In Bad Taste: Sugar, Slavery and Wordsworth’s Racist Poems

This talk is about a teacup. Gifted to the poet William Wordsworth in 1816 and in use for several decades, it is a curiously garish object that invites us to think about taste in both literal and aesthetic terms.

Some two hundred years ago the poet and other members of his household stirred sugar produced by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean into this very cup, to sweeten tea produced under comparably brutal conditions in Asia. This innocuous household object sits at the heart of a global network of exploitative food production. 

I begin by discussing the association between sugar and slavery in the British imagination in general before examining two political sonnets by Wordsworth that engage with Black subjects. Both sonnets – one dedicated to the Haitian Revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and the other describing an unnamed Black refugee woman – were first published in 1803, but Wordsworth kept reworking them over and over again, still making revisions in the final lifetime edition of 1846. In placing Wordsworth’s increasingly distasteful revisions against the backdrop of his hardening conservatism and embrace of a pro-slavery position in the debates leading up to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, I am looking for a way of acknowledging my own anger at Wordsworth within an ‘objective’ literary historical reconstruction of the political context in which his opinions were formed. 

Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic (2023) and one of the editors on the Longman edition of The Poems of Shelley. This talk grows from her current book project, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, which is structured around a series of encounters with objects contained in the archives of the major Romantic poets, including Wordsworth’s tea cup. A work-in-progress sample from the book won the 2021 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award and a 2022 Whiting Foundation Creative Non-Fiction Grant. She has also published articles on translation, ekphrasis, creative/experimental criticism, and the racist history of hair.