The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive

For centuries, the Romantics have been examined with one dominant fact of their time thought of as backdrop: the transatlantic slave trade. In The Trembling Hand, award-winning Shelley scholar Mathelinda Nabugodi re-engages this context, and the result is like seeing restored world-renowned frescoes for the first time--layers of obfuscation cleared away. Drawing on a series of objects--William Wordsworth's library card at Cambridge, a lock of Mary Shelley's hair, Byron's boots--Nabugodi takes us on a dazzling journey back in time, one full of unexpected discoveries that bring to life their poetry and how it has lasted.

Here is a journey into the heart of empire, and into a heart of the empire's archives, led by a brilliant, skeptical, wining literary sleuth. Along the way Nagubodi reminds us that John Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Byron grew up in a world funded and framed by the transatlantic slave trade. It structured their social lives, built the buildings where they first met, buildings she revisits, underwrote their scholarships, and even sometimes, in the form of young African servant boys, provided the trembling hand which held the missives of love they passed to their lovers.

The Trembling Hand's breakthroughs could last generations, altering the way Romantic poetry is read going forward. In one of many illuminating moments, Nabugodi makes a strong case for the fact that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was inspired by the specter of slave ships returning to port, sailors emaciated, sails in tatters. In another, her reading of Frankenstein places it in conversation with another gothic fable of the time, one written by the son of a plantation owner from Jamaica.

The Trembling Hand builds this portrait intimately, luxuriously, allowing the reader into Nabugodi's own trips to various archives, describing what steps she must take to access materials, and how she feels holding them as a woman whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers. Part literary sleuth, part philosopher of the archive, she has given us a tremendous new kind of book: a first-rate linked biography, but also a groundbreaking work on the politics and history of archives, who built them, and how entwined they are with an industry which was the very antithesis of freedom.