As previously announced here, Honno are gearing up for the publication of their next Welsh Women’s Classics volume in March 2025. Behind the scenes, work has progressed so far that I’ve just finished writing the introducion. I discuss the life of author Louisa Matilda Spooner, her overall work before diving into some interesting details of the present volume, Country Landlords. The below is an extract from this introduction about the role of the Black servant, Yarico, and her literary and real-life origins. There are not many Black characters knocking about Welsh literature during the Victorian period, so it was high time to shine the light on one of them.
Entanglements of Empire
With its setting in a remote coastal village, Country Landlords may at first sight appear as a regional novel set at the geographical and economic fringes. However, in light of William Madocks’s real transformatory projects, Spooner shows how the perpetuated marginalisation of rural Wales is rooted in a London-centric mindset. Instead, even the supposed provincial hinterland of Angharad is thoroughly connected and tied up with Europe and the British empire by way of trade routes, the movement of ideas (as reflected in the liberal use of quotes from German literature) and the global migration of people.
Aside from the geographical sprawl of the narrative to Germany, Italy and Australia, the black servant Yarico represents the most obvious example of Welsh entanglement in the British Empire. The development of her backstory does not reach any further than her involvement as Gertrude’s nurse and subsequent maid, and her storied existence is entirely defined through her relation to the white men and women around her. Within the historical time frame of the novel, Yarico first appears in Australia in the late 1820s as Gertrude’s nurse following the death of the infant girl’s parents. The novel never illuminates whether Yarico was born and raised there or whether she travelled there, nor under what circumstances. Equally, her age remains a complete mystery. Considering Spooner’s predilection for quoting far and wide from other literary sources, the time-frame of the novel and Lady Strangford’s insistence on calling her a ‘slave’, it is, however, not unlikely that Spooner intended her origin to be understood as that of a formerly enslaved person from the West Indies.
While the name Yarico may no longer hold currency for present-day readers, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences it was thoroughly embedded in popular culture and abolitionist literature. The name originated in a 1673 account of Barbados written by Richard Ligon, a failed sugar plantation owner from England. In this account he relates the supposed true story of an indigenous woman named Yarico, who fell in love with a shipwrecked and injured English trader, Inkle. She protected him from discovery and subsequent death at the hands of her people on an undisclosed island in the Caribbean. Following his recovery, Yarico left the island with Inkle who, at the first possible opportunity, sold her into chattel slavery, even raising the price he demanded when Yarico told him she was pregnant with his child. In his Barbadian narrative, Ligon makes out that Yarico was still enslaved when she provided him with medical relief. This short account received little attention until it was picked up and retold half a century later in Richard Steel’s short-lived magazine The Spectator in 1711. From the wider circulation of this magazine, the narrative was soon adapted and fleshed out to form the popular comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787), with a libretto by George Colman jr and musical score by Samuel Arnold. As in the Ligon version, Yarico is a native American. It was around this time of the opera’s rising popularity that the tale was adapted to several poetic renderings in which Yarico was described both as Indian and Black and without a determinable homeland, placing her fate in proximity to the abolitionist movement.
Just like Spooner uses quotes from and references to German literature to comment on the inner lives of her protagonists, her Yarico reflects the popularity and adaptability of the original story in the creation of Country Landlords’ Black, Patois-speaking nurse without discernible origins. Unlike the mistreated native American woman, this reincarnation is given agency and determinacy even in her loyalty towards her employers:
Not able to restrain her irritability any longer, [Lady Strangford] seized Gertrude by the arm and shook her violently. No sooner did Yarico see the act, than she sprang upon her feet like a tiger and held her ladyship fast with both hands.
Country Landlords
Undeniably, Yarico’s portrayal and speech carries all the stereotyped hallmarks of a Black character written by a white author. Her dialogue is marked by stereotyped speech patterns; she only ever speaks about herself in the third person, is superstitious and almost all her physical traits and movements are exaggerated, bordering on caricature. At the same time, Spooner gives Yarico a fierce sense of justice, loyalty and initiative to act on behalf of her employers when they fail to stand up for themselves that none of the other servants in the novel possess. While Country Landlords never states outright that Yarico was ever enslaved, her formerly well-known literary namesake’s fate suggests as much. On the one hand, the readers are presented with an extensive explanation about Captain Lewis’s youth and how he came to be Gertrude’s foster father in Australia, but on the other, no light is shed on his relation to Yarico other than that she was in his service and moved with them to rural Wales.
Source: Wikipedia.
At first glance, the suggestion of a Black servant even in a fictionalised version of Porthmadog this early in the nineteenth century might seem outlandish. However, the novel is set in the same district where less than a century earlier, the Black man who eventually became known as John Ystumllyn lived and died. Taken in his childhood possibly from the West Indies and enslaved to service in the Wynn family of Ystumllyn, he worked for the family as their gardener until 1768, when he eloped to get married to his fellow-servant, Margaret Gruffydd. As a result, both of them lost their place with the Wynns, but John regained it several years later because the family valued the quality of his work. A seven times father, John died in 1786 and was buried at Ynyscynhaearn, the same graveyard where Spooner’s parents and then later she herself were interred. It took another century before his biography was eventually written and published by Robert Isaac Jones in 1888, largely based on retained communal memory. As Country Landlords predates this biography by nearly three decades, it is therefore extremely likely that Spooner as a native to the same district had some knowledge of John which, in turn, may then have influenced her creation of Yarico, the Black servant on a rural Welsh estate.
Sources
J. Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (2007; Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010)
P. Hulme, “English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yariko Reader.” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Nov., 2001), pp. 874-876.
F. M. Jones, ‘YSTUMLLYN, JOHN (d. 1786), gardener and land steward’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography (2021).
R. Ligon, A true & exact history of the island of Barbadoes: illustrated with a map of the island, as also the principal trees and plants there, set forth in their due proportions and shapes, drawn out by their several and respective scales […] (London, 1657)
