Vulgar History - Regency Era Heiresses and the History of Enslavement

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00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is Anne Foster and we are in our Regency era. This season we're talking about the Regency era, which is a time period centered around the early 1800s in England and the UK, but it also has wider repercussions to other parts of the world, which we'll also be talking about like today.

00:00:52.480 Our guest today is Dr. Miranda Kaufman, author of Heiresses, Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean.

00:01:00.200 And her book is talking all about the connection between people in England and people in the Caribbean and the slave trade and how we don't often think or talk about that when you're picturing the Regency era and you're thinking about Jane Austen or Bridgerton.

00:01:17.280 But the wealth that a lot of these people had was acquired through the slave trade, through the exploitation of enslaved African people. And Miranda's book really gets at this topic. It's one of those books where the more specific you are, the broader your information can become.

00:01:38.320 So her book profiles nine heiresses, women who wound up in England and their ties to the slave trade in the Caribbean.

00:01:47.760 And in so doing, she's able to really open up a broader conversation about this whole topic, which I'm going to get into in my conversation with Miranda Kaufman.

00:01:57.640 You may be familiar with her name from her previous book, The Black Tudors.

00:02:01.980 I read that when that came out several years ago, and it was such a huge shift for me personally to read about all of her excellent research that she did, just reinserting people of color into Tudor era of England, which is often thought about as just white people were there.

00:02:20.660 But in fact, she did so much research there, and then she's doing a similar amount of research here to really just to open up our understanding of a time period that maybe you think you know, in this case, the Regency era.

00:02:32.660 Anyway, I was so pleased that Miranda agreed to speak with me on the podcast.

00:02:37.260 And so please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Miranda Kaufman.

00:02:40.540 so we are joined today by Miranda Kaufman author of Aresis a new book who profiles nine women who

00:02:53.120 married into the British aristocracy bringing huge wealth generated from Caribbean slavery

00:02:58.220 into the country and Miranda my first question is what what made you write a book on this topic

00:03:05.560 Like, how did you get interested in this idea?

00:03:08.180 It goes back to quite a long way to 2006 when I was hired by English Heritage to do a survey of the houses they look after with their links to enslavement and abolition.

00:03:21.600 Because it was in the run up to 2007, which was the bicentenary of the abolition of British trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.

00:03:31.160 And there was quite a lot of commemoration of that at the time.

00:03:34.600 and i was still doing my phd on black tutors but i took this on as a side project and i they gave

00:03:44.320 me a list of 33 houses to review and a list of ways in which a house might be connected and

00:03:50.720 you know beyond the obvious ones of that it was built or owned by an enslaver plantation owner

00:03:57.220 or trafficker or merchant selling uh goods produced by enslaved people one of the things

00:04:03.840 on the list was heiresses so if if the man of the house had married a woman who had lots of money

00:04:10.120 from those sources uh then then that was another way in and so that's when I first encountered

00:04:17.740 the phenomenon and one of the most colorful characters in my book Elizabeth Vassel because

00:04:23.620 she married Sir Godfrey Webster of Battle Abbey which was built on the site of the Battle of

00:04:29.240 Hastings. So it was quite an old house. So it was my first sort of heiress. And it was on the

00:04:37.040 back burner for a while while I wrote my book, Black Tudors. But then I came back to it seven

00:04:42.260 years ago. I will ask you some questions about the individual women you profile. Could you give

00:04:47.780 us just a sense of how common it was for women to inherit plantations in the Caribbean?

00:04:53.300 well if you think about it i think men would rather have passed their property on to other men

00:04:59.540 but that's not how human reproduction works so there are several instances you know they'll

00:05:05.080 they'll leave it to a son or a grandson or a nephew or a distant cousin or anyone

00:05:09.880 male but if all of that runs out or if they're particularly fond of their their daughter or 0.98

00:05:16.960 at least or whatever they um you do get wives you know as widows inheriting or daughters or

00:05:23.180 nieces granddaughters so it was not 100 common but it definitely happened

00:05:29.860 so when i started out the book research i did a sort of wider survey and found about 150 women

00:05:37.440 that sort of fit the bill uh particularly but that's specifically women who then moved to

00:05:43.380 Britain married in Britain there would have been a larger number of women who inherited in the 0.97

00:05:49.520 Caribbean and actually in the 1830s when enslavement itself came to an end in the British

00:05:55.420 Empire 40 percent of the people who claimed compensation were women but I wouldn't classify

00:06:03.660 all of those as heiresses as such because for me I had a kind of higher bar of how wealthy they had 0.93

00:06:08.780 to be. Whereas, you know, several of those women would have owned a relatively small number of

00:06:13.740 enslaved people, sometimes only two or three. In the stories of the women you profile, you

00:06:18.620 mentioned several different islands. Could you just give sort of an overview of where most of

00:06:25.160 the heiresses inherited the property from? Like what, which islands specifically? Right. So the

00:06:31.840 Caribbean was sort of split up amongst different European powers. There were British islands,

00:06:37.600 french islands spanish islands and even other european nations that you don't immediately

00:06:42.920 associate with the caribbean had small uh numbers of islands that they controlled at various points

00:06:48.540 such as the danish people uh had some of what's now the u.s virgin islands for example but the 1.00

00:06:55.580 british the main british island was jamaica so a significant number of the women i looked at were

00:07:02.040 were jamaican uh and then barbados was sort of the first major british uh colony in the caribbean

00:07:09.740 you know and also some of these islands changed hands several times between the european powers 0.88

00:07:15.380 during the during the period of enslavement but so jamaica barbados i've also got women in the

00:07:22.700 book from st kitts with links to st vincent granada antigua so there are several different

00:07:30.940 islands across the Caribbean that were colonized by the British at different points.

00:07:37.000 There's so many places are mentioned in the book. I found that this is all new to me. I've come

00:07:42.640 across, you know, just references to people having wealth from the Caribbean, but I've never read a

00:07:48.220 book that really delved into what did that mean before. And I found it really interesting to how

00:07:53.160 these women, when they returned to England, or some of them were born there, how were they viewed by

00:07:59.660 British aristocratic society at the time? Well, they were viewed as an opportunity to get rich 0.99

00:08:06.840 quick. But, you know, because the sort of British class system, you know, very much had

00:08:12.420 the eldest son inheriting all the family wealth, partly to sort of keep these estates in one hand

00:08:20.500 so that they didn't get split up and parceled up over a few generations. And so younger sons,

00:08:26.800 you know had a choice of the army or the church or or marrying marrying well so they were they

00:08:34.100 were definitely an attractive marriage option but there were sort of downsides because you know

00:08:41.080 people were looked down as being nouveau riche or you know it's a new money or uh you know being in

00:08:47.100 trade as you'll sort of see in the you know the novels of Jane Austen for example so so these

00:08:52.000 people definitely were in trade although like plantation owning could then potentially be

00:08:56.700 you know come off as land owning but it's not quite the same as owning land in britain uh and

00:09:02.960 then although some of these families then go in for buying land in britain uh but then and then

00:09:08.240 there's also this um fear of potentially criminal ancestry because of the earlier history of um you

00:09:14.840 know before the british started transporting convicts to australia they would actually send

00:09:19.960 them to virginia or barbados so there's there's a bit of that in some of the the kind of um

00:09:26.460 stereotyping and also there's this fear of of um women having some african ancestry somewhere in

00:09:33.980 the family tree and and yeah and these concerns sort of come through in the literature of the

00:09:38.680 time as well well your book opens with the story of a young heiress being uh kidnapped basically

00:09:47.040 Like these women were just seen by some people as, as you said, just sort of a way to get rich quick, which puts them at some risk, I guess, of marrying some sort of cad being taken away.

00:09:59.880 Well, that was, I mean, that was, again, a broader issue as well with any heiress. And in the first half of the, up until 1754, it was easy to get a quick marriage in England as well, sort of on Fleet Street.

00:10:14.280 And that's when Lord Hardwick's Marriage Acts came in in 1754 to make it much harder to get married. So you had to read the bans three times and have witnesses. And this was partly to avoid heiresses being abducted and the family fortune with it.

00:10:29.980 And that's where Gretna Green then comes into play as being the first town you get to when you cross the Scottish border.

00:10:37.480 And Scottish law was different. And so then you come to the second half of the 18th century onwards.

00:10:42.240 If you want to steal an heiress, you have to get as far as Scotland with them before you can marry them.

00:10:48.100 You mentioned a minute ago Jane Austen about heiress.

00:10:51.820 Can you speak about the character in Sanditon, whose story is similar to some of the people you profile?

00:10:58.500 yeah so Sanderson was Jane Austen's last novel that she never finished and you know I wish she

00:11:04.360 had because it'd be so interesting to know what happened to Miss Lamb who is the only

00:11:09.880 well the only Caribbean heiress in Austen's uh work and also I think probably the only

00:11:17.020 person of color in in Austen's work so she's described as being half mulatto uh which is you

00:11:25.680 know pejorative term now and i mean quite a horrible word really because it comes from spanish 0.96

00:11:30.320 for mule essentially a mule being a cross between a i think a horse and a donkey um so so but she's

00:11:38.260 that's how austin describes her so she is very wealthy in the story and uh again you know as i

00:11:45.140 found with real women in my book even the hint of of some african ancestry was not enough to put off 0.62

00:11:51.740 the fortune hunters so uh lady denim in sanderton is very keen for miss lamb to marry i think her

00:11:59.060 nephew uh you know she's seen as a prize you know to be married off but she's also not very well 1.00

00:12:05.500 you know she's described as chilly so she's she's sort of got um a bit of a weak constitution which

00:12:11.500 is partly why she is at this um seaside resort of sanderton you know because the sea air was

00:12:16.900 considered sort of good for your health so I did also want to ask you about and you mentioned this

00:12:22.980 in the book how much interaction like the we're talking about the RSS who came to England or lived

00:12:29.460 in England how much did they even know or understand about what the plantations were like

00:12:35.100 that they that they would inherit they have any interaction with those people yeah so I think I

00:12:41.780 think some people have tried to characterize these absentee enslavers as not really knowing

00:12:47.420 what was going on especially women because they sort of assumed that they weren't involved in

00:12:51.700 the sort of day-to-day business um but that's not what i found and you know several of these women

00:12:57.740 uh were born in the caribbean and spent their early years in the caribbean and i just saw a

00:13:04.380 reference yesterday to you know children in the caribbean were sort of taught to chastise enslaved

00:13:09.020 people from birth you know sometimes they were given an enslaved person as a christening present

00:13:14.080 or you know they would be taught to to whip them if they didn't behave you know as it's like

00:13:18.900 domestics in the house you know from a really really early age so I think um especially some 0.98

00:13:23.960 of those who who don't move to Britain until they're teens you know really or one of the women

00:13:28.420 in the book she's 20 when she leaves Jamaica you know they really have pretty clear idea of what

00:13:33.780 they sort of grew up around there um and and then we have examples uh so when when they're in

00:13:41.860 britain they the estates tend to be managed by an attorney on their behalf and you have this

00:13:47.480 correspondence so you know i found letters written by the women themselves you know with very clear

00:13:55.000 instructions on what should be done on the plantation what should be planted uh in one

00:14:00.400 case uh francis dl uh in chapter two is uh sending instructions for more enslaved africans to be

00:14:08.200 purchased and even talking about what brand should be burned onto their skin

00:14:13.520 so it's i think that's an important thing to point out too that it's

00:14:19.040 it's tempting i think or it has been tempting for people to think oh they didn't really

00:14:24.240 understand what was going on they but clearly a lot of these women who like they they went up

00:14:29.600 managing these plantations, they were quite involved and they knew what was happening.

00:14:33.820 But I do want to also talk to you about another aspect of your book, which is as much as possible,

00:14:38.740 you give voice to the enslaved people themselves. What was it like piecing together

00:14:44.060 those historical records? I assume it's so challenging.

00:14:48.440 Well, I've always been committed to telling stories of people of African descent. My earlier

00:14:54.860 work black tutors pulled together very fragmentary evidence of the lives of african people living in

00:15:01.520 britain in the early modern period and i suppose i took the same approach with this book in that

00:15:07.780 you know i think you could if you ask the right questions and look in the right places you're

00:15:12.680 always going to find more information about these lives than you might immediately think possible

00:15:17.660 and i so i tried to do that here and you know a lot of these family papers the plantation

00:15:24.180 management papers you know have lists of the names uh ages of birth uh of of enslaved people

00:15:32.420 uh which doesn't give you a lot uh of meat on the bones but it you can begin to sort of discern

00:15:38.880 family relationships and things like that and then you know wills can be revealing uh there's

00:15:44.920 one woman in the book who who sort of frees uh an enslaved man called guzman in her will and

00:15:51.740 gives him some land as well so you get some sense of relationships there and then from in the 19th

00:15:59.500 century you get these registers of enslaved people the British government dictated that you had to

00:16:05.100 then write a list of everyone on the plantation every three years and that was quite helpful as

00:16:11.400 well and it has a column about they quite often record who the mother of a person is especially

00:16:16.180 if they're a child. So that's quite handy. But the most sort of satisfying approach sometimes

00:16:21.720 was actually using the enslavers' words against them. Some interesting cases where they're

00:16:25.740 actually writing pro-slavery pamphlets, but they use real life examples from people's lives. So

00:16:31.800 then you get these sort of snapshots of real people's lives on the plantations. And I mean,

00:16:37.960 I think one of the most fascinating stories is that of Betsy Newton. And we know about her

00:16:43.380 because she managed to escape enslavement in Barbados and travel to London to confront her

00:16:49.500 enslaver. And we have the notes that he took on their interview. Everything about it, the fact

00:16:54.880 that she managed to escape, the fact that she got to England. And what was the, it's all very

00:16:59.140 complicated, the status of enslavement in England. But there's something about once she showed up

00:17:04.960 there, she was able to be free because she was there. Could you explain how that worked?

00:17:09.600 there's a sort of free soil principle in england that goes back to at least the tudor period where

00:17:16.440 whether you were enslaved elsewhere in the world if you set foot on english soil

00:17:20.800 you became free and then that game gets corrupted in the 18th century because you find enslavers

00:17:27.960 bringing in people they've enslaved in in the colonies back to england and trying to continue

00:17:32.880 to claim them as property and certainly kind of treating them as property and trying to get legal

00:17:38.080 rulings. But there's never any kind of explicit statute law outlining how slavery is meant to

00:17:45.240 work within the British Isles. But then in 1772, there was a court case, the Somerset case,

00:17:53.980 in which Lord Mansfield ruled that it was illegal to forcibly transport Africans back to the

00:18:01.340 Caribbean once they had got to England. And that was sort of more widely interpreted as setting

00:18:08.460 Africans free in England, although that isn't what Lord Mudfield actually said. But it meant that,

00:18:13.980 yeah, having arrived in England, Betsy's enslavers could not force her to return to Barbados.

00:18:21.380 After Betsy comes to see her enslaver, he says, you know, he says she is free by virtue of

00:18:27.460 arriving in England but there's no way he's going to free her four children who are back in Barbados

00:18:32.560 that she also wants freed. And that was part of the reason why she went there was she was

00:18:38.320 she wanted freedom for herself as well as for her family so it's sort of heartbreaking that she's

00:18:42.380 but she stayed in England as a free person I think did you say in your book she married twice

00:18:47.900 which you can just tell by her change of surnames was that her? That's that's right yeah and she 0.72

00:18:53.100 keeps on petitioning for her children but it's just not he's not going to budge she um yeah and

00:19:00.760 she knows how they're doing because she's getting letters from relatives in Barbados which again is

00:19:05.060 interesting because people assume enslaved most enslaved people couldn't read and write but

00:19:09.640 these this family um the Hylus family are able to uh or the Newton family Hylus Newton

00:19:15.900 this family is is able to correspond across across the Atlantic. And now for a quick

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00:23:01.660 And we're back. And so another story, there's so many interesting asides and stories within

00:23:17.220 stories in your book, but I was wondering if you could share the story of one of the heiresses

00:23:20.880 who fakes her own daughter's death. So yeah, this was an eye-catching one. So this is Elizabeth

00:23:28.420 vassal who was actually that first heiress that i encountered when i was researching battle abbey

00:23:32.960 oh almost 20 years ago uh isn't that crazy and um so she uh she is very unhappily married as a

00:23:42.200 teenager to the much older sir godfrey webster and feels sort of pretty much imprisoned in in

00:23:47.700 sussex and then she finally persuades him to take her on a kind of extended grand tour travels around

00:23:53.920 the continent and then she begins to have fun and you know has at least one you know several well

00:24:01.520 several romances let's say and um but she falls wildly in love in italy with lord holland uh and

00:24:11.300 sir godfrey's given up and gone home and there's sort of a year but she stays out there and she

00:24:16.820 gets pregnant uh and and and she already has sort of um three children two sons and a daughter with

00:24:25.400 sir godfrey but she gets pregnant by lord holland and sir godfrey has already been back home for at

00:24:31.700 least a year so it's definitely not his and this means that divorce is inevitable and at the time

00:24:39.520 after if you got divorced the father automatically got custody of the children and she was fond of

00:24:46.440 her daughter harriet who actually some people say was not fathered by sir godfrey but by lord

00:24:51.100 pelham but that's another story um and so she um i think he's actually sir thomas pelham but anyway

00:24:58.420 some people say harriet was fathered actually by sir thomas pelham but it's hard to prove these

00:25:03.900 things anyway uh so she she loves harriet and she can't bear to be parted with her so she comes up

00:25:10.960 with this visionary scheme, she calls it. And she gets out her watercolour paints and paints

00:25:16.220 red spots all over Harriet's arms and legs and tells everyone she's got an infectious disease 0.96

00:25:21.300 and sends the servants away and then dresses her up as a boy and sends her back to England via 0.51

00:25:26.480 Hamburg. Meanwhile, she tells everyone Harriet's dead and gets her oblong guitar case and fills 0.63

00:25:34.720 it with stones and clothing and like a wax mask and sends it to the British consulate in Livorno 0.83

00:25:40.820 to be buried tells everyone that that's harriet later gossip said she also put a dead goat in 1.00

00:25:46.800 there for good measure uh to get the correct smell uh but but yeah so she she sort of successfully 0.92

00:25:53.700 gets away with this um for several years and later on um has to reveal it um so as not to

00:26:01.260 prejudice her second husband lord holland's um political career but it's it's quite a visionary

00:26:06.920 scheme isn't it it's the fact that it worked i think is one of the most stunning things about it

00:26:14.460 that she no one figured it out until she she had to reveal it herself i a good scheme

00:26:20.400 well i suppose child mortality was you know quite common at the time you know lots lots of children

00:26:27.120 died all the time so it perhaps wasn't quite as surprising and then you're away from home

00:26:32.660 you're traveling there's fewer people to kind of keep an eye on you it might have been harder at

00:26:38.780 home with a full staff of household servants and and the chance that that her husband might

00:26:45.640 run into harriet on the street or something so another extraordinary story i wonder if you could

00:26:53.440 tell us a little bit about francis dl who is a mixed heritage heiress who was legally declared

00:27:00.560 white which is another stunning story yeah so so she's born in Jamaica her father is a sort of

00:27:09.520 a South Sea Company merchant of Scottish descent and her mother Susanna Augier who's also an

00:27:17.240 amazing character her mother was born enslaved um probably with an African mother and she's freed

00:27:26.000 as a as a teenager partly probably because of the influence of her father's business partner

00:27:32.940 peter kayard who uh was sort of sexually abusing her from an early age i think

00:27:39.080 anyway she uh so francis um was born in kingston jamaica in 1729 and when she's about nine years

00:27:49.600 old her mother petitions for her and her half-sister to have the rights of whites and this

00:27:57.820 is this crazy piece of legislation that was passed in Jamaica actually to try and exclude people of

00:28:04.160 mixed heritage from the political and civic rights so they'd got to a point in 1733 where they were

00:28:11.140 worried that people of mixed heritage were able to sort of vote and hold property and they didn't

00:28:18.600 like that so they had to draw a line in their legislation as to who was who counted as what

00:28:24.600 they called a mulatto and who didn't and they came up with this formula where i think you had

00:28:29.900 to be four generations removed from an african ancestor and then what happened was that there

00:28:36.280 were all these relatively privileged people who didn't fit that description and they start 1.00

00:28:41.960 petitioning to be exempt from the new ruling um and they uh and that's what suzanna orge was doing 1.00

00:28:49.020 she wanted those civic rights of being able to testify in court and to hold property and she

00:28:55.320 successfully petitioned for that and then shortly afterward francis leaves leaves for london but

00:29:01.200 it's quite mad that well that that well most most racial divisions uh legally are mad but this is

00:29:07.800 one that you know people find quite surprising well and then the fact that Frances herself she

00:29:12.940 came to to the UK she she got married I think this is probably the most similar story to um

00:29:19.280 to the heiress in Sanditon perhaps um just in terms of being mixed heritage although there's

00:29:25.640 a portrait you have portraits in your book of all of these women and Frances quite light-skinned

00:29:31.020 so anything that people her mixed heritage I think would people would know about it if they

00:29:36.560 knew her family history but it's not visually apparent I wouldn't think although I was giving

00:29:42.500 a talk I did show her portrait uh in a talk in Scotland recently and uh somebody of mixed

00:29:49.100 heritage in the room said oh I can tell but no she said she thought she could tell and I'm looking

00:29:54.380 at it more closely I did think that potentially there was some texture to her hair as well

00:29:59.140 that was quite interesting uh but yeah as we as we as far as we know she had a potentially an 0.50

00:30:04.700 African grandmother but even potentially her grandmother was mixed so we don't because we

00:30:09.320 don't know the identity of her grandmother so but yes it's fascinating it's fascinating

00:30:13.540 I wanted to ask you about one more woman in your book if I may which is the the aunt of Jane Austen

00:30:21.600 that's a good story isn't it um and again I think although people have been investigating

00:30:29.420 Jane Austen's links to enslavement and you know have gone so far to say that oh well she drank

00:30:34.960 tea with Caribbean sugar in it uh so that's a link but but I think this is a much stronger one

00:30:40.000 that most people don't seem to have heard of and um so Jane Austen's mother's maiden name was Lee

00:30:45.800 her name was Cassandra Lee and she had a brother called James Lee who then took on the name

00:30:52.340 Perrett to inherit an estate from from the Perrett family and this James Lee Perrett married Jane

00:30:59.700 Chumley who was a woman from Barbados who is the subject of yeah chapter four of my book and so she

00:31:07.600 was born in Barbados and then moved to England again at quite a young age it's about six or seven

00:31:14.040 to and went to boarding school and stayed with her cousins in Lincolnshire in the in the school

00:31:20.040 holidays um and and she she's quite a character and she lives till into her 90s uh so from Jane

00:31:27.860 Austen's perspective she's this sort of stingy elderly aunt who's constantly complaining

00:31:32.540 not happy with her lot despite being sort of fabulously wealthy with a nice country house 0.99

00:31:37.740 in Berkshire and a nice townhouse in Bath a nice townhouse in Bath but she won't lend any money

00:31:44.920 she won't give any money to the Austens who sort of are rather more in need of it you know and if

00:31:50.160 only she had sponsored Jane Austen then maybe we'd have more Jane Austen novels so people people

00:31:56.620 Austen scholars know about this kind of colourful episode where she actually gets arrested for

00:32:02.620 shoplifting lace in bath uh in 1799 and um it's mad and she ends up in prison in Ilchester jail

00:32:11.880 for six probably about six months when she's uh wait awaiting trial uh but i think it i've i think

00:32:20.220 it's actually been it's a blackmail plot but that i mean that's quite a kind of colorful story but

00:32:25.660 actually her barbados backstory is even more colorful and people don't seem to know about

00:32:30.340 that uh and i found this sort of fascinating story where her her mother remarries uh to this really

00:32:36.880 unscrupulous dastardly character called thomas workman who is a piece of work and is sort of

00:32:43.580 trying to steal the chumley uh fortune for his own purposes and for his son his sons from a

00:32:50.700 former marriage uh and you know and if it wasn't for the big hurricane that hits barbados in 1784

00:32:56.560 he might well have managed it and uh but jane and her sister jane uh jane lee perrott and her sister

00:33:04.740 Catherine are both really angry that they haven't inherited more wealth from their mother when she

00:33:11.680 dies uh and and yeah they don't come across in a great light in that correspondence either

00:33:17.060 and can you just for Jane Austen fans which are the characters who you feel are probably inspired

00:33:25.240 by by this aunt well so there's always a sort of controversy between whether Austen's characters

00:33:32.120 are all from her imagination and we should do credit to her just imagining people uh but then

00:33:38.160 there's always the temptation to draw parallels with people that she she would have known um

00:33:43.040 so there are three characters that scholars have linked to to Jane Lee Perrett and one is Mrs Allen

00:33:50.860 in Northanger Abbey and interestingly Jane Austen started writing Northanger Abbey on a visit to

00:33:56.060 stay with her aunt and uncle in Bath and in the same way Catherine Moreland the heroine of North

00:34:01.860 Anger Abbey goes to Bath with this childless couple Mr and Mrs Allen um and so so so there's 0.99

00:34:09.460 a parallel there and and um Mrs Allen's also a kind of rather vain and irritating character 0.99

00:34:15.980 and again in Mansfield Park um Aunt Norris is another kind of on unattractive character and

00:34:24.740 some people say the word the name Norris might have come from Robert Norris who was a

00:34:28.760 uh horrible liverpool uh trafficker over enslaved africans who um upset thomas clarkson who jane

00:34:37.080 austen was in love with as an author thomas clarkson being a leading british abolitionist

00:34:42.140 uh anyway art norris uh yeah potentially that link to enslavement as well with but also uh she

00:34:49.860 she likes a bit of petty theft herself she's always sponging things and putting little things 1.00

00:34:54.980 in her pockets so people have seen that as the sort of reference to the to the the theft of the 1.00

00:35:00.640 lace in bath and then thirdly interestingly lady denim in sanderton again who's the sort of lady

00:35:06.740 of the manor who sees miss lamb the heiress as an attractive prospect for her nephew and 0.91

00:35:13.080 she again is this sort of elderly very wealthy very stingy uh unappealing character who has a

00:35:22.340 lot of younger relations sort of fighting over who's going to inherit and and again you know by

00:35:27.940 that by her old age you know the Austins and their cousins and we're all we're all very keen to get

00:35:32.800 a slice of the pie from her and I also found these links that those scholars haven't mentioned

00:35:38.400 because they haven't read all her letters and both both uh Jane Lee Perrett and Lady Denham keep

00:35:45.380 cows as pets for their milk and they also quite like they both give a relation a gold watch as

00:35:53.200 a sign of favor so who knows we'll see it we'll see um yeah i don't want to i don't want to emphasize

00:35:59.500 it too strongly but there do seem to be these these parallels with austin's characters to mirror

00:36:05.520 what you do towards the end of your book and your conclusion where do we see the legacy of all of

00:36:11.060 this today well um i think that um it's it's writ large i think i think that you know the racism and

00:36:20.540 racial inequality that blight our world today can be clearly linked back to to the history of

00:36:26.840 enslavement you know more more broadly obviously in the united states as well as in the caribbean

00:36:31.740 but uh obviously it was the it was the english who started enslavement in in the united states

00:36:36.920 so so that's our fault too uh but i and i actually i was i was listening to something

00:36:43.580 yesterday i was quite interested in in actually the legacy of fear in in british caribbean at

00:36:50.040 least um the white people was significantly outnumbered by the black people and there was

00:36:56.520 this constant fear of uprisings and violence and i i think you can potentially draw a thread there

00:37:02.600 to the sort of racist stereotyping of black people as violent or dangerous um i mean we had a

00:37:10.460 yeah we had a there was a horrible stabbing on a train here last week and some people immediately

00:37:18.040 jumped to the conclusion that the stat the um that the man wielding the knife must have been

00:37:24.620 um an illegal immigrant and and so i think i think there is still this fear um that could

00:37:30.900 potentially be a legacy of that but but you know and the the um financial inequality is is clear as

00:37:37.400 well and all sorts of other ways of measuring kind of um unequal outcomes uh and and in the

00:37:43.820 caribbean itself um you know once once they couldn't make money out of sugar plantations anymore

00:37:50.540 once enslavement was ended you know there was a lack of investment in those colonies and

00:37:56.240 you know the CARICOM itself the leaders of the Caribbean heads of government have come up with a

00:38:01.900 list of 10 ways to repair the damage done and they've sort of identified damage in you know

00:38:08.920 psychologically uh so you know they've the need for an apology and acknowledgement but also you

00:38:14.840 know areas of education health mental health physical health uh for example uh the Caribbean

00:38:22.040 has got the highest rates of type 2 diabetes and hypertension which is a direct link to sort of

00:38:28.920 the sugar heavy diet but also there are there are technological downsides and infrastructure i mean

00:38:36.280 there's just so many myriad legacies negative legacies of this part of our history

00:38:41.440 well and you look at in your book you mention your your research you did into your own family's

00:38:48.700 connections to do all of this um what did you find about your family and how did it connect to

00:38:55.300 the stories you tell in your book so i suppose one of the main arguments of the book is that

00:39:01.120 these connections to enslavement are just sort of everywhere in british society you know in the in

00:39:06.380 the period of enslavement you're only ever sort of two or three steps away from someone who's

00:39:10.600 profiting from from this and so inevitably you know my my family when i looked at my family tree

00:39:18.540 some members of my family also profited from enslavement and you know Kaufman is a Jewish

00:39:24.940 name and my dad's side of the family only moved to the UK in the 20th century but on my mum's side

00:39:32.660 I come from a sort of Welsh landed gentry family which can trace the family tree back pretty far

00:39:39.120 and it was on that side of the family that I found a couple of Liverpool merchants who

00:39:45.220 owned slaving ships and also a solicitor who was out in Kingston, Jamaica in the middle of the

00:39:55.500 18th century who also ended up owning part of a plantation and enslaved people and interestingly

00:40:04.680 married a woman of he was one of the people who he petitioned for these rights of whites for his

00:40:10.280 children because he'd married a woman he'd actually had several children with this woman

00:40:15.020 of mixed um descent uh in Jamaica and then actually unusually brought her back to London

00:40:21.340 and married her in London and had sort of other children and descended from one of his daughters

00:40:26.120 and then you know really weirdly then there were sort of distant links to uh actually some of the

00:40:34.000 families in the book that I wasn't aware of at all when I started the research but um then became

00:40:39.180 became apparent so sort of through the liverpool connection some of the two of the daughters of

00:40:46.180 what the heiress in chapter five sort of married into a liverpool slaving family that were then

00:40:52.320 related to our part our liverpool branch so so that was a weird one and then you know i found

00:40:58.980 that we have some portraits on the wall here um of a man who actually inherited newton plantation

00:41:06.720 in Barbados, the one that Betsy Newton ran away from in 1870. So after, and I'm not related to

00:41:13.700 him, but his wife was my great grandmother's godmother. So the paintings ended up here.

00:41:20.620 So it's all interconnected. And, you know, my family is British history and microcosm.

00:41:27.340 That's so fascinating that you described, you started researching this because of,

00:41:32.120 for all those reasons you talked about at the beginning, and then for it to wind up that it

00:41:35.600 come connects back to this portrait in your own home it's just sort of wild yeah yeah all the

00:41:43.680 connections um so can you let people know if they want to I know you're doing lots of events and

00:41:50.780 talks and things how can people keep up with what you're doing if they want to come and see you in

00:41:55.060 person if you want to find out all about my work um and latest events coming up um go to

00:42:02.140 www.mirandacalphman.com. I'm also on several social media sites as at Dr. Miranda Kaufman,

00:42:10.540 specifically Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky and LinkedIn. And I also have a new website

00:42:17.240 in its infancy, www.heiresses.co.uk, where I'm hoping to put up some of the research that didn't

00:42:25.540 make it into the book onto that broader, that broader swathe of 150 heiresses.

00:42:32.840 That's wonderful. And that's great to have that resource as well for people who want to

00:42:36.720 find their own family connections potentially to this whole topic.

00:42:41.520 Yeah. And if people are looking for their own family connections, I'd recommend the UCL,

00:42:45.840 the University College London Legacies of British Slavery database, which was

00:42:49.900 a really good source for me. And you can put any family surname in there and it will come up with

00:42:55.020 whether they got compensation for enslaved people at the end of slavery.

00:42:59.240 Oh, fascinating.

00:43:00.260 Well, thank you so much

00:43:01.260 for taking the time to talk with me today.

00:43:03.700 You're welcome.

00:43:04.340 Thanks, Anne.

00:43:04.820 It was great.

00:43:09.040 So Miranda's book,

00:43:10.440 Heiresses, Marriage, Inheritance,

00:43:12.480 and Slavery in the Caribbean

00:43:13.640 is available wherever you get your books.

00:43:15.980 There's a little link to it

00:43:17.160 in the show notes here.

00:43:18.800 If you want to use my bookshop account

00:43:20.820 to buy that,

00:43:22.520 then I get a little commission

00:43:23.620 and that is something

00:43:24.840 you might want to consider or not.

00:43:26.860 Borrow it from the library.

00:43:27.720 Just read this book.

00:43:28.380 It's such a good book. It's fantastic. And we're continuing on with our Regency era series in

00:43:33.760 honor of my book that I have coming out in February, Rebel of the Regency, The Scandalous

00:43:38.060 Saga of Carolina Brunswick, Britain's Uncrowned Queen. You can learn more about my book, which

00:43:43.360 does not involve the Caribbean, although there's lots of crossover. In Miranda's book, she talks

00:43:48.820 about at one point, there's an author called Monk Lewis, who inherits some property in the Caribbean,

00:43:54.320 and he goes there to see what it's like and he's kind of horrified by what he sees, which

00:44:00.020 understandable. Anyway, Monk Lewis was a friend of Carolina Brunswick, who's the main character

00:44:04.900 of the book that I wrote at rebeloftheregency.com. There's also links there that you can pre-order

00:44:10.780 as a book, as an ebook, as an audiobook, part of which I will be reading. It's going to be

00:44:15.320 available in North America and it will also be available in the UK and other places and I don't

00:44:21.560 have specific details about that yet but those details should be coming soon and yeah next week

00:44:27.460 you're going to be like we're in a regency era this is the new series of the show and i think

00:44:31.620 as i hope i've demonstrated so far with the episodes we've done you know this is we're

00:44:37.060 looking at this era that you might think you know and kind of you know digging into some of the more

00:44:43.420 interesting um lesser known like corners of it to see what was it really like um and there's a lot

00:44:49.940 to dive into in next week's episode i think you're gonna really enjoy i've got a very special guest

00:44:54.740 um a return guest to this podcast who i know you're all gonna be happy to hear from again

00:45:00.120 anyway um thank you so much for listening to vulgar history and until next time keep your 0.97

00:45:05.140 pants on and your tits out vulgar history is researched scripted and hosted by ann foster 0.97

00:45:12.860 editor is christina lumagi theme music is by the severin duo regency era artwork by karen 0.99

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Vulgar History - November 19, 2025

Regency Era Heiresses and the History of Enslavement

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