"Writing the Unspeakable: Labouring-Class Atlantic Crossings"

In the opening pages of Thomas Clarkson’s _History of Abolition_, published in the wake of the 1807 Bill, a well-known and most revealing passage states the unspeakability of the Middle Passage experience, which apparently escapes both description and re-enacting on the reader’s part through some kind of imaginative process. From a different angle, transatlantic slavery, the forced migration of millions of human beings, and their significance in the making of the modern world were long subject to historical erasure, as was, for that matter, the writing experience of labouring-class writers – including those who chose to engage in the slave trade, slavery and abolition discourses. This paper investigates how «truth claims» (Baucom 2005) find their way across the silences of history on these foundational processes in the making of the modern world in the testimonies of Liverpool-based labouring class writers Edward Rushton and James Field Stanfield, whose declarations of reliability as eye-witnesses feature in their prefatory material or elsewhere in their texts.