Diary – 10 March 2007

William Wilberforce is about to hit cinemas as the Great White Emancipationist Hero in Amazing Grace. Wilberforce was a decent guy. We all need heroes; but let’s be clear, this is not, as it claims, ‘The True Story’. Ioan Gruffudd strides around convincing us that slaves had nothing to do with their own emancipation; nor was abolition due to radical democratic republicanism and mobilisation by ordinary people. No, it was nice conscientious white boys pushing a compromise bill through the corridors of Parliament whom we can thank for ridding the world of this abomination. Wilberforce would be appalled at being credited with virtually single-handedly bringing about abolition. Come on, Michael Apted, you’re better than this. It’s the 21st century. Where’s the blockbuster about William Cuffey, the deformed black travelling tailor who really did lead a rights-based, moral radical movement in Britain?

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Just as we’re being deluged with Austen-themed films, 2,000 readers polled for a World Book Day survey have declared Pride and Prejudice the novel they can’t live without. Austen is the only author with four books in the Top 100 list — none of them Mansfield Park. The heroine, Fanny Price, has a political and moral conscience rather than just a lace-ruffled heaving bosom and a subservient attitude to limp egoistic fops. Kingsley Amis dismissed her as ‘a monster of complacency and pride’. Funny that Mansfield Park, with its sharp critique of slavery, economic colonialism and the dismal failure to enforce the Abolition Act, has been seen as tedious and moralistic. When Fanny tries to broach the subject of slavery with her plantation-owning uncle, she is met with that famous ‘dead silence’. Silly Fanny, worrying her little head about Britain’s role in the slave trade. Back to heaving your bosom and lisping at dandies, Fanny, and don’t worry for a moment that the most relevant Austen novel to our present historical moment doesn’t get a look-in on the World Book Day list.