THE TREMBLING HAND

In search of lost Black lives.

Literary scholar Nabugodi melds memoir and deep archival research to investigate six prominent writers—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron—with the goal of tracing the Romantics’ “racial imaginary”: that is, “how the existence of racial slavery infested their creative imaginations.” As a biracial Black woman, she brings an acute sensitivity to her search, of texts and artifacts, for “undead legacies of slavery.” At St. John’s College, Cambridge, she visits the Slavery and Abolition Collection, which houses documents representing debates, pro and con, about enslavement and whose holdings include Wordsworth’s favorite teacup. Like other Britons of his time, she observes, Wordsworth benefited from slave labor each time he mindlessly stirred sugar into his tea. Letters from plantation managers to British owners, conveying slaves’ valuations, horrify her; she is buoyed by reports of resistance and escape by those slaves whom owners damned as “distempered.” Among many disquieting discoveries, she finds that Coleridge, once an ardent abolitionist, became a white supremacist after encountering precepts of scientific racism, which placed the so-called Caucasian race at the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy and Blacks at the bottom. Both Keats’ death mask and his poetic allusions point to a reverence for classical Greek—and white—aesthetics. Byron’s orthopedic boots, which he wore to compensate for a physical impairment, lead Nabugodi to consider a link between disability and Blackness. Byron, like Black people, was made to feel inferior—even cursed—by others’ attitudes about his physical difference. “Romantic-era ideals about beauty and grandeur,” she writes, “are impossible to disentangle from the period’s white supremacist worldview.” Each of the figures she investigates, she discovers to her dismay, sorrow, and anger, was intricately embedded in the slave economy.

An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race.