Anthony Benezet, Antislavery Rhetoric and the Age of Sensibility

Anthony Benezet (1713–84) is familiar to historians of slavery, abolition, and Quakerism for his important role in disseminating Pennsylvanian Quaker antislavery to a wider and ecumenical audience. This article argues that an important reason for this success was Benezet’s considered deployment of a fashionable sentimental rhetoric, or rhetoric of sensibility, that allowed him to reach out to wide audiences and to engage them both through their reason and through their emotions. This strategy enhanced Benezet’s ability to encourage the Quaker discourse of antislavery, as it had developed over a century, to inform Atlantic discourses more widely. To support this argument, the article demonstrates that, in his time and for some time afterwards, Benezet was regarded by many as a man of feeling in terms familiar from contemporary sentimental literature. It concludes by closely reading a selection of passages from his antislavery writing to show that, while Benezet’s rhetoric was by no means purely sentimental, he nonetheless frequently had recourse to a rhetoric of sensibility which he deployed as a powerful tool in his campaign to alert the world to the evil of slavery

The poetics of radical abolitionism : Ann Yearsley’s poem on the inhumanity of the slave trade

This article re-examines Ann Yearsley’s Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade (1788) and argues that excessive attention to the relationship between Yearsley and her former patron Hannah More has obscured the extent to which Yearsley was working independently by 1788, albeit influenced by the burgeoning literature of antislavery. The article shows how interest in the More-Yearsley rivalry has been expressed in critical literature and biography from the 1930s to the present day, generally in the form of compare-and-contrast close readings of both poems in which Yearsley’s poetic vision is subordinated to More’s. It then provides a close reading of Yearsley’s poem to show how it is in dialogue with a range of antislavery verse, including poems by Thomas Chatterton, John Bicknell and Thomas Day, William Cowper, and William Roscoe. The article concludes with an assessment of More’s radical abolitionism and the suggestion that Yearsley’s influence, as well as her influences, be the subject of future study

The Rhetoric of Sensibility: Argument, Sentiment, and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth Century.

PhDThis dissertation argues that by adapting the style and techniques of sentimental novels, poetry, and drama to persuasive writing a significant number of late-eighteenth century political writers were able to develop a distinct and recognisable rhetoric of sensibility. It develops this argument by examining eighteenth-century views on the use and purpose of rhetoric, and by looking at writing in one of the most wide-ranging debates of the lateeighteenth century, the debate over abolition of the slave trade. Chapter One looks at traditional ('neo-classical') rhetoric and contrasts this with some of the many varieties of the eighteenth-century 'new rhetoric'. Chapter Two looks at particular rhetorical strategies employed during the sentimental period and identifies the main tropes of the rhetoric of sensibility. Chapter Three examines the relationship between slavery and literary sentimentalism, looking at the way in which imaginative writers used sentimental rhetoric to advance the idea of anti-slavery. It also considers the extent to which abolitionist poems, plays, and novels themselves contributed to the development of a sentimental rhetoric. Chapter Four examines the use of sentimental rhetoric in nonfictional slavery-related tracts and pamphlets. It explores the ways in which the sentimental rhetorical strategies outlined in Chapter Two were adopted by both pro and anti-slavery writers of the 1780s. Chapter Five discusses how William Wilberforce, the main parliamentary advocate for abolition, used sentimental rhetoric in his early parliamentary speeches. The conclusion examines anti-slavery writing after the collapse of the first abolition campaign in 1792. In particular, it examines the use of sentimental rhetoric in responses to the revolutions in France and Haiti and suggests that after this date sentimental rhetoric, though never entirely disappearing, was progressively supplanted by other forms of rhetoric

Abolishing Cruelty: The Concurrent Growth of Antislavery and Animal Welfare Sentiment in British and Colonial Literature

This article argues that anti‐slavery and animal welfare writers actively and concurrently extended the boundaries of sympathy to promote an anti‐cruelty ethos that encompassed both suffering animals and suffering people and demanded that this shift in sensibilities be enshrined in legislation. It charts this from the 1680s to the 1770s in pamphlets and novels by Thomas Tryon, Sarah Scott, Humphrey Primatt and Laurence Sterne, before exploring parallel early nineteenth‐century debates over bull‐baiting and the abolition of slavery in texts by Thomas Day, Percival Stockdale and Elizabeth Heyrick