Unorthodoxly, I enter this section under the heading of an Interlude. The word may be intended in the particular sense, offered by the Oxford English Dictionary definition, of ‘an interval in the course of some action or event; an intervening time or space of a different character or sort’. Both meanings do their metaphorical job appropriately, considering that what follows does imply an interval in the course of my action, i.e., in the exercise of text-focused criticism, to offer a critical exercise in the interpretation of a text that is not immediately out there, in an attempt to conceive a working hypothesis regarding how a crucial event in history – or truth event, in Ian Baucom's challenging interpretation1 – may impact on individual life experience and, consequently, writing. On the other hand, the second definition, too, aptly encapsulates the quality of distinction – which is temporal rather than spatial, in this case – underlying the segment of the writer's life and career that is under consideration here.

The constituent parts of this section, a Prologue and a Hypothesis, I believe, will allow for an admissible construal of the complex ethical and ideological – no less than personal and creative – itinerary underlying what I suggest is a turning point in Edward Rushton's writing career. In the process, as will be made clear, his 1787 collection of West Indian Eclogues plays a major role, as the indication and effect of a major personal and intellectual caesura: in this sense, I consider this section less a chapter proper than a foundational premise to my reading of Rushton's anti-slavery poetry in general, and West Indian Eclogues in particular.

Prologue

‘An Irregular Ode’, undersigned ‘Liverpool. Edward Rushton’, which appeared on the columns of the Lloyd's Evening Post for 19 March 1781, is apparently one of the poet's earliest published pieces of writing. Edward Rushton was then a twenty-four-year-old, visually impaired youth, and, as the two main biographical sources consistently report, had been living for some years on the brink of poverty, finding lodgings at an old aunt's and paying a boy a tiny sum for reading to him in the evenings.