BOOK REVIEW: edited by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina.<b>BLACK VICTORIANS, BLACK VICTORIANA</b>. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Reviewed by: Black Victorians, Black Victoriana Douglas M. Haynes (bio) Black Victorians, Black Victoriana, edited by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina; pp. vii + 222. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003, $62.00, $24.00 paper, £47.50, £18.50 paper. This collection, lucidly introduced by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, brings together essays that explore the black presence in Victorian society. In three thematic sections, the contributors render black peoples through a range of analytical frameworks that document their social experiences and illuminate their political interventions in a context in which their capacities were defined by whites, whether in Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, or the United States. The geographical range of these essays reminds us that the African diasporas cannot adequately be contained or represented through conceptually narrow definitions of race or the nation-state. Britain was part of a much larger landscape, and black people—whether as objects or subjects—were at the center of the Atlantic world, not the margins. In the first section, Joan Anim-Addo, John Turner, and Jeffrey Green describe the social history of black people through the lives of Sally Forbes, William Darby, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, respectively. Forbes was gifted to Queen Victoria as a tribute from King Gezo of Dahomey. Circus performer Darby was born in Norwich, and classical music composer Coleridge-Taylor in London. Class, family, and community define the arc of these lives; what is striking is the authors' indifference to exploring the meaning of racialized identities. The blackness of black Victorians is taken for granted as is the whiteness of the people that surrounded them. When assessing the attitudes of white people, Jim Crow society serves as the baseline for describing the nature of race relations in Britain. The conclusion that Britain was a more benign place for blacks than the United States does little to advance the historical understanding of the specificity of racialized people in Britain. While the first section focuses on the absorption of black people within society, the second situates them—and Britain itself—in a transatlantic framework, with more [End Page 696] productive results. The ocean that linked people, cultures, and goods within and without the empire created sites of intersection whereby racialized people insisted on their right to exist as human subjects and full citizens. This is illustrated by Lizabeth Paravisini- Gebert in Mary Seacole's memoir The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Seacole placed herself at the center of the nation during the Crimean War. Using skills learned in Jamaica, the self-taught nurse and innkeeper ministered to soldiers in the field in spite of the refusal of Florence Nightengale to permit her to serve in the English nursing delegation. Through the process of narrating the gratitude of government and the monarchy alike, Seacole fashioned herself as a Crimean heroine or a "black Nightengale." Through this persona Seacole consolidated her personal and geographical transits across time and space while grounding herself within the national imaginary. Where the circulation of black people between the Caribbean and Britain constituted one leg of the Atlantic world, the United States and Africa formed the second and third. Due to the centrality of black slavery and its consequences in the making of the Atlantic world, race remained a foundational fault line through which the meaning of freedom and equality was contested and reconstituted. Nicole King discusses the lecture tours of Ida B. Wells in Britain in 1893 and 1895. Wells, who led the campaign against lynching black people, harnessed Britain's moral authority as the first nation to abolish slavery to spur change in the United States. She refuted racist representations of black lynching victims as "culturally abject monstrosities" by exposing the willful failure of the United States to live up to civilized norms (95). While Wells astutely deployed the disapproval of the British people and press to "police white Americans" (98), it is noteworthy that Britain justified expanding its rule in sub-Saharan Africa as a moral imperative as well—a trade-off overlooked by King. As the center of the Empire, London was the destination of visits by envoys on behalf of indigenous rulers under formal or informal British control. Between 1882 and...

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