Women and Abolitionism: Hannah More's and Ann Yearsley's Poetry of Freedom

This article analyses Hannah More's and Ann Yearsley's antislavery poems enphaising the ways in which both poets challenged the authority and integrity of parliement, and adumbrated a demystification of the money nexus that underpinned slavery. Crisafulli's analysis highlights the ways in which 'British sons of murder', from traders to the ship's 'tars' in thier different roles, are seen to be engaged in a brutal and 'savage' activity. The author argues through careful close readings that the language of "Slavery: A Poem" and "The Sorrows of Yamba" is never simply complicit with colonialist discourse as some critics have suggested, but construct an uncompromising counter-discourse that is not only, and powerfully, humanitarian but also stringently political. Linking Yearsley's invitation that slave traders bring their own daughters to this market (together with their wives, aged mothers and ruddy boys) to Swift's "A Modest Proposal", these poets, Crisafulli suggests, used their rhetorical skills on behalf of the slave's humanity and against the greed of the commercial nature to critique and to refeminise Britannia. If this meant contributing to a formulation of women and domesticity as key to the nation as family, at this moment and on this issue, the challenge was radical on several fronts.