The Dying Negro
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The Dying Negro: A Poetical Epistle was a 1773 abolitionist poem published in England, by John Bicknell and Thomas Day. It has been called "the first significant piece of verse propaganda directed explicitly against the English slave systems".[1] It was quoted in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano of 1789.[2]
The first draft of this pioneering work of abolitionist literature was written by Bicknell. Published versions were edited by Day, from 1773.[1] The first edition was anonymous; in all there were six editions.[3]
The work was dedicated to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[4] A substantial introduction by Day to the second edition (1774), and reproduced in later editions, attacked West Indian slaveowners, and drew a parallel with ancient Sparta.[5][6] In the fifth edition of 1793, the names of both authors appeared.[7]
Background
The poem arose from a report in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser of 28 May 1773. It concerned a black servant of a Captain Ordington, who had intended to marry a white woman, being taken on board the Captain's vessel on the River Thames, and shooting himself.[8] The 1772 English legal decision in Somerset v Stewart had been widely interpreted as a ruling abolishing slavery in England, and the implication of what had occurred to the servant was a reaction to an illegal deportation. Day expanded Bicknell's draft, added footnote material on Africa, and played up the "nobleness" of the African depicted in the story.[9]