The trembling hand

The trembling hand Reflections of a Black woman in the romantic archive

Mathelinda Nabugodi

Book - 2025

"A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets-with urgent lessons for today. A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Whiting Award-winning scholar and literary sleuth Mathelinda Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, ...leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own. "Freedom, liberty, autonomy are the period's favorite words," Nabugodi writes. Romantic poets sought truth in the depth of their souls and in the mind's unbounded regions. Ideals of free speech and human rights were being forged. And yet the period was defined by a relentless commitment to the displacement and stolen labor of millions. Romanticism, she argues, can no longer be discussed without the racial violence with which it was complicit. Still, rather than using this idea to rehash Black pain and subjugation, she mines the archives for instances of resistance, beauty, and joy. Nabugodi moves effortlessly between the past and present. She takes us into the physical archives, and, with startling clarity, unpacks her relationships with them: what they are and should be; who built them; how they are entwined with an industry that was the antithesis of freedom; and how she feels holding the materials needed to write this book, as a someone whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers. The Trembling Hand presents a dazzling new way of reading the past. This transfixing, evocative book reframes not only the lives of the legendary Romantics, but also their poetry and the very era in which they lived. It is a reckoning with art, archives, and academia bound to echo through the conversation for a long time to come."--

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Subjects
English literature > 19th century > History and criticism.
Romanticism > United States.
American literature > 19th century > History and criticism.
Littérature américaine > 19e siècle > Histoire et critique.
Romantisme > États-Unis.
Littérature anglaise > 19e siècle > Histoire et critique.
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Mathelinda Nabugodi (author)
Edition
First hardcover edition
Item Description
"A Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
xiii, 417 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 387-417).
ISBN
9780593536469
Contents unavailable.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

In search of lost Black lives. Literary scholar Nabugodi melds memoir and deep archival research to investigate six prominent writers--William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron--with the goal of tracing the Romantics' "racial imaginary": that is, "how the existence of racial slavery infested their creative imaginations." As a biracial Black woman, she brings an acute sensitivity to her search, of texts and artifacts, for "undead legacies of slavery." At St. John's College, Cambridge, she visits the Slavery and Abolition Collection, which houses documents representing debates, pro and con, about enslavement and whose holdings include Wordsworth's favorite teacup. Like other Britons of his time, she observes, Wordsworth benefited from slave labor each time he mindlessly stirred sugar into his tea. Letters from plantation managers to British owners, conveying slaves' valuations, horrify her; she is buoyed by reports of resistance and escape by those slaves whom owners damned as "distempered." Among many disquieting discoveries, she finds that Coleridge, once an ardent abolitionist, became a white supremacist after encountering precepts of scientific racism, which placed the so-called Caucasian race at the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy and Blacks at the bottom. Both Keats' death mask and his poetic allusions point to a reverence for classical Greek--and white--aesthetics. Byron's orthopedic boots, which he wore to compensate for a physical impairment, lead Nabugodi to consider a link between disability and Blackness. Byron, like Black people, was made to feel inferior--even cursed--by others' attitudes about his physical difference. "Romantic-era ideals about beauty and grandeur," she writes, "are impossible to disentangle from the period's white supremacist worldview." Each of the figures she investigates, she discovers to her dismay, sorrow, and anger, was intricately embedded in the slave economy. An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics--and race. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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