Henry 'Box' Brown Abolitionist

A new book about one of the best-known Abolitionist campaigners  in Victorian Britain is being published by Kathleen Chater.    

Here are details

From Slavery to Show Business Kathleen Chater 267 pages, $39.95 softcover, 22 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, index ISBN 978-1-4766-7922-8 Ebook ISBN 978-1-4766-3943-7 2020

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers • Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 336-246-4460 • Orders 800-253-2187 • FAX 336-246-4403 • McFarlandPub.com

HENRY BOX BROWN:

From Slavery to Show Business

Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business is to be published very soon.  McFarland is a well-known publishing company in the USA, and Henry is famous there.   I attach an order form but I’d like to tell you a bit more about how important he is in the history of both abolitionism and entertainment in Victorian Britain.

His story is familiar in the United States because of his extraordinary method of escape from enslavement in the South to the North: he was nailed into a crate and posted. This was how he acquired the sobriquet ‘Box’ which he adopted as his name.  After speaking on the abolitionist circuit for some eighteen months in New England, he fled to old England when the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made remaining in America dangerous.  Initially he spoke on the abolitionist circuit here but thereafter only occasional big events in his life are known: he won a libel case against a newspaper which vilified him; he married again to an Englishwoman; he moved into mesmerism and magic before, after 25 years, he returned to the USA.

He published two autobiographies: the first in 1849 and the second in 1851 in Manchester.  Unlike Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the most famous campaigners against American slavery, he wrote nothing more about his experiences.  He lived a full life but has unfortunately left no record of how he felt about it. With the digitization of British, American and Canadian newspapers it has now been possible to reconstruct his extraordinary journey. 

In researching his life I have been struck by his bravery, not just in his method of escape, but in his break with the abolition movement and his willingness to reinvent himself (he also made forays into acting).  The partnership between him and his second wife, a Cornish schoolteacher, was a revelation.  Almost nothing has been known about her but it is now possible to understand the role she played in his professional career as well as in their personal life, which overturns some stereotypes of the Victorian woman (and man).

He became well-known, appealing not to the bien-pensant middle classes but to the working classes, and is often mentioned in the press as an example of a popular entertainer.  Surprisingly the two ‘firsts’ in English history that he achieved have never been recognised – and you need to read the biography to find out what they were.

I hope you will be as intrigued by this extraordinary life as I was in discovering it.  If you need any more information, please contact me.

Kathleen Chater  

untoldhistories@live.co.uk

The box in the illustration was made by Rory Rennick, an American performer who does a magic act based on Henry’s

What was it about those Whistlers?

 

Sponsor Tate Britain: Remove the racist and harmful “Pursuit of Rare Meats” mural at Tate Britain’s Rex Whistler (change.org)
Petition against Racist Rex Whistler

The current   condemnation of the depiction of a captive Black child led like an animal, and then chained running behind a carriage  in Rex Whistler's whimsical mural in the Tate Britain restaurant is especially remarkable in that it has elicited no public attention hitherto, despite the well-publicised restoration of the 'Pursuit of Rare Meats' art work in 2013.  I myself have never eaten in the [high-priced] restaurant, but had one known of these racist images efforts would have been made to view and condemn them.  

They are exceptionally offensive and really quite inexplicable in an allegedly pastoral scene.

The artist Rex Whistler, who died in WW2, was not related to his earlier namesake, the American James [Jimmy or Jem] McNeil Whistler, who settled in London in the 1860s, but both held racist views. Jimmy Whistler did not as far as I know depict Black figures in his paintings, but he boasted of assaulting a fellow-passenger on a transatlantic voyage.  In telling the tale, Whistler dubbed his victim, from Haiti, 'the Marquis of Marmalade'.  At the dinner table, Whistler first flung insults and then hit his fellow-traveller so  hard that he injured his own hand. As a result, the ship's captain arrested Whistler and locked him in his cabin.

Whistler's explanation was that 'This passenger was simply a Negro among several forced upon our company on the voyage.  The degree to which he offended my prejudices (as a Southerner) who for the first time found Negroes at the same table, led finally to our coming into collision.'  The next day, when reproved for such disgraceful and  'ungentlemanly' conduct, Whistler hit the Captain with his uninjured hand, and was duly punched in the face and subdued in return. 

Rex Whistler  less combative, perhaps,  but something about Black people stirred his prejudices.  He inserted a Black coachman or footman into a fancy portrait of   two upperclass young women, the Dudley Ward sisters, in 1933, historicizing the composition as an 18th-century picnic so as to evoke the social and visual difference of Black and White commonly deployed in earlier aristocratic portraiture.  

And there is somewhere a  mural depicting Circus performers, including a naked acrobat, which  I've only seen in a photo of Rex by his pal Cecil Beaton, reproduced on a book jacket.

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