During the nineteenth century there emerged in England an increasingly hostile view of ethnic minorities. Dr Bolt traces, from about 1850, the changing attitudes of Victorians to 'inferior' races., especially on black Africans.

Focusing on race, the aim of this work is to reflect, develop and extend interest in the 19th century - as the former epoch has come sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past, but the contours of our modernity.

Black Victorians/Black Victoriana is a welcome attempt to correct the historical record. Although scholarship has given us a clear view of nineteenth-century imperialism, colonialism, and later immigration from the colonies, there has for far too long been a gap in our understanding of the lives of blacks in Victorian England. Without that understanding, it remains impossible to assess adequately the state of the black population in Britain today. Using a transatlantic lens, the contributors to this book restore black Victorians to the British national picture. They look not just at the ways blacks were represented in popular culture but also at their lives as they experienced them--as workers, travelers, lecturers, performers, and professionals. Dozens of period photographs bring these stories alive and literally give a face to the individual stories the book tells. The essays taken as a whole also highlight prevailing Victorian attitudes toward race by focusing on the ways in which empire building spawned a "subculture of blackness" consisting of caricature, exhibition, representation, and scientific racism absorbed by society at large. This misrepresentation made it difficult to be both black and British while at the same time it helped to construct British identity as a whole. Covering many topics that detail the life of blacks during this period, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana will be a landmark contribution to the emergent field of black history in England.

Moving away from conventional theories about Victorian attitudes towards race, Salesa focuses on an array of equally influential, yet seemingly opposite, ideas where racial crossing was seen as a means of improvement, a way to manage racial conflict or create new societies, or even a way to promote the rule of law.

While there are many studies of nineteenth-century race theories and scientific racism, the attitudes and stereotypes expressed in popular culture have rarely been examined, and then only for the latter half of the century. Theatre then was mass entertainment and these forgotten plays, hastily written, surviving only as hand-written manuscripts or cheap pamphlets, are a rich seam for the cultural historian. Mining them to discover how 'race' was viewed and how the stereotype of the black developed and degraded, sheds a fascinating light on the development of racism in English culture. In the process, this book helps to explain how a certain flexibility in attitudes towards skin colour, observable at the end of the eighteenth century, changed into the hardened jingoism of the late nineteenth. Concentrating on the period 1830 to 1860, its detailed excavation of some seventy plays makes it invaluable to the theatre historian and black studies scholar.

This approach to Eliot's writings places her within the wider context of debates on racial and cultural differences, furnishing an altered context for scholars to return to her fiction and poetry. It also covers Victorian attitudes to Gypsies, Black slaves, Indians, Jews, and Turks.