Rare. No copy in the British Library. Copac records a single copy at Bodley. OCLC records copies at Stanford and Florida State only in the USA.
A collection of miscellaneous literary works (“written mostly at school”), self-published by a future lawyer, colonial administrator, and slave-owner - and containing his reflections on slavery, emancipation, and empire.
This text is a miscellaneous collection of short literary works, including plays, poems and epitaphs. Much of the text is taken up with a Roman tragedy which positions itself as a sequel to the well-known rape of Lucretia. The other works cover a wide range of themes, including bucolic pastoralism - as in the poetic “Boast of Avon” - and colonial violence - as in the verses “Occasioned by the indiscriminate Massacres at St Domingo”. Throughout the text, the author provides his own editorial footnotes, as well as brief and fantastically self-confident discussions on contemporary politics and moral rectitude.
Published anonymously but attributed to the 19-year old, Fortunatus William Lilley Dwarris (1786-1860). Dwarris was a lawyer, civil servant and writer (see ODNB). At the time of publication, Dwarris was either eighteen or nineteen, and had completed his first year at University College, Oxford. As the title page notes, Dwarris published the text himself. His choice of a Warwick-based publisher might appear unusual for one so well-connected, but his maternal family had extensive roots in Warwickshire, and he had finished his studies at Rugby School in 1804. As the preface notes, this work was “the produce of a few leisure hours, written mostly at school, and at such intervals as school duty would allow” (p. iv).
The collection received two uncompromising reviews in both the Critical and Monthly Reviews for 1806. The Critical Review noted that Dwarris had “done ill, as all writers do who publish their youthful lucubrations, in giving to the world a performance upon the whole so crude and imperfect” (Critical Review, Series. 3, Vol. 6, pp. 100-101). The Monthly Review was generally less caustic, and reprinted several excerpts from the Lucretian tragedy, stating “We cannot conscientiously select any passage for approbation from the tragedy of Brutus” (Monthly Review, Vol. 50, pp. 98-99).
Nonetheless, this collection is particularly interesting for the light that it might shed on Dwarris’ subsequent political and colonial career. As a civil servant, Dwarris was a prominent figure in the debates around colonial slavery and emancipation in the early nineteenth century. In 1822, he was appointed to serve on the government commission reviewing the state of the law in the West Indian colonies. After the other commissioner died, Dwarris was the sole signatory for the three reports published from 1825-1826 - reports which “perceptively discuss[ed] and illustrate[d] the institutionalised racism of these laws” (Fortunatus Dwarris, Civil and Criminal Justice in the West Indies (2010 - Cambridge Library Collection), p. i). Dwarris advocated greater legal protection for West Indian slaves, while also contending that they were generally well-treated by their colonial owners (ODNB).
These reports were naturally of great interest in the ongoing debates around the future of slavery in the British Empire, but in the eyes of many, they were complicated by Dwarris’ ownership of a substantial plantation estate in Jamaica, which he had inherited from his father (and which he claimed he had never visited). Consequently, Dwarris’ verses “Occasioned by the indiscriminate massacre at St Domingo”, and the editorial footnote which he appended, might offer an interesting insight into the early gestation of these views, and consequently to the wider history of the final days of slavery in the West Indies. As the 18/19-year-old undergraduate opined, “The friends of genuine humanity, instead of indulging in visionary schemes to effect the future emancipation of the Blacks (for the words are here synonimous) would do well to co-operate in any plan to alleviate their distress, and to ameliorate their condition” (p. 101).
