Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Transatlantic stories and Transatlantic readers
- PART I “POOR MAN'S COUNTRY”
- PART II THE SERVANT'S TALE
- 5 The bonds of servitude
- 6 Bond and free: contemporary readings of Gronniosaw's Life
- 7 Samson Occom's itinerancies
- PART III PRINTSCAPES
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
5 - The bonds of servitude
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Transatlantic stories and Transatlantic readers
- PART I “POOR MAN'S COUNTRY”
- PART II THE SERVANT'S TALE
- 5 The bonds of servitude
- 6 Bond and free: contemporary readings of Gronniosaw's Life
- 7 Samson Occom's itinerancies
- PART III PRINTSCAPES
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
During the colonial period, most white labor in British America was bound and unfree. There was more than one way of pressing white Britons into involuntary servitude, whether in Britain or America, and the transatlantic stories examined in this chapter addressed some of them. They offer what is now a less familiar perspective on the lives of white people by showing why the word servitude, understood as “a state of degrading or burdensome subjection resembling slavery” was applied to “the condition of being a servant, especially in domestic service,” to indentures, and to “compulsory labor as a punishment for criminals” as well as to chattel slavery (OED). The hardships of servants on the plantations became notorious, and colonists feared that reports of them would keep white servants away. But the stories below represented cruelty and domestic violence as a transatlantic problem, and were didactic interventions which sought to correct and alter the domestic evils they described. They therefore end on upbeat notes.
HOME ON THE PLANTATION: MR ANDERSON
Edward Kimber's History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Anderson (1754), which is mostly set in America, was characterized by its earliest twentieth-century critic as “a narrative of considerable interest as a piece of Americana.” More recently, Melissa Homestead has cogently argued that it belongs to the prehistory of the early American novel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810Migrant Fictions, pp. 115 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011