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Contents ( 72)
  1. Dedication
  2. Epigraph
  3. Contents
  4. The Old Bailey, London, 7 April 1826
  5. Chapter One
  6. Paradise, Jamaica, 1812‒25
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. London, February 1825
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-One
  28. Chapter Twenty-Two
  29. Chapter Twenty-Three
  30. Chapter Twenty-Four
  31. Chapter Twenty-Five
  32. Chapter Twenty-Six
  33. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-One
  38. Chapter Thirty-Two
  39. The School-house
  40. August 1825‒January 1826
  41. Chapter Thirty-Three
  42. Chapter Thirty-Four
  43. Chapter Thirty-Five
  44. Chapter Thirty-Six
  45. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  46. Levenhall
  47. January 1826
  48. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  49. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  50. The Old Bailey
  51. 7 April 1826
  52. Chapter Forty
  53. Chapter Forty-One
  54. Chapter Forty-Two
  55. Chapter Forty-Three
  56. Chapter Forty-Four
  57. Chapter Forty-Five
  58. Newgate Prison
  59. Chapter Forty-Six
  60. Chapter Forty-Seven
  61. Chapter Forty-Eight
  62. Chapter Forty-Nine
  63. Chapter Fifty
  64. Chapter Fifty-One
  65. Chapter Fifty-Two
  66. Chapter Fifty-Three
  67. Chapter Fifty-Four
  68. Author’s Note
  69. Acknowledgements
  70. About the Author
  71. Copyright
  72. About the Publisher

A whisper becomes a shout. How I loved you.

I am afraid. I am afraid.

But the mind is a different place, and there, soon, we will have days together.

And time.

Author’s Note

Francis Barber was a young Jamaican boy brought to London in the eighteenth century and sent into service in the household of Samuel Johnson; Johnson wrote that he’d been ‘given me by a Friend’. The idea of being ‘given’ in England, where all men were supposed to be free, was the springboard for this novel. Barber’s story was chronicled by Michael Bundock in The Fortunes of Francis Barber.

For the scientific aspects of the plot I drew on several useful texts, in particular Andrew S. Curran’s The Anatomy of Blackness, Richard Sheridan’s Doctors and Slaves and two articles by Lorna Schiebinger: ‘Medical Experimentation and Race in the Atlantic World’ and ‘Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World’. Langton’s Crania was modelled on Crania Americana, a book published by Samuel Morton in 1839 (I have taken a novelist’s liberties with the chronology).

I am indebted to several books about early black immigrants to London, including Black London by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Reconstructing the Black Past by Norma Myers, and Staying Power by Peter Fryer. Laddie’s story was inspired by the relationship between Julius Soubise and the Duchess of Queensberry.

I read testimonies of American slaves in Before Freedom: When I Just Can Remember, edited by Belinda Hurmence.

Barbara Hodgson’s In the Arms of Morpheus was a useful and fascinating exploration of the use and effects of laudanum among the upper classes.

I also consulted records of actual legal proceedings, among them the early nineteenth-century case of Jane Rider, the Springfield somnambulist, and Rufus Choate’s 1846 defence of Albert Tirrell in Boston, USA, as well as the Old Bailey online archive.

Other helpful sources included Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in 18th Century England; Catharine Arnold, City of Sin; Peter Ackroyd, London; Dan Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London; Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer’s Regency World; Venetia Murray, An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England.

In May 1823, George Canning introduced a series of resolutions for the amelioration of conditions for West Indian slaves, including religious instruction, leading to the imposition of an amelioration plan by Order-in-Council in Trinidad and Tobago the following year. I have given George Benham ideas in keeping with those proposals, save that his aim was to preserve slavery rather than abolish it.

Some of the remarks attributed to Langton and Benham were written by real West India planters, including Matthew Lewis and Edward Long. Matthew Lewis’s Journal of Life on a West India Estate, including its references to ‘belly women’ and ‘shipboard hens’, and Thomas Thistlewood’s journals provide two vastly different first-hand accounts of life in Jamaica by West India planters. Both diaries reflect the opposite extremes of the white man’s reaction to Jamaica during the period, which swung between cruelty and condescension.

Acknowledgements

Not a page would have made it into print without my husband, Iain.