Olaudah Equiano's Life

How does the life writing of Equiano and the poetry of Cowper strategically use the rhetoric of sensibility in their anti-slavery writing of the late eighteenth century?

From the mid-eighteenth century a cult of sensibility was largely defining the newly emerging, polite, sociable and affable culture that was governed by an emphasis on emotions and feelings.
By the 1780s and 1790s, sensibility characterised how people should behave with moral refinement, with a decisive shift from enlightenment’s trust in reason, which guided actions and judgements, to an emphasis on society as a system of relationships based on social sympathy. Sensibility was concerned with passionate, emotional language, and in connection to the slave debate, was concerned
Most of what we know about Equiano comes from his autobiography The Interesting Narrative in which he describes his enslavement from the age of eleven. In 1762, Equiano returned to the West Indies, before he was able to save enough money to buy his freedom in 1766. The Interesting Narrative gives a first hand account of Equiano’s early life, and is one of the earliest ‘slave narratives’ written in English by an African. This provides an invaluable insight into the conditions of slavery, but it has been questioned the reliability of his account. Although there is evidence that proves most of what Equiano tells us is true, some parts are slightly distorted. Vincent Carretta has identified some of these points, which leaves us to question the dependability of Equiano’s account. Having said this, it is possible that Equiano could have been highlighting the conditions of other slaves he encountered during his lifetime, in an attempt to portray a fuller, more accurate picture of what slaves had to
Through looking at the texts we have studied in this essay, I would argue that the concept of sensibility was purposefully adopted to emphasise the feelings that slaves encountered, and thus, to establish a personal, emotive response from the reader with the aim that society would take action to alleviate the pain that they can connect with. Sentimentalism was used in order to determine a connection between the author and reader that would draw upon the emotions of slaves, showing that they are not in fact a lesser race incapable of human feelings, but on the contrary, equal of maintaining such emotions. This would leave a question hanging over British society during the time, of whether it was justifiable to treat people as such. It can also be argued that to an extent, the use of sentimentalism succeeded in highlighting the conditions tolerated in slavery, and was effective in driving society to take action. It would be interesting to see therefore, exactly how much personal feelings and the technique of sensibility featured in the emancipation of slavery, which came about 63 years after the death of