Black Victorians: Hidden In History by Keshia N. Abraham

'Meatily researched and illuminating... [brings] to swaggering life a group of Britons who have spent too long in the shadows'
SUSIE GOLDSBROUGH, The Times

'Black Victorians shows us, in vivid detail, how Black people didn't just take part in the Victorian era, they shaped it'
DAVID LAMMY MP, author of Tribes

'Fascinating, thorough, well-researched and extremely readable, Black Victorians provides invaluable insight into a history of Victorian Britain that is not often told'
HAFSA ZAYYAN, author of We Are All Birds of Uganda

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A dazzling landmark history exploring and celebrating the lives of Black Victorians

Beyond the narrow, white, patrician vision of Victorian Britain traditionally advanced in our textbooks, there always existed another, more diverse Britain, populated by people of colour marking achievements both ordinary and extraordinary.

In this deeply researched and dynamic history, Woolf and Abraham reach into the archives to recentre our attention on marginalised Black Victorians, from leading medic George Rice to political agitator William Cuffay to abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond; from pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton to renowned composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While acknowledging the paradoxes of Victorian views of race, Black Victorians demonstrates, with storytelling verve and a liberatory impulse, how Black people were visible, present and influential – not temporary presences but established and firmly rooted in British life.

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More praise for Black Victorians

'This book will generate discussion and change mindsets. It is brilliant'
DR MAGGIE SEMPLE OBE, Chief Executive of The Experience Corps

'Richly textured – an insightful work of scholarship’
RON RAMDIN, author of The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

'Engaging, informative and accessible, Black Victorians shines a light on a little-known aspect of British history'
STEPHEN BOURNE, author of Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great War

'Revelatory… This book restores colour to our vision of Victorian Britain'
SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB, Professor Emerita at Roehampton University and author of What is History, Now?

'An important contribution to the history of Africans in Britain… Abraham and Woolf are truly to be applauded’
ONYEKA NUBIA, author and Assistant Professor of History, Nottingham University

'Read this book and learn; it’s time to rewrite the narrative and redress the balance of the Black British presence in our histories… Extremely powerful’
DUWAINE BROWN and PAULINE FOSTER, IBH365 [Islington Black History]/Islington Black History Working Group

’An indispensable introduction to the subject told through the lives of some of the most eminent personalities of the era’
PROFESSOR HAKIM ADI, Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora, University of Chichester

’A triumph – both of collaborative writing and, more importantly, of Black agency’
OSKAR JENSEN, author of Vagabonds

• British History
• Victorian History

ENG- English

• Paperback