In addressing meetings in Britain and Ireland, Douglass was well aware that his audience also included those who would read reports of his speeches in the United States. It was of great importance to him that these transatlantic readers would picture this black man, still legally a slave, cheered and applauded by supporters from all classes of society, welcomed as an equal in public places. He ‘would wish them to know that one, who had broken from the bonds of slavery, was ranging through Great Britain exposing the enormities of the system’. The word ranging here perfectly conveys the kind of limitless and unrestrained freedom he wants to wave before the pro-slavery lobby back home, shaming, even taunting, them with an image of him enjoying rights denied to him in the land of his birth. And if Douglass sarcastically dismissed the insulting language with which that lobby characterised his lecture tour – the New-York Express described him as a ‘glib-tongued scoundrel […] running a muck in greedy-eared Britain against America, its people, its institutions, and even against its peace’ – he must have taken some pleasure from the fact that even his enemies acknowledged his popularity.

It certainly appears that Douglass was always preaching to the converted, even when denouncing the leaders and supporters of the Free Church, who almost never seem to be in the halls in which he speaks. And this image of crowds unanimously fired up by his speeches – ‘all this region is in a ferment’, ‘old Scotland boils like a pot’ – is precisely the one that he wants to convey to American readers.

But there are occasions where he expresses a more generalised frustration that doesn't let his audiences off so easily. ‘When he left America for this country,’ a Manchester paper reported him saying, ‘he expected to find but one opinion about slaveholding and slaveholders in this country among all denominations; but he was disappointed.’ ‘[T]he anti-slavery spirit has scarcely a tangible existence in one town of twenty in all of England,’ he declared in Leeds. And in Glasgow: ‘Not six years ago there were many in this city who did not hesitate to come forward and avow themselves the uncompromising advocates of emancipation, who were called Rev. Doctors of Divinity, and where are they now?