Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Black Georgians

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Who were Ignatius Sancho, Dido Elizabeth Belle and Francis Barber?Between 10,000 and 30,000 black people lived in Britain during the Georgian period. Despite this, some people have remained convinced that black British history doesn't start until after the Second World War.In this episode, Kate speaks to Gretchen Gerzina about some of the individuals who lived in Georgian Britain, their lives and their livelihoods.*WARNING there are naughty words and discussions of slavery and racism in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Edited by Sophie Gee and Thomas Ntinas.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code BETWIXTTHESHEETS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister. Jumping in, as usual, with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, this is an adult podcast of an adult nature, and we will be covering adult subjects. Today we're actually talking about black people in Georgian England.

It's fascinating. But inevitably, we are going to be straying into conversations around enslaved people and cruelty and racism, and I will definitely be swearing. so that just might not be something that you want to listen to right now, in which case, just put a bookmark in this one, and I'll see you next time. In the 1990s, Gretchen Gazzina went into a bookshop in London to find a specific book about the history of black people in England.

And she was informed by a member of staff that not only did they not have that book there, but, and I'm quoting here, there were no black people in England before 1945. Wow. This is so far from the truth and today betwixt the sheets we are going to find out about black people, black culture and black lives in Georgian England. What do you look for a man? Oh money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what's beautiful time. Hello and welcome back to the Twix the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kay Lister. Earlier this month, I spoke to Keisha Abraham's and John Wolfe about how wrong the assumption that Victorian Britain was just white. It was just a complete whitewash. It's so wrong. It was very racially diverse. And if this is the case, what about the people that came before the Victorians? What about Georgian Britain? How racially diverse were? with aid. Well, today I'm joined by the historian Gretchen Gazzina to talk about this overlooked

period in black British history. I'm ready if you are. Let's go. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, Gretchen Gazzina. How are you? Well, I'm a little time to decide what the weather is in two continents or two countries because I'm heading to London shortly and I suspect it's as chilly there as it is here in New England. We're heading that way, you know, we're into kind of drizzle season. I mean, it drizzles all year round, but we're now cruising in autumn and it's not kind of beautiful. Well, it is beautiful in its own way, but it doesn't do that kind of Massachusetts fall, is it's kind of foggy and drizzle. That's what we do particularly well. Yeah, well, I lived in England for a couple of years, so I'm well acquainted with the weather. Yes, and you must be able to

talk about the weather at great length as well. That will get you by in Britain for, you'd almost pass a natural Britain. Especially if it snows. If it snows or if it's sunny or if it's anything out of just kind of grey drizzly, we will obsess about it past all reasonable measure. Like if it snows, everybody

goes completely bonkers. It was quite sunny here over the summer and everyone went completely balmy as well. But layers, that's what you need. But tomorrow is the re-release of your book. Yeah, I'm so excited.

about it. And all of this was rather unexpected because the book was published originally in 1995. And they told me later some writers and my agent in London and some others that really needed to be brought back into print. They said that it was published too soon. And that now when everybody is sort of attuned to ideas about black British history and race, it was its time. So I'm thrilled. although I spent the entire summer updating and revising it to make it more current and to reflect new research that had been done. It's an incredible book. And you know, at the moment, you can't get it for love and money

because obviously all the old editions have been kind of squirled away somewhere and we're waiting for the new edition to drop tomorrow. Can't get it anywhere. I've tried. I've looked. But it's incredible. So it was published in the 90s. It has now been updated and re-released as Black England,

a forgotten Georgian history. I've got so many questions about this. It's such important and amazing work. And I suppose my first question is, why Georgian Britain? What made you want to set about recovering black history in Georgian England? Well, it's a strange roundabout thing. I was writing a book about black people represented in 18th century British novels. And I had done a great deal of research about it.

And I was very excited about the fact that this wonderful book that we all call it, the Bible of Black British history called Staying Power by Peter Fryer had just been released in paperback so I could manage to carry it. The big one, you know, the first one was very heavy. So I went into an now unnamed bookshop in London, couldn't find it anywhere, and finally went up to the woman at the counter and I said, well, I'm looking for this book. It's just come out in paperback. And rather than helping me find where it might be located, she just looked at me and said, madam there were no black people in england before 1945 and i i couldn't believe it so i looked at her

and rather than say well anyway let's see if we can find it i just said well you're wrong and she said well there are no numbers so it was so rude and we had a bit of an argument and i left without the book and then of course found it in another store so it was fine, but she was very invested on the fact that this book could not have been written because there wasn't anybody there. And he started, Peter Fryer, may he rest in peace, he started with the Romans, as many do now, and the black presence. So I went home, put aside this book I was writing on fiction in the period, and decided I would just write about this period itself, and that's what I did. Did you send a copy to the bookstore with the bitch?

woman, just, you know, make sure that she's stuck in it. You know, it's been quoted far and wide. So she must know who she is. Or she doesn't remember it at all. But it didn't matter because it led to a book. It's such a weird thing to say. Like that emphatically, that's such a strange, I mean, maybe it's not that people have got these kind of daft ideas,

but I suppose it speaks to something wider, doesn't it? Is this idea that there wasn't a black presence or a history before the wind generation. That's exactly right. And people still do hear that. They do say it still. I worry that people who, when they see reviews, will say, oh, well, you know, there were only a couple of people here and there and over a few years, and therefore it doesn't really count. It doesn't matter. But, you know, people are very invested, I think, in thinking that there was not this population. Why do you think that that is? I mean, it's a huge question. I'm sure it's not going to have one with a very a happy answer. But why is that, do you think, that we are so invested in this idea that

black presence in Britain is new or within the last century? Well, I think it's a few things. One is that people have become very invested in Englishness and what that might mean. And even though we know that Englishness doesn't really exist in that way, because it's a mix of all sorts of people who came from all over from Northern Europe, from, you know, all sorts of populations and communities. But I think people are very invested in just thinking, there's an idea of Englishness, and it's, what is it, Union Jackson pubs and all of that,

and therefore there couldn't have been anyone else here who counted. But in fact, they weren't there, and we've got lots of books since mine was originally published to prove it. I mean, Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufman's book. Then there was David Olashogh's book, and Hakeem Adi has just published a new one. That is a kind of updating of Peter Fryer's book. It's not the same book, but he goes through the history.

And there's lots of evidence, but people just don't want to hear it. And they didn't look for it. No. Now that it's kind of being uncovered by amazing historians such as yourself back in the 90s, and as you said, other people now, is it almost embarrassing how much of this history there is. It hasn't been spoken about. Well, why do you say embarrassing? Because I suppose it's just, I say embarrassing because as a white historian, it's just,

When people point it out, when people start looking at it and the evidence, it's so overwhelming. There's so much history. It's so rich. And I feel a sort of, I suppose, a level of responsibility of like, why didn't I know that? I should have known that. I suppose I feel embarrassed for my own ignorance around it. Oh, well, you know, that's interesting that you say that. Recently, I had Patterson Joseph, the actor who's done a play on Ignatius Sancho and now is just publishing a novel.

He came into the class and someone asked him, why is it that people don't know this? And he said, you know, I don't fault those people who don't know. He said, because they weren't taught it either. They are just reflecting what they learned as students or readers many years ago. Therefore, if they weren't taught it, they didn't think it existed. So he said, I don't blame them, but it's time to learn about it now. So I thought that was very generous because our first impulses,

it's what we really need to know about this. this is part of the national history. But I think there is something almost a bit threatening, I think, about changing the way we think of our histories. It's happening in America a lot, and it's happening in the UK, I think, although a lot of people are now reclaiming this history and wanting to learn more about it,

which I think is a wonderful thing. I think it's amazing. And you can see that people do feel, some people do feel quite threatened by this idea, of multiracial history, that it wasn't just this mono whitewash throughout history. And it's just curious as to why that is. I mean, it's racism, isn't it? But it's like, what is that rooted in?

Is it an idea of Britishness? Why would it be a threat? Why wouldn't it be something utterly amazing and fabulous? So let's talk a bit about the Georgian period itself in Britain. So this is before slavery was abolished. Well, yes, but we just have to give a little caveat to that, because slavery, they claimed it didn't exist in the British Isles, and especially in Britain and particularly in England,

although there have been a number of books that have shown slave sales, all sorts of things. A new book came out just about Scotland and runaway enslaved people in Scotland in that period. Wow. So there was a lot of information out there now. So slavery was abolished, first the slave trade and then slavery, but only in the kind of colonies in the West Indies. So there wasn't actually an official end to slavery in England.

A lot of people took a court case to assume that that meant it abolished slavery. But in fact, the judge, the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, he was very careful to frame that so that people would not think slavery had been abolished. And he had a black great niece living in his house. Oh, I didn't know that. I mean, even if Britain liked to say at the time that they had abolished or hadn't abolished or whatever it is, the bond line is that they benefited greatly from slavery. Absolutely. And people are really just now doing the accounting.

So a book came out several years ago from UCL after a big research project, where they accounted for all the money and how it was spent because the slave owners, the plantation owners, were compensated for the loss of their enslaved people. But the enslaved people got no money. So that money went to all these wealthy people, and they were the foundations of all sorts of things. Prominent banks, businesses that still exist, vast swathes of architecture in London and elsewhere,

all came from this compensation money, which would have been trying to do the accounting now, billions of pounds, I think, in today's money. So the things that we think of as quintessentially British and English in particular were, in fact, because they were compensated for the work and the lives of these people for the loss of their money that they were gaining from plantations. So it's not unknown, but I think people don't realize the extent to which it had funded so much of what we see now. And that's why we see all these things in Liverpool and Bristol now and people say, well, hang on. Yeah. How do you go about researching a history like this? Because the records, they must be quite difficult to work with. Do you have any sort of sense of how many black people were in Britain, in England or London in the 18th century?

It was probably the largest population of black people that we didn't see until after the wind rush. But keep in mind that the population itself of everybody was much smaller at that time, of course. I always want to give a shout out to all the people who did research before I did because I had to call upon them and then just go further with it. So I'm always very careful to always give credit where it's due. But people have said between 10 and 30,000 people mainly in London, but not always. Now, whether that number is correct, people are now saying maybe it was really closer to 15 to 17, but in a much smaller population. And then there were people who weren't just in the big port cities because you would expect to see lots of black people in Liverpool or Bristol and London. But they were also people, you know, working quietly in country houses, maybe the only person for miles around who was all alone in there.

So there are people who are trying to track down who some of those people were now. And as you probably know, the National Trust got into a bit of difficulty with the public because, they wanted to trace how colonialism affected the products in the houses, the people who lived there, the money that made those houses possible. And there was a huge backlash. We don't have to go into that now, but I think that's part of that resistance. This is one of the most frustrating things about historical research, isn't it? It's just that you know that they're there, but it's just you have to find the records to see the people. And you're so close. I suppose what I'm trying to get a hold of is what would life have been like for a black person or a person of color in 18th century Britain? What have you found? What's your

research shown? Well, first of all, to go back to what I said about other people's previous research, what I did was go back to all of their research, go back to all their resources, and then went to the original locations where those documents were housed, and then tried to trace them back and build a bigger picture around them. So, for instance, I spent ages in what was then called the Public Record Office, and it's now National Archives in Q, and I traced back. I found some of the actual court cases, depositions, and transcriptions in places where I didn't expect to find them. I found a really important one in New York, of all places, in the manuscript. So you go back and do that. But the hardest part, the hardest, the most difficult part, is that things don't always get

documented by race. So it's very difficult. find someone. When the book first came out, someone said it was in a review and they said, well, she should have gone to the rent rolls to find out where all the black people were living. And I said, well, first of all, they don't list tenants by race. You know, you might occasionally find someone. You might find someone in a church baptismal or wedding record by race, but it wasn't necessarily the norm. They might just say, oh, this is so unusual. This black couple got married here. And here's the record. But you don't go back and say, oh, look at this. In East London, there were 15 black people in this neighborhood. You know, you can't find that. No. No, you can't. As a historian,

you know this. It's almost impossible. We depend upon each other to delve and look. We also depend on genealogists. And now people can have their genetics tested. Oh, it's a great story there, which was many years ago. There was an epidemiological study being done. in Brighton. And they were trying to locate people who were carriers of certain diseases or traits. And they found this community

of all white people where a lot of people were carriers of the sickle cell trait. And they were all white. But sickle cell trait is from people who are of African descent. And one woman, some people didn't want to talk about it. This was on film. They interviewed them.

But another woman just started laughing and she said, well, that explains great-grandfather from Jamaica. We always just thought he was a white sea captain. But there it was in the DNA, in the genetics. So, yeah, I'm convinced that a lot of people have some heritage that they have not yet discovered. Maybe now with everyone doing all these genetic tests, they'll find things that they don't want to find. My brother did the genetic test.

So I'm going to assume our DNA is the same unless my parents have something they want to tell me. And I was really hoping that it would come back with something like that. There would be a Jamaican sea captain or something. And it wasn't. It was just absolute Northern English. Apparently my ancestors just turned up in Bolton and waited for the mills to open. There was nothing interesting about them whatsoever. Well, a sea captain is always good for family history.

Right? What I wouldn't have given for a sea captain, Gretchen, honestly. I'll be back with Gretchen after this short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists

and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. You haven't covered some amazing lives in your research, even if you can't get to everybody, as you were saying, the quiet lives.

But there are some truly impressed people that I hadn't heard of before, like Ignatius Sancho, which is just the most incredible name ever. Yeah, he was very well known and he's very well known now, partly because of Patterson Joseph's play and now his novel, but also because he had had his portrait painted by Gainsborough. So there's a famous portrait that at the time when they first discovered it, I don't know where it was. I think Sanchez's son owned it for a while and then I don't know where it got passed on, but it now resides in Canada, in Ottawa, and everyone's kicking themselves that they let

this important painting get out of the country. But he was just the most wonderful man. And I'm so glad that Patterson has tried to flesh out that story. So his letters were published right after his death by a friend. And then his son, who went into printing, actually republished it. And they pretty much stayed available all this time. He knew the great and the good. He had been working in some of the great houses.

He was rescued by the Montague family. And he was trained and educated by them. And then he went on when he finally got free of these awful women who owned him and wouldn't allow him to learn how to read. He was friendly with David Garrick, the actor. So he tried to be an actor, but he had a bit of a speech impediment and he didn't go well. He suffered a lot from Gowd and he was very overweight. But he's interesting for several reasons. One is that he's one of the instances of a black man marrying a black woman and raising a black family.

When he retired, if that's the way we want to put it, from working for the Montague family, they gave him enough money to open a shop in Westminster. And he sat there cutting sugar and selling tobacco, all the things were actually slave products, but we're expected at a grocer's. He married this wonderful woman named Anne. They had several children that he called the Sanchonettas. That's great. People came into the shop just to talk to him, and he corresponded with everyone.

He corresponded with Lauren Stern, who wrote Tristram Shandy. He corresponded with, you know, a lot of major figures. He knew the sculptor Nolikins. He knew a lot of people who would just come and hang out with him. And then his letters just showed him to be so witty, but also at the same time acknowledging his place in British society. He said things like, sir, I am just about a lodger here, even though he'd been there since infancy,

just a lodger here. But he was anti-slavery, and he's a composer. And so we have some of his music now to listen to. You can probably find it for your show. He's a wonderful person. He died too young, I think, in his 50s. But he gives us a really interesting view and what life was like in London at his period.

And, you know, observing from the windows of his shop, he saw or was near to the Gordon riots, which were the anti-Catholic uprising. So he was a kind of window on the age. He was great. And one of the things, so I've got to ask you about this, because primarily what I research is the history of sex for sale.

And in your book, you identified a number of specialist brothels in London that had black women working there. Yeah, but, you know, put that into context. There were some of those. They were also homosexual brothels. They were also brothels. They were also brothels specializing in, you know, physical abuse.

The lash. Yeah. So people would specialize in whippings and spankings and that sort of thing. So the Georgians specialized in a lot of things. And if you look at some of the incredibly rude prints by people like, you know, Gilray and Rawlinson and all of that, you will see just how detailed some of the images they were. So, yes, they were black women working in them. but there were also lots of other people. So tell me about Francis Barber.

Who was Francis Barber? Oh, Francis Barber. We're very lucky that Michael Bundock has recently, well, in last several years, published a very comprehensive biography of him. So we've learned a lot more. Francis Barber was the servant of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson. And he was, it's a little unclear. We don't think he was ever owned by him,

but he was given to him to help out and to work for him by a friend. So Francis went into Johnson's household as an adolescent, I would say, and he worked there for many years. He was actually at Johnson's deathbed. Wow. And he tried to run away because he did not like that kind of life. It was a very strange life. I mean, Dr. Johnson had a lot of people living in his house,

and it was very crowded. If you go into Johnson's house and you go see where the, dictionary was written that he put together. You can get a sense of how many people might have lived in this house. That wasn't actually that big, but it's very, I love authors' houses, so you know, you really get the sense that they were there. So Barber at one point tried to run away and joined, speaking of sea captains, and joined the Navy. He was so excited about just having some freedom. He's a young man. He didn't want to just be sitting and there buying food for Johnson's cat, which he did, hodge. It's a good name for cats. It is.

But Johnson was really upset because he thought that being on a ship was like being in jail except on the water. And he thought that was a terrible thing. So he pulled all sorts of strings with the great and the good. And he got him returned. And I don't think Barbara was very happy about that. But he did stay. You know, he came back. He stayed.

Johnson sent him to a private school for a while where he was much, much older than the boys at the school. he was, I think, maybe 20 or in his 20s. And so he did some work for the family as well there. And Johnson would just send him letters saying, be a good boy. And I'd think, wait a minute. This is a guy who wants to have a life. But he did learn kind of the basics, reading and writing. But the most amazing thing is that when Johnson, who was a very anti-slavery writer,

made him his heir, and he not only got a lot of money, but he also got to control the estate. So he was the executor. So people who couldn't stand him and hated that a black man was now in control of Johnson's writings and his letters and things, they would have to go to Francis or Frank to get permission to republish some things

and they kind of did it with gritted teeth. He didn't end so well. I mean, he married a white woman and they moved when Johnson died. They moved to Litchfield, which had been Johnson's home, and they tried various things, setting up a school or a bookshop and all of that. But the thing was, even though he gave him all this money,

he never really trained him in sort of finance and how to control all of that. So he didn't do very well financially because he didn't quite know how to do that. And he had been ill at the end, and so he didn't live as long as he should have. But Barbara's story is a really fascinating one. There's a picture by E.H. Shepard,

who illustrated Winnie the Pooh and all of those. He later did an illustration of Barbara at Johnson's deathbed. So it's a very sweet picture. What about voices of black women that you've come across in 18th century, Britain? And can tell me about some of those women? Yeah. I've added more since the book has been revised and updated because I did a 10-part series on Radio 4 called Britain's Black Past,

and I traveled all over interviewing people about some of these residents from that period. But some of the stories we had were so sad. You know, a woman who lived in a hovel by the side of the road, others who Nalikins had a black servant. She was not given soap or food or any of those things because he and his wife were misers. It was a terrible thing. And I think she finally took to drink, I think. She was cold and hungry.

So there were stories like that. But there were a couple of really interesting ones as well. One was the work of several people you can see in the book, and I always credit them, where there was a Francis or Fannie Coker who lived in a German. Georgian house with Parra Jones, who was a servant. He was enslaved. She was not. She was treated like a queen by the family, and she ended up going back and forth to her original home. She sent money back and forth. She had a decent life. She was trained as a seamstress and a ladies' maid. But Parra Jones, who now has a bridge named after him in Bristol, was never freed. He had a very difficult life,

and he, too, took to drink. They're trying to recover some of these stories. But my favorite, of course, is Daito Elizabeth Bell, who's on the cover of both of the books. And she's just a wonderful story, although it shows the complications of race and family at those times. She was the great niece of Lord Mansfield. John Murray was his given name.

And he had a house, Ken Woodhouse, that he would still go visit in London. And she lived in that house. Now, for a lot of many years, we thought, We knew all about her, but it turned out that so much more research has been done by others now that we now know she was never enslaved. People always said she was enslaved. She was not. Her mother actually lived with her in London, who was a mother, a black woman. Her father was a white man, Lindsay. She also shared the house with her cousin, her white cousin, Elizabeth Lurie.

She had a pretty decent life. It was kind of not so much a servant, although she did some of the things, perhaps help take care of the dairy. she did some of his correspondence and that sort of thing. But she had a room that was covered with chintz and she had a nice wardrobe and all of that. When he died, Lord Mansfield died, he put in his will, he made clear to say that she was free, and people took that to mean that he freed her, but the fact was that she was never born into slavery

and that he just wanted to make it known publicly that she was a free woman and that he, in fact, in a codicil, increased her inheritance. She married, well, if you've seen the movie Bell, they took a lot of liberties with her. They cast it beautifully, everyone that's gorgeous to look at. But she did not marry an abolitionist lawyer. She married a French steward, and then she bought one of the first houses to be built in Pimlico.

She bought it with her own money. Wow. Yeah, she bought it with her own money. The house is now gone, sadly, but she and her husband, Davinier. They had three sons, two twins and one other. So she died fairly early on. He stayed there with the children. One of the twins later died.

But the other one became very well known and very well positioned in London. So she was just a gorgeous picture. The painting, the dual painting of her, which has now been attributed to David Martin rather than Zophany, which was originally thought to be. It was used in things like FAC or Fortune, a television show. They did half an episode on that painting. And people assume before that that she was servant of her cousin, her white cousin in the painting.

In fact, it hung for years in a house where they called it Lady Murray and her black servant or something like that, her maid. But she was not a maid. So she's a wonderful story. I mean, she died too young, so that's not wonderful. But it changes. When we think about Bridgeton or Sanditin and some of these things, we have to think, well, you know, that's total fantasy. but it's based on some nuggets, nuggets of truth. It's not completely wide of the mark, is it?

This is a really complex history, and I suppose one of the things that is very challenging about it is there were lives like Bells and others that have got sort of agency and seem to be quite happy apart from the fact that they were cut short. But then I suppose there were also lives that we don't know anything about, and there was dreadful suffering, and temptation is you don't want to present it as,

oh, it was actually fine for people of colour in the 18th century because that is certainly not true. I know. You know, and my worry, I mean, I speak a lot. The Jane Austen groups really want me to talk to them. So I keep having lots of talks and speeches and, you know, with the Jay Knights. And I also talk to Regency writers, which is even more complicated because they have no idea. They're just making it all up.

But because we've seen Bridgeton, I worry that people will think this is a historical truth, when in fact what I think Shonda Rhymes was doing was saying, you know, what if? What if we could have had these people who actually made their way into high Georgian society and who had all this money and who were dukes and ladies? What if? And what would that look like? And that's why I think people like it so much. My concern is that people will see it and say, oh, that's really what happened.

There were all these ladies and all these dukes and they were, you know, in the ton, you know, and they were having this incredibly important life. And I just want to be a kind of corrective to some of that to say, yeah, it's fun. It's fun. I love watching those, but I also take it with many grains of salt. I'm surprised that the Bronte scholars haven't tried to get hold of you because I read a compelling argument that Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights was supposed to have been a black man. Well, that's an interesting story as well.

I saw the film. Did you see the film that was done several years back? I did, yes. I was actually living in London, and I went to see it, and I sat near some postgraduate students, and in front of us came three older women who sat themselves down in two rows ahead of us, and then the film came on,

and it's very silent for a long time. There's the wind and the moors, and the children are sitting there. And then this black youth is on the screen. And of course, I think she makes an argument in the book. We can follow that. But anyway, the women in the front row got so angry and they announced that they were going to complain to the manager. Oh, my God.

And everyone else was laughing. They thought, what's the manager going to do? He didn't make the film. And they stormed down. So stupid. But lots of arguments have been rid of Nevada. Carol Phillips wrote a novel about it that goes back and forth in history to talk about Heathcliff. and he doesn't use the name Heathcliff.

But she does say things. He's swarthy. He was found on the streets of Liverpool. He was brought home under the coat, you know, of their father. And there was a definite sense that, you know, he was not white. What that meant, you know, we don't know. But she drops a lot of hints in there that this is not an unreasonable interpretation. I thought the film was spectacular.

And I think that reading of it's really important. And I just love the thought of three. middle-aged white woman trying to complain to Emily Bronte. That's so stupid. Well, in lieu of her, they had the only thing left is the management. And he would say, oh, I made a mistake when I wrote that book. No, he didn't write the book. Doesn't that show just how fragile this stuff is?

Like, why would that matter? It just fascinates me as to why would that have been such an issue that all three of them would have got up and complained? Yeah, I think it taps into some very dark and strange. things. It does. I actually, we thought it was very funny. Yes. And we enjoyed the film. The rest of us were sitting there. But it was one of those things where you just, they were expecting to see a traditional period drama and that they injected this other reading and interpretation into it that has, in fact, some basis in the literature that somehow this was sacrilege to them. I don't know if they

expected Catherine Hepburn and something. It wasn't right, but it was a great film. Oh. Just before I let you go, because I'm aware that I've trespassed on your very valuable time, and you've got packing to do to come and be in the drizzle in London. But when you were reviewing your book and updating it and everything, did you find anything out? Did you uncover anything that's gone into this revised book that really made you excited

as a historian? I know all of it will have done, but is there anything that you can think? of that just made you go, oh, yes. You know, there were some things that were new that I knew some of the researchers, people we had who had uncovered things in the meantime, and I really wanted to get their work in there. So that was very important. And I'd known about it, but, you know, the thing was, it wasn't just the new things

that people had found, but it was rereading what I had done 25 years earlier, or whatever it was, and thinking, oh, well, you know, that's not bad. and some of the characters that I had liked so much the first time round, and I had gone back and gone through Peeps' Diaries and all sorts of things, and I thought, oh, this character, this man, Jack Beef, he's close to my heart, and I talk about him quite a bit. So some of them were like finding old friends again, and some of them were putting nuances onto some of the things that others had found

and then adding to that. I will say that at the beginning of the first book, the first time I did it, I wrote that no longer could I walk the streets of London without seeing this kind of double image the whole time, the people who are rushing up and down the streets. But at the same time, I could see black pages and turbines carrying the lap dog of a lady or someone rushing to the theater to help their employer, people being pushed onto slave ships and then going to court to try to regain their lady. freedom. All that became so alive and vibrant and I will never ever see London the same again, ever. Gretchen, thank you so much. If people want to find out more about you, where can they find you? I have a website, Gretchengrisina.com. And the book is on sale, I think, tomorrow. Have a glass of champagne and toast the re-release. I intend to, maybe two. Several. Have several. Absolutely. Oh, thank you so much. It's been wonderful to talk to you.

so much. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Gretchen for joining me. I could honestly, I could listen to her just talk about this for weeks and weeks. But if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.