SOURCE: Richardson, Alan. “Darkness Visible: Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry, 1770-1810.” Wordsworth Circle 27, no. 2 (spring 1996): 67-72.

In the following excerpt, Richardson argues that even though poetry by abolitionists writers Robert Southey, Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, and Anne Yearsley shows that British Romanticism contributed to the construction of racial identity, their racial representations varied considerably.

My purpose here is not to engage in the debate on “race” and culture, but rather to keep the contours of that debate in view while I examine the representation of race in the critical years, 1770-1810—from just before the 1772 Somerset decision to just after the passing of the 1806 Slave Trade bill—in the abolitionist poetry of four writers associated with Bristol: Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, Anne Yearsley, and Robert Southey. The contemporary revaluation of race as a conceptual category stresses that race has always been an ideological construct, “contradictory, disruptive...