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The Unredeemed Object: Displaying Abolitionist Artefacts in 2007

Jane Webster a
a
School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2009

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 Slavery and Abolition
Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 311 – 325

The Unredeemed Object: Displaying

Abolitionist Artefacts in 2007
Jane Webster
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This article reviews the ways in which two key abolitionist artefacts were displayed in
British museums in 2007. The Wedgwood ‘kneeling slave’ cameo (1787) and the broad-
sheet Description of a Slave Ship (1789) are two of the most familiar icons of abolition,
but presented museums with particular challenges in 2007. It is argued that the widely
taken decision to limit engagement with the materiality, and above all the textuality, of
these artefacts meant that their unique importance as the earliest propaganda tools of
the nascent abolition movement was only partially revealed.

When Captain Parrey, of the royal navy, returned from Liverpool, to which place
Government had sent him, he brought with him the admeasurement of several
vessels, which had been so employed, and laid them on the table of the House of
Commons. At the top of his list stood the ship Brookes (sic). The [abolition] com-
mittee therefore, in choosing a vessel on this occasion, made use of the ship Brookes;
and this they did, because they thought it less objectionable to take the first that
came, than any other.1

This contribution focuses on two very familiar objects created by British abolitionists
in the late 1780s, the moment at which, for the first time, the abolition of the slave
trade began to look achievable. These artefacts are the Wedgwood cameo bearing
the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (Figure 1) and Description of a Slave
Ship, a broadsheet depicting the stowage of slaves on the Liverpool ship Brooks
(Figure 2). These objects were the first propaganda tools of the Society for Effecting
the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), formed in May 1787. They nevertheless
present particular problems for museum curators, in that both have been subject to
the modern critical gaze, and found wanting, justly accused of reflecting the paternalist

Jane Webster is Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at Newcastle University. She teaches and researches on
colonial archaeology, with a particular focus on Roman slavery, and the archaeology of transatlantic slave shipping.
She has recently edited a collection of papers on the archaeology of slave shipping for the International Journal of
Historical Archaeology, and is researching a book on the material culture of British slave ships from 1600–1807.
Correspondence to: School of Historical Studies, Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle NE1
7RU, UK. Tel.: þ44 (0)191 2227575; Email: j.l.webster@ncl.ac.uk

ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/09/020311– 15

DOI: 10.1080/01440390902819037 # 2009 Taylor & Francis
 312 Jane Webster
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Figure 1. The Wedgwood Slave Medallion. This example from the National Maritime
Museum collection (ZBA2924/ F5739). Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum,
London.

rhetoric of the abolition movement and perpetuating eighteenth-century racial

stereotypes.2
Throughout 2007, museums made careful use of this body of contemporary work in
displaying both the cameo and the Description to the public. Yet in so doing, they con-
sciously stepped back from the contextualised interrogation of both as contingent,
eighteenth-century objects. This article will explore this phenomenon, and ask what
more could have been made of these artefacts by re-immersing them in history.3
Neither were simply visual propaganda tools, as is so often claimed.4 Both employed
 Slavery and Abolition 313
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Figure 2. Broadsheet depicting the ‘Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship’ (James Phillips,
London, 1789), with original extensive text. National Maritime Museum collection
(ZBA2745/FO886). Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, London.
 314 Jane Webster
words as well as pictures in putting across their message. They were designed to be
read, as well as viewed, and I will suggest that the importance of these artefacts as
eighteenth-century texts and objects – words as well as things – was largely over-
looked in presenting them to the public in 2007. In the latter part of this article I
will focus on the Description, arguing that undue focus on the image, at the expense
of its accompanying text, meant that much of what is most important about this mas-
terful propaganda tool remained unexplored, despite the presence of Description of a
Slave Ship, in some form or another, in every exhibition taking place in 2007.

Redeeming abolitionist memorabilia

There can be no such thing as an uncompromised abolitionist artefact, a point brought
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out brilliantly in Marcus Wood’s recent discussion of Thomas Clarkson’s African chest,
and one fully recognised by museums in 2007.5 The canonisation of abolitionist
propaganda tools produced by SEAST, which could so easily have been used to
satiate the hunger for ‘redemptive narratives’ that the topic of the slave trade all too
easily invites,6 was entirely avoided. Museums were careful to highlight the fact that
abolitionist memorabilia have been revealed to be confused and compromised
objects, reinforcing eighteenth-century notions of racial hierarchy.7
Manchester Museum provides a good example amongst many here. The ‘Revealing
Histories: Myths about Race’ exhibition presented a selection of historical artefacts
and images used in the past to support racist ideas alongside wording by members
of the group of activists, collectors and academics who had created the exhibition.
Here, a bronze token bearing the ‘Man and a brother’ image and motto was
accompanied by the following text panel:
This token was a symbol of support for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
The man is nameless and naked. He is shackled and kneeling and his words are a
plea to the European. I find this very uncomfortable, it makes the African man
seem like a victim. . . . I think we need to stop thinking about this as a heroic
object and repeating the stereotype of the helpless black slave. (Dominique)

Museums were fully aware that time has not finished with these eighteenth-century
artefacts, whose biographies are still being written by contemporary theorists and
artists. To borrow a term employed by Francis (abstract, this issue), they have
entered a period of recuperation through art, and in 2007 many museums turned
to contemporary art as they sought for new and challenging ways to display both
pro-slavery and abolitionist artefacts and images.8 As Rice (this issue) expresses it in
discussing Godfried Donkor’s work, artistic re-interrogation of the past facilitates a
redemption of the ‘what-has been’, and the commissioning of modern art interrogating
both pro-slavery and abolitionist imagery was certainly one of the most striking, and
consistent, features of 2007 exhibition planning.9 These commissions were installed in
a variety of ways that encouraged the visitor to think critically about their avatars,
which were commonly also placed on display: the juxtaposition of old and new
once again. In this sense, then, contemporary art empowered museums to display
 Slavery and Abolition 315

compromised artefacts in a way that foreground their problematic nature, but did so
from the perspective of the present, not the past. As a result, the materiality and tex-
tuality of eighteenth-century abolitionist material culture were somewhat overlooked.
In the remainder of this article I hope to explore what may have been lost as a result.

Object and Text I: The Wedgwood cameo

Surprisingly little contemporary information exists regarding the production and use
of the Wedgwood cameo medallion.10 It was manufactured in 1787 at Etruria, the Staf-
fordshire factory of one of Britain most famous eighteenth-century ceramicists, Josiah
Wedgwood, and is a ceramic rendering of the seal and accompanying motto adopted
by SEAST in 1787. Thomas Clarkson’s description of the adoption of the seal clearly
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reveals the perception that a ‘supplicating’ image would speak most effectively to its
target audience. Put another way, though the rationale informing this choice must
trouble the contemporary viewer, there can be no doubt that Clarkson was as aware
in 1787 as we are today that SEAST had created a passive image of a slave waiting
for freedom to be gifted to him. Moreover, they had done so knowingly.
On the second and sixteenth of October [1787] two sittings took place; at the latter
of which a sub-committee, which had been appointed for the purpose, brought in a
design for a seal. An African was seen, (as in the figure) in chains in a supplicating
posture, kneeling with one knee upon the ground, and with both his hands lifted up
to Heaven, and round the seal was observed the following motto, as if he was utter-
ing the words himself – ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ The design having been
approved of, a seal was ordered to be engraved from it. I may mention here, that
this seal, simple as the design was, was made to contribute largely, as will be
shown in its proper place, towards turning the attention of our countrymen to
the case of the injured Africans, and of procuring a warm interest in their favour.11

Josiah Wedgwood had been an inaugural member of SEAST. His main contribution
to the cause was to be a material one: the realisation of this seal in the form of a cameo.
His factory had perfected the art of the ceramic cameo, manufacturing an astonishing
variety of designs with many subjects. Almost all were rendered in jasper ware. The
‘Man and a brother’ cameo is unique in that black rather than white was used for
the portrait – a black figure on a porcelain background.12 Ceramic historians love
the medallion for its technical virtuosity, and it has traditionally been displayed in
this light. One of the four museum trails created for the 2007 ‘Uncomfortable
Truths: Traces of the Trade’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum explored
abolitionism, and guided the visitor to an example of the medallion, only to find it
displayed as one of a sequence of stylistically related, neo-classical Wedgwood minia-
tures. The 2007 trail guide provided background information on Wedgwood and abol-
ition, noting that the image presented the black African as a passive and
depersonalised victim, whilst the (much older) labelling inside the display case
made no mention of slavery or abolition at all. That disjuncture – and the failure
to reconcile it – speaks both of missed opportunities, and of the problems inherent
in displaying these cameos. At the V&A as elsewhere, of course, the temporary trails
 316 Jane Webster
and other display strategies that enabled viewers to relate the Wedgewood cameo and
its cognates to slavery are now disappearing, returning these artefacts to a less proble-
matised obscurity.13
Almost every abolition exhibition held in the United Kingdom in 2007 included
either a Wedgwood cameo, or some other rendition of the original design. In the eight-
eenth century, this was repeated in a wide variety of media. It was worn as a necklace,
brooch or hairpin; it appeared on household ceramics; it was embroidered onto
samplers and other small items of needlework; it was set into the tops of snuff
boxes, furniture, canes and cufflinks; and numerous brass versions (medals and
tokens) were also made. As has already been highlighted, most museums carefully
drew notice to the fact that the Wedgwood medallion is a compromised object,
open to contemporary deconstruction. Yet far fewer picked up on the materiality of
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the cameo, which in the eighteenth century was not mounted on a wall or placed in
a display case: it was designed to be worn, and worn above all by women.
Drawing on Mary Guyatt’s work, Anna Kett has recently unpicked the rich history
of female use of this object, which was mounted onto jewellery such as hair pins and
bracelets, and worn on the body in a variety of ways.14 In this way, the cameo served a
dual purpose as a fashion item and a propaganda emblem.15 As Sarah Watson Parsons
has noted: ‘Like a campaign button, the medallion implicated the wearer in the cam-
paign. Pinning the medallion on one’s breast imparted to it meanings which it did not
have when it was used to seal the documents of the Society.’16 It is surprising that more
museums did not capitalise on this reading of the object, given that accessories
bridging the ground between fashion statement and ethical or political statement
are readily intelligible to today’s consumer. It is in this context, too, that the presence
of text on the cameo (‘Am I not a man and a brother?’) takes on a particular relevance:
as with the much-coveted Katherine Hamnett protest t-shirt of today (‘Katherine says
no to nuclear’), meaning – and desirability – resided in the interweaving of object
and slogan.
We can go further than this, however, and note that a great deal of the material
culture of abolition was either created by women, or marketed for female consump-
tion.17 For example, women skilled in needlepoint frequently re-produced the
Wedgwood design on pincushions and other fabric items, and indeed were responsible
for feminising its associated motto (‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’) (Figure 3 and,
for a 2007 reading of the feminised logo, see Figure 4).18 Few such artefacts were placed
on display in 2007, no doubt as a result of their fragility, but their absence highlights
the point that the importance of the domestic domain as a setting for the consumption
of abolitionist material culture is often overlooked.
In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tea services, rolling pins, sugar
bowls, jugs and many other household objects were produced bearing mottos distan-
cing the user from slave-made produce (‘East India sugar not made by slaves’).19 These
objects, found in museum display cases throughout 2007, were also intended for
display in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but at that time they were put
on show in domestic arenas – kitchens, parlours, dining rooms – presided over by
women.20 As Martha Kazt-Hayman recently emphasised, limited research has been
 Slavery and Abolition 317
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Figure 3. Pincushion with kneeling female slave, and the biblical reference Hebrews 13:3
below (‘Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them’). The reverse of this item
depicts an extract from the Royal Jamaican Gazette of 1 August 1827: a notice of the sale of
a black child, aged seven. National Maritime Museum Collection (ZBA2453/F5760-1).
Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, London.

undertaken on the production and marketing of abolition-related products, and

important questions about the manufacturers, the purchasers and the motivations
of both remain unanswered. The potential for new work in this field is enormous.21
 318 Jane Webster
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Figure 4. ‘Am I not a daughter and hardworking?’ Sarah Trigg Souvenirs, 2007 (http://
www.sarahtrigg.co.uk/sarahtrigggallerysouvenirs.html).

There was a temporal issue here for museums in 2007 in that many surviving objects
of the anti-saccharite movement date to the 1820s and 1830s and thus post-date the
abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Efforts to boycott the consumption of West
Indian sugar were well underway by 1791, however.22 The installation of anti-sacchar-
ite domestic wares in recreated domestic settings might have facilitated a foreground-
ing both of the agency of the female consumer, and the role of women within the
abolition movement itself. At the same time, this would have provided interesting
ways to interrogate the relationship between the ‘domestic’ home setting and the
slave-grown products of ‘domestic’ (national British) colonial territory.23

Text and Object II: The Description

The now iconic Description of a Slave Ship (1789) was published in London by James
Phillips, on behalf of the London Committee of SEAST. It was an ‘improved’ rendition
of an earlier stowage plan of the Liverpool slaver Brooks, drawn up by the Plymouth
Committee of SEAST in December 1788.24 The Description was subsequently much
copied, but often without the extensive text that had accompanied the original.
As Marcus Wood has famously emphasised, the Description is a hypothetical projec-
tion: an idealised rendering of an imagined slaving voyage.25 However, the Brooks was
of course a real slave ship, built in Liverpool in 1781. It had made four slaving voyages
 Slavery and Abolition 319

before the Description was created, and would make seven more between 1791 and
1804, carrying more than 5,000 Africans into slavery.26 The vessel was laid up in the
Liverpool docks in February 1788 when the measurements employed on the broad-
sheet were taken. The Description appeared just a few months after the passage of
the Dolben Act, and can only be understood in the context of this, the very first
attempt to legislate the British slave trade.27 The purpose of the Act was to reduce over-
crowding on slave ships by relating the numbers of individuals carried to the size
(tonnage) of a ship. The aim of the Description was to demonstrate conclusively
that, even under the terms of the newly enacted Dolben Act, ships carrying the legal
number of slaves for their size would still be grossly overcrowded: 442 people are
shown crowded onto the slave decks of the Brooks.
The Dolben Act must in turn be set in the wider context of the 1788–1789 Com-
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mittee of the Privy Council enquiry into the slave trade. This, and the subsequent
House of Commons enquiry of 1790–1792, generated an astonishing (and still
under-researched) mass of data about the day-to-day practicalities of the business
that was slave shipping.28 Throughout the enquiry process, individuals in favour of
the slave trade, and others opposed to it, stood up in the House and were questioned.
As will be discussed further below, the Description was drawn up using data commis-
sioned by the government for the 1788 enquiry, and presented to Parliament in the
same year.
The Description is referred to so often today as the ‘Brooks image’ or the ‘Brooks plan’
that it is easy to forget that it is a description in words as well as pictures. It is the
image, of course, that Marcus Wood is speaking of in his contribution to the catalogue
accompanying the 2007 Westminster Hall exhibition:

Detached, abstract, formally enticing, diagrammatically precise, it is an image which

invites the viewer to fill in its emotional blankness. And yet this image also denies
the African body any cultural or creative autonomy. In this sense the Plan (sic) is
a deeply compromised artefact which presents the slave through a vision of absolute
disempowerment and non-entity.29

Whatever one makes of this statement, it overlooks the fact that the Description (as its
title suggests) amalgamates image and text. Where has that text gone? In 2007, at West-
minster and elsewhere, it was largely absent.30 Most museums presented the stowage
plan minus the original text. In some cases, only fragments of the ‘Brooks image’ were
used, rendering even the visual element of the Description partial and incomplete. At
the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, for example, a fragmentary, much
magnified section of the Brooks slave deck was employed on a panel introducing the
voyage of the Liverpool slaver Essex. What is lost with the text – and there is a
good deal of it – is an extraordinary story: one that concerns the relationship
between Parliament and the nascent abolition movement, and one that was quite
deliberately realised in the wording and layout of the Description itself.
The written word was an integral part of the Description as conceived by SEAST.
Words occupy more than half of the total space of the placard, and are positioned
directly below the more frequently reproduced stowage plan of the Brooks. On the
 320 Jane Webster
right hand side is placed a lengthy account of the horrific conditions endured on slave
decks. It is drawn from (and at one point directly quotes) the eyewitness testimony of a
former Bristol slave ship surgeon. Alexander Falconbridge’s An Account of the Slave
Trade on the Coast of Africa had been published (once again by James Phillips) in
1788, and 3,000 copies were disseminated by SEAST.31 On the left, a set of dimensions
(or admeasurements) is presented, along with the information that this data was col-
lected at the behest of Parliament by Captain Parrey, of HM Navy. In the centre, we
find the Committee’s explanation of what it has done with the data at its disposal,
and at the top, the stowage plan, realised using those data.
Little is known of Captain Parrey, the naval captain who measured the Brooks as it
lay in the Liverpool docks. Yet it is clear that Parrey made these measurements not for
SEAST, but for Parliament.32 Parrey was in fact sent to make admeasurements of nine
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ships, of which the Brooks was only one, and his findings were subsequently read out in
Parliament in June 1788 by Admiral Charles Middleton, Controller of the Navy.33
Clarkson and four fellow committee members (James Phillips, George Harrison,
Joseph Woods and Samuel Hoare) took those dimensions and executed the Descrip-
tion. They used as a guide the stowage plan drawn up in Plymouth some months
before, combined with mathematical reasoning, and more than a little guess work.
The guess work was necessary because it is extremely unlikely that any of the four com-
mittee members charged with producing the description could ever have set eyes a
slave ship laden with a human cargo.34 Exactly the same can be said of course, for
most of the population of Britain, a country whose slave ships returned to port
laden not with slaves, but with the products of slave labour, grown in distant colonies.
Marcus Wood has referred to the Description as ‘imaging the unspeakable’, but it also
images something that its makers had never seen.35
I am not aware of a single 2007 exhibition at which the story behind the production
of ‘the Brooks image’ was laid bare. It is surely a point of more than academic interest
that the measurements upon which the Description was based were collected by the
Royal Navy at the behest of Parliament. Yet this fact was not made explicit even at
the Parliamentary Exhibition in Westminster Hall.36 The companion website for the
exhibition does note that the Description was sent by SEAST to every member of
the House of Commons,37 but the point here is surely that the members would
recall that this abolitionist tract was drawn up from Parliament’s own data. At Wilber-
force House, a connection was made between Parliament and the Brooks, but the
Description was not mentioned in the same context. The panel accompanying the
three-dimensional model of the Brooks that Wilberforce commissioned for his own
use in Parliament stated:

Based on a Liverpool slave ship, the ‘Brookes’ or ‘Brooks’ (which is the correct
name) was one of nine vessels measured for the Parliamentary enquiry into the
slave trade in 1788. Wilberforce used this model during his anti-slave trade speeches
in Parliament.

The crucial point, lost here and wherever the ‘Brooks image’ was displayed, is that
the Description was a propaganda masterstroke. In a country where the great majority
 Slavery and Abolition 321

of individuals had no direct experience of the realities of slave shipping and slavery,
witness testimony was absolutely crucial to the abolitionist cause. Thomas Clarkson
had perceived this so accurately that, in the two years prior to the opening of the
1788 enquiry he had toured the ports of Britain persuading former slave ship
sailors to appear before the House.38 Indeed, this is how he had met Alexander Falcon-
bridge, the surgeon whose testimony appears on the Description, and who would testify
before Parliament on numerous occasions between 1788 and 1792.39
The Description is itself the ultimate testimony, drawing on data sought and
recorded not by SEAST, but by Parliament, and therefore unimpeachable. Parrey’s
data, read out in the House by the most senior figure in the Navy, were unquestion-
able: a matter of true record, set down in the Sessional Papers of the House. The
International Slavery Museum in Liverpool actually displays that record, a pull-out
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leaf from Volume 67 of the Sessional Papers of the House of Commons, containing
the admeasurements of the Brooks and the eight other slave ships measured with
it. Yet the accompanying caption brings no attention to the Brooks itself, or to the
relationship between this document and the Description, as it appears elsewhere in
the gallery.
Only when the text of the Description is brought back into focus can its importance
as a propaganda tool be fully appreciated. The flawed, idealised and compromised
‘Brooks image’ was also a flash of strategic brilliance: it advanced the agenda of the
abolition movement by appealing to an unquestionable veracity, to a truth laid
down in Parliamentary record. With its text reinstated, and re-immersed in history,
the Description, on some levels at least, redeems itself.

Conclusion
This article began with a question about the balance struck between text and object in
displaying the ‘unredeemed’ memorabilia of abolition in 2007. My conclusion must be
that the Wedgwood cameo was often displayed in ways that denied its materiality
(both as object and text) whereas the Brooks was consistently reduced to image,
divorced of its all-important wording. It was always object, never text, and as a
result there could be no full immersion within its historical depths.
It is easy to forget that it was between 1788–1792, and not in 1807, that the slave
trade was laid bare before the nation in the series of Parliamentary inquiries that
made its inner workings a matter of public record. Description of a Slave Ship encap-
sulated that process for the lay observer: therein lay its point, its brilliance, and indeed
its failings, as we understand them today. In passing contemporary judgement on the
Description it is necessary to recall that Clarkson and his allies struggled to render
intelligible (to themselves and other observers) a mass of data that had been recorded,
but not yet interpreted, nor visualised. Today’s museum-goers in their turn, should be
encouraged to read the Brooks broadside, and to struggle with the eighteenth-century
world of which it is a product. They would have much in common, in this endeavour,
with Clarkson and his fellow abolitionists of the 1780s.
 322 Jane Webster
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to James Walvin and Vanessa Salter for providing information on the
2007 exhibitions at Westminster Hall and at Wilberforce House, Hull. Anna Kett
very generously provided me with a copy of her unpublished MA thesis on the
Wedgwood Medallion, which proved invaluable in writing this article. Finally, I am
most grateful to the artist Sarah Trigg for allowing me to reproduce an image of the
transfer-printed plate ‘Am I not a daughter and hardworking?’ (Figure 4), from her
Souvenirs collection (http://www.sarahtrigg.co.uk/sarahtrigggallerysouvenirs.html).

Notes
[1] Clarkson, History, 2: 112.
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[2] Guyatt, ‘Wedgwood Slave Medallion’; Wood, Blind Memory, 16 –40; Wood, ‘Packaging Liberty’,
203– 209; Bernier and Newman, ‘Public Art’, 138.
[3] Wood, ‘Atlantic Slavery’, 152, discusses the ‘uniform rejection of historical immersion, mimicry
and parody’, which, in his view, characterised the British museum community’s approach to
exhibiting slavery in 2007. For an alternative view, see Bernier and Newman, ‘Public Art’,
and their praise for the unsanitised ‘The Middle Passage: Voyage through Death’ installation
at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.
[4] Both are commonly referred to as ‘visual propaganda’ (see, e.g., Wood, ‘Packaging Liberty’, 201,
207 on the Description; Katz-Hyman, ‘Doing Good’, 220 on the Wedgwood cameo; Oldfield,
Popular Politics, 155 –170 on both).
[5] Wood, ‘Packaging Liberty’. When this artefact is placed in the context of Clarkson’s part in
establishing the troubled and paternalistic Sierra Leone Company, (Pybus, ‘“A Less Favourable
Specimen”’), it becomes even more problematic than Wood suggests. It may be noted here that
Katherine Prior’s suggestion that it takes 10 –15 years for ideas in the scholarly literature of
slavery to become established as good practice in museums (Prior, ‘Commemorating Slavery
2007’, 203) seems rather pessimistic; Wood’s Blind Memory, published in 2000, has had a con-
siderable influence on museum practice.
[6] Bernier and Newman, ‘Public Art’, 140.
[7] See, e.g., Guyatt, ‘Wedgwood Slave Medallion’; Wood, ‘Packaging Liberty’; Watson Parsons,
‘Arts of Abolition’.
[8] See also Bernier, ‘“Speculation and the Imagination”’; Green, ‘Remembering Slavery’.
[9] Numerous examples are discussed by Rice and Francis in this issue; see also Rice, ‘Naming the
Money’; Bernier ‘“Speculation and the Imagination”’; Green, ‘Remembering Slavery’.
[10] For background, see Compton, ‘Josiah Wedgwood’; Guyatt, ‘Wedgwood Slave Medallion’;
Katz-Hyman ‘Doing Good’, 219 –220; Kett, ‘When Fashion Promoted Humanity’, 12 –17.
[11] Clarkson, History, 1: 215.
[12] Guyatt, ‘Wedgwood Slave Medallion’, 96 –97.
[13] The Manchester Museum adopted a similar strategy in its main galleries, creating a museum
trail that guided the visitor to objects already on display but with temporary labelling
raising questions designed to provoke debate on slavery and its legacy. In the Money gallery,
for example, a metal token was displayed with the words: ‘This medal, created by Josiah Wedg-
wood, is probably the first logo designed for a political cause. The design was widely copied in
books and leaflets and on personal items like salt boxes and cufflinks. It gives the impression
that the enslaved Africans were passively waiting for campaigners like Wilberforce to rescue
them.’
[14] Kett, ‘When Fashion Promoted Humanity’. For contemporary usages, see Clarkson, History, 2:
191 –192, 215.
 Slavery and Abolition 323

[15] Wedgwood’s cameo tapped into a growing trend for social imitation and emulative spending
(see Oldfield, ‘London Committee’, 334; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 155–156).
[16] Watson Parsons, ‘Arts of Abolition’, 355.
[17] Some museums did pick up on this point, At Wilberforce House Hull, for example, a panel
accompanying a display of anti-slavery ceramics stated: ‘Anti-slavery ceramics were produced
in the early 19th century to support the wider abolition movement that was gaining strength
throughout the country. They were aimed at women and produced to appeal to their
“maternal” instincts. The most common design is that of a kneeling slave. The enslaved
African was depicted as passive to provoke sympathy from white Europeans. Historically this
was not true as many slaves fought against their enslavement.’
[18] See, e.g., the reticules produced in the 1820s by the Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves
(http://collections.vam.ac.uk/objectid/O68954 and http://collections.vam.ac.uk/objectid/
O69040). The National. Maritime Museum collection includes a woolwork rendering of the
kneeling slave (http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID¼ZBA2840), as
well as the female version of the image shown in Figure 3. Further examples of abolitionist nee-
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dlepoint can be found in Watson Parsons’ excellent discussion, ‘Arts of abolition’, 361–364.
[19] See Margolin, ‘And Freedom to the Slave’, for a range of examples.
[20] ‘If marking one’s body with a sign of sensibility was good, then marking one’s larger domestic
domain was even better’ (Watson Parsons, ‘Arts of Abolition’, 361).
[21] Katz-Hayman’s own detailed study of a single transfer-printed pearlware Staffordshire jug
demonstrates the possibilities offered by detailed analyses of this kind (Katz-Hayman,
‘Doing Good’). For more general overviews placing post-1807 abolitionist artefacts in the
context of consumer protest against slave-produced goods, see Oldfield, Popular Politics;
Sussman, Consuming Anxieties.
[22] Sussman, ‘Women and the Politics of Sugar’.
[23] On the semantic slippage between these two notions of domesticity, see Sussman, ‘Woman and
the Politics of Sugar’.
[24] Clarkson, History, 2: 111– 2; Wood, Blind Memory, 14– 18.
[25] Wood, Blind Memory, 16 –35; Wood, ‘Packaging Liberty’, 206.
[26] Information on all these voyages is contained in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, now
available online at: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces. The first four of these
voyages (TSTD Identification numbers 80663-6) had all been made between Liverpool, the
Gold Coast (Ghana) and Jamaica. A further six voyages were undertaken between 1791 and
1800 (TSTD 80667-80672). On its last voyage, in 1804, the ship was captured and detained
in Buenos Aires (TSTD 80673). In total, the Brooks carried an estimated 5,122 Africans into
slavery; 4,729 of whom survived the voyage.
[27] ‘An Act to regulate, for a limited Time, the shipping and carrying of slaves in British Vessels
from the Coast of Africa’ (28 Geo. III Cap. 54). The bill was brought before Parliament by
Sir William Dolben, hence the common shorthand term ‘Dolben Act’. The Act became law
in 1788.
[28] Report of the Lords Committee of Council appointed for the consideration of all matters relating to
Trade and Foreign Plantations . . . concerning the present state of the trade to Africa, and particu-
larly the Trade in Slaves (1789); Journals and Sessional Papers and Votes of the House of
Commons, vols. 67– 73 (Slave Trade papers 1788–1790) and vol. 82 (Slave Trade papers
1791–1792).
[29] Wood, ‘Packaging Liberty’, 207.
[30] The ‘Brooks image’ published in the Westminster Hall exhibition catalogue (Unwin, ‘Exhibition
Catalogue’, 272, cat no .4) is an ‘image only’ version produced by J. Robertson of Edinburgh in
1791. The catalogue entry makes no mention of the text that accompanied the original.
[31] For background, see Clarkson, History, 1: 459–460. For the full text of Falconbridge’s An
Account, see Fyfe, Anna Maria Falconbridge, 193–230.
 324 Jane Webster
[32] Clarkson History, 2: 112.
[33] Journal of the House of Commons 43, 15 November 1787–25 September 1788.
[34] Clarkson had toured slave ships in English docks, but these were not, of course, carrying slaves,
and certainly would not have had their slave decks in place: these decks were laid in off the coast
of Africa, and dismantled once a slave ship had disembarked its human cargo (Webster, ‘Slaves
Ships’, 7 –9).
[35] Wood, Blind Memory, 16.
[36] James Walvin, personal communication with the author. Nor does this information appear in
the accompanying published catalogue (Unwin, ‘Exhibition Catalogue’) or on the exhibition
website (http://slavetrade.parliament.uk/slavetrade/index.html).
[37] http://slavetrade.parliament.uk/slavetrade/assetviews/pictures/theslaveshipbrooksofliver
pool.html/.
[38] See Clarkson, History, 1: 348, for the background here. Clarkson began collecting eyewitness
testimonies from sailors in 1786.
[39] Most notably, he endured four days of often hostile questioning in 1790 (Abridgement of the
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Minutes of the Evidence before a Committee of the Whole House, to whom it was referred to
consider of the Slave Trade, 1789 (1789–1791), 581–632). Falconbridge did not live to see
abolition in 1807. In 1791, Clarkson persuaded him to become governor of the troubled and
chronically under-resourced ‘Province of Freedom’ (Sierra Leone). He died there two years
later; by his wife’s account, having drunk himself to a disillusioned end (Fyfe, Anna Maria
Falconbridge).

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