The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 821 passages
Cite this work
- APAHarriet Martineau. (n.d.). The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/the-hour-and-the-man-an-historical-romance
- MLAHarriet Martineau. "The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/the-hour-and-the-man-an-historical-romance.
- ChicagoHarriet Martineau. The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/the-hour-and-the-man-an-historical-romance.
What it is about
The novel Harriet Martineau wrote in 1841 about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolution, at a time when slavery was still legal across much of the world.
Context and history
Martineau was a writer and sociologist and an avowed abolitionist, which had brought her threats in the United States. To make a former black slave the tragic hero of a serious novel was, in 1841, a political decision as much as a literary one: the book asks the British reader to recognise moral greatness and a capacity to govern in a man whom his world denied both. As a historical novel it has the faults of the genre and of the period, and it idealises its protagonist; as a document of the abolitionist movement and of how fiction was used to change minds, it is of the first order. Her economic and sociological work, which is better known, is also in the corpus.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
________________________________________________________________________ The following is taken with acknowledgements from Chambers Dictionary of Biography, about the subject of this book. Pierre Dominique Toussaint l'Ouverture (1746-1803). Haitian black revolutionary leader (the surname derives from his bravery in once making a breach in the ranks of the enemy). Born of African slave parents in Haiti, he was freed in 1777. In 1791 he joined the black insurgents, and in 1797 was made commander-in-chief in the island by the French Convention. He drove out British and Spaniards, restored order and prosperity, and about 1800 began to aim at independence. Napoleon proclaimed the re-establishment of slavery, but Toussaint declined to obey. He was eventually overpowered and taken prisoner, and died in a prison in France. Harriet Martineau wrote this book in 1839, during which year she also wrote "Deerbrook", and published an analysis of her tour of America, from which she had returned in 1836. ________________________________________________________________________ THE HOUR AND THE MAN, BY HARRIET MARTINEAU. CHAPTER ONE. WAITING SUPPER. The nights of August are in Saint Domingo the hottest of the year. The winds then cease to befriend the panting inhabitants; and while the thermometer stands at 90 degrees, there is no steady breeze, as during the preceding months of summer. Light puffs of wind now and then fan the brow of the negro, and relieve for an instant the oppression of the European settler; but they are gone as soon as come, and seem only to have left the heat more intolerable than before. Of these sultry evenings, one of the sultriest was the 22nd of August, 1791. This was one of five days appointed for rejoicings in the town of Cap Francais--festivities among the French and Creole inhabitants, who were as ready to rejoice on appointed occasions as the dulness of colonial life ren