First edition of the only known British antislavery gift book. This copy with a four-line inscription in Turkish which translates roughly as: “This noble image belongs especially to the lady of honour, known by her distinguished name, a refined and accomplished woman of letters. Hadi presents [or perhaps dedicates] this book with her affections.”
The editor, Mary Anne Rawson (née Read) (1801-1887), was a devout Congregationalist and staunch advocate for total abolition who spent much of her life at Wincobank Hall on the outskirts of Sheffield. She was raised in an evangelical household, and over the decades the house played host to such guests as William Wilberforce, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass.
Rawson and her mother were “founding members of the Sheffield Female Anti-slavery Society. Their activities included fundraising for the national campaign, writing and distributing pamphlets and tracts, and house-to-house visiting in support of the campaign for abstention from slave-grown produce. The Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society was the first to take up the Leicester abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick’s call in Immediate not Gradual Abolition (1824). The women asserted the importance of women’s actions in this field and countered arguments that they were overstepping their sphere. ‘We ought to obey God rather than man’, they wrote in the 1827 report” (ODNB).
Rawson’s anti-slavery activities saw her take on this ambitious editorial project, soliciting contributions from prominent supporters of the abolitionist cause. Between 1826 and 1834 she received over one hundred and fifty letters to this end, the originals of which are held in two scrapbooks at the John Rylands Library. She alludes to external factors delaying the publication of this book in her preface (perhaps including her marriage, the birth of her daughter, and the death of her husband, all of which took place between 1828 and 1829), meaning that the book was in fact published after the passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, and was “advertised in the contemporary press as a suitable present for Emancipation Day on 1st August [1834], when the … Act came into force” (Bird). The engraved title-pageby H. Corbould reinforces this, with a sentimental vignette scene of a Black family weeping before a monument to Wilberforce, their chains broken on the ground beside them, and an emancipation scroll bearing the names of Clarkson, Suffield and Buxton.
Rather than a straightforward celebration of abolition as a fait accompli however, the preface also addresses the continued hardships endured by those in the apprenticeship system, the plight of people enslaved in the Americas, and clearly points the finger back at British consumers: “There is too much reason to believe, that the extensive trade still carried on in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies, is sustained by British capital, and screened by British ingenuity. In Cuba and the Brazils, and in some of the French colonies, the market for human cattle is daily supplied from the coast of Africa; while the mines of Chili and Peru are peopled with miserable, though guiltless, victims, whose blood is drained by a system of unparalleled horror, to fill the pockets of English shareholders!” (viii).
Whilst the gift book was to become a much more common tool of the abolitionist movement in the United States, this is the only recorded example known to have been produced in Britain (Bird). The way in which Rawson gathered the contributions through her own correspondence network offers a rich insight into the reach of her activist work, and the distinctly feminised format of the book (with its gilt edges, decorative binding, engraved title-page) belies the more serious call to arms in its pages. Unlike pamphlets, which were cheaply and quickly produced, easy to distribute and relatively ephemeral, the gift book was designed to be gifted, cherished and returned to time and again. It was advertised by the publisher at a price of 12 shillings, 36 times the 4d cost of a copy of Elizabeth Heyrick’s hugely influential 1824 pamphlet Immediate not Gradual Abolition (see Baldwin’s London Weekly Journal, 7 August 1824, p.1).
When considering this idea of gifting, it becomes all the more interesting to note the inscription in Ottoman Turkish. The idea that the networks of exchange developed around a women’s antislavery society in England could reach a female readership in the Ottoman Empire or its diaspora only further demonstrates the power and value of such publishing efforts.
Bird, Eleanor, “A Woman of Letters: Mary Anne Rawson’s Letter Collection and her Compilation of the Anti-Slavery Gift Book The Bow in the Cloud, 1826-1834.” in Nineteenth Century Gender Studies. Issue 17.2; Summer 2021.
