Open Windows: Teaching Mary Seacole

Open Windows: Teaching Mary Seacole Adam Guy (bio) I teach mary Seacole's autobiography of 1857, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, as part of a broad survey course titled Literature in English, 1830–1910. I teach this course to first-year undergraduate students in the first weeks of their English degrees at the University of Oxford. Since the majority of undergraduate education in Oxford takes place within its colleges rather than its faculties and departments, group sizes are small—roughly between three and twelve—and I usually teach between one and three of these groups each year. As a first-year teaching text, Wonderful Adventures is, among other things, a clear and engaging entry-point into talking about nineteenth-century literature and its entanglements with empire. As part of these discussions, Seacole's narration of her travels across the Americas to Britain enables me to introduce my students to the notion of the Black Atlantic. The text also provides an immediate challenge to students' notions of both what literature is and what autobiography is. Undergraduate readers coming to nineteenth-century literature tend to expect prose literature to be represented by the novel and to see autobiography as a simple transparent window on an individual's experience. Seacole's text helps us nuance both of these ideas, offering an engaging example of the fact that life writing was a distinct part of the nineteenth-century literary field and of the notion that autobiography can do more than simply relate a given personal truth. I begin my seminars on Seacole as she begins her text, with a discussion of her identity. As well as being the author of the widely selling Wonderful Adventures, Seacole—a free-born Jamaican woman—was a nurse, a hotelier, a businesswoman, and a traveller: she was born in Kingston in 1805 and died in London in 1881. All of these identities are in play as she narrates her personal history. The autobiography opens with Seacole's account of her "birth and patronage": "I was born in the town of Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, some time in the present century. As a female, and a widow, I may be well excused giving the precise date of this important event." She [End Page 33] goes on to add that she is "a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins" (11). As a teaching text, this opening works brilliantly as a general way of discussing the complex and multiple forms that identities can take; more specifically, it is as good an example as any of the identity discourses and categorizations available to writing subjects in the middle of the nineteenth century. I have long seen the latter notion to be a particularly important one to explore at the beginning of an English degree, a reminder for students that many aspects of identity and experience are historically circumscribed. Seacole's text can exemplify a nuanced form of historicism that breaks with students' preconceptions about the relationship between literature and history, a relationship too often taught at school level as a matter of finding one-to-one correspondences between literary materials and historical events. In this respect, Seacole's Wonderful Adventures becomes a paradigm for my students of how they might relate to and explore the literature of the past tout court. THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURES AS A PANDEMIC / EPIDEMIC TEXT At the onset of the 2020–21 academic year, in line with UK government policy, my institution returned to face-to-face teaching; the previous academic year had ended three-and-a-half months earlier amid a national COVID-19 lockdown during which all university business went online. The new academic year's return to the embodied world was both cautious and cavalier: cautious because of the heavy restrictions put on in-person interactions; cavalier because, with still so much to be learned about the virus and vaccines yet to be rolled out, student and staff lives were being put at risk. I taught two seminar groups that term. One seminar met in a dark-wallpapered nineteenth-century room from which the oak table had been removed. All participants sat on chairs spread out...

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