The Slave singing at Midnight, 1856

Sir John Gilbert RA (1817 - 1897)

RA Collection: Art

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This wood-engraving showing a desperate enslaved man is an illustration for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘The Slave Singing at Midnight’. In the poem, Longfellow describes one night hearing an enslaved man singing the Psalm of David, a heart-breaking rendition drifting across the darkness from an unknown location. The poet relates how he was deeply moved by the anguish in the man’s voice, and Longfellow implies that although the act of singing gives some solace and calm to the enslaved man, the misery of captivity still lingers as an ever-present reality for him.

This illustration conveys the man’s desperation, curled on his knees with his eyes raised in an appeal for some external salvation. The darkness and poverty of his situation reinforce his dismal circumstances, his isolation from society, and hopelessness.

Longfellow was an American poet who wrote a volume of anti-slavery poetry in 1842, partly inspired by meeting the writer Charles Dickens and reading the manuscript for his 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.