This is not a novel point. A litany of largely black historians – from the Victorian era to the present day – have discussed, documented and analysed the black British presence in the 19th century. But the statement that there were black Victorians helping to build Great Britain hasn’t properly landed in Victorian studies.

This is a strange state of affairs. Since at least the first century AD, Britain’s population included people from north Africa. There were people of African descent in the courts and societies of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as brilliantly documented by Onyeka Nubia and Miranda Kaufmann. As the English (and, later, British) colonised lands and enslaved fellow human beings, more people of African descent came to Britain.

• Read more | The missing Tudors: black people in 16th-century England

Questions of ethnicity

By the 18th century, there were thousands of people of African descent living and working in Britain (as well as Asians and Native Americans). It has been estimated that, by the late 18th century, there were 10,000–20,000 black people living in England. They married and had children, who did the same, assimilating into British society.

But the first national census in 1801 was mute on questions of ethnicity (in fact, ethnicity wasn’t mentioned in the census until 1991). What’s more, in undertaking
genealogical research, you soon learn that the location in which someone was born doesn’t necessarily indicate ethnicity. There’s also the fact that women mostly altered their names upon marriage, the enslaved were cruelly given the names of their captors, and contemporary descriptions such as “dark” could be applied to white as well as black Victorians.

So, archival obfuscation might partly account for the relative historiographical oversight. Ignorance, disinterest, neglect and racism are other explanations as well. Black Victorian assimilation is another. Yet local studies have revealed that black people were relatively common in densely populated areas such as London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Kent, and in our book we explore individuals active across British society – everyone from William Cuffay, the Chartist leader who campaigned for political rights for the working classes, to Fanny Eaton, the domestic worker and Pre-Raphaelite muse.

We mined an array of archives to prove the point: in Haringey, London, there are photographs of the black footballer Walter Tull , who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, and the nurses Sister Freda  – who worked at Tottenham Hospital – and Asarto Ward . At Waltham Forest, there are stories of Madagascan Christian refugees; at the Museum of Croydon, materials on the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; at the Lambeth Palace Library, the letters of the black bishop Samuel Crowther. The Black Cultural Archives in London is also an invaluable resource.

They were not just onlookers. They were active participants who moulded the Victorian landscape

The digitisation of archives has helped resurrect silenced voices. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’ made him world-famous in 1898, gave interviews to The Musical Times where he forcibly asserted: “It has been stated again and again that I was born in the West Indies. This is not the case. I was born in London.”

The National Archives have made accessible the state trial reports of William Cuffay who, when charged in 1848 with intending to “levy war against the queen”, defiantly addressed the Old Bailey: “I know my cause is good, and I have a self-approving conscience that will bear me up against anything, and that would bear me up even to the scaffold; therefore I think I can endure any punishment proudly. I feel no disgrace at being called a felon.” Cuffay, born and raised in Kent, was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania for life.

Racism for the masses

Scratch the surface of the era, then, and black Victorians become visible and perceptively active in areas ranging from politics to art, sports to entertainment, theology to law and the menial and skilled trades.

This was at a time when the notion of “race” was assuming even greater importance. In scientific circles, the advancing theory of polygenism stated that humanity was divided into separate groups with inherited, biological differences (and white was deemed superior to black). Meanwhile, an expanding empire brutally subjugated people across the globe, and despite the abolition of slavery within that empire, Britain still relied on the cotton picked by the enslaved. Back home, the entertainment industry was taking racism to the masses, notably in the form of “human zoos” and blackface minstrelsy. (It was partly due to this racist form of entertainment that the acclaimed black actor Ira Aldridge was vilified for “defiling” Shakespeare’s Othello in the 19th century.)

It was in this context that black Victorians both triumphed and struggled across the social scale. Social investigator Henry Mayhew recorded a number of black Victorians living on the margins. One such man, who was labelled a “Negro Beggar”, had travelled from America to Britain having heard that in Britain “whites did not look down on them [black people] and ill-treat them, as they do in New York”. Yet the “Negro Beggar” (Mayhew never gives us his name) struggled to find work and when he tried to get employment on English ships, “they won’t have me”, he told Mayhew.

Denied a lowly job on the ships, the “Negro Beggar” was also denied access to public establishments. (“At some places they don’t care to take a man of colour in,” he said). He was also subject to racist taunts: “The butchers call me Othello, and ask me why I killed my wife.”

Mayhew labelled another black Victorian, Edward Albert, “The negro crossing-sweeper, who had lost both his legs”. Albert told Mayhew: “I was a little boy when the slaves in Jamaica got their freedom.” Aged nine, Albert joined the Royal Navy as a cabin boy, before working his way up to head cook. It was on one voyage that he suffered frostbite to his legs: “After my limbs became affected, the master of the vessel, and mate, took me to the ship’s oven, in order… to cure me; my feet … were put into the oven; in consequence of the treatment, my feet burst through the intense swelling, and mortification ensued…”

Albert was subsequently abandoned by the vessel, but he was determined to seek justice, telling Mayhew: “I will never leave England or Scotland until I get my rights.” He wrote a memoir, Brief Sketch of the Life of Edward Albert or the Dead Man Come to Life Again, which outlined his brutal treatment and asserted his hitherto denied rights. What ultimately happened to Albert, we do not know.

Elsewhere, another black Victorian was telling his story from the social margins, deep inside a Victorian mental asylum. Joseph Peters (c1843–83), a seaman born in present-day Liberia, wrote to the medical superintendent: “I should like you to release me that I may go to my own people.” Peters passionately retold his biography, which included the death of his father when he was a child, the poverty he and his mother experienced, and his life as a seaman traversing the globe: “Hoping you will give me my liberty,” he concluded in his letter. Peters never did get his freedom: he died six years later and was buried in the asylum cemetery in 1883.

Pablo Fanque was born into a workhouse in Norwich but escaped by joining the circus. In 1841, after perfecting the art of acrobatics and equestrianism, he started his own group, winning praise for his respectable circus and posthumously finding immortalisation in the Beatles song, ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ (In which, inspired by an 1843 poster promoting one of Fanque’s circuses, John Lennon sings: “The Hendersons will all be there; Late of Pablo Fanque’s fair, what a scene.”)

---

On the podcast | Hannah-Rose Murray describes how African American abolitionists toured Britain in the 19th century: