Chapter 2 - From Plantation to Prison

Summary

Wedderburn’s view of Black-led abolition was further outlined in his life narrative, Horrors of Slavery. The narrative initially emerged as a series of letters to a working-class periodical, Bell’s Life in London, after the editor had questioned whether plantation owners ever enslaved their own mixed-race children. The question prompted Wedderburn to share his life story, in which he represented himself as a “product” of plantation slavery and testified to his father’s moral depravity as a “slave-dealer.” Although the letters prompted threatening replies from his half-brother, Andrew Colvile, Wedderburn republished the Bell’s Life letters as a pamphlet that was sold by ultra-radical booksellers in London. Horrors radically tracked Wedderburn’s life from slavery on a Jamaican plantation to his harsh sentence of solitary confinement in an English prison for blasphemous libel, making it an essential supplement to more commonly studied Romantic-era slave narratives, such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.