The Slave in the Dismal Swamp, 1856

Sir John Gilbert RA (1817 - 1897)

RA Collection: Art

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This wood-engraving shows an escaped enslaved man crouching among reeds in a swampy landscape. It is an illustration for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, ‘The Slave in the Dismal Swamp’. In the poem, Longfellow describes the plight of a fugitive slave who conceals himself in a dark and dangerous swamp in a desperate attempt to avoid recapture. The poet builds sympathy for the man by contrasting his condemnation to life in captivity to the freedom of the wild animals around him.

The dark eeriness of the wood-engraving mirrors the menacing tone of the poem. The dense rushes surrounding the hunched figure in the centre convey the hopelessness of his situation without any offering of true escape from his life of misery.

Longfellow was an American poet who wrote a volume of anti-slavery poetry in 1842. This was partly inspired by meeting the writer Charles Dickens and reading his manuscript for American Notes, in which Dickens strongly criticised the continued existence of slavery in America (the slave trade had been outlawed in Britain in 1807 and slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833).

The engraving is an illustration in a published collection of poems, The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The word ‘Negro’, employed by Longfellow in the second line of the poem and reproduced here, was used historically to describe people of black African heritage. Since the 1960s however, it has fallen from usage and today can be considered highly offensive. The term is repeated here in its original historical context.