A volume called only Victorian Jamaica might easily be mistaken for a broad narrative of an understudied period in the Caribbean island's history. Readers could overlook such a work, but to do so in this instance would be a grave misstep. This large (nearly 800 pages), handsome, richly-illustrated, insightful volume is not a narrative of nineteenth century Jamaica, but much, much more. Drawing on oft-neglected visual and material culture sources, Victorian Jamaica is a significant contribution to the history of Jamaica as well as Britain and its empire. It is a book to be perused, pondered, pored over, and thought about time and again.
Through a series of short chapters focused on specific objects and more extended essays organized into three thematic sections, the book “aims to provide a portrait of the Victorian age in a Caribbean colony” (3). The comparative neglect of Jamaica during Queen Victoria's reign has obscured the period's importance as a time of critical transition. The Victorian period began fully for Jamaica with the realization of “full freedom” for enslaved people on 1 August 1838, shortly after Victoria ascended the throne. Most scholarly studies have focused instead on the pre-emancipation period and, more recently, on post-independence from 1962. This timely volume seeks to fill this gap by exploring Jamaican culture and history in the six decades after the emancipation of enslaved Jamaicans in the 1830s.
The “comprehensive view of Jamaican culture in the Victorian era” (34) that emerges from this portrait is diverse and complex, cutting across class, gender, religious, and racial lines. The volume seeks to “avoid binary models” and instead emphasizes “a pluralistic view of nineteenth century Jamaican society” (6). Although surviving evidence makes the “recovery of nonwhite histories a significant challenge”, (24) nonwhite Jamaicans are at the core of the volume. The place of Jamaicans of colour remained complex and subaltern in many ways, as the second watershed event of the period, the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, highlighted. Indeed, it was one of the rare instances that nineteenth century Jamaica drew the sustained gaze of the imperial metropole. But the editors argue, and the individual chapters reinforce and support, that every aspect of Jamaican culture engaged with the imperial centre and a full understanding of Victorian Britain must include the Caribbean perspective.
There are four sections, the first presenting twenty-two material and visual objects in short Object Lessons. These are a highlight of the book and immediately foreground the volume's use of visual and material sources. The object lessons introduce us chronologically to artefacts that begin in the early years of Queen Victoria and end with a wood engraving of a statue of the Queen erected in 1897. That statue also features in a later chapter that describes representations of empire, making connections with post-independence Jamaica where it was broken and defaced as an act of protest. Copies of this statue stood in places across the empire, emphasizing the “cross-cultural entanglements of empire” (505). Taken together, the object lesson and the chapter serve to map the pervasive presence of Victoria as a “symbolic assertion of empire” (493), but one that was unstable and on which physical, bodily harm has been inflicted. Just this sort of interplay exemplifies the book's richness: a visual representation of a material object reflective of changing political and social realities is a metaphor for the volume.
The power of objects to tell multiple stories comes through repeatedly. A single painting by noted artist Frederic Church interrogates themes such as nature, land ownership and management, the structure of the sugar economy, and plantations as places of violence and death. A piece of furniture carved from two hundred samples of Jamaican wood to resemble a bookcase with books for the 1891 Jamaica Exhibition illustrates furniture production, libraries, natural history classification, and the timber industry. Such object lessons show the vibrancy and vitality of material and visual culture.
The remainder of the volume has three thematic sections. Crafted by a distinguished group of contributors, these essays range across numerous fields: history, art history, curatorship, religion, African and African-American Studies, architectural history, music, urban studies, and English literature. The overall quality of the essays is high, and the sections deal with the creation and functioning of the nineteenth century Jamaican state and society, its visual and material cultures, and a final part that interweaves race, performance, and ritual in chapters focused on mixed-race identity, dress, religious practices, theatrical and public performances, music, and the nature of Jamaican Victorianism.
The book makes substantial methodological and historiographical contributions. By using a wide range of material and visual sources, Victorian Jamaica positions materiality at the centre of analysis, something that is lacking in previous studies. The artefacts, architecture, prints, paintings, maps, and photographs come from several collections in Jamaica and elsewhere. Photography, which emerged almost simultaneously with emancipation, plays an especially prominent role in the source base for the collected essays. The Institute of Jamaica, the National Library of Jamaica, and the National Gallery are outstanding repositories, although interesting objects emerge from locations such as the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Princeton University Library, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and private collections. The editors and contributors draw these sources together and deploy them to understand a period frequently neglected in the literature on Jamaica.
The book frequently highlights the connection between the past and the present, illustrating ways in which Victorian Jamaica resonates in the present day through the mounting of recent exhibitions and continued work by contemporary artists. The effort to address Jamaican artist and activist Omari Ra's concern that there is still, “limited attention to black life and history … in favour of all things colonial”, drives the volume.
There are a few minor drawbacks. Even though it is not the volume's goal to offer a narrative of Jamaican history in the Victorian period, a chapter outlining the period between the 1830s and 1900, or perhaps a timeline of critical events, might have aided non-specialists. Instead, the volume constitutes a “thick description” of Jamaican culture and its artefacts (35). The book is visually alluring, with nearly 300 colour illustrations, and the overall quality and number of images alone make the book an outstanding contribution. Nevertheless, a handful of the panoramic pictures and maps might have been reproduced at a larger size to enable readers to appreciate their finer details.
Victorian Jamaica is a striking achievement. This hefty tome goes a long way toward filling a significant historiographical gap on the nineteenth century history of this Caribbean island. Often picturing little known materials from collections in Jamaica and elsewhere, a magnificent visual and material panorama of Jamaican culture and society emerges. As a result, scholars from a range of fields with interest in the nineteenth century should be quick to acquire this book and take on board its many contributions.
