The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive [Audiobook]

A juicy and revelatory history of the Romantic poets that restores them to their fullest context by examining the impact of the transatlantic slave system on their lives and work, by a brilliant young, Whiting award-winning Black scholar. For centuries, the Romantics have been examined without any attention given to one of the most significant political issues of their time: the transatlantic slave trade. In The Trembling Hand, award-winning Shelley scholar Mathelinda Nabugodi re-engages this context, and the result is like seeing restored world-renowned frescoes for the first time—layers of obfuscation cleared away. Drawing on a series of objects—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s library record at Cambridge, William Wordsworth’s tea cup, a bracelet made of Mary Shelley’s hair, Lord Byron’s boots—Nabugodi takes us on a dazzling journey back in time, one full of unexpected discoveries that bring to life their poetry and how it has lasted. Here is a journey into the heart of empire, and into the heart of the empire's archives, led by a brilliant, skeptical investigator. Nabugodi reminds us that John Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, and Byron grew up in a world funded and framed by the transatlantic slave trade. It structured their social lives; built the buildings where they first met, buildings Nabugodi revisits; underwrote their scholarships; and even sometimes, in the form of young African servant boys, provided the trembling hand that held the missives of love they passed to their lovers.