by starroute » Mon Nov 14, 2005 4:28 pm
There are darker places in the British psyche than the British themselves generally reckon with. In particular, the Jamaican sugar plantations left a mark on Gothic horror that bears testimony to an awareness which has since been consciously forgotten.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/JAMAICAI.htm">www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hu...MAICAI.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Jamaica, as a colony of the British Empire, was a producer of rum, livestock, and most importantly sugar cane. In the seventeenth-century, Jamaica's tropical climate, along with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, made Jamaica into the world's largest sugar producer. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jamaica remained the world's largest sugar exporter. Both the United States and Continental Europe depended heavily on the British Colonial, and therefore the Jamaican, export of sugar. . . .<br><br>Establishing Jamaica's place in the British Empire required "greater infusions of capital and population, particularly through the forced migration of Africans". As this economical equation came to be reality (where "capital" was sugar, and "population" was slaves) the island was covered by vast sugar plantations, owned by wealthy English gentry. . . .<br><br>In the end the slave rebellions, and the abolition of slavery that resulted in a labor shortage, caused the Jamaican sugar industry to collapse.<br><br>As the rebellions were reaching their peak, Charlotte Bronte was growing up and writing her first fictional stories. According to Susan Meyer, there is evidence that Bronte had knowledge of the slave rebellions in the West Indies, and the tortures inflicted on the rebellious slaves. Bronte used these tortures in her fiction, and she also created a black character who lead occasional rebellions against her English masters.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.pilotguides.com/destination_guide/central_america_and_caribbean/jamaica/sugar_plantations.php">www.pilotguides.com/desti...ations.php</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> With the English came a period of sprawling and prosperous sugarcane plantations and piracy. Slaves were imported from Africa to work the plantations of wealthy Englishmen, many of whom lived in England lavishly spending their Jamaican profits. Investment and further settlement hastened as profits began to accrue from cocoa, coffee and sugarcane production. . . .<br><br> New slaves from Africa, mainly Fante, Ashanti, Coromantee Ibo and Yoruba people were continual imprisoned and shipped over from Africa, then put to work on sugar plantations in appalling conditions. The slaves would have to be up at 4 o'clock and work in the fields until sunset. A worker would yield up to 6 tonnes of raw crop a day. Slaves were burnt, strangled and otherwise tortured to terrorise them into obedience.<br><br>Slave revolts punctuated the 18th and 19th centuries, and freedom was finally granted in 1838. A drop in sugar prices eventually led to a depression that resulted in an uprising in 1865. The following year, Jamaica became Crown Colony, and conditions improved considerably. Introduction of bananas crops reduced dependence on sugar.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.open2.net/slavery/sugar_dynasty.html">www.open2.net/slavery/sugar_dynasty.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The Beckford family were Britain’s answer to the Borgias. In little over 100 years they transformed themselves from an ordinary middle class family into the richest and most flamboyant dynasty in Europe. Their money flowed from 22 enormous Jamaican sugar plantations worked by thousands of slaves. They were the most flamboyant example of a new class of rich West Indian plantation owners who became the yuppies of Georgian England.<br><br>Towards the end of the 18th century two cousins became the inheritors of this vast Beckford fortune. They were both called William, but their lives were radically different. William of Fonthill never set foot in Jamaica. He inherited the bulk of the Beckford fortune and he used that money to live a fantasy life. He wrote the first Gothic novel, composed music and was one of Britain’s most celebrated collectors of art and antiquities. But he also became embroiled in the greatest sexual scandal of Georgian England. With the Beckford name ruined he sought to re-enter public life by building the greatest stately home in Britain – Fonthill Abbey. But this huge Gothic folly and the double dealing of the man who was supposed to manage his wealth meant that the Abbey bankrupted the family. Shunned by society it became William’s pleasure dome where he lived out his exile and watched as the sugar industry that had made him so rich began to slowly collapse.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/beckfor1.htm">www.infopt.demon.co.uk/beckfor1.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Few men attained greater celebrity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than William Beckford (1760—1844), the wealthiest man in England. With enormous wealth as his Aladdin's lamp, he decided to make his Arabian dreams come true. By the time he died at the venerable age of 84, he had built the loftiest domestic residence in the world, had assembled a virtual harem of boys, had his own militia to protect his Fonthill estate of 6,000 acres, had written the first Oriental-Gothic horror novel in English literature, and had become the most scandalous connoisseur of hedonism in the modern world. . . .<br><br>Beckford found solace in his exile by writing additional Episodes for his thinly veiled fantasy-autobiography, <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The History of the Caliph Vathek</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, published in 1786. Beckford portrayed himself in his most wicked colours as the villainous Vathek, the caliph who is satiated with sensual pleasures and builds a tower so he can penetrate the forbidden secrets of heaven itself. Prince Gulchenrouz is modelled upon Courtenay, "the most delicate and lovely creature in the world" who occasionally puts on the dresses of Princess Nouronihar (modelled upon Courtenay's aunt Lady Loughborough). Princess Carathis, based upon Beckford's mother, is a witch who is always mixing the powder of Egyptian mummies with frogs' warts, and running up and down the palace casting evil spells, much as she did in real life. Vathek becomes insanely jealous and murders both Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz, but Gulchenrouz ascends straight to heaven and lives in a perpetual childhood surrounded by a bevy of beautiful boy-houris. Vathek sacrifices fifty lovely lads, who "stripped and presented to the admiration of the spectators the suppleness and grace of their delicate limbs. . . . At intervals they nimbly started from each other for the sake of being caught again and mutually imparting a thousand caresses." They are thrown over a cliff one by one, but are rescued by a magic genie and taken to join Gulchenrouz in his merry sports. Vathek finally ends up in hell, "wandering in an eternity of anguish" for his venture into eighteenth century sadomasochism.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://pluto.scs.ryerson.ca/~monica/lewis.htm">pluto.scs.ryerson.ca/~monica/lewis.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Matthew Lewis wrote his best-known work, <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Monk,</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> over a period of ten weeks at the age of 19. When first published there was public outcry against the violence and sexual content of the book, and in particular its blasphemy and covert homosexuality. The Marquis de Sade had high praise for it, calling it <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>far superior in every respect to the strange flights of Mrs. Radcliffe's brilliant imagination.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> He may have recognized in it traces of his <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Justine,</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> which Lewis obtained in Paris in 1792. . . .<br><br>When Lewis was elected to Parliament in 1796, it was to represent the seat of Hindon, vacated by William Beckford, author of <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Vathek.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> Beckford, although unprosecuted, was unable to take the seat because of outrage following the exposure of his liaison with Lord Courtenay. It is ironic that Lewis, whose homosexuality was hardly a secret, was accepted in his place. In fact, his association with deviance contributed to his celebrity. . . .<br><br>Lewis had a sugar plantation in Jamaica, the subject of his book <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Journal of a West Indian Proprietor.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> The year after visiting Byron he returned to Jamaica where he contracted yellow fever. Lewis died on the passage home and was buried at sea. The chain weights slipped off his coffin which bobbed back to the surface; when last seen, he was drifting back to Jamaica. In spite of his reservations about <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Monk</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> and Lewis' dinner parties full of young ensigns and mirrored bookcases, Byron wrote <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>I would give many a Sugar Cane, Monk Lewis were alive again.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=starroute>starroute</A> at: 11/14/05 1:36 pm<br></i>
