Michael ToussaintBiblio.com
The Hour and the Man true
1841rif. 92161London: Edward Moxon 1841. Fine. Very rare life of Toussaint Louverture by an English abolitionist Edward Moxon London 1841 12.5 x 19 cm Relié First edition RBH records no copy sold since 1980 complete with its appendices at the end of the volume. Half anthracite calf bindings bordered with blind-tooled rolls spine with five false raised bands numerous gilt fillets and rolls forming a border blind-tooled ornament in the compartments burgundy calf title-pieces marbled paper boards marbled paper endpapers and pastedowns all edges marbled unnoticeable repears to joints. The binder omitted to include the imprint page at rear of vol. I and II. Illustrated with a folding colour map of Haiti. Rare copy of this fictionalised biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture who under the pen of the abolitionist Harriet Martineau becomes a ""Shakespearean hero part George Washington part Count of Monte Cristo"" to bring about the end of slavery in the United States. ""Martineau's images and themes would figure in the rhetoric of black and white antislavery writers alike especially Frederick Douglass Harriet Beecher Stowe Ralph Waldo Emerson Lydia Maria Child Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Martineau's presentation of Toussaint made a black man central to the conception of what freed slaves might be capable of accomplishing and it provided a crucial if complicated model for American writers."" Susan Belasco ""I have thought of ""The Hour and the Man"" as the finest historical romance in any language. You would wonder if you knew how often I have read it over and over again even in the last two years."" Florence Nightingale to Jane Martineau quoted in Harriet Martineau Harriet Martineau's Autobiography with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman London 1877 3 p. 476. In previous centuries the black hero had only been embodied in wholly fictional portraits tinged with more than a little exoticism and mostly as secondary characters: the Negro of Surinam in Voltaire's Candide or Juba in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda not to mention Aphra Behn's inimitable Oroonoko. Among abolitionist texts first-hand accounts such as those of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano had in fact preceded the interest of Western writers in narrating black destinies by several decades. The biography in the strict sense a work on the life of a black historical hero would ultimately be the last such genre to emerge: Jekyll's life of Sancho 1782 is the earliest example but it forms the preface to a volume of letters rather than a stand-alone work. Commentators have noted the novelty of this choice of subject in Toussaint L'Ouverture and its clear departure from the slave narrative format. Martineau does not confine herself to oppression alone but instead extends her narrative into a tribute to his struggle for freedom in an adventurous and romantic sense one intended to further the abolitionist cause: ""This tale was written before Martineau had seen slavery for herself although she researched well before writing it. It was widely read and praised in England and sufficiently well known in America for her to be courted by abolitionists and upholders of slavery alike anxious to persuade her of their views when she went to America from 1834 to 1836.In contrast The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance 1841 was written after her American trip. Most unusually for the period it had a black man Toussaint L'Ouverture as hero. Martineau's account of how this ex-slave expelled the French and later the Spanish from what became known as Haiti incorporated both a passionate hatred of slavery and the environ-mentalist educational ideas which she had imbibed from her upbringing. For her L'Ouverture was able to rule intelligently and in an enlightened manner partly because of his good fortune in having been permitted to read and gain access to classical works especially those of Epictetus and Fénélon which taught Edward Moxon hardcover
