| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dark Victorians. By Vanessa D. Dickerson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. x, 163 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03256-1.)
At first glance, nineteenth-century African Americans' veneration of British Victorians and Britons' fascination with slavery in the United States both seem perplexing, considering that these phenomena coincided with the height of the British Empire and, therefore, with the forced labor of blacks around the globe. Nonetheless, as Vanessa D. Dickerson's Dark Victorians shows, a complex relationship developed between the two populations, conducted through transatlantic visits and the literature that grew out of them.	1
Dark Victorians joins a trend in African American literary history that takes a closer look at such real—or imagined—crossings and how they shaped culture on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Along with Audrey A. Fisch's American Slaves in Victorian England (2000) and other studies, Dickerson's book offers an important contribution to the field of American studies by reexamining literary production about slavery from a transatlantic perspective. Dickerson's work extends this trend by addressing the "intercultural relations" between black Americans and British Victorians on both shores (p. 5). The author is aware that her undertaking may strike some readers as Eurocentric in its stress on British cultural authority. She counters that charge by insisting, rightly, on the "hyperhybridized" nature of African Americans in the United States and the extraordinary influence of Victorian culture on white and black Americans before the Civil War (p. 6).	. . .

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