“Slavery in Black and White” from “Fun” (1866)

Slavery in Black and White

Engraving

Distinguished Philanthropist: — “Really, my good man, I can give you no further attention, I am so engaged with those interesting blacks!”

See commentary below

Fun (10 February 1866): 215

Courtesy of the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

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The man trying in vain to get the help of the philanthropist wears the peasant farmer’s traditional smock. The philanthropist, who holds a sheet on which “anti-slavery” appears while “Exeter Hall,” the large London auditorium at which the famous Baptist Charles Spurgeon preached, ignores the plight of English and Irish tenant farmers. Opponents of both the anti-slavery campaigns and investigation of the Eyre Affair frequently echoes Thomas Carlyle’s charge that the Evangelicals and Quakers who led these movements (and who often were factory and land owners) were, at best, hypocrites who ignored the plight of poor working people and at worst direction attention at the problems of blacks as a way of keeping attention off their own actions. As George Levine pointed out many years ago in “The Uses and Abuses of Carlylese,” in Carlyle what began as trope in a liberal attack on the wealthy degenerated in his later work into crude racism. — George P. Landow

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Last modified 9 March 2016