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Intolerable Anonymity: Robert Wedderburn and the Discourse of Ultra-Radicalism

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835/6), the son of a Jamaican slave named Rosanna and her owner, James Wedderburn, was a journeyman tailor, a seaman, an abolitionist activist, an ultra-radical revolutionary, a preacher, possibly a pornographer and keeper of a brothel; he was also, in some sense, an author. The surviving body of Wedderburn’s work principally consists of an early spiritual autobiography, Truth Self-Supported, an autobiographical denunciation of his father, The Horrors of Slavery, and a six-issue periodical addressed to the slaves of Jamaica, The Axe Laid to the Root, along with some incidental publications including his defense at trial for “seditious blasphemy” and a few chapel hand-bills. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to what the “authorship” of Wedderburn actually means. He preferred a spoken medium, was questionably literate, possibly highly edited, and appropriated other author’s materials freely even as his own name was used as a pseudonym for another writer’s works. In this essay I propose to show that the difficulties in defining Wedderburn’s authorship, rather than serving to obscure his voice, in fact serve to highlight the unorthodox nature of the author-function that became attached to his name. Wedderburn’s author-function serves to define a body of work while simultaneously resisting the ideological assumptions underlying the notion of single proprietary authorship; rather, it serves to express the communal voice of a class and an ideology. Wedderburn’s participation in that communal expression of working-class radicalism appears particularly focused through the milieu of the Spencean movement. A diminutive Newcastle schoolmaster who experimented with the creation of a phonetic alphabet, Thomas Spence seems a strange figure for the establishment of a revolutionary underground movement; E.P. Thompson noted in 1963 that it had been thus far easy for critics to dismiss Spence as “little more than a crank” (161). Yet Spence’s influence on the London working-class underground was significant, starting with his Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2015 Vol. 37, No. 1, 61–77, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2014.978493