No “rare phenomenon”: Francis Williams, Edward Long, and the art of Latin verse composition
Professor John T. Gilmore, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick
Possibly the earliest Black writer known in the British empire, the Jamaican Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762) attracted considerable attention in his lifetime and afterwards, even though only a single surviving poem can be ascribed to him. The fact that he was a Black man who wrote verse in Latin was treated as an important piece of evidence by both sides in arguments about racialised hierarchies and the legitimacy of colonial slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in the later eighteenth century.
In a pioneering article on Francis Williams published in 1970, the Jamaican classicist Locksley Lindo lamented that “Williams’ ode, interesting as it is, suffers from its isolation, and can be placed only with the greatest difficulty in the history of Caribbean literature.” In his notorious attack on Williams, Edward Long, the white racist historian of Jamaica, suggested that the poem could be admired only as a “rare phenomenon”, implying a negative judgement similar to Samuel Johnson’s comment on a woman preaching, that “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”. The “isolation”, or lack of awareness of any context for Williams’s one surviving poem, has often led to the assumption that there is something strange about him choosing to write verse in Latin.
This paper seeks to demonstrate that Williams was working within a literary culture which placed a high value on the consumption and production of Latin verse, and which spanned the Atlantic, including Britain’s Caribbean colonies. The ability to compose verse in Latin was widely regarded as a characteristic of the educated gentleman, and Williams’s desire to be accepted as such is a sufficient explanation for the existence of his poem. Detailed analysis of Long’s response reveals that he was fully aware of this, and shows both the limitations of his own learning and the desperation of his attempts to belittle Williams’s achievements.