International Life Writing

Memory and Identity in Global Context

Paul Longley Arthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317967156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Representing the best of international life writing scholarship, this collection reveals extraordinary stories of remarkable lives. These wide-ranging accounts span the Americas, Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific over a period of more than two centuries. Showing fascinating connections between people, places and historical eras, they unfold against the backdrop of events and social movements of global significance that have influenced the world in which we live today. Many of the authors document and celebrate lives that have been lost, hidden or neglected. They are reconstituted from the archives, restored through testimony and reimagined through art. The effects of colonialism, war and conflict on individual lives can be seen throughout the book alongside themes of transnational connection, displacement and exile, migration of individuals, families and peoples, and recovery and recuperation through memory and writing, creativity and performance.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Life Writing.

Tense and Tender Ties: Reflections on Lives Recovered from the Intimate Frontier of Empire and Slavery

Cassandra Pybus

This essay is an exploration of the social and cultural space on the frontier of empire, where sexual and affective transgressions of the taxonomies of race and power were enacted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It begins with research into the life of a mixed race colonist in early Australia, whose story carried me unexpectedly, and in a circuitous way, into the improbable world of Doll Thomas, a free woman of colour in the eighteenth-century colony of Demerara. Not only does the history of this remarkable woman and her daughters open a little known aspect of slavery and emancipation, it also illuminates the submerged social history at the heart of one of England’s most famous novels, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

For over two decades I have been fascinated by the life of Gilbert Robertson, the mercurial editor of the True Colonist newspaper in the Australian colony of Van Diemen’s Land (later known as Tasmania). I have always seen Robertson as a kind of antipodean Heathcliff, an embittered outsider, who provides a richly layered subject for a study of colonial race relations. Though always referred to as a gentleman in public, in private he was reviled as a mulatto. In private the wife of the governor, Sir John Franklin, described Robertson as ‘a half-caste of the West Indies … a perfect miscreant equally devoid of principle and feeling, of great corporeal size and strength and of the most brutal countenance’.¹ As it happens, my fascination with Robertson has led me to recover a series of different life stories, and taken me deeper into the territory of Emily Bronte and her sister Charlotte. These stories allow me to explore that social and cultural space of Ann Stoler’s ‘tense and tender ties’ on the frontier of empire, where sexual and affective transgressions of the taxonomies of race and power were enacted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Stoler 829).

Gilbert Robertson, Planter of Demerara

My original subject arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1824 to take up a large land grant. Gilbert Robertson was raised and educated within an illustrious family in Scotland, but he claimed to be born in Trinidad on 10 November, 1794. He was very specific about the date, which suggests that the birth had been recorded in some way. I have not been able to find any documentary evidence of his birth, nor have I been able to determine who his mother was. I assume his mother was an African slave whose records cannot be located in the archives. Records of his father, however, can be located in the archives: according to the obituary from the Edinburgh newspapers, Gilbert Robertson Senior was a planter in Demerara. The National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh helped me to identify him as the son of Reverend Harry Robertson, who was the younger son of the chief of the Clan Robertson of Kindeace. Harry Robertson had two brothers—John and George—both merchants in the West Indies, and a sister who married the Reverend George Rainey. I found some information about Gilbert Robertson’s merchant uncles in the Sandbach and Timme Papers, held at the Liverpool archives: John Robertson was a merchant in Tobago, while George Robertson had a trading company called Robertson Parker and Sandbach, first in Grenada, and then in Demerara. George Robertson’s two business partners both married into Gilbert Robertson’s family: Samuel Sandbach married Gilbert’s sister Ann Robertson, and Charles Parker married Gilbert’s cousin Elizabeth Rainey.

The Prentis Papers at the University of Virginia told me that a Gilbert Robertson was living in the Spanish colony of Trinidad in 1794, where he was a correspondent to Robert Prentis in Williamsburg. I was disappointed to find that this man was over 50 at the time and the cousin of Harry Robertson, so he could not be my Gilbert. However, in November 1796, and again in 1787, this man writes about a Gilbert Robertson at the customs house, which I interpreted to mean there was a second Gilbert Robertson living in Trinidad. I knew my Gilbert had been working for his uncles since 1794 and that they were trading in Trinidad by 1797, so I presumed that they employed their young nephew, Gilbert, as their agent. The letters of Charles Parker, also held in Liverpool, established that by 1799 Gilbert Robertson was living in Demerara, acting as an agent for his uncle, George Robertson, as well as managing a plantation for Charles Parker.

Gilbert Robertson’s mulatto son, also named Gilbert Robertson, must have been born before he left Trinidad. The child was about five years old when his father sent him to live with his own father, Harry Robertson, in Scotland. In doing this he was following the Scottish tradition in the West Indies of those who had children by enslaved women. Both his uncles sent their children home to Britain. The Liverpool archives show that George Robertson had a son (referred to in Parker’s letters as ‘Black George’) who was educated in London; and the journal of an anonymous Glasgow merchant held in the National Archives of Scotland has a repeated listing for the payments of John Robertson for his two mulatto sons, Charles and Daniel Robertson, to be privately educated in Glasgow. Charles Parker also appears to have sired mulatto sons whom he had sent home to Scotland. In 1791 Charles Parker asks his father: ‘How have you settled about my boys, Charles & James?’² I believe that Gilbert Robertson sent his own son Gilbert Junior home with Charles Parker when Parker traveled to Scotland to marry Gilbert’s cousin Elizabeth Rainey in 1799.

Charles Parker’s letters to his wife are full of affectionate regard for her cousin Gilbert Robertson, until 1810 when they show a marked change. In July he writes:

I am sorry to say that accounts of Gilbert Robertson (from him we have heard nothing) are far from flattering, he is over head in debt, I see nothing for it but compulsive measures to get what can be got out of his hands, the sooner this course is begun to be acted on perhaps the better.

A clue as to what this was about can be found in his preceding discussion about her brother Gilbert Rainey, also in Demerara, who was made to promise Parker that during his stay in Demerara he must ‘abstain from any connexion with the women there particularly never to cohabit with or admit any such to his confidence.’ In a letter written from Glasgow on 11 August 1810, Parker dropped a bombshell into my research: ‘Who do you think is in Glasgow’, he wrote teasingly to his wife, ‘but Gilbert Robertson’s Mother-in-Law Doll Thomas with about 19 of her children & grandchildren come home for education’.³

This was a shock. I had no clue that Gilbert Robertson had married. I had not thought there were wealthy white women living in Demerara. So I searched through the Demerara Gazette for the years 1803 to 1818 and found various references to a Dorothy Thomas, who was undoubtedly a rich woman. The Gazette carried advertisements for her runaway slaves, and sometimes it printed a notice that she was temporarily leaving the colony, usually accompanied by servants. Who was she? Why had her name not appeared in other records? I found the answer in the ‘List of Free-Coloured Persons who have Paid their Colonial Tax levied on Slaves’ for 1808.⁴ It transpired that Doll Thomas, owner of substantial land property and eighteen slaves in 1808, was a free black woman. This I was able to confirm through Google Books where I located references in an obscure text: Matthew Henry Barker’s The Victory; or, The Ward Room Mess, published in 1844, which confirmed that this freed slave had risen, remarkably, to a position of great wealth:

Every servant I had was a slave, but not mine, as I hired them from their proprietors, chiefly from the well-known Doll Thomas, a negress, who had formerly been a slave herself in Montserrat, but having a liaison with her master, she bore him two daughters (as fine girls as ever), and she was not only emancipated, but well provided for, and her wealth increasing, she was at this time the richest person in the colony. (191)

It was at this point that my biographical research veered in a completely different direction. My search for Gilbert Robertson had led me, by chance, into the world of one of the most extraordinary colonial women of her time.

Doll and Her Daughters

Trawling through Internet genealogy sites, I was lucky enough to stumble upon another dedicated researcher who was also looking for Doll Thomas. This man was writing a book about his ancestor, Huntly Gordon, who had been Surgeon General of the British army. His research had found that Huntly Gordon’s mother was a Christina Thomas, born in Grenada and the youngest daughter of Doll Thomas. Moreover, he had located the extensive will of Doll Thomas, which he obligingly sent to me along with the records of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints taken from St. George parish register in Grenada. The will established that Dorothy Thomas was born in Montserrat about 1760 and died in Demerara in 1847. The baptismal records of Grenada included multiple references to a free woman of colour named Dolly Kirwan who later became known as Dorothy Thomas. The surname Kirwan suggested to me that this woman was the daughter of the Montserrat planter, John Kirwan, whose youngest son, Nicholas, had a plantation in Dutch-controlled Demerara during the 1780s. It is my guess that Nicholas took Doll, as well as her mother Betty, to Demerara as his chattels. By 1785 Doll was a free woman in nearby Grenada. At that time she had already given birth to several children, named in the baptismal records as Elizabeth Kirwan, Fanny Owen, and a son with the surname Isles, who died in infancy. Another daughter known as Charlotte Foden was not in the baptismal record.

It was no simple matter to determine the father of these children, as the names have been mis-recorded. A detailed examination of records from Demerara suggests that the most likely candidates for paternity were two white planters: Nicholas Kirwan, who was probably the father of Elizabeth and Charlotte; and John Coesvelt Cells, who was probably the father of Fanny and the boy who died. After 1785 Doll named a John/Joseph Thomas as the father of Ann, born sometime before 1785; Eliza born in 1787; Joseph born in 1789; Harry born in 1790; and Christina born in 1796. Joseph Thomas was a white doctor on Grenada but Doll does not appear to have been his concubine. She was already quite wealthy, with a large number of slaves and her own house in the town, and so did not need to be the dependant of a white man. She was still legally known as Dorothy Kirwan in 1797 when she manumitted one of her slaves, referred to only by the single name Betty, in Grenada. This woman was her own mother, probably given to her as a gift by Kirwan when Doll herself was manumitted some 13 years earlier.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century Joseph Thomas had died, according to the carefully manipulated account given by her youngest daughter, Christina, many years later. Doll then returned to Demerara, where she was at first recorded as Dolly Kirwan, but soon enough she had used her wealth to insist that she be called Mrs. Dorothea Thomas. While the Demerara Gazette accorded her the desired surname, the paper was fairly scrupulous in making sure she was recorded as Miss Thomas. When her daughters were about 15 years old, each one became the concubine of a prominent white man. In Grenada Dolly left behind her daughters Elizabeth and Ann, who were cohabiting with the merchants John Coxall, and John Gloster Garraway, respectively. In Demerara, the daughter baptised as Fanny, but now known as Catherine Cells, had been cohabiting with the Dutch planter D. P. Simon since 1795, while Charlotte was cohabiting with the merchant John Fullarton and Eliza with Gilbert Robertson.

In 1810, just as Charles Parker detailed in his letter, Doll Thomas had come ‘home’ to put them into good schools. According to the Demerara Gazette, Doll Thomas sailed to England with her son Henry and youngest daughter Christina, and several slave servants, as well as her Coxall, Garraway and Fullerton grandchildren. The boys were enrolled in the Dollar Academy outside Glasgow, while Christina and the granddaughters went to a finishing school in London. Christina returned to Demerara in 1815 when she became involved in a liaison with merchant Robert Garraway; in the following year she must have been in Barbados, and given birth to a child, because the records show that their daughter, Ann Garraway, was baptised in Barbados in 1816. Garraway had entered into a kind of marriage with her that could be invalidated if he returned to England before she turned 21. Needless to say he did return to England in 1818 and the following year Christina was back in Demerara, cohabiting with Major John Gordon, a widower. Apparently Gordon also entered into some kind of marriage arrangement with her but in 1821 he was ordered to Scotland with his regiment. Christina followed him a few weeks later, setting up in lodgings in Glasgow at the end of July where she gave birth to their son Huntley in August. By an extraordinary stoke of luck for me, in terms of my research, Christina was at the centre of an important Scottish legal case that set the precedent on what was required to prove a marriage by ‘habit and repute’. Extensive court records of the case, as well as a cache of 18 letters, are held in the Archives of Scotland. These documents make it possible to reconstruct their life in some detail.⁵

In June 1822, Gordon was posted to Ireland with his regiment and at his request Christina subsequently joined him in Dublin for a few months. In 1823 he was denied promotion and, having been put on half pay, decided to sell his commission, but could only obtain the regulation price for it. Money became a problem for Gordon and Christina, and it was revealed that Gordon was heavily dependent on money that Christina received from her mother. The couple returned to Glasgow in the autumn of 1823 and was joined in their lodgings by Doll Thomas and her slave-servant, who stayed for three weeks. At this time Gordon sought to secure a sum of £10,000 as Christina’s dowry, but Doll would agree to give no more than £5,000. Gordon was bitter about this, claiming that she could easily afford it, but did not want her daughter in a legitimate marriage. He continued to live with Christina as man and wife in various lodging-houses in Edinburgh from May 1824 to April 1826. It was observed that he addressed Christina as Mrs. Gordon, and that she met most of the household’s expenses. However, it was also observed that they did not go out together, even to church, and that when John had parties of his male friends to dinner, Christina remained out of sight. Some time in 1826 Gordon became acquainted with a widow with an income of £300 a year (broadly the equivalent of a capital sum of £10,000) and in September he announced that he would be marrying the widow. His letters indicate he did not desire this marriage, but could see no other course of action. His most significant comment came in one of his last letters: ‘It was in your mother’s power about three years ago to make you respectable, but she said she did not care for your getting married, that you were not better than your sisters that were living in a different way’. This looks like an extreme claim for Gordon to make, as it is incongruous to think that this emancipated slave woman would not want her daughters to be respectably married. Yet this was exactly the case. Doll Thomas may have been an illiterate ex-slave, but she was a surprisingly modern woman who wanted no truck with British property laws that could see her fortune pass into the hands of white men. Her will was very explicit that her daughters could inherit on the strict condition that their defacto husbands had no claim on the money and the daughters could not be made responsible for their debts.

Abandoned by Gordon, Christina sought advice from a lawyer who told her that under Scottish law the fact that they had lived together for so long as man and wife may mean she could prove a marriage by ‘habit and repute’. So she took Gordon to the Edinburgh Sheriff Court to prove the legitimacy of their relationship. She failed to make the case, both in the Sheriff’s Court and the higher court of appeal. As part of Christina’s case a cache of letters from John Gordon was presented to the court. Christina’s letters were also presented to the court but these do not survive. Having read her letters, the initial judge formed the view that ‘the picture which they exhibit is one over which most men so situated would rather have been disposed to throw a veil’.

Gordon’s letters make it obvious that he loved Christina, in his selfish way, and he absolutely adored their son. But he couldn’t live without the money he was demanding. He was furious that Doll would not put up the dowry he wanted when she could so easily afford it. ‘I think that a woman who would not jump to give you the money … is less than a brute’, he told Christina, insisting that he would not accept ‘one penny less than the sum I mentioned’. ‘Your mother need not sell a house or a slave till the price is good. She can get money from any merchant to mortgage her slaves’, he cajoled. He pointed out to Christina that when her mother died and she inherited her share of the estate, she would be ‘richer than I ever expect to be in this world’. Gordon was afraid of Doll and hated being in her power: ‘You always tell me about your famous mother’, he writes. ‘Do you really think I am afraid of her? I would soon have her put in prison where she would get her heels cooled’. He insisted that when Doll came to Glasgow he would not see her. For all that, Doll came to live with them in Glasgow for a period of three weeks, during which time Gordon sat at the table with her every night. What a humiliation this must have been.

Christina’s case read like a Jane Austen subplot. I was so captivated by it that it was quite a long time before I asked myself what Doll Thomas was doing in Scotland in 1823. The letters make it clear that she was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Tense and Tender Ties: Reflections on Lives Recovered from the Intimate Frontier of Empire and Slavery
• 2. The Politics of Writing Convict Lives: Academic Research, State Archives and Family History
• 3. The Murderer and His Victim: Tracing a Lost Convict of the Botany Bay Decision
• 4. Narratives of Natural History: Recovering Lost Lineages in Margaret Levyns’ Life-Writing
• 5. The Theology of Materialism: Redeeming the Natural Religion of Robert Chambers and Vestiges
• 6. Fiction and Testimony in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
• 7. Recovering Lives Through Art: Hidden Histories and Commemoration in the Works of Katsushige Nakahashi and Dadang Christanto
• 8. Recovering Ocean Island
• 9. Unearthing the Past: Dwikozy Revisited
• Index