bittersweet empire: latin american commodities in...
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BITTERSWEET EMPIRE: LATIN AMERICAN COMMODITIES IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
By
JACQUELINE K. AMORIM
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2015
© 2015 Jacqueline K. Amorim
To my mom, my sister, my brother, and my partner
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation would never have come into being without the unflagging support of my
advisor, Pamela Gilbert. Pamela is a model teacher, scholar, and administrator, and her guidance
and feedback was invaluable throughout the dissertation process. I will be forever grateful for all
the many chats we had over tea: Pamela always generously offered the advice of a mentor and
friend. I could not have asked for a better advisor.
I would also like to thank my committee members, Tace Hedrick, Susan Hegeman, and
Efrain Barradas, for their support throughout the process and for challenging me as a scholar. In
many ways this project grew out of a paper I wrote for a course I took with Tace—her
enthusiasm for my project throughout the years always encouraged me to continue working, even
when the project hit a stumbling block. I was lucky to have a committee made up of brilliant
scholars who were always available to help and generous with their advice.
I would also like to thank my editors: my dissertation group helped so much throughout
the years with concrete, detailed, and varied, feedback that always made it easy to identify the
next step in my project. I also thank Carolyn Williams for helping me to understand the
implications of my project and to Wayne Losano for helping me to revise the final product.
Friends and family have watched the progress of this dissertation from near and far. I
would like to thank my mom and sister for always lending a sympathetic ear and for encouraging
me to continue my studies. Their “get it done” attitude served to motivate me more than once. I
would also like to thank my brother, Alex: his passion for literature and for learning always
served to remind why I had chosen graduate school. I thank my stepfather, Jorge, stepsister,
Katia, and cousin, Veronica, for their kind words throughout the years. I also thank Gabriel
Mayora, Timothy Robinson and Sarah Lennox, whose camaraderie made graduate school a
wonderful experience.
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My last words will go to my husband, Matthew, who has supported me the most.
Matthew never doubted the project would get done. Without Matt’s love, there would be no one
else to thank.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................... 4
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................. 7
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. 9
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 11
2 UP IN SMOKE: TOBACCO, EXOTIC WOMEN AND NINETEENTH CENTURY
CULTURE ...................................................................................................................... 24
The Mulata on Cuban Tobacco Lithographs (1840s and 1850s) .................................... 28 French Writer Mérimée’s Carmen (1845) ...................................................................... 38
English Writer Ouida’s Cigarette (1867) ........................................................................ 47
3 SWEET DOMESTICITY: THE SYMBOLICS OF (CUBAN) SUGAR IN
MIDCENTURY ENGLISH TEXTS .............................................................................. 61
The Tradition of Sugar and Slavery in the Domestic Space ........................................... 63 An Interlude: The Sweet Relationship between England and Cuba ............................... 74
Midcentury Sugar in the Home: Purify Rather Than Expel ........................................... 81
4 BITTERSWEET EMPIRE: MID-VICTORIAN CHOCOLATE AND THE ANXIETY
OF FOREIGN ADULTERANTS ................................................................................. 109
Previous Scholarship on Chocolate .............................................................................. 111
Adulterations Detected ................................................................................................. 121 Strange Origins ............................................................................................................. 127
Purity: Chocolate, Domesticity, and Empire ................................................................ 145
5 BRAZILIAN COFFEE: (NOT) MAKING MEANING WITH THE
EXTRACOLONIAL ..................................................................................................... 163
Extracolonial Brazil and the British Empire ................................................................. 165
Coffee’s Trade Trajectory ............................................................................................. 170 Children’s Literature, Coffee, and Brazil ..................................................................... 179
6 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................. 202
REFERENCES .................................................................................................................... 207
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................................................... 217
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure page
2-1 “Descuidos del tocador.” [“Carelessness of the Player”.] From the series “Vida y
Muerte de la Mulata.” ............................................................................................... 57
2-2 “La conducen al hospital.” [“They Take Her to the Hospital.”] From the series “La
Vida de la Mulata.” ................................................................................................... 58
2-3 “Las consecuencias.” [“The Consequences.”] From the series “Vida y Muerte de la
Mulata.” ..................................................................................................................... 58
2-4 “El palomo y la gabilana.” [The Male Dove and the Female Hawk.”] From the
series “Historia de la Mulata.” .................................................................................. 59
2-5 “Si me amas seras feliz.” [If You Loved Me, You Would Be Happy.”] From the
series “Vida y Muerte de la Mulata.” ........................................................................ 59
3-1 Los gringos invadiran la Habana. [“The Gringos Will Invade Havana.”] ............. 106
3-2 “Quebrado de primera (de centrifuga).” [“First Rate (From the Centrifuge).”] .... 106
3-3 “Quebrado de segunda.” [“Second Rate.”] ............................................................ 107
3-4 “Blanca de segunda (tren comun).” [“Second Grade White (Common Train).”]... 108
4-1 Painting on a tray showing cocoa production and consumption. ............................. 153
4-2 An ad called “The Cacao Tree.” .............................................................................. 154
4-3 An ad for Maravilla Cocoa.. .................................................................................... 154
4-4 A Punch cartoon from 1855, titled “The Use of Adulteration.” .............................. 155
4-5 An ad for Epps Cocoa with instructions for preparation. ........................................ 155
4-6 A Trinidad Cocoa ad. ............................................................................................... 156
4-7 An ad for the Paris Chocolate Company.................................................................. 156
4-8 A Dunn and Hewett’s ad. ......................................................................................... 156
4-9 An advertisement for Fry’s chocolate. ..................................................................... 157
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4-10 A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring a child .................................................................. 157
4-11 A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring a mother and child ............................................... 158
4-12 A Fry’s Cocoa ad depicting a woman in a fur coat .................................................. 158
4-13 A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad from 1900 illustrating industrial consumption ................... 159
4-14 A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad depicting cocoa consumed on a ship .................................. 159
4-15 A Cadbury’s ad featuring a male scientist ............................................................... 160
4-16 Baron Liebig’s Cocoa and Chocolate ad. ................................................................ 160
4-17 Cadbury’s ad from circa 1900 featuring two young children. ................................. 161
4-18 An ad for Fry’s Cocoa and Milk Chocolate from 1906. .......................................... 161
4-19 An Epps’s Cocoa ad ................................................................................................. 162
4-20 A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring three young children ........................................... 162
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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
BITTERSWEET EMPIRE: LATIN AMERICAN COMMODITIES IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
By
Jacqueline K. Amorim
December 2015
Chair: Pamela K. Gilbert
Major: English
This dissertation examines Latin American and Caribbean commodities in Victorian
literature and culture in order to better understand how the Victorians used these goods to make
sense of their relationship to the Americas. The first half of my dissertation focuses on Cuban
tobacco and Cuban sugar in order to illustrate how consistently these commodities were coded
and represented in British literature, art and advertisements. In Chapter 2 I argue that tobacco’s
strong associations with the racial Other, as well as its gendering as a “masculine” commodity,
meant that tobacco was frequently used to imagine imperial masculinity for the Victorian
purchaser or consumer. In Chapter 3 I argue that sugar represented attempts to purify and
distance (white) English culture from association with the colonies through its association with
domestic English femininity. Together these chapters illustrate the complexity of the codes that
surround Latin American/ Caribbean commodities and suggest that this area is a rich site for
further scholarly analysis. In the second half of my dissertation, I investigate how and why
commodities were symbolically coded. For example, in Chapter 4 I argue that, on the one hand,
the complicated and uncertain trade routes that brought chocolate to England resulted in its
association with impurity, adulteration and poison; on the other hand, much of this anxiety
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disappears once chocolate came to be grown in English colonies in West Africa. In Chapter 5, I
analyze coffee, which was coming from Brazil, but which, unlike the other three commodities I
examine, appears to have had no symbolic value in Victorian literature and culture. I argue that
coffee’s lack of symbolic value, despite the clear relationship between England and Brazil during
this period, and despite the fact that the British did consume Brazilian coffee, is a result of
coffee’s long history as an extracolonial product and Brazil’s status as a newly independent
nation. Thus, together my last two chapters suggest that there was a logic to how and why
commodities were symbolically coded, and that part of that logic depended on the dynamics of
power between the British Empire and colonial producers.
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Betrothed” (1885), the speaker laments the fact that he
will have to stop smoking cigars upon marriage: his future wife has written a letter demanding he
choose between her and “the god Nick o’ Teen” (38). For most of the poem he compares “his
loving lass” (7), Maggie, to his “harem of dusky beauties” (22), i.e., his cigars. In one instance,
he claims that his wife will grow old and wrinkled and he will never be rid of her, but cigars are
“Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown” (11). The speaker continues to draw
comparisons between Maggie and his cigars (all of which are very unflattering to Maggie) until,
at the end of the poem, he decides that he would rather break off his engagement than give up his
Cuban cigars. He states: “a woman is only a woman, but a Cigar is a Smoke/ Light me another
Cuba, I’ll hold my first sworn vows/ If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for
Spouse!” (50-52).
“The Betrothed” provides a rich starting point for my dissertation because it illustrates
the complex attitudes towards tobacco commonly held during the Victorian period. However
comic in tone, Kipling presents tobacco smoking as a masculine activity, as something
threatened by the company of women. The speaker’s isolation as he smokes and contemplates
his betrothal further emphasizes the masculine nature of this activity. Tobacco smoking is
presented as almost illicitly sexual—the speaker not only personifies the cigars as female, but
suggests that the cigars he enjoys at home in the evenings are a “rival” for his future wife.
Simultaneously, the poem acknowledges several times that the tobacco the speaker smokes came
to England from Cuba. He refers to his cigar as a “Cuba” in the last lines of the poem (above)
and as a “Cuba stout” in the first line of the poem. He also refers to his cigars as “Havanas” (l. 3)
and “Cabanas” (l. 40); Havana and Cabana are cities in Cuba, and the latter was the name of a
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popular brand of Cuban cigar. Thus, because the poem emphasizes both the masculine nature of
consuming tobacco and the foreign origins of tobacco, it ultimately links the consumption of this
foreign good to British masculine identity.
Texts like this poem emphasize how the Victorians not only privileged commodities—
here we see an entire poem written about cigars—but also gave them a great deal of symbolic
weight. Kipling’s poem is a reflection of the fact that, due to developments such as the Industrial
Revolution and the boom of empire, the Victorians were suddenly inundated with (foreign)
goods in their everyday life and these commodities (and their representations in cultural texts)
“teemed with signification” (Richards 2). Because of the foreign origins of many of these goods,
as Anne McClintock argues, these commodities often brought “scenes of empire into every
corner of the [English] home” (McClintock 130). Whether it was Indian shawls brought back
from India as gifts, Cuban cigars smoked in the home, or advertisements depicting colonial
locations, the Victorians were constantly reminded of the supply chains that brought goods into
the home as a result of the ever-growing empire and its various trade routes. Thus, because “a
host of ideas reside in Victorian things” (Freedgood 8), Victorian commodity culture is a
particularly relevant subject for scholars interested in exploring what Edward Said calls the
“imperial map of the world in English literature” (82).
Even though many Victorian cultural artifacts, like Kipling’s poem, explicitly link
commodities consumed in England to their Latin America and Caribbean producers, scholars
have paid little attention to commodities that came to England from non-English colonies in
Latin America and the Caribbean. Instead, scholars of Victorian consumerism and commodity
culture tend to center their research on commodities that came to England from areas under
formal British control, such as the West Indies and India. For example, Anne McClintock’s
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well-regarded Imperial Leather (1995) analyzes commodities that were deeply associated with
the British colonization of Africa in the advertisements used to sell those goods, such as
advertisements for Pears Soap. Since the publication of Imperial Leather, many other scholars
have studied commodities that came to England as a result of formal colonial relationships:
Anandi Ramamurthy’s Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising
(2003) focuses, like McClintock’s work, on Victorian advertisements portraying colonial
locations in Africa, though she considers Asia as well; Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things:
Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (2006) explores goods produced in Madeira, the Anglo-
Caribbean, and India; Julie Fromer’s A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England (2008)
analyzes Indian and Chinese tea in British culture; and Susan Daly’s The Empire Inside: Indian
Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (2012) examines goods produced in British-
controlled India, such as shawls, cotton and diamonds. While each of these interesting studies
opens up avenues for new research in the fields of Victorian imperialism and material culture,
their attention to areas of formal British control has meant that commodities coming from Latin
America and the Caribbean have remained largely ignored.
This dissertation explores commodities brought to England through imperial relationships
with non-English colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean in an attempt to illuminate the
role that these commodities played in British literature and culture as well as England’s
relationship (politically and culturally) with a few representative Latin American producers.
Essentially, I argue that the Victorians were consuming a great deal of Latin American and
Caribbean commodities, and they were aware of these commodities’ origins (as is evident in the
case of the Cuban tobacco in Kipling’s poem). Second, I argue that these commodities took on
symbolic meanings that were consistently included in representations of these commodities in
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Victorian texts and advertisements. For example, as with Kipling’s poem, tobacco was often
personified as brown skinned and female and its exoticism was continually emphasized; as a
result, it was often marked as a product meant for masculine consumption. Victorian writers
could use tobacco in their texts knowing that readers would understand its exotic and masculine
connotations. Third, I argue throughout the dissertation that the symbolic language that
surrounds each of these commodities reflects England’s relationship to the colony or nation that
was the major producer of the commodity in question. For example, as I will illustrate, Cuban
commodities such as sugar and tobacco frequently appear and are consistently symbolically
coded in Victorian texts. This directly correlates to England’s active role in Cuban politics and,
even though it was a Spanish colony, Cuba’s status as an important chess piece in the relations
between England, Spain, and the United States. In contrast, Brazilian coffee is barely discussed
in Victorian texts and its connotations are not as consistent. Once again, this literary
representation parallels England’s relationship to the commodity’s country of origin. Although
the English were very active in Brazil, and although they did consume coffee, England’s
relationship to Brazil was very different, as Brazil was a former colony and newly independent
nation during the Victorian period. Together the chapters of my dissertation suggest that some
of the symbolic language that surrounded these commodities depended on the kind of imperial
relationship that existed between England and the colonial nation that produced the good.
Although many understand the word imperial to mean “of, like, or pertaining to an
empire,” the word is often used as a synonym for “colonial” in Victorian scholarship, and this
tendency ignores Britain’s engagement in economic and cultural imperialism with non-English
colonies. It is a tendency that also ignores the fact that the British consumed and made meaning
with goods imported to England as a result of informal power relationships with colonial
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producers. While colonialism is an act of imperialism, and the two terms are inter-related, they
may also describe distinct relationships. “Colonialism” describes a situation in which an empire
has taken control of a foreign nation or territory and that nation/territory officially becomes part
of the empire. In contrast, “imperialism” can be used to describe an informal relationship of
power in which an imperial nation may exert a significant amount of control due to its financial
and military power. The nation/territory in question might remain (in theory, at least)
autonomous, or it might even be the colony of another empire. For example, though Cuba was a
colony of Spain for the majority of the nineteenth century, England had an imperial relationship
with Cuba, and, through that imperial relationship, England was able to obtain raw products such
as sugar and tobacco. To understand this relationship, we might contrast it with the one England
had with Brazil, another country I discuss at length in this dissertation.
Although it is fairly common knowledge for scholars of the Caribbean, it is a little-
acknowledged fact among Victorianists that the English were very much involved in late-
eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cuban politics and culture, particularly as they relate to
Cuba’s development as a slave nation and world producer of sugar. First, it was the British who
provided the “initial stimulus to the Cuban sugar industry by introducing 5,000 slaves in 1762”
when the British occupied Havana for ten months during the Seven Years War (Tomich “World
Slavery” 303).1 Throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England continued to
help Cuba increase its production of raw goods, even while trying to force Cuba to abolish the
slavery that made those production levels possible. On the one hand, the English were very
involved in Cuba’s economy: merchants and engineers frequently aided the Cuban sugar industry
by introducing technological advancements (including equipment and railroads) that allowed
1 The British later returned the city to the Spanish in exchange for Florida
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slave plantations to prosper. On the other hand, the English continually attempted to force Cuba
to change policies in ways that suited England. For example, England not only forced Spain to
sign a treaty to abolish slavery in Cuba in 1835, but also for most of the century policed the
waters outside of the Cuba to prevent slave ships from entering Cuban ports. The British
Empire’s significant influence on Cuba’s economy and laws regarding slavery, despite the fact
that Spain was Cuba’s colonizer, points to the imperial relationship that England had with Cuba
as a result of the British Empire’s size and might.
While the British were very active in Brazil, sometimes in similar ways, ultimately the
imperial relationship was a very different one. For example, England also forced Brazil to sign a
treaty to abolish slavery and policed Brazilian waters to prevent the traffic in slaves. In Brazil,
the British built infrastructure including shipping and construction (“of railroads, sewers, lights
and telegraphs”) and invested in Brazilian goods, such as coffee (Forman 454). However, in
contrast to Cuba, Brazil was an independent nation for most of the nineteenth century, as Brazil
gained its independence from Portugal in 1822. As a result, while the British had a great deal of
influence in Brazil, their relationship was less forceful: they never tried to annex Brazil and
instead focused on increasing their trading privileges—though, of course, sometimes the
considerable size and might of the British Empire helped England maintain the advantage.
To an extent, popular texts from the nineteenth century acknowledge the different kinds
of imperialism that England engaged in. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’Urbervilles (1892),
Angel Clare remembers all the “great advantages of the Empire of Brazil as a field for the
emigrating agriculturist” and all the land that “offered there on exceptionally advantageous
terms” to farmers like himself (Hardy 332). Here, as in most of the references to Brazil in
Victorian literature, Brazil’s independence is acknowledged: it is often referred to as “the Empire
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of Brazil.” Also, importantly, Brazil is most often characterized as a site for investment—in Tess
of D’Urbervilles and elsewhere, farmers willing to move to Brazil are promised great
advantages. Similarly, an advertisement from The Examiner on April 13, 1972 encourages
investors to contact the Brazilian Coffee Estates Company, a company formed “UNDER
CONTRACT WITH THE IMPERIAL BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT,” to invest in coffee
farming at a staggering return of twenty percent. Again, we see Brazil’s independence
emphasized (the “imperial Brazilian government”), along with investment opportunities for
Britons with capital. In contrast, the anxiety caused by Cuba’s continued use of slaves, despite
objections from England and its official colonizer, Spain, is reflected in Victorian literature and
advertisements; many of these texts emphasize finding ways to force Cuba to abolish slavery and
reflect an awareness of Cuba’s colonial status. In fact, the anxiety the English felt about colonial
Cuba’s continued use of slaves was so marked that it is even reflected in Cuban literature and art.
In Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes, o la Loma del Angel (1839; 1882), Don Candido de
Gamboa is under enormous financial pressure because the British continually attempt to capture
his ships and seize his cargo, which consists mostly of African slaves. Similarly, a Cuban
tobacco lithograph (discussed in Chapter 3) is an image of a pompous Englishmen arriving in
Cuba and is playfully titled “Los gringos invadirán la Habana” [“The Gringos Will Invade
Havana”] (Figure 3-1). Thus, even when playful, Cuban and English texts acknowledge that the
relationship between the massive empire and the colonial slave nation was often tense.
In some cases, the tension caused by these political relationships influenced the symbolic
coding of the commodities coming from those nations. For example, sugar became symbolic of
England’s failed attempts to force Cuba to abolish slavery and, as a result, often took on the
language of purity and contamination, as sugar might be “contaminated” by the horrors of
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slavery. Similarly, because chocolate came to England through extremely complicated trade
routes it remained a touch too “foreign” for most of the period.2 While the English continued to
consume chocolate at ever-increasing rates, it was only after they gained complete control of the
supply chain (by planting cocoa in Africa) that there was a massive boom in chocolate
consumption. However, while I discuss those anxieties in order to fully explore the Victorians’
understanding of their relationship to these Latin American producers, it must be emphasized
that the Victorians were consuming all of these commodities in great quantities.
Accordingly, because all four of the commodities I discuss here—tobacco, sugar,
chocolate, and coffee—were ingestible commodities, together they reveal the confidence
England had in the relationships that brought these goods to England. Although the English
were anxious about the slavery that might be used to produce sugar, they continued to consume
sugar throughout the century; though they might be anxious about the various trading routes that
brought chocolate to England from all over Latin America, chocolate consumption rates
continued to increase throughout the period. Coffee and tobacco were also consumed regularly
in Victorian England. When we consider the fact that these goods are not just traded or given
symbolic meanings in cultural texts but regularly consumed—ingested—in England, it is
apparent that they are important objects in the lives of Victorians. As such, these commodities
deserve the same kind of attention that has recently been given to commodities coming from
India and the West Indies and other areas under formal British control.
Chapter Summaries. The first half of my dissertation examines commodities produced
in Cuba, as together they provide a case study that reveals the importance of England’s
2 Although I acknowledge in Chapter 3 that chocolate was a frequently adulterated product, which did affect the rate
of consumption in England, I argue that chocolate’s messy supply chain and exoticism exacerbated those anxieties.
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relationship to a non-British colony. This imperial relationship was important not only from a
political standpoint but also culturally as these goods were clearly integrated into British culture
and given symbolic value in the literature and art of the period.
For example, in Chapter 2, I investigate Cuban tobacco, which clearly illustrates the
intersection between masculinity, imperialism, and commodity culture. Ultimately, I not only
argue that Englishmen consumed this Cuban product and were aware of its colonial origins, but I
also argue that tobacco’s strong associations with the racial Other, as well as its gendering as a
“masculine” commodity, meant that tobacco was frequently used to imagine imperial
masculinity (i.e., “appropriate” masculinity) for the purchaser or consumer. By looking at mid-
century representations of racially-Othered women who are tied to a commodity “intended” for
men, I unravel both the real and perceived relationship between imperial men and colonial
women as well as how race and colonial culture were commodified and consumed by European
subjects through these representations. Also in Chapter 2, I look at Cuban tobacco lithographs
and discuss the similarities between the representations of smoking women included on Cuban
tobacco packaging (some of which made its way to Europe) and representations of smoking
women in English (and French) literature to argue that it is clear that England and Cuba were not
simply trading in commodities but also in culture.
In Chapter 3, I turn to sugar, a Cuban commodity strongly associated with femininity, to
illustrate the variety of symbolic codes that are attached to Cuban commodities and to draw out
the complexities of England’s relationship to Cuba. Thus, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 collectively
reveal just how important Cuba and Cuban commodities were to Britain. While there has been
significant Victorianist scholarship on Caribbean sugar, this scholarship tends to focus on the
period before British abolition and on England’s own slave colonies, such as Jamaica and
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Antigua. I argue that, despite the lack of scholarship on the issue, sugar was still an important
topic and symbol in mid-nineteenth-century England, as illustrated by such texts as Gaskell’s
North and South, George Eliot’s “Brother Jacob,” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Curse
for a Nation.” Furthermore, even though existing scholarship emphasizes sugar as a British
colonial product, by the mid-nineteenth century sugar was a product produced mostly in Cuba
and is thus an important marker for understanding the relationship between England and Cuba. I
illustrate that sugar’s associations with both white skin and femininity (and therefore, ideas about
“purity”), which it gained during the period of British abolition, are vital components of its
usefulness as a tool to address symbolic questions regarding England’s modernity and national
identity later in the century. Thus, for example, while texts such as Gaskell’s North and South
have traditionally been read as (merely) concerned with English industrialism, the novel’s
linking of English industrialism and American and Cuban slavery has remained largely
unexplored. Ultimately, sugar’s symbolism was the opposite of tobacco’s. Sugar was connected
with femininity and represented attempts to purify and distance English culture from association
with the colonies, even those colonies such as Cuba that belonged to other empires.
While the first half of my dissertation illustrates the complexities of England’s
relationship with one non-English colony, the second half examines commodities that came to
England as a result of more complicated trade relationships. As suggested above, this
dissertation not only aims to enhance our understanding of Victorian commodity culture by
considering Latin American and Caribbean goods that England received as a result of its imperial
(rather than colonial) relationships, but also to complicate our understanding of the variety of
imperial relationships that England had with these nations.
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First, in Chapter 4, I examine chocolate, a commodity that was not linked with one
particular colony but with many colonies—British and non-British. Thus chocolate’s role in
British literature and culture was far more complicated than any of the commodities that came
primarily from Cuba. Importantly, though scholars such as Sophie and Michael Coe, Sarah
Moss and Alexander Badenoch, Deborah Cadbury, and David Satran have written extensively on
the subject of chocolate, many of these scholars do so in the context of the birth of major (now-
multi-national) companies such as Cadbury’s. If chocolate’s associations with the colonies are
mentioned, scholars tend to focus on the turn of the twentieth century when it became
scandalously clear that companies such as Cadbury’s were (still) using West African slaves to
produce cocoa. However, there has been very little work (if any) regarding chocolate’s symbolic
value in mid-nineteenth century England, when British-consumed cocoa was still primarily
produced in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to recovering chocolate as a Latin
American product, I argue in Chapter 4 that, like sugar, chocolate was personified as feminine
and, like sugar, there was an imperative to imagine that chocolate was “pure”—despite food
adulteration rumors and the awareness it was being produced by slaves in places like Brazil and
Venezuela. Yet, through my close readings of Victorian advertisements, news articles, and
novels (such as William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Florence Marryat’s The Blood of
the Vampire and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla), I argue that Victorian cultural texts reveal that,
unlike sugar, chocolate was never quite successfully imagined to be pure. Instead, because
chocolate was coming to England from so many different colonial locations, it became
associated with adulteration and contamination for most of the century; it was not until the turn
of the twentieth century, once chocolate began to be grown in English colonies in West Africa,
that chocolate lost all associations with contamination of the domestic space and became
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associated, instead, with domestic bliss. Chocolate and its negative connotations helped the
English work out their anxieties about the extent of their oversight in distant non-English
colonies over which England had little control; concurrently, the shift that takes place once
England did gain more control over production illustrates the link between colonialism and the
consistent symbolic coding of commodities.
If the first three chapters of my dissertation illustrate that the English preferred
colonialism, even when the colony in question was not English, to a messy supply chain, Chapter
5 illustrates what happens when the relationship is a strictly imperial one. In Chapter 5 I
examine Brazilian coffee and consider English attitudes towards a product not only produced in a
non-English colony but in a nation that was not a colony at all—since Brazil gained
independence from Portugal (with England’s help) early in the nineteenth century. I argue that
Brazil’s independence, combined with coffee’s history as an extracolonial product (that is, a crop
grown in non-colonies for most of its history), meant that coffee was not useful to the Victorians
as a symbol in the same way that other colonial products were: the most extensive search for the
words “coffee” and “Brazil” in Victorian texts reveals that the English were simply not interested
in coffee as a symbol and rarely even acknowledged its South American origins. Even in the few
Victorian children’s books I have identified that take place in Brazil on coffee plantations and
that acknowledge the large number of English expatriates who moved to Brazil to grow coffee
themselves, coffee itself is barely mentioned. My analysis of these texts provides a useful
contrast for representations of tobacco, sugar, and chocolate and suggests that there may be a
link between the kind of political/imperial relationship England had with (post)colonial nations
and the way commodities from those nations are (not) coded.
23
In this way my dissertation seeks to direct our attention to Latin American and Caribbean
commodities in British literature and culture in order to better understand the symbolic weight
they carried and the ways they reflected England’s relationship with colonial producers. The
complexities I present also convey the demand for additional future research. In particular, my
dissertation raises the question of how and why commodities were coded and whether or not a
complication of our understanding of British imperialism might help us to answer that question.
24
CHAPTER 2
UP IN SMOKE: TOBACCO, EXOTIC WOMEN AND NINETEENTH CENTURY CULTURE
Tobacco’s relationship to masculine adventure has had a long history. Sailors and
adventurers encountered the crop for the first time as part of their commercial transactions with
the natives of the New World, and they brought the crop back with them along with stories of all
they encountered in that far-off place. Once introduced to Europe, tobacco’s association with
adventurers such as England’s popular Sir Walter Raleigh, a man considered “handsome, virile
and eloquent and whose mannerisms were widely imitated,” only furthered the association
between this foreign commodity and the performance of masculinity (Gately 46).1 The
association between men and smoking continued over the next few centuries. In the nineteenth
century, after a period when snuffing, rather than smoking, tobacco had become popular, the
practice of consuming tobacco that European travelers had helped spread all over the world
returned with soldiers to Europe in all sorts of new and exotic forms, including the hookah from
India and cigars from Spain (Hughes 158-159). Although smoking had always been associated
with the New World, the new wide variety of exotic methods of consuming tobacco amplified
tobacco’s exotic and colonial associations.
The belief that tobacco was a significant marker of masculinity was also influenced by
the unique conditions of the nineteenth century. In nineteenth-century England, for example, as
a result of the Industrial Revolution, the rising middle class disrupted the historically ironclad
association between class, wealth, and power, leading many to ponder what made one man
“superior” to another, if it wasn’t wealth or class. For example, Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes,
Hero-Worship and The Heroic in History (1841), a very influential text from the Victorian
1 Sir Walter Raleigh’s legacy includes popularizing tobacco use in England in the sixteenth century.
25
period, compares hero archetypes, such as the prophet, the poet, the priest, and the man of letters
and suggests to the Victorian reader several versions of masculinity, many of which no longer
directly depended on familiar markers such as wealth, lineage, or physical strength.2 As James
Eli Adams argues in Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity, many of these
new definitions of masculinity shifted the focus of masculinity from martial courage to inner
struggle and were “many-faceted constructions of identity and social authority that inevitably
situate[d] the private self in relation to an imagined audience” (Adams 2). As a result, during
this period, smoking—an activity that helped the smoker express identity through the methods
and apparatuses chosen and an activity that helped men perform silent meditation and increase
their self discipline—became even more tied to masculinity.
Numerous scholars who have performed close readings of scenes in which tobacco is
consumed in Victorian literature acknowledge its ties to masculinity. For example, as Stephen
Lock illustrates, great male thinkers such as Sherlock Holmes are often shown smoking, and
texts that emphasize all male communities, like prisons, universities or clubs, often feature
significant tobacco consumption. Similarly, Russel Poole points out that in a scene in Charlotte
Bronte’s Villette, in which the protagonist must walk alone at night, “The prowlers who pursue
[Lucy] are depicted as hypermasculine, mustachioed and smoking cigars” (266, emphasis mine).
While there are a few Victorian texts that represent women smokers, references like these in the
nineteenth century that directly link tobacco consumption to masculinity are simply too
numerous to count.
2 For example, Carlyle examines Mohamed as an example of the prophet in that chapter; Dante and Shakespeares in
the chapter on poets; John Knox and Martin Luther in the chapter on priests; and Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and Robert Burns in the chapter on men of letters.
26
This persistent association between men and tobacco meant that smoking by women in
Victorian England “came to be not only frowned upon but outrightly condemned by mid
nineteenth-century respectable society [sic]” (Hilton 140). In fact, great efforts were made to
protect women from exposure to tobacco: at dinner parties men smoked in separate rooms,
husbands smoked away from home when possible, and smoking jackets were employed to
protect men from carrying the smell of tobacco back to their wives. While one obvious outlier of
this phenomenon is the fin de siècle figure of the New Woman, it is worth noting that, though
she was often represented as a smoker, her tobacco consumption was perceived as taboo. In
other words, the New Woman is imagined to have smoked, worn pants, and ridden bicycles
precisely because these were masculine activities, and she did these things to protest constrictive
gender roles. Thus, on the one hand, the New Woman’s smoking paradoxically further illustrates
that up until the end of the century smoking was associated with masculinity. On the other hand,
because her smoking stands out as one instance of female smoking, it further illustrates how
infrequently women are represented as smokers during the nineteenth century.
In this chapter I focus on a handful of mid-nineteenth-century representations of women
who are tied to the commodity of tobacco decades before the New Woman first appears: the
mulata3 women depicted on Cuban tobacco lithographs (1840s and 1850s), Cigarette from
Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), and Carmen from Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1845). In
contrast to the New Woman, the women I discuss in this chapter do not smoke in the drawing
rooms of polite society, and their smoking is not performative and protestant: in each of these
mid-century texts, these women are inescapably tied to tobacco—it is an extension of their
3 I use the Spanish term for two reasons. First, it is a more precise term than the English term “female mulatto.”
Second, as I will discuss in the section that follows, I use the term not to refer to mixed race women in general, but
to a specific historical symbolic figure that was very important to the Caribbean.
27
exoticism and Otherness. Further, as I will illustrate, these texts are, paradoxically, more
concerned with the masculinity of the male protagonists than those texts that feature smoking by
men in traditional settings.
Thus, as I illustrate throughout this chapter, though these texts feature women smokers,
they are a useful lens through which to investigate tobacco consumption in the nineteenth
century, particularly its ties to masculinity. Rather than challenging our understanding of
tobacco consumption, each of these texts magnifies already existing ideas about tobacco. For
example, the fact that these women are brown skinned reflects the fact that in much of
nineteenth-century literature tobacco was personified as brown skinned and female. For
example, in the Kipling poem I mentioned in the introduction, “The Betrothed” (1885), the
speaker laments that he does not want to give up his “Cuba stout” (l.1) or “Havanas” (l.3)—he
resents that he’s forced to choose between “bondage bought with a ring” and “a harem of dusky
beauties fifty tied in a string” (ll. 21-22, emphasis mine). Thus, in this poem the cigars are
personified as “dusky beauties,” which are part of the speaker’s metaphorical “harem.”
Similarly, while tobacco was often associated in the nineteenth century with the New World—
for example, in the passage quoted above, Kipling’s speaker emphasizes the Cuban origins of his
cigars—the texts I discuss in this chapter only highlight the association between tobacco and
colonial/exotic locations.
In fact, as will become clear in my analysis, these texts are preoccupied with the foreign:
not only do these texts originate from various countries (Cuba, England, France), but the
narratives are displaced (sometimes several times) onto a different time and place. For example,
the lithographs, while mostly designed by Frenchmen, are depictions of Afro-Cuban women.
Carmen, written by a Frenchmen, depicts a Gypsy woman living in southern Spain. Under Two
28
Flags is written by an English woman, set in French Algeria, and centers on a mixed-race camp
follower and female soldier. While these geographical displacements can be dizzying, we will
see that they all find their roots in the same causes: these texts suggest that the performance of
masculinity depends on both appropriate commodity consumption (tobacco) and encounters with
the exotic. While masculinity, even imperial masculinity, is, of course, a dynamic rather than
monolithic concept, it is clear that in each text tobacco and exotic women are used to help each
protagonist achieve a particular kind of masculinity—one that is based on race, class, and
imperial encounters with the Other. In this way tobacco is a useful commodity for study, as it
explicitly illustrates the importance of goods from the New World in English and European
culture and the way that European consumers were not only aware of tobacco’s origins, but also
often amplified and celebrated them.
The Mulata on Cuban Tobacco Lithographs (1840s and 1850s)
Tobacco was one of two crops the Spanish chose for the colony of Cuba. As such, its
cultivation and production became a daily reality for the Afro-Cubans also brought to the island
to cultivate it.4 The fact that Afro-Cubans in general are associated culturally and
representationally with this product is apparently the result of this historical relationship.
However, while the tobacco lithographs produced in Cuba in the nineteenth century often portray
Afro-Cubans, I am interested specifically in those that depict the figure of mulata: these
lithographs are, unlike the others, serialized; as a result, they portray a rich narrative that clearly
illustrates the symbolic importance of these images to the tobacco packaged with them.
Because the mulata embodies the intersections of race, gender, and imperial discourse, the
mulata has historically been important to Latin America and the Caribbean both imaginatively
4 The other major crop was sugar, as I discuss in Chapter 3.
29
and politically. Vera Kutzinski, in her book Sugar’s Secrets (1993), not only discusses
representations of the mulata found in a wide variety of cultural texts, but also dedicates most of
a chapter to the tobacco lithographs I discuss here. Kutzinski suggests that images of the mulata
in representational art, including those depicted on the lithographs used for tobacco
advertisements and packaging, often worked subversively and were at least one factor that
helped to unite Cubans of various races and classes as a common group, when, after 50 years of
slave rebellions, a virtual tug-of-war ensued between Cuba’s now-abolitionist colonizer, Spain,
and the pre-Civil War United States. Because many exiled revolutionaries in Cuba supported
annexation to the United States, Spain continually tightened its hold on Cuba and at the same
time decreasingly saw white criollos (those of Spanish heritage who were born on the island) to
be Spanish in nationality (Novas 173).5 Thus, like many scholars who trace how the figure of
the mulata helped to consolidate national identity in this context, Kutzinski argues that it is
precisely as a nonwhite, female body that the mulata becomes “the exclusive signifier of race and
sexuality” and becomes “a site—in fact the site—of Cubans’ struggle over cultural meaning and
political authority” (Kutzinski 42, emphasis original).
However, while many scholars, including Kutzinski, periodically mention the power
structure of the caste system that existed in colonial Cuba and the importance of these images in
eventually shifting that power structure, I would argue that most of these analyses take that
dynamic for granted. For example, in her chapter on the lithographs, Kutzinski’s most
5 When Spain threatened to abolish slavery in Cuba, the Creoles who depended on slavery felt even more
"disaffected from Spain." They felt that if Cuba could be annexed to the United States, like Texas, they would be
able to remain a slave state and sell their goods to North America duty free. Likewise, the United States felt that the
annexation of Cuba would benefit it for several reasons: it would put less pressure on the United States to abolish
slavery, it would provide the United States with more resources, and it would allow the United States to continue
Manifest Destiny and bolster the nation. Consequently, President Polk offered $100 million for Cuba, which Spain
rejected (Novas 173).
30
significant conclusion is that these lithographs portray a masculinist perspective. Although these
sorts of conclusions are certainly true, these scholars fail to consider one very important factor:
the symbolic nature of the tobacco packaged with these lithographs. Kutzinski intuitively
understands what an analysis of tobacco makes explicit: these images are part of a transaction
that allows the male consumer to carefully construct a masculine persona, which is based on the
consumption of colonial goods and on understanding their place within the empire.6
While the figure of the mulata appears in a variety of mediums, including art, literature,
and film, here I focus on the 12cm-by-8.5cm tobacco lithographs produced in the 1840s and
1850s in Cuba, as they clearly illustrate the significance of the pairing of the figure of the mulata
with the commodity of tobacco. In a large portion of these lithographs, produced by at least
three tobacco manufacturers, a serialized tale describing the life of a mulata, including her birth,
rise to mistresshood with a white Creole, and eventual punishment and death, is depicted.7 The
depiction in the lithographs of the mulata as transgressive and sexually available, and the pairing
of those images with a commodity often personified as brown and female, mark the mulata as
consumable. Consequently, the consumption of the image of the sexually available mulata and
the act of smoking become part of the performance of white Cuban masculinity. Thus, while
increasing volumes of work follow threads similar to (in some cases dependent on and indebted
to) Kutzinski’s Sugar’s Secrets—such as those by Jill Lane, Alison Fraunhar, and Alicia
Arrizon—I argue that by not considering the symbolic value of the tobacco that is paired with
these images these scholars have not fully explored the dynamics in the relations of power
6 Here I refer to any of the European empires, including Spain’s, France’s, and England’s.
7 Most scholarship on these lithographs depends on the lithographs that have been collected and reproduced in two
books by Núñez Jiménez in the 1980s. (See reference list.) Three of the series featuring the mulata are “Vida y
muerte de la Mulata [Life and Death of the Mulata] by Llaguna and Company; “Historia de la mulata” [History of
the Mulata] by Para Usted; and “La vida de la mulata [The Life of the Mulata] by La Honradez.
31
between white colonizer and colonized Other as represented in these lithographs.8 It is not just
significant that these images portray a “masculinist” perspective, but that they portray
relationships of power that are largely based on race. By examining this element more closely, I
aim to better understand the role of these lithographs in defining and upholding the caste system
in Cuba and also to better understand the significance of pairing these images with the
commodity of tobacco specifically—rather than, say, sugar, Cuba’s other major crop.
A multitude of details within these lithographs reinforces the significance of these images,
including the fact that the lithographs are made in the costumbrista tradition, an art form
originating in Spain. Costumbrismo, an art form that aimed to present everyday scenes
realistically, served sometimes to draw attention to problems that merited change and at other
times to underline or create a difference between oneself and others or between one’s nation and
other nations. Thus, these images helped to define Cubanness (and therefore demarcate the
difference between Cuba and other nations) and also to uphold the caste system in Cuba.
Because, as Jill Lane argues, the art form portrayed locals through “‘authentic’ representations of
social, ethnic and national ‘types,’” and “elaborated social and racial taxonomies of the
population, disseminating and naturalizing criteria of inclusion and exclusion in the body politic”
(21), these lithographs depend on the mulata as a specific “type” to convey important messages
to consumers about belonging, class, and nationality.
Furthermore, while portraying the racially ambiguous mulata in demeaning ways that were
supposedly “authentic,” the lithographs also continually engage in the practice of choteo, a form
8 It is true that criollos were different from Spaniards in that they were born on the island and there was much
contention between the two castes. While the criollos would have considered themselves colonized by Spain, for
the purposes of my analysis I refer to both the criollos and Spaniards as colonizers of Afro-Cubans as they both had
power over Afro-Cubans because of their white skin and their ties with Europe.
32
of mocking. The victim of choteo is any person who behaves in ways that do not “correspond to
one’s place in society and choteo is the insulting price one pays for being caught” (Medrano 6).
For the mulata, the joke of the choteo always points to her sexuality—as seen in Figure 2-1, with
the mulata’s breasts and underwear inappropriately visible—a fact that is at least partially owing
to the popular belief that she was “naturally” more sensuous.9 The title above declares that this
image is one of a series titled “Vida y muerte de la mulata” [“Life and Death of the Mulata”].
The caption below, “Descuidos del tocador” [“Boudoir Repairs” or “Carelessness of the Player”
10], mocks the mulata’s fine European clothing and alleged grace by drawing attention to her
crass, public boudoir repair. The fact that she performs this repair on a street corner—the place
where it is imagined she belongs—and in view of a white woman, who stands in the safety of her
doorway, is meant to point to the mulata’s supposed-true gross nature beneath all her fine
European clothing. Because the choteo on these tobacco lithographs emphasizes her eventual
downfall and untimely disease-infected death (Figure 2-2), the narrative of the images suggests
that the mulata, like tobacco, is a product meant for the pleasure of the white Creole—and once a
culturally accepted version of Cuban masculinity is performed, she, like the empty tobacco
package, is easily discarded (Figure 2-3). Similarly, because the images in these lithographs
either characterize this sexuality as natural and especially useful to the mulata’s attempts to
climb the social and racial ladder, or as conniving and predatory, the choteo in these lithographs,
therefore, either mocks the mulata for eventually reaching too high or mocks the “fools” who fall
for her tricks.
9 This belief can be attributed to the fact that she was often the product of rape or can be attributed to the erotics of
exoticism and ambivalent origins. In actual practice, this belief, combined with limited career options for the mulata,
meant that Cuban mulatas were frequently forced to prostitute themselves or become the mistress of a white criollo
in order to support themselves, a fact which also accounts for their depiction in these marquillas as sexualized.
10 This is an alternate title that has been suggested in several places, though it is not a direct translation.
33
I suggest that the mulata’s association with tobacco helps to imbue her with transgressive
eroticism that makes her eventual conquest inevitable. While Kutzinski briefly acknowledges
that it was the mulata’s embodiment of the “illicit sexuality of the street walker” that made her
the “prime target for the tobacco factories’ mass-produced serial lithographs and their not-
infrequent use of sexual innuendo, facilitated by the underlying association of smoking with
burning desire,” it is important to acknowledge that the reverse of this claim is also true (60).
While the mulata is a prime target for these lithographs because she was thought to be inherently
more sexual, her transgressive connection with the masculine commodity of tobacco only further
eroticizes the mulata. In other words, her association with tobacco was illicit because tobacco
consumption was taboo for women and that illicit behavior emphasizes her eroticism.
Furthermore, since tobacco factories in this period in Cuba were the hotbeds of revolution—a
place where radical ideas like annexation and independence were discussed daily—her
association with (perhaps dangerously) radical politics through association with tobacco would
have yet again stressed her transgression and the erotics of that transgression.11
Certainly, many of these tobacco lithographs, such as in the lithograph in Figure 2-4,
emphasize the mulata as transgressive and aggressive. In this lithograph the mulata is
sexualized by her excessive cleavage and by the implication that the necklace she holds is
payment for sexual services rendered. She seems to dominate the frame, as her person (and
dress) takes up a much larger percentage of the frame, forcing the viewer’s eye to her. The
choteo, leveled at the male in this case,12 contained in the caption “El palomo y la gabilana”
11 In Cuba, cigar factories often had a lector, or reader. The reader served as a “disseminator of the proletarian
tradition.” By midcentury, “the lectura expanded its scope to include the reading of the proletarian press, translation
of foreign novels, and in general the promotion of a wide variety of labor causes” (Perez 73-74).
12 I assume here that the male in this image is a criollo, based on the long history in Cuban literature and art of
representing the mulata’s (romantic) interaction with criollos. Thus, while it is possible to read this figure as being
European (Spanish or French, for example), I find it much more likely that contemporary consumers of these
34
[“The Male Dove and the Female Hawk”], places the mulata in the masculine position, the
predator to the unsuspecting, wealthy criollo.13 In this way it is obvious that sexuality in these
lithographs is associated with power, and the more sexual the mulata in the lithograph, the more
powerful she is portrayed as being. However, even while pointing to the mulata’s aggression,
the real message here is contained in the choteo that the male receives for not taking the
supposedly more gender-appropriate role of dominating the mulata.
Thus, by using the same space to argue that the mulata is both passive (purchasable) and
aggressive (in need of conquest) meant that, while choosing a tobacco product for consumption,
the criollo could also choose whatever version of the mulata best suited his vision of Cuba and
construction of masculinity. After all, as stated above, as a result of the slave rebellions,
antipathy towards Spain, possible annexation to the United States, and potential independence
from Spain, white Creoles—who saw themselves as superior to Afro-Cubans, but also saw
themselves as more Cuban then Spanish—found it difficult to define themselves in terms of
white upper-class European masculinity. However, by portraying the mulata in authentic Cuban
settings, in ways that are “natural to her,” the white Creole was able to imagine a Cuba that was
his—both literally and imaginatively—while also maintaining his whiteness by reminding
himself of the ways that she was both different and manageable. In choosing the version of the
mulata on tobacco lithographs that best suited his construction of his own masculinity, the white
criollo could define himself as the mulata’s superior—her purchaser and conquistador. In other
words, through this act of imagination and the associations of tobacco beneath the image he
lithographs would have assumed the figure was meant to be a Cuban Creole. At the very least these lithographs
were most likely produced with Cuban Creoles as the primary consumers in mind.
13 Of course, marquillas such as these suggest that the mulata’s prostitution “was motivated by greed and selfish
desire for luxury, making it easy to blame her for her self-commodification and to rationalize her exploitation”
(Fraunhar 465).
35
consumes, the criollo could construct a “new” white European masculinity, which was not
Spanish/European at all but, rather, Cuban. Thus, while Kutzinski briefly acknowledges that the
“imagined community called Cuba…encode[d] its national identity in the iconic figure of the
mulata” (7), I argue that, considering the symbolic value of the tobacco packaged with these
lithographs and the fact that those associations lend the Creole authority on the basis of his
masculinity, it is clear that these images of the mulata on tobacco lithographs became a way for
working out white masculine identity as well.14
The fact that this carefully negotiated construction of the mulata on tobacco lithographs is
meant to benefit white Creole masculinity—particularly through emphasizing her Otherness—is
made clear by another important element in the lithographs: the double. In a number of
lithographs, the mulata is accompanied either by a white female who watches from a distance or
by a darker African woman who follows closely (Figure 2-5). These figures function "as a
warning to less discerning readers, who might otherwise be deceived by the mulata’s generally
pleasing appearance” (Kutzinksi 66). The African slave woman (often appearing to be the
mother of the mulata) reminds the viewer of the mulata’s African heritage and her membership
in a group that her body obscures. However similar in skin tone that the mulata appears to be to
the criollo or Spaniard who keeps her as mistress, she will never truly be like him. The white
woman who watches nearby (as in the lithograph “Descuidos del tocador” above) functions in a
similar way: she is a contrast or foil for the mulata and reminds us of what the white woman—
that “angelic guardian of virtuous womanhood” (Kutzinski 78)—would or would not do and
therefore emphasizes the mulata’s essential difference. In this way, while using costumbrismo to
14 While many of the lithographs portray Afro-Cubans, the lithographs that are part of serialized tales centered on
the mulata mostly depict white men.
36
claim that the mulata is part of the criollo’s national (masculine) identity, these lithographs also
constantly reinforce the criollo’s (white) superiority by continually emphasizing their shared and
their separate histories. The fact that this is a slippery way to maintain whiteness is precisely
why the mulata is often portrayed as quite dangerous.
Additionally, this reminder of the mulata’s dark skin connects the mulata more clearly to
tobacco, as the mulata’s skin was considered in Cuban culture to be a symbolic articulation of
the natural product.15 For example, in a series of tobacco lithographs depicting grades of sugar,
skin tones are used to visually mark the quality or refinement of the sugar: the lighter skinned the
subject on the lithograph, the higher grade and more refined the sugar being depicted.16 In
contrast to this handful of lithographs depicting sugar, most of the tobacco lithographs
emphasized skin tones ranging from mulata to black (Arrizon 91). Because most contemporary
consumers of these lithographs would have understood the connection between tobacco and the
mulata’s skin color, her commodification as sexual being and as exotic Other would have been
even more complete. Accordingly, by linking her to slaves and former slaves, to the
prostitute/concubine, and to the tobacco that is packaged beneath these images, these images
make clear that the mulata depicted on these lithographs is destined for consumption by the
white Creole. On the one hand, the Creole can consume her while imagining that it is her destiny
to be consumed; both acts are made possible by her association to tobacco. On the other hand,
because she is coded as a sexual commodity and associated with tobacco, it is clear that the
mulata is to be consumed by males. Thus, the mulata’s association with tobacco reveals
15 As Kutzinski also points out, in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940) Fernando Ortiz compares cigars
to “cinnamon skin” and different types of tobacco to the “intermediary and mixed pigmentation” of Cuban women.
16 This is at least partially due to the fact that sugar was lightened during processing, while tobacco naturally had
darker tones.
37
nineteenth-century Cuban attitudes towards masculinity: according to these lithographs, to
maintain white masculinity the male consumer must consume masculine commodities as well as
the Other—two ideas that have long been connected in the imperial imagination.
Furthermore, the male gaze implicit in these images further illustrates that these
lithographs functioned in the construction of masculinity. While some may argue that the
voyeurism implied is a necessary by-product of Costumbrismo, the masculinity implicit in the
tobacco beneath these images complicates that claim. Further, as Kutzinski suggests, several of
these lithographs were designed by European artists, particularly Frenchmen (60); thus, these
were lithographs designed by Europeans for Europeans and Creoles in a way that maintains
systems of imperial power.17 In this way these lithographs function as Jill Lane suggests, when
she argues that Costumbrismo often functioned as a “colonial scalpel” by which the local (Afro-)
Cuban was differentiated from the foreign (European/criollo) and “through which emerging
Cubans were hailed and interpellated” (28). She later points out that the “fact that costumbrismo
consistently favored images of African and black Cuba reflects less what was actually happening
on Havana streets or homes than who was looking and what concerns organized their
view…white men don’t [usually] appear at the center of these images because they are already
imagined as the primary point of view” (148, second emphasis mine). While some may object
that Afro-Cubans would also have purchased tobacco with these sorts of images on the package,
thus consuming it along with the criollo, surely that is beside the point. Ultimately, tobacco is a
commodity that was produced in colonies and which maintained an association with those
colonies when consumed by white males. In this case, tobacco was consumed by white males
17 Some of the lithograph artists include the Frenchmen Eduardo Laplante, Federico Mialhe, and Hipolito Garneray,
as well as the Basque Victor Patricio Landaluze.
38
living in the colony in which it was produced, but, significantly, the racial Other is still an
important part of that consumption and necessary to the construction of masculinity based on
whiteness. The pairing of these Orientalist images with the commodity of tobacco makes these
lithographs not simply useful for consolidating a national identity, but also creates an appropriate
white masculinity for the white Creole at the expense of those caricatured in the images. In this
way the mulata becomes another object that the white male uses symbolically to create his own
masculinity identity—a fact that is far more easily and profoundly accomplished by the pairing
of these images with the (masculine, exotic) commodity of tobacco.
French Writer Mérimée’s Carmen (1845)
Also written in the 1840s, the French novella Carmen, written by Prosper Mérimée,
portrays a transgressive and exotic smoking woman, Carmen, whose construction bears striking
similarities to the Cuban lithographs. Carmen has even more intricate and persistent similarities
to the lithographs than (as we will see) it does to Under Two Flags. For example, though
authored by a French writer, Carmen takes place in Spain (the colonizer of Cuba and,
consequently, the entry port of European tobacco from Cuba); in Carmen, a French narrator
“relates” the story of a racially ambiguous woman’s entanglement with a Spaniard (don José)18
in a way that is not dissimilar to the French artists who depict mulatas interacting with Spaniards
and Creoles in the lithographs. The intertwining of French and Spanish influences in both texts
may simply be the result of the fact that both were expanding imperial nations, as well as the fact
that in the nineteenth century, goods and people from England, France, and Spain were
circulating along similar routes during this period.
18 Although typically one would capitalize the title “Don” here and throughout the paper, I have elected to write the
character’s name as Mérimée wrote it.
39
Because of these sorts of similarities, it may be beneficial to consider France’s and
Spain’s relationship with tobacco at the time of publication. In the case of Carmen, a novel
written by a Frenchmen for the French but so identified with Spain that even today it is
recognized as one of its most representative pieces of literature (Colmeiro 127), it would be an
oversight to consider simply one nation or the other. Because Spain colonized Cuba, which
produced its tobacco, and because Spain had large tobacco factories, including the very famous
factory in Seville, which is featured in Carmen, early nineteenth-century Spain was a major, if
not the primary, consumer of tobacco. Consequently, the Spanish began smoking cigars and
cigarettes in high volume before France and England, as the English and French still relied
heavily on pipe smoking and snuffing, two methods of tobacco consumption that were very
much associated with the English and French, respectively. Thus, the perception that cigars were
exotic, grown in foreign colonies such as Cuba, and then further processed in the factories of
“Oriental” Spain, is precisely what prevented its popularity from spreading to other countries at
the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. However, as mentioned in the
introduction to this chapter, with continuing expansion, travel, and trade, and as a result of the
Peninsular Wars (1808-1814), eventually the French and English began smoking cigars and
using tobacco in other ways. By the Crimean War (1853-1856), a large spike in cigar and
cigarette smoking in England and France meant that Spain was now a major provider of
Europe’s cigars.
For these reasons, it is significant not only that Carmen takes place in southern Spain
where Carmen works in the famous Seville cigar factory19 (a place not unlike the radically
19 While Carmen leaves her position at the factory early into the narrative, it is clearly an important element of the
story and one that is emphasized in every retelling of the novella.
40
political cigar factories of Cuba20) rolling cigars, but that the story is narrated by a cigar-loving
French amateur anthropologist and set in the period before France and England began smoking
cigars and cigarettes on a large scale. Contemporary readers of this novella, which is also
framed as a travel narrative, would have paid special attention to the intriguing foreign
practices—such as cigar smoking— revealed in the story and the allure of the description of
foreign spaces—such as large cigar factories where Gypsy women like Carmen (that is, femmes
fatale who smoke) work. The fascination readers in France would have felt towards these exotic
places and people explains the “anthropologist” perspective adopted by the narrator of Carmen.
Significantly, the supposedly neutral anthropologist perspective adopted by the narrator
of Carmen is not unlike the voyeurism inherent in the Cuban lithographs. Like the lithographs,
Carmen pretends to be an accurate, authentic representation of a foreign space, though it is
clearly presented through the male gaze. However, despite the fact that Carmen is named for the
smoking woman at its center, the French narrator meets Carmen only for a few very brief
moments near the beginning of the novella: the rest of the story is told through “observation,”
assumption, and reliance on don José’s version of events, which he relates to the narrator.21
Thus, this story—related by a Frenchmen, relying on the account of a Spaniard, in a novella that
was intended for other white male Europeans—is clearly meant to relate specific ideals about
European masculinity back to European men. It is for these reasons that, again we will see here,
it is not accidental that this woman is so heavily associated with tobacco. Like the mulata,
Carmen’s association with tobacco further codifies and commodifies her to make her, like
20 In actual practice, Spanish cigar factories, like Cuban cigar factories, employed poor women, who were often non-
white (Gypsy women instead of mulatas) and also used lectores.
21 For those unfamiliar with the text, the narrator does meet Carmen once, at the beginning of the novella. The rest
of the novella deals with the don José’s story of his obsession with the “dangerous” gypsy-woman, Carmen, to
whom the narrator, too, was attracted at their meeting.
41
tobacco, a tool for creating “appropriate” masculinity for don José. In both cases, that
association clearly reveals the way that tobacco is associated with the imperial Other and the way
both become an integral part of the creation of appropriate masculinity.
To be clear, the question of masculinity is, in fact, a central concern in Carmen, and
though don José complains to the narrator of the trouble Carmen has caused him, by the end of
the story Carmen’s commodification and consumption do indeed create an appropriate
masculinity for don José. At the beginning of don José’s tale (chronologically speaking), it is
clear that the problem with don José’s masculinity resides in his ethnicity, which holds a
questionable status in this particular context.22 Through the narrator we discover that don José is
a Basque hidalgo, an “old Christian” (Mérimée 39-40), and a blonde-haired blue-eyed aristocrat,
who appears at first to fit traditional European ideals. However, don José’s ethnicity is itself a
problem as the Basque country has always had a questionable relationship with the rest of Spain
and represents to the French narrator the land between imperial France and “oriental” Spain.
Furthermore, for “all their ethnic differences, Basques and Gypsies have a lot in common in
Carmen” (Colmeiro 137), as, in the story, the questionably masculine don José, after becoming
enamored of Carmen, trades his military uniform and city-life for Gypsy garb and life in the
forest, becoming an “acculturated Gypsy, to the extent that he is mistaken for one in Gibraltar”
(Colmeiro 137) and thus becomes doubly Othered. However, when don José kills Carmen at the
end of the tale, he is reintegrated into the patriarchy (albeit in jail).23 This is symbolically
22 This is, of course, not unlike the criollo, whose race, according to the Spaniards, would have been in question due
to contact with Afro-Cubans.
23 By the end of the novel, don José is back in the city (civilization) and has achieved the sympathy of the French
narrator. While he is in jail, there is a sense that he now “belongs” to a (masculine) community that is represented
by the French narrator. Thus, while some may argue that prison is a space metaphorically outside of society, I argue
that Mérimée meant the reader to feel that don José has been returned to the fold by the end of the narrative.
42
represented by his return to the city (i.e. civilization), as well as by the sympathy and masculine
camaraderie the narrator feels for him. Once don José has rejected the Other, his place in the
patriarchy is more stable. However, because don José essentially “went native,” leaving his post
and living as a Gypsy in the forest, his prison sentence reminds other men of the importance of
masculine self-control. The fact that Carmen is a challenge to the masculinity of the male
characters, as well as a conquest that will prove their masculinity, is signaled to the reader by her
appropriation of the masculine act of smoking. In this sense, Carmen becomes like the “hawk”
in the lithograph above titled “The Dove and the Hawk” (Figure 2-4).
However, as in the case of the mulata, this tale of the sexual commodification and
consumption of the Other in many ways depends on the associations of tobacco. For example,
the first time don José is introduced in Carmen he is a fugitive and encounters the French
narrator in a wood outside the city: in the interaction that follows, tobacco is used to establish a
bond between these two characters and to reveal the masculine crisis don José is experiencing.
When the French narrator offers don José a cigar and don José politely responds, “What a time it
is since I’ve had a smoke!” (Mérimée 13), his exclamation that he “used to” smoke expensive
cigars reveals that he is not a lower-class bandit, as the reader and narrator might suspect, but is,
in fact, a member of the upper class that has somehow fallen to his current position. The narrator
recognizes that, rather than an “untouchable,” don José is an aristocrat whose masculinity is at
stake. Don José’s acquaintance with the French narrator and his acceptance of the cigar from a
fellow gentleman marks the beginning of a narration that will lead to don José’s reintegration
into patriarchal society.
While, as in many mid-nineteenth-century adventure novels, Carmen’s racial Othering is
an important element of her role in don José’s adventure and consequent development, it is
43
significant that what makes Carmen stand apart from other Gypsy women in the text is her
smoking. For example, when Carmen is first introduced, the French narrator remarks:
“[Carmen] hastened to inform me that she was very fond of the smell of tobacco, and that she
even smoked herself” (Mérimée 28). As Richard Klein argues, Carmen encourages the reader to
draw a connection between Carmen’s body and the commodity of tobacco, as she is not simply a
woman who smokes, she is “the fiery heart of the burning ember, Carmen red at the end of the
cigarette, in which every brilliant dream is perpetually turned to delicious smoke and bitter ash”
(114). Further, her power is somehow linked to tobacco in the text, as it seems to be the smoke
she exhales as much as her beauty that ensnares the men. For example, in the same scene where
Carmen declares her love of smoking, after the French narrator offers her a cigar, he comments
to the reader “We mingled our smoke” (Mérimée 33); it is from that moment that he becomes
obsessed with Carmen.24 Finally, while Carmen’s smoke might also be read metaphorically to
“allud[e] to her [supposed] fatal fickleness” (Mitchell “Prometheus” 1), it is significant, of
course, that Carmen’s job at the tobacco factory where she works is literally—and quite
symbolically—to roll cigars by hand and then to chop off the head (Mérimée 40). In this way,
tobacco is both clearly linked to masculinity and, as the text makes clear, specifically to the
challenge—and threat—that Carmen poses to don José’s masculinity. As with the mulata, this
threat sets Carmen up as a conquest for don José that becomes necessary for him to attain
appropriate masculinity.
Additionally, like the mulata, Carmen’s race and connection to tobacco have a circular
relationship. It is because Carmen is racially Othered that she is associated with tobacco, but at
24 It is this obsession that will cause the French narrator to forget his “anthropological” mission and beg don José to
relate the story of Carmen.
44
the same time her association with tobacco further racializes her. For example, in Carmen
tobacco is linked (by the French narrator) to Spanishness in general and the Gypsy women who
work in the factories in particular (Mérimée 41)—coincidentally, a scene in the novel suggests,
as José Colmeiro argues, “fantasies of the oriental harem or brothel” (136). Similarly, the French
narrator’s Orientalist “explanatory” remarks throughout the text, such as his declaration that “In
Spain the giving and accepting of a cigar establishes bonds of hospitality similar to those
founded in Eastern countries on the partaking of bread and salt” (Mérimée 13-14), clearly
Orientalizes the smoking of cigars in Spain. Because tobacco is made exotic before we are even
introduced to Carmen, her smoking and connection to tobacco perfectly reinforce her Otherness
and sexuality, the two factors that become most essential to her commodification. In this sense,
Carmen suffers at least a triple Othering: first, due to nineteenth-century Europe’s “conflation
of” (particularly southern) “Spain with the Orient”; second, due to the “romantic mythification”
of the Gypsy (Colmeiro 127); and, third, due to her connection to the exotic commodity of
tobacco.
However, like the mulata, at the same time there is a certain alluring ambiguity about
Carmen’s Otherness. While it is clear to the reader that Carmen is a Gypsy, those around her
seem continually confused by her ethnicity. For example, when Carmen asks the French narrator
to guess her ethnicity, he responds: “I think you are from the country of Jesus, two places out of
Paradise…[or] perhaps you are of Moorish blood—or…a Jewess” (Mérimée 29). The conflation
of Andalusian, Moorish, and Jewish (and Gypsy) nationality here makes clear that all are almost
interchangeable in this context. This narrator is attracted to her smoking and to her exoticism.
Of course, it is at least equally important that Carmen at first mistakes the French narrator for an
45
Englishmen (Mérimée 28), a fact which further demonstrates that this world is divided between
white (Western) European males and exotic Others. Tobacco is what they have in common.
Additionally, like the mulata in the Cuban lithographs, Carmen is sexualized, and
threateningly so, by her transgressive association to tobacco. In the first place, as we see above,
her transgression is clearly linked to fears of castration, symbolized by her job at the tobacco
factory, which is literally to roll cigars and cut off the tip. Second, each time the reader
encounters Carmen in the text (through both don José’s and the narrator’s accounts), the text
works diligently to highlight some element of her sexuality. For example, according to the
narrator, their first encounter involves Carmen using her sexuality in an attempt to rob him
(Mérimée 35). Similarly, the first time we see her outside of the cigar factory don José remarks
that she was barely clothed, wearing a “very short skirt” and having “thrown her mantilla back,
to show her shoulders” (41); according to don José, Carmen’s first words to him are an attempt
to bargain for her freedom from imprisonment using her sexuality (45). Because these incidents
described by the two male voices of the text suggest that Carmen’s sexuality is a tool that she
uses repeatedly in deliberate, conniving, and manipulative ways, the text suggests that it is the
men who are the victims of her predatory sexual behavior.
While her carefully coded transgression and sexualization signals to the reader that her
commodification is necessary and that these traits must be quelled and/or redirected for
productive purposes, her commodification is depicted as voluntary. According to don José, it
was not only Carmen who initiated their first contact and their first bargain (Mérimée 45), but,
more significantly, don José suggests after he has killed Carmen that Carmen returned to the
place where don José was staying, knowing that he would kill her—in essence voluntarily giving
her life so that don José could return to society. Don José states, “I was hoping Carmen would
46
have fled…She did not choose that any one should say I had frightened her” (Mérimée 89). In
the end, when don José kills (metaphorically consuming) Carmen (the exotic, sexual body of the
Other), don José reasserts and redefines his (white imperial) masculinity.
Carmen’s ties to tobacco highlight her transgression, sexuality, and exoticism and thus
make her both a dangerous conquest and the perfect Other against which don José and the
narrator can define their imperial masculine identity—and it is a transaction that works. In the
last scene of the novella, don José begs Carmen to leave the country with him, apparently
believing that leaving the south of Spain will allow him to reform and leave behind the life of
crime they lived outside of the city. When he states, “It is because of you that I am a robber and
a murderer. Carmen, my Carmen, let me save you, and save myself,” Carmen knowingly replies
“You love me still and that is why you want to kill me” (91). When she refuses to go with him,
he stabs her twice and later turns himself in “at the nearest guard-room” (Mérimée 92). Later don
José eschews any responsibility for her death and instead blames “the calle [street]…for having
brought her up as they did” (92-93). In any case, it is in this final moment, ironically during a
loss of control, that don José finally (re)gains masculine self-control. Because, not unlike the
mulata, Carmen’s association with tobacco emphasizes her transgression, race, and
commodification, her consumption (death) and the re-imagining of its cause masculinizes don
José, de-racializes him, and returns him to male society. Thus, this is a story that is not simply
about a femme fatal and the soldier who fell for her; it is also the story of the consumption of the
Other as a method for attaining appropriate masculinity and the way that tobacco becomes a
central element of that transaction. After all, though it appears early in the novella, it is
chronologically after don José kills Carmen that he shares a cigar with the narrator—the first he
has had in a long time and the first he will enjoy now that he is appropriately masculine.
47
English Writer Ouida’s Cigarette (1867)
In the mid-1870s, French composer Georges Bizet would write an opera based on
Mérimée’s novella that would become a blockbuster hit in Paris, London, and New York.
Although the opera had not yet been written at the time of the publication of Under Two Flags,
by Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé25), it is clear from the reception and the reviews of the opera that
the novella was read by Victorians earlier in the century. Perhaps as a result, Under Two Flags,
written twenty years after Carmen, shares some marked similarities to the lithographs and
Carmen.
Under Two Flags centers on Bertie Cecil, an indolent, effeminate aristocrat who finds
himself in great financial distress due to his own profligacy and the loss of an important horse-
race on which he has bet. To make matters worse, he is falsely accused of forgery, but cannot
clear his name as it would mean destroying the reputation of a lady and exposing his younger
brother, the true culprit. Consequently, Cecil fakes his own death and exiles himself to Algeria,
where he joins “Chasseurs d’ Afrique,” a fictional regiment that clearly represents the French
Foreign Legion. In Africa, Bertie meets the young Cigarette, a female soldier whose self-
sacrifice ultimately make Bertie a war hero; shortly after her death the main conflicts of the
novel are resolved and Bertie returns to England with his best friend and his best friend’s sister,
who will become Bertie’s wife.
While the plot of Under Two Flags is quite different from Carmen, like the Cuban
lithographs and Carmen, Under Two Flags depicts a world where the attainment of appropriate
masculinity by the male character is dependent on the consumption of (tobacco and) a racially
ambiguous and transgressive woman who is associated with tobacco—in this case, a woman
25 Ramé later adopted the more French-sounding “Marie Louise de la Rameé.”
48
appropriately named Cigarette. Like Carmen and the mulata, Cigarette’s tobacco consumption
helps mark her as sexualized, transgressive, and Other, and her death/consumption helps make
the male protagonist more appropriately masculine.
As Cigarette’s nickname suggests, tobacco consumption is clearly an important reality of
the world depicted by Under Two Flags, and its consumption is clearly linked with masculinity.
The sheer number and variety of references to tobacco in Under Two Flags, which include pipes,
cigarettes, cigars, bowls, and hookah, reflects the veritable explosion of tobacco consumption by
the mid-nineteenth-century in England. Where earlier in the century the British mostly either
consumed (“French”) snuff or smoked (“English”) pipes (with a very limited number of
Englishmen smoking “foreign” cigars), by midcentury—due to British colonial expansion and
soldiers returning from abroad26--tobacco flooded into England (and other European countries)
in all sorts of “new” incarnations, including the hookah and meerschaum bowls that the
protagonist, Bertie, uses. Therefore, by the 1860s, men in England not only used tobacco, but
had a wide variety of methods of using it to choose from, each with a specific symbolic
association. For example, pipes in the early nineteenth century were intimately associated with
bachelors (Gately 191) or with statesmen.
Because (as mentioned in the introduction) smoking by women was even more
condemned in 1860s England than it was in Cuba or Spain in the 1840s, it is significant that the
commodified woman in the story is named Cigarette. Her name not only clearly marks her as
commodified but signals to the reader, due to the precise commodity she is likened to, that she
will be used for masculine consumption by the end of the novel. While the heroine of Under
Two Flags is called Cigarette because she smokes them, the connotations of cigarettes in the
26 For example, soldiers might be returning from the Crimean or Peninsular Wars.
49
nineteenth century are relevant to the text. For example, due to the opening of French and
British cigarette factories in 1843 and 1846, respectively, cigarettes were the cheaper and more
easily available tobacco product in the last third of the century (Mitchell “Prometheus” 3), and,
consequently, a less exotic tobacco product than hookah, meerschaum, and cigars.27 Cigarette,
like the product she is named after, is somewhat less exotic than the cigar-smoking Carmen:
though the mixed-race, cross-dressing French-speaking female soldier is clearly Othered, her
loyalty, bravery, and honor are repeatedly depicted as representative of traditional “English”
values. Additionally, because in this period cigarettes were intimately associated with soldiers
who braved harsh conditions in exotic locales (Klein 3),28 Ouida’s choice of tobacco products
reflects the fact that Bertie’s enlistment as a soldier is a central component of this masculine
bildungsroman. Thus, while, as with don José and the criollo, Bertie achieves appropriate
masculinity through an encounter with the female Other, in this case that female Other helps him
to become masculine not only through her death (consumption), but by making him a war hero.
However, while Bertie’s service in the French Foreign Legion becomes “the proving
ground for his masculinity and honor” (Szabo 281), the female soldier who fights alongside him,
Cigarette, is the true linchpin in Bertie’s transformation—a fact that is emphasized throughout
the text in the many comparisons between Bertie and Cigarette, which highlight Bertie’s
femininity and Cigarette’s masculinity and which foreshadow the exchange that will take place
upon Cigarette’s death/consumption. For example, from the beginning of the novel, Ouida
describes Bertie in exceptionally feminine terms: “he was known generally in the Brigades as
‘Beauty’…[with] a face of as much delicacy and brilliancy as a woman’s; His features were
27 Perhaps consequently, cigarettes would become the tobacco product most smoked by women in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, when women began to smoke publicly.
28 For more on this association, see also Chapter 5: “The Soldier’s Friend” in Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime.
50
exceedingly fair—fair as the fairest girl’s [sic]” (Ouida 12). As Victoria Szabo argues, while part
of this representation has to do “with the old idea of the soldier as an aristocratic dandy,” his
relationship with his (albeit considerably more masculine) best friend, the “Seraph,” suggests a
“more overt femininity and homoeroticism” (Szabo 289). In deliberate contrast to Bertie, the
cross-dressing and tobacco-smoking Cigarette is characterized as “audaciously pretty,” with hair
“cut as short as a boy’s” and whose lips were most “handsome” when “a cigarette was between
them” (Ouida 145). She was “dashing, dauntless, vivacious,” has had a “thousand lovers,” and
was more like a “handsome, saucy boy than anything else under the sun” (Ouida 148). By the
novel’s end, because of his association with the quasi-masculine, transgressive Cigarette, Bertie,
at first an indolent, dandified aristocrat, becomes a silent long-suffering war hero who leaves
Africa and Cigarette behind in order to return to England and his beloved horse with his best
friend and his new wife, his best friend’s sister.29 Ultimately, even while in this text the problem
with the protagonist’s masculinity lies with his inappropriately gendered behavior (rather than
his race), Cigarette, like the other women discussed here, becomes a required element in the male
protagonist’s acquisition of appropriate masculinity.
For example, like the mulata and Carmen, Cigarette’s race and sexuality are enhanced
through her connection to tobacco. Cigarette is described as the daughter of a camp follower,30
who has a “heart as bronzed as her cheek” (Ouida 148) and tiny “brown hands” (Ouida 145).
Her “scarlet lips” are most beautiful when a cigarette or “a short pipe” are “between them”
29 About midway through the story, Bertie encounters a beautiful aristocratic woman named Venetia, of whom he
becomes instantly enamored. Venetia is the appropriate love interest who is everything Cigarette is not—a paragon
of Victorian femininity. Later we discover that Venetia is the Seraph’s younger sister. Thus, after learning
appropriate masculinity, he not only leaves Africa, but his relationship with the Seraph becomes less homoerotic,
symbolized by his marriage to his best friend’s sister.
30 The nationality of her father is unknown.
51
(Ouida 145) and she dances “with the wild grace of an Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl”
and all the “warmth of Africa, all the wit of France, all the bohemianism of the Flag” were in her
dancing (Ouida 158). As Pamela Gilbert explains, this reference is particularly revealing as
“British readers were familiar with the figure of the Nautch girl as the emblem of Indian moral
decay and its infectiousness; British men, it was thought, were vulnerable to the appeal of the
Nautch girls who encouraged them to ‘go native’” (“Ouida” 175). While Bertie remains
invulnerable to Cigarette, whom he continually infantilizes by calling her “little one” or other
affection nicknames such as “my brave little champion” or “kitten” (Ouida 219-220), it is clear
that the men around Cigarette feel the effects of Cigarette’s “infectious” and erotic behavior as
well as the attractiveness of her exoticism. Similarly, despite Bertie’s apparent immunity, as
Matthew Hilton states, “Cigarette’s masculine activities d[o] not leave her entirely ‘unsexed’”
(141). After all, Ouida makes clear that most men find this smoking woman very attractive,
including her “thousand lovers,” “from handsome marquises of the Guides to tawny, black-
browned scoundrels in the Zoaves” (Ouida 148).
Furthermore, as with the mulata and Carmen, there is a certain racial ambiguity to
Cigarette: it is not clear what nationality she is (possibly Creole French or Franco-African) and
the imagery used to her describe her borrows from any number of nationalities. At the same
time, Cigarette does not care to know Bertie’s nationality and cares only that he is an aristocrat,
which she doesn’t like, a fact that she refers to often. In fact, when she first learns of Bertie’s
blonde-haired love interest, Venetia, Cigarette angrily refers to her rival as a “dainty aristocrate
[sic]”–-a phrase that is clearly meant as an insult (Ouida 217). Thus, as does Carmen, Under Two
Flags works carefully to construct a world divided between white European and racial Other:
Bertie’s exact European identity is somewhat irrelevant, as is Cigarette’s exact racial makeup.
52
Instead, this text, like the others I have discussed in this chapter, is far more concerned with
providing, through tobacco and these racially ambiguous women, commodified safe spaces,
where (imperial) masculinity can safely be worked out.
Importantly, tobacco is not only a ubiquitous commodity in the text, but even from the
first few pages of the novel tobacco functions as a sort of barometer of masculinity. For
example, the first time we see Bertie Cecil he is smoking from a bowl, which as Iain Gately
explains, was indicative of “smoking prowess” and was a favorite of the upper-class (189) and
therefore an appropriate method of tobacco consumption for Bertie. However, throughout the
scene Bertie is promiscuous with his tobacco consumption as he continues to take “deep draughts
of Turkish Latakia previous to parting with his pipe for four or five hours” and most of his
exhalations are accompanied by “meditative whiff[s] from his meerschaum” (Ouida 14). A
page or so later he wishes for a “papelito” [cigarette] (16), and, within a few more, he smokes
from a hookah (24). With the repeated references to smoking and the range of tobacco products
he smokes in such a short time as well as the consistent attention paid to the object he smokes,
we see that, as with everything else in Bertie’s life, he is perhaps too concerned with the
performance of smoking—and therefore represents a dandified version of masculinity. In
contrast, by the end of the novel he smokes cigarettes, and occasionally cigars, in a military
setting, representing appropriate tobacco consumption and his transformation to a physically
strong and emotionally reserved gentlemen soldier.
Despite the fact that tobacco products often served as attributes of male power and were
central to male identity, Cigarette not only smokes the masculine commodity, but that
consumption becomes one of her defining characteristics. The first time we see her she speaks
“with a puff of her namesake” (Ouida 145). When she is angry, she hurls a cigar at the offender
53
(Ouida 166). She smokes to defy social conventions and, as the narrator remarks, to scorn the
“doom of Sex, dancing it down, drinking it down, laughing it down, burning it out in tobacco
fumes” (Ouida 206). Throughout the text her constant anger is couched in language that links
her symbolically to a smoldering cigarette: flashes of anger seen in her eyes remind us of the
sudden brightness of the embers when one inhales from a cigarette (Ouida 191, 209). In this way,
for Cigarette, smoking is not only something she embodies, but is often tied to her “pluck” and
her fiery nature. At the same time, Bertie declares that Cigarette has no real future, that she will
soon become the “cruel, terrible thing which is unsightly and repugnant to even the lowest
among men; which is as the lees of the drunk wine, as the ashes of the burnt-out fires” (Ouida
245, emphasis mine). So numerous are the references to cigarettes here that were one to
eliminate all the references to smoking, there would remain little information about Cigarette.
In a familiar pattern, this text, like the ones before it, makes clear that the consumption of
this mixed-race woman is necessary for Bertie’s transformation. Cigarette saves Bertie’s life and
refuses a military honor, instead publicly declaring it Bertie’s right, thereby making him a war
hero (Ouida 354-355). With the color in her cheeks “bright and radiant” (334) and “with all her
fiery disdain” “ablaze…like brandy in a flame,” Cigarette declares to the shock of all those
gathered that the military honor of the Cross belongs, not to her but instead to Bertie, as he “is
the finest soldier in Africa” (335). A short while later, when Bertie is sentenced to death for
striking a superior officer, she dashes across a desert for hours trying to save him. In a crucial
shift, as Cigarette rides to save Bertie the narrator remarks that Cigarette “had been ere now a
child and a hero; beneath this blow which struck at him she changed—she became a woman and
a martyr” (399, emphasis mine). A few pages later, at the moment Bertie displays appropriate
masculine control, meeting his death “with silence and with courage” and becomes appropriately
54
masculine (Ouida 408), Cigarette jumps in front of Bertie and the “death that was doomed was
dealt” (Ouida 409). Thus, Cigarette, whom Bertie had continually referred to as a child,
becomes a woman at the moment of her consumption and martyrdom; once she dies, the
heretofore effeminate Bertie is made properly masculine and can return home to England.
Of course, like the mulata and Carmen, Cigarette’s death (and metaphorical
consumption) is depicted as voluntary. As Pamela Gilbert explains, in Ouida’s fiction both “men
and women must negotiate the demands of power in the realm of exchange…Men and bad
women, can (safely) enter this process of circulation—women by yielding to it and directing
their own commodification, and men by a dangerous and careful negotiation of identity and the
exercise of their ability to control other commodities” (Gilbert “Disease” 141). In this way,
Cigarette’s only power here is to direct her own commodification, while Bertie demonstrates his
masculinity by controlling her along with other commodities. As a result of her death (and
metaphorical consumption), which saves Bertie’s life while preserving his newly acquired
masculinity, Bertie returns to England, now properly masculine, with his best friend and his
appropriate (non-smoking, blonde, English) wife, Venetia. Although Venetia’s “delicate face”
just happens to look “almost absurdly like” the Seraph’s (Ouida 98), his marriage to a beautiful
woman who is a paragon of Victorian virtue is clearly symbolic of his newly acquired
masculinity.
Ultimately, here, as in all these texts, Bertie leaves the world of the Other, with a new
understanding of his relationship (as a masculine, white European) to the imperial Other. His
encounter with Cigarette, who is perfectly codified through her association with tobacco, is what
makes this possible. As with Carmen, Cigarette’s association with tobacco lends her a fiery
spirit that benefits Bertie by serving, to some degree, as an example of appropriate masculine
55
behavior. Similarly, while the mulata became a symbol for Cuban national identity, Cigarette
stands in as the ideal (English) soldier, and, as such, allows Bertie to return to England a hero.
Although there are slight variations in the way these women are used, in every case, these
women are marked for consumption through their association with tobacco. Further, these
women are made exotic, sexualized, and transgressive in a period where one version of
masculinity gaining currency depended on men being the directors of desire and the colonizers of
the Other. While some might argue that the fact that these women are here coded as exotic is a
way of excusing their transgressive behavior (particularly their smoking), this same exoticism
reveals important clues about nineteenth-century attitudes towards tobacco. Through their
consumption of tobacco and their interaction with these mixed-race smoking women, each of
these men defines his masculinity against the commodified female/exotic body and leaves this
encounter with the Other with a new understanding of his place within the empire. Each of these
texts also ultimately reimagines the conditions of the attainment of that masculinity. The fact
that the symbolic associations of tobacco are similar (and that these representations of mixed-
race women are similar) in texts produced in Cuba, France, and England suggests that tobacco’s
attendant meanings were carried with it on trade routes and by traveling soldiers. In this way, it
appears that many of these countries were trading not just in commodities, but also in culture.
Furthermore, these texts were not only extremely popular in the nineteenth century, but
their legacies carried into the twentieth century. For example, Under Two Flags had a huge
readership and the enduring character of Cigarette has been represented in several motion
pictures in the twentieth century (for example, in 1912, 1916, 1922 and 1936). It is even now
one of the most widely recognized sensation novels by Victorianists. Similarly, Carmen has been
reproduced into several plays, a famous opera by Bizet, and countless film adaptations. So
56
famous is Carmen that, while written in French, it is one of the three literary figures that the
Spanish most identify with today (after Don Juan and Quixote) (Colmeiro 127). Finally, the use
of the mulata’s image to sell tobacco would be the beginning of trend over the next century to
pair images of exotic women with tobacco products. In fact, according to Matthew Hilton,
Cigarette “set the tone for the representation of women and smoking in the turn-of the century
art, literature and photography” (Hilton 141). Similarly, in turn-of-the-century tobacco art,
representations of “Carmen types” were frequently used (Mitchell “Images” 329). In fact, of all
the “exotic” types of women used in tobacco art, Spanish/Gypsy women “are most often shown
engaged in the act of smoking” (Mitchell “Images” 333, emphasis mine). Together all these
facts demonstrate the paradox that represents these women: on one hand that they are so
commodified through their association to tobacco within these texts, that it is only fitting that
their stories have been further commodified through countless retellings and re-appropriations;
and on the other, their popularity is evidence of the fact that there is something about these
smoking women that has spoken to their audiences for the last century and a half.
The continued popularity of these texts and their themes throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries is also evidence of tobacco’s persistent association with exoticism and
colonialism. While throughout the nineteenth century tobacco was a product increasingly
produced in Latin America and the Caribbean (and those origins were largely known and
acknowledged31), tobacco was for a long time associated with the colonies more generally. In
the chapters that follow, the exact origination of each of the commodities becomes more and
more relevant; by studying each of these commodities and the meanings they take on, we can
31 This fact is evidenced by cultural artifacts from the period, including Kipling’s poem above.
57
learn a great deal about the way that Latin American goods were consumed by Victorians and
used symbolically in everyday culture.
Figure 2-1. “Descuidos del tocador.” [“Carelessness of the Player”.] From the series “Vida y
Muerte de la Mulata.” Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las Marquillas
Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX. La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985. 13.
58
Figure 2-2. “La conducen al hospital.” [“They Take Her to the Hospital.”] From the series “La
Vida de la Mulata.” Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las Marquillas
Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX. La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985. 30.
Figure 2-3. “Las consecuencias.” [“The Consequences.”] From the series “Vida y Muerte de la
Mulata.” Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las Marquillas Cigarreras Del
Siglo XIX. La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985. 18.
59
Figure 2-4. “El palomo y la gabilana.” [The Male Dove and the Female Hawk.”] From the
series “Historia de la Mulata.” Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las
Marquillas Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX. La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba,
1985. 24.
Figure 2-5. “Si me amas serás feliz.” [If You Loved Me, You Would Be Happy.”] From the
series “Vida y Muerte de la Mulata.” Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las
60
Marquillas Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX. La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba,
1985. 8.
61
CHAPTER 3
SWEET DOMESTICITY: THE SYMBOLICS OF (CUBAN) SUGAR IN MIDCENTURY
ENGLISH TEXTS
In the preceding chapter I attempted to illustrate that mid-nineteenth-century
representations of tobacco, when paired with the image of a racially mixed woman, functioned to
consolidate imperial masculinity for the purchaser or reader. I also argued that the fact that these
representations existed in both mid-nineteenth century European and Cuban texts suggests that
these nations were trading not only in commodities such as tobacco, but also in culture, a fact
which illustrates the ways that (colonial) commodities were used to make meaning, perhaps in
similar ways across different geographies. In this chapter I discuss representations of (Cuban)
sugar in mid-nineteenth-century English and Cuban texts to illustrate the ways that sugar was
used to work out ideas about domestic sanctity in the face of increasingly global networks.
Significantly, because sugar and tobacco circulated along similar trade routes, both
carried with them strong associations with colonial culture; however, in Victorian England the
two products represented two very different responses to exoticism: while tobacco represented a
celebration of those (colonial) trade routes that brought exotic products to England, sugar
represented the fear that the English had little control over the production methods of those same
commodities. Thus, on the one hand tobacco represented a celebration of adventure and
Orientalism (especially for male consumers), while on the other hand sugar came to represent
(racial) purity at home—a purity that came only after a deliberate (if not always successful)
erasure of these colonial associations. Importantly, sugar’s symbolic value was similar in Cuba.
For example, while tobacco represented a sort of celebration of miscegenation through the figure
of the mulata, as discussed in the previous chapter, sugar came to represent the opposite
impulse—that is, in this context, attempts to “whiten” Cuban culture according to European
standards. Notably, sugar is a particularly suitable product for this metaphor as it whitens as it is
62
processed; sugar is brown only when it is partially refined. Consequently, though sugar and
tobacco were similarly produced and circulated,1 in Victorian England and in Cuba sugar came
to represent the opposite of tobacco: if tobacco was masculine, sugar was feminine; if tobacco
was exotic, sugar was domestic; tobacco was symbolically racialized, sugar was symbolically
“purified” of racial otherness.
While this chapter will focus primarily on England, these connotations of sugar—and the
fact that they occur in Cuba as well as England--will be important to understanding my overall
argument. Ultimately, I argue in this chapter, when we examine references to sugar in mid-
nineteenth-century texts—such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), George Eliot’s
“Brother Jacob” (1860), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Curse for a Nation” (1860)—three
very important elements become clear: first, that sugar (and its production) was an important
symbol in mid-nineteenth-century English writers’ attempts to construct a national identity that
turned on notions of England’s “superior” modernity; second, that, because Cuba was still using
slaves in sugar production, Cuba (and its sugar) became the “Other” against which midcentury,
post-abolition England contrasted itself; and, third, that sugar’s associations with racial purity
and domestic femininity played a key role in why and how sugar was used as a center for these
debates regarding modernity and ethical production.
To best illustrate my argument and its intervention in the scholarship that exists, I will
spend a significant portion of this chapter reviewing prior scholarship. In the first place, by
examining the research done by Victorianists on sugar as a symbol in texts written before
abolition, I demonstrate how my argument regarding midcentury texts addresses a gap in our
1 That is, produced through the labor of slaves or freed slaves, and circulated along similar trade routes.
63
understanding of Victorian commodity culture as well as our understanding of Cuba’s place in
the greater web of the British Empire. Then, after I provide some brief context on the cultural
and historical relationship between England and Cuba, I will illustrate how, by midcentury—in
part because of sugar’s appearance in earlier abolitionist rhetoric, in part because of sugar’s
association with Cuba—sugar became a symbol that allowed (female) Victorian writers to
imaginatively define the (“modern, industrial, ethical”) British Empire against other (“less-
modern, less-ethical, less-industrialized”) world producers that England nonetheless depended on
for raw materials.
The Tradition of Sugar and Slavery in the Domestic Space
Sugar was a useful symbol to the midcentury writers I discuss in this chapter in part due
to sugar’s history as a symbol for British abolition and female political action. Thus, one reason
that scholarship of English literature has focused so heavily on texts produced during the period
when English sugar came from English slave-colonies is that, as Lenore Davidoff and Catherine
Hall illustrate, the early nineteenth century was also a period when women in England exerted a
surprising amount of political power in the form of “influence” (Davidoff and Hall 170). In
short, one of the most tangible ways these early women exerted their influence was over the
consumption of slave-produced sugar by the English. The fact that British women chose to gain
political influence by regulating the ways that the English consumed certain commodities reflects
a historical moment when “consumer objects became, with the growth of wide-scale
consumption, ‘an expression and guide to social identity’” and British culture “projected onto the
female subject both its fondest wishes for the transforming power of consumerism and its
deepest anxieties about the corrupting influence of goods” (Kowaleski-Wallace 5-6). During the
early nineteenth century many women became concerned about the fact that Caribbean sugar had
not only become “an important symbol of the proliferating chains of interdependence between
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England and its Caribbean colonies,” but a symbol of all that was undesirable about that
affiliation—in particular, its association with (the mistreatment of) black slaves. Consequently,
these women were able gain a new level of power through their debates about sugar, and
eventually—through methods such as pamphlet writing and boycotting— to exert enough
influence to abolish slavery in the British Empire (Sussman 48). Thus, scholarship on sugar in
the first three decades of the nineteenth century in England often turns on the question of
abolition within the empire, as well as on attempts by early Victorian women to increase their
political power through abolitionism.
While many commodities were produced through slavery, these “influential” women of
the emerging British middle class in early-nineteenth-century England may have focused their
energies on sugar in particular due to its symbolic association with the (maternal) female body
(Kowaleski-Wallace 40). Thus, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace suggests, because of these debates
over sugar and slavery, “real women [were] enlisted in a national politics… [and] their domestic
actions mimic[ked] in miniature the actions of a state imagined as a maternal body” (Kowaleski-
Wallace 47). This association not only made it easier for women to claim sugar consumption as
their domain, but by boycotting sugar women were effectively challenging “the semiotic chain
that align[ed] [them] with the very properties of sugar itself,” and argued that they were not “to
be associated with mindless sensual pleasures” (Kowaleski-Wallace 41). In this way female
domestic virtue played an “innovative role” in “deciding the nature of Britain’s involvement with
Caribbean slavery” (Sussman 48) and by symbolically focusing on sugar women were ultimately
able to achieve political power through their ability to “regulate domestic space” (Kowaleski-
Wallace 42).
65
Scholars not only illustrate how real women gained real power through these debates
about sugar and through careful negotiations of femininity, but how literature produced during
this period also uses much of the same rhetoric so popular among abolitionists. For example, one
important rhetorical strategy employed by these early-nineteenth-century authors, or “mothers of
empire,” which will be important to my analysis of midcentury texts, is the rhetoric of
contamination. Many abolitionist texts at the beginning of the century metaphorically connected
eating sugar with “eating the slave’s blood, or sometimes, bloodied flesh” (Kowaleski-Wallace
46). As Sussman illustrates, abolition pamphlets circulated horrifying “true” scenarios, such as
tales of slaves cutting themselves and bleeding into the rum or molasses they were working to
produce, literally contaminating the sugar eaten by the English (57), who would thus become
“unwilling cannibals” (50). This early rhetoric suggests that one of sugar’s most dangerous
features was thought to be its misleading visible purity—though snow-white, sugar could be
contaminated by unknown horrors perpetuated on dark bodies.2 Thus, for early-nineteenth-
century abolitionists, the only way to ensure that the English were consuming “pure” sugar was
to guarantee that sugar was produced under safe and humane labor practices—a belief that was
furthered by early-nineteenth-century writers.
While I intend to pick up where these scholars left off, by looking at texts produced after
British abolition that continue to discuss sugar, this heavy-handed rhetoric concerning sugar,
slavery, and the diligent oversight of domestic women (in the name of “pure” white femininity)
that is identified by these scholars will be a large part of my analysis of midcentury novels, as
later discussions about sugar use this rhetoric heavily. However, it is clear that in the decades
between this early-nineteenth-century abolitionist movement and the production of the texts I
2 This, as suggested earlier, is partially why sugar was linked to fears of miscegenation, especially in Cuba.
66
discuss, English women writers’ concerns shifted from the topic of slavery within Britain’s
empire—as slavery was no longer legal in the British Empire by midcentury—to the new
problems caused by industrialism and changing trade patterns. Thus, while the earlier midcentury
texts illustrate that one of the major concerns was on keeping contamination out, defending the
boundaries between foreign (colonial) contaminants and domestic sanctity, in contrast, as we
shall see, later midcentury texts more carefully and symbolically negotiate problems, or
“contaminations,” that are already “inside.” I argue that these careful negotiations reflect the fact
that by midcentury, the fear was no longer the slavery happening in England’s colonies, but the
slavery on foreign (Cuban and American) slave plantations as well as the harsh labor conditions
in England’s mills.
To understand how midcentury texts deal with these “contaminants” differently than the
earlier texts, it is necessary to review a few representative texts from the first few decades of the
nineteenth century. The early method of merely defending boundaries between England and its
colonies and expelling contaminants from the English home is clearly illustrated in one early-
nineteenth-century novel often discussed by scholars, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). The
major concern of Belinda appears to be cleansing the home by expelling problematic elements,
such as the Creole character and other associations to the slave-colonies, rather than by
condemning those problematic elements outright. Susan Greenfield illustrates this evaluation
when she argues that “Lady Delacour is interested not in ‘civilizing’ the West Indians but in
defining the boundaries that distinguish them from the English” (Greenfield216). Consequently,
one of the central threads of the plot of Belinda is Lady Delacour’s attempts to ensure that
Belinda does not marry a West Indian Creole,3 who, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, belongs
3 Before 1850 four meanings of the word “Creole” were in circulation: white people of Spanish descent born in
Spanish America; white people of European descent born in the West Indies; people of non-aboriginal descent born
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to a class that was “a historically unique political problem” to the process of imagining
nationhood (Anderson 58). By the end of the novel, Lady Delacour’s machinations to marry
Belinda and Virginia to Englishmen, even if they too earn their money in the colonies, illustrate
her attempts to pursue colonial advantage while also maintaining a “pure” national identity,
totally separate from Creoles (Greenfield 219). In other words, it is clear that the novel does not
argue against the English earning money from sugar colonies: it merely works to distinguish the
boundaries between the English plantation owners and the cruel (rather than benevolent) slave-
owning (and possibly racially-mixed) Creoles. Significantly, even as the novel cleanses the
domestic space of links to cruel slavers or miscegenation, the novel continually and
paradoxically links the plight of women to “the slave trade, which the domestic woman endorses
but which her own exchange resembles” (Greenfield 224). Thus, as previous scholars have
argued, Belinda is important not only because it participates in the condemnation of colonial
slavery, but also because it argues that women—as both slave-like and naturally good—are more
clearly in tune with the suffering of others, even while they are charged with protecting the
English home from any contact with the Other. At the same time, Belinda does not
wholeheartedly condemn plantation slavery, as it does uphold the myth of the benevolent English
master.
Mansfield Park (1814) not only illustrates more clearly the attempt to draw boundaries
between home (in England) and abroad (in English colonies), but also shares in common many
of the other features many scholars associate with Belinda. For example, like Belinda, one of
Fanny Price’s most important features are her commitment to a sense of “rightness” and her
in the West Indies; non-aboriginal people (both of white and of African descent) born in Spanish America (Thomas
2).
68
ability to feel compassion—a fact which is emphasized by continual comparisons between Fanny
and slaves4 —even while she does nothing to improve the plight of those who suffer.5 Further,
like Lady Delacour in Belinda, Fanny represents the abolitionist rhetoric that called on “female
sensibility to safeguard the home from colonial contamination, to preserve that home as a symbol
of purified English identity, and to ensure that the domestic sphere remains distinct from the
colonial arena” (Sussman 61). Thus, through Fanny’s “female sensibility” Austen emphasizes
the purity of the domestic space—such as when, in one often-discussed example, Fanny is the
only one to object to her cousins’ performing an inappropriately racy play (Lovers’ Vows) while
Sir Bertram is away on his sugar plantation in Antigua (204).
Additionally, like Belinda, Mansfield Park takes great pains to expel colonial elements,
such as Creole-like characters, and cleanse the English home from associations with plantation
slavery. First, when Sir Bertram returns from Antigua, he expels Mrs. Norris,6 who has been
cruel to the slave-like Fanny throughout the novel and therefore represents the corrupt (and
inept) overseer. This expulsion, in addition to Sir Bertram’s kindness to Fanny, ultimately
confirms his position as the wise and benevolent “plantation” master. This reading is further
supported by the fact that Mansfield Park is repeatedly referred to as a “plantation” in the text.
Second, Fanny is cleansed of her association with the colonies when she rejects the chaos of her
hometown, Portsmouth, and gratefully returns to the quiet domestic space of Mansfield Park in
the final section of the novel. This rejection is an especially important move in the novel since,
4 See Sussman’s discussion of how English “women were [often] asked to identify with suffering slaves,” but only
as it furthered the image of “themselves as compassionate domestic women” (64).
5 Edward Said makes this argument at length in Culture and Imperialism.
6 Interestingly, Ferguson explains that Mrs. Norris’s surname may be a reference to John Norris, who was one of the
“most vile proslaveryites of the day” (Ferguson 70).
69
as Ferguson argues, Portsmouth correlates with Antigua, as both are “symbolic sites of
indeterminacy near water and places where the allegedly uncivilized cluster” (Ferguson 86). It is
only after Mrs. Norris has been expelled, and the desirability of the insulated south has been
confirmed, that Fanny becomes a suitable match for her cousin, Edmund Bertram.
The isolationism illustrated by these early-nineteenth-century texts is something that, as
we will see, can no longer be maintained by midcentury writers. For this reason it is important to
note that Fanny’s loyalty to Mansfield Park over her family’s place of residence, Portsmouth,
illustrates what Sussman argues was a prevailing idea at the beginning of the century: first, that
“a circumscribed domestic space,” such as Mansfield Park, “is more representative of an
authentic British identity than the powerful, international networks of commerce;” and second,
that to remain British this space must remain separate from “and superior to, those networks”
(Sussman 51, emphasis mine). In contrast, later midcentury novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s
North and South not only actively acknowledge the large international networks that are by that
point an inescapable fact of modern English society (and which in some cases were desirable, as
they brought such products as tobacco to England), but work to reconcile this truth with an
updated sense of English identity. In other words, these later “sugar texts” will no longer focus
on defending the boundaries between England’s borders and (England’s) slave colonies, but by
midcentury, as the texts I analyze later in this chapter show, many (female) writers were more
concerned with making sense of the complicated trade routes that brought products from all over
the world into England’s homes, products that were produced by methods outside of English
control.
However, before I turn to these midcentury texts, I must first discuss first how Charlotte
Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) functions as an intermediary text in this shift in the way that female
70
authors came to write about sugar. Many scholars have discussed the function of Bertha Mason
Rochester, a Creole woman locked in the Thornfields’ attic, brought to England from Jamaica
after Edward Rochester married her for her dowry, a sugar plantation. For example, Deidre
David reminds us of one fairly common argument: “Jane Eyre vanquishes the figure of
counterinvasion from the colonies, suffers magnificently in the process, and erases the economic
exploitation and sexual debauchery represented by Rochester and his inheritance” (David 83).
When interpreted in this way, Jane Eyre may seem to have much in common with texts such as
Belinda and Mansfield Park, apparently being a text with a central female character, pure and
properly feminine, who works to maintain the image of a righteous empire by expelling and
punishing the Creole figure who represents the cruel sugar plantation economy. However, a
closer examination of Jane Eyre, especially given the changes that take place between abolition
and Jane Eyre’s date of publication, reveals that Jane Eyre illustrates that this early solution of
merely expelling the Creole character (who represents the system of plantation slavery) and
eliding English culpability, even on a rhetorical level, is no longer productive given the more
complicated trade relations that arise in post-abolition England.
The Creole figure here is actually very different from those in texts like Belinda—and in
ways that cannot simply be explained by a change in the character’s sex. For one, Bertha, unlike
earlier Creole figures, does not stand alone as a representative of the cruel sugar plantocrats and
against which characters like Rochester can define himself as the better Englishmen7; instead,
Bertha both implicates Rochester and symbolically stands in for Rochester’s sins, which he must
account for. Similarly, while scholars have noted that “Jane Eyre demarcates both femininity and
7 Notably, scholars such as Sue Thomas argue nearly the exact opposite of my argument here, instead suggesting
that Bertha’s function is to stand in for the cruelty of Creole slave drivers on sugar plantations and is in that way
more similar to the earlier Creole figures.
71
masculinity in imperial and racial terms” (Thomas 1) it is more important that Bronte
deliberately blurs these categories, implicating both English and Creoles, both men and women,
in the web of empire.
Thus, while it is true, as many have noted, that Rochester is in some ways cleansed of
some of these crimes of empire (represented by Bertha) by the end of the novel, it is just as
important, if not more so, that the novel demands that he be cleansed. In other words, Jane Eyre
reveals a struggle to reconcile English identity with anxieties about English involvement with the
production of colonial products, such as sugar. While Bertha may be “the racial Other incarnate”
and more closely tied to Caribbean sugar than Rochester is, Rochester is openly condemned for
the fact that she is in England because she was “caught in the colonized West Indies and
confined ‘for her own good’ by a master who has appropriated her body and her [sugar-] wealth”
(Perera 82). Thus, while in the early-nineteenth-century rhetoric of sugar and slavery the Creole
is condemned and the Englishman’s guilt is denied, decades later, in Jane Eyre, Bronte makes it
clear that that simple denial is not an option.
Notably, though Bronte’s text reflects a change in the debate, she does still borrow
heavily from the early abolitionist rhetoric to implicate not just Rochester but also the whole
imperial (and colonial) system. In the first place, the “savage” Bertha is linked to cannibalism
when she bites her brother George Mason as if she were a “carrion-seeking bird of prey” (Bronte
213). Further, Bertha is described by Jane as a “clothed hyena” (Bronte 298), a figure that in
religious iconography “eats decaying corpses… [and] has been used a symbol of those who
thrive on the filthy corpse of false doctrine” (Thomas 7). The fact that cannibalism gained its
meaning in the context of “European expansion into the Caribbean” and was used metaphorically
to describe British subjects who consumed “colonial products” improperly (Sussman 52-53) only
72
further highlights the fact Rochester represents the British Empire’s approach to the colonial
marketplace. As a result, he is counterpoised to St. John, who goes to the colonies as a
missionary, rather than a capitalist.
This reading of Bertha as a symbol that condemns the empire’s consumption of colonial
products is furthered by Bertha’s relationship to the domestic space: she is not only a specter that
haunts the halls of Rochester’s home, but, by the novel’s end, Bertha must die and the domestic
space she haunts must be destroyed in order for Rochester may be cleansed of his crimes. In this
way, Bertha has a literal presence as a character, but, more importantly, as a metaphorical
presence as an extension of Rochester’s violence. Although many scholars have often argued that
Bertha functions as a double for Jane,8 I suggest she is more accurately an extension of
Rochester, as it is not only his home that she haunts, but additionally, as Sue Thomas has argued,
Bertha breaks out of her cell most frequently when Rochester acts inappropriately—such as his
“over-familiarity of telling [Jane] about his affair with Celine Varens,” his “bigamous wedding
preparations,” and in his savage disappointment when Jane chooses to leave (Thomas 11). The
fact that Rochester is maimed and blinded by the fire that kills Bertha suggests that he must lose
a piece of himself as penance—an element in the story that enacts a reversal of the cannibalism
metaphor so frequently referenced by early abolitionists.
Thus, though it still relies heavily on the language of domestic purity and colonial
contamination established by early-nineteenth-century writers, Jane Eyre does complicate
England’s culpability in a way that texts such as Mansfield Park simply do not. In this way,
while Jane Eyre does devise “a fantasy of rehabilitated wealth” at the end of the novel (David
8 See “Three Women’s Texts.” Though Spivak starts by refuting this claim, she is an important source for
understanding this common argument.
73
84), I would argue that it also exposes this rehabilitation as fantasy. The fact that this
rehabilitation is a fantasy is emphasized by the fact that Jane and Rochester retire to the Ferndean
forest (Bronte 459), rather than rebuilding or purchasing a new home. Therefore, while the story
of Jane Eyre is about the civilizing mission of a pure and properly feminine woman bent on
influencing Rochester and teaching him to be properly masculine, it is equally about the secret in
the attic. It is only after Bertha destroys herself and burns the house down that Rochester can
begin to build anew, an “allegory” that exposes “the general epistemic violence of imperialism,
the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission
of the colonizer” (Spivak 251). Although Spivak argues that Jane Eyre shows this in spite of
itself, I would still argue that, despite its obvious flaws, Jane Eyre is an intermediary text,
dealing with colonialism more directly than do Mansfield Park and similar texts.
The concerns Bronte points to regarding England’s culpability will only become more
marked in the English texts I analyze next, as they are texts written long after abolition, in the
midst of England’s attempts to define its own (liberal) modernity. For, after all, the reason Jane
Eyre functions so well as an intermediary text—and what scholars have failed to account for—is
the fact that Jane Eyre, while set about twenty years earlier, was written in 1847, about fifteen
years after slavery had been officially abolished within the British Empire and approximately
forty years after it was effectively abolished in England.9 In contrast, while England abolished
slavery relatively early in the century, the United States and Cuba, major trading partners with
England, would not officially abolish slavery for another thirty years; even more importantly,
9 Slavery within the British Empire (including the colonies) was officially abolished in 1833 by the Slavery
Abolition Act, though several earlier laws had effectively ended it, including the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which ended
slavery within England’s borders.
74
Cuba’s notoriously slow abolition movement only effectively freed the slaves about sixty years
after England did.
It is important to note that these truths caused some anxiety for the English—which I
argue is reflected in midcentury cultural texts—precisely because the abolition of slavery within
the empire created a sort of vacuum; as sugar colonies faltered and the English scrambled to find
new ways to produce sugar through cheap labor, Cuba, with its ever-increasing supply of slaves,
was producing more sugar than ever—approximately a third of the world’s sugar (Tomich
“World Slavery” 298).10 Consequently, mid-nineteenth-century English writers, particularly
those new “mothers of empire,” reached to find new ways of reconciling English identity with
these new networks that flooded domestic markets with foreign goods and often goods produced
by the colonies of other empires. Before addressing the question of how women authors such as
Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot attempted to address these new
issues through allusions to earlier debates on sugar, I will introduce one more context for that
argument: the Cuban sugar trade and Cuban texts about sugar.
An Interlude: The Sweet Relationship between England and Cuba
A general sketch of the relationship between England and Cuba regarding sugar and
slavery is important to understanding the exact nature of the anxiety that England would have
felt towards Cuba after abolition in its own colonies. As I suggested earlier, by midcentury sugar
no longer represented merely the horrors perpetuated on English slave plantations, but stood for
a wider array of ethical concerns that England encountered due to the increasingly complicated
trade patterns that were by that time in place. In essence, with abolition and modernization did
10 Eric Williams controversially argues in Capitalism and Slavery that because abolition coincided with periods of
economic decline in the British Caribbean, abolition was ultimately motivated by economic self-interest.
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not come better, more ethical production methods; because the British not only felt an obligation
to prevent the traffic in slaves to Cuban sugar plantations, but felt some anxiety knowing that—
despite their claims to moral superiority—they would later consume that slave-produced sugar,
Cuban sugar became an important emblem for these anxieties. Thus, in this section I will not
only provide some historical background on the relationship between England and Cuba, but also
attempt to illustrate the ways that Cuban texts (such as novels and lithographs) reveal the
similarities in rhetoric in both countries regarding the symbolic value of sugar.
Although it is fairly common knowledge for scholars of the Caribbean, it is a little-
acknowledged fact among Victorianists that while Cuba was not an official colony of England
the English were very much involved in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuban politics
and culture, particularly as these related to Cuba’s development as a slave nation. As I discuss in
the introduction, much of England’s influence in Cuba was a result of England’s might as a
massive empire and Cuba’s position as an important Caribbean colony, albeit a Spanish colony.
To begin with, it is important to note that it was the British who provided the “initial stimulus to
the Cuban sugar industry” by introducing 5,000 slaves in 1762 (Tomich “World Slavery” 303).
Then, the Cuban sugar industry took off when the sugar industry in the British West Indies
declined after abolition. Furthermore, on the one hand, before slavery was abolished within the
British Empire, England was a major supplier of slaves to Cuba; on the other, after the abolition
of slavery in the British Empire, English merchants and engineers frequently aided the Cuban
sugar industry by introducing technological advancements that allowed slave plantations to
prosper. In short, the English certainly played a role in Cuba’s becoming the world’s largest
supplier of sugar in the nineteenth century.
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Furthermore, the British had much to do with creating the global conditions that called on
Cuba to focus so heavily on sugar as a crop. As Dale Tomich so clearly illustrates, “the
expansion and structural transformation of the world market between 1760 and 1860” that
England helped to spearhead was directly linked to the development of sugar and slavery in
Cuba: as modern industry developed and new consumption patterns became dominant, raw
materials were required on “an unprecedented scale” and Europe became more dependent on
“peripheral producers,” such as Caribbean islands, for foodstuffs. Thus, England, as a major
economic and political power, produced the conditions under which Cuba came to produce so
much slave-produced sugar.
Even after England abolished slavery within the empire and launched a political and
cultural campaign to condemn Cuban slavery, it became clear that England could not escape its
own complicity. While England anxiously began to police the waters near Cuba in an attempt to
prevent the traffic in slaves, England ultimately continued to facilitate Cuba’s use of slaves to
produce sugar by participating in “triangle trade.” In the triangle trade, the English not only
received goods produced by slaves, but supplied textiles to slave countries, who then used those
textiles to purchase more slaves. Sometimes English mariners directly participated in the slave
trade despite its illegality. In this way trade between England and the United States and Cuba
ultimately facilitated the importation of Cuban slave-produced sugar to England and the
exportation of textiles from England to Cuba. Without this circulation of goods, Cuba, which
essentially produced raw products only, would not have been as well equipped to participate in
the world market. As we will see in Gaskell’s North and South, the link between foreign slavery
and English textile mills is one that many midcentury Victorian readers were aware of and which
caused anxiety for many Britons.
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This anxiety was heightened by the desire in England to imagine the English system as
the height of modernity. In contrast, the constant maneuvering by Cuba to avoid abolition
exemplified Cuba’s “backwardness” in comparison to England. As Dale Tomich suggests, “the
history of slavery in nineteenth-century Cuba is understood as a narrative of flawed and
unfinished liberalism … characterized by their incompleteness and immaturity” (Tomich
“Wealth” 6). In essence, “slavery came to be understood as the antithesis of the emergent forms
of polity, moral sensibility, and economic activity” and became “the negative standard against
which the new forms of freedom,” such as that of workers in British textile mills, “were defined”
(Tomich “World Slavery” 297). Thus, even while the English were tied up in the system they
had helped to create, and even while slavery was “the means to achieve Cuba’s integration into
the world market and secure the colony’s prosperity and progress,” the English worked hard to
distinguish England from Cuba to preserve the image of England as a now-truly-modern and
ethical nation.
Interestingly, though Victorian English texts are somewhat quiet about this relationship,
and though scholarship on this question is minimal at best, in contrast, nineteenth-century Cuban
literature and culture continually references the fact of this relationship between England and
Cuba. For example, even while few Cuban novels were produced in the nineteenth century, at
least two of the most important novels of the nineteenth century have central English characters:
in Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), the female protagonist, Carlotta—whose father,
notably, owns a sugar plantation—is in danger of marrying a scheming and mercenary English
merchant, Enrique Otway, who does not love her, but merely intends to exploit her (sugar-)
wealth; in Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes, o la Loma del Angel (1839; 1882), the anti-hero
protagonist’s father, Don Candido de Gamboa—again, the owner of a sugar plantation—is under
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enormous financial pressure because the British continually attempt to capture his ships and
seize his cargo, which consists mostly of African slaves. In fact, even popular tobacco
lithographs (discussed in the previous chapter) often depict overly entitled Englishmen, such as
the one in Figure 3-1, “Los gringos invadiran la Habana” [“The Gringos Will Invade
Havana”].11
What is especially important about these Cuban novels and images is not just that they
illustrate the effect this relationship with England had on Cuban culture, but they also illustrate
the similarity between the rhetoric used in early-nineteenth-century England and the rhetoric that
was used in Cuba. For example, in all these texts, “pure” sugar (though slave-produced) is linked
to white femininity. For instance, the lithographs in Figures 3-2 – 3-4 from the series titled
“Muestras de azucar” [“Samples of Sugar”], illustrate this logic. In all of the lithographs, sugar
is not only personified as female, but the quality of sugar is linked to the whiteness of the female
figure’s skin: for example, in Figure 3-2, “Quebrado de primera (de centrifuga)” [“First Rate
(From the Centrifuge)”] the mulata figure is significantly whiter than the figure in Figure 3-3,
“Quebrado de segunda” [“second rate”], thus implying that both first-rate sugar and first-rate
women are both lighter in color. Similarly, in Figure 3-4, the woman who is referred to as
“Second Grade White (Common Train)” [“Blanca de segunda (Tren comun)”] is Asian and her
ethnicity is what prevents her from being “first rate.” Thus, these lithographs demonstrate that in
Cuba sugar was not only associated with femininity, but also that quality (of both sugar and
women) was associated with whiteness. Further, due to racist anxieties in Cuba regarding the
ever-increasing number of African slaves on the island, these lithographs also illustrate the link
11 As stated in Chapter 1, these tobacco lithographs were gathered Núñez’s Cuba En Las Marquillas Cigarreras Del
Siglo XIX (see references).
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in the Cuban imagination between “contaminated sugar” and “contaminated bloodlines”—a fear
that is not unlike the English fear that sugar would be literally contaminated with the blood of
African slaves.
Paradoxically, even while this racist rhetoric abounds in texts concerning sugar, in Cuban
literature, as in early-nineteenth-century English literature, appropriate white femininity and
domesticity is linked to the ability to feel a generous compassion for slaves. For example, in Sab
the fair Carlotta and her cousin Teresa are the only characters who see the male mulatto slave-
protagonist, Sab, as a bona-fide human being; furthermore, Teresa, who is even more attuned to
Sab’s suffering than Carlotta, is fittingly later confirmed as the more appropriately feminine
character when she joins a nunnery.12 Similarly, in Cecilia Valdes, while the anti-hero Leonardo
is abusive towards his slaves, his appropriately feminine intended fiancé (he dies before
marrying her) is marked by her unique ability to understand and compassionately care for her
slaves’ needs.
Finally, in yet another similarity between these two nations, just as abolition had a
profound effect on the way England saw itself as a(n ethical) nation, Antonio Benitez Rojo has
argued that in Cuba the tension between the pro-sugar plantocracy and those opposed to the
dominance of the sugar mill and slavery is precisely what led to the birth of a sense of
“Cubanness.” For example, he argues:
Cubanness emerges precisely in this schism that divides Cuba geographically,
ethnologically, economically, and socially. Of these two Cubas, the one that has
always dominated is Cuba Grande, with its sugar mill, and whose culture is
oriented toward the foreign sugar markets. Cuba Grande is an authoritarian Cuba,
proud and insensitive—a Cuba that tends to reduce society to the requirements of
production, technology and, above all, market demand. Cuba Pequena, by contrast
looks inward, toward the land, and its cultural poles are formed by the diverse
12 Significantly, as in Belinda and Mansfield Park, in Sab white women are linked through their suffering with
slaves.
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elements of folklore and tradition… It is in this manufacture-resisting Cuba that the
scientific and poetic discourses of Cubanness first appeared; it is in this Cuba,
insofar as it is the mechanism of a “small” power that resisted the domination of the
“large” power inherent in the sugar-producing machine, that the profession of the
writer and the institution of Cuban literature first emerged. (Benítez Rojo 15-16)
Thus, in Benítez Rojo’s argument, writers and other artists helped to push back against the sugar
industry, and it was also that pushback which in turn created the institution of Cuban literature
and, by extension, the recognition of “Cubanness” as a cultural norm. Ultimately, even while
“recognizing in their racism a form of exorcism, these white men began to think of themselves as
Cubans” rather than just as inhabitants of another plantation island (Benitez Rojo 20).
Importantly, a similar argument could be made for how abolition(ist writers) helped the English
to learn to see themselves as a more superiorly ethical and modern nation.
However, it is precisely here where these nations diverge. After abolition, England
clearly adopted the attitude that slavery needed to be, and would be, abolished everywhere and
saw abolition as a sign of modernity. In this schema, slavery might coexist with liberalism in the
world market, but they were mutually exclusive. As a result, “Cuba remain[ed] fixed as the site
of slavery and racial ideology, while true capitalism, the real bourgeoisie, and authentic
liberalism are taken to occur elsewhere” (Tomich “Wealth” 6)—in this case, in England. 13
However, as I have outlined here, while the English wanted very much to think of themselves as
separate from and superior to Cuba, which still depended on slavery, it was undeniable that
England played a part in creating the conditions that had Cuba producing nearly a third of the
world’s sugar by 1868, a world whose demand for sugar had increased at staggering rates in the
previous decades (Tomich “World Slavery” 298).
13 Of course, I do mean to suggest that slavery is not reprehensible or that moving to a new form of production is not
more desirable; I merely suggest that the teleological rhetoric that Tomich identifies is perhaps one reason that very
few scholars have discussed sugar/slavery in the literature and culture of post-abolition England.
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In this way, by examining the relationship between England and Cuba, it is clear why
sugar became a nexus for concerns regarding national/racial identity, as well as political/ethical
concerns such as slavery. I argue that sugar’s strong associations with Cuba and Cuban slavery,
along with its historical relationship in England to abolitionism and female political
participation, is precisely why sugar is such a powerful symbol in the midcentury texts I analyze
next.
Midcentury Sugar in the Home: Purify Rather Than Expel
Midcentury English texts illustrate that the language of sugar used by abolitionists earlier
in the century did not disappear in England post-emancipation, but, due to changes in the world
market, merely changed shape. It is clear from the texts I analyze in this final section that the
English were at least partially aware that the advancements in industrialization and international
trade in midcentury England did not, in fact, result in a clean break from the consumption of
slave-produced goods or from the ethical concerns relating to that production/consumption.
For one thing, despite the fact that scholarship on sugar in Victorian texts largely ignores
the symbolics of sugar in texts produced in England after Jane Eyre (1847), it is clear that not
only did the Victorians continue to think about sugar and slavery throughout the century but, due
to the changes in trade networks that took place by midcentury, the anxiety over slave-produced
sugar merely became linked to Cuba rather than to England’s own colonies.14 For example, J.
Anthony Froude, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Kingsley all discuss slavery and sugar in Cuba
in their immensely popular travelogues: Froude infamously weighs both the relative benefits and
drawbacks to abolition while traveling in Cuba (363)15; Kingsley remarks that, while Cuban
14 To an extent, slavery in the United States was a concern as well, though the focus there is usually on the
production of other goods such as cotton.
15 The English in the West Indies (1888).
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“political morality” is “utterly dissolute,” Cuban slaves are treated surprisingly well on sugar
plantations, valued and cared for as if they were “two-legged” mules or other valuable livestock
(324)16; and Trollope declares that his “first object after landing” in Cuba “was to see a slave
sugar estate,” though he finds that these slaves and the sugar they produce are kept “sacred from
profane eyes” (133)17. The link in these writers’ minds between Cuba, slavery, and sugar, and
their curiosity about this connection, reveals their awareness of the fact that the slave situation in
Cuba in fact had a direct bearing on English consumers—for while England may have abolished
slavery in its own colonies, thanks to the modern global economy the majority of midcentury
England’s sugar was produced by slaves in Cuba.
It is important to understand that Cuba not only continued to produce enormous amounts
of sugar through slavery, but that most Victorians were also probably aware of the fact that most
of England’s sugar (and a third of the world’s sugar) was being produced by these Cuban slaves.
Popular English texts frequently included comments intended to educate/remind the reader about
this element of England’s relationship to Cuba. For example, in Isabella Beeton’s Book of
Household Management (1861), an extremely popular text that sold 60,000 copies in its first year
and nearly two million by 1868, Mrs. Beeton includes the following aside:
Sugar has been happily called “the honey of reeds.” …Our supplies are now
obtained from Barbadoes, Jamaica, Mauritius, Ceylon, the East and West Indies
generally, and the United States; but the largest supplies come from Cuba…It is
propagated from cuttings, requires much hoeing and weeding, giving employment
to thousands upon thousands of slaves in the slave countries, and attains maturity
in twelve or thirteen months...Sugar is adulterated with fine sand and sawdust.
Pure sugar is highly nutritious, adding to the fatty tissue of the body; but it is not
easy of digestion. (Beeton 671, emphasis mine)
16 At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1874).
17 The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859)
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In passages like these and ones included in travelogues (above), found in popular texts and read
every day (in this case, by English women), it is clear that readers were continually reminded of
several facts: first, that England’s sugar is mostly coming from Cuba; second, that Cuba is still
using “thousands upon thousands” of slaves; and, finally, that sugar can easily contain
contaminants. Consequently, pure sugar (perhaps meaning that sugar grown in English colonies)
is to be prized. While it is true that food adulteration became an important topic in the second
half of the century (as investigations revealed that many mass-produced foods were in fact
adulterated/contaminated, which I address in Chapter 4), the symbolic fear that “pure” white
sugar was adulterated while being produced by black slave bodies abroad was a rhetoric common
in abolitionist texts earlier in the century.18
In addition to references in popular culture such as these, several Parliamentary Papers
were published detailing import and export figures for both sugar and slaves to/from Cuba,
making clear one more element in England’s relationship to Cuba: England’s proactive efforts to
curb the slave trade in Cuba. For example, in one of the appendices of a parliamentary report
titled “Reports from the Committees: Ten Volumes: West Coast of Africa” (1842), the appendix
outlines the fact that Cuban sugar enters England’s borders because “Cuba and Brazils [sic] can
afford to sell their sugars in our markets at about one-half the price of the sugars of Jamaica”
(266). In the same report, the author writes, “What keeps slavery alive and flourishing in Cuba,
Porto Rico [sic], and the Brazils [sic] but the power of obtaining fresh slaves as fast as they wear
down the health and strength of those they hold?...The vigilance of our cruisers has nearly put an
end to the conveyance of goods from Cuba and the Brazils [sic] to the coast of Africa” (28,
18 See Anthony Wohl, pages 52-53, for a list of the kinds of adulterations frequently found in such common foods as
bread and milk.
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emphasis mine). Thus, in addition to references in popular culture, these parliamentary papers
publicly acknowledge to the politically aware Victorian reader not only that Cuba is still using
slaves to cultivate (English) sugar, but that England is actively trying to prevent the slave traffic
that makes that level of sugar production possible.
The anxiety that this sort of ethical paradox appears to have created in midcentury
England is evidenced in many texts, if one only looks for them. These texts take up where Jane
Eyre leaves off to address a variety of issues that arise from the increasingly international trade
network from which England receives its colonial goods. The texts that follow often explicitly
acknowledge that slavery no longer exists within England or her colonies. Even so, these texts
use the language of sugar in a way that is consistent with the earlier abolitionist texts, even if
they now use it metaphorically, in an attempt to distinguish the English from the “Other-
colonizer” (such as the Spanish or Creoles), while still also negotiating England’s own
culpability in the system they are condemning.
Because, as discussed above, the international trade networks that exist in mid-
nineteenth-century England make that distinction an increasingly difficult one to make, the texts
I analyze next make a few important concessions, not present in the pre-abolition texts I
discussed in the introduction to this chapter. First, instead of having a Creole character against
which the Englishman can measure himself, and then expel, these texts often have English
characters that become “marked” by Creole characteristics. These characters must either shake
these associations in order to distinguish themselves as properly English and masculine, or else
become condemned if too markedly “Creole.” As we will see, this move more clearly
acknowledges the fact that the English are implicated in the system they condemn and thus
cannot so easily (metaphorically) set themselves apart from the Creole plantation owner. Second,
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in a related move, the topic of slavery becomes more elusive, as characters may symbolically
resemble slaves, but actual slaves are barely mentioned. The symbolic and elusive nature of
slavery in these texts creates metaphorical distance between the use of this sugar rhetoric by
midcentury writers and the earlier abolitionists; in other words, this allows the texts to discuss
English culpability through the language of sugar, without drawing a direct comparison between
the English and slaveholders. Similarly, these texts that follow often explicitly acknowledge that
slavery no longer exists within England or her colonies—a crucial fact that reveals that
England’s own colonies, even when explicitly mentioned, are most likely not the true target of
this rhetoric, a reading that politically-aware Victorian readers would have understood.
Finally, these texts add one more element to distinguish the English from the “Other-
colonizer”: an elaborate language of “raw” goods (or raw sugar) versus manufactured/finished
products is introduced. In essence, the Creole-like characters are most often associated with raw
goods, and, therefore, are most directly associated with trade networks and the colonies, while
those characters that are properly English are associated with the finished—and purified—
product. Such a language allows the English to distinguish themselves as the more civilized and
advanced and to suggest or acknowledge that the goods they receive from these international
networks are only a small part of the finished product.
The fact that sugar rhetoric became a way for midcentury writers to address industrialism
and international trade networks is perhaps most clearly illustrated by Elizabeth Gaskell’s North
and South (1855). The novel is set in an industrial town, Milton-Northern (based loosely on
Manchester), where Margaret Hale and her family have relocated from peaceful southern
England. Although Margaret is, at first, extremely critical of industrialism—longing instead for
the south, a place she remembers as a place of tranquility—through her relationship with the mill
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owner, Mr. John Thornton, and the working class Higgins family, her attitudes are challenged. In
essence, by the novel’s end Margaret has become more understanding of the mill owner’s
position, the mill owner more understanding of the workers’, and the peaceful resolution of all
the class tensions in the novel are symbolized by the impending marriage between the
appropriately feminine Margaret and (in the tradition of Rochester) the now properly masculine
and ethical Englishmen, Mr. Thornton.
To illustrate how this industrial novel works to valorize and differentiate labor conditions
in England from those in other contexts, the reading that follows depends not just on the
relationship between Margaret and Mr. Thornton (normally the focus of scholarship on the
novel), but on Margaret’s brother, Frederick. Although he appears only very briefly in the novel,
Frederick further emphasizes the international context of this industrial novel. In the novel,
Frederick is a wanted man in England after participating in a mutiny onboard an English vessel
against a cruel captain who frequently whips his sailors with a cat-of-nine-tails for not working
quickly enough. After the mutiny, which is implicitly compared to both a slave rebellion and the
strike at Thornton’s mill, Frederick lives in exile in Spain. Thus, his presence in the novel helps
Gaskell to address the private and the public, the domestic and the international: “while Margaret
negotiates the vertical, domestic [in both senses of the word] axis, connecting operative to
manufacturer to customer,” her brother “Frederick operates along the horizontal, international
axis, connecting supplier to distributor to manufacturer” (Lee 461). Thus, as Julia Sun-Joo Lee
also argues, though he seems a minor character, Frederick is a crucial element in North and
South’s treatment of the ethics of the global economy as “Frederick introduces an international
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context to the novel that has traditionally been read in national terms….his peregrinations
illuminate the global network in which the novel unfolds” (Lee 451).19
Before I address that international context directly, it is important to understand that
Frederick’s implication in Spanish international trade (and his subsequent creolization) only
makes Margaret’s role as the pure/refined, femininely domestic, moral center of the novel more
significant, as she is a character who follows in the tradition of novels such as Mansfield Park.
First, besides functioning as the point on which a variety of networks converge, like Fanny Price
before her, Margaret continually showcases the ideal moral response in any given situation, her
commitment to that sense of rightness in effect creating much of the conflict of the novel. For
example, a scene where Margaret serves tea to the mill owner, Mr. Thornton, and her father,
while they discuss labor questions and the conditions at Thornton’s mill is important for reasons
besides its depiction of Margaret’s model feminine behavior and domesticity. Thornton observes:
It appeared …all these graceful cares were habitual to the family; and especially of
a piece with Margaret….She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation,
but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands moved with
pretty, noiseless, daintiness. She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall
down over her round wrist. Mr. Thornton watched the replacing of this troublesome
ornament with far more attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it
fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently, until it tightened her soft flesh; and
then to mark the loosening—the fall…She handed him his cup of tea with the
proud air of an unwilling slave; but her eye caught the moment when he was ready
for another cup; and he almost longed to ask her to do for him what he saw her
compelled to do for her father, who took her little finger and thumb in his
masculine hand, and made them serve as sugar-tongs. Mr. Thornton saw her
beautiful eyes lifted to her father, full of light, half-laughter and half-love, as this
bit of pantomime went on between the two, unobserved, as they fancied, by any.
(Gaskell 79-80)
19 Lee’s argument here (and throughout the article generally) is that Frederick brings an international context to the
novel through his connections with the maritime trade and (American) slavery. While she focuses on the United
States, it is my argument that Frederick’s relationship to the international context connects this text to the debates
regarding Cuba as well and creates contact zones between those sites and English mills. Margaret’s role in the novel
as well as Frederick’s connection to Spain strengthens my reading. However, I do not believe that Lee’s argument
and my own are mutually exclusive.
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In this crucially important passage, the reader is given several impressions of Margaret that will
be key throughout the rest of the novel. First, while she is firm in her judgment of right and
wrong and passionate about the conversations she and Mr. Thornton engage in, Margaret’s skills
as hostess reveal that she is, above all, the model of proper femininity. Of course, this femininity
and domesticity, as I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is an important hallmark in these
sugar texts as it links political action by women to their relationship to the domestic space.
Further, the image of Margaret’s “ivory hands” against the teapot was, as Kowaleski-Wallace
discusses, a common abolitionist image, ivory hands symbolizing both the fact that, as a middle-
class woman, she is meant to “live off the resources and labor of others” and also the fact that
she is supposed to “‘civilize’ what is essentially brutish in men” (39). Because the tea table also
became a principal site from which middle-class women boycotted sugar, ivory hands against a
(dark) teapot become an important abolitionist symbol. Second, also in the tradition of the earlier
abolitionist texts, Margaret is linked to slavery both through the image of the bracelet on her
wrist, tightening around her “soft flesh,” suggesting a bangle or symbolic shackle and also by the
fact that she serves Thornton, the harsh mill master, as if she were “an unwilling slave.” This is
symbolic of the fact (as it was for Fanny Price and Jane Eyre before her) that “women were
[often] asked to identify with suffering slaves,” but only as it furthered the image of “themselves
as compassionate domestic women” (Sussman 64). Finally, and most symbolically important, in
this scene Gaskell directly engages with the language of the earlier sugar boycotters when
Margaret’s feminine hands (used as sugar tongs) mediate between her father and the sugar in his
tea. This symbolic gesture not only links the topic of conditions in Milton (the obvious subject of
the novel) to larger international concerns (such as England’s continued relationship to slavery),
but marks Margaret as the appropriate, and vigilant, overseer of the kinds of ethical issues that
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will be tied up in these questions. The fact that Thornton expresses a desire in this passage to
have Margaret mediate between himself and sugar, as she does for her father, foreshadows her
later role as a catalyst for change at Thornton’s mill, helping him to remove that “terrible
expression in [the workers’] countenances of a sullen sense of injustice” that Margaret
recognizes upon arriving at Milton (81). 20
Importantly, as I suggested earlier, texts such as North and South illustrate one major
shift in the way these midcentury texts negotiate English culpability as well as English
superiority when compared with texts such as Belinda or Mansfield Park. While both Thornton
and Frederick’s captain are indicted for Creole-like behavior—Thornton for labor conditions at
his mill, Frederick’s captain for behavior that incites a mutinous uprising—the metaphorical
nature of their association with the stock character of the Creole eliminates the possibility in this
text of an easy distinction between inside/outside or Creole/English. For example, though
Thornton is by no means the cruel Creole slave-plantation owner of earlier texts, such as
Belinda, Thornton, like Rochester of Jane Eyre, is certainly implicated in the system that allows
slavery to flourish and for attitudes that allow him to prosper from that system. In fact, not only
does Thornton’s cotton fabric mill depend on slave-produced raw materials, but Thornton’s
attitude towards his workers frequently echoes the rhetoric of plantation owners, such as when he
states, “the truth is, [the workers] want to be masters, and make the masters into slaves on their
own ground. They are always trying at it; they always have it in their minds and every five or six
20 Although scholars have generally ignored the topic of sugar and slavery in the text, the link in North and South
between women and the consumption of colonial goods is often discussed: in particular, scholars frequently discuss
the scene in which Margaret and her cousin admire newly-purchased Indian shawls (for example, see Civilizing
Subjects). While the fact that other scholars have acknowledged this element strengthens my argument, it is more
important here to understand that Margaret ultimately rejects this frivolous (colonial) consumption and becomes
more concerned with (domestic and international) methods of production that lie behind that consumption, which
are represented by the industrial north.
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years, there comes a struggle between masters and men. They'll find themselves mistaken this
time, I fancy—a little out of their reckoning” (116). This language, which suggests that the
continual potential for an uprising is justification for harsh methods, is accompanied a few pages
later by the Thornton’s description of the “wise despotism” he intends to rule with: Thornton
also claims that “the duties of a manufacturer are far larger and wider than those merely of an
employer of labour…[we are] the great pioneers of civilization” (123). In this way, though
Thornton is careful to let his workers have their own lives at home, Thornton’s language when
describing his relationship to his mill workers calls to mind attitudes commonly ascribed to
slavers (or “masters”) who were often cruel to their slaves.
This reading is strengthened by the presence of Frederick, a character who reminds the
reader more clearly of Thornton’s mill’s relationship to both the metaphorical and literal
plantation. First, Frederick and his position as mutinous sailor, ironically on a ship working to
“keep slavers off” (Gaskell 107), implicates Thornton (and by extension, English manufacturers)
“in an international system of commerce that could not exist but for slavery.”21 Lee explains the
so-called triangle trade (discussed earlier in this chapter) that not only brings Cuban sugar to
England, but also allows English mills to continue to operate:
Ships from England transported cotton goods and other supplies to Africa, where
they sold and traded for slaves. Loaded with their human cargo, these ships then
sailed to the West Indies and to America, where the slaves were sold to plantation
owners in exchange for goods such as raw cotton, sugar, and tobacco. In the third
segment of the journey, the ships returned to England, where they unloaded and
sold their merchandise. All three English interests prospered in this so-called
triangle trade. …Mariners, in other words, were the consummate “middlemen,”
connecting and profiting from various commercial interests. (Lee 459)
21 Lee, here, is addressing Frederick exclusively, but I argue that both Thornton and Frederick are implicated.
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Thus, Frederick’s presence in the novel serves as a reminder to the reader of the message the
parliamentary papers make clear: though England may be working to stop more slaves from
entering Cuba—even Frederick’s ship is charged with “keep[ing] slavers off”—England is still
complicit in a network that brings goods like cotton (the material Thornton’s mill requires) and
sugar to England and thereby allows slavery to continue to be profitable.22 Although one might
argue, as Lee does, that North and South is more concerned with American slave-produced
cotton, Gaskell makes clear that she is concerned with the larger system of international trade,
which includes not only American cotton but also the rights of British workers in textile mills, as
well as Caribbean-produced goods, such as the (Cuban) sugar that Margaret uses at the tea table.
Thus, the novel not only addresses the problems with labor conditions at Thornton’s mill,
but also deliberately introduces a “contact zone” (Lee 463) between that mill and the global
marketplace. Frederick, who is “metonymically linked to slavery through the maritime trade”
(Lee 454) and whose mutiny “introduces the conventional saga of a runaway slave” (Lee 464), as
Rosemarie Bodenheimer has argued, “reflects the dangers of Thornton’s authoritarian position as
well as the corresponding dangers for his striking workers” (Bodenheimer 59). Furthermore,
Frederick’s return to England “brings the transatlantic world into the Hales’ living room” (Lee
457), thereby reminding the reader that “the attempt to demarcate British culture at this time was
uncomfortably shadowed and threatened by the specter of the United States” (Giles 38) and, as I
emphasize, the Caribbean. Consequently, the collision of these two narratives—Thornton
attempting to prevent a strike by his mill workers and Frederick on the run after a mutiny against
22 Although Frederick’s ship works to keep slavers off, “he also protects British interests, ensuring the safe transport
of American slave-produced goods to English ports (an irony that did not go unnoticed by abolitionists)” (Lee 460).
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a (physically) cruel and despotic captain23—calls on Margaret not only to help Thornton
negotiate the conditions between him and his men, but to distinguish Thornton in some clear way
from his counterpart, the slaver-captain.
Because Margaret is at the heart of this novel—and in the tradition of earlier abolitionist
novels, the pure, feminine domestic woman, and moral center of the novel—it is logically
through her that the novel will make certain concessions in order to resolve these tensions.
Significantly, Margaret’s preparedness for this challenge is symbolized by her move in the novel
towards the industrial north, rather than, as in the case of Fanny Price, away from that confusion
and towards a deliberately ignorant existence in the south. Still, as that appropriately feminine
woman, Margaret cannot be called on to lay a plan for changing conditions at Thornton’s mill,
only to act appropriately during the aftermath, a fact which is signaled by Frederick’s physical
entrance to “the novel after the strike, bringing to the foreground the repercussions rather than
the provocations of rebellion” (Lee 464). More importantly, Frederick’s introduction to the
narrative allows a space onto which anxieties created by the novel thus far can now be displaced
and expelled.
For, though Thornton is at times compared to a Creole planation owner, ultimately it is
Frederick who is most associated with (raw) sugar and slavery through his profession.
Consequently, though he his born and raised in England, even his physical features are marked
as Creole:
…he had delicate features, redeemed from effeminacy by the swarthiness of his
complexion…but at times [his eyes] and his mouth so suddenly changed, and gave
her such an idea of latent passion, that it almost made [Margaret] afraid…it was
rather the instantaneous ferocity of expression that comes over the countenances of
all natives of wild or southern countries—a ferocity which enhances the childlike
23 Significantly, Lee outlines the ways in which the conditions of sailors on ships could at times very much resemble
the conditions of slaves on a plantation, particularly when the practice of flogging is considered.
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softness into which such a look may melt away. Margaret might fear the violence
of the impulsive nature thus occasionally betrayed… (Gaskell 247).
Here, in addition to physical features typically ascribed to the Creole—“effeminate,” “childlike,”
“swarthy,” with a “ferocious continence like the natives of “wild” and “southern countries”—
Frederic is described as having a temperament often considered typical of the Creole: impulsive,
passionate and with latent violence. Thus, while Lee suggests that Frederick’s “cosmopolitanism
exceeds linguistic or national boundaries” and “portends…a more transgressive racial and
ontological hybridity” (Lee 473), what is key here is that that hybridity marks Frederick as
symbolically Creole; thus, Gaskell aligns Frederick with a figure that blurs the lines between
English and Other and which is most clearly associated with plantation slavery. Accordingly, his
exile in Spain (notably, Cuba’s colonizer), conversion to Catholicism, and marriage to a Spanish
beauty (named Dolores, a name associated with the Virgin Mary) not only implies that he is now
more closely aligned with Spanish identity (and therefore Spanish methods of colonization), but
that that same exile effectively expels from England the character most closely aligned with
(Cuban) slavery and colonial trade.
According to the logic of the earlier sugar novels, once Frederick has been removed from
the novel as the symbolic Creole (as in the case of Bertha), Thornton must move in the opposite
direction in order to be cleansed of negative associations. Again, as in Jane Eyre, Thornton, like
Rochester, first must suffer (both emotionally and economically); Margaret, like Jane, must
subsequently come in and save the day (both emotionally and economically). First, Thornton’s
factory fails through some unwise investments and he becomes financially “hard pressed” and
“vulnerable,” no longer dreaming of becoming a “merchant prince” with the “influence of a
name in foreign countries and far-away seas,” but struggling to save any part of his mill so that
he can (he claims) institute his new attitude of brotherly love towards his factory workers at
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home (419). At the same time, Margaret has returned to the south, leaving Thornton to suffer her
absence, while, through a series of deaths, Margaret (conveniently) becomes an heiress (412-
413). Further, in a clever displacement the last chapters of the novel drop the question of
Thornton’s mill almost entirely and, as in Jane Eyre, the tension of the novel becomes whether
or not Thornton and Margaret will marry. Significantly, however, the moment when Margaret
and Thornton come together in an embrace of “tender passion,” the money that Thornton will
have through his marriage to Margaret (as in the case of Rochester) is no longer tied to the
questionable financial practices that “marked” him in the first place (435). Consequently, the loss
of sugar (or mill) money that is then replaced by her inheritance allows the Englishman to elide
his culpability in the larger trade system while maintaining appropriate masculinity, as well as
class identity—not to mention, we imagine, institute his new-found understanding of a brotherly-
love, or humanitarian, model of management for his mill, further setting him apart from the
plantation owner.
The fact that Thornton will continue to own a mill (presumably one that continues to
work with imported, slave-produced cotton, despite the symbolic loss of his original fortune),24
while Frederick lives in Spain, forever banished (literally and figuratively) from England,
illustrates an important distinction between these men: while both men touch slave-produced
goods, share the same basic race and class-status, and have a connection with the appropriately
pure and feminine Margaret, it is clear that Frederick is ultimately more “tainted” because of his
stronger association with raw goods. In other words, if writers struggled to distinguish (modern,
24 The novel does suggest that Thornton might have to turn to other sources for his cotton, such as that produced by
Indian Coolies. However, even if that were the case, my point still stands: first, Thornton has clearly escaped being
marked in the same way that Frederick has been marked, and, second, the English’s attempts to distinguish English
labor conditions from that in slave countries is at times mere hair-splitting, since Indian Coolies were forced to work
under slave-like conditions.
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increasingly industrial) England from the countries (reprehensibly) producing raw materials
through plantation slavery, one method they had for doing so was to distinguish the raw—and
therefore ‘contaminated,’ or at least ‘tainted’—product from the finished—and somehow
purified—product; the raw product becomes marked as foreign, while the process of turning this
product into a finished good is what becomes essentially “English.” Thus, by using the symbolic
codes of sugar established decades earlier, Gaskell works to differentiate labor conditions in
England from those in other contexts, such as the United States and Cuba, and, by relying on
sugar as a symbol for negotiating those tensions, makes clear that England’s identity as a modern
nation is dependent not only on its factories, but also on its domestic spaces. The marriage
between the reformed mill owner and appropriately feminine woman who oversees the sugar
used at tea table emphasizes this reading.
Many of these elements discussed in North and South are even clearer in George Eliot’s
“Brother Jacob” (1860). For example, not only does Eliot use the metaphorical language of
sugar, but the protagonist, David Faux, is a confectioner—making this short story both
figuratively and literally about sugar. Like Frederick, the fact that David is marked as Creole is
partially a result of his spending time abroad in contact with raw products; however, unlike
Frederick, David does not merely work on a ship that participates in the triangle trade that allows
slave plantations to prosper. David actually abandons the confectioner’s trade to go to the
colonies, in a direct attempt to make money from sugar plantations. In this way Eliot’s text does
not merely suggest symbolically the significance of a global economy; she blatantly juxtaposes
the reality of sugar production in the colonies with the symbolic connotations of processed sugar
in England.
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In some ways, like North and South, “Brother Jacob” appears to respond to Jane Eyre
and other texts before it. For example, like Jane Eyre, though “Brother Jacob” is written long
after slavery, it takes place during slavery (1820s). Further, the scheming protagonist of Eliot’s
story, appropriately named David Faux, seems to have a Rochester-like hero in mind when he
imagines that he will go to the colonies, make a fortune from a sugar plantation, and marry a
dusky beauty—essentially imagining that his “easily recognizable merit of whiteness” will give
him a natural advantage in the slave colonies (Eliot 6). Additionally, as Carl Plasa points out,
Jane Eyre and “Brother Jacob” share much in common with the 18th-century story of Inkle and
Yarico,25 a story explicitly mentioned by David in “Brother Jacob” when he checks it out from
the circulating library (6). In essence, all three plots center on Englishmen who (attempt to)
profit financially from a relationship with a foreign woman in the colonies and then who
abandon this woman to marry an English heiress. However, Eliot makes clear in “Brother Jacob”
that David’s rehearsal of this logic is now (at the point of the story’s publication) unbecoming an
Englishmen. In the first place, though David imagines that it is “probable that some Princess
Yarico would want him to marry her, and make him presents of very large jewels beforehand;
after which, he needn’t marry her unless he liked” (14), Eliot makes clear that David never
encounters such a romanticized princess in the slave colony nor does he succeed in marrying an
English heiress back in England.
25 Inkle and Yarico is most famously a comic operetta staged in London in 1787; however, an earlier version appears
in Robert Steele’s Spectator (1711) and is based on a supposedly true story recorded in Richard Ligon’s A True and
Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). Inkle and Yarico is the story of a young man who shipwrecks on an
island only to be saved by a native princess, Yarico; though they have a romantic relationship from which he profits,
when he returns to England Inkle attempts to sell Yarico into slavery (along with his unborn child) so that he can
recover his financial losses and marry an English heiress. Although he ultimately repents and marries Yarico, the
story of Inkle and Yarico shares some marked similarities with Jane Eyre.
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In this way Eliot’s sarcasm and disdain for the protagonist is not only palpable, but in the
story these plans are ultimately unsuccessful—a fact which reflects the changes in attitudes
towards slavery that have taken place in England by the time Eliot is writing in 1860.
Consequently, as Plasa argues, “Brother Jacob” is a text that not only “recall[s] abolitionist
politics, [but] Eliot’s text” also critiques “both the pursuit of profit in the sugar islands
themselves and the quest for erotic self-gratification which invariably accompanies it” (Plasa
77). In this way Eliot makes clear that David, who finds that no “position could be suited” to him
“that was not in the highest degree easy to the flesh and flattering to the spirit” and whose
inclination “towards foreign climes…where a young gentleman of pasty visage, lipless mouth,
and stumpy hair, would likely to be received with the hospitable enthusiasm which he had a right
to expect” (Eliot 6), is a caricature of the greedy colonizer-Englishman.
Significantly, David’s deceit throughout the short story is often directly linked to sugar.
For example, when David decides at the beginning of the story that he will go to a sugar colony
in order to attain wealth, he at first resolves to steal the money he needs for the passage from the
confectioner for whom he works. When his plan to steal risks detection, he decides instead to
steal from his mother instead, as “it is not robbery to take property belonging to your mother: she
doesn’t prosecute you” (7). However, when his “idiot” brother, Jacob, catches David in the act of
stealing his mother’s guineas, in order to distract Jacob David tricks Jacob into believing that
burying the stolen money will turn it to sweet lozenges (9-12). Later, when David Faux (now
returned from the colonies and operating under the pseudonym Edward Freely) opens a
confectioner’s shop in Grimworth, his shop becomes a symbolic nexus of deceit: he not only lies
to his customers by claiming to be an orphaned heir, and thus an appropriate suitor for a local
beauty, but it is also at the confection shop that the women of Grimworth purchase baked goods
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to secretly pass off as their own at home, thereby deceiving their own families with David’s
sugar.
Thus, David Faux’s overwhelming relationship to sugar in the text, through his position
as a confectioner and dreams of a grand plantation life, works to mark him as an immoral
character. In other words, David’s relationship to sugar throughout the text does not symbolize,
as it does for Margaret, that he is an appropriately moral person, but symbolizes instead that he is
someone who “pollutes” the very sugar he touches, as the Creole plantation owner would,
causing others to consume sugar polluted with his deceit. In this way, because sugar in Eliot’s
text is associated with the lies David tells in order to succeed financially and is directly linked to
the plantation system in the colonies, sugar maintains the earlier abolitionist connotations of
contamination. Similarly, the fact that the women of Grimworth unwisely accept his baked goods
and bring them into their own homes signals that these women are not properly vigilant in
preventing contaminated sugar from entering their homes.
Importantly, as suggested above, an important shift here from earlier abolitionist rhetoric
is the line drawn between raw sugar and finished goods. When David’s “idiot” brother Jacob
crashes into David’s store, ultimately exposing him for a fraud and preventing his marriage to
Penny, the townspeople appear just as horrified to learn of David’s lies as they are that they
consumed his baked goods. Importantly, Eliot ends her story by stating that after David has left
town the “demoralization of Grimworth women was checked…The secrets of the finer cookery
were revived in the breasts of matronly house-wives, and daughters were again anxious to be
initiated in them” (51). This is a revealing detail as presumably the raw sugar used to make pies
in Faux’s shop is coming from the same source as that used to make pies within the homes of the
women; thus, the issue is not merely whether or not sugar is contaminated by slavery, but
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whether or not it goes through the proper process of transformation, which essentially purifies
and distances that product from its initial form. In this way, by having the women return to
baking and by expelling (the creolized) David from the text, the text works to distance the
English from the production of raw sugar abroad, while ultimately eliding the fact that “the
domestic spaces into which his business reaches are themselves already haunted by the spectre of
slavery” (Plasa 89).
This attempt to distance England’s domestic finished products from the site of the
production of raw goods abroad is even clearer in Aunt Martha’s primers for children. Aunt
Martha’s Corner Cupboard: A Story for Little Boys and Girls (1875),26 by Mary and Elizabeth
Kirby, is a great example of how pervasive this language of domestic purity (and purification)
was in regards to the transformation of tainted sugar. In the first place, Aunt Martha’s Corner
Cupboard is structured as if it were a story in which the domestic and kind “Aunt Martha”
explains to children in the story how pantry items came to be in England for their enjoyment. By
setting the story up in this way, the text works very carefully to delineate the domestic (in both
senses of the word) site of consumption from the foreign site of production of raw materials and
participates in “instilling a colonialist consciousness in English children” (Norcia 254); the
primer also reveals that, as in all the texts I have discussed here, “food and power are linked”: the
primer teaches children that the “proper flow of food nourishe[s] the Empire,” while the Empire
“consume[s] the resources and energies of the colonial world” (Norcia 263). Throughout it all,
the primer works to instill in its readers a sense of England’s superiority.
26 This primer was reprinted several times under a series of similar titles including Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard,
or Stories about Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Honey, &c and Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard, or Stories about Tea, Coffee,
Sugar, Rice, &c.
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As in “Brother Jacob” (and as in North and South, for that matter), the text here not only
works hard to distance English consumption from the production of raw materials, but when
those far-off colonies are mentioned, the entire subject of Cuba is omitted. For example, in the
section on sugar Aunt Martha elides the topic of exactly where English sugar is being produced:
while Aunt Martha explains that a “great deal” of England’s sugar is made in Jamaica, she
neglects to explain where the rest (and majority) of England’s sugar comes from (62). However,
at the same time that the text is vague about the import statistics for sugar, the text does carefully
emphasize the humane nature of sugar production in English colonies: Aunt Martha explains
that, “at one time [in Jamaica (and, presumably, other English colonies)] the black people who
made the sugar and took care of the canes were slaves…but one happy morning they were all set
free” (61-63). Because slaves were still used in other colonies, such as Cuba, when this primer
was written, it is clear that this statement is an attempt by the text to differentiate English
colonialism from the model of colonialism practiced by other countries, such as Spain.
However, what Aunt Martha’s Corner Cupboard illustrates more clearly than the
distancing of domestic England from foreign colonies is the way purity and modernity depends
on the domestic space. In the first place, according to the primer, the now-modern British Empire
is prevented from bringing contaminated sugar into English homes because “a great giant called
Steam [sic] helps to make the sugar now, and does more than all the black people put together”
(63), thus highlighting the ways in which modern machinery helps to distance England from the
methods of production in other colonies (e.g., slaves), thereby distancing England from that
possible source of “contamination.” Of course, it should be noted that though the primer
carefully characterizes steam power as a method of removing the need for slaves in English
colonizes (as steam “does more than all the black people put together”), as I mentioned earlier,
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Cuba also used steam power on slave plantations (thanks in part to English engineers); thus, what
the primer works to juxtapose as two possible methods of production (slaves versus machinery)
worked together as one process in Cuba.
Regardless of what happens abroad, the most revealing argument made by the primer is
the way it stresses what happens to sugar when it gets “home” to England: first, “after [sugar]
gets [to Europe/England], some if it goes through another process and is made quite white, and
into tall cone-shaped loaves…called “lump-sugar;” and the other goes by the name of “raw” (72,
emphasis mine). Then, [inside the domestic space] sugar is transformed into “Christmas
pudding… and the plum-cake and the tarts, and the custards, and all the nice things that little
boys are so fond of” (60). In this way the text emphasizes that “raw” sugar, imported from
abroad, goes through yet another (whitening) purification process before it enters the English
home, and, once there, white, feminine hands will provide yet another transformation for the
sugar, shaping it into a finished/baked good before it is then safely consumed.
In this way the symbolic cleansing that I outlined in North and South in the scene where
Margaret offers her white hands as sugar-tongs to mediate between her father and sugar, as well
as the contamination that takes place when the domestic women of Grimworth in “Brother
Jacob” do not handle and therefore do not symbolically “purify” their own sugar, is all part of the
same pervasive logic meant to separate modern and “ethical” England from the site where raw
goods are produced by black (perhaps even slave) hands. While Aunt Martha’s Cupboard allows
that English baked goods “would have no sweet taste in them if it were not for the sugar” (60)
grown “in very hot countries where black people live and monkeys run about the trees” (61), this
text (and the ones discussed above) ultimately works to put as great a distance as possible
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between the domestic site of consumption and the place where raw products are grown and
potentially contaminated by unknown horrors, such as slavery.
As an important aside, the fact that the English were to an extent aware of the hypocrisy
inherent in these standards is illustrated by one controversy surrounding Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. While Barrett Browning, a fierce abolitionist, wrote the relatively well-received
“Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1847)—a poem about an American slave who runs away
from a sugar plantation and kills her “far too white” infant, while lamenting that her dark skin
means she will never know freedom from the captors who approach (XVII, 4)—Barrett
Browning also wrote a (perhaps-lesser-known) controversial poem called “A Curse for a Nation”
(186027).28 In “A Curse for a Nation,” a female speaker condemns an unspecified nation across
“the Western Sea” (Prologue 4) for its hypocrisy, as it claims to be “Freedom’s foremost
acolyte,” while “calm footing all the time/ on writhing bond-slaves” (7-11). Significantly, while
Barrett Browning publicly declared that the poem was directed at the United States and intended
as an argument that the United States should “lose much of its credit for its own struggle for
freedom” as well as “any power of moral authority” due to its continued use of slaves (Gladish
275), the poem sparked a controversy in England when many English readers felt that “in the
context of the whole book, prefaced by a Prologue sharply blaming the British, the poem could
only be understood as an invective against [Barrett Browning’s] native land's political and social
system” (Arinshtein 37). On the one hand, the female speaker at first refuses, in the Prologue, to
write a curse against the unnamed nation (the United States) because her “heart is sore/ for [her]
own land’s sins” (Prologue, 18-19)—a homeland whose “love of freedom… abates/Beyond the
27 Although the poem was written upon request and published in 1856 in the United States, the version that is
relevant to this discussion is the one republished, with a prologue, in 1860 in Poems Before Congress.
28 Both poems are collected in Selected Poems, edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor.
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Straights” (Prologue, 25-26). On the other hand, within the poem itself, the speaker critiques the
United States for “watch[ing] while nations strive” and favoring “the cause” “only
under…breath” (26-31). Apparently, many English readers felt that statements such as these
pointed to parallels between England and the United States’ current political situations, and that,
therefore, despite her protests, Barrett Browning had dared to suggest that both nations were not
doing their part to support the cause of freedom, particularly as it related to the cause of abolition
(DeLaura 211).
Whether the poem was an attack on England or just mistakenly perceived as one, it is a
fitting closing example for this chapter as the poem and its reception reveals that the English
were potentially more conscious of their own double standards than some of the texts I have
analyzed thus far might suggest. Additionally, the defensiveness felt by English readers may
have been very directly linked to the knowledge that sugar was being produced by slaves in
Cuba: for example, David J. DeLaura suggests that the occasion for the poem may have been the
“Ostend Manifesto,” a document “signed by the chief American diplomats assigned to England,
France and Spain,” in which American pro-slavery sentiment was declared, as was the intent to
annex Cuba as an additional slave-state of the U.S (DeLaura 211, emphasis mine). DeLaura’s
observation here not only supports the idea that the poem may have been (at least partially)
directed at England’s refusal to take a real stand against slavery in Cuba (as well as against the
United States), but, in addition, the uproar caused by its reception in this context only strengthens
my suggestion throughout this chapter that the English were aware of the fact that they were to
some degree complicit in the system that allowed slavery to prosper and very careful to negotiate
(and bury any signs of) that culpability.
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Whether Barrett Browning did mean to reprimand England—thereby refusing to
participate in the negotiations that these other female authors that I have identified take part in—
or whether she meant only to critique the United States, this poem reveals a fissure in the façade
that midcentury English culture worked very hard to maintain. In other words, if England were to
continue to receive a large number of slave-produced colonial goods, while maintaining that
England was superiorly ethical and superiorly modern for not using slaves in their own colonies
and for maintaining better conditions for English workers, then an elaborate cultural system was
crucial in helping English culture negotiate its culpability. Thus, English women writers—the
metaphorical descendants of those “mothers of empire” who called for abolition within the
British Empire by boycotting sugar—rose to the occasion and took up where their predecessors
left off.
Thus, while scholarship by Victorianists largely remains silent on the topic of sugar and
slavery in English literature and culture after the abolition of slavery within the British Empire, it
is clear that sugar did continue to be an important topic as well as an important symbol for
national(istic) concerns in England. By defining themselves against the world, the English were
able to create a stronger sense of national identity, one that centered on the idea that they were
more ethical, more modern, and more politically advanced, and by using the language of the
early abolitionists, these midcentury female writers made clear that these “advancements” by the
British Empire were part of a larger teleological “progress” that began at the turn of the century
with abolitionism in England.
Furthermore, these writers reveal how commodities, particularly sugar, allow scholars to
trace the discourse of anxiety that the English felt about their national identity in the face of an
increasingly global system and in a way that focusing simply on abolitionist rhetoric does not
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allow. Through the analysis of sugar we can see the way that privileged white women were able
to participate in nation-making through their participation in the (global) marketplace—both as
the domestic purchasers of sugar as well in as their role as the producers of these cultural texts
which discuss sugar. In this sense, if, as I argued in the previous chapter, an analysis of tobacco
reveals how Englishmen and Cuban men used the figure of the mulata to celebrate Orientalism
and the liminal spaces of national identity, then an analysis of sugar reveals the way white
women were made the guardians and the center of national/domestic purity, symbols of all that
was good, and the protectors of all that must be kept sacred (and separate) from the Other. In
this way, while tobacco was coded as masculine and highlighted the role of men abroad in the
colonies, sugar was coded as feminine and highlighted the role of women in the empire, as the
protectors of the domestic space. Because sugar as a physical commodity lent itself so perfectly
to ideas about purity, femininity, and domesticity (in both England and Cuba), it became the
perfect way for English women writers to participate in the debate regarding England’s role in
the world economy—as well as the debate regarding women’s place in deciding that role. Thus,
both sugar and tobacco together reveal the myriad ways that commodities helped the English
make sense of their imperial relationship with colonial producers, even if the colonies producing
those goods were not English colonies.
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Figure 3-1. Los gringos invadirán la Habana. [“The Gringos Will Invade Havana.”] Adapted
from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las Marquillas Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX. La
Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985. 57.
Figure 3-2. “Quebrado de primera (de centrifuga).” [“First Rate (From the Centrifuge).”]
Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las Marquillas Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX.
La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985. 78.
107
Figure 3-3. “Quebrado de segunda.” [“Second Rate.”] Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba
En Las Marquillas Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX. La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de
Cuba, 1985. 79.
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Figure 3-4. “Blanca de segunda (tren comun).” [“Second Grade White (Common Train).”]
Adapted from Núñez, Jiménez A. Cuba En Las Marquillas Cigarreras Del Siglo XIX.
La Habana: Ediciones Turísticas de Cuba, 1985. 81.
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CHAPTER 4
BITTERSWEET EMPIRE: MID-VICTORIAN CHOCOLATE AND THE ANXIETY OF
FOREIGN ADULTERANTS
In the previous chapter I analyzed the symbolic associations surrounding (Cuban) sugar
in midcentury Victorian texts and the ways in which sugar was used to help the British work out
anxieties about their own modernity and domestic sanctity in the face of increasingly complex
networks of imported slave goods. In this chapter I turn to cocoa, or chocolate1, which shares
some important similarities to sugar. In particular, in the Victorian period chocolate was, like
sugar, associated with femininity, and, like sugar, there was an imperative to imagine that
chocolate was “pure”—despite food adulteration rumors and the awareness that it was being
produced by slaves in such places as Brazil and Venezuela. Similarly, both sugar and chocolate
represented for the Victorians an awareness of the increasingly global networks that brought
goods to England. However, mid-nineteenth-century Victorian cultural texts reveal that during
that time chocolate, unlike sugar, was never quite successfully imagined to be pure, and, instead,
became symbolic of a host of negative associations. I argue in this chapter that those negative
associations are due in part to the untraceable nature of the networks that brought chocolate to
England: chocolate came not only from English colonies in the Caribbean, but, more often, from
non-English colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America. To complicate matters, the exact
origin of the chocolate beans sold in the marketplace was often uncertain.
By investigating the complicated language that surrounds cocoa in the mid-nineteenth
century, including its negative symbolic associations, I address an issue that is often ignored by
scholars: that is, the importance of where chocolate was being imported from. Essentially, if
1 As I will discuss later in this chapter, though today one might use the term “cocoa” to refer to the hot beverage and
“chocolate” to refer to the edible candy, up until the mid-to-late-Victorian period the terms were largely
interchangeable as edible chocolate either did not exist or was not popularly consumed.
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scholars writing about chocolate mention the mid-Victorian period at all, they argue simply that
chocolate was largely unpopular in England until the late-Victorian period for a variety of
reasons, including the difficulty of preparation, the relatively high import duties (compared with
those of tea and coffee), and—the most consistently cited reason—the frequency with which
grocers adulterated cocoa with harmful products. Many scholars suggest that it was when the
adulteration of chocolate with harmful substances lessened at the end of the century that
chocolate began to be consumed on a large scale in England. However, as I will illustrate, the
midcentury Victorians were consuming chocolate in ever-increasing amounts—even if
representations of chocolate in cultural texts during this period appear to be fewer than in the
periods before and after. I argue in this chapter that the language of adulteration that surrounds
chocolate during this period can be seen as a means for working out concerns about foreign
products that came to England through its imperial, rather than colonial, networks. Thus, when
cocoa consumption increased at the end of the century, it is not only significant that anti-
adulteration laws had been passed (in 1872 and 1875), but that England had begun to grow cocoa
in the colonies of West Africa (in the 1870s) and had, consequently, come to rely less on an
imperial relationship with South America for cocoa beans.2
To make this argument clear, this chapter has three distinct sections. First, I provide a
brief overview of the current scholarship on chocolate to show that scholarship has thus far
2 While colonialism is an act of imperialism, and the two terms are inter-related, the two terms may be used to
describe distinct relationships between nations. Colonialism describes a method in which an empire officially
colonizes a foreign country, territory, or people; those colonized become formally dependent on the ruling nation
and become officially part of the colonizer’s empire. In contrast, “imperialism” may be used to describe an informal
relationship of power in which the foreign country does not become part of the empire and remains (in theory, at
least) autonomous (though the imperial nation may exert a significant amount of control due to its financial and
military power). Thus, while many countries in Latin America were not officially part of the British Empire (i.e.,
they were not colonies), because of the size and power of the British Empire England still exerted significant
influence over many of many of these countries.
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largely ignored the context of Latin America and the Caribbean and to provide important
historical context for my argument. Next, in the largest section of this chapter, using cultural
texts from the mid-Victorian period, including travelogues, novels, and advertisements, I will
illustrate that we cannot unravel the symbolic value of chocolate during the mid-Victorian period
without considering its connections to Latin America and the Caribbean. While chocolate was
indeed frequently adulterated, that fact alone does not account for all the layers of meaning that
accompany the language of adulteration in texts and advertisements of the period; because
chocolate was a frequently adulterated product that came from “somewhere” in Latin America
and the Caribbean, it became an apt symbol for fears of “contamination” within the home. (In
particular, as I will illustrate, on the one hand it became associated with poison—due to its
relationship to poisonous adulterants and the belief that its bitter taste made it a good medium for
deliberately delivering poison to a victim; on the other hand, because it was a foreign product
that women bought at the market and brought into the home, it was often associated with bad
women, foreigners, or both.) For contrast, the final section of this chapter will look briefly at the
end of the Victorian period to illustrate that once the British Empire was able to acquire cocoa
beans through a colonial relationship with West Africa, chocolate became symbolic of (racial)
“purity,” “progress,” and wholesome English middle-class domesticity. Not only do these texts
market to the British consumer that their wholesome “English” cocoa is coming from West
Africa, but also, in part because this colonial relationship is portrayed so positively, chocolate
effectively loses all association with the dangers of invasion and contamination that were present
in the midcentury texts.
Previous Scholarship on Chocolate
When it comes to the study of Victorian commodity culture, chocolate is perhaps one of
the most difficult commodities to discuss. On the one hand, (mid-)nineteenth-century England
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had a very complicated relationship with this crop; on the other hand, perhaps owing to this first
reason, scholarship in this area is, to say the least, very incomplete. Despite the numerous texts
with titles such as The True History of Chocolate3, or Chocolate: A Global History,4 many
critical texts about chocolate give intense detail about its consumption and socio-cultural history
starting with Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés (each credited in his own way with
bringing chocolate back from the New World) through to the present, with one noticeable
exception: they seem to mostly skip over the Victorian period. The standard explanation given in
many of these texts for this gap in the scholarship is that there is simply not much to say: the
English were not particularly interested in chocolate before the late-Victorian period, and
chocolate’s success in England (at least in part) ultimately depended on the Adulteration of Food
Acts of 1872 and 1875 (Clarence-Smith 24).
In a sense, there is some truth to the idea that the English lagged behind other European
countries in adopting chocolate. Because the cocoa tree is indigenous to South and Central
America (Robertson 65), it was Spanish explorers who encountered it there and brought it back
to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cocoa, then a drink very different from the one
we know today,5 was quickly accepted as a delicacy at the Spanish Court and “was a sanctioned
way of ‘cheating’ on Catholic fast days among most classes” (Moss and Badenoch 72). Due to
this association with Catholic fasting, as well as the geographical proximity of the two countries,
it was only a matter of time before it became popular in Catholic France as well.
3 Coe and Coe.
4 Moss and Badenoch.
5 Meso-American cocoa “was spiced with cinnamon and black pepper from Asia, sweetened with sugar from Cuba,
coloured with achiote (a red-colored dye) from the West Indies, and spiked with almonds and hazelnuts from Spain.
The concoction was served heated” (Off 30). By the early nineteenth century it was a “greasy gruel-like liquid
prepared from roasted ground cocoa beans” (Satran 50)
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In contrast, chocolate took much longer to become popular in England. Although by the
end of the sixteenth century English friars had encountered chocolate, it “remained
characteristically Spanish until the end of the seventeenth century” (Moss and Badenoch 34). In
fact, in at least one early-seventeenth-century incident “English pirates raiding Spanish ships did
not know what the bean was for” and dumped the expensive beans overboard (Cadbury 28).
Chocolate was truly introduced to the English diet after two important events in the seventeenth
century: first, the English acquired Jamaica and the cocoa plantations there from the Spanish in
1655; second, a Frenchman opened the first chocolate house in England in 1657 (Ramamurthy
64).
Importantly, though “illustrations and engravings” that appeared during this period
“always represented [cocoa’s] Central American origins” (Ramamurthy 64) (Figure 4-1),
because of its association with Spain and then France cocoa came to be associated in the English
imagination with continental Europe. This became especially true in the eighteenth century.
Thus, even while in England chocolate was “available to all those who had money to pay for it”
(Coe and Coe 170), and even though chocolate houses played an important role in the
Enlightenment (Off 40), until the nineteenth century chocolate remained largely a “product
associated (in Europe) with Catholic clergy and idle, languid aristocracy” (Moss and Badenoch
53). Accordingly, due to English attitudes towards Catholicism and the continental aristocracy,
while tea, coffee, and chocolate “arrived virtually simultaneously” in England (Coe and Coe
167), chocolate for a long time “suffered from an unfashionable image” (Clarence-Smith 22).
For these reasons the consumption of popular beverages of coffee and tea eclipsed that of
chocolate.
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However, while it is true that this very strong association between chocolate and
Continental Catholics covered a large portion of chocolate’s history, in the mid-Victorian period,
as the Victorians of the growing British Empire became less Francophile, it is clear that
chocolate’s associations shifted back again. Moss and Badenoch very briefly acknowledge this
fact when they state that “over the course of the long nineteenth century,” the “origins of
chocolate, particularly its Latin American roots” were “exoticized”—before they were “mostly
erased” (87).6 It is the period of “exoticization” that Moss and Badenoch briefly mention on
which this chapter focuses. Similarly, Rammamurthy briefly acknowledges that cocoa was
always “a tropical product” that mostly “retained its exoticism in consumption,” though she
claims its identity “shifted from a native American identity to an African one during the period
of the European-Atlantic slave trade [roughly the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century]”—
she makes no mention of Latin America and its place in the trajectory of cocoa’s perceived
origins (64). Thus, according to many scholars, chocolate was associated with the Aztecs and
Mayans since the time of its “discovery” by Europeans and was consumed by the Spanish and
French. In the nineteenth century it came to be associated with West Africa and was consumed
more widely; however, as I will illustrate, during the mid-Victorian period, before it came to be
associated with West Africa, cocoa was associated with the “exotic” locales of Latin America
and the Caribbean, and it is during that period that its consumption began to increase in England.
This chapter considers the effect that this exoticism had on chocolate’s connotations in the
Victorian cultural imagination.
6 While Moss and Badenoch do suggest, as I argue, that chocolate was associated with Latin America during this
period, they do so only very briefly. This chapter is concerned with examining closely a period that has been at best
glossed over.
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However, despite the fact that in the mid-Victorian period chocolate was neither
associated with Catholicism nor yet with British national identity and the benevolent colonialism
of West Africa, scholars who discuss chocolate in the mid-Victorian period often invoke these
two attitudes towards chocolate. For example, David Satran, in one of the most extensive literary
studies of chocolate in the nineteenth century—if not one of the only meaningful literary studies
of chocolate in that century—discusses at length the negative depiction of chocolate in Charles
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty (1841).
He argues that in both texts—essentially the only two Dickens novels where Dickens saw fit to
make “more than mention” of chocolate—“chocolate drinkers are among his most despicable
characters” (Satran 50). However, Satran’s exclusive focus on Dickens, and on his only two
historical novels at that, leads him to a partial misreading of chocolate’s role in the mid-
nineteenth century. For example, while he acknowledges that in these novels “chocolate seems to
be a drink of the past,” he fails to consider that Dickens’ depiction of chocolate here might have
been influenced by the fact that these novels are set during the French Revolution and anti-
Catholic riots of the 1780s, respectively; therefore, perhaps Dickens portrays chocolate as a
“foreign indulgence tied to things decidedly un-British, namely the aristocracy, Catholicism, and
continental Europe” (Satran 51) because these novels are set during a time when that was
decidedly the case. Similarly, while discussing an 1870 letter by Caroline Austen in which she
remembers the extravagance of having chocolate at Anna Austen’s wedding decades earlier,
Moss and Badenoch write that “in Jane Austen’s novels of upper middle class life it is only the
very rich and autocratic General Tilney who drinks chocolate” (Moss and Badenoch 48-49). This
letter, written much later in the century, merely describes a time when chocolate would indeed
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have been an expensive extravagance, as the wedding in question and publication of Northanger
Abbey (1818) occur at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
While many of these (rare) characterizations of Victorian attitudes towards chocolates are
largely backwards leaning, in contrast the scholarship on chocolate that focuses on the end of the
nineteenth century mostly uses the late nineteenth century as a sort of jumping off point for
discussing modern-day chocolate consumption. For example, Emma Robertson discusses the
way posters advertising chocolate, which first appeared in the late nineteenth century, had by the
twentieth century “created, and reinforced, particular uses and identities for each type of
product,” so that while each chocolate product was essentially still chocolate, “the attendant
meanings are vastly different” (Robertson 19). Thus, “solid chocolates were treats for middle-
and upper-class women and children,” cocoa became “an equivalent to soup” for working-class
families (Moss and Badenoch 72), chocolate boxes became symbolic of “romantic love” (Coe
and Coe 243-245), and the chocolate included in soldiers’ rations had “assumed a distinctly
British identity” by World War I (Satran 116-117). Similarly, though many scholars
acknowledge the fact that major English chocolate companies such as Cadbury’s, Fry & Sons,
and Rowntree had all had moderate success by 1860, most of these scholars emphasize instead
the size and success of these (mega-) companies by the turn of the twentieth century, or,
alternatively, they discuss these companies’ Quaker beginnings in the Victorian period in order
to contrast that image with the knowledge that by the end of the nineteenth century chocolate
spelled “economic exploitation of cocoa farmers [in West Africa] by the British firms”
(Robertson 85). In fact, the scandal that occurred when it became clear that British firms, such as
Cadbury’s, were still relying on slavery to produce cocoa in West Africa at the turn of the
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twentieth century is often cited as an important moment in the history of modern business ethics
and consumer awareness politics.
These two approaches to the study of chocolate in the nineteenth century create an
incomplete portrait of the attitudes towards chocolate during a large part of the Victorian period
and suggest that the average Victorian ate little chocolate until the end of the century. However,
this is simply not the case. In the first place, it is clear from any source on the subject that cocoa
imports to England and per capita consumption steadily increased between 1820 and 1900. In
fact, during most of the nineteenth century chocolate was part of the official Royal Navy rations,
having “replaced breakfast gruel … in 1824” (Clarence-Smith 22); as a result of this shift, Fry &
Sons “stressed its royal warrants and its role as sole supplier to the Royal Navy” as a point of
pride in its advertisements (Clarence-Smith 75).7 In the same year (1824) that the Royal Navy
replaced gruel with chocolate, Joseph Cadbury opened his “coffee-and-tea shop in Birmingham,
where he sold the traditional chocolate drink,” and by 1853 Cadbury’s “obtained the royal
privilege as purveyors of chocolate to Queen Victoria” (Coe and Coe 243-245). However,
chocolate was not merely for sailors and the Queen: Henry Mayhew recorded in his classic
London Labour and the London Poor (1851) “that more than three hundred vendors lined
London’s main throroughfares, selling the working poor mugs of coffee, tea, or drinking
chocolate for a penny” (Broomfield 25, emphasis mine). Similarly, an article in The London
Review from October of 1867 calls cocoa a “favourite beverage” and argues that, while the
“government was buying up all the cocoa it could get for the troops” during the war in Crimea,
after the war the price of cocoa “ought by this time to have returned” to its previous price, so that
7 This fact is also evidenced in Victorian literature. For example, in Captain Frederick Marryat’s The Privateer’s
Man: One Hundred Years Ago (1846), the sailors sit down each morning to a “repast of chocolate” (105).
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it could be more easily consumed by the average Victorian, who very much wanted to consume
it.8 In his book The Analysis of Adulterated Foods (1881), Victorian writer James Bell supports
the idea that cocoa was becoming a favorite beverage of the English: as evidence of his claim
that “the use of cocoa in this country has continued gradually to increase,” he includes a chart
that illustrates that while only 267, 321 pounds of cocoa were imported to England for domestic
consumption in 1820, by 1850 the number was closer to 3.1 million pounds, and by 1880 (after
both the passage of the anti-adulteration acts and the plantation of cocoa in West Africa) close to
10.6 million pounds (76).
Further, it is clear that the steady increase in chocolate consumption was correlated with
the major innovations to the industry that occurred during the nineteenth century.9 For example,
though many people cite cocoa’s unpleasant taste and strange texture as one reason for its lack of
popularity in the eighteenth century (again, in comparison to the amounts consumed in Spain and
France), in 1828 the Van Houten Press was developed, which pressed the cocoa butter out of
chocolate, “leaving a cake that could easily be powdered and sold for drinking”—thereby
making cocoa less viscous and much more palatable. Additionally, in the same year, Coenraad
Van Houten began adding alkaline salts to chocolate, thereby inventing the “Dutching” process
(still used today), “which improved the way the chocolate mixes with water” (Moss and
Badenoch 57). However, not only did these two innovations make drinking chocolate more
palatable, but a third major development happened in 1847 when the British Fry family invented
8 Although the author starts by stating that the hearts of all were “so warm towards the brave fellows who were
defending the integrity of Turkey, that no one grudged paying sixpence a pound more for cocoa,” he goes on to
argue that the price of cocoa should be lower now that England is not at war.
9 As Coe and Coe argue, “the technological breakthroughs that made” the “transformation from liquid to solid”
possible “were pretty much confined to the Protestant and thoroughly capitalistic nations of northern and central
Europe; the Catholic countries…which had played such a leading role in chocolate’s history in preceding centuries,
were now largely backwaters as far as such innovations went” (236).
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the first chocolate bars, or edible chocolate, which they called “Chocolat Delicieux a Manger” (a
product sold in England, though it was given a French name). Thus, it was during the mid-
nineteenth century that in England chocolate came to be known as a food in addition to a drink.
Similarly, in 1868 Cadbury’s released the first “chocolate box,” which contained “chocolate
candies” (Coe and Coe 243-245).10 In this way, though scholars frequently acknowledge the
explosion in chocolate consumption at the end of the nineteenth century, the Victorians were not
only consuming chocolate earlier in the century, but great energy was poured throughout the
period into improving and developing this product for mass consumption.
However, significantly, when we shift from speaking about chocolate in relation to
continental Catholics in the eighteenth century to speaking about a boom in British consumption
at the turn of the twentieth century, it is Latin America that falls out of the equation—when, in
fact, closer inspection of the midcentury cultural texts reveals the frequency with which Latin
America and the Caribbean are paired with chocolate. For example, the travelogues from the
mid-nineteenth century emphasize that chocolate comes from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Kingsley writes with excitement in At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871), that though
he had been “eating and drinking [cocoa] all [his] life,” he encounters the crop for the first time
upon a visit to the West Indies and imagines the seeds he looks at will eventually be “sold in
London as Trinidad Cocoa, or perhaps sold in Paris to the chocolate makers” (155-156).
Similarly, Sir Richard Burton, the geographer and explorer, writes in Explorations of the
Highlands of Brazil (1869) that despite its collapsing economy, Brazil continues to export cocoa
to Europe (91). Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) gives a history of
10 Cadbury’s chocolate box had a picture of John Cadbury’s young daughter on the front. While this kind of imagery
was not typical for chocolate during this period, it would become very important symbolism at the turn of the
century, when chocolate was considered a safe and wholesome food for families to consume.
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cocoa with the recipe for preparing the drink: she states that cocoa “grows in the West Indies and
South America” and that it has “always been a favourite beverage among the Spaniards and
Creoles.” Although “high duties laid upon it” had confined it “almost entirely to the wealthier
classes,” now the “removal of this duty has increased their cultivation” (875)11. In yet another
example, an 1867 ad for Epps cocoa disguised as an article called “The Cocao Tree,” from The
Sixpenny Magazine, suggests that Epps cocoa comes from La Guayra, Venezuela, which is “the
seaport whence are shipped the finest varieties of Cocoa [sic]” (Figure 4-2). Similarly, an 1868
ad for Maravilla Cocoa claims obscurely that the “Maravilla estate is the most favored portion of
South America” (Figure 4-3). Thus, these kinds of cultural artifacts clearly illustrate the way
“Latin American roots” of chocolate were “exoticized” (Moss and Badenoch 87)—and even
marketed—during the mid-Victorian period.
Significantly, in Figure 4-3, the Maravilla Cocoa advertisement’s claim that “THIS
COCOA, while possessing all the essential properties, far surpasses all other HOMEOPATHIC
COCOAS” also points to what will be another element in the analysis that follows: the myriad—
and often conflicting—properties attributed to cocoa. My argument centers on the language of
adulteration surrounding chocolate, not only because it is a popularly cited reason for why cocoa
was supposedly unpopular in mid-Victorian England, but also because the language of
adulteration forms a part of the complicated web of uncertainty that surrounded chocolate in the
midcentury. One classic example of this uncertainty is the fact that just as frequently as it was
11 Interestingly, in an article from The Examiner in 1842, called “Sir R. Peel’s Tariff-Coffee, Cocoa, Tea, and
Tobacco,” the author states that due to the duties on imports, “nearly all” of the cocoa “that [the English] consume
now, is the produce of our own West Indies” and unless the government will change these duties, unfortunately,
“such will of course be the case” as “foreign cocoa will, as now, be a virtually prohibitively article.” Complaints
such as these littered throughout early Victorian newspapers illustrate that the Victorians were very eager to have
access to “foreign” chocolate—a fact that again emphasizes the likelihood that, once these duties were lowered, the
midcentury Victorians associated cocoa with Latin America and possibly even preferred cocoa produced in
“foreign” colonies (386).
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depicted as a dangerous conveyor of contamination and poison, it was touted as a medicine,
exotic elixir, and a nutritious menu item—as in the case of the “homeopathic” cocoa above that
comes from exotic estate somewhere in “Latin America.” These myriad and conflicting
associations, including the language of adulteration and contamination, reveal that Victorian
anxieties surrounding chocolate stemmed from the fact that chocolate was actually adulterated
and was a foreign food product brought to England through one of many imperial networks—
though which one brought any given chocolate to England, no one knew.
The section that follows distinguishes between the literal dangers of chocolate
adulteration to the Victorians and the language included in texts and advertisments that might
have been a more symbolic expression of anxieties relating to the contamination of the domestic
(in both sense of the word) space. I examine extant work on Victorian adulteration and present
close readings of texts such as Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the
Vampire, as well as several Victorian advertisements.
Adulterations Detected
The mid-nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the occurrence of food adulteration in
England, as opportunistic merchants took advantage of the fact that after the Industrial
Revolution those living in urban areas, such as London, came to rely more heavily on grocers for
readymade foodstuffs. Many underhanded merchants responded to the dramatic increase in
demand by adding adulterants to their food to stretch their supply in order to increase profit.
However, unfortunately for the Victorians who relied on these products, many of the materials
added to these food products were quite poisonous. For example, it was commonly found that
cheese was dyed with red lead, bread [was] made whiter by alum or even arsenic,
and candy [was] colored with poisonous salts of copper and lead. Cheap, spoiled
butter could be “revived” with a washing in milk and then sweetened with sugar.
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Cocoa was extended with brick dust—as was cayenne pepper. Black pepper was
often mixed with sand, while mustard powder could be more flour and turmeric
than actual mustard. (Broomfield 117)
As Andrea Broomfield points out in Food and Cooking in Victorian England, many of these
“underhanded purveyors” adulterated food because they knew they would suffer no
consequences, as “politicians and government officials hesitated to pass stricter pure food laws
or enforce existing ones because they contended that a laissez-faire economy would keep
adulteration in check” (118). Additionally, these grocers were able to sell these adulterated goods
because as people came to rely more heavily on readymade goods they “lost knowledge of how
to cook competently…[as well as] a sense of how food should taste, how it should look, even
how long it should last” (117). In fact, food adulteration became such a concern in the mid-
Victorian period that new literatures on the subject appeared: on the one hand, scientific studies
were launched to assess and quantify the amount of food adulterated and reports were published
for the average reader, such as those by Arthur Hassall, Friedrich Accum, and James Bell; on the
other hand, “cookbook authorities such as Beeton routinely published directions for detecting
adulteration as well as tips for how to avoid purchasing adulterated products” (Broomfield 118).
In short, food adulteration was a very serious concern in the Victorian period.
While every formal study on the subject during the mid-Victorian period revealed that
nearly every food product examined was adulterated, cocoa appears with insistent frequency in
these debates. For example, physician Dr. Hassall wrote a “series of reports in The Lancet
exposing typical scams in cocoa production: brick dust, red lead, and iron compound to add
color; animal fat or starches such as corn, tapioca, or potato flour to add bulk” (Cadbury 59).
Advertisements (particularly those for the Epps brand) frequently quoted Dr. Hassall’s work in
order to assuage the fear that cocoa was so frequently adulterated—though of course, they
quoted only the parts of Hassall’s work that encourage the consumption of cocoa for its health
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benefits when it was not adulterated. Similarly, James Bell dedicates an entire chapter in his
Analysis and Adulteration of Foods (1881) to cocoa and discusses one by one each of the
common adulterants frequently found in cocoa. Even Frederich Engels notes in The Condition of
the Working Class of England (184512) that in England “Cocoa is often adulterated with fine
brown earth, treated with fat to render it more easily mistakable for real cocoa” (Engels 70). In
this way, while it is clear that other products were frequently, if not more frequently,
adulterated—such as the bakery bread tested between 1851 and 1854, which “with no exception”
was contaminated with alum (Broomfield 118)—chocolate is, at the very least, a product
consistently listed among the foods commonly adulterated.
While it is true that cocoa was certainly not the only adulterated product, Victorian texts
appear to work hard to reinforce a negative view of cocoa as a frequently adulterated product—
and not just in cookbooks and official reports. For example, in a Punch cartoon from 1855, titled
“The Use of Adulteration,” a little girl asks a grocer, “If you please, sir, Mother says, will you let
her have a quarter of a pound of your best tea to kill the rats with, and a ounce of chocolate as
would get rid of the black beadles” (Figure 4-4). Reinforcing the dangerous adulterations found
in the chocolate the little girl asks for, behind the counter the grocer has no containers labeled
“chocolate” or “tea,” but instead has red lead, sand, nux vomica, plaster of paris, et cetera.
Similarly, the popular 1852 novel Mary Prince; or, The Memoirs of a Servant Maid, by G.W.M.
Reynolds contains a scene in which the protagonist, Mary, discovers her shopkeeper master
adulterating his goods. She overhears him saying:
There! I have put the sloe-leaves into all that tea—the sand into this sugar—the
turmeric into that mustard—the potato-flour into the arrow-root—the prepared
starch into that cocoa—the chicory into the bean coffee—and the stuff out of the
12 The Condition of the Working Class of England was written during Engels’ stay in Manchester from 1842-1844; it
was published in Germany in 1845, and in English in 1887.
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deal box into the ground coffee. This, Mrs. M. is what I call industry. (Reynolds 43,
emphasis mine).
Mary’s declaration that this act was “the most wicked dishonest, mixing improper things with his
goods—in fact practicing the most scandalous adulterations!” illustrates how negatively the
adulteration of goods, including chocolate, was perceived, even when the adulteration is merely
starch (Reynolds 44) In an article called “Sketches of Society” by “Aunt Margery,” found in The
Literary Gazette (1844), though the author mentions other questionable practices related to the
preparation of other food items, she spends considerable time discussing the way that “Cocoa,
properly a most wholesome and nutritious accompaniment to the breakfast-table,” has become
known for its “adulteration by the dishonest tradesman” (Aunt Margery 42-43). These examples
suggest that while cocoa is not necessarily more adulterated than other goods, cocoa was
perceived as particularly noteworthy—perhaps because of “the ambiguous position between the
confection and medicine that chocolate would still occupy through much of the century” (Moss
and Badenoch 60) and the emotional response elicited by the thought of consuming a tampered
treat, or worse, a poison instead of a medicine.
Fears regarding the adulteration of chocolate may also have been heightened by the fact
that chocolate was a drink with a complicated preparation and with many varying recipes; as a
result “there was general uncertainty about the correct forms of preparation and consumption”
(Moss and Badenoch 60). Chocolate’s recipe had changed many times from the time it was
introduced to Europe: though the Mexicans of the sixteenth and seventeenth century made the
drink “by boiling corn and cacao and flavoring it with hot pepper,” in the seventeenth century,
the Spanish came to like the drink mixed with “sugar, vanilla and cinnamon” (Momsen and
Richardson “Preparation” 495); by the nineteenth century recipes focused on methods for
reducing the fat in the gruel-like drink.
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Further complicating the attitude towards cocoa is the question of which substances were
considered ingredients of the drink and which were considered adulterations. By the time the
drink came to be prepared in early-nineteenth-century England, the then-viscous drink “had such
a high fat content that the excess cocoa butter had to be skimmed off the finished drink or
absorbed in starchy additions such as arrowroot, potato starch or sago flour” (Moss and
Badenoch 57). While the Van Houten Press (invented in 1828) had eliminated the need for the
starchy additions that the English had been adding to cocoa, The Lancet’s investigation into
adulterated cocoa revealed that even the lesser-adulterated Cadbury’s chocolate was adulterated
with starches (Coe and Coe 247). What is surprising here is the scandal that this news elicited as,
again, there was a time decades earlier when starch was considered not an adulterant but a
necessary ingredient. Still, cookbooks, such as The Dessert Book, written in 1872, warned that:
Many persons think that good chocolate thickens when prepared. This is a mistake; for
this thickening only indicates the presence of farina. If, in breaking chocolate, it is
gravelly; if it melt in the mouth without leaving a cool, refreshing taste; if it becomes
thick and pasty on the addition of hot water, and forms a gelatinous mass on cooling—it
is adulterated with starch and similar substances. (Quoted in Coe and Coe 247, emphasis
mine)
Thus, we can see that the question throughout the period was not merely how to protect against
adulterated cocoa, but also what exactly qualified as an adulterant.
Revealingly, it is during this period that cocoa ads try to assuage these fears and develop
a language of “simplicity” and “purity” that would become much more important at the end of
the century. For example, addressing the difficulty of preparation, 1862 Epps ads from the
nineteenth century frequently included preparation instructions: in an ad from The Sixpenny
Magazine, these instructions are about a paragraph and sound like a chemistry experiment:
To make Cocoa Properly [sic]—mix two tea-spoonfuls of the powder with as much
cold Milk [sic] as will form a stiff paste, and then add, all at once, a sufficient
quantity of boiling Milk, or Milk and Water [sic] in equal portions…Success in
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making it is dependent on pouring the Milk on the Cocoa [sic] at the moment it is
rising foaming in the saucepan.” (Figure 4-5)
However, later in the century Epps ads such as the one found in The Examiner from 1868 more
succinctly state, “It is made simply by pouring-on boiling water or milk.” While some ads
emphasized simplicity, others emphasized cocoa’s purity. For example, an 1850 ad in The Critic
for Graham and Hedley’s Roll Cocoa was designed to appeal to “persons anxious to procure
Manufactured Cocoa [sic] in a pure state” (emphasis mine). Accordingly, Cadbury’s developed
the slogan “Pure therefore the best,” which they would continue to use throughout the rest of the
century. While it is clear that the language of “simplicity” and “purity” was designed to assuage
very real fears relating to ease of preparation and adulteration, by the final section of this chapter
it will be made clear why, by the end of the century—when cocoa is no-longer heavily
adulterated and after cocoa has been planted in West Africa—this language of “purity” takes on
very different (racial) implications.
Thus, while it is clear that the Victorians were concerned about adulteration and that
scholars such as Cadbury, Moss and Badenoch, and the Coes are to a degree right to cite anti-
adulteration laws in the early 1870s as key to clearing the way for the end-of-the-century boom
in chocolate consumption, there are many other factors to consider in order to understand
Victorian attitudes towards chocolate. First, the fact that these adulteration concerns did not
inhibit a growing taste for cocoa in Victorian England complicates a simple cause-and-effect
understanding of the significance of these laws. Second, and more importantly, the fact that Latin
America and the Caribbean are frequently imaginatively paired with cocoa and chocolate during
this period but then largely disappear from the same kinds of texts in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century must be considered.
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Strange Origins
The fact of the matter is that while chocolate came from Latin America and the
Caribbean during a large part of the Victorian period, the exact origin of beans was uncertain, as
they came from diverse areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, and their origins became even
more obscured when they were funneled through centralized ports and/or shipped from
secondary ports13 (Momsen and Richardson “Preparation” 498-499).14 Thus, if a Victorian
wanted to purchase beans from a particular locale in order to ensure quality, or even simply due
to a preference (perhaps for more exotic beans or perhaps for those grown in English colonies), it
would have been very difficult during this period to ensure the origin of a particular batch of
cocoa.
Examples of the confusion that surrounded cocoa’s origination are dizzying. For instance,
as Janet H. Momsen and Pamela Richardson show, beans exported from Trinidad were not
necessarily Trinidadian cocoa, as Trinidad was a “transshipment point for cocoa from Venezuela
and from other parts of the British West Indies” (“Preparation” 498), and “some of the cocoa”
from islands such as Grenada and St. Vincent was also being “exported via Trinidad” to Great
Britain (“Preparation” 499, emphasis mine). To complicate matters, much of the chocolate
imported to England from Latin America and the Caribbean came through other European ports
first, such as chocolate that came from ports in France, which was then sold as “French”
chocolate. These displacements were often acknowledged in cocoa ads. For example, in the Epps
ad from 1867 cited earlier, which masquerades as an article on cocoa called “The Cacao Tree,”
though the ad never states clearly that the beans for Epps Cocoa come from Latin America, it
13 That is, ports where the cacao was not produced and to where cacao has already been imported.
14 See also Richter and Ta (217).
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includes a long description of the port of La Guayra, in Venezuela. The advertisement states that
La Guayra “is the seaport whence are shipped the finest varieties of cocoa” and “is also the chief
port in the province of Caracas and of the whole southern shore of the Caribbean Sea” (Figure 4-
2, emphasis mine). Thus, the ad implies that the beans come from Venezuela, even while
indicating that La Guayra is a secondary port for “the whole southern shore of the Caribbean
sea.” Ads like these point to the reality that, while England did produce cocoa in its own colonies
(most notably, Trinidad, which was also a major transshipment port), it would have been much
more likely for the British consumer to have encountered cocoa from Venezuela or Ecuador (the
two largest producers of cocoa) or a variety of other Latin American and Caribbean countries
that were not part of the British Empire—and, more importantly, for the exact origination of the
beans to have been obscured.15
However, despite the general obscurity behind cocoa’s origins, ads from the period
suggest that Victorians did care where their cocoa came from, as many ads allude to the
origination of the cocoa being sold, even if very vaguely. For example, in the Maravilla Cocoa in
Figure 4-3 (above), the ad suggests that the sellers of Maravilla cocoa procure their beans from a
very specific “estate” in “Latin America”—never mind that the advertisers do not list in which
country this “estate” is located, as if “Latin America” were a single country. Similarly, Trinidad
Cocoa, a popular brand of cocoa at the time, was perhaps so-named to suggest to customers that
this cocoa was grown in Trinidad, a British colonial holding at the time—though, apart from the
name, it is unclear if that is actually where the beans originated. In fact, in Figure 4-6, a 1852
15 While the “British Caribbean” was a “major world producer of cocoa by the end of the 19th century,” the region’s
production of cocoa had “repeatedly suffered from hurricanes and diseases.” Caribbean cocoa became “increasingly
marginalized by the expansion of cocoa production” in other parts of the world, including Ceylon, Malaysia, and—
importantly—West Africa (Momsen and Richardson “Planting” 488). In Jamaica “labor shortages following slave
emancipation meant that cocoa did not recover until the end of the 19th century when market prices improved”
(Momsen and Richardson “Planting” 482), and by then cocoa was already being cultivated in other colonies.
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Trinidad Cocoa ad from The Critic mentions a third party, a “Messrs. HENRY THORNE and
CO., Leeds,” who are engaged by the manufacturers of Trinidad Cocoa to prepare “the article,”
complicating the matter of origination further.
Importantly, ads like these rhetorically link the issue of origination to adulteration. The
ad states that because Trinidad Cocoa has been “justly celebrated for its peculiarly invaluable
nutritive properties,” “strenuous…competitive efforts [have been] thereby excited…[and] the
most flagrant adulterations have been resorted to, with the sole aim of lowness of price”;
however, the consumer can rest easy that the manufacturers of “Genuine” Trinidad Cocoa
“manufacture only from the choicest Nuts [sic], and rightly eschew adulteration in any shape
whatsoever.” The ad not only links the adulteration of other brands with a desire to compete with
brands like Trinidad Cocoa, but also promises that because their cocoa is “genuine” Trinidad
Cocoa, the consumer can rest assured that it is made from “the choicest Nuts [sic]” and
unadulterated, thereby blurring the line between origination and adulteration.
The fact that cocoa’s origins were uncertain, even sometimes deliberately obscured, is
also acknowledged in literature from the period. Charles Kingsley writes in At Last: A Christmas
in the West Indies that as he stares at cocoa beans in Trinidad he wonders if they will be “sold in
London as Trinidad Cocoa, or perhaps sold in Paris to the chocolate makers” (155-156). To
Kingsley, it seems plausible that instead of cocoa grown in Trinidad becoming “Trinidad
Cocoa,” it is equally likely that it will go to France and then come back to England “as ‘Menier’
or other” with both “possibly” having originated “from this very island” (247). Similarly, an ad
for the Paris Chocolate Company, found in 1853 issue of The Critic, advertises (in all capital
letters) that it sells “FRENCH CHOCOLATE.” However, closer inspection reveals that this
“French” chocolate is actually “prepared from the choicest Cocoa of the English markets and
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manufactured in the …French method” and is even “distinguished by the Patronage [sic] of her
Majesty the Queen” (Figure 4-7, emphasis mine). What is clear is that there was a sense in this
period that cocoa was coming from “somewhere” in Latin America and the Caribbean and, more
often than not, imagined to be coming from several exotic and mysterious locales—colonies, but
usually not English colonies. Many cocoa companies even exploited this sense of exoticism by
offering a variety of strange-sounding “types” of cocoa: for example, a Dunn and Hewett’s ad
from The Examiner in 1869 advertises varieties such as “Caraccatina” (presumably a play on the
word “Caracas”), “Lichen Islandicus” (or “Iceland Moss Cocoa”), and “Maizena Cocoa” (Figure
4-8).
While many viewed “exotic” cocoa in a positive light (its medical, nutritive, and
“homeopathic” qualities were often touted), by the midcentury it was more often associated with
poison: it was poisonous due to adulterants, but also imagined to be the perfect medium for
deliberate poisonings because of its exotic and strong taste. In particular, it was associated with
women who poisoned. Bad women were not only imagined to sit around enjoying chocolate
instead of tending to those who depended on them as caretakers, but it was the women who were
lax in their duties as housewives who unknowingly brought poisonous market goods, such as
chocolate, into the family home; or worse, it was women who actively poisoned those in their
home in the guise of preparing this sweet treat for guests and family.
As early as the seventeenth century, stories drawing on the connection between
chocolate, poison, and women begin to appear: for example, French writer Mme. D’Aulnoy told
the story of a “Spanish ‘lady of quality’” who “took revenge on a lover” by offering “him the
choice of a dagger or a poisoned cup of chocolate.” He chose the chocolate “and drank it to the
last drop, complaining that it lacked enough sugar to cover up the poison’s bitterness” (Coe and
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Coe 139-140). 16 Similarly, in a frequently repeated story, Englishman and Jesuit Thomas Gage
told “of Creole women who were so fond of their chocolate that they insisted on drinking it
during church services in Chiapas (present town of San Cristobal de las Casas)” (Quoted in
Gordon 548). When the bishop excommunicated those who continued to have their chocolate in
church, “the bishop was murdered by chocolate laced with poison, presumably by one of the
unhappy local women. The story gave rise to a ditty—‘Beware of the chocolate of Chiapas’—
and became the motif for subsequent murder-by-chocolate stories” (Gordon 584).17 In fact, an
1853 article in The New Monthly Magazine contains an eight-page retelling of this story, called
“Beware the Chocolate of Chiapa [sic]”. The fact that the story is written here as a cliffhanger
that ends before the bishop is poisoned indicates that the writer presumed the Victorians were
familiar with the story.
The 1853 retelling of the familiar story also includes significant embellishments that
reveal a great deal about Victorian attitudes towards chocolate, particularly the association
between chocolate and bad women. For example, in this version of the story, it is not just
suspected that “a local woman” poisoned the bishop, but the exact woman is identified, named
Dona Magdalena, and portrayed as a femme fatale. While all the women who insist on
consuming chocolate in church despite the bishop’s official condemnation of the practice are
connected with the Devil and “the Pagan deities [sic]” (Costello 255), the Mexican Dona
Magdalena stands apart from the women whose bodies have been negatively affected by their
16 Likewise, Martha Few’s work “Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth
Century Guatemala” details a series of women who were accused of using chocolate in poisonings.
17 Henry Stubbe retold Gage’s story in 1662 (Gordon 584).
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consumption of chocolate18 as a “haughty beauty”—although she is a beauty whose
“countenance” threatened “deadly vengeance” against the bishop (Costello 257). After the ladies
have failed, after various attempts, to get the bishop to change his mind and invite the women
and their chocolate back into the mass, Dona Magdalena feigns piety and convinces the bishop
that she is a “striking…exception to the conduct of the rest of the ladies of Chiapa [sic]”; as a
result, the narrator tells us, mockingly, the bishop desires to “cultivate a better acquaintance with
one so devout” in order to use the “study of physiognomy” to judge the sincerity of this
“beautiful woman.” Importantly, it is when the bishop does not limit his visits with her to the
“chapter-room and the confessional,” but begins to visit her at her home that he is in real danger:
one of the last images of the narrative is the bishop’s carriage at her door, as the narrator asks the
reader if Dona Magdalena’s “proud heart” has really been humbled, or “what… secret
thought…makes those dark eyes gleam and those pale lips tremble?” (Costello 261).
This embellishment, which focuses on a specific femme fatal who poisons the bishop in
her own home, ultimately reveals the fears about women and the contamination of the domestic
space that are often tied up in texts about cocoa during this period. In the first place, because
poisons are disguised by food (in this case chocolate), they symbolically confound the unstated
contract that women should mediate between the consumer and the food, providing enjoyable
and safe nourishment to her family and her guests. Second, the fact that poisonings (whether
done intentionally by women or caused through adulteration by grocers) often take place within
the domestic sphere heightens these fears as such poisonings disrupt the sanctity of the domestic
space and blur the boundaries between public and private. For example, these same fears can be
18 One woman, Dona Jacinta, is described as a “toothless old lady, who almost lived upon the condemned beverage”
(256), while another, Dona Caterina, is a “stout lady” whose “appetite no climate could have affected” enough to
justify a physical need for chocolate consumption during mass (257)
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seen in a sensational case from the late 1860s regarding Christiana Edmunds, or “The Chocolate
Cream Poisoner.” After trying unsuccessfully to poison the wife of her ex-lover, Dr. Charles
Beard, with a gift of chocolates, she began poisoning the general public by obtaining chocolate
creams, lacing them with strychnine, and then returning them to unknowing vendors, who sold
them; she also sent parcels of poisoned chocolate to the homes of prominent people. Although
most people who consumed these chocolates merely fell ill, she did kill at least one person: a
four-year-old named Sidney Barker. The sensation surrounding the case not only reveals
Victorian anxieties about women who pervert their role as caretakers, but also anxieties about the
safety of the home, especially from foods bought into the home from the public sphere. These
narratives also reinforced cocoa’s association with indeterminacy and contamination.
The highly sensational mid-nineteenth-century case of Madeleine Smith is probably what
most strongly reinforced this association between women, chocolate, and poison in the
midcentury Victorian’s mind. Madeleine Smith was a Glasgow socialite who went on trial for
poisoning her lower-class French lover, Pierre Emile L'Angelier. The story goes that when her
parents—not knowing of her relationship with L’Angelier—arranged a suitable marriage for her
within the Glasgow upper-classes, she tried to break off the relationship with L’Angelier and
reclaim her love letters; when he threatened to use the letters to expose her and to force her into
marriage to him instead, she poisoned him with arsenic. Although the indictment of Madeleine
Smith claims vaguely that she gave her lover “a quantity or quantities of arsenic, or other poison
to the prosecutor unknown, in cocoa or in coffee, or in some other article or articles of food or
drink to the prosecutor unknown” (Quoted in Irvine 196), it is clear that in the popular
imagination many assumed she had poisoned him with chocolate laced with arsenic. In the first
place, Smith had perhaps tried more than once to poison L’Angelier and it was rumored that he
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had become suspicious of chocolate he had consumed by her hand on an earlier occasion. An
American law review published in the 1850s states: “If the gossip brought forward as evidence
by the Crown is credible, L'Angelier was suspicious that he had been poisoned before—in cocoa
or coffee, administered by his sweetheart.” The review then claims that it is likely “that on this
occasion [which resulted in his death] he swallowed in cocoa (for a cup of coffee would be
incapable of holding more than twenty grains in suspension) between 200 or 300 grains of gritty
arsenic” (Irvine 218-219, emphasis mine). Others summarize the case more simply: on the first
attempt, “after a visit to Madeleine during which she gave him some hot chocolate, Emile had a
serious but not fatal gastric attack” (397); on the third attempt, “L’Angelier was less fortunate”
(Hartman 398). Thus, in the sensational case of Madeleine Smith, just as in the case of Christiana
Edmunds, the discussions that surrounded Smith’s case reveal a Victorian anxiety regarding
“bad” woman who violate their contracted roles as providers of safe foodstuffs to their loved
ones, even disguising these poisons in foods considered treats. They also reveal that whether or
not it was the case, the Victorians wanted to believe that chocolate had been the medium for
delivering that poison.
The fact that this case of female chocolate poisoning stuck in the Victorian imagination is
revealed by at least one writer, Wilkie Collins: not only does Collins reference Smith’s case in
The Law in the Lady (1875) when a character also receives the unique verdict of “Not Proven,”
which was made famous by Madeleine Smith’s trial, but, more significantly, the anti-heroine of
Armadale (1866), Lydia Gwilt, is clearly based on Madeleine Smith. For example, while the
real-life Madeleine Smith was caught between the promise of a suitable fiancé and an
overbearing ex-lover, Lydia is caught between an abusive husband and a lover she adores
(Collins 468). Madeleine Smith poisons the man she wishes to be rid of with arsenic, and during
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the trial “great importance was attached by the prosecution to the tracing and custody of certain
letters” between Smith and L’Angelier (Irvine 216). Similarly, Lydia is charged with “murdering
her husband by poison” (though Collins never reveals the beverage used for the poisoning)—he
“fell ill” and “two days afterwards” was found dead (Collins 469); during her trial the
prosecution focuses on “her private correspondence with the Cuban captain,” her lover (Collins
469). Furthermore, in both Smith’s case and the fictional trial of Lydia Gwilt, the trial results in a
verdict of “Not Proven” due to a problem with these letters: in the real-life Smith case, “the proof
of the dates of the various letters which were given in evidence caused great trouble to the
Court” as the letters were not individually dated (Irvine 207),19 and in Lydia’s case, her trial
results in a verdict of “Not Proven” partially because her lover “burnt all [her] letters, and
[she]…burnt all his” (Collins 469-470). Thus, the parallels between Lydia Gwilt’s fictional
character and Madeleine Smith are very clear20 and made more likely by the fact that Armadale
was published within nine years of Smith’s verdict.21
These sensational cases and their resulting mythologies suggest that because of its
association with adulteration, as well as the uncertainty surrounding its exotic origins, cocoa was
an apt symbol for the contamination of the domestic space, especially by women. After all, as
Rebecca F. Stern points out in her reading of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” the problem
of adulterated food and its representation in literature often pointed to the “bad shopping” of a
woman who brought poisonous foods into the home (496). Although she does not discuss
chocolate, Stern reminds us that there was an “ideological shift that frankly encouraged
19 The envelopes had a dated post-mark, but there was some question as to whether or not letters were found in the
same envelopes they had been mailed in.
20 For example, see Mary S. Hartman and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, who also acknowledge these facts.
21 The trial was in 1857 and Armadale was published in 1866.
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commercial anxiety,” teaching Victorians to “protect themselves” by “engaging them in a
defense against fraud both at home and at large” and women were often portrayed as those who
most needed to protect themselves and their families from this fraud (Stern 496). Stern argues
that Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” is not just the story of a young girl, Laura, who falls ill
after consuming foodstuffs bought at the marketplace, but a poem that exposes the fact that even
the “pastoral home is not safe” from threats inherent in the public sphere, which might “invade
and infect” the home.22 If adulterated foods become associated with dangers that might “invade
and infect” the home, then, it is my argument, this was even more the case with frequently
adulterated, imperial cocoa. Using similar language, Frederic Accum, the Victorian who wrote A
Treatise on Adulterations of Food (quoted earlier in the chapter) is outraged by the “nefarious
traffic” (Accum 10) that comes into the home, “poisoning the private spaces of the body and the
supper table” (Stern 486). Because the domestic sphere is the domain of women in mid-Victorian
England, it is not surprising that many of these images of adulterated chocolate are connected
with bad women—and, sometimes, with women who poison. It is, after all, this logic that makes
the Punch cartoon in Figure 4-4 (above) humorous, as a little girl shops in her mother’s stead,
and quoting her mother, candidly suggests that grocer’s products—including chocolate—are
poisonous to their bodies and homes.
However, what makes this matrix of associations stronger is that women were not only
supposed to guard their families from adulterated products—products which first come from the
far reaches of empire—but in several texts from the period women’s bodies—particularly those
bodies made-up with cosmetics—are themselves linked to adulteration. For example, in a
22 As a result, the poem focuses on the illness brought on to Laura’s body, who is tempted by the sweets offered her,
in contrast to her “abstemious sister who advises suspicion, prudence and a tight-lipped approach” (Stern 481).
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frequently quoted passage, Wilkie Collins jokingly compares the made-up woman to adulterated
sugar; in Man and Wife (1870) he writes:
You go to the tea-shop, and you get your moist sugar. You take it on the
understanding that it is moist sugar. You shut your eyes to that awkward fact, and
swallow your adulterated mess…You go to the marriage-shop, and get a
wife….You bring her home; and you discover the old story of sugar again. Your
wife is an adulterated article. Her lovely yellow hair is—dye. Her exquisite skin is
pearl powder. Her plumpness is—padding…. Shut your eyes and swallow your
adulterated wife as you swallow your adulterated sugar. (74, emphasis mine)
Thus, Collins connects women who wear cosmetics to look more beautiful to an adulterated
food-item that masquerades as something other than what it is; by doing so, he also suggests that
this kind of woman might not be qualified to ensure her family’s safety from the counterfeit. In
short, because chocolate was particularly associated with adulteration and contamination, it is no
surprise, given attitudes towards women during the mid-nineteenth century, that the two would
become linked in the Victorian imagination.
As an important side note, similar to the connection between adulterated foods (like
chocolate) and adulterated women here, another association frequently present in midcentury
texts is the connection between female poisoners and cosmetics. For example, in another
Victorian sensational case, Florence Maybrick poisoned her husband with arsenic she extracted
from flypaper, and she claimed she had extracted the arsenic from the flypaper for her own
cosmetic use (Jones 132-133). Similarly, it was believed that Madeleine Smith poisoned her ex-
lover’s chocolate with arsenic that she obtained from cosmetics she purchased, perhaps a “face-
wash for her complexion” (Talairach-Vielmas 147-148). Wilkie Collins plays up this connection
in Armadale: the schemes of Lydia Gwilt (again, a character based on Madeleine Smith)
thoroughly depend on cosmetics and “the heroine’s construction is … grounded on a
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transgressive use of cosmetics” (Talairach-Vielmas 13).23 Thus, it is a text that—like the 1853
story “Beware of the Chocolate of Chiapa [sic]”—connects the beautiful female body to poison
and to chocolate.
In this way this matrix of associations in the mid-Victorian period between women and
chocolate, poison and adulteration, means that in Victorian literature women who consume
chocolate are marked as dangerous women who must be kept from the home. For example, the
beautiful Becky Sharpe from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), though not a
poisoner, “sip[s] her chocolate” as she schemes. In the memorable scene where Rawdon sits in
jail while Becky inappropriately entertains Lord Steyne in their home, Becky writes to Rawdon
to assure him that she is so distressed that Rawdon is in jail and that she cannot help him that she
“couldn’t drink a drop of chocolate” (599). Because we know she is very fond of chocolate—
Rawdon “always made” her “chocolate” and it “took [it] to her of a morning” (460)—and
because this letter, the text later confirms, is insincere, the novel links Becky’s failure in her role
as good wife to Rawdon to her consumption of chocolate.24 By the end of the novel, Becky is
expelled from the good homes of Victorian England: she is no longer with Rawdon and has
become an outcast from those who knew her—even her son “declined to see his mother” (784).
Similarly, in Armadale, Lydia is exposed as a schemer and poisoner and dies by the end of the
novel; the last chapter of the novel focuses on the wedding between Allan Armadale and his
betrothed, Miss Milroy, who has throughout the text been Lydia’s foil.
23 For example, not only is she able to marry Ozias Midwinter because she looks much younger than she is, but “her
closest adviser is Mrs. Oldershaw, a minor character modeled on Rachel Leverson, famous for her miraculous
cosmetics,” and for the fact that she was later “charged with fraud” (Talairach-Vielmas 13).
24 Perhaps significantly, the text also gives a negative connotation to chocolate with the name of the club, “The
Cocoa tree,” where Becky and Rawdon fleece people.
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This logic that links (foreign and adulterated) chocolate with women who need to be
removed from the home is present even in gothic vampire fiction, such as Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Carmilla is an angelic-looking and chocolate-consuming young girl who
is left by her mysterious mother with the young protagonist, Laura, and her father. Significantly,
Carmilla’s chocolate-consumption is one of several behaviors that mark Carmilla as peculiar;
when it becomes clear that Carmilla is also a vampire, she is expelled and killed—that is, after
the text reveals that Carmilla is actually an ancestor of Laura’s, whose real name is Millarca. In
this way, Carmilla is not only a story of an angelic-looking, chocolate-drinking vampire who
must be expelled, but a woman who, as ancestor and relative of Laura, perverts the role she
should have filled: instead of friend and/or sister and mother to Laura, nourishing and protecting
Laura, Carmilla is a relative who preys on and is nourished by Laura.
In fiction or in the press, many of the texts about chocolate during this period connect
chocolate with women who poison or who unwittingly allow their families to be poisoned.
Because chocolate is an exotic product, imported to England, then brought into the home by
women whose duty it is to protect the home, chocolate becomes a particularly apt symbol for
fears relating to the contamination of the home. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, not
only do these texts about chocolate often point to contamination of the home by women (who
contaminate the home or allow it to be contaminated), but as I outlined in the introduction, many
of the texts from the midcentury also connect chocolate to the contamination of the home by the
foreign. These fears in particular suggest that cocoa’s symbolic associations during the mid-
Victorian period were related to questions of origination and cocoa’s symbolic association with
the far-reaches of empire.
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Importantly, Carmilla helps bring the discussion of (contamination and) cocoa full-circle,
as it is also a text that deals with the exoticization of chocolate and the way that cocoa
symbolized fears regarding the “indeterminately foreign.” Although the novella takes place
abroad, in Styria, it is important that the novel emphasizes Laura’s Englishness and Carmilla’s
foreignness. As Patrick O’Malley points out, though Laura, “stands on the precarious border of
English and foreign identity” (O’Malley 138), as her father is English and she bears an English
name but has never actually seen England, it is clear that “the characters attempt to maintain the
schloss as a refuge of Englishness in the midst of Styria” (O’Malley 139): they quote
Shakespeare to each other, they speak English to each other “partly to prevent its becoming a lost
language among us, and partly from patriotic motives,” (Ch. 1) and they drink tea in contrast to
the Austrian traditions of drinking coffee and chocolate. In contrast, Carmilla is “indeterminately
foreign,” a vampire who “infiltrate[es]” “various homes” and whose foreignness is pronounced:
various clues “swirl around the question of Carmilla’s national identity,” but what is “known is
that she is explicitly not English,” since, “after all, she takes chocolate rather than tea” (O’Malley
139).25
Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, a text published at the end of the
nineteenth century but which reads in many ways like an example of 1860s sensation fiction, has
similar themes, including vampirism, the invasion of the “foreign” into English homes,
25 Similarly, Armadale highlights the foreign in a way that is not part of the original Madeleine Smith trial and is a
text that covers vast geographical territory and nationalities. For example, while the Smith trial took place in
Glasgow, Armadale bounces between Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad, Madeira, England, and the Continent. While
Smith’s lover L’Angelier was French, in Armadale Lydia’s lover is more strongly exoticized, being a “Cuban sea
captain,” whom she later marries after her trial. Other foreign elements are added to the text through Lydia’s next
marriage, as Ozias Midwinter is exoticized in many ways: not only has he lived as a Gypsy and a very well-traveled
sailor, but Ozias is a Barbadian man with “hot creole blood” (351)—his father was a Creole “born on [the] family
estate” in Barbadoes, and his mother was a “woman of the mixed blood of the European and African race” (14) from
Trinidad (34).
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inappropriate female behavior—and, of course, chocolate consumption. The text centers on
Harriet Brandt, a mixed-race Caribbean woman who voraciously consumes chocolate and other
sweets, and who, as a psychic vampire, (unknowingly) saps the life-force out of those who
remain close to her.
Like Carmilla, the text absolutely connects the threat she poses to English homes to her
heritage. In fact, most characters consider the fact that many fall ill around Harriet a mere
coincidence, until Doctor Phillips, a racist but authoritarian doctor, explains to other characters
that he is certain that vampirism exists in Harriet’s blood because he is acquainted with her
(Caribbean) family history; in other words, her (mixed-race) heritage is offered up as the very
proof of her vampirism. According to Phillips, Harriet is the bastard child of a father who was a
“cruel, dastardly, godless” mad-scientist plantation-owner who performed vivisections on his
slaves; her mother was a gluttonous mixed-race voodoo priestess. Dr. Phillips not only claims
that the sins of her parents are being visited upon Harriet, but adds that Harriet’s grandmother,
while pregnant by her white owner (with Harriet’s mother), had been “bitten by a Vampire bat
[sic], which are formidable creatures in the West Indies and are said to fan their victims to
sleep…whilst they suck their blood” (68-69). According to Dr. Phillips, the fact that Harriet’s
grandmother was bitten while pregnant is what gave Harriet’s mother “her sensual mouth, her
greedy eyes…[and] her lust for blood” in the first place (69). In this way the text most certainly
links the danger Harriet poses to the English characters to her mixed blood: the ancestral line that
includes at least two instances of miscegenation is the explanation for her vampirism, as “that
which is bred in her will come out sooner or later and curse those with whom she may be
associated” (69).
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Like Carmilla, the text also works to obscure Harriet’s race and nationality, and, though
she “passes” for English, the text highlights the fact that her ancestry is very complicated. For
example, Harriet’s father is said to be an Englishman, though possibly Creole; he lived in
Jamaica but was medically trained in Switzerland (67)—yet when Harriet Brandt introduces
herself as an Englishwoman, Mrs. Pullen exclaims “Are you? …Brandt sounds rather German!”
(13, emphasis mine). Similarly, after meeting her for the first time, Ralph Pullen asks if Harriet is
Spanish; when he is told that Harriet is an Englishwoman, he responds that she must be Creole,
because “you never see such eyes in an English face!” (49). Harriet’s mother was a “fat, flabby
half caste” from Barbados (69), yet Harriet was raised in Jamaica; while she claims to be an
Englishwoman, Harriet was raised in a convent in Jamaica most of her life, where she became
more accustomed to speaking French than English. Because the text makes clear that the
“explanation” for Harriet’s vampirism is her race, and because the text also continually
highlights that whatever Harriet is, she is not English, the text clearly links the danger Harriet
poses to her foreign (even indeterminately “Caribbean”) ancestry.
According to the text, Harriet’s ancestry is also responsible for the way she consumes
chocolate. In one important scene, Harriet, while sitting on the beach, “continually dip[s] her
hand” into a “large box of chocolates,” her mouth “stained with the delicate sweet meat.” This
scene rhetorically links Harriet, through her chocolate consumption, with her cruel Barbadian
mother, who was “gluttonous and obese” (76) and had a “sensual” and greedy mouth—Doctor
Phillips declares that you can tell “by the way she eats her food” that Harriet inherited “her half-
caste mother’s greedy and sensual disposition” (77). Chocolate consumption is also linked to
Harriet’s inappropriate sensuality and indulgent tastes. In fact, many of the text’s central tensions
revolve around the way that Harriet pushes the boundaries of what is appropriate for women,
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including being too physically intimate with Ralph Pullen and Bobby Gobelli, her lack of
inhibition, and her gluttonous consumption of sweets.
Most importantly, chocolate consumption is literally connected with the danger she poses
to others around her in one of the most memorable scenes of the novel. In the scene where
Harriett “continually dip[s] her hand” into a “large box of chocolates” while sitting on the beach,
Harriett also holds a baby in her arms, “playing at nursemaid” (32-33). The reader knows the
baby is slowly dying from contact with her, though the other characters do not. Because Harriet
is continually consuming chocolates at the same time she is sapping the energy of the child she
holds, her chocolate consumption becomes a metaphor for her feeding off the energy of the
child. In fact, chocolate is so dangerous here that pages later when the mother of the child notices
that her child is sick, another character, Elinor, states that perhaps the baby is sick because
Harriet has “been stuffing the child with some of her horrid chocolates or caramels. She is
gorging them all day long herself!” (41). Thus, this scene emphasizes the connections between
Harriet’s chocolate consumption, her exoticism, and her danger to those around her.
Consequently, it is a scene that links the danger that she poses not only to her exoticism, but also
connects that danger to her (failed) womanhood: she is not only a foreigner who slowly kills a
small English child while eating chocolate, but a woman who (while playing at nursemaid)
utterly fails to nourish and care for an infant.
Some of these same themes are seen in the novel’s treatment of another character, the
Baroness Gobelli, the only character besides Harriet who consumes chocolate in the text. In the
scene described above, she joins Harriet while Harriet eats chocolate bonbons and because “she
liked chocolate almost as well as Harriet did” she begins eating them, “grabbing about a dozen in
her huge hand at the first venture” (33, emphasis mine). Like Harriet, the Baroness—a woman
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with an “elephant build” and “with a large, flat face and clumsy hands and feet,” with a complete
“lack of education and breeding,” and who was “exceedingly vulgar” (5)—is not welcome in the
homes of the English characters. Also like Harriet, the Baroness is characterized throughout the
novel as a terrible woman and mother: she is abusive towards her son, and when he is dying from
too much contact with Harriet she ignores his complaints of weakness. Finally, also like Harriet,
the Baroness is characterized as a foreign element to the English middle-class home: because
“she must have sprung from some low origin” despite the way she speaks “familiarly of
aristocratic names,” the question of “who the Baroness had originally been” is one that “no one
could quite make out” (5, emphasis mine). Thus, the other characters not only dislike the
Baroness because of her inappropriately feminine behavior, but also because they cannot tell
where she comes from—her origins are uncertain. In this way the Baroness is in many ways
Harriet’s counterpart: both are inappropriately feminine and inappropriately English.
Like many of the other texts about bad women who consume chocolate and contaminate
the English home, these women must be expelled. Harriet commits suicide after she marries and
(despite having been warned by Doctor Phillips about her psychic vampirism) unintentionally
kills her husband on her honeymoon. Although she leaves a note claiming that she is “unfit to
live” and that she intends to “go to a world where the curse of heredity…may be mercifully
wiped out” (187), it is symbolically significant that Harriet not only must die once she attempts
to step into the role of wife to an English husband, but that the text removes her from England (to
Europe on her honeymoon) within hours of her marriage—she does not even spend one day in
England as officially part of an English household.
We see then that many midcentury Victorian texts not only link cocoa to an indeterminate
place during a time when it was coming from “somewhere” in Latin America or the Caribbean,
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but they also link cocoa to the contamination of the domestic space. However, these connotations
shift after the 1870s. Although it is clear that there are far more references to cocoa in cultural
texts after the 1870s than in the decades before—and while this shift may be partially due to
increased availability of a less-adulterated product, as well as the advent of modern advertising,26
which together helped grow companies such as Cadbury’s into massive firms—the shift in the
symbolic connotations of cocoa at the end of the century can also be clearly connected to the
knowledge that after the 1870s English cocoa came mostly from British colonies (after the
English had planted cocoa in West Africa).27 For example, while the language of “pure”
chocolate was originally born out of the adulteration scares of the midcentury, in the last decades
of the nineteenth century this language is paired with images of safe domesticity and the white
nuclear family, as well as positive images of British colonialism (in West Africa) and a general
sense of (imperial) national pride. This contrast, which I will discuss in the section that follows,
is one of the most convincing illustrations of the importance of colonialism (rather than
imperialism) to the acceptance of cocoa into the English diet.
Purity: Chocolate, Domesticity, and Empire
If in the mid-nineteenth century chocolate had a host of sometimes-conflicting
associations, by the end of the century chocolate had clearly “arrived.” Even while Victorians
had been improving and consuming chocolate throughout the century, the connotations
surrounding chocolate at the turn of the twentieth century were clearly much more positive. For
26 During the midcentury, Victorian advertisements looked more like what we would today call “classified
advertisements”: they were a block of text on a page. Later in the century advertisements became image driven, with
catchy slogans; in other words, at the turn of the century the modern advertising campaign (as we know it today)
was born.
27 Many place the date of cocoa production in West Africa at 1878, though others claim it was a year earlier or later.
However, cocoa had been planted in Africa by other European powers earlier in the century. In particular, the
Portuguese planted the very first cocoa in Sao Tome in 1824 (Off 58).
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example, while chocolate in the mid-Victorian period is associated with transgressive women
who contaminate the home or allow that space to be contaminated, in the last two decades of the
Victorian period and the beginning of the twentieth century chocolate was associated with
domestic bliss. Advertisements showing women and children safely consuming chocolate, with
the safety of their homes, abound in this period. For example, in a 1891 Fry’s ad a small girl sits
at a family table with chocolate in her hand; here, the ad suggests that the “PURE
CONCENTRATED COCOA” is not only safe for little girls like this one to consume, but the ad
simultaneously draws on the symbolism of the innocent girl-child’s body to emphasize the purity
of the cocoa (Figure 4-9). Similarly, a Cadbury’s Cocoa ad from 1889 shows a very small girl,
also in a domestic setting, consuming cocoa with the headline “The BEST BEVERAGE FOR
CHILDREN” and the prominent slogan, which takes on additional significance here,
“Absolutely Pure” (Figure 4-10). Again, the ad suggests that the cocoa is safe for even the most
delicate bodies to consume, because, like the innocent (white, middle-class) girl-child, Cadbury’s
Cocoa is “absolutely pure.” This emphasis on purity, innocence, and families in these ads is not
only similar to the language that surrounds refined sugar, but is worlds apart from the Punch
cartoon in Figure 4-4 (above), which shows a little girl in the marketplace on an errand to buy
chocolate as a form of pest control for her mother; it is also worlds apart from the association
between “adulterated” women and contaminated chocolate discussed above. Instead, ads from
the turn of the century, such as the Cadbury’s ad from 1900 (Figure 4-11), where a woman feeds
her little girl chocolate directly from her hands, while a grandmotherly figure consumes
chocolate in the background, make clear that chocolate is now considered not only a safe item
for people of all ages to consume, but that this safety is associated with the feminine figures who
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carefully safeguard their homes. In fact, these ads often draw a symbolic connection, not
between women and poison, but between cocoa and a mother’s milk.
The fact that the safe consumption of chocolate was clearly associated with appropriate
femininity during the last decades of the Victorian period is also clear in literature from the
period. For example, in “Maggie’s Story” from Christina Rosetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874),
the central story line of the short story is that little Maggie, a sweet and well-behaved young girl,
must deliver a parcel containing tapers, crackers, a ball, and a pound of vanilla chocolate that
was left at her grandmother’s shop on Christmas Eve. In the short story Maggie protects the
chocolate as she trudges along the forest road in freezing weather and diligently refuses to eat the
chocolate herself. She also refuses to feed it to starving birds (though “it was rather for their
sakes than for her own that she lifted the cover of her basket and peered underneath” (83)) and
even denies it to a little boy who openly begs for it. By the end of the short story, Maggie
successfully performs this feminine duty, without even once disturbing the chocolate; as a result,
the doctor’s family, who purchased this enviable treat, is able to consume it on Christmas Eve.
Although Maggie herself does not consume chocolate in the story, and though the doctor’s
family does not thank her for her service, the short story makes clear that Maggie’s actions were
ideal and that her grandmother will reward her with love and affection for her careful
safeguarding of the chocolate treat.
The fact that chocolate had come to be considered a great treat, rather than a dubious
foodstuff, by the end of the period, and one especially associated with good women, is
continually reinforced in literature throughout the next several decades after the publication of
Speaking Likenesses. For example, in G. Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), when Eliza
Doolittle encounters Professor Higgins for the first time, Higgins knowingly sways Eliza into
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agreeing to become his student (and therefore participating in his bet) with the promise of
chocolate. Thus, as David Satran argues, “When Higgins reaches for the fine chocolate creams
on the piano he no doubt has a strong hunch of what they…mean to young women, particularly
those in Eliza’s social position” (3)—as she is poor and chocolate creams were, during this
period, a particularly expensive form of chocolate. When Higgins reinforces the value of
chocolate by comparing consuming chocolate to owning gold and diamonds and then promises
Eliza a “never-ending supply of chocolate creams” it is clear he does not intend merely to bribe
her, but also to play on the association (in this period) between consuming chocolates and being
“a lady” (Satran 3). In short, when Higgins gives her half a chocolate cream and consumes the
other half in order to mark their contract, it is clear that he draws on the same association
between (upper-) middle-class femininity and chocolate that can also be seen in the ad in Figure
4-12. This 1890 ad not only draws a connection between Fry’s chocolate and the fashionable
Victorian woman wearing an expensive fur coat, but makes clear that it is a product “FOR
HEALTH STRENGTH AND BEAUTY ” (emphasis mine). Thus, this ad, like Higgins’ speech,
makes clear that chocolate is precisely the kind of thing that a lady might consume, especially
the kind of lady with the income to buy fur coats and the leisure to be concerned with
maintaining physical beauty—in short, the kind of lady Eliza would presumably wish to be.
However, ads that celebrate (upper-) middle-class masculinity are just as important in
chocolate advertising during this period and also frequently feature a celebration of England’s
(imperial and technological) “progress.” For example, in Figure 4-13, a Cadbury’s ad from 1900,
a man who is the picture of masculinity calmly consumes cocoa in a factory setting; the
simplicity of the advertisement works to emphasize the quotidian nature of both cocoa
consumption and factory power by this point of the century, connecting both to the image of the
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English male. Because the fire engine is also new technology during this period, the ad
emphasizes English technological “progress.” Similarly, in Figure 4-14, a Cadbury’s ad from
1885, a strapping Englishmen consumes cocoa while aboard a vessel; we are left to imagine
where this particular boat is headed and/or where it is currently located in the Empire. The
caption not only suggests that Cadbury’s cocoa is important to “STRENGTH AND STAYING
POWER”—such as a man like the one who dominates this image might need—but takes on the
double meaning of suggesting that cocoa is fuel for the empire itself.
Ads such as these not only link cocoa to the men who oversee the empire and who ensure
that England receives superior imported products, but often explicitly connect cocoa to the
technological advancements so intimately connected with the advancement of the British
Empire. For example, the caption of the Cadbury ad above (Figure 4-14) suggests that Cadbury’s
cocoa is superior because “In the whole process of manufacture, the automatic machinery
employed obviates the necessity of its being once touched by human hand”— in other words,
this cocoa is not only perfect fuel for the man who must do the work of empire, but is itself a
symbol of the advancements England has come to enjoy, particularly advancements in factory
equipment. Notably, the emphasis on the technology that obviates the necessity of touching the
cocoa distances the consumer from the colonial producer of cocoa. In the same way, an ad from
1892 features a male scientist-professional who examines Cadbury’s cocoa and declares its
purity; the ad subtly reminds the reader of the advancements in science that ensure that cocoa is
now safe for families to consume (Figure 4-15). These kinds of advertisements link the image of
the male-as-servant-of-empire to technological and scientific advancements in England and both
of these advancements to the safety of chocolate as a domestic treat.
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Further, when we consider all these turn-of-the-century images of chocolate as a whole,
whether it is the new images of ideal domesticity or the emphasis on (imperial) masculinity and
technology, what is clear is that Latin America is no longer an element in the imagery that
surrounds chocolate. Instead, chocolate became a symbol for the technologically advanced and
geographically advancing empire because it was a crop that (within England) illustrated the
benefits of technological advancement in food production. Cocoa was also a particularly apt
product for demonstrating the benefits, for England, of a colonial relationship with Africa.
The fact that cocoa’s associations had shifted from Latin America and the Caribbean to
the new territories in Africa is nowhere clearer than in the advertisements that feature black
Africans. While it is true that Africans had appeared in advertisements and artwork featuring
cocoa since at least the eighteenth century, these earlier figures were meant to represent slaves on
Caribbean and Latin American plantations. For example, the Baron Liebig’s Cocoa and
Chocolate ad in Figure 4-16 depicts a slave working on a tropical plantation, while a European
woman (comfortably distanced from the plantation worker) sips the final product. However, the
ads depicting Africans at the turn of the century are careful not to depict these figures as slaves in
the New World, but as happy African producers who supposedly benefit from a colonial
relationship with England.
In fact, it is apparent when looking at these turn-of-the-century ads that one of their
central aims is to convince the viewer that this colonial relationship between England/Europe
and Africa is a positive development and represents imperial progress. For example, in Figure 4-
17, a Cadbury’s ad from circa 1900, a young African child and a young white girl sit on a rug
enjoying cocoa. As Anandi Ramamurthy suggests, in this ad the barefoot African stands for
“Africa and the producer of raw materials” as he offers a cup of cocoa to the little girl who
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stands for Europe and the pose seems to deliberately suggest “partnership” between the two
(72).28 Importantly, images of African colonialism such as these often “reflect and endorse an
imperial relationship”—or, as I would amend, a colonial relationship—“which is not brutally
oppressive,” but is instead a relationship between Europeans and Africans based on the belief
that Africans were in need of “European guidance and supervision” (Ramamurthy 73).
This positive attitude towards colonialism in Africa can be seen in countless cocoa ads
from this period, including an ad by Fry’s Cocoa and Milk Chocolate from 1906 (Figure 4-18).
In this ad a young African male is depicted pouring drinking cocoa from a raw cocoa pod into
cups; the fact that this sambo-like character happily serves the presumably European viewer
cocoa while standing on a globe emphasizes cocoa as a colonial product and one that comes from
a supposedly positive colonial relationship. Because the cups “are decorated with shields and
crests of various European powers” (Rammamurthy 74)—with Britain’s in front—the ad
suggests that Britain is at the forefront of exploring this colonial space to its fullest advantage.
Thus, many of these ads link cocoa production with both the progress of Africa and expansion of
the empire.
Importantly, many of the ads that emphasize Africa as cocoa’s producer also emphasize
racial difference rather than miscegenation. Ads such as the ad in Figure 4-17 (above) and the
one in Figure 4-19 not only emphasize English paternalism, which “encouraged the mimicking
of European dress and behavior amongst Africans” (Ramamurthy 86) (hence the European
28 Anandi Ramamurthy suggests that “cocoa companies (mostly owned by Quakers)… develop[ed] an image of an
African peasant producer—albeit as a child—but with the appearance of potential development” precisely because
these “images supported the ideological position of the Third Party”—a “school of thought which saw itself as the
keeper of true colonial conscience in Britain”—and whose membership may have included the likes of William
Cadbury (63). Whether or not Ramamurthy is right that this political affiliation is one reason for Cadbury’s
emphasis on Africa in its ads, it is certainly clear that Africans are frequently featured in chocolate ads during this
period and (as Ramamurthy suggests) often as (happy) children.
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clothing the African boy wears in Figure 4-19), but they also continually link the “purity” of
chocolate to the purity of the body of the girl-child who consumes it. Thus, the purity of her body
(and the chocolate she consumes) is emphasized in contrast to the dark body beside her. For
another example, an ad from circa 1900 depicts a caricature of a young English girl sitting with
an African male child on either side of her, as all three consume chocolate; centered prominently
underneath the white English child is Cadbury’s famous slogan, “Absolutely Pure” (Figure 4-
20). The ad thus places her in a privileged position, which is meant to remind us of her purity as
well as the purity of the chocolate and also to remind us of the clear racial “otherness” of the
children associated with cocoa’s origins. This sort of language is obviously a huge shift from the
language of miscegenation and indeterminacy that surrounds chocolate in the novels discussed
above.
More importantly, when we consider these turn-of-the-century ads that focus on safe
domesticity, imperial “progress,” and the prominence of Africa as the new producer of cocoa, it
is clear that the anti-adulteration laws were not the only factor that boosted cocoa’s consumption
in England. We must remember that while the adulteration of cocoa was a real concern, cocoa
was one of many adulterated products. Similarly, cocoa’s association with adulteration during
the midcentury was heightened by many factors, including its association with the failure of
“bad” women to protect the home and its association with the far reaches of empire and
indeterminacy. In this way, while anti-adulteration laws helped lessen some of cocoa’s negative
associations, I argue that it is no coincidence that cocoa “consumption quadrupled” in the two
decades (1880-1902) after the English started producing cocoa in Africa (Gordon 590).
It is clear that by comparing cultural texts from midcentury and the turn of the century,
we can see that much of the uncertainty surrounding this product was eliminated after the
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English had control of the production chain. Accordingly, at the turn of the century, cocoa was
celebrated as a product that came from a colony, and, as I have suggested here, the Victorians
would have understood the significance of that shift. In other words, it is significant that cocoa’s
period of “unpopularity” correlated with a renewed awareness of the fact that cocoa was coming
from “somewhere” in Latin America and the Caribbean and that its success and its association
with “Britishness” correlated with the colonization of an area of the world that, thanks to
England and other European powers, would soon become the world’s leader in chocolate
production.
Figure 4-1. Painting on a tray showing cocoa production and consumption. Adapted from
Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage. Eds. Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-
Yana Shapiro. Hoboken: Wiley & Sons, 2009. 71.
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Figure 4-2. An ad called “The Cacao Tree.” Adapted from The Sixpenny Magazine Feb. 1867:
146.
Figure 4-3. An ad for Maravilla Cocoa. Adapted from The Tablet 3 April 1869: 29.
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Figure 4-4. A Punch cartoon from 1855, titled “The Use of Adulteration.” Adapted from Punch 4
Aug.1855: 47.
Figure 4-5. An ad for Epps Cocoa with instructions for preparation. Adapted from The Sixpenny
Magazine Feb. 1862: 218.
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Figure 4-6. A Trinidad Cocoa ad. Adapted from The Critic 15 Nov. 1852: 602.
Figure 4-7. An ad for the Paris Chocolate Company. Adapted from The Critic 1 Aug. 1853: 413.
Figure 4-8. A Dunn and Hewett’s ad. Adapted from The Examiner 15 May 1869: 317.
157
Figure 4-9. An advertisement for Fry’s chocolate. Adapted from The Illustrated London News
17 Jan. 1891: 93.
Figure 4-10. A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring a child. Adapted from The Graphic 23 Nov. 1889:
640.
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Figure 4-11. A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring a mother and child. Adapted from The Illustrated
London News 22 Dec 1900: 951.
Figure 4-12. A Fry’s Cocoa ad depicting a woman in a fur coat. Adapted from The Illustrated
London News 23 Dec. 1890: 707.
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Figure 4-13. A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad from 1900 illustrating industrial consumption. Adapted
from Cadbury’s website.19 Sept. 2015. <https://www.cadbury.co.uk/the-story>.
Figure 4-14. A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad depicting cocoa consumed on a ship. Adapted from The
Illustrated London News 19 Aug. 1885: n.pag.
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Figure 4-15. A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring a male scientist. Adapted from Pears Christmas
Annual Dec 1892: vi.
Figure 4-16. Baron Liebig’s Cocoa and Chocolate ad. Adapted from Ramamurthy, Anandi.
Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. 66.
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Figure 4-17. Cadbury’s ad from circa 1900 featuring two young children. Adapted from
Ramamurthy, Anandi. Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British
Advertising. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. 73.
Figure 4-18. An ad for Fry’s Cocoa and Milk Chocolate from 1906. Adapted from Ramamurthy,
Anandi. Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. 73.
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Figure 4-19. An Epps’s Cocoa ad. Adapted from Ramamurthy, Anandi. Imperial Persuaders:
Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2003. 87.
Figure 4-20. A Cadbury’s Cocoa ad featuring three children. Adapted from The Illustrated
London News 22 Dec 1900: 951.
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CHAPTER 5
BRAZILIAN COFFEE: (NOT) MAKING MEANING WITH THE EXTRACOLONIAL
In my previous chapters I have illustrated the ways that goods produced in Latin America
and the Caribbean were carefully coded—as feminine or masculine, racialized or “pure”—in
ways that helped the Victorians make sense of their place in the empire and make sense of
England’s relationship to the nations that produced these goods. However, in this chapter I argue
that coffee was a product that was very different from these other commodities: in short, coffee
came to England as a result of a very different imperial relationship than the other commodities
discussed here and, therefore, did not acquire the same kinds of symbolic meanings. Although
coffee was consumed regularly in England, it is rarely given more than a passing mention in
Victorian novels, if it is mentioned at all. Although the English were heavily involved in the
coffee trade in South America (particularly in Brazil), coffee’s origins are rarely discussed in
Victorian texts—except in a few young adult novels, which I will address later in this chapter.
I argue that coffee’s lack of symbolic coding is due to its unique history as a nineteenth-
century Latin American product that entered the English diet through trade rather than through
colonialism. Ultimately, the absence of symbolic coding ironically emphasizes the importance
of the symbolic values that the Victorians placed on many other ingestible commodities: Indian
tea, Cuban sugar, and Chinese opium had a world of meaning in Victorian cultural texts because
they helped the English make sense of their relationship to those colonial territories. In contrast,
coffee came mostly from Brazil, which was not a colonial nation1 during the Victorian period.
The lack of symbolic language in Victorian texts that mention coffee suggests that the Victorians
may have attached symbolic meanings to imperial commodities only when they helped the
1 Brazil gained its independence from Portugal in 1822.
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British make sense of their relationship with a colonial nation. In addition, these facts suggest
that it may be important that the commodity in question come from a colonial nation, as all the
goods previously mentioned in this dissertation came from colonies, even if those colonies
belonged to other European empires.
To illustrate these points, I first provide some historical context for England’s
relationship with Brazil in the nineteenth century, as well as a brief overview of how coffee came
to be grown in Latin America. Once I have established coffee’s unique history, I will then
discuss a handful of children’s novels that acknowledge that coffee was produced primarily in
Brazil during the Victorian period: R.M. Ballantyne’s Martin Rattler (1858), Emma E.
Hornibrook’s The Spanish Maiden: A Story of Brazil (1895)2, David Ker’s Torn From its
Foundations (1908), and Bessie Marchant’s Lois in Charge, Or, A Girl of Grit: The Story of a
Plantation in Brazil (1918). Although they barely mention coffee, they illustrate the paradox of
England’s relationship with Brazil. On the one hand, they do acknowledge, unlike the majority
of Victorian texts, that England was involved in Brazilian politics, including the abolition of the
slave trade and the transition from a sugar-based economy to a coffee-based economy. On the
other hand, because these texts represent only a handful of novels that acknowledge coffee’s
place of origin in the nineteenth century, but at the same time barely represent actual coffee or
even Brazilians, they reveal the way that Brazil was imagined as a sort of blank slate waiting for
Britons willing to immigrate. While the texts acknowledge that Britons were involved in Brazil
and that coffee was grown in Brazil, coffee itself is unimportant to these texts. Instead, the
coffee-districts of Brazil became a synecdoche for all the opportunities newly independent Brazil
offered to enterprising imperialists. In fact, in several of the texts, slavery becomes a more
2 Also published as Transito: A Story of Brazil (1887).
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important symbol than coffee, but unlike Cuban sugar, coffee does not become a symbol for
Brazilian slavery. Thus, while coffee was (like the other commodities discussed in this
dissertation) produced in Latin America and the Caribbean, coffee simply did not take on the
same kind of symbolic meaning that sugar, tobacco and chocolate did.
Extracolonial Brazil and the British Empire
As I argue throughout this dissertation, nineteenth-century Britain, as a major empire, had
quite a bit of power and influence in places that were not considered British colonies, and Britain
was certainly involved in the largest coffee economy in the world: Brazil. In the nineteenth
century Brazil dominated the coffee market and “produced more [coffee] than the rest of the
world combined” (Topik 47). As Stanley Stein argues, Brazil’s coffee output in the nineteenth
century was so great that “in many circles, Brazil and coffee were synonymous” (Stein 78). With
Brazil producing so much coffee, there is no doubt that England depended on Brazil for much of
its coffee—particularly since the British not only consumed significant amounts of coffee, but
because Britain also re-exported coffee to other nations (Topik 45).
Accordingly, the British were not only actively involved in Brazilian politics, but also
sometimes even in contradictory ways. For example, as briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, the
British policed the waters surrounding Cuba and Brazil in an attempt to put an end to the slave
trade. In Brazil’s case, the Aberdeen Act of 1845 gave the Royal Navy permission to stop and
search Brazilian ships suspected of transporting slaves and to seize the ship and arrest any slave
traders—even if the ship was in Brazilian waters or docked in Brazilian ports.3 At the same
time, paradoxically, the growing “taste for coffee” among “Europe and America’s growing urban
3 Notably, this bill was passed as a result of the fact that Brazil continued to import slaves, despite signing a treaty to
abolish slavery in the 1820s. It should also be noted that, due to Brazil’s relative proximity to the west coast of
Africa and the ease with which slaves could be transported, Brazil imported record numbers of African slaves.
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populations” dramatically increased “the demand for slaves” and even led to the voracious
clearing of virgin forest as Brazil attempted to meet the growing demand (Stein 79). Thus, as in
Cuba, even while the Royal Navy policed the waters of Brazil to prevent slavery, England’s
demand for slave-produced goods is exactly what encouraged the use of slaves in Brazil. More
contradictory still, even while England policed the waters of Brazil to prevent slave ships from
coming in to port, it was the British that protected the sea routes merchants needed to export their
slave-produced products (Topik 45). Further, British merchants who catered to Brazilian elites
and who operated on the same routes also “possessed a high financial stake in the illicit [slave]
trade” (Guenther 33); thus, many Britons profited from Brazilian slavery.
Given Britain’s activities in Brazil, it is important to address the nature of the relationship
between Brazil and Great Britain during the nineteenth century, as it has been a topic of great
debate among historians. In particular, while some argue that, in Latin America, England
engaged in a practice often referred to as “informal empire,” others argue vehemently that this
label grossly overstates the power and intentional control that England had over Brazil. Many
argue instead that the relationship between the two nations is more accurately described as one of
free trade. This question is an important one, for I believe the nature of Brazil and Britain’s
relationship may have quite a bit to do with coffee’s lack of coding. On the one hand, though
England did have a relationship with Brazil that depended on England’s position as a major
empire, it was a relationship different from the others seen in this dissertation. The effect of this
difference, and the importance of England’s official relationship to a particular Latin American
producer, can be seen when we compare Brazilian coffee with Cuban sugar, which, as I
illustrated in Chapter 3, came from a colony that was an important chess piece in the relations
between England, Spain, and the United States and which took on a world of meaning in
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Victorian texts. On the other hand, the desire to imagine that this relationship was not one based
on British power began in the Victorian period and is reflected in the texts I analyze later in this
chapter.
For several decades after the 1960s it was believed that the informal-empire thesis
explained nineteenth-century England’s relationship to Latin America. As Louise H. Guenther
explains:
According to the informal empire thesis, Spanish and Portuguese America
underwent a generally linear process through which Iberian imperial dominance
was replaced by British imperial dominance during independence, and in its turn
this British influence was replaced by that of the United States after World War
I…. The informal-empire model serves to explain many of the overall changes in
world trade flows over two or three centuries. (Guenther 1)
Thus, Guenther suggests that the informal-empire thesis accounts for the period between Spanish
imperialism and United States imperialism in Latin America. Rory Miller further explains that
this thesis also suggests that the British “always aimed to secure hegemony through ‘informal’
means of obtaining influence, and they resorted to force and annexation only where this proved
impossible” (17). In other words, according to this thesis, though England had few formal
colonies in Latin America in the nineteenth century, it very much used its power to influence
trade and policy in the region to its advantage—and occasionally used a show of might to protect
its interests, but only when absolutely “‘necessary.” In this way the informal-empire thesis grew
out of a “discontent” with the way “imperial historians had concentrated on the colonial empire
and ignored other areas of influence” (Miller 17) and represented an attempt to characterize the
British Empire’s influence in South America. If this characterization of the British influence in
South America were true, there would be little difference between the amount of power the
British Empire had in official colonies and in unofficial areas of control.
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However, while there are elements of the informal-empire thesis that I agree with, many
historians have convincingly argued that this term may overstate the power that England had
over Brazil - or the power it wanted over Brazil. For example, Guenther has argued that the
informal-empire thesis assumes “the presence of long-range planning and conspiratorial
intentionality from within the metropole,” when it seems clear that the British government was
not always aware of the actions taken by British merchants and emigrants in Brazil and that in
some cases their actions even contradicted the wishes of the British government (5). Similarly,
Miller argues that there is little evidence of a conspiracy between “British governments and
businessmen” since their actions were “frequently unsychronised”; they “often criticised one
another; and the interests of individual firms generally diverged and often conflicted” (240).
Instead, many argue that Brazil and England’s relationship in the nineteenth century was one of
mutual benefit based on free trade—in short, the British helped Brazil obtain its independence,
helped build infrastructure, and protected Brazil’s trade routes in exchange for “preferential
trading privileges” (Miller 2). Many also point to the fact that the British government never
attempted to annex Brazil and generally remained uninvolved in Brazilian policy that did not
directly affect trade as further evidence against the informal-empire thesis.
However, while I acknowledge that some elements of the informal-empire thesis might
be overstated, I argue that the relationship that England had with Brazil was not merely one of
free trade, nor a relationship that was unrelated to imperialism. In fact, even those who argue
against the informal-empire thesis frequently acknowledge the imbalance of power between
these two nations. For example, one must not forget that while postcolonial nations such as
Brazil were shaping their independent identities in “relation to the rest of the world,” as Guenther
acknowledges, the nineteenth century was a world “dominated by the commercial and political
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networks of Great Britain” (4). Similarly, while many argue that short-term profit is what
guided England’s (and English merchants’) decisions in Brazil (rather than long-term planning),
it was British influence, in the form of capital and political pressure, that changed Brazil from a
“slave-based, Northeastern-centered sugar colony to an independent, Southeastern-centered
‘modernized’ nation” (Guenther 3). Thus, I hesitate to characterize such a relationship as simply
one of free trade; after all, we must remember that empires are often built and driven by “trade.”
Thus, as Peter Rivière argues, at a minimum, the case of nineteenth-century Brazil illustrates
“that at least parts of an empire may be the result not of any grand design, but rather of the
unintended outcome of a number of individuals going about their own lives with Britain absent-
mindedly looking on” (177). While it is possible that the British government did not actively
endorse a long-term plan of imperialism in Brazil, the relationship between England and Brazil
was still an imperial one, if absent-mindedly so, or even if less so than in official colonies. At the
same time, it is clear that most people agree that there was something different about what
Britain was doing in Brazil, though that difference might be difficult to pinpoint.
Ross Forman, in his article “When Britons Brave Brazil,” also struggles to accurately
characterize the relationship between newly independent Brazil and the British Empire; however,
Forman’s depiction of Brazil’s relationship to Great Britain is a useful one and one that aligns
well with my understanding of Britain’s trade-centered imperialism in nineteenth-century Brazil.
He writes that while “Britain dominated—or was seen to dominate—Brazil’s trade and internal
efforts at reorganization throughout the nineteenth century,” many historians, including Rory
Miller, have argued that Brazil’s dependence of Britain was “tempered by the strong role of the
Brazilian state, its world dominance in the production of coffee and rubber, and its relatively
advanced manufacturing industry” (Forman 458). Accordingly, to acknowledge these opposing
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arguments, Forman elects to use the term “extracolonial” to describe Brazil’s relationship to
Britain (457), since Brazil “was not a British colony, or even a designated ‘sphere of influence,’”
but “nevertheless found itself caught up in the imperial network of what Liberal Victorian
politicians…began describing as ‘Greater Britain’” (456). Thus, throughout this chapter I will
also use Forman’s term, “extracolonial,” to characterize this imperial relationship based on free
trade.
While Britain and Brazil’s unique extracolonial relationship is illuminating, in this
chapter I want foreground the importance of coffee’s history, as I believe both are central to
understanding why coffee, unlike so many other Latin American goods, does not take on
symbolic meaning in Victorian texts or advertisements. In short, Brazil was not only an
extracolonial nation, but coffee was throughout its history largely an extracolonial product.
Coffee’s Trade Trajectory
While each of the commodities examined in the dissertation thus far came to England
through imperial networks (in addition to, or instead of, colonial networks), those commodities
were ultimately all colonial products—that is commodities produced in colonial nations. For
example, not only were tobacco, sugar, and chocolate produced in colonies in the nineteenth
century, but from the time they were first introduced to Europe they had always been colonially
produced goods.
In contrast, “coffee was not introduced to Europe through colonial conquest” (Jamieson
276), but simply brought back by European travelers and merchants who visited the Arab world.
Coffee had been consumed in areas bordering the Red Sea, particularly Yemen, since at least the
fifteenth century, but it was only in the early seventeenth century that European visitors first
encountered coffee when visiting Red Sea ports. Arab merchants continued to control the coffee
trade until the end of the seventeenth century, and many of the customs and methods for
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preparing coffee were transplanted with coffee from the Arab world to Europe. In fact, the
famous European coffee houses of the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century so often
discussed by scholars were in many ways mere reflections of the coffee houses visitors
encountered in the Middle East and Northern Africa, which had existed there since the sixteenth
century.4 In this way, while the coffeehouse may have been an essential component of the
creation of the public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe,5 it was ultimately an Eastern
innovation that was transplanted to the West through ordinary trade.
Thus, as Ross Jamieson argues, the trade in coffee “was not a European invention, but
more accurately a European takeover of existing Arab trade in the product” (276). While for a
long time the Dutch East India Company controlled the market—buying Yemenite coffee at the
port of Mocha, then later from Java—by the late seventeenth century English and French
merchants tried their best to increase their market shares (Courtwright 20-21). However, once it
was clear that Yemen could no longer produce the amount of coffee that Europe increasingly
wanted (though it was still a relatively “small luxury market”), European merchants (including
the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish) transplanted the crop from the Arab world to their own
colonies in the Americas. By “the 1770s over 80 percent of the world’s production originated in
the Americas” and former centers of production, such as Mocha, Java, and Reunion, “could not
keep up with expanding Latin American production” (Topik 43). Thus, while in many ways in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coffee was an imperial product (in the sense that it came
to Europe through trade networks maintained by the major European empires), significantly it
did not arrive in England or its colonies through the familiar methods of conquest and
4 Coffee houses began to appear in 1530, beginning with Damascus and Cairo.
5 For more information about coffee’s role in the creation of the public sphere, see The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere by Jurgen Habermas
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colonization. Because coffee was not needed to (symbolically) justify or make sense of
England’s relationship with a colonial nation, it never called for the same kind of coding that
commodities such as sugar and tobacco required. Similarly, because coffee did not have the
same relationship to colonial methods of production (e.g., slavery), coffee did not produce the
same kinds of anxieties in England that other commodities did.6
Another important difference between coffee and the other products discussed in this
dissertation is the fact that in the nineteenth century coffee production was most successful in
newly independent countries, rather than in colonies. In other words, while coffee was
transplanted to Latin America by the various European empires, the countries that exported the
most coffee in the nineteenth century were, ironically, those that gained independence. For
example, while coffee was introduced to Venezuela in 1820, “it was not until the wars of
independence had destroyed the cacao economy that coffee took over the Venezuelan
commodity market” (Jamieson 283).7 Similarly, many historians have argued that Brazil
“emerged as the world’s major coffee exporter partly because of its independence in 1822”
(Topik 44). While many scholars mention these facts in passing, these are the elements of
coffee’s history that make it unique. Ultimately, in the grand scheme of history, coffee had a
short history as a colonial product; conversely, in the few formal colonies that continued to
produce coffee in the nineteenth century, coffee was not the major export. For example, while
Cuba did grow coffee, sugar and tobacco production eclipsed coffee production and coffee
exports were insignificant. More importantly, the vast majority of coffee in circulation in the
6 While Brazilian plantation owners did sometimes use slaves, coffee production mostly relied on free laborers.
Because sugar and cotton were produced exclusively by slaves, they were products that were far more associated
with slavery.
7 Incidentally, British merchants controlled the planting of coffee in that country, too (Jamieson 283), though
Venezuela did not produce nearly as much as Brazil.
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nineteenth century was produced in independent nations, particularly in Brazil, which was by far
the largest producer of coffee.
Of course, the fact that coffee was not a colonial product does not mean that England did
not import significant amounts of coffee or that England was uninvolved in the Brazilian coffee
economy. British neocolonialism (or “extracolonialism”) was a significant factor in Brazil’s
astronomical coffee production. For example, Brazil had the largest railroad network of any
coffee-exporting country, a fact that increased Brazil’s ability to produce and transport coffee; by
the late nineteenth century, the extensive railroads led to a “massive” “expansion of Brazilian
production” (Jamieson 283). Significantly, these railroads were a direct result of “Great
Britain’s extensive influence” (Forman 454), including the fact that the railroads were heavily
financed by Barings Bank of London (Wild 174). British extracolonialism was also responsible
for providing “inexpensive and reliable shipping and insurance, loans, [and] infrastructure
investments” in addition to the “protection of sea routes” (Topik 45). In this way, while it is
certainly true that England was primarily a tea-drinking nation, it is clear that the British were
heavily involved in the business of coffee.
Of course, as Ross Forman reminds us, this British involvement in the Brazilian
production and distribution of coffee was not the only role England played in nineteenth century
Brazil; the British also had a great deal of influence over Brazilian mines, “shipping and
construction (of railroads, sewers, lights, and telegraphs),” and even “politics (from the
relocation of the Portuguese capital to Rio ...in 1808 to the 1888 abolition of slavery)”—facts
which have “prompted many historians to dub the nineteenth century there ‘the English
century’” (Forman 454-456). For my purposes, it is significant to note that the “English century”
coincides with what might also be called Brazil’s “coffee century.”
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To a small degree, many of these facts are acknowledged in the literature of the period,
mostly in travelogues and children’s literature, which reveal British interest and involvement in
Brazil’s coffee economy. For example, in the letters of British chemist and author Charles
Blachford Mansfield, written in the early 1850s and collected by Charles Kingsley in Paraguay,
Brazil and the Plate, Mansfield writes extensively about a trip to Brazil. He writes that he had a
“particular wish” to visit Paraiba “because it is in the heart of coffee country” (80). He also
discusses the extensive presence of the English and other Europeans, stating that in Pernambuco
“there are said to be more than three hundred English” living there and that there is even “an
English church” (74). Similarly, geographer and explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, in
Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil, discusses extensively the fact that coffee “grows
admirably” in Brazil (224). In the children’s primer Round the World: A Story of Travel
Compiled from the Narrative of Ida Pfeiffer (1875), D. Murray Smith describes Pfeiffer’s
journey north of Rio, where Pfeiffer witnesses firsthand the burning forests, “set on fire for the
purpose of clearing the ground for [the] cultivation [of coffee]” (34). The primer then recounts
Pfeiffer’s visit to a coffee plantation and describes “the preparation of coffee-berries for the
market” (37), including the behaviors of the “labourers on the plantations of Brazil” (37). In
passages such as these, it is clear that each coffee plantation becomes a synecdoche for the entire
coffee economy and that many Britons sought to witness, or even participate in, the work being
done in Brazil. These passages are also reflections of the very real fact that many Britons
visited, and even immigrated to, Brazil in order to participate in that coffee economy as farmers,
merchants, and government agents.
In fact, though it does not directly discuss coffee (except for a breakfast scene in which
characters casually consume it), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’Urbervilles (1892) features a plot
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line that emphasizes the fact that many Britons immigrated to Brazil. When Angel Clare feels he
cannot achieve the life he dreams of by working on an English farm, he begins to think of the
“great advantages of the Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist”: after all,
“Land was offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms” (Hardy 332). Although he is
ultimately unsuccessful as a farmer there, after “contracting a fever in the clay lands near
Curitiba” and “having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by other hardships”
(Hardy 352), this passage reveals that many Britons did know of the opportunities that
supposedly awaited them in Brazil. In fact, the narrator suggests that Angel’s experience was a
common one to “all the English farmers and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded
into going thither by the promises of the Brazilian government and by the baseless assumption”
that they could survive all “the weathers by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains”
(Hardy 350). Thus, it is clear from passages such as these that the British understood that there
was potential opportunity in Brazil for English families willing to emigrate—and, by extension,
it is plausible that many Victorian readers would have assumed that Angel was farming coffee.
Texts throughout the nineteenth century advertised Brazil as a field for emigration and
coffee as a lucrative investment—though they often advertised either one or the other. For
example, Charles Dunlop’s aptly named Brazil As a Field for Emigration: It’s Geography,
Climate, Agricultural Capabilities, and the Facilities Afforded for Permanent Settlement (1886)
describes southern Brazil (where coffee farming was prevalent) as a land “not inferior in point of
fertility and salubrity to the most favoured of our English colonial possessions” (3). The fact
that Dunlop felt there was a need to publish such a report suggests that there was significant
interest in Brazil as a site for emigration. These texts clearly worked in tandem with the
advertisements that regularly appeared in British newspapers advertising investment
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opportunities in Brazil and/or investment opportunities in the coffee trade. For example, an
advertisement from April 13, 1972 in The Examiner encourages investors to contact the
“BRAZILIAN COFFEE ESTATES COMPANY, LIMITED,” a company formed “UNDER
CONTRACT WITH THE IMPERIAL BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT.” The ad states that “The
Directors [sic] have provisionally arranged for the purchase of the ‘Angelica’ Estate, situated in
the province of S. Paulo [São Paulo], containing about 26,000 acres, of which a large portion is
Coffee [sic] land of the first quality.” After a few paragraphs with more details about the estate
and the workers employed there, the ad promises that “The profit on this quantity of Coffee
[sic]” will “enable the Director to pay a Dividend of 20 per cent. per annum upon 250,000, the
amount of the nominal Share Capital of the Company [sic].” These are the kinds of
advertisements that characters in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister and Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s “The Green Flag” presumably answer when they decide to invest in coffee (and,
incidentally, lose quite a bit of money).8
However, even while it is clear from a historical standpoint that the British were very
involved in Brazil (building infrastructure, owning plantations, evangelizing local Brazilians, and
importing Brazilian goods—including coffee—to England), the connection between coffee and
Brazil is rarely acknowledged in Victorian novels. For example, (as discussed above) Tess of the
D’Ubervilles takes place partially in Brazil and so does Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the
Vampire (1897), but neither acknowledges coffee production in Brazil; The Prime Minister and
“The Green Flag” discuss British investment in coffee on the stock market, but do not mention
Brazil. This is a pattern that is repeated in British novels. For example, in Anne Bronte’s The
8 Although it is not directly pertinent to my argument here, it is interesting to note that the coffee house of the late
seventeenth century and early nineteenth century is credited with the birth of the modern stock market.
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Tenant of Wildfeld Hall (1848), teetotaling characters drink coffee throughout the novel; in
Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White the Italian Count Fosco consumes coffee in one scene; in
Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1866) one of the main characters runs a coffee stall; in
Arthur Morrisson’s A Child of the Jago (1896) a coffee shop is a front for criminal activity—and
yet, in all of the novels, coffee consumption is treated matter-of-factly and in no way connected
to any foreign producer, much less Brazil. For example, to quote one illustrative example from
The Woman in White when Count Fosco is drinking coffee in preparation to stay up all night,
Collins writes:
The coffee was brought in by Madame Fosco. He kissed her hand in grateful
acknowledgment, and escorted her to the door; returned, poured out a cup of coffee
for himself, and took it to the writing-table.
"May I offer you some coffee, Mr. Hartright?" he said, before he sat down. (307)
In this scene, as in countless others in Victorian texts, characters consume coffee, but unlike the
other commodities discussed in this dissertation, coffee seems to serve no symbolic purpose:
neither coffee nor the coffee service is described in detail. In another example, in A Child of the
Jago, the protagonist Dicky is served coffee in a coffee shop that serves as a front for receiving
stolen goods. Morrison writes:
[Mr. Weech] brought the coffee, and not a single slice of cake, but two. True, it was
not cake of Elevation Mission quality, nor was it so good as that shown at the shop
in High Street: it was of a browner, dumpier, harder nature, and the currants were
gritty and few. But cake it was, and to consider it critically were unworthy. (67)
In this scene, coffee is just “the coffee”—the cake Dicky gratefully consumes is much more
symbolic: the cake served in this coffee house of ill-repute is “brow[n], dump[y]” and “har[d],”
and unlike the kind of cake sold in fancy shops.
I suggest that these facts are the result of coffee’s unique commodity history and reveal a
great deal about why and how commodities are coded as foreign. Many, like Anne McClintock,
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have argued that commodities in the Victorian period “seemed to have lives of their own” and
that the commodity became “the fundamental form of a new industrial economy,” as well as “the
fundamental form of a new cultural system for representing social value” (129-138). While
throughout this dissertation I have taken that claim as true and interrogated the symbolic “lives”
of several Latin American and Caribbean commodities, coffee appears to be a commodity that
did not “tee[m] with signification” (Richards 2), and which did not bring “scenes of empire into
every corner of the [English] home” (McClintock 130). The most obvious explanation for this
difference is the fact that Brazil was on the periphery of British conceptions of empire and that
coffee was not perceived as a colonial product. The fact that the inverse is true also supports this
reading: some of the commodities that had the most symbolic weight in Victorian literature (and
which are the most often discussed by scholars interested in commodity culture) are those with
the clearest ties to formal colonies, such as tea and silk from India and sugar from the West
Indies.
To illustrate this lack of coding in Victorian literature, I will address four novels—all
written for adolescents—that do connect coffee production with Brazil: R.M. Ballantyne’s
Martin Rattler (1858), Emma E. Hornibrook’s The Spanish Maiden: A Story of Brazil (1895),
David Ker’s Torn From its Foundations (1908), and Bessie Marchant’s Lois in Charge, Or, A
Girl of Grit: The Story of a Plantation in Brazil (1918). By reading these texts closely, I hope to
illustrate, first, that even when coffee and Brazil are connected, as in the very rare case of these
four novels, coffee is not a symbolic element in the text, but instead serves simply to teach the
young reader about the factual geography and economy of Brazil. As a result, it is used by the
writer to bolster the realism of the text. Second, I discuss elements of each text that characterize
for the young reader Britain’s relationship with Brazil to further illuminate the ways that Brazil
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was perceived at least as being an “extracolonial” location, as Forman calls it, regardless of the
actual relationship between the two nations. The perception that Brazil was a kind of empty
space, at the periphery of the empire, contributes to coffee’s lack of coding even in texts where
coffee’s origins are acknowledged.
Children’s Literature, Coffee, and Brazil
The handful of travelogues and children’s books and primers where coffee and Brazil are
explicitly linked take place in Brazil (rather than England) and emphasize themes common to
juvenile literature: in particular they emphasize moral conscientiousness while celebrating
imperial expansion and adventure. The importance of these topics to children’s literature has
been discussed at great length by scholars of children’s literature, who suggest that children’s
literature deliberately prepared children to be future imperialists: as Patrick Brantlinger has
noted, “Much imperialist discourse was…directed at a specifically adolescent audience, [because
they were] the future rulers of the world” (190). Similarly, M. Daphne Kutzer argues that
Children’s texts…form a crucial part of any…national allegory: children are the
future of any society, and the literature adults write for them often is more obvious
and insistent about appropriate dreams and desires than the texts they write for
themselves. (Kutzer xiii)
The dreams and desires that adults prescribed for young children in the nineteenth century often
centered on the furtherance of the British Empire, and, by extension, attainment of a “higher
self” which was based both on the reader’s self-identification as a loyal citizen of the British
Empire and as a practicing Protestant Christian (Boone 67). Religiosity and imperialism often
intertwined because evangelism was a central tenet of the British “civilizing mission” and
because it was “evangelical organizations…and, later, individual evangelical publishers” who
published many of these stories, in order to “instill obedience, duty, piety and hard work” in their
readers (Richards 3).
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The desires that adults prescribed for these “future rulers” are what led to many of the
classic tropes of children’s literature. Children’s literature intended mostly for boy readers often
emphasized the Muscular Christian ideal, a popular idea that emphasized energetic Christian
evangelism and rigorous masculinity—both of which were often measured against the Other in
colonial adventure stories. (And, as we saw with tobacco, in the Victorian period, imperial
masculinity was often defined in contrast to the Other.) R.M. Ballantyne’s novels, for example,
frequently emphasize that “true heroes are not just mindless men of action but they are also
thoughtful and pious” (Hannabuss 57); in Ballantyne’s novels “Christianity and Anglo-
Saxonism” (and, by extension, imperial adventure) all go “hand-in-hand” (Richards 3).
Similarly, when intended for a mostly female readership, Victorian children’s stories often “drew
upon the ideas of a woman’s aptitude for ‘civilising’ indigenous inhabitants of colonial locations
and ‘raising up’ the working classes at home”; these girl heroines modeled good English
Protestant values and demonstrated their ability to “survive rugged colonial location[s]” or a
“war at home” (Smith 3).
Given the work that children’s literature does then, it is not surprising that the handful of
novels that I found that connect coffee with the place where it was mostly being produced—
Brazil—are in fact children’s novels.9 Children’s literature is the genre arguably most concerned
with themes of empire, and Brazil and coffee were bound to figure into its lessons. At the same
time, the fact that the connection between coffee and Brazil is (as far as I can tell) mostly
confined to a handful of novels intended for children and teens, illustrates how differently this
Latin American producer was treated in Victorian literature. Coffee was a globally traded
9 Scholars do not make a distinction between children’s literature and adolescent literature during this period
because both literatures were read widely by children of all ages.
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product and Brazil one of the largest countries in the world, and yet the two are only connected
in texts meant to education children, or “future imperialists.”
As I have illustrated in other chapters, children’s primers often taught children about
distant places through a discussion of the commodity most associated with that colony, including
the work that Englishmen did to increase production of that commodity. For example, in Aunt
Martha’s Cupboard (1875), “Aunt Martha” explains to children how goods from various areas of
the world arrive in England. While in most chapters she spends a great deal of time describing
the people and the landscape of colonial producers (as she does in her chapter on sugar, which
focuses on Jamaica), the chapter on coffee stands apart from the others: though she clearly states
that Brazil is the major world producer, sending “out enough almost to supply the world” (84),
the majority of the chapter focuses instead on the act of transplantation of coffee from Yemen to
the New World by Europeans. The fact that the connection between Brazil and coffee is
mentioned in passing shows us once again that Victorian writers were relatively uninterested in
the connection between Brazil and coffee—even in the moments dedicated to acknowledging
that connection. These moments also demonstrate that these writers were not unaware of the
connection. Not surprisingly, however, the chapter on coffee is the only one in the primer that
does not focus on current methods of production and instead focuses on historical event.
Aunt Martha’s Cupboard is a useful example because it illustrates the ways in which
children’s texts that connect coffee and Brazil are far more concerned with teaching young
readers about their own potential for greatness, especially in regards to their participation in the
commodity chain. In the chapter on coffee, Aunt Martha relates a famous anecdote that
illustrates how Europeans intervened in the coffee trade to make it what it was by the late
nineteenth century. She explains that because the supply of coffee from Mocha (Yemen) “was
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very little, compared to what comes to England now,” the “different countries of Europe set
about having coffee planted” in the Americas (79-80). In one particular incident, a French
officer, on a ship transporting the new crop to the West Indies, gave up his water ration to protect
the plant. Although the men on the ship were “suffer[ing] from thirst,” the officer noticed that
“the tender plants he was cherishing with such care began to droop”; rather than letting “them
die, he went without himself, and poured the scanty supply given him on their roots” (82).
Thanks to this “act of self-denial,” the “brave officer” ensured that coffee grew in “great
plantations” in the Americas (82). Thus, in this account, the brave officer not only makes sure
the crop gets transplanted to the Americas, but symbolically gives (water) from his own body to
nurture the crop and ensure its continued growth. Similarly, no Brazilians or other Latin
Americans figure in this history: the plantations that become the center of the four novels I
discuss next are credited to the “different countries of Europe” and the “brave officers” who
endured sacrifices such as these in order to transplant the coffee there.
All four of the novels I address in this section build upon this theme. Each of the novels
takes place in Brazil (often on a coffee plantation), but centers instead on the work of
enterprising Europeans and works to ensure that readers understand their own value in the effort
to maintain a cooperative (trade-centered) relationship with Brazil. At the same time,
paradoxically, as in the case of the primer above, each text rarely portrays Brazilians, focusing
instead on Brazil and its coffee districts as a kind of utopia. This lack is an important difference
from many colonial narratives for children, which often describe local populations at length,
usually as either a hostile or childlike race—in either case a race that is inferior to the British.
My analysis starts with R.M. Ballantyne’s Martin Rattler (1858) because it is the earliest
of the novels that I discuss in this chapter and because it perhaps most clearly illustrates my
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argument. In the novel, Martin accidentally drifts out to sea in a small boat and is rescued by a
passing ship bound for South America; after the ship is wrecked on the shores of Brazil as the
result of an attempt to evade pirates, Martin and his companion Barney explore the exotic
playground of Brazil. In this fictional Brazil, Martin and Barney, the sole survivors of the
shipwreck, experience one adventure after the next, from encounters with exotic animals to being
captured and forced into slavery by natives, and throughout the novel they continually
demonstrate their mastery over the landscape and the peoples around them until they are returned
to England.
While it is true that for large sections of the novel Martin Rattler is a Robinsonade10 that
elides “the human element [in Brazil] in favor of naturalism and tropical exoticism” (Forman
462), I argue, like Ross Forman, that Ballantyne very carefully depicts Brazil as a country that
waits for the English to help transform Brazil “into an economic empire run according to a
British (and Protestant) model” (Forman 457). However, while the novel does not argue for
direct colonization, as the English protagonists return home to England by the novel’s end, the
novel still illustrates for the reader the potential opportunities in Brazil for young imperialists. It
is no coincidence that Martin is described early in the story as one who is fascinated by the
“deeds of Vasco di Gama [sic] and Columbus” when he learns about them in school (Ballantyne
Ch. 5), as this is the kind of personality celebrated in much of children’s literature as particularly
suited to exploring the limits of empire.
10 That is, a novel that follows a familiar pattern established by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In these novels
the protagonist is often shipwrecked on a sparsely populated island, battles harsh natural conditions and natives, and
builds a new civilization while he hopes for rescue. These texts include commentary on the society to which the
protagonist belongs and chronicle the masculine development of the protagonist, who, of course, by novel’s end is
not only returned home more masculine but also richer.
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More importantly to my purposes, though the novel is for the most part unconcerned with
coffee, there is one significant moment where the importance of coffee to Brazil comes into
focus. In an encounter with a former-priest-turned-hermit, Martin, and by extension readers of
the novel, not only learns of the importance of coffee to Brazil, but through the discussion of
coffee is reminded that Brazil is a land of opportunity for Englishmen willing to work abroad.
In the first place, Ballantyne makes clear to his young readers that, though England did
not colonize Brazil directly, Brazil is indebted to Europeans who came before. When they
encounter the priest, Padre Caramuru, he first relates to them a history of Brazil that depends on
brave Europeans like Columbus and suggests that Brazil is still in need of help from enterprising
Europeans. “Padre Caramuru’s ‘confession’ of his life story” that draws connections “between
his story and national conditions” (Forman 464) starts with the discovery of Brazil by “Vincent
Yanez Pincon, a companion of the famed Columbus” (Ballantyne Ch. 11). Padre Camaruru
argues that because, shortly after this event, Americus Vespucius discovered the “Bay of All
Saints” [Baia de Todos os Santos] and “took home a cargo” that told of the “rich treasures” of
Brazil, Europeans were destined to return to take care of the natural resources, “for the wild
Indians who lived there knew not of their value” (Ballantyne Ch. 11). According to the priest,
Camaruru’s ancestor, one of the first Brazilians, lands in Brazil a few years later by
shipwrecking on the shore in a scene that mirrors the one in which Martin lands in Brazil—
though it is a struggle with “savages” rather than pirates that results in Camaruru’s ancestor
becoming the sole survivor of his shipwreck. As a result of the efforts of brave Europeans such
as these, Camaruru declares, “the coasts of Brazil began soon after this to be settled in various
places by the Portuguese,” as well as the Spanish, Dutch, and English (Ballantyne Ch. 11). Thus,
the telling of Camaruru’s history, which emphasizes the role of Europeans in Brazil’s
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development and which draws connections between Martin and Barney’s landing in Brazil and
the arrival of the first settlers, suggests that further interference by Europeans would be
welcomed (by the former priest at least), despite Brazil’s recent independence.
What is important in Martin Rattler is not only the invitation for nineteenth-century
Europeans to introduce “social and economic developments” to Brazil (Forman 463), but the
way that (coffee) farming becomes symbolic of all that potential. Throughout Martin Rattler
there is a continual emphasis on the richness of the land and the expanses available for farming.
In one sense, this is illustrated most clearly in the large didactic sections of the novel where the
plants and geography of Brazil are listed and explained. However, more explicit passages state
that in Brazil there is still land for the taking. For example, at the end of his story, Camaruru
states that the prize Camaruru’s ancestor received for his brave journey to Brazil was a long line
of descendants who were “cultivators of the soil and traders in the valuable products of the New
World” (Ballantyne Ch. 11, emphasis mine). The invitation in these novels for British farmers to
come cultivate (through the employment of native workers, of course) the soil of Brazil
“themselves” is one that is continually emphasized in these young adult novels. For example,
some pages after Caramuru’s description of his ancestor’s history, he states that though Brazil “is
very large and very rich” it is “not well worked”—a clear invitation to English readers back
home who believe they might work the soil better (Ballantyne Ch. 11).
Of course, “cultivating the soil” in Brazil is clearly linked with the production of coffee.
In fact, the long story about Camaruru’s ancestor begins with a question about the coffee and
other products on Camaruru’s table, which he grows near his cabin. Camaruru tells a wide-eyed
Barney that “there are plenty of [coffee trees] here. Much money is made in Brazil by the export
of coffee—very much,” adding that, in fact, “in less than two years the exports of sugar and
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coffee amounted to more than the value of all the diamonds found in eighty years [in Brazilian
mines]” (Ballantyne Ch. 11). As a result of this conversation, when the ever-virtuous Martin
later makes his fortune in a Brazilian mine by finding a diamond, returning it to its rightful
owner and receiving a significant financial reward, the priest’s comments that coffee and sugar
production are more lucrative echoes throughout the novel. Thus, on the one hand, Martin
Rattler illustrates that coffee appears in this text because it links the adventures of young
protagonists to the potential development of Brazil as a country; on the other hand, Martin
Rattler also illustrates the way coffee is relegated to the background, even in those British novels
set in Brazil—for, again, while there is a significant discussion that centers on coffee production
in Brazil and the opportunities that await enterprising Europeans, coffee is never again discussed
in the novel outside of these few pages.
However, perhaps as a way of acknowledging the unique (“extracolonial”) relationship
between Britain and Brazil, the novel, like many of the others I discuss here, rarely portrays
other Brazilians, instead characterizing Brazil as a sort of “empty space.” Ross Forman explains
this phenomenon in his article “When Britons Brave Brazil”: though he does not discuss coffee
in his article, Forman analyzes the same four texts that I discuss here and the ways these
narratives “explore what it means to maintain a British identity in a foreign culture” (Forman
456). Forman argues that this emphasis on the “‘empty space’ of southern Brazil—where the
indigenous population had been erased and the Afro-Brazilian population was proportionally
small—meant that these novelists were writing primarily about British interactions with other
populations of European origin” (458). While I agree with Forman’s reading of Brazil as an
empty space, I do not believe these novels focus on interactions with other Europeans, but,
rather, specifically with other Britons, a fact that illustrates that these narratives are in many
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ways insulated from a specific time and place. This illustrates again the way Brazil was
characterized in British culture: as a place of opportunity for enterprising Britons rather than as a
population that requires colonization. In this way Brazil becomes a “foundation for securing
personal and national middle-class futures for British protagonists”: if these characters retire to
England, they bring with them “the profits they reap”; if they remain, they “establish agricultural
settlements akin to those in Australian and North America, thereby reflecting the period’s
perception of South America as a likely site for British mass immigration” (Forman 457).
Although Martin Rattler only briefly discusses farming, and only in theory, the three
novels that I discuss next take place (at least partially) on coffee plantations and, thus, illustrate
that English farms in Brazil were characterized as microcosms of English society. For example,
Emma E. Hornibrook’s The Spanish Maiden: A Story of Brazil (1895) centers on a Brazilian
coffee plantation and contains many of the same themes as Martin Rattler, including the image
of Brazil as a promised land waiting for British intervention to bring it to its fullest potential.
When the protagonist, Transito, and her mother, Mrs. Latrobe, discuss whether to follow Mr.
Latrobe to Brazil, Mrs. Latrobe describes Brazil to Transito as a land of great promise for
England’s poor, a “great rich place, where many—hundreds and hundreds of our poor people—
might live in comfort and plenty” (37). Similarly, Brazil is not only described as Mr. Latrobe’s
“El Dorado” (42), but as soon as they arrive in Brazil, Mr. Latrobe echoes Mrs. Latrobe’s earlier
sentiment: he tells Transito that “some day this country [Brazil] will be opened up, and from its
fruitfulness [poor] men will reap gold, as well as dig it out of its mines” (42). These sentiments
clearly echo those in Martin Rattler and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and once again suggest that—
despite coffee’s relative absence from Victorian texts—the average Victorian was likely very
aware of the opportunities that awaited English emigrants in Brazil.
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At the same time, much like Padre Camaruru in Martin Rattler, several men express
throughout The Spanish Maiden the sentiment that the Brazilians are not capable of working the
land the way it should be worked and that the right kind of European/English emigrant could
benefit by working it instead. For example, at one point (though the novel introduces readers to
Brazilians who are very hard workers) Mr. Latrobe tells Transito that “Brazilians despise men
who till the ground; trabalhadores [workers] as they call them”; as a result, “The country wants
new blood” (94). However, he qualifies the statement by stating that not any Englishmen will
do: Brazil has no need of “lazy English emigrants…who drink spirits, and think it too much
trouble to light a fire to cook their own dinner”—instead Brazil needs help from Europeans
willing to “handle pick and spade with a will” (94). In this passage and throughout the novel,
Brazil is advertised as a land for the English—specifically hard working and morally upright
Englishmen—to come and work the soil that the Brazilians will not or cannot work. In fact, by
the end of the novel (after falling ill for most of the novel), Mr. Latrobe becomes determined to
permanently settle in Brazil in order to see to the “interests of the settlers” (287): he states that
“At present you see only settlers who have capital and pasturage for mules have a chance of
getting on” and that “There is the scarcity of labour and the pride of ignorance to contend with”
(276). Because more Englishmen should emigrate to Brazil to help remedy that problem, Mr.
Latrobe decides to take a job as a “Government agent” (287), in order to see “this vast region
opened, to see the erewhile famishing hordes [sic], from other lands, ‘faring sumptuously’ on the
‘milk and honey’”—because in Brazil there is “‘bread enough to spare,’ while millions in the
mother countries …“peris[h] with hunger” (288). Thus, in this text, as in Martin Rattler, Brazil
is not only depicted as a nation in need of European intervention to bring it to its fullest potential,
but one that is depicted again and again as a country that promises great rewards for virtuous and
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hardworking Englishmen willing to work there. Thus, these kinds of characterizations of Brazil
emphasize the Victorian belief that Brazil would help the English “to relieve internal population
pressures without requiring Britain to expand its colonial government (as immigration to Canada
and Australia necessitated), to open up resources required by European capitalism, and—through
the blessings of those who settle in the region—to provide an entitlement for Britain’s global
good name” (Forman 474). While Martin Rattler discusses these benefits/opportunities in
theory, The Spanish Maiden suggests to the reader that these developments were already in
progress.
For example, in The Spanish Maiden Brazil is depicted as a country that has already been
made better due to British involvement thus far. When Transito and her parents first arrive in
Brazil and survey Rio de Janeiro from their ship, they see the mark of Englishmen on the
Brazilian city: for example, “Sugar-Loaf” Mountain [Pão de Açucar], a peak in Rio’s Guanabara
Bay, is remembered by Mr. Latrobe as the place where the “daring English middy planted the
Union Jack” (47).11 Although the reference is obscure, it is clear that Mr. Latrobe remembers
this Brazilian landmark as representative not of Brazil’s greatness, but as representative of some
anecdote related to English history. Similarly, after landing in Brazil, the trio travel inland to
stay with Mrs. Latrobe’s brother, an already well-established coffee plantation owner with a
massive fazenda [plantation]. While English plantation owners would have most certainly been
in the minority in Brazil, compared to Brazilian and Portuguese plantation owners, the reader is
only ever shown the coffee plantation owned by the English Mr. Lennard, Transito’s uncle. This
emphasis in the novel on the mark Englishmen make on the land for the betterment of other
11 This is an oft-repeated anecdote, but usually in equally obscure terms.
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Englishmen reflects both the attitude the Victorians had towards Brazil and the lack of attention
paid in these narratives to actual Brazilians.
Although The Spanish Maiden takes place mostly on a coffee plantation in southern
Brazil, ironically it is even less concerned with coffee than is Martin Rattler. Once it is made
clear that Mr. Lennard primarily produces coffee on his fazenda, coffee is relegated to the
background of the novel, as a kind of set prop. In fact, the word “coffee” only appears two or
three times in the entire novel, and always in passing. The lack of mention of coffee in this novel
about a plantation in Brazil illustrates clearly that coffee itself was unimportant as a symbolic
object—the characters seem to barely even consume it.
Instead, the central aim of the novel appears to be to illustrate the myriad opportunities
for success in Brazil for average Englishmen. For example, as discussed above, Mr. Latrobe
finds his niche as a “government agent” who helps other expatriates find opportunities in Brazil.
When Mr. Latrobe and Mr. Lennard both fall ill, we are introduced to an English soldier who
becomes the local doctor, serving the rich English fazenda owner and his family and the local
Brazilians. Transito, the protagonist, marries Ral Lennard, the plantation owner’s son, who has
not only lived a prosperous life, but who is the heir apparent to his father’s fortune. Furthermore,
through the romantic relationship between Ral and Transito, the novel also suggests that there
are plenty of opportunities for British Protestant missionaries in Brazil: not only does Transito
convert from Catholicism to Protestant Christianity, but she helps her future husband, her
parents, and a local priest do the same. By the end of the novel, though, as Ral Lennard explains,
Englishmen may face legal consequences for distributing Protestant Bibles in Brazil (293), Ral
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determines to become a missionary in Brazil (317).12 Thus, while coffee is almost omitted from
the narrative (in one of the few novels that actually connects coffee and Brazil), life in the coffee
districts of Brazil represents countless opportunities for British emigrants.
This characterization of Brazil is, again, one that reflects the extracolonial relationship
that Britain had with Brazil. Britain wanted to profit in some way from a relationship with Brazil
and expatriates living in Brazil benefited from moving to a newly independent nation with much
open farmland. At the same time, it was not a colonial relationship, and the British sought to
characterize it as one of mutual benefit. Thus, in many of these texts, paradoxically, even while
Brazilians are largely absent, the British characters have extensive conversations about the ways
that the British can help Brazil’s conversion from a “backwards” Catholic slave colony to a
modern, Protestant, and abolitionist nation.
The Spanish Maiden focuses on two kinds of conversion, both with geographical
significance: the conversion from (Brazilian) Catholicism to (English) Protestantism (discussed
above) and Mr. Lennard’s conversion from cruel slave-owning plantation owner to a man who
better understands his responsibilities to Brazil and his workers. While at first Mr. Lennard is
held up as an example of what Englishmen can accomplish in Brazil, as someone who is “rich
and powerful, reigning as a petty chief away there in the prairies” (Hornibrook 41), it quickly
becomes clear that Mr. Lennard’s profits are due in part to his tendency to trap workers into a
kind of indentured servitude. Mr. Lennard asks João, a Brazilian worker who accompanies the
Latrobes from Rio de Janeiro to Mr. Lennard’s plantation, to work for him; however, João has to
pay Mr. Lennard back for the house he is given on the property—something João struggles
12 According to Ross Forman, the story Ral tells at this point in the novel to explain to Transito the dangers of
proselytizing or distributing Bibles is “based on an historical incident at the time of the Christie Affair that involved
the Scottish missionary Robert Reid Kalley,” but is an inaccurate depiction of the events in question (475-476).
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throughout the novel to do with the meager wages he is given. Although the narrator remarks
that Mr. Lennard “kept no slaves” and “had never bought or sold one,” it is clear that João and
workers like him become slaves to Mr. Lennard (Hornibrook 114). At first, Mr. Lennard
comforts himself with the thought that “He was not a hard master, and bondage [on his
plantation] was not bitter” (Hornibrook 114). However, Mr. Lennard then begins to have an
attack of conscience: he begins to feel that he has “entrapped” “the poor tropeiro [cattle driver]”
and that the “bonds and deeds” in his safe were like “fetters that might not be easily broken”; Mr.
Lennard even has nightmares in which the “face of João appear[s] in his dreams” (Hornibrook
158). For most of the novel, he pushes away his guilt until he suffers a bad fall from a horse and
exposure to fumes during a massive fire on the plantation. João, the mistreated indentured
servant, decides to save his master and thus provides the impetus for Mr. Lennard’s conversion.
Hornibrook writes that “in that awful moment, and under the influence of his deep penitence and
remorse, João was conscious of but one yearning and desire. It was, [sic] that the man who had
entrapped him would not be held accountable for it by God” (Hornibrook 178). As a result of
João’s bravery and goodwill, when Mr. Lennard recovers for his injuries he forgives João’s debt
and becomes a “very different person from the proud, independent, sleek gentleman who was
owned in the neighboring fazenda, and for more than thirty square miles around, as lord” (178);
for the remainder of the novel, he refuses to answer to the title of “patrão [boss],” asking his
workers to call him “friend” instead.
Importantly, slavery was an important issue when it came to British involvement in
Brazil and perhaps best illustrates Britain’s attempts to influence Brazilian policy as well as
Brazil’s resistance to that pressure. In short, the “abolition of the international slave trade over
the course of the nineteenth century was largely driven by British policies and action” (Guenther
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33), yet Brazil was one of the last nations to abolish slavery. Although Brazil had agreed to stop
the importation of slaves as a condition of British aid during Brazilian independence, slavery was
not legally ended nationwide in Brazil until 1888 despite immense pressure from the British. For
example, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the Aberdeen Act of 1845 gave the
British Royal Navy permission to stop and search Brazilian ships suspected of transporting
slaves, even if the ship was docked in Brazilian ports. However, Brazil continued to be the
“largest slave market in the Americas” (33) due to both its relative proximity to West Africa and
the determination of plantation owners to continue using slaves. This issue caused serious
diplomatic tension between the two nations as Britain was determined to stop the importation of
slaves to Brazil, but Brazil was a “key trading partner for Great Britain” (33); compounding
matters was the fact that an “integral part of the Brazilian economy” was “Slavery, and thus the
slave trade” (Rivière 7-8). Due to this history, if the Victorians associated anything with Brazil
more than they did coffee, it was slavery. In fact, both in these novels and in Victorian culture
more generally, slavery, more than coffee, was a symbolic issue that sat at the center of the
British Empire’s relationship with Brazil. Because this conversion is one of the central plotlines
of The Spanish Maiden, Hornibrook suggests to readers that successful emigrants may have
important ethical questions to navigate in Brazil, of which slavery became very symbolic.
According to texts such as these, Englishmen are superior to the task of navigating these ethical
dilemmas—perhaps even role models to the Brazilians around them.
Although slavery had been abolished by the time of their publication, Ker’s Torn from Its
Foundations (1908) and Marchant’s Lois in Charge; or, A Girl of Grit (1918) both address the
use of slaves in the coffee districts and illustrate slavery’s function as a symbol long after it had
been abolished in Brazil. Torn from Its Foundations, a twentieth-century novel set in the
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eighteenth century, opens with a scene in which a runaway slave happens upon boy sleeping in
the woods and saves the boy from a poisonous snake. When the boy, Ken, awakes, he learns that
the slave, Pam (short for Epaminondas), has run away from an abusive Portuguese master and
Ken’s “English blood boils at [the] ghastly spectacle” of Pam’s scarred back (Ker 20). Pam
decides during that conversation that he can trust Ken because “Inglis boy—good!” (Ker 14).
Although Ken’s father’s coffee plantation suffers a slave revolt shortly thereafter—a horribly
violent event that provides the impetus for Ken’s meanderings throughout Brazil for the rest of
the novel, as he tries to make his way back to England—the opening scene of the novel is meant
to underscore the misguided nature of those revolts, as Ken’s family are upheld as “unwontedly
humane for that age” (Ker 20). Thus, despite the “profoundly misguided” revolt, the Dunbar
plantation is set up as place that “offers principles of fairness and freedom that spur economic
growth” (Forman 468-470). In fact, throughout the rest of the novel, Pam (along with a family
friend of Ken’s) loyally follows his new master, Ken, across Brazil, regardless of the hardships
they face—including shipwrecks, encounters with pirates, shark-infested waters, and a trial at the
Inquisition (at which they are found guilty). Pam’s loyalty to Ken is meant to underscore Ken’s
goodness—and by extension that of Great Britain.
Importantly, given the date of publication, Pam and Ken’s first meeting, their friendship,
and the slave revolt are all clearly meant to demonstrate the benefit of English involvement in
Brazil throughout the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century. On the one
hand, Ken’s father’s coffee plantation is portrayed as a refuge for slaves in a novel set before
Brazilian independence and long before either Brazil or England had abolished slavery; on the
other hand, the novel was written twenty years after Brazil finally did abolish slavery and almost
a century after England had. Thus, the anachronistic portrayal of attitudes towards slavery and
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British neocolonialism is clearly an attempt to compare the practical benefits of British influence
in Brazil with that of Portuguese influence before Brazil’s independence. Forman makes a
similar point when he argues that
Ker’s recourse to earlier Victorian, Protestant abolitionist themes in the novel—
published twenty years after Brazil became the last country to abandon slavery—
signally gives a history of the moral benefits of extracolonialism for both Britons
and Brazilians, suggesting a longstanding British interest in Brazil’s welfare that
deserves to be continued. (468)
However, I would add to this reading that the fact that Ker sets this story on a coffee plantation is
a revealing anachronism: in the second half of the nineteenth century coffee production in the
south became far more important, while during the time of Portuguese colonialism, sugar
production in the north (based heavily on the use of slaves) was the major source of income for
Brazil. I believe that this is a reflection of the fact that at the time of publication the British
Empire had reached its height and that the British had already finally successfully pressured
Brazil to abolish slavery. Although the only mention of coffee in the novel is when the narrator
states that on Dunbar Plantation grew “long, straight, symmetrical rows of coffee-plants [sic]”
(27), the fact that this anachronistic anti-slavery novel focuses on a coffee plantation rather than
sugar plantation supports this reading. Similarly, the focus on a coffee plantation helps to
distance the English from plantation slavery, for which sugar had become a symbol. This
reading is also supported by the fact that three of the four novels I discuss here, three of the four
novels that even mention coffee in connection with Brazil, were written after slavery had finally
been abolished in Brazil in 1888.
Marchant’s Lois in Charge (1918), written ten years after Torn from Its Foundations, is
the novel that most clearly links the work of Englishmen in Brazil to the production of coffee
and that most clearly acknowledges Brazil’s unique relationship to the British Empire. While
The Spanish Maiden and Torn from Its Foundations barely mention coffee, Lois in Charge most
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explicitly suggests that Englishmen are directly involved in caring for the coffee that will be
exported around the globe. On the very first page of the novel, we are introduced to Lois, who
oversees the work on her father’s coffee plantation, Villa Riqueta, since the “picking season was
close at hand” and, without supervision, “workers on the coffee plantation did not seem to
understand what the word hurry meant” (Marchant 9). Most of the first chapter centers on the
work being done to ensure a good coffee harvest, including a scene in which Lois climbs to a
high peak, observes an impending storm, and saves her father’s plantation from a catastrophic
flood by advising the men to tend to the dam nearby that threatens to burst. Further, this novel
actually centers on two coffee plantations that Lois temporarily oversees: when her step-brother,
Jim, becomes the target of a notorious blackmail scheme and disappears, Lois travels up-river to
his coffee plantation and steps in as overseer in his absence.
The attention given to coffee farming in this twentieth-century novel (compared not only
with other texts discussed here, but with Victorian literature more broadly), has led other
scholars to comment on it. Although Forman does not discuss coffee in relation to Martin
Rattler, The Spanish Maiden, or Torn from Its Foundations, he does acknowledge the importance
of coffee to Lois in Charge. He writes that:
The very commodity being grown on her family’s plantation, coffee, and its
implication in habits of home consumption back in Britain further emphasize this
incorporation of Brazil as extraterritorial into the familiar and middle-class home.
The text tacitly equates Brazil with the commodity it produces, and it empowers its
protagonists Lois and Jim with the role of improving that commodity within the
confines of self-contained British plantations. (Forman 472)
In one sense, as Forman points out, in Lois in Charge coffee is grown within the confines of a
self-contained British plantation and, thus, like the texts discussed above, does not portray many
Brazilian characters. However, the novel does more explicitly link Brazilian coffee and the
English middle-class home. The novel suggests that the British might achieve great wealth on
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coffee plantations like the two owned by this family, but also, through its attention to the work
done by English characters (rather than just their employees), the novel suggests most clearly
that these English characters oversee the commodity chain that brings coffee to England. This
shift in attitude might reflect the fact that by World War I (during which Lois in Charge was
published) it was not only clear that Brazil would never formally belong to the British Empire,
but that England was in danger of losing most of the empire it had already built for itself.
Thus, in this sense, the novel is self-conscious about insisting that there are many
Englishmen with deep roots in Brazil and that there are continued benefits for English
involvement in Brazil. This nostalgia is clear when Lois reflects on the great stretches of
agricultural land she observes from a peak near her father’s plantation. Marchant writes:
Mile on mile, league upon league, the land lay spread at her feet. There were
hundreds and thousands of acres of coffee plantations; more hundred and thousands
of acres of dense forest; many wide spaces given over to the cultivation of corn and
sugar; reaches of pasture land, where herds of cattle and of horses looked like tiny
insects crawling on the ground. (Marchant 18)
In this scene, while Lois clearly describes the greatness of Brazil, the fact that she stands on a
mountain overlooking these expanses, with all these plantations “spread at her feet,” connects
symbolically the development of Brazil and the Brazilian landscape (over the previous century or
more) to the (literal) oversight of British expatriates. Thus, on the one hand, this scene
“underscores Lois’s connection and commitment to the land” (Forman 478); on the other, it
underscores the perceived benefits of the extracolonial relationship between England and Brazil
throughout the Victorian period and the early twentieth century. Thus, while Forman argues that
in this scene and others Lois claims “individual Brazilian citizenship as part and parcel of a more
general British identity” (478), I argue that this scene is one that celebrates (at least perceived)
partnership between Great Britain and extracolonial Brazil and thus celebrates a distinct sense of
British identity based on the empire.
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This attitude is also reflected through the familiar trope of slavery, which serves to
“reassert the role of Britain and Britons as protectors and guardians, as prosperous settlers whose
success offers models to be emulated by Brazilians” (Forman 479). While Lois oversees her
step-brother’s plantation, Lontra Praia, not knowing if he fled the plantation or was taken by
members of a blackmail ring, her step-brother, Jim, hides on the plantation in plain sight,
disguised as a black worker named Cork. The central tension of this section of the novel is
Lois’s struggle to see that Jim’s crops are cared for by workers who continually threaten to
strike. We learn at the end of the novel that Jim (as Cork) had himself been inciting the rebellion
in order to draw Lois’s attention to the cruelty of his own overseer. Unbeknownst to Jim until he
disguised himself, the overseer had been forcing workers to live in “insect-infested huts”
(Marchant 155) that resemble slaves’ quarters and inflicting violence on them at every
opportunity. In an important and very symbolic scene, Jim, still disguised as the black worker,
Cork, revenges himself on the overseer by nearly thrashing him to death for having thrashed
women on the plantation, while Lois stands in “amazement at seeing that the tables were turned”
between the master and slave (180). This scene serves as the climax to the subplot of working
conditions on the fazenda; by the end of the novel, Lois determines to improve the workers’
living conditions by building houses and educating the workers on maintaining sanitary living
conditions, while Jim resolves he will continue “to get down to the bottom of things as [he] ha[s]
been doing, and that there will be some drastic reforms on the fazenda when [he] get[s] back to it
in [his] rightful capacity” (Marchant 266).
Although Forman is right to suggest that these scenes suggest that Jim and Lois are
“model employers who, in the extracolonial context, address Brazil’s labor issues and amicably
resolve them to everybody’s profit” (479), it is worth noting that Marchant relies on the
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Victorian trope of the British plantation owner in Brazil who realizes for himself the dangers of
slavery. In this way the novel is retrospective and nostalgic, reflecting on the good that English
influence in Brazil has done so far—in this case, pressuring Brazil throughout the nineteenth
century to abolish slavery—while also suggesting that there is still more work to be done in
Brazil, specifically in the coffee districts of Brazil, by Englishmen willing to live abroad and set
a moral example. Notably, this is a distinct difference from representations of Cuba, since it
emphasizes English-owned (rather than Brazilian-owned) operations in Brazil; in contrast,
Cuban sugar and tobacco were always depicted as produced by Cubans.
In this way, like the novels that I discuss above, coffee functions as a geographical
marker—a signifier for Brazil as well as the settler colonies over there—and shorthand for the
opportunities that emigrants might have in Brazil, including opportunities to do good. While
novels intended for adults did not bother to acknowledge that coffee was produced in Brazil, it is
clear that the average Victorian was aware of this connection and that the writers of these
children’s novels expected their readers to know it, too. At the same time, all of these novels
make clear that slavery was a much more powerful marker for the relationship between Britain
and Brazil than coffee was and one that is much more heavily emphasized in at least three of
these stories. In that way, the (coffee) plantation becomes subsumed to the slavery that might
take place there.
At the same time, these novels illuminate the way that Brazil was characterized to young
readers even while the actual relationship between Britain and Brazil is “obscured” (Forman
457). While Forman argues that Lois in Charge and The Spanish Maiden depict the progression
of their title characters from girls to women and the parallel transformation of “unformed” land
into the “formed” land of a “miniature England” in Brazil, I would argue that in these novels the
200
coffee farm is portrayed as always already a miniature England, or at the very least a protected
space within which the characters have very little contact with actual Brazilians. In all the novels
except Martin Rattler, English characters are already well established on their fazendas; still, in
Martin Rattler the priest Camaruru points to the Europeans who came before and the continuity
of that interference. The characterization of these farms as “miniature Englands” or of Brazil as
an “empty space” again, I argue, reflects Brazil’s position as an extracolonial nation, a sort of
liminal space in the grand scheme of imperialism. Additionally, while Forman distinguishes Torn
from Its Foundation and Martin Rattler from the girls’ stories of The Spanish Maiden and Lois in
Charge, emphasizing that the protagonists of the first two novels embark on cross-country
travels before returning to England, as I have shown, all four of the novels directly discuss the
question of coffee farming in Brazil—and all are equally unconcerned with portraying Brazilians
in that context. In this way these novels are different from many children’s books that take place
in formal English colonies in that they are not “preoccupied with maintaining British identity”
and in that they do not present the characters as “engaging in any meaningful contact with
indigenous inhabitants” (Smith 85).13 These are not about the colonial; they are about the
extracolonial.
Further, these books reveal the ways in which the extracolonial was different from the
colonial in children’s fiction. As Forman argues, these books all appear to recognize “that sites
of informal imperial activity do differ from those of formal activity—a recognition revealed in
their use of background information about Brazil to legitimate their novels as historical fictions”
(481). Coffee and slavery serve as two kinds of “background information” that these novels
13 Smith makes this argument specifically about Marchant, but I believe it applies to the other novels.
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provide in order to connect concerns in Brazil to the potential good that the English might do in
these extracolonial locations and the opportunities that await adventurous expatriates.
More importantly, this unique relationship between Britain and Brazil—whether we call
it an example of informal empire, an extracolonial relationship, or a(n imperial) trade
relationship—partially accounts for coffee’s lack of coding. For, although I have discussed four
novels in this chapter that do acknowledge coffee production in Brazil, coffee’s relationship to
Brazil was a fact largely absent from Victorian literature. Further, even in these novels that
discuss coffee farming in Brazil, coffee is barely discussed. As I have suggested several times
throughout this chapter, this lack of coding suggests that many other colonial products were
coded symbolically because they helped the Victorians make sense of, and perhaps justify, their
relationships with those colonial producers. Thus, the lack of coding around coffee suggests that
commodities did not develop “lives of their own” (McClintock 129-138) or “tee[m] with
signification” (Richards 2) haphazardly; rather, many commodities, but not all, were part of a
complex system for making meaning—and there were rules governing that meaning-making.
While it would be difficult to make a hard-and-fast rule on how and why commodities took on
symbolic meaning in Victorian literature and culture, it is clear that the origin of the commodity
and England’s political and imperial relationship to that producer were likely factors. Thus,
while I have tried to show throughout this dissertation that the Victorians did consume
commodities from Latin American and Caribbean producers that were not British colonies, and
that these commodities were often symbolically coded in consistent ways in texts from the
period, the case study of coffee suggests that the kind of meaning that these goods took on may
correlate in some way with England’s (perceived) power over the colonial producer or with the
producer’s position as a colony or non-colony.
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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
As we have seen, Latin American and Caribbean commodities produced in non-English
colonies were consumed regularly in England and often even privileged in the literature and
advertisements of the period. I end by returning to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Betrothed,”
which I discussed in the introduction. While my dissertation set out to explore the symbolic
meanings attached to Latin American goods in Victorian literature, like the Cuban cigars in
Kipling’s poem, ultimately my dissertation brings to the forefront the question of Britain’s
complex and varying relationships with the nations who produced these goods. Thus, in
retrospect, we might find it significant that Kipling’s speaker refers to the origins of his cigars at
least four times in the poem not only because it illustrates that the Victorians were aware of the
foreign origins of tobacco, but also because it illustrates how privileged Cuban tobacco was in
comparison to other Latin American goods: for, as we saw in Chapter 5, though the British were
also involved in Brazil in the nineteenth century, Brazilian coffee simply does not get the same
treatment as Cuban cigars in Victorian literature. Kipling’s poem reminds us, then, that it is not
enough to understand which goods the Victorians were consuming: further research into this area
should investigate the symbolic meanings attached to these goods in British literature, and
consider what those meanings illuminate about England’s relationship to the (former-) colonial
nation(s) that produced them.
Further research into this question is needed for two reasons. First, as I have illustrated
throughout this dissertation, the coding of these commodities was clearly not haphazard. For
example, although the two major commodities that were exported from Cuba had very different
connotations in England, those connotations were reflections of very real elements of England’s
relationship to Cuba. On the one hand, tobacco reflected a celebration of exoticism and colonial
203
culture because it was a colonial product that was almost exclusively shared among men,
including the sailors, adventurers and engineers who travelled to Cuba and to other colonies.
The fact that it became associated with mixed-race women in Cuba, England and France also
reflects the fact that these meanings were circulating along the same trade routes as the
commodity itself. On the other hand, at the same time, in the nineteenth century Cuba became
synecdoche for all the nations that continued to use slaves after British abolition, and sugar,
Cuba’s most important export product, and the product that was produced on massive slave
plantations, carried those associations with it to England. Thus, it is no accident that one product
celebrated colonial culture while the other represented a willful forgetting of England’s
relationship to Cuba—together they reflected the complexities of England’s relationship to Cuba.
Similarly, the fact that one product was associated with masculinity and adventures abroad and
the other with femininity and the purity of the domestic space in England reflects the complex
nature of imperialism, which depended both the private and the public spheres.
The second half of my dissertation only further suggests a correlation between the
symbolic coding of Latin American commodities and England’s relationship to the producers of
each good. For example, the language surrounding chocolate in Victorian literature and culture
was as messy as the trade routes that brought chocolate to England. It was only once England
gained more control over the supply chain (that is, once chocolate had been planted in colonies
in West Africa) that chocolate’s connotations became clearer and more consistent. Once
chocolate came from within the Empire, it was associated not with contamination, but with
British identity and the nuclear family. Similarly, coffee, which came from an extracolonial and
newly independent nation, had almost no symbolic value in Victorian literature and its origins
were rarely acknowledged. These facts suggest that the symbolic language that surrounded these
204
goods in Victorian literature and advertisements was meant to help the Victorians to make sense
of their relationship to these (former-) colonial nations. By consuming these goods, the
Victorians not only commodified and consumed colonial culture, but also were reminded of the
activities of the British Empire abroad.
While other scholars may find other methodologies for answering these questions, I
suggest that imperialism, in all its forms, should be at the center of any discussion of commodity
culture. This dissertation emphasizes the importance of complicating our understanding of
British imperialism. The British Empire was not a monolithic entity: the relationships England
with various nations all over the globe were varied and complex. Because those relationships
had a real bearing on the lives of Victorians, the complexities of empire were often reflected in
the literature of the period. While scholars have acknowledged these complexities in some cases
(most notably, studies that focus on England’s imperial relationship with India), in many cases
the British Empire’s activities are flattened into the catchall term “imperialism.” If we enrich the
vocabulary we use to investigate the British Empire’s activities abroad, in order to complicate
our understanding of how varied these relationships were, we would easily see the relevance of
an investigation into areas of the globe that were not officially part of the British Empire. By
extension, we would also clearly see the relevance of the commodities that came from those
areas of the globe—commodities that filled Victorians’ homes, and which reflect so much about
those imperial relationships.
In many cases, these commodities not only still fill our homes, but these commodities’
imperial histories are important still today. An art exhibit that took place in the summer of 2014
in Brooklyn, New York, in a building that once served as a Domino Sugar factory, is one clear
twenty-first century example of the persistence of many of the themes in this dissertation. In “A
205
Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby,” artist Kara Walker created a massive sphinxlike
sculpture made of 30 tons of sugar. Though posed like a sphinx, the sculpture depicted a black
woman kneeling and bent over, with her genitalia exposed, wearing nothing but a scarf on her
head that called to mind the “mammy” stereotype. Surrounding the massive sculpture were life-
sized depictions of black children, which were made of molasses. Together, these sculptures
served to remind the audience of the black labor that for centuries made the trade in sugar
possible. After all, as I explained in Chapter 3, the sugar trade (in Cuba and elsewhere)
depended on both the transatlantic slave trade, as well as continued trade between European
empires, who consumed massive amounts of sugar, and the colonies in the Americas that
produced sugar using slaves. The fact that Walker used pure white sugar to create this massive
sculpture of a black woman, and the fact that the art exhibit took place in a former sugar factory,
drew attention to the way that, historically, these connotations were erased as sugar was
processed, much as it was during the Victorian period. The exhibit served to remind the viewer
that in the nineteenth century, in both England and the U.S., the factory-produced good was
continually rhetorically and imaginatively distanced from the slave-produced raw product.
Furthermore, the sphinx’s naked body and the fact that she is the only figure coated in white
sugar also serves to remind us of the way that black slave women, whose children became slaves,
were excluded from traditional notions of femininity, which white sugar represents. Although
these histories are often willingly forgotten, the giant sculpture of the “Marvelous Sugar Baby”
reminds us of their “subtle” persistence.
Furthermore, while these cultural artifacts remind us of the long reaching effects of the
nineteenth century imperialism and slavery, they also serve to remind us of the relevance of these
questions today. These questions are relevant not only because slavery is an important part of
206
our history, or because many of the empires that built their wealth on slavery are still the most
powerful nations today, but also because commodity culture, imperialism, and even exploitation,
are still relevant questions in our increasingly global world. Thus, by complicating our
understanding of nineteenth century empires, and their legacies, we complicate our
understanding of the inescapable realities of commodity imperialism today.
207
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Jacqueline K. Amorim received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in the fall of
December 2015. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Stetson University in 2006 and her
master’s degree from the University of Florida in 2010. Her research interests include Victorian
commodity culture, the British Empire, and representations of the gendered/raced body in
Victorian literature. She is a recipient of the McKnight Fellowship, the Graduate Fellowship, and
the Graduate School’s Dissertation Scholarship Award.