Fugitive Families
Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain
by Lyn Innes
Paperback (No longer our product)
(September 2025)
ISBN: 9780718898144
5.94 x 8.98 inches
Price: $34.00
On back order
An insightful investigation of seven extraordinary lives, Fugitive Families is a fascinating portrait of the writers, speakers and activists who left the US under the Fugitive Slave Act and the British society they discovered.
Ellen Craft, disguising herself as a white slave-owner to escape with her husband, William. Mary and William Allen, the first legal interracial married couple in America, fleeing the country after threats of lynching. Francis Fedric, after 50 years of brutal treatment escaping through the Underground Railroad. Sarah Remond Parker, invited to Britain to lecture on abolitionism, and then qualifying as one of the first women doctors. These courageous men and women left the United States as the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and citizenship for black people denied, finding in Britain another country mired in a colonial history. Lyn Innes explores the lives of these extraordinary speakers, writers, and activists, as they challenged reductive narratives, campaigned against slavery, and built their own lives and families, interacting with movements for Women’s Suffrage and Temperance, electoral politics, and Nationalist movements. Tracing varying influences, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Innes examines British perceptions of race through how these speakers were perceived, understood, supported, received, and criticised. An insightful investigation of seven extraordinary lives, Fugitive Families is a fascinating portrait of social attitudes in the 1850-60s, a history that underpins modern British society.
The descendant of Indian immigrants to Australia, Lyn Innes is an Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. Her interest in African and African American History and Literature developed while she was teaching at Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama, during the1950s. She co-edited two volumes of African short stories with the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, and has written about the history of Black and Asian writers in Britian. Her book about her Indian ancestors is currently being produced as a film.
- By (author) Lyn Innes
"These well-rounded studies of five Americans who found sanctuary in Britain and Ireland from U.S. slavery and bigotry provide valuable insights into Black participation in British history. Their contacts with other refugees, efforts to achieve literacy and to support their children reveal the ambitions of the dozens of Black American fugitives who lived in mid-nineteenth century Britain." Mr Jeffrey Green (author of Black Americans in Victorian Britain, 2018) "A vivid, moving and impeccably researched account of the remarkable lives of a group of Black American slaves who crossed the Atlantic in an attempt to find freedom and remake their lives, and who significantly influenced the abolitionist movement and the wider Victorian culture of the mid and later nineteenth century." Rod Edmond (Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History, University of Kent)
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