In September 1809 Anne Hart Gilbert and her sister Elizabeth opened a Methodist Sunday school (the first in the West Indies) at the naval centre of English Harbour, Antigua, which was willing to teach both slave and free children. Anne…
Tag: Isobel Grundy
Black History Month: Phillis Wheatley
On 18 October 1770 there appeared at Boston, Massachusetts, an advertisement for a broadside entitled An Elegiac Poem, On the Death of . . . George Whitefield. Whitefield was a charismatic evangelical preacher from England, who had died near Boston…
Black History Month: Slavery
Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago this month the slave ship Zong left Africa for Jamaica loaded with newly captured people, of whom an even larger number than usual were doomed to die on the voyage. When by the end…
Black History Month: Black community in Eighteenth Century London.
As long ago as 1722 there was an established Black community in London, big enough to turn out in numbers in the wintry middle of January that year for the funeral of a black man named Phipps, who owned an…
Hannah Kilham (1774-1832)
Hannah Kilham (1774-1832), a Quaker convert, was born in Sheffield and died at sea between Sierra Leone and Liberia. Her husband died after eight months of marriage and her daughter died before she was three. She joined the Society of…
Elizabeth Heyrick (1869-1831)
Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), social reformer and abolitionist, is little known today. She receives only the briefest mention in Charlotte Sussman’s Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833, Stanford University Press, 2000. She was hardly mentioned in the media…
Independence Day
The Americans are celebrating their independence from Britain today. Congratulations and good luck to them. But what about celebrating a couple of other, smaller victories from this date? On 4 July 1784 Hester Thrale composed a letter of measured, dignified…
M. Marcin and Lucy Hutton.
She points out that Saint Paul had been taught by his mother and grandmother; she decries ‘Mans Scholastick Learning’, which, she says, has too frequently been set up to contradict the Scriptures; she notes that the words ‘she’ and ‘he’…
Women’s History Month: Caroline Sheridan or Norton
On the 22 March 1808, Caroline Sheridan (later Caroline Norton) was born into a famous theatrical family. (She revered her grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but probably never understood how famous in her day had been her great-grandmother Frances Sheridan.) She…