Black Victorians: Hidden in History is a trade book in which Keshia N. Abraham and John Woolf examine sixteen Black individuals, presenting a range of introductory histories, including asylum inmates, street sweepers, models, radicals, royalty, bishops, abolitionists, actors, and Pan-Africanists. The selection centralizes Black individuals who lived in Britain during the Victorian period, with most subjects born either in Britain or within the British Empire. Abraham and Woolf fill gaps in literature on Black people in Victorian Britain and set a high standard for illuminating and contextualizing Black histories in relation to the British Empire, ideas of race, difference, blackness, identity, and Victorian society overall. They balance historical illumination on Black lives in Victorian Britain with social/restorative justice. Abraham and Woolf reintroduce well-known figures like Sara Bonetta Forbes or introduce erased figures like Broadmoor inmate John Flinn into the historical conversation, emphasizing each subject's agency and consciousness.
Black Victorians uniquely begins with valuable introspection and critical reflection on the process of writing Black history. The preface (by Abraham, a scholar of the African Diaspora and a JEDI [Justice and Equity with Dignity and Intention] advocate) and introduction (by Woolf, a nineteenth-century specialist) detail how Black Victorians was a collaborative and coproductive process of learning and discovery, which required both Abraham and Woolf to challenge and expand their preconceived notions of race and historical practice. Black Victorians, thus, was a coproductive amalgamation of specialisms that infused its research and discussion with insights into race theory and ideas of human variety/racial science. It also offers generous observations about the strengths and limitations writers of different backgrounds and ethnicities have when writing a history of Black people during a period of rising imperialism and colonial oppression.
From here, Black Victorians is divided into five parts structured thematically. Part one lays an important foundation of context on the history of Black presence in Britain and the empire, the historical erasures of Black history in Britain, the development of scientific racism and “paradoxical” Victorian society, according to Abraham and Woolf, with its moralistic and imperialistic cultures (16). Parts two to five are divided into four to six chapters, each focusing on an individual (or a movement, with chapter 19 focusing on the Pan-African Movement). The parts cover inmates and working Black men, individuals connected to or protesting official institutions such as the monarchy, the army, or the Church, and individuals connected to the arts, namely models, musicians, and actors before turning to abolitionists and political figures.
Abraham and Woolf successfully produce a “self-consciously political” study of Black lives in Victorian Britain that contemplates questions of race in the nineteenth century and demonstrates “how people of African descent helped create Great Britain” (xvi). They challenge traditional tropes of exceptionalism in Black British history by recognizing, as they describe, the individual subject “amid the collective” (xvi). In each chapter, the central subject's history is compounded with brief histories of other Black individuals who possessed similar experiences or pursued similar paths as the central subject. For example, Abraham and Woolf examine Sara Bonetta Forbes, Queen Victoria's goddaughter, highlighting her uncertain background, her life between Britain and Sierra Leone, her arranged marriage, her children, and their continued affiliation with Queen Victoria. Yet alongside Bonetta Forbes, Ethiopian Prince Alemayehu is studied, the young prince favored by Queen Victoria until his premature death in 1879 and Nathaniel Wells, Monmouthshire's Black sheriff. Abraham and Woolf ensure that the subjects grouped together in Black Victorians are not misconstrued as personal relationships. For example, the Broadmoor inmates William Brown, John Flint, and Joseph Peters, despite their overlapping incarcerations, are shown to have had different treatments, occupied different wings in Broadmoor and were likely unknown to one another. Moreover, this emphasis on the collective is married with a thorough contextualization of each subject's history with the social, political, and cultural history of Britain, class, the empire, colonialism, imperialism, and ideas of race.
Beyond romanticizing their subjects, Abraham and Woolf present rounded histories featuring triumphant and challenging aspects of their lives. For example, the Victorian actor Ira Aldridge is well known for playing Othello at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1883. Less well-known and covered in Black Victorians is his role in reviving and revising Titus Andronicus, where he made theatrical history by performing the play for the first time in 128 years. Yet Aldridge also incorporated toned-down minstrel characters into his later performances to meet audience demands for the increasingly popular minstrelsy. The rising popularity of derogatory images of Black people and the need to conform to audience demands signalled Alridge's challenging navigation of race, performance, and changing social trends.
A notable criticism in Black Victorians is that more Black men than Black women characterize the Black presence in Victorian Britain, with an absence of working Black women beyond Fanny Eaton's example (who, while being a Pre-Raphaelite model, also worked in various service roles). The politics of selection (and likely limited source material/archival research) hinders our perception of gender, race, and class in this period, missing out on the lives of women like nurse Annie Brewster, actress Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, or former enslaved woman, known as Josephine, who escaped slavery and was smuggled to Liverpool like the featured Henry Box Brown. The book's format, featuring the individual amid the collective, lent itself well to including Black working women, but this opportunity was missed. Furthermore, while acknowledging the massive contributions of historians like Hakim Adi, Gretchen Gerzina, Caroline Bressey, Peter Fryer, Marika Sherwood, and Folarin Shyllon, Black Victorians lacks some critical engagement with the historiography.
Nevertheless, the informal but impactful approach, writing, and activism of Black Victorians bring to the forefront the depth and insidious character of historical erasure that permeates popular Victorian British history. Rather than dwelling on this erasure, Abraham and Woolf retell Black histories with a spirit of celebration and agency. Black Victorians is historically, politically, and socially astute and successfully presents for popular audiences a history of Black “individuals amid the collective” comprehending what it means to be Black, British, rich, or poor in Victorian Britain.
