Adding to a rapidly growing body of work on transatlantic literary and cultural connections, this book is most closely related to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London, 1993). Unlike that much more sweeping book though, Dickerson's homes in on African Americans’ relationship with nineteenth-century Britain, together with Britons who wrote in influential ways about black people and slavery (mostly but not only in the United States). One chapter deals with nineteenth-century British travelers and their writing about America, the second with African American visitors to Britain, the third with Thomas Carlyle's writings on “the negro,” and the last with W. E. B. Du Bois's intellectual debt to Europe.

Undoubtedly this topic has much to recommend it, not least because Dickerson introduces the intriguing possibility that the idea of “the Victorian” might have had a special meaning for African Americans well into the twentieth century (she mentions Maya Angelou's description of Southern black girls learning “Victorian” mores [10], and briefly discusses Adrienne Kennedy's play Funnyhouse of a Negro, in which Queen Victoria is adopted as an autobiographical persona [128]). Her conclusion draws into the discussion some of the political uses to which the term “Victorian” has been put since the late twentieth century, and its relationship to “neo-Victorian” fiction and its criticism: a broadening of terms that might in turn allow for reflection upon the range of her own study.

However, this does not emerge, and indeed the book never quite feels as fully worked-out as it deserves to be, starting with the terms of the title, which feel only partially unpacked. At first sight, “Dark Victorian” seems to promise an examination of racial irony or ambiguity, but no definition appears until chapter 3, when Dickerson glosses it as “an enemy to be routed at every single turn by freedom-seeking blacks abroad” (89). The epithet is thus perfectly apposite, as she applies it, to the Carlyle of the virulent article An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, but Carlyle takes up less than a quarter of the book, so when the explanation comes the reader wonders why the apparently limited phrase has been employed for the title. And risky to make the adjective “dark” mean only politically reprehensible, especially where the title might initially be taken to apply to the black Americans who traveled to Victoria's realm? Why associate Carlyle's failures of humanity—by calling them “dark”—with black people? “Victorian” too, deserves much more careful attention if it is to do the work Dickerson wants it to in this argument. To some extent, Dickerson uses “Victorian” merely to signal thought and culture “roughly from 1830 to 1914” (4)—that is, not precisely tied to Victoria's reign, or strictly speaking “Victorian”—especially as she is sometimes not only talking about Britain. Elsewhere, “Victorian” seems to be shorthand for a particular intellectual culture. Unfortunately, her short account of this in her introduction is so broad of brush as to sound almost like a caricature: “in the nineteenth century, the Victorians were confident and triumphant. The English people (I am speaking especially of white Britons) in greater numbers than before enjoyed increased leisure and wealth” (8). One doesn’t need to be wincing at that substitution of “English” for “British” to feel that this is simplistic, writing out historical change between 1837 and 1901 (let alone her broader chronology), not to mention national, regional, class, and gender differences. Most of the subtleties of circumstance, in other words, that need to be taken into account to examine adequately Frederick Douglass's distinctive reception in Scotland, or Carlyle's position on emancipation in the West Indies. Asserting that “Victoria's `subjects' … tended to be optimistic, dogmatic, earnest and enthusiastic” (8) not only makes the inhabitants of the whole Empire identical in general character with the British (or is that only the English?), but the statement immediately summons up all the important “Victorians” for whom this description would be ludicrous (Emily Brontë? John Ruskin? Carlyle himself?).

One can’t fault Dickerson's range, or the reading that has clearly gone into this work: the first chapter offers an overview of the history of British slavery, followed by glimpses of the United States travel writing of Captain Marryat, Harriet Martineau, both Trollopes (Frances and Anthony), Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Fanny Kemble, and Rudyard Kipling, while the second chapter introduces the British travels of, among others, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, William Wells Brown, Josephine Brown, John Brown, and the Reverend J. W. C. Pennington. As the length of these lists suggest, though, most travelers and texts are dealt with fairly cursorily. There is however, a welcome close reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point” and in later chapters of Carlyle's Occasional Discourse and Du Bois's novel Dark Princess and the epigraphs of The Souls of Black Folk. Some of the most interesting discussions seemed to me those about Alexander Crummell's promotion of British values in Liberia (107–8), and the observation that Du Bois came to Africa through Europe (112). Du Bois's Europe was of course as much German as British, and many of the artists admired by the characters in Dark Princess—whom Dickerson ropes in with Du Bois's “Victorian” interests—are continentals. They are also more usually identified with revolutionizing nineteenth-century aesthetics than embodying them (Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse). It is not quite clear whether Dickerson would consider nineteenth-century African American connections with Europe to be continuous with those between the Harlem Renaissance and European Modernism, or whether she would see the latter as a transformation of the former. Clearly, she has got hold of an important moment in African American cultural history, even if one could wish she had sorted out its implications more thoroughly before pressing ahead into print.