Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain

Ellen Craft, disguising herself as a white slave-owner to escape with her husband, William. Mary and William Allen, the first legal interracial married couple in America, fleeing the country after threats of lynching. Francis Fedric, after 50 years of brutal treatment escaping through the Underground Railroad. Sarah Remond Parker, invited to Britain to lecture on abolitionism, and then qualifying as one of the first women doctors. These courageous men and women left the United States as the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and citizenship for black people denied, finding in Britain another country mired in a colonial history. Lyn Innes explores the lives of these extraordinary speakers, writers, and activists, as they challenged reductive narratives, campaigned against slavery, and built their own lives and families, interacting with movements for Women's Suffrage and Temperance, electoral politics, and Nationalist movements. Tracing varying influences, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Innes examines British perceptions of race through how these speakers were perceived, understood, supported, received, and criticised. An insightful investigation of seven extraordinary lives, Fugitive Families is a fascinating portrait of social attitudes in the 1850-60s, a history that underpins modern British society.