So Many Books

As a young man, Weeden II had been quite outspoken in his dislike for empire and his opposition to slavery, as evidenced in his Zimao, the African (1800) and his poetry collection, Bagatelles (1795), most notably in poems such as "The Slave", "The Indian Warrior, bound to the stake", "The Indian in Despair", etc. Even then, there are definite limits to his radicalism: Zimao the handsome maroon is paired with Wilmot, the "good" plantation owner, for example; the Indians are sympathetically depicted, but the manner of treatment owes a good deal to what we might call the noble savage aesthetic, and presents them as tragic, doomed figures, speaking using jarringly eighteenth-century poetic diction. (But then, no more jarring than when Tacitus makes the British leader Calgacus give an oration that would have been at home on the floor of the Senate - and what other diction did Weeden have access to?) Anyway, this is an aspect of Weeden I've always been fond of, and one thing I'd been wondering is whether his politics changed as he moved out of his twenties, as is so often the case.

Reading his letters from middle-age gives little clue as to that: they are mostly concerned with family and professional matters. But yesterday, I found this fascinating passage in a letter to his son Weeden III, written in his early fifties (on 13th July, 1824) about an event that I feel ashamed to say that I knew nothing about. I've included for interest the immediately preceding sentences about the recent deaths of Thomas Rennell (yes, I had to look him up too) and Byron (whom he evidently had little time for, perhaps because he'd been so mean to his little brother):

The deaths of Rennell & Byron form a contrast awful, improving, important. Yet, how few comparatively lament the one; how pompous & gorgeous are the outward demonstrations of grief for the other! But God seeth not as man seeth.

The death of the Queen of the Sandwich Islands bears a pathos which a poet might feel strongly. A child of nature sacrificed in a few weeks at the shrine of civilization & modern refinement! Change of habits of living, routs of plays & operas, in confined & scented rooms, with a smokey atmosphere, & and at midnight, lead us with ease to divine the powerful disease by which the denizen of pure regions fell. There is in truth the semblance of a mystery visible throughout the treatment of these honest Islanders, that awakens the warmest compassion for the fate of the departed & the liveliest sympathy for the embarrassments & difficulties of the living. “Rex et amicus appellabatur” is the political phrase explanatory of the system now pursued towards these people, to make them subjects to our power & interests & to withdraw them from the paws of the Russian bear.

"There speaks the author of the Bagatelles!" I cried as I read this. Still drenched in the language of noble savagery, admittedly, but still anti-imperialist in his instincts, or at least that's my reading. Never change, great-great-great Grandpapa.

If, like me, you need some of this historical context filling in, there's an account here (including pictures), but briefly, King Kamehameha II (aka Liholiho) and Queen Kamāmalu were visiting from the Sandwich Islands (i.e. Hawaii) when the Queen caught measles, quite possibly in Chelsea, and died a month later, on 5th July. The grief-stricken King also succumbed, dying on the 14th, the day after this letter was written.

Ironically, the captain of the ship that returned their remains to Hawaii was called George Byron - a cousin of the poet.