Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain
Book Talk And Discussion with Professor Lyn Innes
19 February, 16.00-17.30, Arts Complex, Lecture Theatre 2
Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain investigates the lives of writers, speakers and activists who left the US under the Fugitive Slave Act and the British society they discovered.
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.
For more information on the book, click here.
Lyn Innes (C.L.Innes) is Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures, University of Kent, Canterbury. Born and educated in Australia (Sydney University), Lyn studied and taught in USA. and was awarded a Ph.D. (Cornell University, 1973); taught at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama (1968-70), University of Massachusetts (1973-75), where she worked with China Achebe and coedited with him two volumes of African Short Stories. She taught Postcolonial and other literatures at the University of Kent from 1975 till 2005. Relevant publications include Chinua Achebe (CUP, 1990), Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society (Harvester Press, 1993), A History of Black and Asian Writers in Britain (CUP, 2002 and 2008); An Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures (CUP, 2008), The Last Prince of Bengal (Saqi, 2021), Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain (Lutterworth Press, 2025).