a metaphorical connection between the occult and “blackness.” Moore and Johnson contend that even more specific than the connection of obeah in this sonnet to the “poor, black, and dispossessed” was its identification with African-­born persons, either taken by British authorities from slave ships or imported as indentured laborers, who were identified in the public’s mind with the practice of obeah in Jamaica and Guyana.21 Dirty and slouching, with a sore foot, the figure discussed by Moore and Johnson is not so far from the man with mottled skin and limbs ravaged by leprosy who kisses and rubs his face on a little white girl in the novel With Silent Tread, published around 1890 in Antigua by Frieda Cassin. The combination of dark skin, disfigurement, and malevolence solidifies the threat that black people pose to white Caribbean people such as this Antiguan girl. Her contraction of leprosy later in life is an outward sign of the cultural taint that proximity with black people in the tropics inevitably augurs for Caribbean whites.

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

665

But in “A Mysterious Murder” just who poses a threat to whom? Baracouda Jim’s “huge mole” and twisted toe may or may not indicate moral or evolutionary deficiency (because he hasn’t yet attained full humanity, or because he has regressed), and his gold earrings may bespeak an exotic, perverse sexuality. He is, however, the victim, not the perpetrator, of dastardly deeds. It is the scions of the planter class who constitute a threat to other Jamaicans, notwithstanding the honor they have brought to the colony by their intellectual achievements. Furthermore, while residence in the tropics actually or purportedly links all Caribbean people to perverse inclinations, in MacGregor’s short story it is imported ideas that hold undue sway over the characters and either make them vulnerable or exploit their susceptibility to diabolical persuasion. Such is the hold that the occult has over the psyche that the unconscious husband manages to mesmerize poor Jim Jonson into going out with him to his boat on a moonlit night. The story makes it clear that human sacrifice, in this case at least, does not have a black, working-­class provenance but is affiliated “with occult phenomena now recognized as a branch of medical science.” Elite interest in the occult stood in a complex relationship with perceptions of the modes of life deemed typical of African-­and South Asian–descended working-­class people. The strong late ­Victorian interest in the spirit world, reincarnation, mesmerism, hypnosis, spiritualism, Theosophy, and Swedenborgianism was elite-­identified, but Obeah, Myal, Vodou, Regla de Ocha, and Santería were decidedly not. Freemasonry hovered somewhere in between. Queen Victoria was said to be interested in making contact with her dead husband. It was one thing for the upper class to attend a séance, or to debate the merits of phrenomagnetism, or to locate Robert Burns’s “poetic genius” in his skull.22 But for Caribbean people, association with the supernatural or spirituality outside of a strictly Christian provenance was precarious. The bodies of enslaved people had served as the testing ground for experiments in electricity that undergirded theoretical discussions about the relationships among mesmerism, telepathy, telecommunication, and the telegraph.23 White missionaries and their Afro-­and Indo-­Caribbean converts paid keen attention to the work of the Spirit/​spirits in their congregations, since spirit possession, not to mention candles and incense, heaved too closely to the wrong kind of spirits. As Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert have pointed out, the spiritism associated with French-­born Allan Kardec offered elite Cubans and Puerto Ricans a way to resist being affiliated with Spanish-­identified Catholicism, U.S.-­identified Protestantism, and spiritual systems associated with the lower classes.24 Caribbean elites who studied in Europe or with European-­trained scholars were very interested in theorizations of phrenology and neurology by

666

Fa i t h S m i t h

Jean-­Martin Charcot, Alfred Binet, and others. The essay “The Hidden Self,” published in 1890 by Harvard psychologist William James, reviewed French theorists’ discussion of the ability to tap into the “submerged consciousness” by way of hypnosis. This “submerged,” “hidden,” or “double” consciousness (some of Binet’s work is translated with this latter term) captured the interest of African American thinkers such as Pauline Hopkins, whose novel Of One Blood: or The Hidden Self was serialized in the Colored American Magazine from late 1902 to early 1903. Of One Blood’s hero, Reuel Briggs, is studying medicine at Harvard and reads an article that is very close to James’s “The Hidden Self.” Briggs, who has the nervous disposition associated with brilliant intellectuals, is a voracious reader on the supernatural and allows himself to be mesmerized, and he is passing as white. In this way, Hopkins exploits ambiguous racial categories, as well as the ambiguity of the “science” of the supernatural and the “scientific” racial theories that claimed to disclose with reliable measurements the proof of white superiority and black inferiority.25 Her protagonist Reuel Briggs is smarter than any of his white peers, and he eventually claims the racial heritage that he had initially rejected, when an expedition to Ethiopia reveals that he is the king of a hidden, thriving civilization. Race is both a falsehood that puts terrible limits on black people’s claims to full citizenship and an essential, distinctive identity and heritage. Science sanctions racist falsehoods but also reveals untapped resources of the unconscious. Perhaps better known than Hopkins’s exploration of a hidden or double consciousness is the elaboration of a Negro self and an American self “warring in one dark body” by James’s student W.  E.  B. Du Bois, appearing initially in articles in the late 1890s and in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Du Bois also commissioned photographs of members of Georgia’s “Talented Tenth,” college-­ educated African Americans who were morally respectable and sometimes racially ambiguous, to contest notions of black inferiority — ​­by displaying them at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, for example. Shawn Michelle Smith has argued that the decision to crop some of these photographs placed them perilously close to the more popular usage for cropped shots in the late nineteenth century: the mug shot. In an era when the photograph claimed to uncover the “truths” of criminality — ​­in recording the evidence of the crime scene and particularly in disclosing the measurable facts of criminal intention in the subject’s ear, forehead, or space between the eyes — ​­Du Bois both challenged and risked reinforcing perceptions of African Americans as dangerous, perceptions used at that very historical moment to justify their lynching.26 The theories of European anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and others were used to demonstrate that the size of a skull or an ear or the slope of a

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

667

forehead could reliably identify a pickpocket or a murderer. Criminology connected detective work to craniometry and other anthropological discourses that claimed to interpret with precision racial characteristics not only by measuring body parts but also by interpreting objects and therefore the inherent characteristics of ethnic and racial constituencies. The study of crime was linked to the study of the “family of man” and, in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Cuba, where Lombroso-­influenced anthropologists joined the police in linking “objetos” seized from spiritual sites to people of color, to crime, and to the classification of people of African descent, and relatedly Africa, in relationship to the family of races. As Alejandra Bronfman has shown, simultaneous independence from Spain and reluctant acquiescence in the 1903 Platt Amendment after the Spanish-­American War found white Cuban elites wishing to assert to North Americans and Europeans their ability to wield power, and “people of color” wishing to show their ability to share that power, in part by demonstrating that they had served the independence struggle with distinction. Both sets of Cubans, but those of African descent more particularly, had to ward off suspicions that on “cultural” grounds they were not quite ready, when the authorities seized objetos from suspected nañigos and brujerias — ​­spiritual leaders or witches, valid or malevolent figures, depending on the level of official hysteria. As the paraphernalia seized in police raids circulated among “religious, legal, and scientific institutions,” the interpretation was inconsistent. 27 Were they ritual objects, and if so, what was the status of “ritual” in a territory that was inclined to assign legitimacy to Afro-­Cuban spiritual institutions but was deeply ambivalent about what precisely such legitimacy might signify. Whether such “objetos” were evidence that crimes had been committed was a key issue in the sensational case of a white child whose corpse showed evidence of ritual sacrifice. Bronfman points out that some who were arrested in the subsequent police raid were white but that this was downplayed in news reports, thus reinforcing the connection between such rituals and Afro-­Cubans. In the short story “The Mysterious Murder,” Detective Linxie outlasts James Joson and Dr. Shalton-­Armont. “Coloured” and “of a light-­brown complexion,” and thus symbolically a racial combination of the other two men, he fits some commentators’ conception of the colony’s future, or at least offers the key to it — ​­a local who is identified racially with neither the dominated nor the dominant. Much like the cultural space occupied by the short story itself, and the newspaper carrying it, he embodies Belinda Edmondson’s conception of the “brown” middlebrow, which undermines oppositions of high and low culture, white and black, and upper and working class.28 Like the detective and the judge who solve a murder with dispassionate efficiency in Manuel

668

Fa i t h S m i t h

Zeno-­Gandía’s 1894 Puerto Rican novel The Pond, Detective Linxie is rational and smart, without putting on airs. He shows a moral conscience when he shudders at the horrible evidence he witnesses, but he is neither sentimental nor frightened. He determinedly smells the blood and examines footsteps as he tracks down clues at the couple’s compound, shielded from view by the dildo cacti that keep lower-­class eyes from looking in but that also conceal, as we find out, questionable activities. Inside the doctor’s laboratory, Linxie’s horror of discovering and handling James Joson’s heart is preceded by viewing photograph upon photograph of humans under the influence of mesmerism or suffering mental illness. Photography records the stages of the effects of various phenomena and is itself complicit in the crimes that are required for science.29 This laboratory of upper-­class Obeah paraphernalia recalls the Cuban objetos, circulating among “religious, legal, and scientific institutions.” 30 But this lab is at the Shalton-­Armont home, and as a sort of parallel living room, it is decorated with a horrifying kitsch, the terrible requirements of modern science. As nineteenth-­century Victorian travelers to the region, such as James Anthony Froude and Spenser St. John, sensationalized child sacrifice in Haiti, and as white Cubans suspected black Cubans of the same evil deed, African Americans were ritually tortured, castrated, and killed in North America.31 In (white) Shalton-­Armont’s excision of his (black) employee’s pulsing, throbbing organ, we can observe experimental and religious rituals intersecting in the name of “science,” as the famed “black heart man” turns out to be white. “Light-­brown” Detective Linxie manages to avoid the risk posed by two social groups. First, he evades the threat of castration by predatory white elites who seek scientific distinction and perhaps also a rejuvenating racial energy, when they continue to consume black life parasitically, as in slavery. Second, he is never associated with the gullibility of “black” black people who are unduly enthralled by whites and whose own belief in the supernatural — ​­deemed “superstition” rather than “science” — ​­prevents them from perceiving and avoiding danger. The “brown” man has moral authority, and as a detective (but also a potential criminologist, anthropologist, judge), he is the future of the colony. Stephen Cobham’s 1907 Trinidadian novel Rupert Gray also introduces a character who is neither upper-­class white nor working-­class black to address the issue of Caribbean futurity. Rupert Gray is a dark-­skinned, lower-­middle-­ class accountant-­turned-­lawyer holding the key to the political future of the colony. As a cultured, respectable man, Gray affirms his position as tutor of the black working class and both marries into a prominent local white family and assumes control over its considerable wealth. He masters the tropical

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

669

landscape previously “owned” by Victorian travel writers and amateur botanists and befriends English aristocrats, and the novel places faith in the capacity of impeccable manners and the consumption of British canonical texts to allow him to achieve such mastery. Detective Linxie has no time for this sort of cultural distinction, enabling a radical ending whereby he can bring to justice an upper-­class Jamaican recognized as distinguished by Jamaicans as well as by Europe’s scientists. Linxie, it seems, has the potential to achieve this result without having to assimilate, as Trinidad’s Rupert Gray does, to a role of “high-­cultural” mastery. Yet this is not where “A Mysterious Murder” ends. Not only does the face of Dr. Shalton-­Armont, arrested “in the name of the Queen,” suggest his genuine bewilderment about his alleged crime throughout the trial, but the very black working-­class spectators out of whose rank the murder victim comes “scouted the idea of a kind ‘bokra massa’ like Dr Shalton-­Armont stooping to such an act of brutality on the body of one of his own servants.” The narrative manages to assert the right of a working-­class black Jamaican to receive full justice — ​ ­“Let it not be said that a jury of Jamaica preferred to sacrifice the life of a poor black man, rather than leave a member of the upper classes in the hands of retributory justice,” the judge asserts — ​­and to exonerate the doctor, since the lack of a motive and his display of innocence convince the jury not to convict him. It is left to the accused doctor’s own innate morality — ​­manifested in a nightmare in which his murder of Jonson, conducted while he is in a cataleptic state, is revealed to him — ​­to discern the truth. He is allowed the horrifying freedom to convict himself and to commit suicide, and thus to preserve his social honor (if not his life) as a respectable white Jamaican. We can read “A Mysterious Murder” as an inquiry into the character of Jamaica’s modernity. A cautionary tale about the presence of black Caribbean people standing in the way of their white counterparts’ full modernity, the story also cautions that white people’s slaveholding legacy prevents them from exercising power with moral legitimacy. The Shalton-­Armonts’ European education has much to answer for here. Her sublime interpretations of Romantic piano music, an imaginative corrective to his stern intellect, remain insufficient to curb the immoral implications of his experiments. Fascination with her music may well have facilitated his openness to mesmerism and somnambulism; even if she has not endorsed what went on in his lab, she is still a passive accomplice in her inability to exert any moral power over him. If both working-­class black men and upper-­class white men are susceptible to mesmerism, thus showing the decadence of educated whites and the gullibility of black people, who can be trusted with the future?

670

Fa i t h S m i t h

The denuded hills above the Shalton-­Armonts’ home, and the beautiful cabbage palms on their property, whose delicious fruit, located in the “heart,” can only be accessed by destroying the entire tree, show that so-­called development comes at a high price: James Joson’s heart is similarly gained with his murder. What is the proper relationship between the imported and the indigenous? If both are necessary, who can be entrusted to find a judicious balance? If there is a way to harness scientific innovations without being overtaken by their harmful effects, the narrative ambiguity of “A Mysterious Murder” renders Dr. Shalton-­Armont neither capable of making this determination nor legally culpable of killing a member of Jamaica’s lower classes. If, as I am suggesting, he is open to critique for heinous crimes and for converting his own and Jamaica’s distinguished fame into notoriety, narrative and social protocols do not permit him to be punished for his crimes by the colonial state or by public opinion. For a long time our discussions of Anglophone Caribbean literary and cultural production have relied upon commentators from the 1950s onward for our view of the Victorian period, and thus their powerful critiques of Englishness in the period leading to political independence have shaped our view of the nineteenth century. In addition, these texts have little or nothing to say about Caribbean-­authored nineteenth-­century texts. With their assumptions of imperial longevity and their presumed failure to prophesy the nation-­to-­come, these early texts from the region can seem embarrassing. If we place these texts in their contemporary moment, however, we might see the traditions and “translations” of which Stuart Hall speaks, as Jamaicans and others negotiate the terms of “Victorian” subjectivities and as they assess the contours of modernity across the Caribbean and the Americas in the context of multiple imperial registers, and within Jamaica’s own multitextured landscape.

Notes 1. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Viswanathan, Gauri, “Currying Favor: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813–­54,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (fall 1988): 113–­29; and Terry Eagleton, “The Rise of English,” in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 15–­46. 2. Nigel Bolland, “Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History,” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century Caribbean, vol. 1, ed. Alistair Hennessy (London: Macmillan, 1992), 50–­79. 3. Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–­1920 (Mona: University of the West Indies, 2004). 4. Rhonda Cobham-­Sander, “The Creative Writer and West Indian Society in Ja­

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

671

maica, 1900–1950” (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 1982); Belinda Edmondson, Caribbean Middlebrow (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010); Leah Rosenberg, “Contested Possessions: Tourism and the Representation of Caribbean Folk Culture,” unpublished manuscript; and Faith Smith, Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-­Century Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). 5. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 8; David Scott, “The Social Construction of Postcolonial Studies,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 391. 6. Jennifer Green-­Lewis, “At Home in the Nineteenth Century: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Will to Authenticity,” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and Diane Sadoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 30. 7. John Kucich and Diane Sadoff, introduction to Victorian Afterlife, ed. Kucich and Sadoff, xi. 8. Stuart Hall, “The West Indian Front Room,” in The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, ed. Michael Macmillan (London: Black Dog, 2009), 18–­19. 9. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (autumn 1994): 5–­23; and Faith Smith, “Introduction: Sexing the Citizen,” in Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, ed. Faith Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 1–­20. 10. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 133. 11. Michelle Cliff, Abeng (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984), 5. 12. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 294–­95. 13. Angelia Poon Mui Cheng, “Comic Acts of (Be)longing: Performing Englishness in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” in Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008), 49–­74. 14. Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–­1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Howard Johnson, “Cuban Immigrants in Jamaica, 1868–­1898,” Immigrants and Minorities 29, no. 1 (March 2011): 1–­32; and Matthew J. Smith, “Emperor, Exiles, and Intrigues: The Case of Nineteenth-­Century Haitian Heads of State in Jamaica,” in The Haiti-­Jamaica Connection (Kingston: Latin-­American Caribbean Center, 2004), 341–­54. 15. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 16. Cobham-­Sander, “Creative Writer”; Edmondson, Caribbean Middlebrow; and Rosenberg, “Contested Possessions.” 17. Leah Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 50–­51.

672

Fa i t h S m i t h

18. Rosenberg, “Contested Possessions.” 19. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 18. 20. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 28. 21. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 17, 345n11. 22. Ilana Kurshan, “Mind Reading: Literature in the Discourse of Early Victorian Phrenology and Mesmerism,” in Victorian Literary Mesmerism, ed. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2006), 31. 23. James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 24. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert, “Espiritismo: Creole Spiritism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States,” in Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 203–­49. 25. Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, Or, the Hidden Self (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004); and Cynthia D. Schrager, “Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race,” in The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 182–­209. 26. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996). 27. Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902–­1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 28. Belinda Edmondson, Caribbean Middle Brow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 29. “For there was a remarkable complicity, tacit and impeccable, between the Salpêtrière [public hospital in Paris where Charcot investigated hysteria and other perceived mental illnesses] and the Préfecture de police. Their photographic techniques were identical and sustained the same hopes. . . . The way in which the École des Beaux-­ Arts aided the Salpêtrière and the Préfecture de police in their efforts must also be interrogated,” Georges Didi-­Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2003), 5. Here, Didi-­Huberman indicts not just medicine and law enforcement but art as well; by this reckoning, both Shalton-­Armonts, physician and musician, are potentially responsible for the moral consequences of turn-­of-­the-­century advances in technology and the production of knowledge. 30. Bronfman, Measures of Equality. 31. Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations of Afro-­Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Lara Putnam, “Rites of Power and Rumors of Race: The Circulation of Supernatural Knowledge in the Greater Caribbean, 1890–­1940,” in Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, ed. Lara Putnam and Maarit Forde (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 243–­67.

Considering Jamaican Victorianism

673

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors is an assistant professor of African American and black diasporic art with a joint appointment in the African American studies and Art and Archaeology Departments at Princeton University. She specializes in African American, Caribbean, and British art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and transatlantic visual culture in the long nineteenth century. Her current book project is titled Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World. The book uses the visual and material culture of the nineteenth-­century cotton trade as a paradigm to untangle historical constructions of global connection and their reappearance in contemporary art of the black diaspora. A N N A A R A B I N D A N -­K E S S O N

T I M B A R R I N G E R is the Paul Mellon Professor and chair of the department of the history of art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-­ Raphaelites (1998) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005), and, with Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (2007). He is coeditor, with Tom Flynn, of Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (1997) and, with Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham, of Art and the British Empire (2007). Recent publications include “An Architecture of Imperial Ambivalence: The Patcham Chattri,” in The Great War and the British Empire: Culture and Society, edited by Michael Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (London: Routledge, 2016). He is cocurator, with Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; and London: National Gallery, 2018). A N T H O N Y B O G U E S is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory at Brown University, where he is the inaugural director of the Center for the Study and Slavery and Justice. A writer and curator, he has curated shows in South Africa and the United States. His most recent curated exhibitions are: Metamorphosis: The Conjunctural Art of Edoaurd Duval Carrie (2017), at Miami Contemporary Art Museum, and Loas, History, and Memory: The Art of Haiti, (2018), at the Colorado Fine Art Museum. He is the author of seven books, his most current being From Revolution in the Tropics to Imagined

Landscapes: The Art of Edouard Duval Carrie (2014). He is currently working on a book on the question of freedom and the human in the Caribbean radical intellectual tradition. He is the coconvener of the research project at the University of Bologna Rewriting the Global History of Political Thought and coeditor of a special issue of the Italian journal Filosfia Politica titled “Black Critique.” who died in 2017, was an influential Jamaican artist, curator, and collector. Holder of a PhD in art history, he played a major role in building up the National Gallery of Jamaica, where he was the chief curator and director for several decades. As an artist, Boxer’s interests lay in Jamaican society and its hybrid culture. His paintings, sculptures, and installations tackle questions surrounding the history of slavery and the political life of the island. He exhibited widely, both in Jamaica and internationally. Boxer published extensively on Jamaican art; his books include Modern Jamaican Art (1998), with Veerle Poupeye, Edna Manley, Sculptor (1990), and numerous exhibition catalogs. In 2013 he coauthored Jamaica in Black and White: Photography in Jamaica c.1845–­c.1920: The David Boxer Collection, with Edward Lucie Smith. D AV I D B O X E R ,

is a professor emeritus of history at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interest includes Jamaica in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has authored several books, including The Jamaican People: Race Class and Social Control and Inside Out and Outside In: Factors in the Creation of Contemporary Jamaica.

PAT R I C K B R YA N

S T E E V E O . B U C K R I D G E is a professor of African and Caribbean history at Grand Valley State University. His areas of interest are precolonial and colonial Africa, slavery and the early colonial Caribbean, gender and sexuality, and material culture. He is the recipient of a Ford Foundation fellowship and has traveled extensively throughout Africa, studying indigenous textiles and dress. He has also lived and taught in South Africa and Ghana. He has published and lectured widely on dress in the Caribbean. His book The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–­1890 was published by the University of the West Indies Press (2004).

is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona. He was awarded a PhD in history from the University of the West Indies, Mona, in 2006, for a thesis titled “Genesis of a Jamaican Team: Culture, Identity, and Integration in Jamaican Cricket, 1880–­ 1918.” He has presented his research on West Indian cricket at conferences and JULIAN CRESSER

676

Contributors

in journal articles and exhibitions. Cresser’s research interests more broadly include sport, Caribbean culture and heritage, and audiovisual history. He previously worked as a senior research fellow at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/​Jamaica Memory Bank, where he researched Afro-­Caribbean cultural retentions and conducted audiovisual documentation of Jamaican social history. left school at sixteen and served an apprenticeship as a furniture maker and restorer. After four years of studying furniture design and furniture conservation at the London College of Furniture, he completed a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, with a thesis titled “The Trading of Timber 1670–­1725.” He joined the London Guildhall University, now London Metropolitan University, in 1993 and taught for more than two decades the history of design and conservation. He completed his doctoral thesis, “Furniture of Colonial Jamaica 1700–­1837,” in 2002. Cross has written numerous articles on furniture and related material and specializes in the conservation of mother of pearl, ivory, and marquetry objects. JOHN M. CROSS

is the head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Art in Kingston, Jamaica. She has served as a curator at the campus art gallery, the Cage, and at the National Museum, Jamaica, and the National Gallery of Jamaica. Most recently, she was the inaugural Stuart Hall Fellow at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, from 2016 to 2017. Her areas of interest include public sculpture, memory, and memorial practices and Caribbean and black diaspora art. Her publications include “Monuments and Meaning” (2004), “‘But Bogle was a Bold Man’: Vision, History and Power for a New Jamaica” (2009), and “The Poetics of Death and Visibility: Introducing Ebony Patterson’s Invisible Presence, Bling Memories,” en mas: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (New Orleans: Independent Curators International and Contemporary Arts Center, 2016). PETRINA DACRES

teaches in the Departments of English and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of Caribbean literature and culture, gender, and the African diaspora experience. She is the author of Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (1999) and Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (2009) and the editor of Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation (1999).

BELINDA EDMONDSON

Contributors

677

is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching are in the areas of African diaspora studies, Caribbean literature and culture, and queer studies. She is the author of Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2015).

NADIA ELLIS

is senior curator of historic fine art at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, and was formerly senior curator of prints and drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. She works on eighteenth-­, nineteenth-­, twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century visual cultures of Britain and the former British Empire. She studied at the University of Nottingham and held positions at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Tate Britain before coming to Yale in 1998. Her publications include Turner’s Drawing Book: The Liber Studiorum (1996) and Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things (2011). Forrester cocurated, with Tim Barringer and Barbaro Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (2007–20­08), and coedited the related prizewinning publication (2007). GILLIAN FORRESTER

is a professor of modern British social and cultural history at University College London. Her first book, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–­1850 (1987, 2002), was jointly written with Leonore Davidoff and focused on the intersections of gender and class in the making of modern society. Since the 1990s she has been working on questions of race, nation, empire, and identity and has published extensively, including Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–­1867 (2002) and a recent collection edited with Sonya Rose, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (2006). Macaulay and Son: Writing Home, Nation and Empire was published in 2012. She is a member of the History Workshop Journal collective and led a project at University College London on the legacies of British slave ownership, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. C AT H E R I N E H A L L

is a professor of history and has served as director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Between Black and White (1981), The Killing Time (1994), and, most recently, The Caribbean (2006). He has also edited or coedited several books, including The Slavery Reader (2003), Contesting Freedom (2005), and The Routledge History of Slavery (2011). He is the editor of the journal Slavery and Abolition.

GAD HEUMAN

678

Contributors

is an associate professor at the Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam. She previously held teaching and research positions at Leiden University, the University of the West Indies, and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (kitlv). Her anthropological research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, and specifically on the spatialization of power, difference, and inequality within cities. She has conducted fieldwork in Jamaica, Curaçao, and Suriname on topics ranging from the cultural politics of pollution to the governance role of criminal organization. She is currently leading a five-­year research program on public-­private security assemblages in Kingston, Jerusalem, Miami, Nairobi, and Recife. This research investigates how urban spaces and populations are governed, and how political subjectivities shift as a result of hybrid forms of security provision. Her publications include Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean (2015). RIVKE JAFFE

is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami. She previously served on the faculty of Yale University and as founding director and chief curator of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (nagb). Publications include Speaking in Tongues: Meta-­pictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean Art (sx); Dreams of Utopia: Sustaining Art Institutions in the Transnational Caribbean (Open Arts); Every Nigger Is a Star: Re-­imaging Blackness from Post Civil Rights America to the Post Independence Caribbean (Black Camera); Crisis of Faith: Charles White’s J’Accuse! and the Limits of Universal Blackness (aaaj); Elegy for En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean; and Sun-­splash, for Nari Ward: Sun-­ Splashed (Perez Art Museum). She recently coedited Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice for sx, curated Reincarnation: R. Brent Malone, a retrospective (nagb), and cocurated Small Axe Presents: Caribbean Queer Visualities. Her forthcoming book is titled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary. ERICA MOIAH JAMES

is an artist and the senior curator (acting) at the National Gallery of Jamaica. He has been exhibiting his photography since 2004 as part of multiple group exhibitions in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. His first solo show, Son of a Champion, was staged at the Mutual Gallery in Kingston in 2012. Lawrence holds a ba in English literature and sociology from the University of the West Indies (Mona) and a diploma in visual communication from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. He is currently an MPhil student in cultural studies at the University of the West Indies (Mona). He was the essayist for Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography (2013). O’NEIL LAWRENCE

Contributors

679

is a biographer and curator whose books include Pre-­Raphaelite Sisterhood, biographies of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and The Collected Letters of Jane Morris. She has curated exhibitions, including Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–­1900, and has authored essays on Ira Aldridge, Josiah Henson, and art against the slave trade. Currently she is working on the Late Victorian Catalogue, National Portrait Gallery (including the portrait of Seacole) and on projects including the black magi and portrayals of Othello. JAN MARSH

is the head of the Research Centre for Material Culture at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands. He was previously head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum and keeper of anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London. He has curated several exhibitions including Materializing Slavery (2007) and The Body Adorned: Dressing London (2012). He has held visiting research fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art and at New York University’s Museum Studies Program. His most recent publications include: Museums, Heritage and International Development (with Paul Basu, 2014); Museums and the Emotional Afterlife of Colonial Photography in Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs (2014); Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, Collaborations (with Viv Golding, 2013); and Slavery and the (Symbolic) Politics of Memory in Jamaica: Rethinking the Bicentenary in Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums (Routledge, 2011). W AY N E M O D E S T

received his PhD in music from New York University and wrote his dissertation on Jamaican mento music. His writing has appeared in Caribbean Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Nieuwe West-­Indische Gids, Ethno­ musicology, and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. He is coauthor (with Kenneth Bilby) of “The English-­Speaking Caribbean: Re-­Embodying the Colonial Ballroom,” in Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean (forthcoming) and was the music director and banjoist on the Jolly Boys modern mento album Great Expectation. In addition to his work in Jamaica, he is the author of “Ding, Ding!: The Commodity Aesthetic of Ice Cream Truck Music,” in Oxford Companion to Sound Studies, and is the leader of the Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra, a traditional Irish music group based in New York City. D A N I E L T. N E E L Y

680

Contributors

is curator of the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Trained in botany (1983) and archaeology (1997), his research focuses on Kew’s role in economic botany since the formation of the Kew Museums in 1847. His current projects include recataloging and interpreting Kew’s collection of Cinchona barks, an in-­depth study of five Victorian medicine cabinets, working with a textile conservator on the history and ethnobotany of Jamaican lacebark, and publication of a catalog of Kew’s basket collection. His role also includes hosting a wide range of visitors to the Economic Botany Collection and running diverse research and educational collaborations with university programs in ethnobotany, design history, object conservation, and museum studies. MARK NESBITT

holds the William Robertson Chair of History at the University of Edinburgh. She formerly taught at Newcastle University in England and served as chair of the (U.K.) Society for Caribbean Studies. She is the author of No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation (2004), and The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Politics and Modernity in the Caribbean World (2015). She has coedited two books: Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005) and Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (2012). She is currently researching gender and reproductive labor in Atlantic slave societies. D I A N A PAT O N

is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Technology, Jamaica, where she has developed and taught courses in architectural history and theory for the past fifteen years, in the Caribbean School of Architecture. Pigou-­Dennis is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Mona, receiving a PhD from the history department in 1997. She has published articles and book chapters on various themes related to architectural history, including Rastafarian spatial and iconographic expressions, the history of Bungalows in Jamaica, and interpretations of historical urban spatialities. She is currently writing a book on the city of Kingston between 1914 and 1945. E L I Z A B E T H P I G O U -­D E N N I S

is a Belgium-­born, Jamaica-­based art historian and curator who specializes in the art and visual culture of the Caribbean and its diaspora. She holds a master’s degree in art history from Ghent University in Belgium and a PhD in art history and cultural studies from the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts of Emory University. She is currently the executive director of the National Gallery of Jamaica. Poupeye’s publications include Caribbean Art (1998), which was published in Thames and Hudson’s VEERLE POUPEYE

Contributors

681

World of Art series, and Modern Jamaican Art (1998), which she coauthored with David Boxer; she has also published many journal articles and exhibition catalog essays on Jamaican and Caribbean art and culture. Poupeye has taught art history, visual studies, and curatorial studies at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, at Emory University in Atlanta, at New York University, and at the University of the West Indies. is an assistant professor in the History of Art Department at Yale University, where she specializes in American art and visual culture, with particular interests in the history of science, nineteenth-­century aesthetic theory, the history of photography, and the relationship between literary and visual representation. Her first book, The Art and Science of Detail: Frederic Church and Nineteenth-­Century Landscape Painting, examines the changing visual, cultural, and historical meaning of detail in nineteenth-­century America. Before joining the Yale faculty, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has also held postdoctoral fellowships at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität, Berlin, and at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Wake Forest University. Her research has been supported by grants from the Wyeth Foundation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. JENNIFER RAAB

J A M E S R O B E R T S O N , a Londoner, is a professor in history at the Department of History and Archaeology, University of the West Indies, Mona, where he has taught since 1995. His research interests include early Jamaica, West Indian urban history, and sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century London. He is the author of Gone Is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–­2000 (2005). He has published extensively on Jamaican history and early modern Britain and has received many awards and fellowships in Jamaica, Britain, and the United States. He is currently working on a book on the first English century in Jamaica circa 1650–­1770. A published version of his inaugural lecture, “History without Historians: Listening for Stories of Jamaica’s Past,” is forthcoming from the Arawak Press.

received her ba and ma in history from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and her PhD in history from Rice University (2012). Roper’s current research focuses on the history of children in the late n ­ ineteenth- and early twentieth-­century Anglo-­Caribbean, specifically on how the intersection of poverty, debility, race, and gender shapes notions of citizenship and the role SHANI ROPER

682

Contributors

of children in development. She has published articles with the Journal of Caribbean History and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Currently acting director of Liberty Hall: The Legacy of Marcus Garvey, she merges her interest in childhood studies with museum education to facilitate the Jamaican public’s engagement with Garveyism and studies of the African diaspora. published Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-­Century Caribbean (2002) and edited Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (2011). She teaches at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. FA I T H S M I T H

is a curator and writer living in Jamaica and working across the Caribbean region. In 2013, she completed her tenure as senior curator with the National Gallery of Jamaica, where she worked on the 2012 National Biennial, Natural Histories (2013), and New Roots (2013) exhibitions. Since then, she has worked with contemporary Caribbean art and culture magazine arc as an editor and writer and with Jamaica-­based contemporary art organization New Local Space (nls) as outreach coordinator and host of NLS’s online art conversation series in. N I C O L E S M Y T H E -­J O H N S O N

is an associate professor of religion and African American studies at Emory University. Her research and teaching interests cover a wide range of topics under the umbrella of Africana religions, namely, religious cultures of the African diaspora with emphases on African heritage religions in the Americas and the Caribbean; women and religion in Africa and the African diaspora; African religions; black, womanist, and Caribbean liberation theologies; theory and method in Africana religious studies; and interreligious dialogue among communities in the African diaspora. She is the author of Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (2005). She recently completed a second coauthored book manuscript on Obeah and Orisa religious cultures in Trinidad. Between 2006 and 2007, she spent a year and a half conducting archival and field research as a Fulbright Scholar in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she focused on the history of religions in Central Africa during the slave period and prophetic religious movements in Congo today. The resulting book, Local and Transnational Legacies of African Christianity in West-­Central Africa and the Black Atlantic World, will be published by Duke University Press in 2018. DIANNE M. STEWART

Contributors

683

K R I S T A A . T H O M P S O N is the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Professor and a professor in the Department of Art History. She is author of An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006), Developing Blackness (National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, 2008), and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), and a recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Award for a distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016). Thompson is the coeditor (with Claire Tancons) of En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (D.A.P., 2015). Thompson has curated several exhibitions, including Bahamian Visions: Colonial Photographs of the Bahamas (2003), the National Exhibition (NE3) (2006), Developing Blackness (2008) at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, and An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica with the Unnatural History of That Place, Fred Wilson’s reinstallation of the collections of the Institute of Jamaica, 2007), and has cocurated En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, March 2015 and traveling internationally through 2017). Thompson is currently working on The Evidence of Things Not Photographed, a book that examines notions of photographic absence and disappearance in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica, and Black Light, a manuscript about Tom Lloyd and electronic light and its archival recovery in African American art.

684

Contributors

Index Page references in italics indicate illustrations, and t indicates a table. Aaron, Eugene Murray: The New Jamaica, 395, 397, 414n4 Aaron, John, 500 Abbott, Thomas, 606 abolition act (1833), 160, 163, 264 abolition of slavery: abolitionists on monogenesis, 26; abolitionists’ use of photography, 389–90; apprenticeship, campaign against, 61; citizenship following, 163; gender’s importance to the campaign, 62; slave-trading countries after British abolition of, 525. See also emancipation; imperial histories Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica (Picken), 624, 625 Aboriginal Indians of Jamaica (Duerden), 548n34 Abrams, Philip, 127 An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica (F. Wilson), 110 ackee, 212 Actor Boys, 642–44 Adrinka symbols, 433, 434, 436 Africa: Afro-Jamaicans as missionaries to, 608, 618n28; explorations of, 161; formal colonization of, 159; yearning for, 615, 621n56 African American church (United States), 610 African Americans, 669 African indentured laborers, 311, 533, 603 “African,” use of, 533 Afrikan. See Ra, Omari Afrikan Vanguards, 42, 48n80

Afro-Catholic lay brotherhoods/ sisterhoods (Brazil), 610 Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Burton), 31 Afro-Cuban spiritual institutions, 668 Afro-Jamaicans: class status of, 583–84; culture and religion of, 31–32, 168, 250, 605 (see also Kumina); domestic structures built by (see architecture, creole); fashion of, 584, 586, 586–87, 593–94, 598–99; industrial schools and reformatories for, 191, 193–94; landownership by, 606–9, 618n24; as missionaries to West Africa, 608, 618n28; role in state formation, 128; stereotyping of, 583; traditional customs of, 607, 618n24. See also black Jamaicans Agriculture Department ( Jamaica), 216 Agriculture Department (United States), 217 Aguilar, Mr., 592, 592–93 Ahmed, Sara, 661 Albert, Prince, 369, 500, 501, 508, 588 Albion estate ( Jamaica), 310 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 661 Alfred Pawsey (retail store), 583 Alfred the Great, 500 Alleyne, Mervyn, 31 Almirall, Raymond F., 465 Alpha Cottage Industrial School for Boys and Girls, 193, 201–2, 204 American Civil War, 233, 304–5, 445 American Missionary Association (AMA), 606–8, 618n24 American Revolution, 165 Amity Hall (St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica), 306–7

Anancy folktales, 564, 574n34 Anderson, William Wemyss, 308 Anthropological Society of London, 26, 526, 546–47n11 antimacassars, 593 Anti-Slavery Reporter, 265–66 Anti-Slavery Society, 145, 415n15 antitaxation riots (1848), 128 apprenticeship: abolitionist campaign against, 61; discipline enforced under, 5; end of the system (1838), 139, 281; for former field slaves vs. skilled slaves, 139; justification for, 5, 27; length of, 5, 61, 139, 624–25; planters’ treatment of apprentices, 139–41, 161, 605–6; prison abuses during, 60, 61–62; and state formation, 125 Arabindan-Kesson, Anna, 17, 28–29, 311 Archer, Mildred, 417n31 architecture, creole, 474–90; African elements in, 475–76, 478, 490; “creole,” use of, 474; fretwork, 487, 489, 492n33; Georgian elements in, 475, 490; low survival rate of buildings, 474–75, 484; materials used in vernacular buildings, 485, 490; missionary writers on, 474, 476, 477, 478–81; Moravian villages, 480–81; names of cottages/villages, 479; overview of, 474–75; single-­volume cabins, 490; size of cottages, 481; social life/built environment of the rural poor, 476–82, 477–79; social reformers on, 474; in St. Ann (case study), 475, 484–90, 486–89, 492n32; of the urban poor after emancipation, 482–84; verandahs, 489–90, 492n32; Victorian elements in, 475, 490; wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof houses, 476, 477 architecture, Victorian, 439–66; architects, 443, 443–44, 464–65, 472n55; artisans, 441–43, 468n14; and the Arts and Crafts movements, 439, 440; brick-making machine, 442; contractors, 443–45, 465, 468n19, 468–69n22;

686

index

and the Crown Colony system, critiques of, 440–41; Demerara coolers, 452, 452; and earthquake damage, 445, 463, 464–65; engineers, 441, 445, 449, 467n6, 469n26; fires’ impact, 439–40; funding for, 439–40, 452, 466n3; vs. Georgian classicism, 439, 440; Gothic style, 446, 447, 448, 450, 451, 455, 457, 457, 459, 469n29, 470n31; later developments (1866–1907), 452–59, 453–60, 471nn45–46, 472n55; mansions, 445–46, 446; metropolitan styles and colonial functionality, 24; monuments for, 441; Moorish style, 455, 457, 458; new materials for, 439, 459–64, 461–62, 472n61; overview of, 439–42, 466n3; post-earthquake building-code revisions, 439, 465–66; prefabricated iron structures, 441, 442, 449, 461, 467n9; public markets and market clocks, 452–53, 471n45; religious-building boom (1830s–1840s), 440, 443, 443–44, 446–51, 447, 450; secular buildings (1830s–1850s), 439, 441, 449–52, 451–52; vernacular traditions of, 24, 465–66; wooden construction, 451, 460, 460–62 archive and heritage of the Victorian period, 35–43; in representations of Jamaica today, 35, 43; statues/images of Victoria, 35–36, 39, 39–43, 41–42, 500 (see also Queen Victoria statue); stories that engage with the past, 36–37, 37 Arnold, Thomas, 241 Arrival of Prince George at Victoria Pier (Duperly Brothers), 353, 353 Art and Emancipation in Jamaica (Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz), 12, 52, 655n9 Arts and Crafts movements, 439, 440 Asante people, 71 Ashanti people, 433, 434 Aspinall, Algeron, 255 At Home (Cleary), 312, 313, 314 Atlas Steamship Company, 221

At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (Kingsley), 273 Augier, Roy, 129 Austin, J. L.: How to Do Things with Words, 623 Azoulay, Ariella, 78 “backra,” use of, 575n36 Bacon, Edgar Mayhew: The New Jamaica, 395, 397, 414n4 Bacon, Francis, 37 Bacon, John, 442; Rodney statue, 354, 495, 496, 498–99, 518–19n8 Bailey, Sophie, 610 Baillie, William Watson: Indian Cooking Outside Her House, 396 Baily, Edward Hodges: Metcalfe statue, 495, 496–98, 497–99, 517, 519n14 Baker, Lorenzo D., 233–34, 459 Baker, Robert, 52 BaKongo groups, 71 ballroom dance, 650–52 balm yards, 609, 618n30 bamboo, 212 Banana Carriers (Duperly and Sons), 314, 314–15 banana exports, 11, 233–34, 234, 311–12, 459, 549n54 bananas vs. sugar in the economy, 11, 311–12 bandana head wrap, 598 bangles, 95 Baptist Church, 69, 457, 458, 459, 608 Baptist Missionary Society of London, 618n28 Baptists, 245, 311, 614, 618n28 Baptist War. See Christmas Rebellion Barclay, Alexander, 643 Barnes, Joseph S., 489 Barringer, Tim, 17, 53, 409, 625; Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 12, 52, 655n9 Barry, E. J., 504–5 Barry, James Miranda (aka Margaret Bulkley), 375, 375, 393n29

Bashford, Alison, 185 Batchen, Geoffrey, 357 Bath Gardens ( Jamaica), 212–14, 218 Battle of the Saintes (1782), 495, 518n4 battles for space, 46n43, 158, 170 Baucom, Ian, 623 Bavastro, Ernesto and Octavo, 349, 365 Baxter, George: The Ordinance of Baptism, 54, 69–72, 70 Beckford, George, 30–31 Beckford, Obi, 610 Beckford, William, 643 Beckwith, Martha, 630, 633, 639n25, 654 Bedwardites, 71 Beecher, J. Coleman, 253 Beeton’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 582 Belisario, Isaac Mendes: Art and Emancipation in Jamaica on, 12, 52, 655n9. See also Sketches of Character Bell, Samuel Q., 149 La Belle Jamaique (R. Turnbull), 653 Belmont Orphanage and Industrial School (Stony Hill, Jamaica), 201–4, 562, 561, 563 Bengal Rent Act (1859), 131 Bennett, Louise, 565 Bennett, Tony, 500, 523–24, 534, 544 Benoist, Philippe: Holland Estate, 300; A View of Coke Chapel from the Parade, 66, 67–68; A View of King Street, 586; A View of The Kingston Church, 581; A View of The Kingston Theatre, 585 Bentham, Jeremy, 156, 175–76 Bertram, Arnold, 251 Besson, Jean, 294 Bhabha, Homi, 40, 416n23, 576n48 Bigelow, John, 28–29, 308, 557–58, 561, 568–69; Jamaica in 1850, 34 Bilby, Kenneth, 619n37, 630, 633–34, 642, 644–45, 655n9, 656n30 Binet, Alfred, 666–67 A Biographical History of England (Granger), 364 index

687

Bishop’s Lodge (near Kingston), 453 bitter bush, 220 black “counter-public,” 32 black dandyism, 583, 626 black Jamaican craftsmanship: Cruickshank lock, 53–57, 56, 119n7; in furniture making, 428; in home construction, 489 black Jamaicans: African traditions of, 4–5, 402; antitaxation riots by, 128; as apprentices, 161 (see also apprenticeship); Carlyle on the alleged idleness/ poor character of, 26, 145, 148, 150; emergence of middle class, 4; in the House of Assembly, 149; idleness of, alleged, 301, 305, 315, 534; improvement of, 27; industrial education of, 538; vs. the Irish, 539; as laborers, 183, 185; medical care for, 181–82; middle-class, 571; Musgrave’s lecture in support of, 538–39; music of, 653–54; as picturesque subjects, 27, 402; political power of, 158, 570; political representation denied to, 4; products of black labor in exhibitions, 529, 532–33; stereotypes/ caricatures of, 7; toll gates destroyed by, 128; unequal status of, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 44n12, 545. See also Afro-Jamaicans; Creole Negroes vs. Africans black nationalism, tradition of, 554–55 black pepper, 212 The Black Question (Dalziel Brothers), 18, 19 The Black Saturnalia (Dirks), 31 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 578 “black,” use of, 565 Blagrove, Henry John, 15, 15–16 Blagrove, John, 16, 44n19 Blake, Lady Edith, 513–14, 590, 591 Blake, Sir Henry: at Diamond Jubilee celebration, 513–14; Diamond Jubilee planning by, 502, 507; on industrial training, 192, 201; on the Jamaica Exhibition, 543–46; Jamaica photo-

688

index

graphs of the Principal Bridges, 461, 461–62; “Opportunities for Young Men in Jamaica,” 544–45 Bligh, Captain William, 212 Bloch, Maurice, 118 Blome, Richard, 235 Blomfeld, William Knibb, 365 blue mahoe tree, 109 Blue Mountains ( Jamaica), 210, 223 Blundell Hunter, 28, 395 Board of Trade and Plantations, 171n3 Boehm, Sir Joseph Edgar: bronze Queen Victoria statue, 507 Bogle, Paul, 9, 19, 21, 22, 150, 306, 394n45, 648 Bogues, Anthony, 27, 51, 554 Bolland, Nigel, 658 Boston Fruit Company. See United Fruit Botanical Department ( Jamaica): annual reports of, 209, 218, 221, 232, 236; attention to crops for smallholders, 236; collaboration with Kew, 30, 209, 216–17, 235 (see also Royal Botanic Gardens); criticism of, 230–33; exhibits by, 228–30, 229; headquarters moved to Hope Gardens, 216; herbarium, 232; history of, 213–17; library, 232; as a scientific institution, 232; successes and failures of, 236; superintendents employed by, 214–15; topographical challenges to, 210. See also specific gardens botany, 209–36; vs. agriculture, 232–33; breadfruit, 212; cinchona, 210, 220, 223–24, 228, 232, 236; coffee, 210; under Crown Colony rule, 213, 231–32; diversity of plants, 210; and environment, 209–11, 211; fiber plants, 221–22, 222, 236; forests, 210, 230–31; and freeholders, 212–13, 219–20; gardens before the Victorians, 211–12; knowledge disseminated, 228–30, 229; medicinal plants, 218, 220, 236 (see also cinchona); orchids, 218, 219; overview of, 209–10;

plant distribution within Jamaica, 217–21; plant transfers, 217–18; souvenir plant products, 224–26, 225, 236; sugarcane’s dominance, 209; and sugar prices/production, 213; tobacco, 217–18; and trade with the United States, 213; tropical, 226–27; in the United Kingdom vs. the United States, 233–35. See also Botanical Department; Royal Botanic Gardens Bowerbank, Lewis Quier, 378, 497 Bowerbank, Dr. Q., 532 Bowerbank statue, 497, 519n10 Boxer, David, 16–17, 51, 53, 320n55; Passage, 37, 37; Queen Victoria Set We Free, 36–39, 38 Boxer, Edward, 36–37 Brady, Mathew: Gallery of Illustrious Americans, 365, 366, 370, 372 Brailsford, Dennis, 242 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 30–31, 263 Bravo, Anthony, 445–46 breadfruit, 109, 212 Brennan, J. W. C., 349, 365; The Constant Spring Hotel, 316, 316–17 Bridges, Edward James, 444, 454–55, 456, 472n57 Bridges, George Wilson, 272 Bright, John, 525 Britain: antislavery movement in, 161 (see also imperial histories); development of state activity in, 128; growth of the Empire, 160 (see also colonial power); Jamaican trade with, 233–34; public health/sanitation concerns in, 128; regulations, increases in, 128; slums of, 174–75, 193 British East India Company, 521n45 Brock, Sir Thomas, 507 Brodber, Erna, 263, 637n9 Bronfman, Alejandra, 668 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 266, 661–62 Brookes, 37 Brown, Charles, 489

Brown, Michael, 616n4 Brown, Vincent, 126 Brown, William, 489 Brown, William Wells, 563 brown identity: as a barrier class, 555, 570; and black Jamaican cultural practice, 565; blacks’ and local whites’ views of brown people, 558, 563; brown elite, 555, 566–70, 567, 569, 572, 575n40; brown-Jewish unions, 568–70, 575n43; brown newspapers, 556; “brown,” use of, 553, 564–65; creolized European clothing fashions, 565–66, 566; alleged cultural distinctiveness, 556; and dialect culture, 565, 572; educational societies, 556; emergence of brown society, 555–57; English/leisure culture, 570–72; foreigners’ views of brown people, 557–58; genteel labor by brown women, 556–57; identifying as white, 555; and middle-class culture, 553–54, 571–72; in Murray’s Brown Sammy in Search of a Wife, 563–65, 574n35; as nationalist, 553–54; as nationless, 553; political power, 556; poverty, 557, 574n20; stereotypes and realities, 557–66, 560, 562, 565–66; urban life and social aspiration linked with, 553–54, 556, 573n4; white vs. brown women, 564 brown Jamaicans: education of, 556; emergence of middle class, 4, 166; fashion of, 583, 584; origins of the term, 28; population growth of, 555–56, 573n9; urban, middle-class lifestyle of, 28. See also brown identity; Gordon, George William Brown Sammy in Search of a Wife (H. G. Murray), 563–65, 574n35 Brown’s Town Chapel, Jamaica, 446, 447 Bruckins dance and music, 1–2, 36, 43n2, 626, 628–30, 646–47, 655n15 Brunias, Agostino, 105 Bryan, Patrick, 28, 51, 248, 563; The Jamaican People 1880–1902, 33 index

689

Buchner, J. H., 480 Buckridge, Steeve O., 17, 565–66; The Language of Dress, 52 Bulkley, Margaret (aka James Miranda Barry), 375, 375, 393n29 bull thatch palm (Sabal palmetto), 222 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. E. L., 186n5 Bunseki, Fu-Kiau, 619n37, 634 Burchell, Thomas, 606 Burke, Samuel Constantine, 502–4, 521n43 Burn, William Laurence: Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies, 34 Burton, C. H., 261n87 Burton, Richard D. E.: Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean, 31 Buru, 642 Butler, Natalie, 492n33 By the Rio Cobre (Armand Duperly), 350 Cabildos de nación (Cuba), 610 Calabar College (Kingston), 618n28 Calabar Elementary School, 252, 253 Calvert, John, 450, 451 Cameron, Julia Margaret: Edward John Eyre, 19, 19–20; Sir Henry Taylor, 141 Campbell, Douglas Houghton, 226 Candomblé (Brazil), 610 Cane River Falls ( Jamaica), 354 Capper, Mr., 202–3 Caribbean: as defined by natural history, 226; Indian laborers in, generally, 395; modernity in, 23, 402 Caribbeana, 367 Caribbean culture: African retentions model of, 31; analyses of, 21, 23; creolization model of, 31; as performance vs. material culture, 21, 23; scholarship on, 30–31 Carlyle, Thomas: on emancipation, 286; Eyre supported by, 151, 271, 301–2, 526; history as preferred genre of, 267; alleges idleness/poor character of

690

index

blacks, 26, 145, 148, 150, 301, 315; influence of, 270; on the National Portrait Gallery, 364; Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, 145, 266, 286, 292, 295; Past and Present, 286; on visuality, 285; on work, 286 Carnarvon, Earl of, 131 Carter, Alexander: Plan of Holland Estate, 301, 301 cartes de visite, 328, 329–31, 331, 357, 363–65. See also Livingston Album Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 78 “Carvalho” (Fonseca), 570 Cascade of Roaring River (Adolphe Duperly), 325, 325, 355–56n6 Cassin, Frieda: With Silent Tread, 665 Castleton Gardens (Duperly and Sons), 114, 115 Castleton Gardens (near Kingston, Jamaica), 231, 354; access to, 214; administration of, 215; as Botanical Department headquarters, 216; climate’s effects on, 214; creation of, 214; distribution of plants from, 221; opening of, 115; photographs of, 211, 215; plants sent to Kew for research, 30 Catalogue of the Portraits in the Jamaica History Gallery (Cundall), 369, 392n20 Cazabon, Michel-Jean: “Coolie Group,” 409, 411; “Coolie Woman,” 409, 411 Celebration of the 1st of August 1838 (Leighton), 626, 627 Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876), 229 Central Board of Health, 133, 137n33, 184 Chadwick, Edwin, 176, 178, 188n46; The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, 175 Chadwick, Osbert, 184, 188n46 Chadwick, W., 228 chalice (Golden Grove Church), 7, 9, 10 Chamberlain, Joseph, 505 Chapman, Charles, 361, 362, 369

character, 163, 168, 180 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 666–67 Charles II, King, 264, 269 Charles Theophilus Metcalfe (Chinnery), 143 Chee Kong Tung, 101 Chevannes, Barry, 31–32, 478, 484 child sacrifice, 669 child’s outdoor cap, 52, 96, 97–98 child welfare and poor relief policy, 205, 205n10. See also industrial schools and reformatories Chinese immigrants, 99–101, 100 Chinese indentured laborers, 28, 99, 101, 311, 414n3 Chinnery, George: Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, 143 Chippendale, Thomas, 421 Chitty, Edward, 527 cholera epidemic (1850–51): board of health created during, 137n33; and climate theory, 179–80; death rate and fear of contagion, 177–78; economic effects of, 183; Milroy’s recommendations, 181–83, 185; Milroy’s report on cholera, 177–85, 188n29; transmission via water, 178, 187n17 Christ Church (Port Antonio, Jamaica), 443, 443–44, 468n18 Christianity: Anglicans, 446, 448, 453; baptism, 69, 71–72; Chinese conversions to, 101; communion, 7, 9, 69, 607; evangelical (see missionaries); impact on sanitary reform, 176; Muscular, 241, 243; transformed into Afro-Jamaican religions, 168; Trinity, 71 Christian values vs. creole culture, 5–6. See also civilizing mission Christmas celebrations, 571, 598 Christmas Morning (Duperly and Sons), 38, 39 Christmas Rebellion (1831–32), 1, 126–27, 264, 281, 323, 446 Church, Frederic and Isabel, 332, 333

Church, Frederic Edwin: Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 52, 82, 83–84, 120n19 Church Missionary Society, 444 Church of Christ in Jamaica, 605 Church of England, 129, 245, 362 Church of Scotland, 245 cinchona, 30, 210, 220, 223–24, 228, 232, 236 cinnamon, 212 citizenship, 163, 167, 193 civilizing mission: vs. African religious heritage, 608, 645; of colonial power, 5, 159–64, 166–67, 179, 580; for Jamaican youths, 251; and sports, 250–52; use of term, 5 civilizing subjects, 158 Civilizing Subjects (C. Hall), 33 Clapham Sect, 268 Clare, M. C., 245 Clarke, Sir Fielding, 365 Clarke, Kamari, 25–26 Clarke, Thomas, 212 Clarkson, Thomas: The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, 265 Clarkson Town (Phillippo), 479, 479 Clarkson Town (St. Ann, Jamaica), 479 class: and brown identity (see under brown identity); and fashion, 582–94, 584–87, 589–92, 594; and race, 28–29; and sports, 242–43, 248, 257–58, 258n13; working-class movement, 240–41. See also middle class Cleary, John, 349, 352, 356n21, 365; At Home, 312, 313, 314 Cleary, J. W., 591; “Grandmother on Mother’s Side,” 99–101, 100 Clerk, Astley, 653 Cliff, Michelle, 662 climate, 210–11 climate theory, 179–80 C. N. Whitney’s Jamaica Camera Exchange (Kingston), 355 Cobham, Stephen: Rupert Gray, 669–70 Cocks, Harry, 498 index

691

Codrington College (Barbados), 618n28 coffee, 30, 210 Coke, Thomas, 67 Coke Chapel (Kingston), 66, 67–68 Colin Clarke, 177 College of Agricultural Science Education (formerly Hope Industrial School for Boys), 193, 201–4, 207n46, 228 Collegiate School (Kingston), 245–48, 246 Collingwood, R. G., 168 Collini, Stefan, 163 Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London, 1886), 107, 229, 230, 537 colonial anthropology, 159 Colonial Bank (Kingston), 454 Colonial Exhibition (Amsterdam, 1883), 229 colonial hybridity, 402, 416n23 colonial mimicry, 576n48 Colonial Office, 139–53; aid to the peasantry, 149–50, 153; debates on responsible government, 157, 170n2; Earl Grey’s role, 146–48; history of, 171n3; and the House of Assembly, 139–42, 145, 148–49, 151; on immigration, 143–47, 311; vs. local elites, 161; Merivale’s role, 143–44, 147, 311; on the plantations’ survival as essential, 139, 145–47, 149, 153; predictions about the peasantry, 281; on prison reform, 172n19; as protector of the population, 139; on the “rights of the Negroes,” 160; Stephen as legal advisor, 139–40, 145; Taylor’s role, 142, 145, 148–50, 164 colonial power: anticolonial political thought, 159, 171n11; civilizing mission of, 5, 159–64, 166–67; and the end of slavery, 160–62; as exploitative and dehumanizing, 161; as force, not persuasion, 158; the native question as central to, 162–64; on plantation racial slavery as commercially advantageous, 159; preoccupation with acts for governing/protecting the Negro,

692

index

159–60, 166–67; subject formation by, 158–59, 161–62, 164; tutelage as a goal of, 158–59, 167, 171n11. See also pastoral coloniality Colonial Produce (Vizetelly), 528 colored Jamaicans: as building contractors, 444, 468–69n22; in the House of Assembly, 149; population size compared to that of whites, 555, 573n9. See also brown identity; brown Jamaicans A Coloured Lady on a Race-Course (A. S. Forrest), 594 Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery (Adolphe Duperly), 1–7, 2–4, 6, 626 communion, 7, 9, 69, 607 Congolese symbols/motifs, 433–34, 434 Congregational Union, 605 Conn, Steven, 548n40 Constantine, Robert L., 149 Constant Spring Hotel (St. Andrews, Jamaica), 455, 455 The Constant Spring Hotel (Brennan), 316, 316–17 Constitution ( Jamaica, 1883 and 1895), 520n31 consumer power, 571 contagionism, 175, 177–78 Cooke, Sir Howard, 39, 39–40 “Coolie Group” (Cazabon), 409, 411 Coolie Housay (Nathan and Co), 399 Coolies at Worship (Duperly Brothers), 398 “Coolie Woman” (Cazabon), 409, 411 Cooper, Carolyn, 573n4 Cooper, Frederick, 170n2 Cooper, William, 377, 378 copper mining, 449 Corinaldi, David Aurelis, 504, 521n43 Corlette, Hubert, 464–65 Coromantee War (1760), 126 Cosmopolitan Gallery (Kingston), 365, 367 Cosmopolitan Gallery (W. W. W. Johnston), 367 Cottage Door (Gainsborough), 312

The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads (Duperly Brothers), 340, 343, 343 Country Negroes (Duperly Brothers), 347 Country Negroes (H. S. Duperly), 335 craniometry, 667–68 creole continuum, 572 Creole Negroes vs. Africans, 159, 167–69 The Creoles, 650–51 Creole society, 30–31 Cresser, Julian, 32 cricket: Ball-play, 252; black Jamaicans’ participation in, 253–54, 254; black spectators at, 255–56; Clowns and Gowns matches, 249; cost of bats, 252; diverse people united by, 243; in elementary schools, 251–54; elite clubs, 246–50, 247; from a game to a national pastime, 32; middle-class clubs, 248; organized competitions in, 248; popularity of, 242, 245; role in British self-definition, 243–44; school teams, 245–46, 246, 252–53; social activities at matches, 248–49; social control through, 242; sportsmanship in, 251–52; standards of play, 248–49 Crimean War (1853–56), 103 criminals, habitual, 133 Croal, A. M.: Diamond Jubilee Address, 513 Cromwell, Oliver, 500, 510 crop-over celebrations, 626, 628, 642 Cross, John, 24, 52 crossroads, symbolism of, 77 Crown Colony rule, 11, 27, 151–52, 503. See also state formation Cruickshank, James: wooden door lock, 53–57, 56, 119n7 Cuban sugar plantations, 399 Cummins, Alissandra, 536 Cundall, Frank, 472n57; on art as ennobling, 541, 546; Catalogue of the Portraits in the Jamaica History Gallery, 369, 392n20; collecting activities of, 24, 368–69; death of, 537; Historic Jamaica, 53, 117; Institute of Jamaica under, 24,

53, 368–69, 537, 542; The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, 549n48; and Livingston, 367; on the Metcalfe statue, 495; role in international exhibitions, 537, 548n39; stature of, 537 currency, British, 260n53 Curtin, Philip D.: Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 34 customs/traditions, importance of, 159 Dacres, Petrina, 53 Daguerian Excursions (Adolphe Duperly), 335–37, 356n6, 580; Cascade of Roaring River, 325, 325, 355–56n6; daguerreotype and lithograph combined in, 325; fashion in, 580, 581, 584; Golden Grove Estate, 298–99, 299; Holland Estate, 299, 300, 301–2; lithography for, 298; Market Street, Falmouth, 336–37; A View of Coke Chapel, 66; A View of the Court-House, 16, 17 Daily Gleaner: on cricket, 247, 255–56; on dancing, 652; on the Diamond Jubilee, 511–12, 522n72; Empire Day competition held, 251; fashion in, 581; on the Jamaica Exhibition, 543; on the Queen Victoria statue, 515, 517; on Victoria, 515, 522n76 Dalziel Brothers: The Black Question, 18, 19 Dancer, Dr., 527, 529 Dancer, Thomas, 212 Darling, Sir Charles Henry, 376, 527 Darwin, Charles, 525; blacks supported by, following Morant Bay rebellion, 45n36; Origin of the Species, 45n36 Daughtry, Mrs., 361, 362 D’Avignon, Francis: John Caldwell Calhoun, 366 Davis, George W., 331, 365 Davis, H. M., 512 Davis, Mrs. M., 589 Day School Children, Jamaica, 91–93, 92 D’Costa, Alfred H., 365 index

693

Dean, Mary, 607 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 163 deforestation, 210, 230 DeMontevin Lodge (Port Antonio, Jamaica), 459, 459 Denis, Elizabeth Pigou, 17, 24 Department of Education, 193 depression, postabolition, 212 de Ruggiero, Guido: History of European Liberalism, 168 Descriptive Catalogue of Articles Exhibited by the Royal Society of Arts, Jamaica at the International Exhibition 1862, 57, 532 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 163 Devis, Arthur William: Grinding Corn, 405; shipwrecked on Oroolong, 417n31 Devon House (St. Andrew, Jamaica), 454, 454, 568 Diamond Jubilee (1897): celebrations of, 502, 510–15, 513 (see also Queen Victoria statue); official portraits of Victoria for, 508, 516; plans for, 502–5, 520n33; politics surrounding, 511; statues for, 501; as a transitional period in British history, 518; Victoria’s long reign celebrated by, 501–2 Diamond Jubilee Address (Croal), 513 Dickens, Charles, 151, 526 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 673n29 Dignitaries of the Church (Walker), 360 Director of Prisons, 193 Dirks, Robert: The Black Saturnalia, 31 dirt, 184–85 Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène, 328, 363 Distant View of the Plains of Westmoreland (Kidd), 290–92, 291 district medical officers, 133–34 Dixon, Alexander, 511, 515 Dolman, Frederick, 505 domestic servants, 195 Donnell, Alison, 263 Douglass, Frederick, 389, 389–90 Downes, Aviston, 242

694

index

Downey, W. and D.: Queen Victoria photograph, 515, 516 Doyley, Henry, 307 Drake, Francis, 271 Draper, Nicholas, 466n3 Dredge, James, 449 dress. See fashion dressmaking, 556 drought, 195, 211, 304 Du Bois, W. E. B., 667 Duerden, Dr.: Aboriginal Indians of Jamaica, 548n34 Duerden, J. E., 548–49n41 Duke and Sons, 255 Dunn, Georgina: Sunshine Waltz, 653 Duperly, Adolphe: background and family life of, 323; carte de visite portrait business of, 328, 329; daguerreotype portrait business of, 323–25, 324; death of, 302, 331; emancipation associated with ruin and misery, 5; in Haiti, 323; landscape photographs by, 16; Morant Bay rebels depicted by, 20–21, 44n22, 340; on-site photographs by, 600n28; stature as a photographer, 365 —works: Banana Carriers, 314, 314–15; Castleton Gardens, 114, 115; Christmas Morning, 38, 39; Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery, 1–7, 2–4, 6, 626; George W. Gordon, 20, 21, 339, 340, 379, 394n45; “Negro Woman,” Lydia Ann, 565–66, 566, 595; Nineteenth Century Negro Girl, Celia, 595, 596, 597; A View of King Street, 586, 586–87; A View of the Kingston Theatre, 585, 585–86. See also Daguerian Excursions Duperly, Armand, 323, 326, 331, 333, 349, 354; By the Rio Cobre, 350; Moore’s Sugar Estate, 302–3, 303. See also Duperly Brothers Duperly, Armand, Jr., 354 Duperly, Eulalia, 349 Duperly, H.: Imported Indian Coolie Washer Woman, 404

Duperly, Henri Louis, 35n19, 323, 324, 325–26, 331, 333, 348, 349. See also Duperly Brothers Duperly, Henry Sylvester, 335, 354 Duperly, Louise Desnoes, 323 Duperly, Nellie de Vries, 349 Duperly, Theophile, 354 Duperly and Tomford, 349 Duperly Brothers (formerly A. Duperly and Sons), 326, 331, 339–40; Arrival of Prince George at Victoria Pier, 353, 353; Coolies at Worship, 398; The Cotton Tree at the Cross Roads, 340, 343, 343; Country Negroes, 347; dissolution of, 349; East Indians in Jamaica, 409, 410; Greetings from Jamaica, Coolies, 409, 410; Kingston on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Statue of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, 514, 515, 522n72; Maroons with Col. Fyfe, 340, 341; Natives of Jamaica, 340, 342; Picturesque Jamaica, 115, 354–55; portraits of Morant Bay participants sold by, 379, 393n38; postcards published by, 355; Statue of Governor Metcalfe, 498; Sugar Cane Cutters, 407; Visitors arriving by carriage and horse-drawn tram at the exhibition building, 542 Dupont ( Joseph) statue, 498, 519n11 East, Hinton, 211–12 East Indian Family (Griffiths), 396 East Indians in Jamaica (Duperly Brothers), 409, 410 East Indian Women Preparing Rice (Baillie), 403, 403–4, 416–17nn26–28 Eaton, Natasha, 510, 515 Eboe or African Wooden Locks (Potts), 533 economic botany, 23–24 An Economy of Colour (Dian and Quilley), 52 Edmondson, Belinda, 28, 668 education: of brown Jamaicans, 556; importance to liberalism, 169; for

moral improvement, 195; spending on, 91–92; and state formation, 127; of women, 540. See also industrial schools and reformatories; schools Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Lord Derby (Noble), 146 Edward John Eyre (Cameron), 19, 19–20 Edwards, Bryan, 272 Edwards, E. B., 532–33 Edwards, Jay D., 490, 492n32 Edward VII, Prince of Wales, 508 Egan, F., 655n8; A Set, or a Christmas Scene in Kingston, 643–44, 645 Egungun cult, 630 Ejectment Act (1840), 294 Elder, Dempster & Co., 234–35 Elizabeth I, Queen, 264, 500 Elizabeth II, Queen, 36–37, 40 Elkington, John, 384, 385 Ellington, Dave, 253, 256 Elliott, John, 35n21 Elliott, Kelly, 480 Ellis, Alexander, 111 Ellis, Nadia, 31 Ellis, Mrs. Tom, 589 emancipation: ambivalences of, 622; anxieties about productivity following, 526–27, 546–47n11; catastrophe prophesied by plantation owners, 5, 9; conditions for the poor following, overview of, 9, 482–84; in Duperly’s Commemorative of the Extinction of Slavery, 1–7, 2–4, 6, 626; number of freed Africans resettled, 608, 618n26; as performance (see under performance); photographs of celebrations of, 78; planters’ attitudes toward, 140–41, 525; political administration after, 29; process of, 78; religion’s role in, 7, 9; and state formation, 125; transitional period following (see apprenticeship); Victoria associated with, 1–2, 511, 513, 646–47. See also abolition of slavery index

695

Emancipation (Picken), 627 Emancipation Act (1834), 1, 5, 141 Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (Burn), 34 Emerick, Abraham J., 71 Empire Day, 251, 662 Empire of India Exhibition (1895), 507 Enclosure Acts, 294 Endersby, Jim, 217 Enfield Garden, 212 Enlightenment, 309 environmental determinism, 179–80 Espute, Queeny, 611 Esu-Elegbara (Legba), 77 etiquette, 578 The Etymology of Jamaica Grammar (T. Russell), 575n36 Evangelistic and Medical Mission, 649, 656n22 Execution of Rebels (Mills), 20–21, 339, 340, 387 Exeter Hall (London), 295, 319n38 exhibitions, 523–46; agro-industrial goods in, 529–33, 530–31t, 547nn14–17; Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 107, 229, 230, 537; Colonial Exhibition, 229; and colonial government’s/elites’ role in Jamaican representation, 527–29, 528; exhibitionary complex, 500, 523–24, 532, 534, 538, 544, 548n37; Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 29–30, 228, 524, 528, 547n14; and industrial education of blacks, 538; industrial-school and prison inmates represented at, 538; Jamaica’s representation as normal/productive, 524–27, 533–34; overview of, 523–24; products of black labor in, 529, 532–33; technologies of, 29 (see also museums); World’s Columbian Exposition, 350, 523, 536–37; World’s Exposition, 229–30. See also Institute of Jamaica; Jamaica Exhibition The Expansion of England (Seeley), 272–73

696

index

An Eye for the Tropics (Thompson), 17, 19, 51 Eyre, Edward John: on abolishing the House of Assembly, 148; biography of, 393n31; on black idleness, 301, 305; Cameron’s photo of, 19, 19–20; charged with murder, 526; controversy surrounding, 26, 151, 169, 271, 301–2, 525–26; in Gulland’s album, 385, 386; on immorality as the cause of poverty, 196; laborers’ petition to, 305, 604, 617n16; in the Livingston Album, 376, 377, 377–78, 393n31; Morant Bay rebellion suppressed by, 9, 11, 150; public attitude toward, 20; The Queen’s Advice circulated by, 320–21n62; supporters of, 378, 526; trial of, 308, 339 Falmouth Post, 556, 581, 645–46 Fanon, Frantz, 577; Black Skin, White Masks, 578 fashion, 577–99; accessories, 579, 584; and accommodation, 578, 591–92; of Afro-Jamaicans, 584, 586, 586–87, 593–94, 598–99; alternative dress, 579–80, 591; beards and sideburns, 593; in Belisario’s Sketches of Character, 587, 587–88; black clothing, 588, 589; of Lady Blake, 590, 591; bonnets, 584, 588; of brown Jamaicans, 583, 584; for children, 97; child’s outdoor cap, 52, 96, 97–98; circulation of, 580–82, 581; and class, 582–94, 584–87, 589–92, 594; creole, 98; crinolines and bustles, 579, 588, 589; democratization of, 577, 582; “dress,” meaning of, 578; dress shops, 582; and etiquette, 578; fashion dolls, 582; hairstyles and hairpieces, 588, 589, 591, 593; head ties and wraps, 105, 586, 587, 595, 596–97, 597–98; hoop skirts, 588; in imperial Britain, 578–80; Jamaicanization of, 566, 594–99, 596–97; masking via, 578, 592; mass manufacturing’s impact on, 582; for

men, 579, 584–86, 585, 591–92, 591–92; in newspapers/magazines, 581–82; Osnaburgh clothing, 582–83, 595, 597; photography’s impact on, 577, 588; pull skirts, 595, 596–97, 597–98; ready-made garments, 583; and respectability, 578–80, 583; retail stores, 583; rural, 595, 596, 597–98; sewing machine’s impact on, 577; sleeves, 591, 591, 593; social mobility via, 577, 591–92, 598–99; and symbolic interaction, 578; ties, 579–80, 591, 601n37; weight of dresses, 588, 591; of the white elite, 583; for women, 579–80, 584–88, 585, 591, 593–95, 594 Fatima (Mrs. Lionel Lee), 53, 105–7, 106, 541 Fawcett, William, 210–11, 215–17, 216, 221, 224, 226, 228, 232–33 Fern Gully (near Ocho Rios, Jamaica), 226 The Ferns and Fern Allies of the British West Indies and Guiana ( Jenman), 226 Fern Walk (Blue Mountains, Jamaica), 226 fiber plants, 221–22, 222, 236 The First of August (D. Lucas), 7, 8 floods, 211 Flora of Jamaica (MacFadyen), 212 Flora of the British West Indian Islands (Grisebach), 226 Fogel, Robert, 284 A Folk Drama (Ra), 42, 42–43 Fonseca, Carlisle: “Carvalho,” 570 Ford, Joseph C., 250 Forde, Maarit, 31 Forestry Department ( Jamaica), 231 forests, 210, 230–31 Forrest, A. S.: A Coloured Lady on a RaceCourse, 594 Forrest, A. S.: The West Indies, 167–68 Forrester, Gillian, 17, 44n22, 51, 288; Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 12, 52, 655n9 Foucault, Michel, 34, 127, 158, 169–70, 284

Fowke, Francis, 542–43 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 339, 356n13 Frederic Edwin Church (F. A. Freeman), 332, 333 “free colored,” use of, 555, 564–65, 573n8 Freedmen’s Bureau (United States), 622 Free Jamaica (D. Hall), 34 Freeman, F. A., 331; Frederic Edwin Church, 332, 333; Isabel Carnes Church, 332, 333; Jamaican Woman, 330, 333 Freeman, Thomasina, 575n40 Free Methodist Chapel (Clarement, St. Ann, Jamaica), 458, 458–59 free trade, 146–47, 160, 187n16 Fremmer, Ray, 426, 437n11 French Revolution, 163 Friendship and Greenwich estate (Holland estate), 291–92, 294 Frith, W. A., 365 Froudacity ( J. J. Thomas), 274 Froude, James Antony, 263, 270–74, 669; History of England, 271–72 Fun, 18, 19 Fung, Richard, 661 furniture, 24, 52, 420–36; Afro-Jamaican motifs on, 432–34, 432–35; creolization of, 428–32, 429–32; influx of European furniture makers, 420–21; Jamaican style of, 421, 426, 427, 428, 436; local woods used for, 420, 422, 425, 428–29; named makers of, 422–28, 423–27 (see also Page, Henry; Pitkin, James and William; Turnbull, John; Turnbull, Ralph); octagonal stool, 203, 203; for the style-conscious elite, 421, 424; Turnbull table, 58, 59; turning and carving of, 429, 429–31, 431, 435 Fyfe, Alexander, 384, 385 Gabriel, Charles, 649 Gainsborough, Thomas: Cottage Door, 312 Gallery of Illustrious Americans (Brady), 365, 366, 370, 372 index

697

Gall’s Newsletter, 628–29 gambling, 101 gangs, 191 Gardiner, Robert Barlow, 444 Gardner, W. J., 164; History of Jamaica, 272, 632, 638n19, 639n29 Garvey, Marcus, 68 Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South, 241 gas works (Kingston), 453 Geertz, Clifford, 117 Geflowski, Emmanuel Edward: background/career of, 506–7; Naorojee bust, 507; Queen Victoria statue in Singapore, 505–6, 506, 508, 509, 510, 521n46; Queen Victoria statue in the Colonial Office, 505; Queen Victoria statuettes, 510; Roberts bust, 507; Robinson bust, 507. See also Queen Victoria statue gender: division of labor by, 201, 204–5; gendered labor of female Indians, 396, 404, 404–5; imbalance among Indian laborers, 406, 418n33; importance to abolition of slavery, 62; women’s exclusion from public roles/spaces, 242 General Board of Health, 178 General Penitentiary (Kingston), 129 genre painting, 312, 405 gentleman, concept of, 241 The Gentleman and the Cabinet-Maker’s Director, 421 George W. Gordon (Adolphe Duperly), 20, 21, 339, 340, 379, 394n45 German immigrants, 99 German sugar exports, 152–53 germ theory, 175 Gideon, David S., 504, 520n39, 521n43 Gilbert, Alfred: bronze Queen Victoria statue, 507–8 Gillies, Rev., 503 Gilroy, Paul, 661 Gleaner: on the Botanical Department, 232; on the Diamond Jubilee, 510; on

698

index

farmers’ problems, 236; founding of, 33; on Morant Bay rebellion widows and orphans, 387; on neglected children, 191; on Stern, 503; on villages, 481–82 The Gleanings, 651 Gleichen, Count: Mary Seacole, 53, 102, 104 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 582 Golden Grove Church (St. Thomas, Jamaica), 7, 9, 10 Golden Grove Estate (Adolphe Duperly), 298–99, 299 Golden Jubilee (1887), 501 gombey (Bermuda), 642 Gomm, Sir William Maynard, 85 Good Hope (Kidd), 282, 283, 285, 296, 316 Gordon, Bishop, 202 Gordon, George William: background of, 21; Duperly’s photo of, 20, 21, 339, 340, 379, 394n45; execution of, 21, 169, 339; vs. Eyre, 378; in Gulland’s album, 381, 383; Kingston Free Press owned by, 556; in the Livingston Album, 379, 381; as a national hero, 570; wife of, 379, 393–94n39 Gordon, Joseph, 21 Gordon, Joseph Milward, 445 Gordon, Lucy Shannon, 379 Gorgistan, 101 Gosse, Philip, 228 Goveia, Elsa, 159, 272 Government Reformatory and Industrial School (Stony Hill, Jamaica), 190, 192–93, 197–204, 198, 200, 205nn4–5, 206n33, 207n48 Graham, Rev., 504 Grand Jury of Kingston, 180 “Grandmother on Mother’s Side” (Cleary), 99–101, 100 Granger, James: A Biographical History of England, 364 Grant, Sir John Peter, 362; on blacks as ill-suited for self-government, 134; court reform by, 133, 152; on family law,

134; as governor, 129–35, 151–52; health measures instituted by, 133–34; immigration encouraged by, 152; land policy of, 131–32; in the Livingston Album, 362, 362, 377; on plants, 231–32; portrait of, 130; Rio Cobre Dam and irrigation scheme, 152, 441; security innovations by, 133, 152; service in Bengal, India, 131–32, 151–52 Grave of Eighty Rebels near Morant Bay, Jamaica, 76, 77–78 Graves, Carlton Harlow: background of, 418n36; Jamaica, Coolies Working on Banana Plantation, 397, 407, 409, 418n36; Schoolchildren, Mandeville, Jamaica, 561, 562, 563 Graves, Jesse Albert, 418n36 Gray, Denise, 487 Gray, John, 156 Great Britain. See Britain Great Emigration, 506–7 Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (London, 1851), 29–30, 228, 524, 528, 547n14 Great Revival (1860–61), 629 Green-Lewis, Jennifer, 659 greenwood, 429 Greetings from Jamaica, Coolies (Duperly Brothers), 409, 410 Grey, Earl, 146–48 Grey, Sir William, 131, 134, 198 Griffiths, C.: East Indian Family, 396 Grinding Corn (Devis), 405 Grisebach, August: Flora of the British West Indian Islands, 226 GR Lambert and Co.: Group Photograph with Statue of Queen Victoria, 499 Guest, Henry, 489 Guest, John, 489 Gulland, Alexander Dudgeon, 76, 77–78, 342–43, 358, 385, 391n4. See also Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion Gumbay Play, 630, 632, 642

Gunter, Henry, 323 Guyana National Museum, 548n28 Haddon, A. C., 548n34 Haile Selassie I, Emperor, 36 Haitian Revolution, 163 Hakewill, James, 12, 15, 298, 354; Holland Estate, 299, 300, 301 Hall, Catherine, 32, 145, 158, 296, 480; Civilizing Subjects, 33 Hall, Douglas: Free Jamaica, 34 Hall, Stuart, 373, 661, 671 Hallowes, Major-General, 502 Handbook of Jamaica, 524, 546n3 A Hand-list of the Jamaica Ferns and their Allies ( Jenman), 226 Hannah Village (Kingston), 483 Hargraves, Roger, 364 Hargreaves, John, 241 Harper’s Bazaar, 582 Harris, Wilson, 25 Harrison, Thomas: Isometric Drawing of Ellis Caymanas Estate Works, 309, 309 Hart, Richard, 45n36 Hart, Samuel, 254–55 Hartlands dispute, 132 Hartman, Saidiya: Scenes of Subjection, 622–23 Hart Shield, 254 Harvey, Marcus, 616n5 Harvey, Thomas, 161, 291 Havighurst, Alfred, 518 Hawkins, John, 264 Hawkins, Richard, 271 Hay, R.: Newcastle, Jamaica, 53, 85–87, 86 healers, 618n30. See also balm yards Heathen Practices at Funerals (Phillippo), 476, 477 Hemming, Augustus, 244 Henderson, John, 156; The West Indies, 167–68 Henriques, George, 653–54 Hering, Henry, 377–78, 393n31 Herschell, Theodosia, 386, 387 index

699

Herskovits, Melville, 616n5 Heuman, Gad, 27, 29, 307, 393–94n39, 556; The Killing Time, 34 “The Hidden Self ” (W. James), 667 Highgate, Jamaica (Belisario), 478, 478 Higman, B. W., 291, 535, 542, 626, 628 Higson, Thomas, 212 Hill, Sir Arthur, 230–31 Hill, Errol, 628, 636–37 Hill, Richard, 565, 565, 568 Hill Gardens (formerly Cinchona Plantation; in the Blue Mountains), 214, 224 Hire, Augustus, 304, 306–7, 320n55 Historic Jamaica (Cundall), 53, 117 History of England (Froude), 271–72 History of England (T. B. Macaulay), 268–72 History of European Liberalism (de Ruggiero), 168 History of Jamaica (Gardner), 272, 632, 638n19, 639n29 The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (Clarkson), 265 Hitchins, Maria, 386, 387 Hobbs, Thomas, 385, 386 Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Prince Victor of. See Gleichen, Count Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, Lord, 291–92 Holland Estate (Adolphe Duperly), 299, 300, 301–2 Holland Estate (Benoist), 300 Holland Estate (Hakewill), 299, 300, 301 Holland Estate (Sutherland), 300 Holmes, F. A., 507–8 Holt, Felix, 44n12 Holt, Thomas: on Froude, 274; “Liberal Democratic Society in Theory and Practice,” 33; on plantation cottages, 292; on political self-rule, 126; The Problem of Freedom, 33, 130–31 Holy Trinity Cathedral (Kingston), 465

700

index

Holy Trinity Church (Montego Bay, Jamaica), 447, 448 Homiak, John, 36 homosexuality, 40, 42 Hooker, Joseph, 209–10, 231–32 Hooker, Sir William Jackson, 55, 209–10, 217–18 Hooper, E. D. M., 230 Hope Gardens (near Kingston, Jamaica), 214–16, 216 Hope Industrial School for Boys (later named College of Agricultural Science Education), 193, 201–4, 207n46, 228 Hopkins, Pauline: Of One Blood, 667 Hordley Estate ( J. S. Thompson and J. Tomford), 303–4, 304, 307, 307, 320nn54–55, 335 Hordley estate (St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica), 303–4, 304, 306–8 horseracing, 243 Horst, Heather, 51 Hotel Act (1890), 455, 463 House of Assembly, 139–42, 145, 148–49, 151 Howell, Leonard, 68 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 623 H. S. Duperly, 354; Country Negroes, 335 Hughes, Thomas, 525 Hughes, Tom: Tom Brown at Oxford, 241 Hume, Hamilton, 393n31 Humphrey, James Ellis, 226 Hunt, James, 26 hurricanes, 210–11 Hurston, Zora Neale, 602–3 Hussay ritual, 412–13, 419n50 Huxley, Thomas, 525 Huzzey, Richard, 274 hymns, 648–50, 656n21 Igbo people, 71 illegitimate children, 191. See also industrial schools and reformatories

Illustrated London News, 307, 307–8, 326, 327, 339, 353, 441, 526 Illustrations of Jamaica (Kidd), 287–94, 288–89, 291, 293 Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies (Rippingille), 7, 8 immigration, 143–47, 152, 311 imperial histories, 263–74; Britain’s fostering of/benefiting from slave trade, 264–65, 269; by Clarkson, 265; emancipation as generosity/liberality, 264–65; by Froude, 263, 270–74; by Gardner, 272; historical and literary relativism, 266–67; and lost/forgotten history of slavery, 263, 265–69, 274; by T. B. Macaulay, 268–72; national histories’ privileged position, 267; by Seeley, 272–73; slave owners’ negotiations in Parliament, 264; slavery avoided/ forgotten as a subject, 264; sugar’s role in, 266; by J. J. Thomas, 274; and the transition from slavery to free labor, 266; by Whig vs. conservative historians, 267 Imperial Institute (South Kensington, London), 228 Imported Indian Coolie Washer Woman (H. Duperly), 404 indentureship: of African immigrants, 311; of Chinese immigrants, 28, 99, 101, 311, 414n3; end of the program, 395; of Indian immigrants (see Indian laborers); and modernization, 402; opposition to, 415n15; plantation views of, 311–15, 313–15; regulation of laborers, 407 independence, Jamaican (1962), 21 Indian colonial policy, 131 Indian Cooking Outside Her House (Baillie), 396 Indian laborers: vs. Afro-Jamaicans, 400– 402; Anti-Slavery Society’s opposition to indentureship, 415n15; in the British

Caribbean, generally, 395; clothing given to, 401, 416n27; contracts for, 401; debates about, 395; demographics of, 400; economic contribution by, 29; first arrivals in Jamaica, 28, 395; gender imbalance among, 406, 418n33; head wraps worn by, 598; Hindu, 400–402; Hussay performed by, 412–13, 419n50; the journey from India, 400–401; living conditions of, 482; meals of, 417n28; medical inspections of, 401; migration due to economic conditions in India, 398–99; opposition to, 406–7; recruitment of, 99, 311, 395, 399–400; segregation from Afro-Jamaican laborers, 407, 418n35; settlement after end of contracts, 400; terms use for, 414n2. See also South Asians, photographs of Indian Rebellion (1857), 19, 131, 133, 135, 159, 501 industrialization, 240, 398–99, 406, 409, 411 Industrial Schools Act (1857), 194, 538 industrial schools and reformatories, 190–205; for Afro-Jamaican children’s reformation, 191, 193–94; Alpha Cottage Industrial School for Boys and Girls, 193, 201–2, 204; as an alternative to prison, 191–92, 194, 204; authority over, 193, 197; bad influences within, 196; Belmont Orphanage and Industrial School, 201–4, 562, 561, 563; as a case study in governance, 29; children admitted perceived as criminals, 190–92, 205n5; destitute vs. criminal inmates, 196, 204; disfigurement of children in, 197–98; economic role, 192–94, 204; and exhibitions, 201–4; and good citizenship, 193; government, 538; Government Reformatory, 190, 192–93, 197–204, 198, 200, 205nn4–5, 206n33, 207n48;

index

701

industrial schools and reformatories,   (continued) Hope Industrial School for Boys, 193, 201–4, 207n46, 228; investigations of, 198–99, 206n33; Kingston and St. Andrew Reformatory for Girls, 194–95, 197; for moral reformation, 194; private, 538; reformatory expansion, 133; reformatory movement’s early years, 193–97, 205n10; “reformatory” term abandoned, 192; as rescue homes for the abandoned and neglected, 192; rewards and punishments for children’s behavior, 191, 199, 205n4; self-sufficiency of, 203; Shortwood Industrial School for Girls, 193, 201–4; for social change, 190; St. George’s Home and Reformatory for Boys, 196–97; vocational curriculum of, 190, 195, 204 Institute of Jamaica (Kingston): anthropological functions of, 534–35, 548n29; archaeological collections, 536; Arts and Crafts Competitive Exhibitions, 541; branding iron and shackles in, 535, 536; collection of Jamaican material culture, 24; contacts with scientific institutions, 537; early acquisitions by, 535–36; founding of, 24, 534, 539 (see also Cundall, Frank); goals of, 534–35, 539–41; Handbook of Jamaica published by, 524, 546n3; history gallery, 536; influence of, 537, 539; on Jamaican vs. imperial art, 547n25; as a landmark, 454; location of, 534, 535; Materialising Slavery exhibition, 110; natural history collections, 535–36; overview of collections, 53, 535–36, 548n40; portrait gallery, 536, 542; public lecture series, 539–41; role in Jamaica’s participation in international exhibitions, 536–37; Turnbull table in, 58, 59; wood-sample cabinet in, 59, 108, 109–10; works

702

index

opposing the legacies of colonialism, 43 Institution of Civil Engineers (Britain), 445 International Exhibition (London, 1862), 57, 228–29, 326, 328, 527 Irish colonial policy, 130–31 Isaacs, Rev. (“Sidegate”), 44n12 Isabel Carnes Church (Freeman), 332, 333 “The Islanders” (Kipling), 244 Island Medical Service, 134 Isometric Drawing of Ellis Caymanas Estate Works (Harrison), 309, 309 Jacottet, Louis Julian: View of the Court House, 16, 17 Jaffe, Rivke, 29, 52 jalap, 223 Jamaica: agricultural potential of, 235; formation of the colony, 164–65; picturesque representations of, 83, 115, 402 Jamaica, Coolies Working on Banana Plantation (C. H. Graves), 397, 407, 409, 418n36 Jamaica Assembly, 67, 125–26, 165, 294, 440, 446 Jamaica Association Football League, 248, 254 Jamaica Baptist Union, 605 Jamaica College (St. Andrew), 455, 457, 457 Jamaica Committee, 525 Jamaica Constabulary Force, 132–33 Jamaica Cricket Challenge Cup, 248 Jamaica Daily Gleaner, 221 Jamaica Dispatch, 62 Jamaica Exhibition (Kingston, 1891), 542; British support for, 11; construction/ demolition of halls, 457, 463, 472n57; goals of, 543–44; hotel building in preparation for, 455; and industrial training, 192, 201, 203–4; influence of, 537; and the Jamaica Court, 230; and

modern collecting, 24; number of visitors to, 543, 546; “Obeah Doll,” 54, 113; opening of, 542–43; social uplift via, 542–43; and state formation, 126; wood samples exhibited, 53, 108, 109 Jamaica Female Training College (Shortwood, Jamaica), 202 Jamaica Free Press, 556 Jamaica Government Railway, 89 Jamaica in 1850 (Bigelow), 34 Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (Phillippo), 34, 63, 64, 266, 295–97, 297, 625, 627 Jamaica Lawn Tennis Association, 247–48 Jamaican Code of Education, 500 Jamaican Orchids (North), 219 The Jamaican People 1880–1902 (Bryan), 33 Jamaican Victorianism, 658–71; and amnesia, 661; Jamaicans self-fashioned as tropical, 664; MacGregor’s “Mysterious Murder,” 30, 664–66, 668–71; and melancholy, 661; and modernity, 659, 661, 663, 665, 670; overview of, 658–60; and respectability, 660–61, 663; retrospective Victorianism, 660–63; and shame, 661; and the spirit world/ occult, 666; “Victorian,” use of, 659–60 Jamaican Woman (Freeman), 330, 333 Jamaica Peasantry (Cleary and Elliott), 315, 315 Jamaica photographs of the Principal Bridges (H. Blake), 461, 461–62 Jamaica Public Works, 109 The Jamaica Question (Tenniel), 18, 19 Jamaica Railway Company, 89, 440–41, 449 Jamaica Society, 534 Jamaica Song and Story ( Jekyll), 653 Jamaica: The New Riviera ( Johnstone), 354–55 Jamaica Times, 30, 570, 664–65 Jamaica Union of Teachers, 251

Jamaica Yacht Club (later Royal Jamaica Yacht Club), 248–49, 251, 454–55 James, Erica Moiah, 53 James, William: “The Hidden Self,” 667 James Cowles Prichard: Natural History of Man, 26 James II, King, 264, 269 James Valentine and Son: Negro Boy, 350, 351 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 266, 661–62 Jane’s Career (Lisser), 572 Jehangir, Sorabji: Representative men of India, 366 Jekyll, Walter: Jamaica Song and Story, 653 Jenman, George Samuel, 210, 214–15; The Ferns and Fern Allies of the British West Indies and Guiana, 226; A Hand-list of the Jamaica Ferns and their Allies, 226 Jesus Christ, 9 Jewish-brown unions, 568–70, 575n43 jipijapa hats, 514, 522n73 John Caldwell Calhoun (D’Avignon), 366 Johnson, Michele A., 5–6, 32, 140–41, 169, 248, 658, 665 Johnston, James, 656n22; Songs of Grace and Truth, 649 Johnston, William Walker Whitehall, 385: background of, 358, 391n4; Cosmopolitan Gallery, 367; William Walker Whitehall Johnston Photograph Album, 358, 380, 382 Johnstone, James: Jamaica: The New Riviera, 354–55; The Llandovery Waterfall, 35n22, 352, 352 Jonkonnu: bans on, 31, 630, 644; Belisario’s images of, 630, 631; and Bruckins, 630, 645–46; as carnivalesque, 629; characters in, 642; colonial reaction to, 638n19; and creole religion, 630, 632; early accounts of, 642; European styles in masquerades of, 598; extravagance of, 638n19; and Gumbay Play, 642; vs. Hussay, 413; license required for, 571;

index

703

Jonkonnu: (continued) vs. missionary work, 644–45; music in, 642–45; Myal linked to, 31, 632; origins of, 638n19; professional recitation, 636; and rebellion, 630; revival of, 645–46; as threatening institutional interests, 571 Journal des Demoiselles, 582 Journal of the Institute of Jamaica, 523, 539–40 J. S. Thompson’s Army and Navy Gallery, 335. See also Thompson, J. S. Jubilee Central Committee, 503 Judah, Braham T., 445, 469n26 junkanoo (the Bahamas), 642 juvenile delinquency, 191, 194. See also industrial schools and reformatories Kardec, Allan, 666 Keith, Sir Basil, 212 Kennedy, Imogen (“Queenie”), 633–34, 639n34 Kenny, Gale, 618n24 Kensington Cricket Club, 248 Kerr, Madeline, 619n34 Kessen, Andrew, 361, 362 Kew Gardens. See Royal Botanic Gardens Keystone View Company, 418n36 Kidd, Joseph Bartholomew, 12, 69, 346, 354; Distant View of the Plains of Westmoreland, 290–92, 291; Good Hope, 282, 283, 285, 296, 316; Illustrations of Jamaica, 287–94, 288–89, 291, 293; Kidd’s New Plan of the City of Kingston, Jamaica, 73–75, 74; Montego Bay from Upton Hill, 288, 288–89, 290; Mountain Cottage Scene, 14, 15, 292, 293, 294; West Indian Scenery, 15, 287 Kikongo language, 614–15, 619–20n38, 621n56 The Killing Time (Heuman), 34 King, Anthony, 176–77 King, Ruby, 251

704

index

King’s House (Spanish Town), 214, 453, 464–65 Kingsley, Charles, 151, 270–71, 526; At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies, 273 Kingston: cholera epidemic in, 29, 178; design of, 495; development of, 177; Diamond Jubilee celebration in, 512; earthquake of 1907, 353, 445, 463, 464–65; fire of 1862, 445; fire of 1882, 338, 339, 353; horticultural shows in, 230; imported lumber used in, 485; infrastructure improvements in, 184; Kidd’s map of, 73–75, 74; as a port and commercial city, 4; sanitary reform in (see sanitary reform); slums of, 180, 482–84 Kingston and St. Andrew Reformatory for Girls, 194–95, 197 Kingston Cricket Club, 246–50, 247, 261n87 Kingston Free Press, 556 Kingston Improvements Act (1890), 184 Kingston on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Statue of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Duperly Brothers), 514, 515, 522n72 Kingston Parish Church, 7, 67–68 Kingston Yacht Club, 248 Kipling, Rudyard: “The Islanders,” 244 Knox, Robert: Races of Men, 26 Kodak, 355 Kongo kingdom, 71 Kongo nation, 610–11, 619n37 Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, 120n19 Kriz, Kay Dian: An Economy of Colour, 52; Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, 52 Kumina, 602–15; Atlantic Ocean’s significance to, 603, 616n7; and Baptists, 614; ceremonial gatherings, 613–14; cosmology of (Dikenga Kongo), 611–13, 612; earth’s significance, 614; emergence/​establishment of, 168, 604–5, 615n2, 633; as a family-bonding

and nation-building religious culture, 603, 609–15; historical records of, 609; on humans, 611; kalunga in, 611; Kongo identification in, 610, 619n37; mediums, 602; and missionaries’ role in Jamaica, 604–9, 618n24, 618n28; myal (spirit manifestation and mediumship) in, 613; nkuyu (ancestors) revered in, 602–3, 612, 615; overview of ritual/ customs of, 615–16n2; performance of, 634–35; queens of, 611, 615; re­incar­ nation in, 612; and Revivalists, 614; ritual and ceremonial life of, 609, 612; ritual water-jar dances, 602–3; salt’s significance, 621n54; scholarship on, 31, 619n34, 633–34; spiritual grammar of, 614; subnations, 610–11, 619n37; “Tange Lange Jeni,” 602; Vola’s importance to, 602, 610, 619–20n38; water’s significance, 602, 614; yearning for Africa, 615, 621n56 Kumina (Nettleford), 635 La Beche, H. T. de, 643, 650 labor: by black Jamaicans, 183, 185, 529, 532–33; by children, 92; discourses of, 282, 285–87, 305–6; female dominance of industrial labor force, 556–57; gendered, 201, 204–5, 396, 404, 404–5; genteel labor by brown women, 556–57; hours and rates of pay on plantations, 305–7; indentured (see indentureship; Indian laborers); instrumental theory of, 286, 306; transition from slavery to free labor, 266; views of laborers (see plantation views). See also apprenticeship lace-bark, 52, 96, 97–98 lace caps, 97 Ladies Negro Education Society, 195 Ladies Reformatory Association, 194 Lamming, George, 159, 263, 661 The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland (Cundall), 549n48

landscape painting: absence as characterizing the Jamaican landscape, 83; Kidd’s Good Hope, 282, 283; by military officers, 85; panoramas, 85; tradition of, 12, 15, 282 landscape views of plantations. See plantation views Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, Augustus Henry, 119n7 Lang, Gladys, 599 Lang, Kurt, 599 The Language of Dress (Buckridge), 52 Last Supper, 9 laundresses, 195 Law 8 (1896), 92 Lawrence-Archer, James Henry: Monumental Inscriptions, 367 LaYacona, Maria: Pocomania, 634 Lazarus, Charles P., 445, 454, 472n55, 568 Leboeuf, Marguerite, 575n40 Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (Merivale), 144–45, 162 Lee, Isabella Turnbull, 437n6 Lee, Mrs. Lionel: Fatima, 53, 105–7, 106, 541; prizes won by, 120n29; Queen Victoria drawing, 53, 116, 117–18; Tomasina, a Negress, 107 Lee, William, 437n6 Legislative Council, 125–26, 151–52, 230–32, 502–3, 536–37 Leighton, R. A.: Celebration of the 1st of August 1838, 626, 627 Levine, Sidney, 381, 383, 384 Lewin, Olive, 1–2, 43n2, 634, 639n34, 655n15 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 643 Lewis, Matthew “Monk,” 643 “Liberal Democratic Society in Theory and Practice” (T. Holt), 33 liberalism: on character, 168; on citizens vs. subjects, 163; de Ruggiero’s History of European Liberalism, 168; education’s importance to, 169; and empire, 156–57, 170n2; history of, 156–57; index

705

liberalism: (continued) humanitarian element of, 161; and pastoral coloniality, 169–70; political practice of, 157; on representative government, 157–58, 167–69; rule by producing ways of life, 168–69; technologies of rule developed by, 157 “Library of Wood Samples,” 53 Liele, George, 69 Lignum vitae blossom, 109 Lindo, B. D., 381, 383, 384 Lisser, Herbert G. de, 652; Jane’s Career, 572 lithography, 322. See also Daguerian Excursions; Duperly, Adolphe; plantation views Livingston, Ellen Campbell Harris, 368 Livingston, Julia Cardonal Brodbelt, 368 Livingston, Sir Noel Brooks: background of, 365; as a Caribbeana contributor, 367; genealogical research by, 365, 368; Livingston Album, role in constructing, 368, 392n19; Livingston Album given to National Library of Jamaica by, 365; monumental inscriptions collected by, 367; Sketch Pedigrees, 365, 367–68 Livingston, Ross Jameson, 359, 368, 370 Livingston, William, 368 Livingston, William Henry, 367–68 Livingston Album: black Jamaicans in, 370, 375–76, 378–79, 381; brown Jamaicans in, 370, 378; captions, 363, 392n19; compiler’s identity, 368; Cundall’s influence on, 369, 392n20; demographics of sitters in, 370, 392n22; dissonant images in, 373, 374, 392nn26–27; format of, 357, 359, 364, 368; given to National Library of Jamaica, 365; and Gulland’s album, 358, 384, 393n36; home circle in, 373, 374–75, 375–76; and Johnston’s album, 358; Livingston family in, 370; Morant Bay rebellion memorialized in, 376–77, 376–80, 380; and the

706

index

National Portrait Gallery, 358; organization of, 362–63, 369–70; photographs removed from, 363; postemancipation colonial Jamaican society depicted in, 358; royalty absent from, 369; social networks captured by, 363; studios represented in, 365; women in, 370, 392n22 — persons included: Barclay, Alexander, 378; Berry, Alexander, 380, 393n35; Bowerbank, Lewis Quier, 378; Brymer, Alexander James, 359, 370; Bulkley, Margaret (aka James Miranda Barry), 375; Chapman, Charles, 361, 362, 369; Chapman, Philip, 371; Cochrane, James, 369; Cooper, William, 377, 378; Darling, Sir Charles Henry, 376; Darling, Lady, 376; Daughtry, Mrs., 361, 362; Edwards, Milly, 373, 374; Elgin, Earl of, 377; Eyre, Edward John, 376, 377, 377–78, 393n31; Fiddes, Alexander, 378; Fletcher, Rev., 372; Flynn, Francis Joseph (“General Mite”), 373, 374; Gordon, George William, 379, 381; Grant, Sir John Peter, 362, 362, 377; Harris, John, 371; Harrison, Thomas, 369; Hill, Richard, 378; Hosack, William, 378; Jordon, Edward, 378; Kellett, Sir Henry, 373, 375; Kessen, Andrew, 361, 362; Ketelhodt, Maximilian Augustus, 378–79; King, F. L., 372; Levy, George, 380, 393n35; Livingston, Flora, 359, 370; Livingston, Ross Jameson, 359, 368, 370; Magnan, Peter, 369; Mayo, R., 359, 370; Murphy, Rev., 372; Musson, Samuel Paynter, 371; Nelson, Abercromby, 375; Norman, Sir Henry Wylie, 369; Nuttal, C. E., 359, 362; Nuttal, Enos, 358, 359, 360, 362, 369; Oates, Dr., 567; O’Connor, Luke Smythe, 379, 380, 381; Panton, Richard, 362, 362; Price, Charles, 378–79, 381, 390; Radcliffe, John, 369, 372; Ramsay, Gordon, 379, 381, 393n36; Salmon, John, 378; Saunders, Mr.,

371; ­Shannon, Mrs., 379, 380; Sinclair, James, 359, 370; Storks, Sir Henry Knight, 377, 377; Whitelocke, Hugh Anthony, 378; Wilhelm I, 373, 374 Livingstone, David, 161 Livingstone, William, 553, 558, 561 Livingstone, W. P., 598 The Llandovery Waterfall ( Johnstone), 35n22, 352, 352 Lobdell, Richard, 153 lock hospital, 133 logwood, 459 Lombroso, Cesare, 667–68 London, 174, 193 Long, Charles, 603 Long, Edward, 165, 272, 555 Lorimer, Douglas, 26 Lorrain, Claude, 282 Lucas, David: The First of August, 7, 8 Lucas, Nathan, 270 Lucas, R. Slade, 253 Lucas Cricket Club, 253, 255–57, 261n87 Lynch, F. G. M., 250 Macaulay, Charles, 183–84 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 157, 268; History of England, 268–72 Macaulay, Zachary, 268–69 MacClancy, Jeremy, 245 Macdonald, H. G., 247, 257 MacDougal, D. T., 226 MacFadyen, James, 226; Flora of Jamaica, 212 MacGregor, A. James: “The Mysterious Murder,” 30, 664–66, 668–71 Machunde nation, 610–11 Maclean, Isabel Cranstoun, 252 Madras cloth, 598 mahoe, 429 mahogany, 109, 218, 420, 428–29 Mair, James, 205n7 Mair, Thomas, 192, 199–200, 203–4, 205n7, 207n48 malaria, 178, 223

Manchester ( Jamaica), 174, 481–82, 485 mango, 212 Manley, Edna, 109; Morant Bay memorial sculpture, 21, 22 Mann, James Robert, 467n6 Mansingh, Laxmi and Ajai, 417n28 maps: Kidd’s New Plan of the City of Kingston, Jamaica, 73–75, 74; of Morant Bay rebellion, 79–81, 80 Marie Villa College, 248 Market Street, Falmouth (Adolphe Duperly), 336–37 Market Street, Falmouth ( J. S. Thompson), 335–36, 337 Marlie Mount (near Old Harbour, Jamaica), 445–46, 446 Marly, 553, 573n8 Marochetti, Baron Carlo Giovanni Battista: Sir James Stephen, 140 Maroons, 55, 81, 384 Maroons with Col. Fyfe (Duperly Brothers), 340, 341 Marsh, Jan, 53 Marshall, Paule, 263, 274 Marshall, Woodville, 170 Martha Brae (Trelawny, Jamaica), 294 Martinez, F. N., 254–55 Martinez Cup, 254, 254 Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro: Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 12, 52, 655n9 Mary Douglas, 184 Mary Seacole (Count Gleichen), 53, 102, 104 masculinity, 163 masquerade (St. Kitts and Nevis), 642 material culture, generally, 21, 23–24, 51–53, 111, 482 material turn, 23 Mathur, Saloni, 409, 411 Maull and Polyblank, 356n8 Mayall, John Jabez Edwin, 331, 333 McAdam, E. Stanley, 251 McGranahan, James, 649 McKen, Mark J., 55 McNab, Gilbert, 228 index

707

McNeil, Thomas, 291–92, 294 McPherson, Rowland J., 349 Melbourne Cricket Club, 248, 570–71 “Memorandum” (H. Taylor), 142, 149, 159, 164–66 Menem, Empress, 36 Merivale, Herman: on amalgamation of racial groups, 162–63, 169; on civilization via intermarriage, 163; in the Colonial Office, 143, 147, 311; Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, 144–45, 162; Oxford lectures, 144–45, 157, 162–63, 172n25; as undersecretary for India, 162 mesmerism, 666, 669–70 message-in-a-bottle tradition, 40 Messerschmidt, F. A., 418n36 Messiter, George, 455, 457, 458, 472n55 metalwork, 52 Metcalfe, Sir Charles, 142–43, 143–44, 145 Metcalfe statue (Baily), 495, 496–98, 497–99, 517, 519n14 Methodists, 67, 245 Metropolitan House, 583 miasmatic theory, 175, 178–79 Mico College (Kingston), 253 microbiology, 175 middle class: brown, 4, 28, 166; cricket clubs for, 248; and dialect culture, 572; emergence of, 4, 97, 166, 240 (see also brown identity); and fashion, 583; identifiers of, 571; rise of, 571–72 Middle Passage, 37, 263, 266, 402, 603, 616n8 military, British, 243, 245, 247 Mill, James, 175–76 Mill, John Stuart, 11, 26, 151, 156, 160–61, 525 Miller, Daniel, 51 Miller, Joseph, 616n8 Miller, Margaret, 610 Miller, R. G.: statue of Jordon, 497, 497 milliners, 582 Millionaires’ Corner (Kingston), 568

708

index

Mills, T. J.: Execution of Rebels, 20–21, 339, 340, 387 Milroy, Gavin: medical background of, 178; on quarantining, 178, 187n16; The Report on the Cholera in Jamaica, 178–85, 188n29; on supervision of sanitary conditions, 184 mimic man, 40 minimalism, 37 Mintz, Sidney, 23 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 284–85 missionaries: Afro-Jamaicans treated as subordinate by, 608; AMA, 606–8, 618n24; attention to spirit possession, 666; autonomy of colonial missions, 608; Baptist free villages established by, 63–65, 64, 296, 479–80, 606; Baptist mission, beginning of, 69; Christian Victorian culture promoted by, 607; on creole culture, 5; cultural norms circulated by, 580; denominations of, 605; on ex-slaves’ redemption/slave owners’ damnation, 295; goals of, 65, 295, 604; home circle’s importance to, 373; on labor and respectability under emancipation, 287; on landownership by Afro-Jamaicans, 606–9, 618n24; nonconformist, 446, 448, 469n29, 605, 608, 648; paternalism and benign racism of, 608; predictions about the peasantry, 281; on the rights of ex-slaves, 145; role in Jamaica, 604–9, 618n24, 618n28; schools established by, 580; schools for training ministers, 608, 618n28; on villages, 474, 476, 477, 478–81; wages and rents negotiated by, 605–6 mission civilisatrice, 164 model farms, 197 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 87 Modest, Wayne, 24, 29, 53–54, 226 Mondogo nation, 610–11, 619n37 Monk, William Henry, 656n21 Montagnac, Clara De, 653

Montego Bay from Upton Hill (Kidd), 288, 288–89, 290 Montego Bay Secondary School (St. James, Jamaica), 246 Monumental Inscriptions (Lawrence-­ Archer), 367 Moody, Dwight, 649, 656n20 Moore, Brian L., 5–6, 32, 140–41, 169, 248, 658, 665 Moore, Joseph, 602, 610, 612–13, 619n34 Moore’s Sugar Estate (Armand Duperly), 302–3, 303 Morant Bay General Hospital (St. Thomas, Jamaica), 460 Morant Bay rebellion (St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1865): as an act of citizenship, 167; arrests following, 384; brown, white, and black Jamaican participants in, 44n13; casualties of, 81, 120n20, 150–51, 306; causes/outbreak of, 129, 150, 306; colonial rule challenged by, 493; colonial rule following, 11, 27, 125–26; death penalty for the rioters, 306; depictions of, 18, 19–21, 23, 44n22, 76, 77–78, 340; events leading to, 9, 11, 307; executions following, 387; as a failure of government, 135; in Gulland’s album, 380–81, 383, 384, 385–86, 387; image of Jamaican tranquility shattered by, 525; international press on, 525–26; in the Livingston Album, 376–77, 376–80, 380; map of, 79–81, 80; memorial sculpture, 21, 22; newspaper coverage of, 307–8, 387; photographs of people/events of, 339–45, 340–44, 387, 394n45; and religious revival, 648; scholarship on, 34; suppression of, 9, 11, 150–51, 379, 384; white Jamaicans’ response to, 151. See also Eyre, Edward John; Gordon, George William Moravians, 245, 480 Moreton, J. B., 558–59 Morris, Daniel, 209, 214–16, 220–25, 222, 228–30, 232–33, 235

Morrison, Toni: Playing in the Dark, 270 Mountain Cottage Scene (Kidd), 14, 15, 292, 293, 294 Moyenge nation, 610–11 Mpulu Bunzi, 616n4 mulatto Jamaicans. See brown Jamaicans Muller, C., 299 Mumbaka nation, 610, 619n37 Murphy, Laura: Pleasant Hours Waltz, 653 Murray, Andrew C., 652 Murray, Henry Garland: Brown Sammy in Search of a Wife, 563–65, 574n35 Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, 638n17 Muscular Christianity, 241, 243 Museum of Economic Botany (now Economic Botany Collection, Kew Gardens, London), 209, 221, 228, 236 Museum of the Institute of Jamaica, 228 Museum of the Jamaica Society, 228 museums, 29; factors in development of, 536; first in Jamaica, 534; geological, 534; social uplift via, 538, 540–41, 543–45. See also Institute of Jamaica Musgrave, Sir Anthony, 198, 232, 481, 538–39 Musgrave, Lady, 224–25, 568, 580–81 music, 641–54; Actor Boys, 642–44; Bruckins, 646–47, 655n15 (see also Bruckins dance and music); creole airs, 650–51; dance music, 650–54; gospel, 649; hymns, 648–50, 656n21; in Jonkonnu, 642–45; mento, 652–53; during the Morant Bay rebellion, 648–49; nyabinghi drumming, 642; overview of, 641; and race, 653–54; secular melodies in sacred texts, 650, 656n26; Set Girls, 642–45, 644; waltz, 653 Mveng, Engelbert, 617n10, 617n15 Mvula, Manoka (Manuka Vola), 602, 610, 619–20n38 Mwanda, Ina, 619–20n38 index

709

Myal: and Baptism, 605; Christian converts’ links to, 607; death and resurrection rituals of, 71–72; development of, 632; emergence of, 71, 168; Gardner on, 632, 639n29; and Jonkonnu, 31; Kongo origins of, 71; and Kumina, 613; as performance, 632–33; white robes worn by followers of, 71–72 Myrtle Bank Hotel (Kingston), 454, 456, 463 “The Mysterious Murder” (MacGregor), 30, 664–66, 668–71 Naipaul, V. S., 263, 411 Naorojee, Dadabhai, 507 A Narrative of Events ( J. Williams), 60, 61–62, 161 Nathan and Co: Coolie Housay, 399 National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), 634, 634–35 National Gallery of Jamaica, 12, 53, 110 National Library of Jamaica, 17, 24, 53 National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad (formerly Royal Victoria Institute), 548n28 National Portrait Gallery (London), 358, 364–65, 368–69 nation (a people) vs. “nation” (a geopolitical state), 603 Native Baptists, 605, 607 Natives of Jamaica (Duperly Brothers), 340, 342 native views, 411 Natural History of Man (C. P. James), 26 Navigation Acts, 264 Negro Boy ( James Valentine and Son), 350, 351 “Negro,” use of, 533 “Negro Woman,” Lydia Ann (Adolphe Duperly), 565–66, 566, 595 Nelson, Abercromby, 384–85, 385, 386, 500 Nesbitt, Mark, 30 Nettleford, Rex, 46n43, 158; Kumina, 635; Pocomania, 634, 635, 640n37

710

index

neurology, 666–67 New Broughton Presbyterian Church (Manchester, Jamaica), 446 Newcastle ( Jamaica), 354 Newcastle, Jamaica (Hay), 53, 85–87, 86 The New Jamaica (E. M. Bacon and E. M. Aaron), 395, 397, 414n4 Nicholas, Robert, 44n22, 387 Nicholson, Sir Charles, 464–65 Nightingale, Florence, 103, 663 Night Noises Prevention Law (1911), 614 Nineteenth Century Negro Girl, Celia (Adolphe Duperly), 595, 596, 597 Noble, Matthew: Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Lord Derby, 146 noblesse oblige, 241 No Bond but the Law (Paton), 33 Norman, Sir Henry, 153 North, Marianne, 210; Jamaican Orchids, 219; View in the Fernwalk, 227 North and South (Gaskell), 241 Northumberland, Duke of, 217 Nugent, Lady, 643 Nunes, John, 149 nutmeg, 212 Nuttal, C. E., 359, 362 Nuttal, Enos: in the Livingston Album, 358, 359, 360, 362, 369; on the Queen Victoria statue, 517 Nuttall, Clare, 203 Nuttall, Enos, 202–3 Oates, Dr., 567 Obeah, 605, 621n52; disappearance of, 481; identification with Africans, 665; and Myal, 632; prohibition on, 111, 113, 665; scholarship on, 31 Obeah figure (Robinson), 54, 111–13, 112 object based epistemology, 548n40 objetos (Cuba), 668–69 Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question (Carlyle), 145, 266, 286, 292, 295 occult, elite interest in, 666

O’Connor, Luke Smythe, 379, 380, 381, 384, 385 Offences Against Persons Act (1861), 659 Of One Blood (Hopkins), 667 Old Naval Hospital (Port Royal, Jamaica), 441 Oliver, Vere Langford, 367 Olmos, Margarite Fernández, 666 On the Road to Castleton, 211 Opening the Railway Line at Porus, 53, 88, 89–90 “Opportunities for Young Men in Jamaica” (H. Blake), 544–45 orchids, 218, 219 The Ordinance of Baptism (Baxter), 54, 69–72, 70 Origin of the Species (Darwin), 45n36 orphans. See industrial schools and reformatories Osborn, Robert, 568 Osborne, Thomas, 180 Oughton, Samuel, 305, 320n60 Our American Cousin (T. Taylor), 593 overcrowding, health hazards associated with, 174–75, 179, 181 Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónke, 617n14 Page, Henry, 426, 426–27, 428, 431, 437n9, 437n11 Palcy, Euzhan, 662 Palisadoes Plantation, 214 Palmerston, Lord, 364 Panini, Giovanni Paolo, 39 Panton, Richard, 362, 362 Parade Gardens. See St. William Grant Park Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 666 Parkhurst, V. P.: Picturesque Jamaica, 350 Parochial Committees, 502–3 Parrish, Susan Scott, 549n42 Parry, John: Map of the County of Surrey, 79–81, 80 Passage (D. Boxer), 37, 37 Past and Present (Carlyle), 286

pastoral coloniality, 158–59, 169–70 Paton, Diana, 27, 29, 31, 52, 54, 142, 172n19; No Bond but the Law, 33 Patterson Smith, James, 27, 46n40, 134 Pearce, Frank, 247–48 Pearce, G. H., 247 peasantry: appeal to Victoria re smallholdings, 305–6, 320–21n62; Christianization of, 481 (see also missionaries); Colonial Office’s aid to, 149–50, 153; Colonial Office’s predictions about, 281; growth of, 153; hardships of the 1860s, 304–5; landholdings of, 294–96, 304 Penn, Robert, 542 The People of India ( J. F. Watson), 411–12 performance, 622–37; Act of Abolition as, 623–25; Bruckins dance and music, 1–2, 36, 43n2, 626, 628–30; emancipation as, 623–37, 624, 627, 631, 634; emancipation celebrations, 624, 625–26, 637n9; Emancipation Proclamation readings, 31; overview of, 622–23; staged, 635; theater, 635–36; of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 635–36. See also Jonkonnu; Myal Perkins, Mary Anne, 393–94n39 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 439 Phillippo, James Mursell, 21, 272; Clarkson Town, 479, 479; Heathen Practices at Funerals, 476, 477; Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, 34, 63, 64, 266, 295–97, 297, 625, 627; portrait of, 542; and Sligo, 319–20n44; Sligoville created by, 296; Sligoville with Mission Premises, 63–65, 64, 296–97, 297; on village dwellings, 476, 478–80; Visit of a missionary and wife to a plantation village, 476, 477; on women’s fashion, 594–95 Philosophic Radicals, 176 photography, 322–55; abolitionists’ use of, 389–90; albums, 17, 328, 355, 357, 364 (see also Livingston Album); amateur, 355; cartes de visite, 328, 329–31, 331, 357, 363–65 (see also Livingston Album); and colonialism, 401; index

711

photography, (continued) cruise-ship photographers, 355; daguerreotypes, 298, 322–24, 326 (see also Daguerian Excursions); Day School Children, Jamaica, 91–93, 92; demise of original prints, 355; documentary properties of, 78; Armand Duperly’s views of Jamaica, 345–46, 347, 349; environmental portraits, 352–53; eventfulness of, 78; of former slaves, 15, 15–16; “Grandmother on Mother’s Side,” 99–101, 100; historians of, 51, 357; history of, overview of, 16–17, 19; Indian laborers in (see South Asians, photographs of ); invention of, 298; Kingston photographers (1850s), 326–28, 327, 356n8; Kingston photographers (1860s), 333–39, 334–38; laborers depicted, 312, 313–14, 314–15; Morant Bay rebellion images, 339–45, 340–44; mug shots, 667; occurrence/documentary, 353, 353; Opening the Railway Line at Porus, 53, 88, 89–90; photographers active in Kingston, 16; of plantations (see plantation views); portrait, and history/national identity, 358; portrait, and social identity, 364–65; postcards, 355; status of sculpture vs. photography, 504; stereoscopic, 326, 328; and tourism and trade, 401–2; tourism’s impact on, 354–55; view photographers, 350–55; as a visual record, 577; Wedding Group, Jamaica, 94, 95; wet-collodion process, 17, 326. See also Duperly, Adolphe; Duperly Brothers Photography Album Documenting the Morant Bay Rebellion (Gulland): and the Livingston Album, 358, 384, 393n36; Morant Bay rebellion’s treatment in, 380–81, 383, 384, 385–86, 387; “Natives of Jamaica,” 387, 388, 389–90 phrenology, 666–67 Picken, Thomas: Abolition of Slavery in Jamaica, 624, 625; Emancipation, 627

712

index

the picturesque, 16, 27, 83, 115, 282, 284, 309, 312, 402 Picturesque Jamaica (Duperly Brothers), 115, 354–55 Picturesque Jamaica (Parkhurst), 350 Pim, Bedford, 526, 546–47n11 Pitkin, James and William, 55, 57, 59, 422, 424–26, 425 plague, 178 Plan of Holland Estate (Carter), 301, 301 plantations: abandoned, 83, 120n18, 132, 231, 305, 448; cheap labor in the transitional period for, 5 (see also apprenticeship); Colonial Office on survival of, 139, 145–47, 149, 153; decline of, 297; emancipation opposed by owners of, 5, 9; hours and rates of pay for labor on, 305–7; mass production/ mechanization at, 308–10, 309–10; provision grounds, 284–85, 292, 294–95; resistance to authority on, 284–85 plantation society, 30–31 plantation views, 281–317; Brennan’s Constant Spring Hotel, 316, 316–17; by Duperly, 302–3, 303 (see also Daguerian Excursions); of indigeneity and indentured labor, 311–15, 313–15; Kidd’s Good Hope, 282, 283, 285, 296, 316; Kidd’s Illustrations of Jamaica, 287–94, 288–89, 291, 293; and labor discourses, 282, 285–87, 305–6; machinery in, 308–10, 309–10; maps and surveys, 309; overview of, 281–84; Phillippo’s Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, 34, 63, 64, 266, 295–97, 297; photographs in the decade of crisis, 302–8, 303–4; picturesque, 282, 284, 309; and visual regimes, 284–85, 316–17 plants. See botany Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 270 Pleasant Hours Waltz (Murphy), 653 Plummer, H. L., 261n69 plural society, 30–31 Poco, 605

Pocomania (Nettleford), 634, 635, 640n37 Pointon, Marcia, 364 Police Act (1846), 129 Polish emigration, 506–7 Polish National Lodge, 507 pollution, health hazards associated with, 174 The Pond (Zeno-Gandía), 668–69 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), 194 Port Antonio ( Jamaica), 354 Portrait of Akbar II with Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, 144 portraiture, painted, 12; Fatima, 53, 105–7, 106 Porus ( Jamaica), 53, 88, 89–90 Potts, Dr.: Eboe or African Wooden Locks, 533 Poupeye, Veerle, 53 Powell, Jenny, 500, 507 power: of black Jamaicans, political, 158, 570; of brown Jamaicans, political, 556; consumer, 571; Foucault on, 34, 158, 169–70; individuals made subjects by, 158; rituals and state power, 117–18; statues as symbols of, 498–99, 508; symbolic language of, 117. See also colonial power praedial larceny, 196 Pratt, Mary Louise, 85 Price, Charles, 149; as an assemblyman, 444–45; as a building contractor, 444–45; death of, 445; in the Livingston Album, 378–79, 381, 390 Price, Richard, 25 Prichard, James Cowles, 7 Primrose Cricket Club, 253–54, 254 prints, 12; albumin, 345, 363; Art and Emancipation in Jamaica on, 52; lithographic, 322 (see also Daguerian Excursions; Duperly, Adolphe; plantation views); vs. photographs, 322 (see also photography) prisons: abuses in, 60, 61–62; mergers of, 133; and slavery, 172n19

Privy Council, 40 Privy to the Adventures of Nation Building (Stoddart), 39, 39–40 The Problem of Freedom (T. Holt), 33, 130–31 prostitutes, 133, 181 Protector of Immigrants, 407 Providence, 212 Psalms and Hymns (I. Watts), 648 Psalms of David (I. Watts), 648 Public Health Act (1848), 175 Public Works Department, 442, 452–53, 460–61, 463, 471n46 Punch, 18, 19, 526, 546n10, 560 Purdie, William, 217 quadrilles, 650–52, 656n30 Quakers (Society of Friends), 195, 605 quarantining, 178, 187n16 Queen of the Antilles (R. Turnbull), 653 The Queen’s Advice, 149–50, 305–6, 320–21n62 Queen’s Hotel (Kingston), 462, 463 Queen Victoria drawing (Mrs. Lionel Lee), 53, 116, 117–18 Queen Victoria photograph (Downey), 515, 516 Queen Victoria Set We Free (D. Boxer), 36–39, 38 Queen Victoria statue (Geflowski), 494, 506, 509; arrival and placement in storage, 517; commissioning of, 505–7; created for the Diamond Jubilee, 495, 498; damage to, 493, 495; debates about, 502–5, 521n43; empire symbolized by, 493, 499, 505; erection and location of, 53, 117, 493; height of, 517; marble for, 507–8; pedestal and roundels for, 508, 509, 510, 517; plaster replica of, 515, 517; public reaction to, 515, 517–18; unveiling of, 511, 513–15, 514, 522n72; veil/accouterments in, 508, 509, 510. See also statues index

713

Queen Victoria statue in Singapore (Geflowski), 505–6, 506, 508, 509, 510, 521n46 Queen Victoria statue in the Colonial Office (Geflowski), 505 Queen Victoria statuettes (Geflowski), 510 Queen Victoria’s Veil (Stoddart), 40, 41, 42 Quilley, Geoff: An Economy of Colour, 52 quinine alkaloids, 223 Ra, Omari (aka Afrikan), 36; A Folk Drama, 42, 42–43 Raab, Jennifer, 52 race: as a binary, 27–28, 46n43; as central to British imperial history, 25–26; and character, 163–64; and class, 28–29; and crime, 667–68; debates on, 26; and embodied human action, 27–29; environmental determinism of theories of, 179–80; equality among races, 295; hair texture as a marker of, 105, 107; Jamaica defined as black, 40, 42; liberal governance and racial thinking, 26–27, 46n40; and music, 653–54; polygenesis vs. monogenesis, 26; white superiority linked with success of empire, 244 Races of Men (Knox), 26 racism, scientific, 26, 45n36, 159 railways: building boom (Britain, 1830s–1840s), 449; economic development via, 89; government purchase of, 11, 89; plants transported by, 221. See also Jamaica Railway Company rainfall, 210 Raleigh, Walter, 271 Ramchand, Kenneth, 554–55 Ramsay, Gordon: in Gulland’s album, 385, 386, 393n36; in the Livingston Album, 379, 381, 393n36 Rappaport, Helen, 501 rara (Haiti), 642 Rastafari, 31, 36, 493 rebellions, suppression of, 126–27. See also Morant Bay rebellion

714

index

Reconstruction (United States), 163 Reform Act (1867), 27 reformatories. See industrial schools and reformatories Reid, J. H., 553 Reid, William, 536 religion: and the civilizing symbolic order, 168; creole, 630, 632; influence of, 648; revivals of (1800s), 648; role in emancipation, 7, 9. See also Christianity; Kumina; missionaries; spirituality/ religion, Afro-Jamaican Renan, Ernest, 267 The Report on the Cholera in Jamaica (Milroy), 177–85, 188n29 Representative men of India ( Jehangir), 366 respectability: under emancipation, 287; and fashion, 578–80, 583; and Jamaican Victorianism, 660–61, 663 revenue office (Port Antonio, Jamaica), 453, 453, 471n46 Revival: emergence of, 605; flags used in, 629; and Kumina, 613–14; and Myal, 632–33; Pocomania, 32; ritual sealings by, 609; scholarship on, 31, 619n34; white robes worn by followers of, 71; Zion, 32, 629, 638n17 Rhys, Jean, 662 Richmond ( Jamaica), 607, 618n24 Richmond Terrace, Surrey (Turner), 288 Richmond Terrace, Surrey (Willmore), 288, 289 Ridgeway, Alexander F., 527 Rio Cobre Gorge and Flat Bridge ( Jamaica), 354, 441 Ripoll, Miss, 202 Rippingille, Alexander: Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies, 7, 8 Rippon, James: A Selection of Hymns, 648 rituals and state power, 117–18 Roaring River Falls ( Jamaica), 325, 325, 354, 355–56n6 Roberts, Frederick, Lord, 507

Robertson, George, 322 Robertson, James, 17, 52–53 Robinson, Daniel George, 507 Robinson, May: Obeah figure, 54, 111–13, 112 Rodney, George, 270, 495, 500 Rodney statue ( J. Bacon), 354, 495, 496, 498–99, 518–19n8 Rohlehr, Gordon, 572 Roman Catholic Church, 245 Roper, Shani, 29, 538 Rose, Nikolas, 180 Rosenberg, Leah, 665 Royal Africa Company, 264, 269 Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew Gardens, London): Caribbean ethnographic objects in, 23–24; cinchona distributed by, 223; collaboration with Botanical Department, 30, 209, 216–17, 235; Cruickshank lock in, 55, 57; Economic Botany Collection (formerly Museum of Economic Botany), 209, 221, 228, 236; funding/management of, 209; under Joseph Hooker, 209–10, 231–32; under William Hooker, 209–10, 217– 18; Jamaican perceptions of scientists from, 30; as a national botanic garden, 209; under Thiselton-Dyer, 209–10, 222, 232, 235 Royal Gazette, 581 Royal Irish Constabulary, 132–33 Royal Jamaica Yacht Club (formerly Jamaica Yacht Club), 248–49, 251, 454–55 Royal Navy’s involvement in the slave trade, 264 Royal Society for the Arts and Agriculture, 195 Royal Society of Arts ( Jamaica), 57, 527, 529 Royal Society of Arts and Agriculture ( Jamaica), 529, 534 Rue Cases-Nègres (Zobel), 662–63 rugby, 245

Rugby School, 241 ruins, extant, 25–26 Rupert Gray (Cobham), 669–70 Ruskin, John, 526; Modern Painters, 87 Russell, Thomas: The Etymology of Jamaica Grammar, 575n36 Russell Brothers and Moncrieff, 333, 365, 377–78, 380; Views of Morant Bay, 343, 344, 345 Saa, Daniel, 444 Saint-Domingue uprising (1791–1804), 267–68, 273, 420 Salvation Army, 605 Samuel Hart and Sons, 254–55 Sandby, Thomas, 85 Sandiford, Keith, 242–43 Sanitary Commission (India), 133 The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (E. Chadwick), 175 sanitary reform, 174–86; and black abjection, 177; cleanliness ideologies, 174, 176; contagionism, 175, 177–78; under Crown Colony rule, 184; depictions of unsanitary conditions, 175; economic benefits of, 183, 185; evangelical Christianity’s impact on, 176; fear of disease and degeneration, 174, 176; and the “Great Unwashed,” 176, 186n5; legislation, 175; metropolitan vs. imperial public health reform, 185; miasmatic theory, 175, 178–79; Milroy’s report on cholera, 178–85, 188n29; moral discourse, 176, 186; morality and disease, 180–81, 185, 188n29; overcrowding, health hazards associated with, 174–75, 179, 181; pollution, health hazards associated with, 174; quarantining, 178, 187n16; along racial lines, 176–77, 185; sanitizing the Victorian city, 175–77; and utilitarian philosophy, 175–76; White Towns vs. Black Towns, 176. See also cholera epidemic sanitary systems, 133 index

715

Sankey, Ira, 649, 656n20 Sankey, John, 507 Sankeys (songs), 649 Sant, William Eloin, 442–43 Santería (Cuba), 610 Sarthou, P., 333 Savage, John, 326, 327, 328, 356n8 Savanna-la-Mar Diamond Jubilee celebration ( Jamaica), 511–12 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman), 622–23 Scharf, George, 364 Schoolchildren, Mandeville, Jamaica (C. H. Graves), 561, 562, 563 Schoolgirls ( J. S. Thompson), 334, 335 schools: attendance limited by child labor, 92; Day School Children, Jamaica, 91–93, 92; discipline in, 92; elementary, 169, 500; missionaries’ establishment of, 580; overcrowding in, 91; secondary, 92, 245. See also industrial schools and reformatories Schuler, Monica, 605, 619n38, 633–34 Scott, David, 23, 25, 34, 185 Scott, Sir Walter, 267 Scottish immigrants, 99 Scottish Missionary Society, 618n28 sculpture. See statues Seacole, Edwin, 103 Seacole, Mary: bust of, 53, 102, 104; journeys by, 663–64; warmth of/service by, 103–4, 663; Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, 103 Seaga, Edward, 638n17 seamstresses, 581–82 Seeley, J. R.: The Expansion of England, 272–73 Sekula, Allan, 363 A Selection of Hymns (Rippon), 648 Sepoy Mutiny. See Indian Rebellion Set, or a Christmas Scene in Kingston (Egan), 643–44, 645 set dancing, 651 Set Girls, 642–45, 644 Seventh-Day Adventists, 605

716

index

Shango (Orisha) ceremony, 616n5 Shankar, Guha, 419n50 Sharpe, Sam, 126–27. See also Christmas Rebellion Shaw, Mr., 199 Sheller, Mimi, 32, 34, 44n13, 126, 292 shopkeepers, Chinese, 101 Shortwood Industrial School for Girls, 193, 201–4 silk cotton tree, symbolism of, 77, 109 silverware, 52 Simbi (nature spirit/god), 71, 616n4 Sir Henry Taylor (Cameron), 141 Sir James Stephen (Marochetti), 140 Sir John Peter Grant (G. F. Watts), 130 Sisters of Mercy, 202 Sketches of Character (Belisario): in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 52; JawBone, or House John-Canoe, 630, 631; on Jonkonnu, 636; Koo-Koo or Actor Boy, 12, 13; Lovey, 587, 587–88; Milkwoman, 346, 346; Red Set-Girls and Jack-in-theGreen, 643, 644 Sketch Pedigrees (N. B. Livingston), 365, 367–68 Slave Compensation Commission (Britain), 466n3 slavery: African body treated as property/ investment, 159–60; black slaves vs. black Africans, 26; clothing made by slaves, 582; communion denied to slaves, 7, 9; dehumanization of black slaves, 161, 168; end of, and colonial power, 160–62; final abolition of (1838), 163; justifications for, 295; photographic representation of slave life, 78; and prisons, 172n19; slaves’ role in ending, 281. See also abolition of slavery; emancipation; imperial histories; Middle Passage Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (Dian), 52 Sligo, Marquis of, 63, 296, 319–20n44, 420

Sligoville ( Jamaica), 296, 479, 606 Sligoville with Mission Premises (Phillippo), 63–65, 64, 296–97, 297 Sloane, Sir Hans, 209, 642 smallpox, 133 Smith, Eustace, 253 Smith, Faith, 30, 35 Smith, Honor Ford, 661 Smith, Jacob, 489 Smith, James H., 489 Smith, James Patterson, 27 Smith, John M., 309 Smith, Sir Lionel, 142, 281, 650–51 Smith, Michael Garfield, 30–31 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 667 Smith Village (Kingston), 483 Snow, John, 187n17 soccer, 245, 248, 254 social Darwinism, 243 social uplift: of black children, 29; via fashion, 577, 591–92, 598–99; via Jamaica Exhibition, 542–43; via museums, 538, 540–41, 543–45. See also industrial schools Society of Apothecaries (London), 223 Society of Friends (Quakers), 195, 605 Society of Industry (Hanover, Jamaica), 527, 533 Songs of Grace and Truth ( J. Johnston), 649 Sorgel, Sabine, 640n37 South African War (1899–1902), 518 South Asians, photographs of, 395–414; accessories/gendered labor of female Indians, 396, 404, 404–5; vs. Afro-­ Jamaican images, 397, 397, 407, 409, 410; and colonial ideology, 398; at craft labor, 408, 409; in cultural/religious celebrations, 395, 398–99, 412–13; as documentary, 395; East Indian Women Preparing Rice, 403, 403–4, 416–17nn26–28; ethnographic conventions in, 411–12; in European clothing, 396, 405, 409, 411; Indo-Caribbean

homes, 395, 396, 402; maintaining connections with India, 395, 397, 401–3, 412; as native views, 411; as rustic, 409, 411; in villages, 395, 396; Woman Sitting with Hat, 405, 406; at work, 395, 397, 407, 408, 409 Souvenirs of Jamaica (Wortley), 225, 225 Spanish Town ( Jamaica), 4, 354, 449 Spanish Wall, 446, 447 Spencer, Herbert, 525 spiritism, 666 spirituality/religion, Afro-Jamaican, 31–32, 168, 250, 605. See also Kumina; Myal; Revival sports, 240–58; amateur vs. professional, 32, 242–43; black Jamaicans’ participation in, 252–54; church teams, 245, 257; and the civilizing mission, 250–52; and class, 242–43, 248, 253–56, 258, 258n13; cost of playing, 252; creolized, 240, 255–58, 257; empire/monarchy celebrated in, 251; horseracing, 243; and imperialism, 243–44; manliness through, 241–42; mass participation in, 252–55, 254; military teams, 245, 247–48; organized competitions in, 248, 257–58; overview of, 240, 257–58; in public schools, 241–42; reformation in Britain, 240–43; rugby, 245; school clubs, 245, 257; soccer, 245, 248, 255; social control through, 242, 250–51; tennis, 247–48, 250, 252; transferred to Jamaica, 243–46, 258; women’s exclusion from, 242, 250; working-class submission through, 242; yachting, 248–49, 251. See also cricket Spring Garden, 212 Spring Park (St. Elizabeth, Jamaica), 460 Spruce, Richard, 223 squatters, 131–32, 294 St. Andrew Club, 250 St. Andrew’s Kirk (Falmouth, Jamaica), 441 index

717

Stanley, Lord, Earl of Derby, 145–46, 146 St. Ann ( Jamaica), 149–50, 195–96; Clare­ mont, 485–86, 486, 488, 489; creole architecture in, 475, 484–90, 486–89, 492n32 Stark, James Henry, 234; Stark’s Illustrated Jamaica, 310, 310 state formation, 125–35; Afro-Jamaican majority’s role in state system, 128; court system reform, 133; education, 127; and emancipation/apprenticeship, 125; family law reform, 134–35; freed people, representatives acting on behalf of, 125; Grant’s governorship, 129, 131–35; Sir William Grey’s governorship, 131, 134; health provision, 127; ideological projection of state, 127; and imperial debates about empire, 125–26; Indian colonial policy as a model for Jamaica, 131; Irish colonial policy as a model for Jamaica, 130–31; land reform, 127, 129–32; legal protections for slaves, 127; Marxist view of, 125; and political disfranchisement of the poor, 126, 130; property holding/ transmission, 128; public health/ medicine reforms, 133–35; reformatory expansion, 133; spending anxiety, 128–29; state as representing interests of a minority vs. all, 126; suppression of rebellions, 126–27; taxation, 129–30; through everyday encounters, 127–28 Statue of Governor Metcalfe (Duperly Brothers), 498 statue of Jordon, Edward (R. G. Miller), 497, 497 statues: bronze, 507; in Europe, growth of, 499; for the Golden Jubilee (1887), 501; human form idealized in, 501; national history embodied by, 500; pedestals for, 510; power symbolized by, 498–99, 508; replicas of, 508; role in political culture, 499; status of sculpture vs. photography, 504; in St. William

718

index

Grant Park, 495–501, 496–98; of Victoria, 35–36, 493, 499, 500–501, 507–10 (see also Queen Victoria statue) St. Catherine’s Ragged School, 580 Stebbins, George, 649 St. Elizabeth ( Jamaica), 481 Stephen, Sir James: abolitionist connections, 140; bust of, 140; on the Emancipation Act, 141; as legal advisor, 139–40, 145; on the plantation system, 144 Stephenson, Thomas Burchell, 251–52 Stern, H., 521n43 Stern, Philip, 495, 502–5, 521n43 Steward, Walter, 384, 385 Stewart, Dianne, 7, 9, 31, 52, 632, 634 Stewart, John, 650 Stewart, Robert, 168 Stewart, Susan, 117, 392n27 St. George’s College (Kingston), 248, 445 St. George’s Home and Reformatory for Boys, 196–97 Stiebel, George, 454, 568, 570, 575n43 Stiebel, Magdalen Baker, 575n43 Stimpson, Catharine, 501 St. James ( Jamaica), 482 St. Luke’s Anglican church (Balaclava, Manchester, Jamaica), 459 St. Matthew’s Anglican Church (Claremont, St. Ann, Jamaica), 467n9 Stoddart, Roberta, 36; Privy to the Adventures of Nation Building, 39, 39–40; Queen Victoria’s Veil, 40, 41, 42 Stoler, Ann Laura, 170n2, 268 Storks, Governor Sir Henry, 132, 197, 377, 376 Straits Settlements, 505, 521n45 Struggler, 556 St. Thomas in the East ( Jamaica), 150. See also Morant Bay rebellion St. Thomas in the Vale, 52, 82, 83–84, 120nn18–19 Sturge, Joseph, 161, 291 St. William Grant Park (formerly Victo-

ria Park; Parade Gardens; The Parade; Kingston): military displays in, 73; Coke Chapel in, 66, 67–68; statues in, 495–501, 496–98 subjects vs. citizens, 163, 167 sugar, 145–47, 152–53, 297–98, 399, 524–25. See also plantations; plantation views Sugar Cane Cutters (Duperly Brothers), 407 Sugar Duties Act (1846), 129, 136n13, 185, 213 Sulman, T.: Ruins of the Fire at Kingston, Jamaica, 338, 353 Summers, W., 318n25 Sunshine Waltz (Dunn), 653 “Susannah (Old Slave) and Blagrove,” 15, 15–16 Sutherland, Thomas: Holland Estate, 300 Swettenham, Governor, 253 Swift River Bridge (Portland, Jamaica), 461, 461–62 symbolic interaction, 578 Tacky’s Rebellion (1760), 127 tailors, 581 Tainos (Arawak), 536, 548n34 Taylor, Alexander, 44n22, 387 Taylor, Diana, 633 Taylor, Sir Henry: biography of, 157; in the Colonial Office, 142, 145, 148–50, 164; Eyre supported by, 169; “Memo­ randum,” 142, 149, 159, 164–66; on plantation labor under emancipation, 286–87, 305–6 Taylor, Tom: Our American Cousin, 593 tea meetings, 646 technologies of rule, 157–58, 168; liberalism’s development of, 157 Tenniel, John: The Jamaica Question, 18, 19 tennis, 247–48, 250, 252 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 526, 535–36 terracotta, 104 Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair, 559, 560, 566, 568

Tharp, William, 282 Thiselton-Dyer, William, 209–10, 222, 232, 235 Thistlewood, Thomas, 71, 212 Thomas, Deborah, 25–26 Thomas, Herbert, 113, 665 Thomas, J. J.: Froudacity, 274 Thompson, J. S., 333, 339, 348, 349, 353, 356n13, 356n21, 365; Hordley Estate, 303–4, 304, 307, 307, 320nn54–55, 335; Market Street, Falmouth, 335–36, 337; Schoolgirls, 334, 335 Thompson, Krista, 78, 312, 315, 401, 543; An Eye for the Tropics, 17, 19, 51 Thompson, Robert Farris, 31, 434 Thomson, Robert, 214–16, 218, 223, 229, 231–32 Thornton family, 268 timber, 59, 109, 225, 475. See also mahogany Titchfield Hotel (Port Antonio, Jamaica), 459 tobacco, 217–18 toll roads, 290 Tomasina, a Negress (Mrs. Lionel Lee), 107 Tom Brown at Oxford (Hughes), 241 Tomford, J., 336, 349; Hordley Estate, 303–4, 304, 307, 307, 320nn54–55, 335 topography, 210, 211 tourism, 115, 126, 316, 354–55, 401–2 Toussaint L’Overture, 163 Towner, Daniel, 649 Town Party, 149, 556 Trachtenberg, Allan, 370, 372 tradition, meaning of, 25 The Tragedy of Morant Bay (Underhill), 34 travel literature, 226 treadmills, 60, 61–62, 161 A Tread-Mill Scene in Jamaica, 60, 61–62 trees, exploitation of, 109 Tregear’s Black Jokes, 290, 318n25 Trelawney Girls’ School, 580 Trelawny ( Jamaica), 481 trespass law, 132 index

719

Trollope, Anthony, 156, 167, 448, 451–52, 470n32, 557–58 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 267–68 trusteeship, 157–58 Truth, Sojourner, 389 tumbeiros (“floating tombs”; slave ships), 616n8 Turnbull, Cuthbert, 422, 437n6 Turnbull, John, 52, 55; craftsmen employed by, 57, 59; marriage to Mary Pitkin, 422, 424; specimen woods used by, 59; style/techniques of, 59; table, 58, 59; timber used by, 225 Turnbull, Ralph: arrival in Jamaica, 422; death of, 437n6; family life of, 437n6; furniture signed by, 422, 423; separate workshop/location from that of his brothers, 422, 437n6; specimen timbers used by, 422, 424, 424; workshop of, 437n6 Turnbull, Richard: La Belle Jamaique, 653; Queen of the Antilles, 653 Turnbull, Thomas, 422, 437n6 Turnbull, 529, 532, 547n17 Turner, J. M. W.: Richmond Terrace, Surrey, 288 tutelage, 158–59, 167, 171n11 Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony (Curtin), 34 Twomey, Christina, 205n10 Underhill, Edward Bean, 305; The Tragedy of Morant Bay, 34; The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition, 451, 451 Underwood & Underwood, 418n36 Unitarians, 469n29 United Fruit (formerly Boston Fruit Company; United States), 234–35, 460–61, 520n39 United States: emancipation and black male suffrage in, 163; Jamaican trade with, 233–35; sugar plantations in, 399; theater in, 635

720

index

United Synagogue (Kingston), 457, 458, 472n55 Universal Photo Art Company, 397, 407, 409, 418n36 urbanization, 240, 557 urban planning, 73–75, 74 utilitarian philosophy, 175–76 vaccinations, 133 Valdes, J. B., 349, 365 Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica (Church), 52, 82, 83–84, 120n19 Vance, Norman, 241 Van Cuylenberg, J., 261n87 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 559, 560, 566, 568 Venables, Sir William, 542 venereal disease, 133 Verley, Eliza Jane Lazarus, 568, 569, 575n40 Verley, Louis, 568, 575n40 Verly, Albert, 575n40 Vickars, Edward, 149 Victoria, Queen (r. 1837–1901): accession of, 1, 43n1, 125, 439; black clothing worn by, 588; cartes de visite of, 331, 333, 369; coronation of, 43n1; death of, 126, 517–18, 588; Elizabeth II associated with, 36–37, 37; emancipation associated with, 1–2, 511, 513, 646–47; Golden Jubilee for (1887), 501; in the history syllabus, 500; images of, 39, 39–43, 41–42, 504; interest in making contact with her dead husband, 666; last years of her reign, 518; military attire of, 579; public appearances after Albert’s death, 500–501; statues of/memorials to, 35–36, 493, 499, 500–501, 507–10 (see also Queen Victoria statue); as Supreme Lady, 510; veil worn by, 508; wedding to Albert, 501. See also Diamond Jubilee Victoria Jubilee Hospital, 659

Victoria Mutual Building Society, 659 Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Young), 43n5 Victorian Order, 659 Victoria Park. See St. William Grant Park View in the Fernwalk (North), 227 A View of Coke Chapel (Adolphe Duperly), 66 A View of Coke Chapel from the Parade (Benoist), 66, 67–68 A View of King Street (Adolphe Duperly), 586, 586–87 A View of King Street (Benoist), 586 View of the Court House ( Jacottet), 16, 17 A View of the Court-House (Adolphe Duperly), 16, 17 A View of The Kingston Church (Benoist), 581 A View of The Kingston Theatre (Adolphe Duperly), 585, 585–86 A View of The Kingston Theatre (Benoist), 585 Views of Morant Bay (Russell Brothers and Moncrieff ), 343, 344, 345 Visit of a missionary and wife to a plantation village (Phillippo), 476, 477 Visitors arriving by carriage and horsedrawn tram at the exhibition building (Duperly Brothers), 542 visuality, 285 Vizetelly, Henry: Colonial Produce, 528 Vola, Manuka (Manoka Mvula), 602, 610, 619–20n38 Voysey, Annesley: Christ Church, 443, 443–44, 468n18 Waddell, Hope, 618n28, 632–33 Walcott, Derek, 263 Walker, Samuel Alexander: Dignitaries of the Church, 360; Nuttal photograph, 358, 359, 360 Wallen, Matthew, 212 Walters, Christopher, 149

wanáragua (Belize), 642 Wardian cases, 217 Waring, George, 184, 188n46 Warner-Lewis, Maureen, 31–32, 634 Watchman, 556 water access, 503–5, 520n33 Watson, James, 195 Watson, J. Forbes: The People of India, 411–12 Watts, George Frederic: Sir John Peter Grant, 130 Watts, Isaac: Psalms and Hymns, 648; Psalms of David, 648 Wedding Group, Jamaica, 94, 95 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 500 Wesleyan Chapel, 440 Wesleyan Coke Chapel (Kingston), 448 Wesleyan Missionary Society, 358, 360 Wesleyan School, 440 Wesley Chapel (Kingston), 67 West End Foundry Company (Kingston), 445 West India Committee, 142–43 West India Improvement Company (United States), 89–90, 460 West Indian Scenery (Kidd), 15, 287 West India Prisons Act (1838), 129, 136n13 West India Regiment, 514, 514–15 West India Royal Commission, 233 The West Indies (Henderson and Forrest), 167–68 The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition (Underhill), 451, 451 Westmoreland ( Jamaica), 481 Wexler, Laura, 389 Wharton, Thomas, 212, 217 W. H. Climie and Company, 455, 457 White, H. C., 418n36 white, spiritual symbolism of, 71 white flags of African ritual expertise, 614, 621n52 index

721

white Jamaicans: population size compared to colored Jamaicans, 555, 573n9; response to Morant Bay rebellion, 151; self-identified as British, 244; views of brown people, 558, 563 Wickstead, Philip, 12 Wilberforce, Robert Isaac and Samuel, 265–66, 268 Wilberforce, William, 140, 265–66, 268 William IV, King, 43n1 Williams, James: A Narrative of Events, 60, 61–62, 161 Williams brothers (stonemasons), 442, 467n12 William Walker Whitehall Johnston Photograph Album (W. W. W. Johnston), 358, 380, 382 Willmore, James T.: Richmond Terrace, Surrey, 288, 289 Wilmot, Swithin, 630 Wilson, Fred: An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica, 110 Wilson, Nathaniel, 212, 214, 216–21, 223, 228–29, 231 Winkler’s Musical Monthly, 653 With Silent Tread (Cassin), 665 Wolmer’s School (Kingston), 246, 253, 556 women: brown, 556–57, 559, 561, 564; education of, 540; exclusion from public roles/spaces, 242; exclusion from sports, 242, 250; fashion for, 579–80, 584–88, 585, 591; flogging of, 62, 665. See also gender Women’s Self Help Society (Kingston), 224–25, 538, 547n16, 580–81 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole (M. Seacole), 103 wooden door lock (Cruickshank), 53–57, 56, 119n7

722

index

wood-sample cabinet, 59, 108, 109–10 workhouses, 194 working-class movement, 240–41 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 350, 523, 536–37 world-sense, 604, 617n14 World’s Exposition (New Orleans, 1884), 229–30 world’s fairs, Jamaica’s representations in, 29–30 Worthy Park ( Jamaica), 297–98 Wortley, Edward J.: Souvenirs of Jamaica, 225, 225 Wright, E. F., 261n87 Wyke, Terry, 498 Wynter, Sylvia, 168 Xaymaca (“land of wood and water”), 109 yachting, 248–49, 251 Yai, Olabiyi, 609–10 Yallas River Bridge (Easington, St. Thomas, Jamaica), 441, 462, 462 yams, 230 yards, 475–76, 478, 483–84, 609, 618n30 yellow fever, 85 yellow yacca (West Indian satinwood), 429 York Castle High School (St. Ann, Jamaica), 245–46 Yoruba performance, 616n5, 630 Young, G. M., 518; Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 43n5 Zeno-Gandía, Manuel: The Pond, 668–69 Zionism, 605 Zobel, Joseph: Rue Cases-Nègres, 662–63

This page intentionally left blank

This page intentionally left blank