Hope End in spite of the romantic prospects which environ it in spite of the beauty of beholding Nature wrapt in her bridal robe which we have at present IS dull and IS lonely [;] the sun rolls over our heads—no Papa is here to greet us.
This is a fascinating glimpse of how important her father’s charisma is to the creation of this happy home. For every idyll is part fantasy, and Hope End in particular is being built with blood money. For, to an even greater extent than Graham-Clarke’s, Barrett wealth comes from sugar plantations. Ba’s father was born Edward Barrett Moulton at Cinnamon Hill in St James, Jamaica, in May 1785, and spent his first seven years in the elegant eighteenth-century Great House overlooking Montego Bay. It’s a beautiful spot, among aromatic cinnamon trees, that by the 1970s will be seductive enough for country and western star Johnny Cash to move in. The estate that surrounded young Edward, though, was one of several sugar plantations owned by his maternal grandfather Edward Barrett and worked by enslaved people.
Edward’s mother was a Barrett, his father a Moulton, and when he was thirteen and living in England, he and his brother added a second ‘Barrett’ to their names in order to inherit from their maternal grandfather, who by then had neither surviving sons nor other legitimate grandchildren. As it had with the Clarke estate, money wanted to follow the family name. Once again, this required a complex process involving a Royal Warrant. That John Graham-Clarke was on hand to guide the youths through this suggests that he might even have proposed the idea. (Was he already planning a dynastic marriage?) When, later that same year, the teenaged Edward’s grandfather died, he left some 84,000 acres of sugar plantation where around 2,000 people were enslaved: a substantial legacy indeed.
The Barretts seem to believe themselves to be of mixed heritage. Hercie Barrett, Ba’s four times great-grandfather, arrived in Jamaica in 1655, an officer in the army that captured it from Spain. As a reward, in 1663 King Charles II granted him land: a colonist, then, but not yet a slave owner. Subsequent generations, however, changed this, and the intervening century and a half has been plenty long enough for the kinds of consensual and non-consensual relationships across ethnic divides, both acknowledged and otherwise, that produce mixed-heritage populations in long-colonised societies. When she’s nearly forty, Ba will write to her lover that she herself has ‘the blood of a slave’:
I would give ten towns in Norfolk (if I had them) to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave!—Cursed are we from generation to generation!—I seem to hear the ‘Commination service’.
This letter has been much quoted, including by commentators who believe that it displays not anxiety about heritage but right-minded abolitionist guilt. But the (racist) phrasing is clear. ‘Some purer lineage than that of the blood’ addresses ethnicity, not the blood on the family’s hands; and that Commination Service, already almost obsolete in Elizabeth’s lifetime, tries to ward off divine punishment not so much for any particular sin as for the ‘original sin’ of being born.
Internalised racism is a baroque falsehood. Shame is a complex, unreasonable emotion, and shame and anxiety about something understood as one’s very identity is both profoundly unreasonable – no one can help how they’re born – and particularly complex because it concerns what is inescapable. From a twenty-first-century perspective, though, Barrett mixed heritage would be brilliant news. How exciting if the cultural game changer that Elizabeth Barrett Browning will become proves to have broken open not only the male canon but the canon of white writing too.
Which is why it’s important to be careful with the actual recorded facts. Disappointingly, Ba’s closest relatives whose mixed heritage is certain aren’t people she’s actually descended from but are lateral kin: second cousins who are the children of Grandmama’s profligate brother George Goodin Barrett. Three years after Papa and his siblings arrived in Britain, this second, illegitimate set of Edward Barrett’s grandchildren made the same Atlantic crossing. Their mother Elissa Peters was of mixed heritage. She had been enslaved until the death of her late ‘owner’, to whom she was ‘given’ by his father. When George Goodin died she was freed, and sent with her six children by him to John Graham-Clarke, to be settled in Newcastle under the terms of their father’s will, that they ‘not fix their abode in Jamaica but do settle and reside in such countries where those distinctions respecting colour are not maintained’. This optimistic construction of race relations in early nineteenth-century Tyneside all too conveniently tidies the children away from their late father’s property.
The roots of Barrett privilege are in shallow soil. The family are paradoxically placed as beneficiaries of the very racism that causes them such anxiety. The customary behaviour of the Jamaican plantocracy does indeed make mixed heritage somewhere in the branching tree of their ancestors a reasonable hunch, but hunches aren’t history. Nevertheless, if race is at least partly a social construct – not a set of essentialist, eugenical capacities – shouldn’t we count it a kind of victory for nineteenth-century black writing that a woman who with relatively good reason believes herself to be of mixed heritage achieves literary superstardom before 1850?
