Our vision of Victorian Britain tends to be monolithic - white, imperialist, prurient, patrician. Delve into the archives, and another history emerges, with figures such as leading medic George Rice, protestor William Cuffay, abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond, pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton and composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor. This book shows how Black lives were visible, present and influential – not temporary presences, but established and rooted - and how the Victorian view of race was paradoxical and ambivalent.
