Vanessa D. Dickerson. Dark Victorians. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-252-03256-1. Price: US$35.00

Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Dark Victorians presents an illuminating snapshot of the transatlantic exchange, both literal and discursive, between English Victorians and African Americans before, during, and after the American Civil War. This concise study seeks to create a picture of this relationship rather than present an exhaustive study of the literature, which is not to suggest that Dickerson does not do her homework. In the first two chapters in particular, where first we get the perspective of British Victorians visiting the United States and of African Americans traveling to England, Dickerson brings a wide range of voices into the discussion. She then chooses representative figures Thomas Carlyle and W. E. B. Du Bois to explore the discourses more deeply in the third and fourth chapters respectively. She finishes the study with a compelling survey of contemporary writers’ reflections on the legacy of Victorian England on both sides of the Atlantic. Arguing that Thomas Carlyle was something more sinister than a curmudgeonly traditionalist in his writings on individuals of African ancestry is to be expected. More exciting is Dickerson’s argument in Dark Victorians that, using Paul Gilroy’s phrase, Victorian England served as “a parental culture for black Americans” (10). Dickerson describes Dark Victorians as a study of “the discursive and cultural cadences, kinships, and correspondences” (10) between the two cultures. The study’s major premise is However, even more valid is Dickerson’s observation that her study examines “black America’s romance with Victorian Britain” (4), for it is there that the energy of the book resides. The title is a bit misleading—Dickerson’s “dark Victorians” describes those Englishmen, such as Thomas Carlyle, who fed the intensifying culture of racism which developed after the emancipation of slaves in British colonies such as Jamaica. She terms “black Victorians” those African American individuals, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who embraced the culture and mores of Victorian England. Building on the work of R. J. M. Blackett, Gail Bederman, and many others, Dickerson’s study explores the interdependent relationship between nineteenth-century African Americans and white Britons. Dickerson focuses on literal crossings, defining the latter to include forms of journey, encounter, change, “violence and extermination” as well as “writing” (4) which brought these two cultures into contact with one another. The first chapter deals with British travel to the United States and publications that resulted from the experience, setting the context for discussion of British encounters with African American slaves and American blackness more broadly. Rehearsing much work that has already been done, Dickerson surveys the major travel works of British men and women who visited America. Compelled by the great American democratic experiment in contrast to the use of African slave labor, English Victorians flocked to American shores. The study points out the ambivalence of those, like Charles Dickens, who criticized the brutality of slavery while, at the same time, asserting violent and derogatory ideas about Africans in general. At times, Dickerson’s examination of the surrounding contexts feels a bit simplified, as when she argues that “In light of the particular way British relations to Africans unfolded economically, geographically, literarily, and demographically, it was easier for Britain to emancipate its blacks” (20). The extensive work by abolitionists in the years between the Somersett case in 1772 and the emancipation of British slaves on English soil hardly speaks to an easy process. In addition, the vehement turn in public opinion away from abolition and towards a virulent scientific racism complicates, to say the least, the vision of a Britain eager to embrace African equality. The chapter ends with a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” …