Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Patriarchy and Patrimony
Frederick Douglass was one of the most notable visitors to Irish shores during the nineteenth century. He had left the United States in 1845, following the publication of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, in order to avoid recapture and re-enslavement, and generate support for the antislavery cause in Europe. His travels throughout the then United Kingdom in the two years from 1845 to 1847 had a lasting effect on his social and intellectual status. Alan Rice and Martin Crawford describe him arriving in ‘Britain [and Ireland the] … raw material of a great black figure; [and leaving] … in April 1847 the finished independent man, cut from a whole cloth and able to make his own decisions about the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement’.
Douglass's personal and political transformation found correspondence in the shifting form of his literary work, which became enmeshed in those same strategies and ideologies. In Ireland, his autobiography was re-published by the Dublin Quaker printer, Richard Webb, shortly after Douglass's arrival in September 1845, and went to variant and second Irish editions in 1846. Just as Douglass's personal and professional standing were deeply marked by the experience of being outside the United States, the reprinting of the Narrative in Ireland marks the beginning of a stage in Douglass's literary career that has an impact on contemporary readings of his life and work.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World , pp. 13 - 36Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007