Literary Condemnation of the Slave Trade and Wealth as the Cause of Corruption Represented in the Light of English Literature

Abstract

This article has illustrated how, within the framework of English literature, the slave trade and money are both literarily condemned as the root causes of corruption. When the slave trade was prohibited in the British Empire in 1807, the idea of equating labourers with slaves was highly controversial. That had happened very swiftly after a campaign that had only really begun 20 years before. Both slavery and the trade in Africans have already been condemned on occasion and in literature. The social objective of imitating the great landed nobility was examined and criticised by Adam Smith. The literature of the eighteenth century was also afflicted by the contradiction between the social and moral hierarchy. It is significantly more focused on the landed classes than the corporate sector, even though it is sometimes considered a bourgeois art form. Contrary to popular belief, writers of the late eighteenth century did not promote bourgeois principles in opposition to those of the aristocracy. Conversely, in the last decades of the century, they favoured a rural way of life and resisted urbanisation. They tended to side with the underclass against their new rulers, the industrial bourgeoisie, in the class struggle that industrialization sparked.