The Hour and the Man

First edition, RBH records no copy sold since 1980, complete with its appendices at the end of the volume.  

Half anthracite calf bindings, bordered with blind-tooled rolls, spine with five false raised bands, numerous gilt fillets and rolls forming a border, blind-tooled ornament in the compartments, burgundy calf title-pieces, marbled paper boards, marbled paper endpapers and pastedowns, all edges marbled, unnoticeable repears to joints.

Illustrated with a folding colour map of Haiti.

Rare copy of this fictionalised biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who, under the pen of the abolitionist Harriet Martineau, becomes a "Shakespearean hero, part George Washington, part Count of Monte Cristo" to bring about the end of slavery in the United States.  

"Martineau's images and themes would figure in the rhetoric of black and white antislavery writers alike, especially Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. Martineau's presentation of Toussaint made a black man central to the conception of what freed slaves might be capable of accomplishing, and it provided a crucial, if complicated, model for American writers." (Susan Belasco)

"I have thought of "The Hour and the Man" as the finest historical romance in any language. You would wonder if you knew how often I have read it over and over again, even in the last two years." (Florence Nightingale to Jane Martineau, quoted in Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, (London, 1877), 3, p. 476,).

In previous centuries, the black hero had only been embodied in wholly fictional portraits tinged with more than a little exoticism, and mostly as secondary characters: the Negro of Surinam in Voltaire's Candide, or Juba in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, not to mention Aphra Behn's inimitable Oroonoko. Among abolitionist texts, first-hand accounts such as those of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano had, in fact, preceded the interest of Western writers in narrating black destinies by several decades. The biography in the strict sense (a work on the life of a black historical hero) would ultimately be the last such genre to emerge: Jekyll's life of Sancho (1782) is the earliest example, but it forms the preface to a volume of letters rather than a stand-alone work. Commentators have noted the novelty of this choice of subject in Toussaint L'Ouverture, and its clear departure from the slave narrative format. Martineau does not confine herself to oppression alone but instead extends her narrative into a tribute to his struggle for freedom in an adventurous and romantic sense, one intended to further the abolitionist cause: 

"This tale was written before Martineau had seen slavery for herself, although she researched well before writing it. It was widely read and praised in England and sufficiently well known in America for her to be courted by abolitionists and upholders of slavery alike, anxious to persuade her of their views, when she went to America from 1834 to 1836.In contrast, The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance (1841), was written after her American trip. Most unusually for the period, it had a black man, Toussaint L'Ouverture, as hero. Martineau's account of how this ex-slave expelled the French and later the Spanish from what became known as Haiti, incorporated both a passionate hatred of slavery and the environ-mentalist educational ideas which she had imbibed from her upbringing.

 

For her, L'Ouverture was able to rule intelligently and in an enlightened manner, partly because of his good fortune in having been permitted to read and gain access to classical works, especially those of Epictetus and Fénélon, which taught him to be a stoic. He also discovered how to conduct troops and battles from Marshal Saxe's Military Reveries. L'Ouverture is portrayed as inspired by the struggles of the ancient Greeks for liberty, although he had neither seen liberty in action nor had he the power of appropriately exercising the virtue in which he gloried.

 

Martineau's somewhat overblown, didactic narrative was accompanied by an appendix of nearly 60 pages at the end to show her evidence and that the aim was worthy. Martineau tried to prove that black people, even brutalised slaves, could overcome their circumstances, given the right education and opportunities; for they had as much potential as Europeans to show intelligence, humanity, love and virtue. In the same way, Europeans could be corrupted by living in the unjust brutality of a slave state. Thus she tried to depict the class distinctions and enmities in both white and black communities once L'Ouverture was able to establish black rule. L'Ouverture, and his wife and daughters especially, portrayed the dignity, intelligence and beauty of black people," (Ruth Watts, "Martineau and popular education", in Harriet Martineau and the Birth of Disciplines Nineteenth-century Intellectual Powerhouse, 2016)

Precious copy of this political novel, published ten years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by a woman determined to change the perception of the Haitian Revolution while giving abolitionism a unifying hero.