While watching "Jingle Jangle" on Netflix my husband walked through the room and said, "You know, that could never have happened. There was never a Black middle class in Victorian England."
My first response was to disagree, but then I sort of had to agree.
If there was a large Black population in England, why don't we ever hear about it? Dickens has no black characters in his novels like Twain does. I tried to do a web search, but only got history tied to the U.S.A. and a mention that England and Europe abolished slavery in 1833/34. What happened to the freed slaves?
Caribbean slaves come later to England to avoid slavery (see the Nottinghill neighborhood in the film Small Axe). And perhaps freeing the slaves in England wasn't as big a deal because they already had the Welsh, Irish and Scots working as wage slaves and indentured servants. Queen Victoria brought servants of color back from Commonwealth colonies and at various earlier times different rulers made having little "blackamores" faddish. So yes, there was a Black population in England.
I understand the desire to create Christmas traditions for under-represented populations. And, yes, a story like Jingle Jangle is fiction... but isn't this "blackwashing" history, making people long for at past that never existed? Is this the same as cultural appropriation?
According to Wikipedia, "By the mid 18th century, London had the largest Black population in Britain, made up of free and enslaved people, as well as many runaways. The total number may have been about 10,000. Many of these freed slaves were forced into beggary due to the lack of jobs and racial discrimination. Owners of African slaves in England would advertise slave-sales and for re-capture runaways… Racism against black people grew after 1860, when race-based discrimination was fed by then-popular theories of scientific racism. Attempts to support these theories cited 'scientific evidence', such as brain size."
This was the beginning of the Eugenics Movement that eventually gave rise to Nazi extermination camps. Many evils have been and still are justified" by this thinking.
I did find that the British government paid today's equivalent of $150 million in reparations to its slave owners for their loss of property when slavery was abolished. Forgive me for imagining them receiving that compensation and then shipping people off to the States and selling them there.
~ by Sandra Hofferber